Rachael Arsenault's Blog - Posts Tagged "preview"

Below I've included the text of my short story "Order Up!" for your reading pleasure. It, along with several other short stories, can be found in my collection, Everyday Magic. This particular short story won the Fog Lit Books for Young People Prize in 2017.

Edit: I almost forgot to mention: The rest of the short stories in Everyday Magic are also available for free if you have Kindle Unlimited on Amazon.

Hope you enjoy!

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ORDER UP!

“What the hell did you just do?”

Azalea feigned innocence as she dusted charisma into a coffee. “What do you mean?”

“Whatever you put in that last guy’s drink, it was not luck.”

Setting her wand aside, Azalea added one teaspoon each of sugar and cream to the drink. As she snapped the lid onto the paper cup, she asked, “How would you know? What, are you stalking me or something?”

“Um, I work with you on the order line. I brew; you boost.”

“Can you guys quit the chatter and get these orders caught up?” snapped Winter, the manager. Her white-blue hair was falling out of its bun and she wore an expression caught between anger and panic. It was 8am, the peak hour for the café. Customers were lined up out the door and growing restless without their fix.

“We’re on it!” Bluebell said, getting started on an order for three French vanilla’s, one with charisma and two with calm. In a low voice, she continued to chastise Azalea. “Seriously. Luck is green. You put white into his drink. White pixie dust is delusion, not luck.”

Azalea sighed dramatically, causing her rose petal pink hair to flutter. “Well, he was rude.”

“So you’re breaking the Code of Magical Conduct? Azalea, that’s a felony!”

“Only if I get caught.”

They continued running through orders like an assembly line. The whole time, Bluebell’s mind was spinning. Not only would Azalea get in serious trouble if anyone found out she had spiked a customer’s drink, but that man could hurt himself or someone else and, potentially, the café could get shut down. Besides, there were already enough half-breed haters around. There was no need to give them more ammunition to push for a ban on part-pixies and other magical creatures in the city.

The morning rush was always short lived – everybody came at once and hardly anyone lingered. This was a good and bad thing for Bluebell’s situation. On the upside, it made it easy to slip out from behind the counter relatively soon. On the downside, she had no idea where the deluded man might be, let alone how she was going to undo Azalea’s mess.

With her wand tucked into her apron, she wandered through the mostly-empty café, pretending to straighten out chairs and wipe down tables while she scanned for any sign of the man. She hardly had a chance to look at him in the second between Azalea spiking the drink and Orion passing it over the counter, but she remembered that he was tall with blue-rimmed glasses.

Only three customers had stayed behind in the café. A woman with brown curls piled elaborately on top of her head, sipping green tea with inspiration and scribbling rapidly in a notebook. A person with buzzed blond hair and several nose piercings who had already emptied their cup of hot chocolate with focus was intently reading a massive textbook. The third customer had left their seat to go to the bathroom, leaving their drink and a laptop on the table.

Bluebell’s stomach felt like it was full of ravens, pecking and clawing and twisting everything up inside. If the man wasn’t here, how was she going to find him? It wasn’t like she could easily walk out of work in the middle of her shift.

A crash came from the bathroom, followed by a string of shouting. Everyone in the café stopped, glancing around in confusion.

“Um,” Bluebell said, “I’ll just… go check if everything’s okay.”

She rushed over to the door with a blue toilet sign on it, pausing to take a deep breath and collect herself before pushing it open.

There was glass all over the floor. And blood.

“Huzwaa!” shouted the man with blue-rimmed glasses. His eyes were enormous and glassy; blood was dripping from his hands. The mirror above one of the sinks had been smashed. He stared at Bluebell for a long second before pointing to the mirror-less spot and slurring,” You… You faerie witches tried to trap my soul in the glass! But I freed it! You can’t get me!”

Bluebell cringed, resisting the reflex to correct him – pixies weren’t faeries or witches. But reason didn’t seem to be his strong suit right now. “Um, sir, I’m very sorry. I think, er, there was an error with your drink. My coworker –”

“Sshuh!” He pressed a finger to his lips, then lifted it away and wagged it at her like she was a naughty sprite. “Not gonna let you cas’ a spell on me! No talkin’!”

