I charged out the door. Details flashed at me like strobe lights: Biggles lying at the foot of the couch, white fur like crumpled tissue, blood along one edge; the Fairy hound only a few steps away, its eyes as big as saucers, its teeth the same ivory as the wall paper behind it, its fetid breath steaming towards me; the scattering of room service dishes on the floor; the crazy angle of the door, hanging sideways in the frame; the TV tuned to pink static.

The hound’s nostrils flared as it scented me, its head jerked up and sideways as it sniffed, trying to locate me. Its fur was mottled black and brown, its eyes and nostrils and panting tongue all the same crimson.

I stepped sideways towards the window.

If there was anytime for supernatural powers to kick in, this was it. What had they given me?

From Santa, the power to make much of little, and to travel quickly.

From the Fairy, the power to trade one thing for another, and to enter any room.

From the Bunny, the power to bring out the life that is there, and to hide and be hidden. Since I was already invisible, big whoop there.

I didn’t really see where any of those were going to come in handy at the moment.

The dog took a step forward, ruby nostrils quivering. Its eyes rolled, searching.

The standing lamp was sturdy brass, holding several branches. I grabbed it and stepped sideways again. The dog lunged at the nearest lampshade and I swung to hit it even as it did so, resulting in an ineffectual blow that just frustrated us both. The dog tore the lampshade off, rended it in three savage bites, let the scraps fall on the floor, even as I backed up towards Biggles.

The growl sent shivers down my spine. It was an atavistic sound, the sort of noise that would have sent my ancestors to the trees and caves, hiding from this fearsome shadow in the night. It made the hairs on every single part of my body bristle as though about to jump ship out of sheer terror. That was one of the powers of Fairy hounds, and somehow, knowing that it was the result of magic made it a little easier to bear.

That growl kept crawling out of its throat, its half opened mouth as it stalked forward. I adjusted the lamp in my hands, preparing.

It leapt.

This time I got some power into the swing. The lamp’s base smashed into the side of the hound’s head, staggering it and knocking it sideways to the ground. It landed beside Biggles, who stirred, a groggy and uncertain moment.

“Get out of the way, Biggles,” I shouted.

He and the hound sat up at the same time, but Biggles was faster. His own teeth flashed, landing at the dog’s throat. The dog let out something between a whine and a yelp, backing away, but it couldn’t escape the gnawing burden at its throat. It cried out and staggered, stepped back, forward, as though confused. Its head tilted up, showing Biggles still working as it sank to the carpet in a pool of blood.

Biggles let go. Blood shows to great effect on white fur, I noted, and felt a little queasy.

“Jesus, Biggles,” I said. “What are you, some kind of vorpal bunny?”

“I can defend myself all right,” he said in a sullen tone. “It surprised me earlier, knocked me out before I could react.” He looked around. “Where are you? How are you doing that?”

I untangled the scarf from around my neck.

“Invisibility cloak,” he said. “Niiiice, very old school. Which one of them gave you that?”

“None of them, actually,” I said. I stooped to examine the dog for any clue. Amid the mangled flesh were the scraps of a gilded leather collar. I extracted it gingerly, looking at the rug. “We’re going to need to call housekeeping.”

A tiny golden plate was affixed to the collar. “Shit.”

“What is it?” Biggles stood beside me. I tilted the plate so he could see the device there.

“Oh, that’s not good,” he said. “That’s not good at all.

Light flickered on the engraved rose and crown.

The emblem of the Royal House of Fairy.

The hotel Biggles suggested was surprisingly swank, but they didn’t lift an eyebrow when he followed me in. I gave him a sideways glance and he winked at me.

“Consortium owns this place,” he said. “Every supernatural uses it.”

I called Harriet after we’d checked into the suite. Biggles had vanished into his room to call room service and catch the tail end of “The Hidden World.” Who’d have thought a Supernatural would want to watch reality television.

She didn’t pick up until the fifth ring.

“Harriet?” I said. “I left my jacket there. I’m out of town, but I’ll come get it when I’m back.”

