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Striker and I took off running for the trees.

The next moments were a blur, but somehow I found myself by my father’s bedside in the county hospital with my backpack at my feet, not entirely sure how I got there or how long I’d been sitting there.

The dragon flew smoothly and swiftly—and I spent nearly the entire flight with my eyes squeezed shut, leaning my body into Mother’s to keep her steady and clinging to the dragon’s ridged spike in front of us for dear life.

My gut tensed. When Striker sounded worried, it usually meant whatever he had to tell me was even worse than I expected.

All day at school, thoughts of Rake kept popping up in my head, till I was practically embarrassed of myself. Would he still be with Pops when he picked me up? Something about Rake fascinated me… and not because he was cute.

I jumped to my feet and shifted protectively in front of Mother, still clutching her hand. “Who’s there? How did you get in here?” The woman’s voice sounded familiar, but I didn’t dare trust my ears right now.

Striker and I took the nearest exit out of the Hub, then hiked to the outbuilding where I kept my pickup truck.

I froze in the doorway, gaping at the brown-eyed man standing on my porch, still holding out his hand for me to shake.

The Mountain Kingdom

I grabbed my spare holster and leather jacket from my locker in the supply room and slammed the locker door shut. “Same trainees today?”

Frank wasn’t my first dead body.

Blurb for Fate Rising:

Fate Rising

“Jay? Jay, wake up!”

He was pale, and bruised, but her father was here. In the flesh. Alive. Or as close to it as Jay ever could have hoped.

Jay glanced at Ryan and Kyle as she said the combination number, but only the briefest flicker in Kyle’s gaze as it locked on hers revealed that he’d just caught up to her plan.

The mob stopped just in front of the shed in Jay’s backyard.

Jay marched across her front yard toward the shimmering mob of ghosts with Kyle and Ryan in tow, but she stopped shy of the curb. The others couldn’t come onto her property—and there was no way she was going out into the street with them unless she had a reason to. Kyle and Ryan as backup were reassuring, but not that reassuring. She would rather avoid a full-on altercation with the ghosts if at all possible.

Jay’s father was one of the others. She’d just spent a couple hours painstakingly combing through online census records on her laptop at the kitchen counter to confirm it—her family tree went back to intersect with the family line of that crazy researcher named James… Roger’s dad’s research partner. Which meant maybe Jayana’s father couldn’t enter her family’s property, now that he was a ghost. The barrier to keep the others out might have overridden his tie to Jay’s mom by m

The sun was already coming up, brightening the sky which had previously been lit only by the moon and street lights. Jay tried not to worry about what she would do next as she, Ryan, and Kyle killed time roaming the aisles of a convenience store, eating snacks, until the bank was open, then headed straight inside the bank to pay her overdue mortgage payments. After all, this moment was worth being thankful for—Jay had been trying to catch up on these payments for months, and