Saturday, July 18, 2020

New Release Sample: SEMI-PSEUDO-SUPERHEROES

Harry escaped while the girls were still filing out. I waited until everyone was gone before I came downstairs. Pop went back to the archives with Dr. Butterfield, and Mum walked off with a knot of girls with specific questions about resources and searching.

There was nothing to pick up and move after the Q&A, not like other talks where Mum and Pop had books or visual aids. I wandered around the room, looking at the stained glass, the chimneys on the lanterns with all the fancy brasswork and colored glass, the inlay on the ends of the benches. There was a lot of history in this little room of ten rows with two five-seater benches in each row.

"Thought so," a familiar, whiny voice said, punctuated with a snort.

I looked at the door. There was Sylvia Grandstone, arms crossed, head tilted to display her golden curls. I wondered who she was trying to impress. Ninety-five percent of the staff were women, and this was a girls-only school. That was followed by a sense of "whew!" Her entrance stopped me just in time, before I acted on an idea of floating up to look at some writing in the stained glass panel at the front of the chapel. While I didn't really care what Sylvia Grandstone thought of me, I wasn't stupid enough to risk her making a fuss that the wrong people might listen to.

I always had to keep in mind the rules Kurt and Felicity and I had made up to protect our talents or powers or whatever let us do what we did. Hide what we did, hide what we were, hide from trouble. There was no telling when the weirdness factor of Neighborlee would fail us, and those people who spied on the children’s home would return, notice us, and make us vanish.

So it was good that Sylvia didn't catch me kinda-sorta flying.


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