The discovery of long lost forgotten objects of power create a wave of occult events that trigger a rebirth of magic in some of the descendants of once-powerful Witch-Warlock families. And their war begins… again. It all starts over Audrey, the bi-racial girl with tainted blood… who doesn’t know she could become the most powerful of them all.
It is a land of ancient city-states, morto e sepolto… the dead and gone. Remnants of forgotten and abandoned houses and estates sprinkle the countryside. Once thriving and vital, now no one lives in them, and the keening of the winds through the ruins is their only sound. Even in towns and cities that live, in almost all, there is a legend sometimes distorted far from its origin of a casa stregata… a haunted house. Some are deathly still, lonely cenotaphs, mere empty markers of a tragic past. Others contain souls that sleep awhile and awake… hungry.
One of our eShort stories for Halloween. A 1,151-word hybrid story (nonfiction with a fiction piece embedded). A father’s story to his daughters about a strange new girl he had met in high school: “When your eyes met hers, she was looking deeper into you than you could ever see into her.”
Val discovers the truth about her family. How her real father and twin sister died, and about her mother. Val learns she unwittingly holds the key to finding a cache of art lost for centuries and worth millions. That key also reveals clues that lead to the location of secret documents from World War Two. Evidence that could destroy a corrupt global business empire and a burgeoning political dynasty that covertly spans and influences nations. That’s who murdered her father and sister and almost killed her mother. It’s who has ruined her life—such as it was—and now will kill her to keep their secrets. To save herself and her mother, she must decipher the clues to find the secret documents and the treasure hidden by her ancestor.
Not her job, but it became her duty. When everyone, including those she loved, is killed… it leaves the mission hers to complete. But it goes tragically wrong. Iris, a messenger intending to warn and save mankind, didn’t make it in time. She was injured and found by a cruel, depraved man and locked away in a secret room where she remained unconscious amid a swirl of vague, painful memories of when she’d been human. Awakened to blood and violence to find that instead of the three decades of preparation, she was to deliver humanity; the world doesn’t know it’s on the brink of an invasion that will enslave mankind… an attack from the same creatures that had destroyed her planet. Could she still fulfill her most crucial purpose… the critical part of her mission? And could she become human again?
Val discovers the truth about her family. How her real father and twin sister died, and about her mother. Val learns she unwittingly holds the key to finding a cache of art lost for centuries and worth millions. That key also reveals clues that lead to the location of secret documents from World War Two. Evidence that could destroy a corrupt global business empire and a burgeoning political dynasty that covertly spans and influences nations. That’s who murdered her father and sister and almost killed her mother. It’s who has ruined her life—such as it was—and now will kill her to keep their secrets. To save herself and her mother, she must decipher the clues to find the secret documents and the treasure hidden by her ancestor.
Val discovers the truth about her family. How her real father and twin sister died, and about her mother. Val learns she unwittingly holds the key to finding a cache of art lost for centuries and worth millions.
That key also reveals clues that lead to the location of secret documents from World War Two. Evidence that could destroy a corrupt global business empire and a burgeoning political dynasty that covertly spans and influences nations. That’s who murdered her father and sister and almost killed her mother. It’s who has ruined her life—such as it was—and now will kill her to keep their secrets.
To save herself and her mother, she must decipher the clues to find the secret documents and the treasure hidden by her ancestor.
RISING SUN | SETTING SUN An old man seeks redemption for his cowardice—as a 16-year-old—in a time of total war. That it could cost the lives of the innocent doesn’t matter.
Val discovers the truth about her family. How her real father and twin sister died, and about her mother. Val learns she unwittingly holds the key to finding a cache of art lost for centuries and worth millions.
That key also reveals clues that lead to the location of secret documents from World War Two. Evidence that could destroy a corrupt global business empire and a burgeoning political dynasty that covertly spans and influences nations. That’s who murdered her father and sister and almost killed her mother. It’s who has ruined her life—such as it was—and now will kill her to keep their secrets.
To save herself and her mother, she must decipher the clues to find the secret documents and the treasure hidden by her ancestor.
A flashfiction piece set in the Depression Era about an unexpected danger encountered by men on the road looking for work. That ‘work’ might not stop when the day is done. Its end might be theirs. Once upon a time in Taos, it happened…
