Chapter 1 - Friend or Foe
Set the the world of Claiming Starlight…
(Claiming Starlight previously published, coming soon to subscribers)
Escape a sorcerer, face a swamp. Debts must be paid, blood is currency, and love is the most dangerous thing of all.
The world is broken. Timelines are disrupted. Alternate realities from fantasy, myth, and the past now all exist in one timeline, on one world. It is said the gods walk the earth and only the god eater can control them.
Twenty years after Apocalypse Day, when veils between worlds shattered, supernatural creatures roam freely alongside the remnants of humanity. Vampir lords carve up the Old City in the North, ruling with an iron fist and an insatiable thirst. Shifter packs carve out territories in the ruins, bound by ancient laws and primal instincts. And in the old, lower coastal regions of ancient United States, once the murky depths of the Louisiana bayou, magic thrives in hidden pockets, a dangerous haven for those who dare to defy the established order.
Margo, a sorcerer’s daughter scared by her past, finds refuge in one such haven. Mrs. Piddlehinton’s bakery, a cozy red house offers Margo a fragile peace and the simple comfort. But Margo foolishly gave everything she had on her first night, and now, Mrs. Piddlehinton says it’s time to pay the rent again. Haunted by the trauma of her past and the fear of being cast out into a world where she’s hunted by both the supernatural and the remnants of her father’s dark influence, Margo must find a way to repay her debt.
Her predicament deepens with the arrival of two powerful blue bloods. Kin no Shita, a seductive succubus, sees Margo as a tempting morsel, his flirtations stirring a dangerous mix of fear and forbidden desire within her. And Cailean, a chilling each-uisge whose beauty belies a predatory nature watches on with curiosity.
As supernatural tensions rise and the swamp whispers its secrets, Margo must choose her path carefully. One wrong step could lead to her ruin, or worse, send her back into her father’s clutches.
Will she succumb to temptation, forge a perilous alliance, or find herself caught in a supernatural tug-of-war? The choice is yours.
This is a choose what happens next story, with questions every few chapters where club subscribers can change the course of the story.
Do you want to revisit Micha and Sophie? In this choose what happens next story the reader will decide some of the major plot points, so if you vote, if you want it, it can happen.
I can’t wait to see where this goes.
Chapter 1
Friend Or Foe
My scarred knuckles worked Mrs. P’s honey wheat bread dough in a rhythm of push and fold, turn. Push and fold, turn. I put my entire body into it, watching the dough move, ignoring the scar lines on my wrists, exposed with my pulled-back sleeves. My short, stubby pinky fingers curled inward with as I worked. I was missing the tips of both of them and they were extra sensitized; I didn’t like how anything felt touching them.
My father raised me as his special miracle girl. And when I was ten, he cashed in on that promise. He told me that if I didn’t let him cut off the tip of my left pinky, monsters would come to kill him, and I would be taken away to live in their slave pens.
I let him do it. Willingly. Grateful I could save us.
I could still see his face, the fever in his eyes, the way his forehead wrinkled in urgency. I’d believed him.
Six months later, the other pinky tip was cut off to protect us from the same monsters. Although I carried a lot of scars now, those first two bits of bone and flesh, lost before I knew how to hate, still hurt more than all the others.
That man sired me on a crackhead he’d taken in off the street. He’d known she was a latent witch. Her child, his daughter, would be the perfect tool for a sorcerer obsessed with power. A double-whammy sacrifice blood sacrifice.
It was hard to look at my fingers and not remember that earnest, trusting, stupid little girl who had willingly given up bits of herself for her father’s blood spells.
Push, fold, turn. Push, fold, turn. Take a breath. Relax my shoulders. Stretch my neck.
I looked out the front shop windows into the jungle of the swamp that surrounded us. There was an outline of my reflection there, framed by red and white gingham curtains, wearing a grim smile and swaying with the work.
Sometimes I didn’t recognize that person. I’d changed a lot since coming to this red house in the middle of nowhere. Too much of Mr.’s P’s good food had softened my former underfed appearance. My lips were less pinched. Since the binding geis placed on me wouldn’t let me cut my black hair, it had grown out, thick and heavy. I always wore it in a braid or three, piled on top of my head to combat the humidity and heat. The climate here also darkened my skin with an unexpected southern tan.
If it wasn’t for my too-large, light gray eyes, and thick eyebrows, I wouldn’t have recognized myself. But those were my dad’s eerie eyes and his thick, broad, caterpillar eyebrows.
My idle mind had wandered again, leaking toward memories like water pulled down a drain. I wished I could concentrate more on the task of kneading dough; it was wonderfully physical. Some people said it was relaxing.
I never relaxed. I’d tried counting how many times I folded and turned the handful. I kept losing track. Mrs. P said I wasn’t very good at this.
She was right. I wasn’t.
We still baked every loaf I kneaded separately. Sometimes she let me eat them. Sometimes she fed them to Rufus, the giant alligator who sometimes visited at her back door.