“Ugh, okay, pixie’s don’t use incantations – that’s a witch thing. Anyway, as I was saying –”

He whirled around and punched another mirror. “Stop! Can’ get my soul! Can’ get my soul!” Then he started shouting the names of imaginary gods humans used to beg to for protection from the supernatural.

Sighing, Bluebell pinched the bridge of her nose. She was going to need a drink with calm after this.

She jumped when the door creaked open slightly and Winter called, “Is everything okay in there?”

“It’s fine!” Bluebell shouted automatically, rushing over to force the door closed. “I’m handling it! Just, uh… kappas.”

Winter spat a curse that, from a witch, would’ve made someone’s ears bleed. “Again? Do we need to call in an exterminator?”

“Nope!” The man collapsed to the floor and started trying to dig, suddenly believing he was trapped in a troll’s cave. “It’s, uh, just one. I can handle it.”

“Alright. If you say so.”

Once Winter had left, Bluebell slipped her wand out of her apron pocket and strode decisively over to the man. After sprinkling a mix of blue and pink dust into her hand, she knelt by the man and pressed the hand over his mouth. He struggled at first, but in seconds sagged and eventually passed out. No amount of delusion-induced adrenaline could fight the potent combo of sleep and calm.

Bluebell looked from the unconscious man covered in blood to the shattered mirrors. Now it was her turn to curse. How was she supposed to explain this?

After a couple minutes of panicked pacing, she poked her head out the door and called out to Winter. The manager hurried over. “What? Do we need the exterminator after all?”

“No, er, I just need the out-of-order sign. I don’t want customers seeing this mess.”

“Right, right. Of course.”

Once the out-of-order sign was in place and Bluebell made it clear to her co-workers that no one should go into the customer bathroom, she found a moment to sneak out back and send a quick text to her friend Luna.

‘Got an incident I can’t fix at work.’

‘Ooh boy. What this time?’ Luna responded.

‘Azalea violating the Code. Customer going delusional. Me having to lie and say it was kappas.’

Luna wrote something very rude about a sacred tree. Then: ‘I’ll be there asap.’

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Bluebell kept busy tidying up behind the counter, wiping down everything she could get her hands on and obsessively glancing over at the bathroom door. Azalea was flirting up a storm with Orion, clearly pining after the older pixie even though everyone knew he wasn’t interested in women. (Or men, for that matter.) Winter was in the stock room doing inventory. This was all fine, as far as Bluebell was concerned. If everyone was already distracted, that was one less thing to worry about. And she already had plenty to worry about.

Something brushed against her shoulder while she meticulously reorganized the stacks of cups. Then, right in her ear, a quiet, “Hey.”

Bluebell jumped, clapping her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. If her best friend weren’t currently invisible, she would have glared at her. “Luna. Don’t do that.”

The other girl just giggled. “Well, come on then. Lead the way.”

After announcing (perhaps a little too loudly) that she was going to check and make sure no more kappas had gotten into the bathroom, Bluebell led Luna to the site of the disaster. Once they had entered the bathroom, the air around Luna shimmered and wavered as she gradually reappeared.

She let out a heavy sigh. “Great Beelzebub, that takes it out of me. I wish the Academy would just teach us how to enchant cloaks already.”

“Isn’t that a senior thing?”

“Unfortunately.”

Bluebell and Luna went to the same Academy of Magic but, being of different magic classes, followed a different curriculum. Where Bluebell was descended from a mix of humans and pixies, Luna and other witches like her descended from a mix of humans and demons. Which, contrary to what a lot of humans believed, wasn’t necessarily “evil”. A lot of the beings classified as demons were shunned angels. It was a pretty brutal history, if what school taught her was true: Shunned angels had their wings cut off, their tongues split down the middle, and fire poured over their skin. Those that survived were deemed demons and branded as foul, ugly creatures. (As if every angel who wasn’t shunned was completely pure and good.) This punishment left them irrevocably, magically twisted, so that even their off-spring couldn’t grow wings and had slightly forked tongues.

