Fantasy

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Before Rachael was kidnapped aboard The Floating Menagerie…

Available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and other online bookstores.

The Exotics: Tigerlilly

(A short story)

by De Kenyon

After Rachael’s friend doesn’t return on the first day of second grade, she asks her mother to find her new address so they can be pen pals. But Rachael’s mother can’t find Brenna’s family anywhere: it’s like they were erased. And it’s a lot like what happened to her mother’s friend Lilly in second grade…except that Lilly is dead, and her mother won’t talk about it. Rachael’s mother has secrets…but Rachael’s going to find out.

Rachael’s best friend from first grade, Brenna, wasn’t there on the first day of second grade, so she asked her teacher, Mrs. Sorensen, where Brenna was, but Mrs. Sorensen didn’t know either. She didn’t even know who Brenna was. When Rachael asked her classmates, most of them couldn’t even remember her.

It was like a nightmare she had dreamed once, where her parents vanished when the bad guy erased their names off a list. As soon as he had finished erasing and brushing the last pieces of eraser off the paper, they were gone. “You will be alone …forever!” It was an evil laugh, and she had woken up crying.

On her way home from the first day of school, Rachael asked her mother, “What happens when you die? Is it like being erased?”

Her mother gave her a weird look. “No,” she said after a while. “I don’t know if anyone really knows what happens. But you don’t just…disappear. Your body’s left behind, whatever happens to the rest of you.”

“Oh, good,” Rachael said. “Because Brenna wasn’t at school today, and I was worried that her name got erased and that she died when it did.”

Her mom gave her another weird look, this time a sad one. “When people die, it’s a little bit like they’re erased,” she said. “They’re gone, and you miss them, and you can’t do anything about it.”

They stopped at the crosswalk and waited for the light to change, then waited for the crossing guard lady to walk ahead of them into the street, holding her stop sign high and looking crossly (her mother had said that the reason they were called crossing guards was that they looked cross, or angry) at all the cars. Rachael had once seen the crossing guard lady slap the top of a car that had tried to sneak by her when it wasn’t supposed to. But not this time.

She and her mother walked across the street, and Rachael said, “Is Brenna dead or not?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I mean, I doubt it, but I haven’t heard from them since school got out. I’ll find out…but I have to warn you, she’s probably moved far away. That’s usually what happens when people don’t show up at school all of a sudden.”

“That’s okay,” Rachael said. “Then she can be my pen pal.” They were supposed to be pen pals with someone at another school this year anyway.

She didn’t have any homework ( yay!), so her mother let her play her zombie game until bedtime. Her father gave her kisses, then her mother. As her mother was kissing her, she asked, “Did you find Brenna yet?”

“No,” said her mother, sounding puzzled. “I had her last name and phone number written down for your birthday invitation list last year and everything. But now it’s like…like she disappeared. I’m still looking.”

Her mother kissed her again, but Rachael had nightmares about the eraser man anyway.

We live in a military town, so that means kids come and go suddenly: they vanish without leaving behind any way to contact them.  It never stops being heartbreaking to lose a friend into thin air like that.

The plan with these short stories is to do one for every main book…that follows a side story  that stands alone but weaves within the main books.

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Now available at Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon, with more to come. What?  You don’t have Book 1?  You can find links for purchase here, or you cansign up for my newsletter and get a free copy.  There’s also a short story, Tigerlilly, that happens before the main story.  It has more clues, but the books can be read without it…

The Exotics, Book 2:

Xanadu House

by De Kenyon

Rachael survived her adventures on The Floating Menagerie and went back to her normal life…except that her mom is still missing. Now she’s coming down with the Exotics virus herself and is changing into a half-human, half-animal Exotic, just like her friends. As a new Exotic, Rachael can’t control the change, so she travels to a safe place for Exotics in danger—Xanadu House. The house is owned by an aunt that Rachael never knew she had, and who will protect any Exotic, no matter which side they’re on. But is Xanadu House as safe as it seems?

Chapter 1

“Go on!” Rachael’s dad yelled. “Get out of here!” The front door slammed.

Rachael rubbed her eyes and blinked a few times; they were all dried out.

Second grade had been a really weird school year so far. At least it was almost over.

First her mom had disappeared, and then she and her friend Raul had been kidnapped and taken to The Floating Menagerie, a strange ship in the middle of the ocean.

The ship had been run by the Shadow Dogs, a group of…well, she didn’t know what to think about them anymore. At first, she’d thought they were people who kidnapped and smuggled Exotics. (Exotics were humans who had been infected with a magical virus that turned them into magical half-animal creatures.) Some of the Shadow Dogs, like Mr. Hightower and Tapeworm, were pretty awful. But some, like Captain Monn and Dr. Menney and maybe even Ken and Sponge and Bob, were pretty nice, and they weren’t trying to smuggle Exotics at all, but protect them.