Her tone was surprisingly cordial. “I was hoping you’d call,” she said. “By any chance, did you grab a scarf out of that Goodwill box? I think I stuck it in there by accident.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” I said. Her tone was off somehow. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “Boy trouble. You know how it is.”

Actually, work had kept me too busy to date much over the past few years, so I didn’t. But I said, “Sure, I know how it is.”

“When do you think you could bring it by? Tonight? Tomorrow?”

“No way,” I said. “I’m on the road, in some hotel called Owl Heights, in a town too small to have a name.”

“When will you be back? I borrowed it from a friend and I need to get it back to them.”

A day more to get there, a day to track down the pig and deal with, a couple of days back. “By Sunday evening at the latest,” I said.

Silence at the other end of the line.

“I could express mail it to you,” I offered.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “Sunday then.” She hung up without saying anything more.

Emerging from his room, Biggles said, “You look like someone just blew you off.”

“What? No,” I said. “I just — I’ve known her a long time, long enough to know when something’s wrong.”
Long enough to know when there was something important she wasn’t saying.

Biggles’ fur was oddly matted and he was wrapped in the leopard print terrycloth robe that had come with the room.

“Did you take a shower?” I asked.

“Yeah, I did. Whassamatter, you think I should be licking my fun clean? What kind of primitive screwhead do you think I am?”

“I hadn’t really thought much about what sort of screwhead you were,” I snapped back.

Supernaturals tended to keep to themselves. Sure, a couple of sitcoms focused on the collision of the two worlds, but most people could go through the day, maybe a week, without spotting one. So I don’t know that Biggles’ indignation at my surprise was all that warranted. I was rapidly becoming one of the leading experts on Supernatural mores.

“Hadn’t thought much about it or hadn’t thought much in general?” he volleyed back.

“Why are you so testy all of a sudden?”

He glared at me for a glacially long moment. “We’ll be facing a poweful, dangerous, and probably insane creature. We may be able to giggle about the shape that’s been forced on it, but let’s not pretend this is going to be a cakewalk. And I don’t even know if you’re any good in a fight.” His beady eyes raked over me, piling details into a mental heap that clearly didn’t impress him. “You’re skinny, clumsy, and while the jury’s still out, I think the verdict will be short on brains.”

I gaped at him. What had happened to the cute little bunny facade? This create was as dangerous as any monster I’d ever fought, and I needed to keep the white fur and sugar dependency from making me overlook that.

“You don’t have to go with me,” I said.

His glare became even more gimlet. “I have to. I have a job and that’s it, pretty much. Accompany you. Guide you. Watch over you.” His whiskers twisted in a sideways sneer.

“Fuck off.” I stalked into my own room and slammed the door shut. Fighting would solve nothing. Although it would have been much more satisfying than my retreat.

I lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling, The sprinkler had a little note attached to it saying it shouldn’t be used for suspending “clothes hangers or other devices.” reasonable enough. What sort of idiot would try to hang stuff from a sprinkler?

What sort of idiot went charging off to fight big bad monsters, even with a trunkload of artillery and a talking rabbit at her back? What if I got hurt, was I on their health care plan already? I didn’t think that I could be. I hadn’t filled out any paperwork or forms. I hadn’t discussed wages or pension plan or benefits or even sick days. Instead I’d just taken that credit card like a gift from Santa and gone charging off with Biggles in tow.

And…they’d given me powers. Superpowers. I din’t know how to call nay of them up or actually use them, but I did have them. The logical thing would have been to go and ask Biggles about it, but he wasn’t in a talking mood and neither was I. Getting up, I fished through my suitcase to find the scarf Harriet had mentioned.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I draped it around my neck and looked in the mirror. Two things happened.

1. I noticed I was no longer visible in the mirror.

2. Something crashed into the next room from the hallway.

Biggles screamed.

Then there was silence.

The cats remain fascinated by the classes. They can't figure out who I'm talking to.

Some people are taking the class in order to edit their own stuff, others to edit for other folks, a couple for a combination of that. We talked about what a developmental edit is intended to do, and how it’s different from a copy-edit. In fact, you want to avoid copy-editing (other than a couple of cases which I’ll get to in a minute) because often that sentence you’re tinkering with will end up discarded or substantially revised in the final version.

