Arik gave a grunt, and his body fell forward as Gunther stepped to the side, and out of his way.
A great gout of flame erupted from his back where Gunther’s blade slipped through.
The flames around Arik’s body grew higher, and pine needles on the ground around the castle caught fire. Continue reading 1943: Part 6
The armor-piercing bullets didn’t do much more than the normal ones.
They knocked Arik backward, some of them ricocheting off him, ripping his suit jacket around his left shoulder. A little blood dripped into the fabric. A wisp of smoke rose from the wound.
“Gunther,” Joe said. “Fire in the hole.” Continue reading 1943: Part 5
Even with the room’s high ceiling, the man’s head stayed less than an inch away. Slouching, he stepped inside, putting him within arm’s reach.
Joe stepped back. He swung his arm to the left, hoping it would cross the circle. It hit an invisible barrier.
Magic, he thought. Continue reading 1943: Part 4
They’d sent him in because intelligence said the Nazis were building a superweapon. This wasn’t technology. The Nazis were summoning demons. Joe knew he didn’t know anything about magic, and he’d never heard of a Sunday School that went into the specifics of demon summoning.
His hadn’t for sure. Continue reading 1943: Part 3
Quiet was, of course, a matter of opinion.
Joe guessed that in the opinion of the soldier pushing up the hatch on the tower’s roof, he hadn’t been quiet at all.
The soldier stared up at him, and slammed the hatch shut. Continue reading 1943: Part 2
June 1943, Germany. Somewhere in the Black Forest:
The castle stood on top of a hill. From his position in the forest, Joe wasn’t impressed. It didn’t match up to the castles he’d imagined when he’d read Ivanhoe. This castle wasn’t much more than a big tower connected to a house. Both were made of stone, but at the end of the day it was smaller than the old monstrosity of a house that Giles Hardwick had grown up in.
He found it hard to make out details in the darkness, but the moon gave enough light for him to notice the two soldiers standing at the top of the tower.
He’d have to kill them both, and he doubted it would be quiet. Continue reading 1943: Part 1
We stepped outside.
Daniel shut the door behind us, and we stood on the walk in front of his front porch, stopping next to a light shaped like an old gas street lamp.
Looking back at the house, I asked, “Is he getting worse?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like one of his good days. He knew who everyone was, and he was in a good mood. It’s so stupid. Do you think he’s worse?” Continue reading Turning Eighteen: Part 8
Owing to a variety of things, the current post isn’t done. It’ll appear later tonight.
Also, my apologies to everyone about the horrible slowness of the site on late Friday and Saturday. The server this is on got hit by a Denial of Service attack. As an added bonus, they then had to do things after preventing the attack to get the server back to responding reasonably quickly.
Hopefully it is now…
So anyway, a bunch of online fiction writers did an April Fools swap, and for various reasons, it didn’t work out for the person who was supposed to write for me to actually do so.
As it happens, Gavin sent me something last night. Think of it as a prequel to what I wrote for his story.
Take a look at Gavin Williams “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.” I did his April Fools Day post.
The other… Alexandra Erin is doing something interesting called “Lit Snacks” in which she writes an ebook and sells advertising in the back of it. She was kind enough to give me free advertising in the first one “The Gift of the Bad Guy” (a piece of superhero fiction).
I’d planned to mention it when it came out, but I somehow didn’t notice. Thus I mention it today.