The bad Shadow Dogs had wanted to make Rachael tell them her mom’s password, because they wanted the secrets on her computer…her mom was an Exotic, a bee (the Queen Bee was her name, and she was a spy for another group of Exotics, the Animal Lovers’ Club).

Rachael finally told them the password to keep them from hurting her and Raul, but the password had been changed.

Her mom hadn’t come back. Nobody knew what happened to her.

And nobody would explain anything to her. Her dad didn’t know, and nobody else would talk to her about it.

So now she was spending a lot of time searching on the Internet for weird stories about animals, trying to find anything that might tell her more about the Exotics or where her mother was, and sometimes she forgot to blink, and it felt like her eyes were dry all the time.

She yelled, “Who was it?”

“Kids from that club of your mother’s,” her father said. “Just because you’re back doesn’t mean they can start having their meetings here again. It’s not like you’re part of their club.”

Of course Rachael wasn’t part of the Animal Lovers’ Club; the club was a fake club. It was really only for Exotics, and Rachael was just a normal second-grader.

But maybe they wanted to tell her something about her mom.

“What did they want?” she said.

Her father said a bad word and stomped out of her hearing. Rachael tiptoed into her bedroom, where she could look out the window over the front door.

She’d taken down all the pictures of princesses and put up glow-in-the-dark stars and pictures of panthers, horses, and falcons. Secretly, she hoped she’d be infected by the Exotics virus, and she was trying to decide what kind of animal she wanted to be. The stars were there because she just liked them.

To her surprise, she didn’t see anybody from the Animal Lovers’ Club out of her window. Instead, the twin Shadow Dog boys who had helped kidnap her and Raul hid behind a tree in the front yard. They weren’t doing a very good job of hiding.

They saw her face at the window at waved her to come down to them.

She opened the window and hissed, “What do you want? Are you going to break down my door and kidnap me again?”

The two boys looked at each other. One of them said, “We wanted to apologize.”

Rachael wrinkled up her face. She wanted to yell at them and call the cops to make them arrest them—but then the truth about the Exotics might be revealed, and everyone would freak out, so she couldn’t.

“I don’t forgive you.” She had to get them to shut up as soon as possible, before her dad came over to find out what was going on. “Go away.”

“Wait,” the other boy said. “It’s about your mom.”

Rachael snorted. “I know, I know, you want her password so you can break into her computer and steal all her secrets. But it’s too late. The password is changed; nobody can get in.”

The second boy shrugged. “I’m just supposed to tell you she’s safe in a castle in Hungary.”

The first boy elbowed the second boy. “You weren’t supposed to say what country.”

“Sor-reeeee,” the second one muttered. “I told you to do the talking.”

Both boys turned around and started walking away from Rachael’s house.

“Wait!” she whispered as loud as she dared.

The first boy stopped, looked up at her, and said, “Sorry, Baby Bee. That’s all we can say.” Then both boys ran down the street.

She closed the window. Baby Bee was the nickname the members of the Animal Lovers’ Club had called her…it was weird that the Shadow Dog boys knew it, too.

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My kids’ story, Beware the Easter Moon, is available on Kindle for free this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  (It’s exclusive on Amazon until, um, July something, so if you need a copy in another format, contact me.)

Beware the Easter Moon

by De Kenyon

Colin’s tired of Grandpa stealing kids’ chocolate Easter eggs. So he hatches a plan to make his Granpa eat one of last year’s Easter eggs. One of the regular kind. That stinks when it gets rotten.

It was a terrible plan. But it was also a great plan.

He just shouldn’t have gone outside at the farm to get the egg on the night of the full moon before Easter.

Colin sneaked out of his grandpa’s big old creepy white house with the tree branches that scratched the windows and the heaters that went hunk hunk hunk all night long while his pile of cousins slept, drooling and farting and snoring.

Grandpa didn’t lock his doors, because he lived a long ways away from anybody else, but his shotgun was on a shelf in the closet, too high to reach unless Colin dragged one of the big silver and green chairs out of the sunroom and into the entryway and stood on it to see. Grandpa always said it was for coyotes.

But all Colin wanted to do was get his egg.

He grabbed his coat off a wire hanger in the closet and stepped into Grandpa’s boots, because Grandpa’s boots were always muddy, no matter what Grandma said, and nobody would notice in the morning if they weren’t clean.

He slowly turned the handle and slowly pulled on the door, but it wouldn’t open and he jerked on it hard and then it almost hit the wall.

But he caught it.

Then he slowly opened the creaking screen door and slowly shut both doors behind him.

The stoop looked white at first because the moon was so bright. But his eyes adjusted, and he tiptoed with the big dried-mud boots down the hard old steps as quietly as he could. The sharp steps had already cut his cousin Maria right across her eyebrow.

