Check out a spooky new season of short stories on The Shadow Storytellers website, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
We also have a merch store now!
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Check out a spooky new season of short stories on The Shadow Storytellers website, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We also have a merch store now!
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 Halloween is right around the corner, and what better way to celebrate than by dimming the lights and listening to some spooky new stories? Wait, did I say, "listening to"? Oh yes. Matt and I are trying something different this season. In a few weeks, we're going to be launching our very own speculative fiction anthology podcast, called The Shadow Storytellers. On this new weekly show, we'll be sharing some of our creepiest, most bizarre and fun short stories for your listening pleasure. All of the content is brand new or never-before-shared, and we've been having a whole lot of fun bringing it to life in audio form. As huge fans of horror and sci-fi anthologies like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt and Creepshow, we really could not be more excited to share this project with you. The Shadow Storytellers first episode will go live on Wednesday, October 6th, 2021, with new episodes airing weekly afterward. If you want to make sure not to miss any updates on the show, use the panel on the right to sign up for email notifications or update your preferences to specifically include The Shadow Storytellers as one of your interests. For more information, please check out The Shadow Storytellers website.  Stories carry with them great power, They can transport us into the light, and into the dark… And into a place in between, a land of shadows… It is in this land where the macabre and the strange reign, With tales of terror Tales of hope Tales of the whimsical And the weird These are stories told in the shadows And we are the Shadow Storytellers. See you in the shadows! I'm in a new anthology! When the World Stopped: A Collection of Infectious Stories is just what it sounds like. It's a multi-author anthology of short stories about viruses, real and fictional, compiled and edited by Emma Nelson and Hannah Smith of Owl Hollow Press, the same publisher that brought you Matt's Bennytown. It's freshly released, and my personal copy is still on its way, so I haven't gotten to look at the stories other than my own yet. However, I hear tell that this was one of Owl Hollow's most popular short story submission calls ever, and that it took a lot of tough choices to keep it down to a manageable size, so I have no doubt that the quality and range of different takes on the theme will be stellar. So, if, like me, you cope through fiction and have spent this year watching zombie movies along with Alien and Contagion and The Thing more times than you can count, consider joining me for some new, timely-on-purpose plague fiction.  From the back cover: Viruses are not new to life or literature, but the ways we experience them are always evolving. And stories are some of the best ways to heal, connect with others, process our own emotions, and remember the nuances of unique times and places, so join us as we explore love and loss, passion and betrayal, fear and panic, togetherness and separation, community and isolation within viruses of all varieties—real and imagined. Look for my story, "The Regrecode." In the year 3020, an idealistic young doctor and her randomly assigned quarantine partner, a jaded operations manager, race to save humanity from a bio-digital virus that can short out the human brain, circumventing all reason and compassion and leaving only childlike pettiness with a compulsion to spread. Click here to order (Paperback and Kindle editions available)  So, remember how Escape Velocity was Amazon-exclusive? Well, it's finally not! You can now enjoy these first two feminist folktales from beyond the stars on whatever platform you prefer (except Google Play, it's being finicky about stocking The Kryssitid Gaze, but I'm working on it). Also, since I couldn't legally give early access to these on Patreon, what with the Amazon-exclusive thing, I'm making them available for one month, starting now, for patrons of all levels to download. And yes, for those asking, I am in the early stages of writing a third installment! Check out the new, all-over-the-book-world links below.