Honing your editing ability to where you can trust it is one way to free yourself up when writing. Instead of listening to the internal editor telling you that sentence isn’t perfect or that you need to check that name on Wikipedia before using it, you can assure that editor it will get its chance during the revision process and go on writing.

Developing a process also helps you know when to stop rewriting. I work from the big picture stuff in, moving to small sentence level details in a second or third draft. Usually my process goes like this:

1. Bang out a first draft. It may have parenthetical directions like (expand on this) or (transition here) or (describe), but it is a complete story.
2. (Optional but encouraged) Let it sit for a week or two. This is where procrastination can really bite you in the ass.
3. Print out the draft and write all over it. This is my developmental edit, in which structures may get changes, sections moved (or eliminated), point of view or tense changed, etc. It’s also where all those parenthetical directions get fulfilled.
4. Entering these changes onto the computer may involve some more tinkering as I do so, but generally I’m working towards another draft that I can print out.
5. That draft gets printed out and edited again. This stage is where I read aloud and tinker at the sentence and paragraph level. I may changes names at this point, and I’ll do things like look for adverbs (as discussed in The 10% Solution).
6. I will probably do another read aloud pass after that’s entered into the computer, depending on how hard a deadline is pressing.

More on developmental editing, what it is, how I do it, and how one needs to adapt editing to genres such as hard SF, dark fantasy, horror, etc, in another post.

Biggles ate his way through candy as we drove up the mountain along 90: Hershey’s Kisses and Malomars, dusty Necco wafers and a rainbow of Skittles, followed by a disturbing mass of gummy worms.

“We’re going to need to stop soon,” he said as the last vanished. “Look, the Indian John reststop is coming up.” He giggled. His humor level was consistent, if nothing else.

“You need to pee?” What was traveling with a three foot tall talking rabbit going to be like? Some people accepted the supernatural, others found it more objectionable. But surely if things got ugly, that cuteness would get us out of the situation.

“I need more sugar.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Listen up, toots. Easter creatures live by certain laws and most of them revolve around sugar or eggs.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Like you’re some kind of expert on festive biology?”

“Festive biology? How can which holiday you’re associated with affect your biology?”

“Easter runs on sugar, babe. So do Easter rabbits.”

“I didn’t see the Easter Bunny eating any.”

“We don’t talk about that,” Biggles said.

“Why?”

“To tell you why we won’t talk about it would involve talking about it, wouldn’t it?” His ears flicked in irritation. “Let’s just say it involves a…sensitivity.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

We drove along in silence for several minutes before I said, “What about Santa, does he have festive biology too?”

“Oh, the ladies always get around to that,” he leered. “You’ve heard it too?”

“Heard what?”

“That the old white beard’s hung like a stallion.”

“Don’t be gross.”

“The birds and the bees are never gross, boss. Sex is a beautiful, natural thing.”

“The thought of Santa Claus having sex is not, however.”

He subsided back into silence.

I stopped in an outlet mall, first at a luggage store, then at stores filling the case I’d just bought with underwear, jeans, shirts, pajamas. A Seahawks cap and a new pair of Nikes. Toiletries from the Body Shop along with a bag of the more pragmatic items from CVS, where I also picked up the list Biggles had dictated to me, which seemed to focus on the major food groups: chocolate, licorice, marshmallow, and red.

He’d opted to stay with the car after looking to see how many children there were at the mall.

“You can’t trust the little bastards not to pick you up and squeeze you,” he said. His nose worked with fevered intensity. “They’re as violent as corn weasels, some of them.”

I didn’t ask for the background on that particular rant; instead I just went.

I had to admit, it was pretty nice, using that corporate credit card. I didn’t have to check labels or which rack I grabbed something off of.

If they wanted to convince me that the offer was appealing, that was already accomplished. But I still didn’t know what lay behind it.

When I came back to the car, children were clustered around it, so close some had their faces pressed to the glass. Biggles sat on the front seat, frozen, eyes fixed forward on the shadow of the leafless branch lying across the dashboard.