Luna hated her split tongue. It gave her a slight lisp. Bluebell just thought it was cute.

“Well,” Luna said, surveying the damage. “I think I can make this work. First things first: the mirrors.”

Raising a hand, she splayed her fingers and began speaking in a low voice, her eyes flashing black. The shards of glass slowly floated up off the ground, drifting back into place on the wall and sealing together. In moments, the mirrors were whole again.

Then, hands on her hips, she turned her attention to the man on the floor. “How long until he wakes up?”

“Not long. Maybe five minutes.”

“Think a quick memory mod will do it?”

“Hopefully.”

Luna knelt by the man, waving her hand over his face and muttering. A couple minutes later, she slouched back and let out a heavy sigh. “I can’t do much for his hands. That’s faerie stuff.”

Bluebell nodded, though it had always confused her as to why faeries and witches couldn’t use all the same magic. Faeries and witches both technically descended from angels, albeit faeries came from angels who hadn’t been shunned. Maybe a special set of magic came with having wings.

Instead of commenting on that mystery, Bluebell said, “We’ll just have to clean him up. When he wakes up, we’ll tell him he, er…”

“Nothing,” Luna said. When Bluebell stared at her as if she’d grown horns (like the monstrous, non-angel breed of demon), she added, “Well, why tell him anything? I’ve modified his memory so he won’t remember anything about his delusional episode. Generally, after a memory mod, the person will fill in the blanks with what personally makes the most sense to them.”

“So we just… let him wake up alone and make up his own explanation for it?”

“Exactly!”

And they did just that. After making sure his hands and the floor were cleaned of blood, Luna cast invisibility over herself again and the two girls exited the bathroom. Bluebell thanked her friend and the young witch left. Then Bluebell returned to her place behind the counter and started brewing herself a cup of tea. She needed something with calm pronto.

She had just taken her first sip when the man stumbled out of the bathroom, looking both embarrassed and confused. He returned to his table (where Bluebell had stealthily replaced his spiked coffee with the correct order earlier) and slumped into his seat. Bluebell watched as he took a sip of his coffee, made a face, then got up and made his way back over to the counter.

“Hi, how help may I you?” she babbled semi-hysterically. What had his memory filled in? Why was he coming back? What had she done wrong with his drink?

He didn’t seem to notice. Rubbing the back of his neck and blushing, he said, “Yeah, I, uh… Well, see, I didn’t get much sleep last night and I kind of… passed out in your bathroom, I guess? Um. My drink’s cold, so… I just wanna buy a new one. With energy this time.”

“Sure,” she squeaked, punching in his order on the computer. When he handed her a five sheet, she swallowed as she counted out his change and forced herself to ask, “Oh, what happened to your hands?”

He blinked at them as if seeing them for the first time. “Jeez. I didn’t realize they were this bad. I just got a new kitten a couple weeks ago and she’s pretty feisty right now.” He paused, holding his hand up to study it, muttering, “How’d I miss cuts this bad?”

“I guess you really do need that energy boost,” Bluebell said with a nervous giggle.

He gave his head a shake, smiling. “Man, you pixies are lifesavers. If I’m this much of a mess with your dust helping me out, imagine what I’d be like without it?”

Bluebell laughed. “Oh, I dunno. Sometimes pixie dust causes more trouble than it’s worth.”

“I can’t imagine how.”

‘No,’ Bluebell thought, ‘you have no idea. And I really hope you never do.’

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END

SHE WHO RISES, the first book in my upcoming A New Age of Magic series, releases digitally on Amazon on May 14th, 2019!


She Who Rises

Amber Martel just wants to get through her Master’s degree. Or at least make an attempt at it. She’s early into her first semester and is feeling the weight of self-doubt and heartbreak as she tries to organize her thesis and deal with living on her own for the first time. It’s more than enough stress in her 23-year-old life.

A research trip to a natural history museum throws her life into new chaos, however, when she touches a piece of quartz and unleashes an explosion that is destructive, powerful – and magical. Now Amber finds herself in the care of two women, Farida and Masika, who claim to have connections to the origins of magic. They tell Amber that she is special, that magic outside their family is unprecedented, and that she needs to help them.

