He smiled and looked me in the eyes,
and in that moment I didn't like him any more.

He said, "It's pretty simple. There are links missing from the chain.
We don't have John Doe number one, and we don't have Anson Charpont.
All we have is you."

"And how is that a problem?" I asked, my mouth suddenly gone dry.

Such a Prude
By Sabrina G. Langton

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Author's Note: The penultimate one of this series, I don't know what I'm thinking, I really don't know where my mind has been finding itself lately. I hope YOU like it and I know YOU, yes you, over there in the corner will understand... ha...

***

I remember the first time my nylon legs hit fresh air.

“Time to get up, Petra,” Ella said.

Instinctively I mumbled, “I don't wanna die!”

I heard my roommate sigh, then she pulled my soft, warm, safe blanket off of me. “You're not going to die. It's the weekend, time for homework and relaxing.”

Swingers

“Over to your right, miss, next in line. Take your luggage with you.”

I mentally shrugged my shoulders and followed the instructions. Parking the bike in the assigned spot, I waited while the bike was secured for the ferry trip.

A bleak landscape stretched below me. I’d appeared in a cave, next to some kind of rock formation. Green gases billowed around me, the stench of death and putrefaction made me gag.

A thundering earthquake shook the cave. Small pieces of rock tumbled from unseen areas, pelting me with fragments.

I ducked, covering my head. I saw something slither away with a whiplike tail and a mouth with far too many teeth. Where the hell was I?

I got off the bus swearing at myself in a village in the middle of nowhere where only a few poor sods could understand English. It was in December 1947 and the quicksilver would have shown minus 40 if it had been able to. It had been a very long journey and the worst part had been the last. 4 hours on a rickety bus that didn’t even pretend to be a coach! I had to remind myself why the hell I was there. Sure, the case interested me but the real reason was that Boston wasn’t big enough for both me and the men in black.

Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.