A gate creaked and slammed against the post. The trees scratched the windows. The ground was white from the storm and the moon, and the threes only cast thin shadows on the ground.

He liked Grandpa’s farm better when the leaves were out in the summer and the wind whispered through them like the running of a river. But now it was so quiet he could hear the coyotes out in the pastures. And it was cold enough to bite his ears and get up his nose and smell like nothing and make his nose drip.

But he wouldn’t be out here long.

He went out the gate, and it creaked when he opened it, but it always creaked and slammed all night in the breeze anyway. One ear was already colder than the other, and he wished he’d brought a hat.

He went down the muddy path to the chicken coop, where the chickens were all sleeping inside the dark building. The coyote howled again, and Colin started running as fast as Grandpa’s boots would let him.

The egg was behind the chicken coop.

It wasn’t a regular chicken egg. It was a last-year Easter egg.

He crunched through the snow, not caring about the loud sound so much as wanting to get back in the house as fast as he could. But his feet sank in and the hard snow tried to take Grandpa’s boots off, so he had to bend over and pull Grandpa’s boots out of the snow with his bare hands and his foot still in it.

The coyote sounded a lot closer now.

Colin looked into the cow pasture, which had a tall, square-wire fence all along the edge so the cows didn’t get out. The snow was deeper on this side, with long strings of dead grass all the way through it. On the other side it was empty and white and went up a long hill with two brown streaks of road for Grandpa’s tractor tires as he took hay out to the cows in a hay trailer and Colin and all the cousins would throw it out to the cows, who would eat it from between the bars of the trailer while they were still moving.

He didn’t see anything on the hill, so he went around the corner of the chicken coop and stomped a hole in the top of the snow.

Carefully, he dug down through the snow to the ground.

Please be there, please be there.

His hand scraped the top of something harder than snow and he saw it: the egg.

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New kids’ fiction now available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble,with other sites to follow (Kobo, Apple, Sony).

I’m trying something new…

This is actually a two-story pack, with “The Test” and another kids’ story set in a fantasy world, “The Scaredy Wizard of Theornin.”  Both play around with Grimms’ fairy-tale themes.

The Test

by De Kenyon

Mari von Ingler is good for nothing, not making sausages or sewing a straight line or anything of use in her village, so her father arranges for her to be an apprentice to a mage…but only if she can pass the mage’s test.

But when the mage arrives, he only sends her out into the forest with no instructions but to come back and tell him whether she passed. She means only to stomp off into the woods and hide for an hour, but now she’s so lost that it would take magic to find her way back…

Mari von Ingler leaned gently against the warm white wall of the inn on the bench made out of half of a tree trunk that nobody but travelers sat on. She didn’t dare move an inch more, or the splinter poking through her thick wool skirt and linen underthings would bite her. She closed her eyes and tried to swallow back the rotten taste in her mouth. She wished she hadn’t eaten Mama’s good food; she wished she couldn’t smell the roast turning on the spit, inside the inn.

Read the rest of this entry »

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New fiction!  This is another book that’s going up on Kindle Direct Select, which means I’m leaving it up there exclusively for three months (until July 9).  I’ll announce when it’s available on other sites, but for now it’s at Amazon.com.

If you buy an Amazon copy but need an additional file format, contact me at publisher [at] wonderlandpress [dot] com.

Inspired by a discussion with one of Ray’s school crossing guards about the madness that was Easter on her grandparents’ farm–including finding last year’s Easter eggs.  And from Britney’s mention that they put out 500 eggs for their day-care Easter party.  500!  Which only worked out to five eggs per kid.  The joke at the beginning…well, that’s from Lee, which should surprise nobody who knows him.

Beware the Easter Moon

by De Kenyon

Colin’s tired of Grandpa stealing kids’ chocolate Easter eggs.  So he hatches a plan to make his Granpa eat one of last year’s Easter eggs.  One of the regular kind.  That stinks when it gets rotten.

It was a terrible plan.  But it was also a great plan.

He just shouldn’t have gone outside at the farm to get the egg on the night of the full moon before Easter.

Colin sneaked out of his grandpa’s big old creepy white house with the tree branches that scratched the windows and the heaters that went hunk hunk hunk all night long while his pile of cousins slept, drooling and farting and snoring.

Grandpa didn’t lock his doors, because he lived a long ways away from anybody else, but his shotgun was on a shelf in the closet, too high to reach unless Colin dragged one of the big silver and green chairs out of the sunroom and into the entryway and stood on it to see. Grandpa always said it was for coyotes.

But all Colin wanted to do was get his egg.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Adventure.  Spies.  Magic.

