Showing results by narrator "Beth Sarah" in All Categories

At fourteen, Penny Winters fell out of the closet and in love with her best friend, Misa Ito. But before they truly understood their feelings, Misa and her family were gone. Over a decade later, when Penny secures a job at a New York advertising agency, she has a second chance at first love when she's introduced to the lead account executive, Misa. But the road to happiness is riddled with potholes. Misa is still impossibly beautiful, but super cold. And Misa shows no recollection of Penny—the girl who once showed her how to skateboard, make daisy chain crowns, and shared every secret with.

What drives someone to keep reaching for all that glitters, no matter the price? It’s easy to believe that more is better: more acclaim, more control, more wealth. But when dreams are fueled by greed, they can quickly twist into nightmares. These six propulsive short stories explore what happens when the true cost of ambition comes due.

Hot on the heels of her 2018 This Is Horror Award–winning short story collection Spectral Evidence, critically horror author Gemma Files compiles fifteen more of her most startling recent nightmares—a creepily seductive downward spiral of dark poetry and existential dread, entirely suitable to the slow apocalypse going on all around us. So take your mind off your troubles and send it somewhere the rules still operate, if only to punish those who violate them.

Living a life of grinding poverty in the General Laborer class, Alice's only hope was the System would someday notice her and reward her hard work. That day arrives when she discovers a System-seed, a one-time chance to change from the lowest to the highest of classes. Now, she is a rare minion-master in charge of an ever-growing horde of dragons. Dragons that will not stay small and cute forever. As each grows and multiplies, so does her power.

It is ever the nature of war to continue getting worse. The war Julietta remains stuck in is no exception. Though more and more threats start showing glimpses of themselves behind the scenes, Julietta can't deal with them while she's busy with boot camp. Even so-called superheroes need to learn how to shoot a rifle and work with a team, but the length and brutality of the war have not been kind to the training camps. Worse, after she graduates, Julietta will be thrust immediately into battle.

For social worker Mallory Ward, working with at-risk youth is a calling. But when one of her clients is tragically killed, she finds herself at a crossroads. Despite long-held resentments toward her distant mother, Mallory retreats to her childhood home on the Rhode Island coast to contemplate her future. Instead, she’s confronted by her past, not only in the renewed tensions with her mother but in the unexpected appearance of a familiar face—and the wrenching losses that drove her away a decade ago.

Hannah has a routine. Wake up, take a shower, go to school, go to work, come home, and pass out. It's a perfectly normal routine for a perfectly normal girl who does not have to remember how her limbs work every morning because of haunting nightmares of being a very different creature in a very different world. That's all she thinks they are—nightmares—until one night, they're all too lucid, and her body on Earth starts to change. Slowly, Hannah's humanity starts to slip away... but surely she can continue just sticking to the routine, right? It'll be fine. It has to be.

Holly Ash is good actor. Just one downside: Most of the people she’s acting with have no idea they’re a part of her fiction. One that has been carefully constructed by the secretive company that Holly works for, known as D.O.P.L. Every assignment is a new role, a new name, a completely new self. Her newest role is “Margot” and her newest target: a boy her age named Will Aldrich.

Out of the frying pan, and into the fire. Lilith’s life has been nothing if not eventful since she was decanted from her cloning tank. She’s encountered heroes and supervillains, survived attempts on her life, fought against supervillains, and moved to Paragon City. Unfortunately for her, superhumans like herself are prone to coincidences, even when villainous organizations aren’t targeting her. The invitation to attend a superhero convention is an innocuous start for her, one which allows her to attend with her lovers. Yet the plans of numerous groups are closing in.

Lilith wasn’t meant to be a person. Created by the supervillain Shadowmind, Lilith was intended to be little more than a replacement body. Yet a rare bout of curiosity led to Lilith being allowed to be born as an individual. With Shadowmind captured and imprisoned by heroes, Lilith is able to chart her own course as she attempts to build a life for herself. Yet her life isn’t fated to be easy or safe. With a death sentence hanging over her head and the cloud of Shadowmind’s reputation, Lilith is the target of heroes and villains alike.

In 2025, the moon hatched and its child died. Things have since gotten worse. Some people have superpowers now, but so do the extradimensional invaders slowly wiping humanity out. By Julietta's eighteenth birthday, the war has been loss after loss for far longer than she's been alive, so she can't bring herself to be terribly shocked when the sky splits in half and weeps death. Surviving is the real surprise.

Sheryl Kyle isn't the trusting type. After all, her abusive late husband and her disapproving stepfather haven't given her much reason to feel otherwise. But when a rugged rancher named Mark seeks her out, she learns her stepfather is on his deathbed. And his dying wish is for her to return to Sweet Creek for one last chance to reconcile.

A sweet sapphic romance takes a deadly dark turn in this sharp-as-a-knife novella with the slow build menace of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber—from a New York Times-bestselling author hailed by Chuck Wendig as "a storyteller working at the top of her class."

Fin Fleming thrives where others fear to go: exploring the dazzling depths off the Cayman Islands as chief underwater photographer for an elite oceanographic institute. Underwater, she’s fearless and in control. On land, her life is anything but calm—tangled by a manipulative ex, complicated new stepsiblings, and a career that’s always on the edge.

Betrayed by those whom she trusted, Isalla was cast down from the heavens and into the heart of the hells. Bereft of her wings, the angel was rescued by Kanae, a demoness who challenges Isalla's belief of what demons should be.

Twin sisters Marisa and Clare Stockton were sixteen when Clare’s body was found in Virginia’s James River. No arrests were made. Fourteen years later, Marisa’s friends and dedicated career as a photographer help her to cope with the open wound of the past. But Marisa still feels the hurt—and the unsolved murder isn’t the only thing haunting her. A recent car crash has erased ten days of Marisa’s memories—a black hole leading up to the accident that’s left her disoriented.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a predetermined limit.

Rachel has orchestrated the perfect plan to win back her husband’s attention. A bloody handprint. Signs of a struggle. And a disappearance staged by Rachel herself. He’ll follow the clues, rescue her, and feel needed again. But when Jake doesn’t come looking, Rachel realizes that their marriage has turned darker than she thought.

Hannah is not human, and she's not sure what will happen when she stops pretending otherwise. Still stuck in a slowly mutating body on Earth and still waking up in a fantasy world whenever she sleeps, Hannah's stress continues to mount every single day. As magic continues to spread to her friends—whether they like it or not—Hannah is forced to confront what that magic means about her and what her terrifying Goddess wants her to do with it.

A year ago, everything was different. I had just left my home, joining the infamous Mountainside Pack. The daughter of an omega wolf, I've always been prized - but not as prized as I would be if my new packmates found out my secret. But when my fated mate - Mountainside's Alpha - rejected me in front of his whole pack council and my secret got out, I realized I had one choice. Going lone wolf was the only option I had, and I took it.