Announcement time! I've got a new book coming down the pipeline this summer, called The Future Mrs. Brightside. It's my first foray into non-speculative contemporary fiction. No aliens, no zombies, no ghosts, just a complicated love story on regular planet earth. Want to see?  After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own. The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad. Coming July 14th, 2020. This is a pretty personal one, as my friends and family can probably guess, and it's been in the works for a few years now, but it's finally ready! So, where can you get it? Well, the ebook's going to be Kindle-exclusive to start out, so if you have a Kindle or Kindle App, you can preorder it right now: The Future Mrs. Brightside (Kindle) It's also going to be on Kindle Unlimited for a while, so once it's out you can read it for free there if you're enrolled. I'm entered in this year's Kindle Storyteller contest, so your page reads really do make a difference for me. If you're non-Kindle, or if you just prefer the physical touch, there'll be a paperback edition out at the same time, link coming soon. In the meantime, you can keep it on your radar by adding it to your Goodreads shelf. Love & Books, -Fiona.  So I know I've been a bit of a ghost lately, but I promise, there's a good reason. Better yet, that reason is finally ready to share. I've been working on a new series of sci-fi folktale retellings called Escape Velocity: Feminist Folktales from Beyond the Stars. I use the term "series" in the loosest sense. These novellas will all take place within the same sci-fi universe, involving many of the same planets and alien species, but each one will be a self-contained reimagining of a specific fairy tale, myth, or legend. Start anywhere, stop anywhere, no risk of cliffhangers. How many of these there might ultimately be depends on you guys. If you like them, tell me! More importantly, tell all your friends! There are plenty more folktales out there itching for an overhaul involving badass ladies and laser weapons. If these are a hit, I might even get Matt in on the fun too. For now, I've got two of these bad girls on the shelves today. That's right, no countdown. I've been neglecting my reviews, my social media, (my laundry, my loved ones...) all for the sake of getting these ready to enter in the 2019 Kindle Storyteller contest, which closes for entries at the end of August. I made it! And just in time for Women's Equality Day, too! What this means for you is that you can read these right now, and if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can do it for free. (If not, they're only a buck each.) If you prefer to go old school, paperback editions are coming in a few days as well. Without further ado, let's take a look at my new lovelies!  Once upon a time, on a glamorous space station called Eris, there was a young woman who could spin base metals into gold… At least, that’s what she tells people to separate them from their money. Naia Mills is a con artist, a Human orphan scraping to get by in a galaxy that doesn’t want her, more than a century after her ancestors rendered the Earth uninhabitable. She travels the stars selling fake gold jewelry and elixirs, until the day she unknowingly swindles the son of a space station commander. Now confined to the station and threatened with a slow death in a radioactive penal colony, Naia has three days to buy her way to freedom with an impossible act of alchemy. Eager to get out from under his father’s thumb, and fascinated with Naia’s profession, the commander’s son is an easy dupe and willing accomplice, but to get their hands on the gold they both need to escape, they’ll have to make a deal with the local mob, and a queenpin so powerful and private that even her closest associates don’t know her name. (Click here to read on Kindle) I've always wanted to adapt "Rumpelstiltskin." I honestly don't know why Disney hasn't gotten around to it yet; it's well-known and brimming with potential. For one thing, its princess comes about as close to saving herself as the Grimms' heroines ever do. Of course, in my version, her shot at survival comes in the form of an identity theft caper, and she'll have to decide what it's worth to her to save the prince as well.  Once upon a time, on the second planet from Apocrytus, there was a monster whose face men trembled to behold… Or they would, if they knew who she was. Perhaps she should leave more survivors. Meligora lives for revenge, but it’s not as dreary as she thought it would be. Her old life ended when the Brotherhood took control of her planet and started rounding up women for mandatory “conversion,” removing their stingers, wings, and most of their eyes, looting their bodies for their valuable reproductive organs, and leaving them docile shells of their former selves. But after her own botched procedure turned her into a lethal weapon instead of a slave, she learned to make the best of things, bending Brotherhood enforcers to her will and slaughtering them in droves each night. She knows it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to stop her, but when a young Human bounty hunter finally follows her trail of corpses, he offers her a choice: stay a wanted killer of dime-a-dozen thugs, or join him in tracking down the man who mutilated her. (Click here to read on Kindle) Unlike "Rumpelstiltskin," I picked the legend of Medusa because of how abjectly horrible and in need of fixing the original story is. Seriously, look it up. Or don't, if you want to continue having a good