Saturday Snippets: August Edition

Where has August gone? It seems like I was just getting ready for it to begin. Ah well. This month's been a bit more productive than July. Here are some snippets for you to enjoy.







I think all this time he’s harbored a certain animosity towards magic and anyone connected to our world. It’s possible he blames people like us for his wife leaving him.

Or he could just be a royal jerk, she said.

I chuckled despite myself. Or that.

***

“Well, that was about as effective as I expected,” Stavros said.

“Better than I expected.” The wooden voice had called from inside Reese’s office.

I stepped past the door, which hung aslant in the frame. “Belchor?”

The place was a mess. Papers and books had been torn from the shelves and Belchor groaned from its prone position in the floor. Scorch marks traced smudgy shapes across its back.

“Is there someone under the bookshelf?” Samantha asked, trying to tilt Belchor upright.

“Belchor is the bookshelf,” I replied, helping her lever it against the wall again.

***

“Exactly so,” Belchor said. “Keep that up, don’t waver, don’t sneeze, don’t blink.”

I pictured Stavros faking a sneeze, or adding “don’t breathe” to Belchor’s list, but he wasn’t a Djinni; the humor would have been lost on him. Or perhaps he didn’t want me to experience another lapse in treatment.

Lapse in treatment. Laps in treatment. Maybe they’d have me running laps. No. Running was bad. Running raised the heartbeat, sped up the venom’s metabolism. Venom. V-nam. Vietnam. Glad I never saw that conflict. The American Civil War was bad enough.

Never did tell Merlin that story.

***

If he was really here—what must her hair look like? What diseased color had that streak—the only physical sign of her parentage—taken on?

Jason’s hand slipped into hers—oh, please, God, don’t let it be a dream—and he said, “Does that feel like a hallucination?”

“Hallucinations don’t feel like hallucinations,” she quipped. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be flirting with him; she ought to be mending things, apologizing.

***

I pushed my hair out of my eyes and waited for Toho to surface, but he remained under the surface far longer than I would have expected. A slick something brushed my leg and I shouted.

Toho surfaced a few feet from where he’d gone under.

“You scare too easily, youngling,” he said with his too-wide grin. “That old joke would not have elicited more than a bark from old Coyote.”

“Coyote probably didn’t have to swim blind in an underground pool with you,” I replied.

“True,” said Toho, leaning away to float on his back. “If he had, he would have made a comment about blindness improving the view.”

“Sounds like Robin,” I said, scrubbing my skin with more sand and trying to ignore the tremor in my voice.

Toho laughed. “Where do you think the Puck learned his tricks?”

***

Crouching next to the fire, Spider Grandmother seemed both spider and grandmother in my Second Sight. It was as though two beings—one a woman like Madame Excelsior or Harry’s grandmother, the other a spider so immense I wondered if Tolkien hadn’t seen her before writing The Two Towers—occupied the same place, their forms overlapping in disconcerting ways. Oddly enough, as we crossed the chamber to stand before her, I thought that the spider looked at me with more kindness and understanding in her eight eyes than the grandmother did. I suddenly felt I understood a little what that line from Narnia meant. The one about wanting to be eaten by Aslan rather than fed by someone else.

But I still didn’t want to be eaten. Not today, at least.




That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed it!

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