As I approached, a girl turned to me. “Is it real or a toy? Yoshi said he can see it breathing.”

I glanced into the car as I unlocked it. From his still posture, it was clear Biggles was trying to impersonate an inanimate object. I could almost see his ears quivering with the intensity of the effort.

“Toy,” I said briefly, opening the door and sliding in beside him.

From her vantage point at the car’s side, the girl peered in, staring across me. I started the engine and the kids scattered.

We exited under a banana-yellow sign exhorting us to come back real soon. As we pulled out onto the road, Biggles relaxed, slumped down in his seat. He remained silent.

The weather was warmer here. I’d stopped regretting my jacket at Harriet’s. It would give me an excuse to call her. As long as she didn’t think I’d left it there in order to do just that. Maybe I had. Maybe my unconscious mind had been trying to help me mend fences.

What would Harriet think of an expedition to hunt down a mad pig? It didn’t exactly fit into her concept of Magic, all unicorns and fairy princes and sexy vampires.

Maybe it was better not to think about Harriet and just let my unconscious mind move that side of things along.

“So clue me in,” I said as we drove along. “What does the Holiday Consortium do?”

“Do?” Biggles said. He shoved a pawful of gummy worms in his mouth, which was as disturbing an image as one might think. His words emerged around them. “Handles their interests.”

“They being?”

“The big three.”

“Tooth, Bunny, and Santa.”

He nodded. “It’s been around longer than you’d think,” he said. “It got set up before the Revelation.”

“The Revelation?” I was pretty sure I knew what he meant. But I’d never heard it called that before.

His ears flicked in irritation. Outside, windmills flickered on slopes furred with brown and yellow grass as the landscape rolled past. “When the Hidden World decided to reveal itself to yours. The Consortium was part of that decision, you know.”

Everyone speculates about that, but most supernatural creatures will tell you they don’t know what prompted the action, even though it was agreed upon by most of their major power groups: the Vampire Council, the main wizardly groups, all but a few of the gods, both Sidhe courts…none of them were saying what prompted the events of 2005. So I glanced over at Biggles, but he didn’t seem to be saying anything more, just watching the sky outside the window while he ate his way through a bag of Twizzlers.

“Be honest with me. Why do you need candy and the Easter Bunny doesn’t?” I asked.

He pulled another Twizzler from the bag with a crinkle and strawberry-scented flourish. “Fine. Because the old man is trying to resist the whole chocolate bunny schtick.”

“Why?”

“Did he tell you he thinks there’s a traitor?”

“At the highest levels, he said.”

“Sssh,” Biggles said, eyes riveted on me. “For the love of Jiminy Cricket, don’t say that sort of thing too loud.” He made a show of twisting around in his seat belt in order to examine the back seat. I think he was less concerned with possible eavesdroppers than demonstrating to me how seriously this should all be taken.

“It starts with what you asked about — the sugar,” he said, turning back to me. “A lot — and I mean a lot — of supernaturals are belief-based, which means they’re dependent on humans. No other race gives off the same juice as a human believer, and before you ask about that, no one knows why.”

“So if humans didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t exist?”

“Right. That’s why those three as as powerful as they are, because multitudes believe in them. It’s why they push back whenever there’s incidents like the Sidhe invading or a dragon nesting.”

“Okay.” It explained a great deal, actually.

“They’re most powerful when it’s their holiday. Santa and the Bunny, at least. The Fairy’s not bound the way they are. But they’re all fueled mostly on kid imagination, which puts them on the top, power-wise. Not a lot of other creatures would want to go toe to toe with one.”

“How’s that connected to sugar?”

He held up a paw. “I’m getting to that. Some things don’t get born from stories and legends. The kind of creatures they’ve set you on.”

“Things created from advertisements.”

“You’re smarter than you look, Boss. Those things are different, somehow, most of the time. Often they’re unthinking and destructive. Sometimes they’re mean. The best way I can explain it is that the association with money twists them. They seek power and once they have it, they abuse it to get more.”