day. Naturally, I took a lot more liberties with this one, and the result is an intense yet fun revenge fantasy that I'd roughly quantify as a blend of Deadpool, Aliens, and Ginger Snaps. I'd also unreservedly call it my most bizarre work to date. So that's that! For today, anyway. Thanks for checking out what I've been up to this summer, and if I've sufficiently intrigued you, happy reading! (Note: because these are on Kindle Unlimited, they're not available in digital form anywhere other than Amazon. However, if you're interested in writing a review and aren't set up for mobi files, email me.) It's here, it's here, it's here... Matt and I are pleased and proud to announce that our latest dark sci-fi adventure, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, is now available from Talos Press! If you've already read Matt's Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel, you might notice that Pinnacle City takes place in the same universe, but the characters and story are entirely new. If you haven't read Almost Infamous, don't worry. You don't need any special knowledge going into this one. What do you need to know about Pinnacle City? Read on.  What It's About: To some people, Pinnacle City is a glittering metropolis, a symbol of prosperity watched over by the all-star superhero team, the Pinnacle City Guardians. But beneath the glitz and glamour is a gritty underbelly, one still feeling the physical and economic damage of the superhero-villain battles of generations past, where the lower class―immigrants, criminals, aliens, sorcerers, and non-humans alike―jostle and elbow for scraps to scrape by on. Private investigator Eddie Enriquez is an ex-con and veteran with powers of his own who still bears the scars of his time as a minion for a low-level supervillain. Good work’s been hard to come by until a mysterious woman shows up at his office with a case the police and superheroes are ignoring: the suspicious death of a prominent non-human rights activist. Meanwhile, superhero Kimberly Kline, a.k.a. Solar Flare, has just hit it big, graduating to the Pinnacle City Guardians. With good looks, incredible superpowers, and a family name that opens doors, the sky is the limit. But in trying to make the world a better place . . . she’ll discover Pinnacle City isn’t as black and white as it once seemed. From the minds of Matt Carter and Fiona J. R. Titchenell, Pinnacle City is a pulpy, throwback noir of yesteryear, where two people from opposite sides of the track must team up to do good in a world full of bad. What People Are Saying: “In this skillfully constructed secondary-world noir novel, having superpowers isn’t always so super, and everyone has something to hide. . . . By allowing everyone to be a little morally grey, Carter and Titchenell spin a superhero story with staying power.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A rollicking take on the all-American superhero tale. It’s Stan Lee meets Dashiell Hammett, with just a little Clive Barker thrown in for good measure.” —Scott Kenemore, author of The Grand Hotel and Zombie, Ohio “Lively and endearing, funny and hip, Pinnacle City puts gumshoe to cape and in a fantastic adult alternate history throbbing with modern pop-cultural conflict and absurdities.” —Johnny Worthen, award-winning author of The Finger Trap Where can you get a copy? We're glad you asked... Just about anywhere you'd like: Amazon Barnes & Noble iBooks Kobo Google Play Indigo Books-a-Million Indiebound Or if you want to be especially retro-awesome, request it at your local bricks & mortar bookstore. Happy reading!
Guys, I've been literally counting down the days to this announcement, and it's finally here. My very own Out of the Pocket has been selected as F-BOM's summer read! I'm so incredibly proud and honored to be included among authors like Intisar Khanani, LJ Cohen, and the club's amazing co-founder, Cecelia Isaac. What's F-BOM, you ask? It stands for Feminist Book of the Month. Basically, it's a tri-monthly book club featuring independent female sci-fi and fantasy authors. They particularly specialize in books that challenge the typical, gendered narratives you see over and over again. In their own words, "The Feminist Book of the Month is more than just a book club. For as little as $5.00 a month members will be actively investing in the future of women in science fiction and fantasy." So what does this mean, exactly? It means that if you become an F-BOM member this summer, you'll get the F-BOM special edition of Out of the Pocket. It has an exclusive preface, in which I rant rather spectacularly (if I do say so myself) about the various sexist things publishers have said to me. You'll also be able to order previous F-BOM special editions at a discount, and I can personally vouch for there being some delicious sci-fi and fantasy titles to choose from. If you're not up for subscribing, you can just get a free membership to the forums, meet some cool people, and watch me answer questions about writing, gender, and genre tropes all summer long. I promise to bring my signature blend of awkward scintillation! Can you tell I'm a teensy bit excited about this whole thing? Hoping to see you there! Time to ooh and ahh over the unbelievably gorgeous cover of Matt's and my upcoming adult sci-fi title, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir! This one's coming in August from Talos Press (pre-orderable now!), and you might or might not have heard Matt or me talking excitedly about it approximately a billion times by now. It's chock-full of our signature dark humor, some affectionate riffing on comics tropes and history, plenty of social satire, and tons of gritty noir flavor. We're champing at the bit to share it. And just look at this cover!  About Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir To some people, Pinnacle City is a glittering metropolis, a symbol of prosperity watched over by the all-star superhero team, the Pinnacle City Guardians. But beneath the glitz and glamour is a gritty underbelly, one still feeling the physical and economic damage of the superhero-villain battles of generations past, where the lower class―immigrants, criminals, aliens, sorcerers, and non-humans alike―jostle and elbow for scraps to scrape by on. Private investigator Eddie Enriquez is an ex-con and veteran with powers of his own who still bears the scars of his time as a minion for a low-level supervillain. Good work’s been hard to come by until a mysterious woman shows up at his office with a case the police and superheroes are ignoring: the suspicious death of a prominent non-human rights activist. Meanwhile, superhero Kimberly Kline, a.k.a. Solar Flare, has just hit it big, graduating to the Pinnacle City Guardians. With good looks, incredible superpowers, and a family name that opens doors, the sky is the limit. But in trying to make the world a better place . . . she’ll discover Pinnacle City isn’t as black and white as it once seemed. From the minds of Matt Carter and Fiona J. R. Titchenell, Pinnacle City is a pulpy, throwback noir of yesteryear, where two people from opposite sides of the track must team up to do good in a world full of bad. Coming August 7th 2018, from Talos Press. Oh, hey, look! Pre-order links! Amazon Barnes & Noble iBooks Google Play Indigo  Okay, looking at that headline, you’re probably asking yourself at least one of a few very specific questions, so I’ll do my best to answer them with all due haste. Q: What are The Prospero Chronicles again? A: Ha, ha. I know it’s been a long, bumpy road of publishing, unpublishing, republishing, re-planning, hiatuses, and all other manner of business and creative drama that can befall a story, but you guys still remember Mina and Ben pitting their mismatched friendship against the forces of the ancient interdimensional monsters they call Splinters, right? Q: Oh, yeah. Wait… is there going to be a screen adaptation? A: Not so far, but ten points for optimism. Q: Is there finally a release date for book four?!?!?! A: No, not quite, but more on that shortly. Q: But the ending of Slivers… A: I know, I know. Q: You sadist! You can’t just bring this up again and keep us hanging on that ending! I have to know what happens to Ben, and Aldo, and… A: You will. Q: Sure, like I’ll someday find out the non-TV ending of A Song of Ice and Fire? A: Ouch. No, really, you will. Q: Is the series dead? Give it to me straight, doctor! A: No! In fact that's the opposite of what this announcement is about. Q: But no release date? A: Not yet. Q: Then what else could you possibly have to announce? A: Here goes. Matt is going to be withdrawing from The Prospero Chronicles, and I’ll be writing the final installment solo. Now some of you may be asking a different set of questions. Q: What? But don’t you guys write separate characters? How can the series go on without him? Why isn’t he coming back? Is he okay? Aren’t you still an adorably married writing duo?! A: Relax. Matt and I are fine, personally, professionally, medically, and in whatever other ways you might be thinking. In fact, we’ve got a superhero noir novel coming out in August from Talos Press, and a post-apocalyptic dieselpunk indie series we’ve been working on together for later in the year as well. It’s just The Prospero Chronicles specifically that Matt’s splitting away from. Q: Wait, is this why, at the end of Slivers, Ben is- A: Hush. No spoilers yet, in case anyone needs to catch up. And the answer is… not consciously? But it does make my job a little easier now. What luck! Q: But why isn’t he writing it with you? A: Matt’s been wanting to work on other projects for a long time. We’ve tried several times to schedule a period to work on the final Prospero book together, but it’s become clear that it’s not really a question of timing; it’s just not where his focus and passion are now. Matt and I have both grown and developed a lot as writers since we first started working on The Prospero Chronicles together. I’ve always had a fair bit of room to stretch within The Prospero Chronicles, but Matt’s generally been stuck playing the straight man. He’s proud of what he put into the series, especially the world building and creature design, which were almost entirely his baby. He’s also going to go on helping me in a consulting capacity, so that I don’t get lost in the territories of Prospero that have only been charted in his head. But in terms of putting words on the page, he can’t stay. The voices of his other characters in other worlds are calling. Q: Aren’t you going to feed us a line about how this is a good thing? A: Believe it or not, it really is. As awesome a writer as Matt is and as great a team as we make, no story is going to benefit from being churned out while its creator’s heart is elsewhere, no matter the reasons or the talent involved. We realized that either we could write a long-procrastinated final book with adequate skill but half the spark missing, or I could write a full-sparked final book in the course of a few months. I believe we made the right choice not just for us but for The Prospero Chronicles themselves. Q: Did you say a few months? A: Well, yeah. That’s what I’m working on right now, and in spite of the way the book’s been restructured to play to my solo strengths and wrap things up in one installment instead of two, I’ve had the essential beats of how this story has to end bottled up for so long that they’re spilling out at NaNoWriMo speed. Editing, cover art, and release day scheduling and planning will take a bit longer, of course, but it’s looking like a 2018 finale might still be within the realm of possibility. Q: Is that all we’re going to get now? A: No! Just to whet your appetite, and maybe a little bit to prove that I’m serious, you get a preview from chapter one of Stitches, book 4 of The Prospero Chronicles. Note of course that this is a draft in progress, subject to changes and corrections, and naturally filled with spoilers if you haven’t reached the end of Slivers yet. Enjoy! 1. The Drip Mina It was Haley who told me. There was a competitive cooking show playing on the TV that evening in my med center room, and one of the contestants was yelling about how the other team had ripped off his method for perfectly searing parsnips while I watched the Occupation guards out in the hallway pat her down for weapons. From the way she stood there with her arms spread, half impatient and half dreading the moment when she’d be allowed across the threshold to see me, I knew enough to make me dread it too. The drugs wouldn’t let me feel the full, visceral twisting of that dread, but no doubt it was occurring anyway, somewhere in my distant-feeling innards. One of the guards raised an eyebrow at the contents of Haley’s backpack but eventually returned it and waved her inside. She extended my brutal stay of enlightenment by treading the four feet to my bed as if they were a rickety balance beam. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice came out raw. “There’s been an attack.” I waited, and finally the blow came, in an economical croaking of syllables. “Kevin’s dead, and Ben’s missing.” My breath quickened, and I found that her raw, blunt voice was more than I could match. Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing. Responding with words was like trying to slay a dragon with a toothpick. Kevin. Kevin who never wanted to fight. Kevin who was going to Berkley and then into politics to save the world the other way. Kevin who forgave me for killing his brother, who’d saved my life at least twice over, who was there from the very beginning, even when I was too preoccupied to thank him, which was always. One little jab of the toothpick. “How?” I didn’t want to hear the words, and Haley didn’t want to say them, but somehow, inevitably, the ritual of exchanging them demanded to be observed. “Officially, hit-and-run.” This part came out in a sharp breath. “Unofficially, they beat him up and broke his neck.” Her breath retreated back in just as sharply, and then started the cycle over again. “And when his parents challenged the coroner’s report…” “Dead or replaced?” I asked. “Replaced, both of them. I mean, we didn’t capsaicin-test them or anything when they suddenly changed their minds two hours later, but-” “I’ll take your word.” “We found this next to him,” she reached into her backpack and pulled out a Ziploc full of stiff, bloodstained fabric, “but there was only one body.” I had to turn the plastic-sealed bundle over twice in my hands before I recognized the shredded remains of Ben’s ‘3 of a Kind’ baseball cap. Something had clawed straight through it. I grabbed my phone from the bedside table. “Don’t,” said Haley. I pushed send anyway. Ben’s number went straight to a voicemail message that wasn’t his. The sing-song recorded voice of Robbie York cut clean through the drug haze and squeezed my stomach up toward my throat. “You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh Mina?” I hung up and threw the phone at the end of my bed, where Haley stopped it from falling off the end. “We don’t know that it’s the Shard who replaced Robbie last time,” Haley said without conviction. “They could have given his body to a new Sliver, or even made the real Robbie record the message, just to hurt you-” “It’s him,” I said. It was, without a doubt. The Shard who had tried to make me kill myself last winter wielded Robbie’s vocal cords with a smug venom all his own. Besides, now that the local Splinter Council was down for the count, and with them the agreement we’d made to keep that Shard out of our dimension, his mind-altering powers would make him one of the first weapons the Slivers would want to put back on the table. “I was going to warn you,” said Haley. “It was just-” “Too much,” I finished. Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing. The nightmare Shard back in town. It was all the very definition of too much. “I kissed him,” said Haley. I’d already charged the dragon the moment I opened my mouth, and there was nothing to do now but keep stabbing at the smallest, loosest scales I could wedge the verbal toothpick under. This one looked as likely as any other. “You kissed Robbie?” I asked. Haley shook her head. “Kevin?” I guessed again, only half hoping. “Were you back together with him when-” “Not Kevin,” she said. