I just started an urban fantasy novel, tentatively titled THE EASTER BUNNY MUST DIE!, which I’m in the very early stages of and am thinking would be part of a series called The Holiday Consortium. What do you think, would you keep reading? (Bear in mind, it’s still first draft rough!)
“The Easter Bunny Must Die!â€
The words met me at eye height, startlingly red and crooked as though hand-printed, although at this distance, I could tell that the sign was mass-manufactured. Figured. The Anti-Supernatural-League pretended to be a grass roots movement, but everyone knew it had been organized by Ferret News to give them something to feature in their broadcasts.
I looked down. The protester standing on the concrete in front of me was so short that she might have been taken for a Supernatural herself, a gnome or goblin or gremlin or any other of the few hundred humanoids in that height range. She seemed as broad as she was tall, adding to the illusion. She glared up at me from beneath a mop of brown hair spilling in all directions, as though getting to the protest that day had been so important that she’d skipped all other considerations.
I’d hoped to slip out this back door of the office to quietly grab lunch from the Taco Taco TACO TIME truck for myself and my co-workers. The protesters had been besieging the front of the Supernatural Relations Bureau for a week now, but now they’d discovered the back as well. I wasn’t sure what they thought they were going to accomplish. We’re a government agency, even if one only a few years old.
“Consort of Darkness!†she screeched. I thought for a second that she was screaming it at me and technically she was, but she was also calling for reinforcements. Clearly she’d been enterprising in trying to stake out this door. I appreciated her ingenuity, but wish it had been applied somewhere else. Like maybe trying to consider why a kill-all-supernaturals-because-the-Bible-says-so might not be the least paradoxical position anyone had ever held.
I’d had a week of lunches of granola bars and shared egg salads. We’d been under orders not to engage with the protesters in any way. They had a way of filming such confrontations to make themselves look a whole lot better, and it was amazing how much support they had. When the world cracked open in 2005 and the Supernatural World was forced to reveal itself after the Gingrich episode, a whole lot of people hadn’t been happy at the idea that we were coexisting with a whole lot of creatures we’d been saying never existed.
I’d been putting off some errands as a result of all this too. I had a slew of overdue bills stuffed in my purse ready to be mailed, and the credit card and insurance company were both a week overdue.
I was used to going out and getting a coffee around ten too. A week of forgoing that, a week of pretending that we were just going about our business while trying to talk over the noise of the chanting and bullhorns outside.
And I’d stepped in gum that morning.
So maybe it was inevitable that I’d make the bad decision I did.
I pushed her.
The protesters were well aware of the orders we were under. They were pretty gleeful about it all, actually. They knew we couldn’t fight back, and they weren’t filming things like the gauntlet of spit our office administrator had had to face when she was a little late that morning.
So this one didn’t see that push coming. Her eyes widened as my hands came out and mine might have gotten a little wider too, because sometimes you find yourself doing something and you know this is a terrible idea and that consequences are starting to rush at you at about a million miles per minute, but you go ahead and do it anyway because you just can’t help yourself?
Yeah, that was it.
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