“What kind of Marxist crap is that? You’re saying money is somehow so inherently evil that association with it turns supernaturals evil?”

“Are there any you can think of associated with money that aren’t? Trolls, dragons…Rumplestiltskin.”

“I can think of one obvious one. The Tooth Fairy.”

He shook his head. “Kid imagination, which focuses on the fairy part, not the money part. And she’s not selling anything, she’s buying it. Mostly. Anyhow, ever heard the expression ‘the exception that proves the rule?’”

“Still waiting on the sugar connection.”

“Easter’s become a celebration of greed for candy. Chocolate bunnies, marshmallow peeps, pushed hard in supermarkets, TV specials designed to peddle a particular flavor. Sugar’s the way the forces of commerce creep into Easter. So the Bunny shuns it, lives on caffeine, cigarettes, and a lot of alfalfa.”

None of this really gibed with what I’d been taught in school, but the academics were still figuring out the Supernatural World. Perhaps I could become some sort of expert. I hadn’t signed an NDA, after all, and so I could write the kind of book Coraline had mentioned. Maybe have it ghostwritten in order to avoid the hard part. I’d always hated writing papers.

“So the Easter Bunny is avoiding candy and he thinks someone in the Consortium is a traitor. Why?”

“We harvest those little gods and beings, siphon off their energy. It powers a lot of the Holiday Consortium’s daily doings. The spell that kills off the little ones takes some power to tun so it’s not really self-sustaining. It need outside juice to keep going. And some of that energy’s been disappearing.”

“Why’s he say top levels, then?”

“When I say some, I mean a lot.”

“I’d think Santa would be just as prone to money corruption as the Easter Bunny. If not more so,” I said.

“Christmas is sort of self-cleansing. Think of what we associate with it: Giving. Selflessness. Charity.”

That made sense too.

As much as any of this did.

The car’s interior smelled new, as though it had just rolled off the assembly line. The license plate read HC-05. How big was this Holiday Consortium? And what did it do, besides knocking off rogue commercial gods? What that it? It couldn’t be.

And Santa Claus. There was an enigmatic figure whose existence seemed to unsettle people more than any implication of a God. He didn’t really make toys and distribute them, or so they said, but he was powerful.

Though I was still disappointed to find out there was no Rudolph. That had been the first question at his initial press conference.

“Get me out of this fucking basket,” something said on the seat beside me.

In the aftermath of talking to my mother, I’d forgotten that particular twist.

I reached over and flipped the lid open. A furry white head emerged to give me a glare.

“Explain to me again,” I said, “exactly how you’re going to ‘help’ me?”

“You,” my erstwhile assistant said, “have clearly never dealt with a magical rabbit before.”

“Not one with a name like Biggles, no.”

The basket had been a typical picnic one, the sort you might take on a romantic picnic for two. The rabbit seemed to grow as it emerged from the confines. By the time a three foot tall version of the Easter Bunny sat beside me on the seat’s bland beige leatherette, the basket had been reduced to shreds around it.

“Like we can choose our names,” he said, glaring at me. “You don’t hear me saying anything about people with weird palindromic last names, do you?”

“Technically, that’s exactly what I just heard.”

He waved a dismissive paw at me. “Let’s get going.”

Like the Easter Bunny, he was a humanoid rabbit, a modicum of dress, long floppy ears, whiskers, that sort of thing.

Unlike the Easter Bunny, he was cute, so sweet it made your teeth hurt just looking at the enormous dark eyes, the twitch of a nose, the soft fur a laundry-fresh, snowy white. He smelled of newly-mown grass and hyacinth.

“You’re doing it again,” he said. “Stop it. Just stop it.”

I closed my mouth to contain the involuntary “awwww” that was about to emerge. “There’s some kind of magic on you, isn’t there?” I said. “The cuteness.”

He stared out the window, watching an elderly woman making her way along the sidewalk, faltering forward with her walker. “You’re not as dumb as you look, are you, Boss?” he said. “Sorry, I forgot I had it on. It’s second nature.” Now he was still shiny white but somehow no longer compelling, captivating as he had been before. He looked at me.

