Excerpt
From "Rosie Red Jacket" by Christine Morgan:
"Boys are the horridest," someone said. "Aren't they just?"
Georgina, on the stone bench by the garden hedge, started so that she almost dropped her book. She caught it against her lap and looked around.
Here was the yard, grassy lawns and flower-beds and tree-shaded paths sloping up toward Drewbury Hall, where her uncle's family lived. Where she, too, now lived, because she had noplace else to go. The brick walls climbed green with ivy, the roof-slates were grey, and curtains stirred in open windows as the maids aired out the rooms.
The only person she saw was Partridge, the driver, out by the carriage-house. He crouched in front of the big brass-grilled snout of Uncle's gleaming auto-motor, polishing the luminaries with a soft rag. It couldn't have been him that she heard, because he was too far away, whistling as he worked.
And the voice had sounded much more like that of a child, a girl her own age.
Which would have been nice, but the only other girl for miles about was the coalman's daughter in the village. Mrs. Curtis, the housekeeper, insisted it simply wouldn't do for Miss Georgina to associate with the coal-scuttle girl. Such things weren't proper, and therefore, weren't done.
She was about to decide she'd imagined it when the someone spoke again.
"Don't you wish that they'd all get the speckles and die?"
From "The Queen of Lakes" by L.S. Johnson:
The moment the path starts to dip, the world goes silent. The very wind ceases to blow; not a leaf stirs, not an animal can be seen, not even an insect. There is only the rasp of my breath, the blood thudding in my ears.
It is forty-two steps from the silence to the far end of the curve. Forty-two steps where the only sound in the world is myself.
Myself and the each-uisge, I mean.
"Where did you go?" I ask. For he is beside me, though I did not hear him approach. I never hear him.
"Here and there," he gurgles. His voice is low and wet, as if his mouth were full of jelly. "Across great lakes and little rivers, so many lovely sights. Though not a one as lovely as you, Rose."
He teases my braid, making it sticky and knotted, and I slap his hand away. Thanks to his fondling I've been scolded by Mrs. Duggan more than once now, for looking slovenly. He strokes the bare strip of my throat instead, smearing my skin as he hooks a gluey finger beneath my scarf, trying to tug it away from my neck.
His fingers are so very cold.
The first time he touched me I was so frightened I nearly stopped walking, but I did not stop, I have never stopped.
I do not know what will happen if I stop.
From "And Only The Eyes of Children" by Laura VanArendonk Baugh:
I'm one of the rare half-breed freaks myself, though not of the type to get an OMG!!!1! photo on the internet. No, I'm lucky enough to pass on a human street – which conversely means I'm pretty unlucky on what passes for a street in the Twilight Lands. So I tend to spend most of my time here.
Exactly here, in fact. This is a good place for us. What, you don't think of Indianapolis as being a particularly supernatural city? That just means we're keeping under the radar. I know, New Orleans and Chicago and places get all the arcane press, but think for a second. Indianapolis has two affectionate sobriquets: "the Crossroads of America," for its prominent location on first the National Road and later several interstates, and "the Circle City," for its efficient, nearly ritual, circle and grid layout.
Crossroads and circles, people, right in the advertising. If you can't find the Fae in that, I can't help you.