New chapter book/middle-grade fantasy series inspired by…my daughter.  Bored with reading the chapter books available and with a mother who wasn’t going to take it anymore, she’s read the first three books in the series with relish, jumping up and down, and yelling about what was and wasn’t fair.

The main character is eight in book 1 and gets older as the series progresses (thus, the chapter book/middle-grade definition).

Purchase at Smashwords, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble–other online bookstores coming soon.  Amazon and B&N are set up to be able to give ebooks as gifts; contact me personally if you want to send an gift book via Smashwords.

Nobody knows what really happened when second-grader Rachael Baptiste’s mom disappeared a week ago–not her dad, not the police, and not even the members of her hobby group, the Animal Lovers’ Club. So when Rachael’s classmate Raul tries to break into her mom’s computer only to be chased away by giant talking dogs, she follows him into the night and discovers that he–and everyone in the ALC, including her mom–have caught a magical sickness that lets them turn into animals. The ALC is a group of spies that works to defend these people, or Exotics, and Rachael’s mom helps lead them in her secret identity as the Queen Bee. As for Raul, Rachael discovers that he can turn into a wolf as they try to escape a rival group of Exotics, the Shadow Dogs. However, the Shadow Dogs capture them and kidnap them to a mysterious ship, The Floating Menagerie, where a group of Exotic kids waits to be sold into slavery…or do they?

The Exotics Series follows Rachael’s adventures with the Exotics from second to fourth grade as she tries to protect the people she loves in the face of hate, betrayal, and overwhelming magic.

Chapter 1

Rachael, who had just brushed her teeth and changed into green spotted pajamas and fuzzy pink slippers, was almost ready to kill the final wave of zombies on her video game when the doorbell rang.

From the kitchen where he was washing dishes after supper, her dad yelled, “Rachael! Will you check the door?”

“I’m on the last wave, dad!” she yelled back.

“Just push the pause button.”

“Please?”

“It’s your turn!”

That was true. Rachael pushed pause on the game, annoyed because it was never the same when you had to push pause all the time. Meanwhile, the person at the front door had started pushing the doorbell button over and over again and pounding on the door.

Rachael peeked out of the glass beside the door. Even though it was dark out and he should have been getting ready for bed, Raul was outside their door. He looked mad and scared at the same time.

“Open the door!” he yelled.

Rachael liked Raul, but he wouldn’t talk to her at school. They were both in Mrs. Sorensen’s second-grade class. Sometimes they played tag at recess, and she’d let him catch her. He was part of a club, the Animal Lovers’ Club, that met with Rachael’s mom at their house once a week (Tuesdays). Sometimes he would talk to her after the meeting, but mostly not.
Rachael unlocked the door. Raul rushed in, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.

“Your mom—” he said, too out of breath to say anything else.

“Nobody’s found her yet,” Rachael said. Rachael’s mom had disappeared a week ago, but Rachael was an ordinary girl who couldn’t do anything about it. So she tried not to think about it too much.

“Your mom’s computer. Hurry.”

Rachael said, “Why?”

“Just come on.” Raul led her upstairs to her mom’s office.

“What’s the matter?”

Raul still had his uniform on from school, and it was dirty, with bits of leaves stuck to his back. “Nothing,” he said.
Somebody banged into the front door like they had run right into it. Raul said a bad word and ran up the stairs really fast, leaving Rachael behind.

“Rachael,” her dad called. “Would you get that? Please?”

“Don’t open the door,” Raul said. He went inside the office.

The front door thudded again, and Rachael heard a cracking sound as the wood started to break.

“Rachael,” her dad whined.

She ignored her dad and followed Raul into her mom’s office; she really didn’t want to open the door.

Raul was sitting at the computer desk, jiggling the mouse and saying more bad words. Rachael knew her mom’s password (she’d looked over her shoulder), but she wasn’t sure that she should give it to Raul.

Then the front door broke open and slammed against the wall. Rachael started to scream, but clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself.

Raul jumped out of the chair. “I have to get out of here.”

“I’m coming, too,” Rachael said.

Raul almost growled at her. “Stay here. Hide in the closet, and they’ll leave you alone.”

“I said I’m coming too.”

Something barked loudly from downstairs like a really, really big dog.

Rachael’s dad said, “What is going on, Rachael? Are you messing around again?” Then he said, “Who broke the door? What are these dogs doing in here? Out! Out!”

Rachael opened the window into the back yard, where their gigantic dog, Ox, was barking and growling. “Go down the trellis,” she said. “Dad made it really strong in case of storms. Then jump onto the shed. There’s a big trash can on the other side.”

Rachael pulled out the window screen, and Raul slid out the window. She started to follow him.

“Go back,” he yelled.

Rachael stuck her slippers in the trellis, reached up, and slid the window shut the rest of the way, as quietly as she could. “Shh,” she said. “They’ll hear you.”