“You’re supposed to explain all this to me,” I said.

He just nodded.

The three — Santa, the Fairy, and the Bunny — had argued over that, which one of them was going to give me an assistant. I wasn’t sure why — I couldn’t get a feel for whether it was because it was an effort or simply because it meant whoever did it was lowest on the totem pole, but they’d bullied the Bunny into doing it. He’d stubbed out his sixth cigarette, twisted his paws, and reached into a hole in the air. His arm disappeared as he did it, up to the shoulder as he fished around in that other space before pulling out the basket.

“Biggles can stay in there till you’re ready for him,” he’d said, handing it to me. It was much heavier than it looked. “He’ll help you out and answer questions.”

Like his creator, Biggles wore vest and bow tie and nothing else. His fluffy white tail rested on the folder they’d given me.

I reached and pulled it out from under him.

“Let’s start here. This is my trial monster?” Without waiting for an answer, I flipped it open and looked at the photo.

“It’s a pig,” I said, and felt the scorn in Biggles’ eyes as the words left my lips.

Indeed it was a pig. A large, anthropomorphic pig, pink as bubblegum, walking upright on its hind legs. It wore a white apron and a chef’s hat, tiled at a jaunty angle at odds with the pig’s morose expression.

“Yup,” Biggles said. “Meet Billy-Bob Barbecue, logo for the national chain by the same name. Usually this kind doesn’t last.”

“This kind?”

He nodded at the photo. “Traitors to their race. Think about what a pig selling pork BBQ is really doing. Selling his own kind’s flesh in order to stay alive. There’s a lot of them – usually pigs, chickens, cows, a few fish.” He shrugged.

“Why don’t they usually last?”

“They off themselves out of guilt. Others, though, just a few…they turn mean instead. Really mean.”

I looked at the info sheet. “Says we’ll find him in Vegas.”

Biggles nodded. “That’s where the chain started. His birthplace.”

“How do we deal with him?”

The rabbit fished through a vest pocket. “You’ll want this.”

This was a silver disk, blank as an untooled coin.

“It’s called a drain. Put it against its skin, and the rest will be taken care of,” Biggles said. “It draws on the creature’s power, siphons it off for the Consortium’s use.”

That certainly helped explain why the Consortium might be devoting itself to this task.

“That’s all I have to do, slap that on it?”

“Oh, no.” Biggles looked incredulous. I hadn’t ever imagined a rabbit could look incredulous, but he managed it with ease. “You have to damage it enough to shake its reality, in order to activate the drain.”

I gestured down at the picture. “Damage it with what?”

“Pop the trunk so I can show you.”

I stared down at the neatly stocked trunk compartment. “Is any of this legal?”

“As a Consortium agent, technically you have diplomatic immunity — but they’d prefer that you not put that to the test. The lower a profile you can keep, the better.”

“These do not look like low profile weapons.”

Grenades, pistols, rifles, guns, guns, and more guns. Night-scopes, thermal-scopes, laser-scopes, enchanted scopes. Holy water and Fido-gas. Was that a mortar?

I shut the trunk before any of Villa Encantada’s inhabitants could come gawp at the contents.

“So Vegas?”

He nodded.

The folder held a corporate credit card. I could buy what I needed along the way.

One gas station stop later, the car was fueled, Biggles had two grocery bags of candy, jerky, and bottled water on the seat beside him, and we were both wearing sunglasses as we left Seattle and headed east over the Cascades.

They gave me a wicker basket holding my assistant, a company car, a corporate credit card, and a folder with my first assignment. I didn’t bother looking at the folder. Instead I went to see my mother.

***

My mother has gone through more husbands than Elizabeth Taylor. That sounds like I’m making a big joke of it all, but it’s the truth: she had nine, Taylor seven or eight, depending on how you counted Richard Burton.

A beautiful, fragile woman who looked like she’d walked off an advertisement. I didn’t know how I had never managed to see it before. A beautiful, fragile woman who’d been absolutely unable to step up to the bat and try to take care of me. Instead she’d bounced off to a psych ward and I went to my aunt’s to live.