Amber wants nothing more than to go home, but it soon becomes clear that might not be safe. Strangers attack them with magic they shouldn’t possess, local police are pointing to them as terrorism suspects, and an enemy from the early days of magic has returned – even though he should be long dead.

For those who are curious to read more, I've shared an excerpt of the book below. Enjoy! And please share with anyone else you think will enjoy SHE WHO RISES!

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I didn’t recognize where we were as we drove along a pothole-ridden road. Dark evergreens rose up on either side, boxing us in, creating the impression that there was only one direction in the world we could follow. The setting sun was a watchful eye over the road that converged into an inverted V behind us, while an emerging blanket of star-speckled blackness draped overhead.

The drive started out quiet. Masika didn’t strike me as particularly chatty in general, let alone when she was around me, someone she clearly couldn’t wait to be rid of. Farida just seemed glum. Aside from the old blue Pontiac rattling over potholes, it was silent.

Farida eventually switched on the radio and started hopping through stations. A song I didn’t recognize came on and she squealed, turning it up enough to hurt my ears. Masika quickly reached over and turned it down a snatch, but that didn’t stop Farida from singing along excitedly. Her off-key but enthusiastic voice was just belting out the last repetitions of “baby, I’m not over you” when headlights suddenly appeared in the distance, headed toward us.

I frowned. Where had they even come from? Were they driving along with no headlights until they saw us?

“Mut,” Farida said nervously. I could see her hands tighten against the steering wheel, bleaching the skin across her knuckles. “You don’t think…?”

“I highly doubt––”

The other car swerved, turning sideways and stopping on the yellow line. It was partially blocking both lanes.

“Pull over,” Masika said lowly.

“But what if it’s Imani?”

“Pull over.”

“Who’s Imani?” I asked.

Masika shot me a look. “Shut up. Lay down. This is none of your concern.”

None of my concern? If there was someone out to get them, that was my concern as long as I had to be in a car with them! Heart hammering, I dug my phone out of my pocket. I could call the police if things got hairy.

Farida had eased the car over to the shoulder of the road. We all fell silent; I was almost too scared to breath. Time seemed to slow down as the driver-side door opened on the other car. A woman stepped out, caught in the beam of one of our headlights. Her coarse black hair lifted in the slight breeze. I couldn’t make out much other detail except that she had naturally tan skin and full, round cheeks.

“Any chance she’s looking for directions?”

Even Farida ignored my comment, instead getting out of the car and slamming the door. She approached the other woman, who called something out to her. I couldn’t hear what it was – the sound was muffled from being inside the car – but it must have been bad because Farida took an automatic step back. I got my window rolled down a crack just in time to hear Farida ask, “… know that?”

“Is she with you or not? And don’t bother lying.”

“How do you know her?” Farida demanded.

The other woman sighed and shook her head. She raised her hand, a gold band inlaid with a large, pearly jewel glittering on her wrist, and said, “I guess we do this the hard way.”

The air around her flared bright, roiling with colour, before dispersing to reveal –

“What the hell is that?” I squeaked. I glanced at Masika, but her expression was grim rather than disgusted or frightened.

Hissing beside the woman was another woman – sort of. Her upper-half was slender and grey-skinned, her face twisted in a menacing grimace. Nearly-black hair hung limply to her shoulders. She was naked, her sickly skin merging with glittering purple scales at the waist, the lower half of her body serpentine. Her tail ended in a nasty, scorpion-like stinger.

I was still trying to process the image when the serpent-woman lunged, slashing at Farida with clawed fingers. Farida narrowly avoided her, then raised both arms to block another strike. The creature suddenly shrieked in pain as Farida’s arms glowed red.

“That’s my girl,” Masika whispered.

Hey everyone!

Black Friday is nearing and so are all the Black Friday sales - including a sale on one of my books! From November 27th to December 4th, She Who Rises will be on sale on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, this will be the perfect time to do so.

You can read an excerpt from She Who Rises over on a previous blog post here.

Enjoy!