“How are you doing there, dearie?” Mrs. P asked, coming up from behind me. I heard the wheels on her cart and smelled the wild raspberries in the tarts she’d taken out of her oven before I saw her.
“Doing good,” I answered. I broke off a hunk of the ball in my hand and stretched it to show her how it was coming along. It was still sticky and didn’t really stretch. At all.
“Are you then? Have you got enough flour?”
“Last time you said I had too much.”
“That was last time. This time use more flour and less worry. If you keep kneading your anxiety into that bread, it’s not going to rise.”
“You said it didn’t rise because I didn’t knead it enough.”
“Just so.” She snorted and hopped up onto a stool so that she could manage the huge pan of baked goods.
“I can do that when I finish, Mrs. Piddlehinton.” She didn’t like me to shorten her name if I said it out loud, though it was a huge mouthful.
“I can do it now, dearie.” The tray was so big that I couldn’t see her head as she moved it.
The brownies I’d read about from the books my father used were small, willowy, light-bodied creatures with hair everywhere. Mrs. P was short and hairy, but she was neither willowy nor light-bodied. As round as a basketball, she had short arms, stubby legs, and no neck. When I watched her walk from the back, she waddled from side to side, as if she had to rock to gain momentum. How she managed to pick up, hold, and move a tray that was a foot and a half along one edge I couldn’t figure out. The woman couldn’t touch her hands together to clap.
It was magic. I’d grown so accustomed to it here that I didn’t feel it. In her own natural space, the air was so thick with her magic and that of her landlord, a griffin, that I couldn’t pick through the constant mist that soaked everything.
She put the tray on the counter. I turned back to the dough. I saw her move out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look back at her, half of the tarts were lined up on a fresh, papered tray ready for customers.
The hairy back of her brown hand pushed a hand-sized raspberry treat toward me on a delicate, old bone china saucer with a chipped edge.
“I’ll do the morning dishes as soon as I have this bread put up for its second rise.”
“I’ve already set Cinnamon and Nutmeg to it.”
“I’ll clean up after them then.”
Mrs. P clucked. Her two daughters would get sudsy water everywhere except on the dirty dishes, and she knew it. There wasn’t much Mrs. P would let me do in her bakery. I’d begged her to let me help, give me work. There had to be some way to repay her, earn my place here. Keep from becoming indebted to her or her landlord.
She was a blue blood. To most of her kind, the devil was in the details. All things had to stay equal. Though she was a kind of brownie and a servant at heart, exchanges were her language.
I didn’t have anything to offer her and the rent was coming due.
My first night here, I’d given her everything I had left of the jewelry stash I’d used to buy and trade my way here from Hyde, where I’d left my father. I’d just been so grateful and bewitched by her safe, cozy, little place in the swamp that’d I’d emptied my pockets without thinking.
A wise human would have started small. Offered something like a good button, or a ball-point pen. Exhausted and sick from traveling in the wet, coughing my lungs out, I’d not been a wise human.
I didn’t know where I would go next if she kicked me out.
“Try the tart now, dearie, please, won’t you? I did something different.”
“What? You didn’t add magic, did you?”
“To strawberries? It makes them taste burned.”
“Spirits?”
“Not this time. It’s still coffee time.”
“Red pepper?”
“Oh…” Her little arms waved, and her eyebrows bobbed. “That’s a good idea.”
I groaned.
“Try this batch first.”
Mrs. P was an excellent cook, but her experiments could be tricky. Sometimes she forgot that I didn’t have the extra benefits of being a magical creature with a strong constitution. I picked up the tart and took a careful nibble.
Her crust was always perfect. This was her biscuit crust, which had a buttery, cookie texture, and it went beautifully with the raspberry, but then I bit into a dab of unexpected white filling. It wasn’t cream or cream cheese, but something like it that made me think of the two. A light sweet cream flavor with the texture of mozzarella.
“Oh!” I liked it.
Mrs. P preened. “Nothing like a good Irish milk cow, is there?”
I filled my mouth with the rest of the tart. We were in the middle of a swamp. The griffin, Thomas, brought her the cow two weeks ago, telling her that if she kept it away from Rufus, she could keep it.
They were great friends, but even Thomas was beholden to blue blood nature. She’d helped him escape from the chains of an enemy. Her bakery, his protection, gifts like the cow were part of a life debt.
I did not want to owe Mrs. P a life debt.
I looked at the half of the tarts she was going to transfer to the other rack and wondered if I should take another. The raspberry, creamy cookie-ness of it had melted in my mouth. They wouldn’t last long.
The shop door jangled, distracting me from the important decision of trying another tart. I swiped a strand of black frizz from my eyes, my gaze snagging on the shadow filling the doorway. The morning sun lit up the surrounding space with a bruised peach halo, creating a shadow across the warped floorboards of the shop.
My breath caught. Every stranger was a potential threat. Every shadow could be my father or, worse, another like him, come to get me.