And all this time, she’d actually been something powerful. Something more than human.

I might have been surprised by it all, but truth be told, the main emotion was not that.

I was seriously pissed off.

Villa Encantada lay on the shore of Lake Sammammish, near the motley of attractions comprising Marymoor Park. Her last husband had set up the trust that kept her there. At least I didn’t have to worry about supporting her in her old age.

I went through the graceful, hushed lobby, a cluster of blue-haired ladies fussing over a tiny dog with more hair than the three of them had between them. In the elevator up the the third floor I studied myself in the brass of the railing, a tiny, frowning Emma Amme.

I’d take it slow. I’d feel her out gently, try to find out how much of what Santa Claus said was true.

Had her supernatural powers helped her snare all those husbands, I wondered. Had the fragile act all been just a sham? It had to have been. And that was what really made me angry, that I’d gone through all those years of school being mocked for having a mom in the looney bin, as they used to say, and worse than that, facing the fear that someday I might meet the same fate.

Which is why all my good intentions fled the minute I saw her face and I blurted out, “When were you going to tell me?”

To do her credit, she didn’t even pretend not to know what I was talking about. She was sitting near the window, curled in an armchair. She looked charming and birdlike and enchanting. She always did. I was pretty sure she had the old codgers here lined up outside her door ready to squire her to the weekly bingo game.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“Santa Claus,” I said briefly, taking the chair across from her.

An odd expression flitted across her face. A horrible thought entered my mind.

“Dad was my real dad, wasn’t he? I mean, you’re not going to tell me my father is Santa Claus.”

She flinched. “I can see where you’d ask a question like that,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her. “But it’s a mean way to hurt me, Emma.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I looked at her. “But why?”

“Why what? Why did I keep it from you?”

“No,” I said. “Why the mental act?”

She only looked at me. Her blue eyes were clear as violets and brimming with tears.

“I know,” she said in her soft voice, “how you must despise me. But you were raised among them, you understand them. Imagine what it was like, being born full-grown and yet knowing nothing. And to have your entire focus on one aspect of life… you don’t know what it’s like, worrying if everything is clean all the time. It’s a filthy, filthy, germ-ridden world. Can you really blame me from fleeing that? Here things are…antiseptic. Most of the time. It helps.”

I stared at her. “You abandoned me because you were afraid I might have germs?”

“Not might,” she said. “Did. You were crawling with them. Crawling!” She shuddered.

Okay, so my mother was a supernatural. And she was crazy.

“Why did they let you live, Mom? They said they killed off most of the commercial gods.”

She leaned forward, plucking at my sleeve.

“Be careful,” she said.

I caught her hand, light as a bird between my fingers. “Why? What happened, Mom, that they left you alone?”

“Thre were a lot of us,” she said. “Sister products. Lady Lemon for floors, Lady Jasmine for dishes…all the others. And me.”

“Lady Sunshine.”

Her eyes had been dropping as though sleep were tugging her to come away. Now they fluttered open, fastened on my face.

“Lady Sunshine,” she breathed. “And you, my little sunbeam.”

That might have touched me more if I’d ever heard her say it before. She studied her fingers, twisted them around each other as she spoke, like broken things crawling. The lucid light I’d seen in her face when I’d first come in, the one that had convinced me that she really had been faking it all this time, was fading before my eyes.

“Mom,” I said. “They say they’re going to kill you if I don’t work for them.”

I don’t know what I expected. She just stared back at me.

“Did you do one of them a favor?”

She smiled, slyly. “Nicholas,” she said. “I did him a favor, all right.”

“What was it?”

But she retreated again, wouldn’t say anything. My fists clenched in frustration but I forced myself to take a deep breath and stand.

“You’re not staying for lunch?” she said. “They have chicken cacciatore.”

The two collections will have the same cover. I like this picture, but it's not the right one.