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I pushed the morphine button. “At the going away party, I kissed Ben, and I’m so sorry, not for the kiss, exactly, it was stupidly innocent, but-” “I don’t care,” I lied, lowering my voice against the guards outside. “I just need to think. I need to make a plan.” Never mind the fact that I’d spent the last week trying to think and plan and getting nowhere. “I wanted it to be there,” she went on. “The spark, the magic, I wanted so much for it to be there, waiting to surprise us, but it just wasn’t.” “Maybe you should talk to someone else about this.” “It wasn’t there, and I think that might be why Ben and Kevin went off on their own afterward,” she persisted miserably. “I think it might be my fault they were alone when they were attacked.” I shook my head. “Ben was only there in the first place because I told him to go.” I felt like a dog snapping and yanking at scraps of culpability, but here in this bed, waiting for my bones to set around the new pins and plates, guilt was the only thing strong enough to drown out the helplessness. I couldn’t let Haley steal it all for herself. They might not have been ambushed if she hadn’t kissed him. And they might not have been ambushed if I’d kissed him instead. “How much blood?” I asked. “A lot, but not a certain death lot,” Haley answered readily. “I looked it up.” “No trail?” “No.” That probably meant Ben had been taken away in a vehicle or wrapped in Splinter matter, for what little help that was. “And it’s all Ben’s?” I asked. “We don’t exactly have a forensics lab on our side here,” said Haley. “But Kevin wasn’t bleeding.” And their attackers wouldn’t have bled real blood. “No sign of a Sliver-Ben walking around?” I asked. “Not yet,” said Haley. “Is that… good?” “It’s not anything,” I said. I wouldn’t have wished replication upon anyone, but if we could be sure it had happened to Ben, we’d at least know where he was. This hadn’t done much good for Aldo; we hadn’t been able to find his replication pod in our last invasion of the Sliver Warehouse, I’d landed myself here in the med center trying to take on the Queen, and now with so few of us left and the Occupation watching over everything, I didn’t know how we’d ever pull off another attempt, but it was almost worse, not knowing. Ben might be in mid-replication right now, or he might have escaped and gone to hide in the woods until he could find a safe moment to make contact. The Slivers might be holding him for some other purpose more horrible than we could imagine, or he might already be dead. I didn’t need to voice any of these possibilities to know that Haley had already gone over them all herself. Haley stepped closer, past the foot of the bed. Her hurt was contagious, and maybe mine was too, and I found I had to roll away onto my side to break the feedback loop. “Are you crying?” she asked. “No.” Her voice cracked. “May I join you?” I scooted forward to the edge of the bed, leaving room for her to curl up behind me. The sunflower and carnation bouquet on the table next to me was still as fresh and cheery as it had been when Ben had brought it to me in the morning on his way to Kevin’s party, when they had both been all right, and for a moment I hoped to see it grow fangs or tentacles or the faces of dead people, or some other surreal nightmare manifestation oozing with the Shard-Robbie’s personal style. Having him tampering with my thoughts again would be bad enough on its own, but I could almost have welcomed it if it meant hoping that the rest of this day, this week, and this news, might all just be part of another cruel illusion. The flowers, the room, and Haley’s weight on the mattress next to me remained mercilessly unembellished reality. On TV, a frantic man with a neck tattoo was grating a piece of ginger into a pan of simmering soy sauce. I pushed the morphine button again. # I should have said that Haley was the first one who told me. Before the night was out, Mom called to check on me, and refrained from saying “I told you so” about the fact that, after three years, I’d finally finished destroying the Brundle family. Then Julie texted, with a few hollow words about how none of the fallen would want us to give up. Then Courtney sent me the new password to a dropbox she’d set up for the undiscovered surveillance feeds she’d been able to salvage. Sometime around ten at night, after Haley had gone home, Patrick arrived and stood in the doorway for eight minutes before asking if there was anything he could do for me, and then for another three before going away. They all flickered by, like tides coming in and out over a pier, while I lay there watching the flowers. That night, I exceeded my drip’s programmed dosage limit for the first time since all my surgeries, no longer bothering to self-moderate for the sake of maintaining any mental clarity, and when I ran out of drugs, I took hits of guilt instead, running a fine-toothed comb over every move I’d ever made to bring us all to where we were. The tines always came away full, making me wonder why I’d bothered fighting Haley for a few traces. My guilt drip turned out to be unlimited, and yet my tolerance for it, already founded on a lifelong habit for the stuff, spiked even more sharply than my tolerance for the morphine, until even my newfound cocktail of the two became an inadequate masking agent for the absence of action. So when the morning came, I sat up, shoved the morphine button over the side of the bed, picked up the vase in the less broken of my two arms, and threw it at a guard’s head. Want more sneak previews? Titchenell & Carter patrons at the Telepath level get early access and behind-the-scenes peeks at all our upcoming indie projects, currently including the full first chapter of Stitches and a complete download of my upcoming YA Paranormal title: Out of the Pocket. |
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