New release sample: QUITTING THE HERO BIZ

 Jane had chafed, waiting for the day her teachers would give her the duty of testing Neighborlee. She had a talent for sensing when a Gift was being used. Just last summer, she had helped locate a girl in Sydney, Australia, who had started manifesting her Gift at age nine. Demetrius and Beauregard had brought her along to investigate. She had befriended the frightened child and convinced her that being able to manipulate water like clay didn’t make her a freak or dangerous.

That had been far more satisfying than the last five years assigned to Fendersburg, the town the Old Poops had put under her care. Jane understood the necessity of generating “odd” occurrences to draw the attention of the Rivals, trick them into making mistakes, to identify and trap them. Her Ghost talent was perfect for the task, allowing her to be in the middle of activities in town while staying entirely anonymous, so the Rivals would never guess she was the bait, even if she talked to them face-to-face. The problem was that Fendersburg’s population seemed to be getting more lazy and shed more I.Q. points as time went on. She wanted something more challenging and meaningful. Just how long could she play “catch me if you can” with the Rivals before they gave up and left Fendersburg alone?

Jane paused in mid-crunch and had a hard time swallowing the last bite of her apple. Thinking about going back to that antithesis of Mayberry had just killed her appetite. On the surface, Fendersburg looked a lot like Neighborlee: small town, business district measured in blocks, not miles; weekly newspaper, Mom & Pop businesses. Everybody knew everybody else's business. Underneath... Neighborlee didn't have a suspected inbreeding problem. Here, people cared about good personal hygiene, and everybody graduated from high school and at least tried to go to college. No Gifted child would ever appear in Fendersburg. Most of her duties entailed protecting the town from itself. 

That sense of being wasted, of having a useless job, made this visit to Neighborlee feel like a treat. Other than the Sanctum and her little apartment in Fendersburg, this was the only other home she had ever had. Ten years in the Neighborlee Children's Home. She had been happy there. She had friends. What happened to those friends? Did they remember her? She had been a quiet child, with a talent for blending into the background and being unnoticed, even before she discovered her Gift.