NEAR:
The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each (Clarkesworld)
Peaches of Immortality (originally appeared as The Immortality Game in Fantasy)
Long Enough and Just So Long (Lightspeed)
Therapy Buddha (20/20 Visions)
Do the Right Thing (unpublished)
10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace (Abyss & Apex)
Memories of Moments, Bright As Falling Stars (Talebones)
RealFur (Serpentarius)
A Man And His Parasite (unpublished)
Not Waving, Drowning (Redstone)
Flicka (Subversions)
Raven (Twisted Cat Tales)
Legends of the Gone (Talebones)

FAR: (much less sure about this order, suggestions welcome)
Zeppelin Follies (Crossed Genres)
Surrogates (Clockwork Phoenix 3)
Kallakak's Cousins (Asimov's)
Five Ways to Fall in Love On Planet Porcelain (unpublished)
Angry Rose's Lament (Abyss & Apex)
Fire on the Water's Heart (Membrane)
Amid the Words of War (Lightspeed)
I Come From the Dark Universe (unpublished)
Seeking Nothing (Daily SF)
Bots d'Amor (Abyss & Apex)
TimeSnip (Basement Stories)
Mother's World (Aberrant Dreams)

(If you're curious about any, all of the online ones are linked to on my fiction page – http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/fiction/. I know there's at least one A&A link that's broken, glad to hear of any other broken links.)

I've left some stories out, because there's actually enough for a 2nd fantasy antho and a horror one, much to my surprise. I've been more prolific over the past few years than I'd realized.

In my utter arrogance, I am debating whether or not I need to hire an editor, which is normally something I'd urge anyone putting together something for self-publishing to do. My reasoning is a) most of these have undergone multiple editing passes for publication, b) I am pretty sure I can find at least one volunteer proofreader, and c) I will be doing at least one read aloud pass to polish and finetune because I'd really like this to end up looking nice and error-free.

Cover art, I have no clue about yet. If I did it myself, it'd be two stick figures dancing.

Chapter Five, continued

It was vault rather than room that met my eyes. A back wall held rows and rows of drawers. In the middle, a raised dais of what looked like the same white plastic as the panel beside the door. On it was a round of gray stone, perhaps a foot in diameter.

We approached and as we got closer, I could feel the temperature of the air dropping with every inch that closed between us and the stone in the middle. I couldn’t imagine how powerful it might be. Some of the artifacts are demigods in and of their own right. We’d studied a few in classes, but I didn’t recognize this one.

We stood around the dais at equal intervals, Santa directly across me. The Tooth Fairy gave me another of those unsettling attempts at a smile.

“Put out your hand and lay it on the Calendar, Ms. Amme,” Santa said.

This close, the stone’s surface was covered with tangled lines, a carving whose meaning I could not decipher. The air reeked of magic, that odd nostril burn you only get when you’re around the really high-powered stuff.

I hesitated. But what could I do? I’d play along, at least until I’d had a chance to talk to my mother. I stretched out my hand.

It was cold, unbelievably cold, when I touched it. I started to pull my hand away, but some invisible force held my fingers fast to it. It rang like a bell, a sound so loud and piercing it was almost painful, a wave of sound carrying us to another dimension, where senses where different, where everything was bright and three shining figures stood in a circle with me.

One of them laid his hand on the stone as well.

“I give you the power to make much of little, and to travel quickly,” Santa Claus said.

The Tooth Fairy followed.

“I give you the power to trade one thing for another, and to enter any room.”

Finally, the Easter Bunny’s paw.

“I give you the power to bring out the life that is there, and to hide and be hidden.”

With every word, I could feel energy coiling inside me, as though I were hollow and being filled for the first time. it was an odd and unpleasant sensation, but I gritted my teeth.

The stone rang again and as the noise faded, I was able to pull my hand away.

Santa Claus smiled at me, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. He handed me a folder. “You’ll find your target in there, and we’ll supply an assistant to help orient you.” He walked to the door. “Once you’ve had a chance to met it, you can return here and we can discuss the next step. Think of it as a trial of sorts.” He turned.

“You’ll want to talk to your mother at first, of course. That’s understandable. Quite understandable. But don’t take too long, Miss Amme We don’t try to keep these creatures down for our own amusement.” He frowned at me. “We do it for the good of the world.”

http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2012/01/04/online-classes-and-workshops-for-2012/