1st 5 Pages March Workshop - Moss

Name: Michele McCole Moss
Genre: YA Fantasy
Title: The Mythics

Chapter One

Alfy wouldn’t have shot him if she’d known he was helping her sister. But, when she saw him crossing the field with her, his chestnut haunches gleaming in the late afternoon sun, Bee’s head lolled and her body was limp in his arms. She didn’t even give him a warning. She didn’t so much as show herself. Alfy hid inside the shadows of the cabin and sent one arrow through the window aimed at his heart.

She wished she was like the girls who made her want to learn archery in the first place. They didn’t cower, trying to remain hidden while taking down their enemies. But, none of those girls were real. In all the pages of all the books she’d read, none of those girls fought a centaur.

She missed, of course. The flint head and a decent portion of the shaft lodged in the soft place below his shoulder, to the left of his heart. She was still a terrible shot. He bent his head low over her sweet sister, unconscious in his arms. God, she hoped she was just unconscious. Before she could think it through, Alfy loosed another arrow in the same direction, hoping for his heart. It buried itself deep in his abdomen. Panic ripped through Alfy as she watched him sway. He couldn’t fall on top of Bee. He lifted her sister and curled around her, searching, before he collapsed.

They were lying in the grass, clouds of insects disrupted from their business among the stiff golden shoots. Alfy ran to Bee as fast as her short legs would carry her. Bee looked so tiny tangled up in the arms of the beautiful monster. He’d crashed down, falling backwards on his carved bow.

His breath gurgled out of him. Light brown curls haloed his honeyed face. His ridiculously long eyelashes fluttered. Alfy froze.

“Take her,” he said. “She’s hurt.” A spray of blood dotted her sister’s snowy hair as he spoke. His voice was a plucked bass string, low and musical.

Bee turned her head, yawning like a lazy cat and curled into the centaur’s chest, smearing him with his own blood. Alfy let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

Carefully, Alfy pulled her sister from his arms, staring at the centaur. Monsters were ugly, vile things. He had no business being that pretty. The end of the world should be dark and disturbing, so why had they made everything so wretchedly beautiful? It was like burying someone you love on a perfect, sunny day. It was wrong.

Chapter Two

MacKenzie Malone dug her toes into the soft sand, looking out into the surf—lost. The beach was clean. Perfect. Ever since the Mythics had come, reclaiming the land, there was no trash. She’d always been disgusted by all the visitor debris, then she’d started making things out of it. Now she missed it. Cleaning the beach was meditative. Trash had been Mac’s treasure. All her pictures started with it, her brain working to sort things into color, shape, or material to make something new. She needed a distraction.

Without the search for bottle caps and chunks of wave-tumbled glass, cans and lost trinkets, her mind was unoccupied. Her mother always joked that there was never a more dangerous time to be around her daughter than when her mind ran idle.

She collected all manner of bits and baubles from the beach. Rows of jars, showcasing her collections, hung from wooden shelves in the garage. She’d helped her dad gather the jars, then drilled the lids into the thick wood. Together they’d twisted the containers into the underside of the pine planks manning the back wall. The topsides of the shelves held cans of oil, wrenches and dirty rags, set down and forgotten during some half-accomplished task of her dad’s. He’d called it his workshop, but Mac never saw him do anything but drink and smoke there.

Her dad died a year ago today, on her sixteenth birthday. She wished she could blame the Mythics, but it was before they arrived. It was just like him to die on a special day, not that anyone celebrated much of anything anymore. If he was still here, he’d unearth alcohol from somewhere and raise a glass to his baby girl.

She couldn’t get her dad out of her head. Morbidly, she wondered if he was trying to talk to her from beyond the grave, still trying to impose his will on this world from wherever he was.

Her mom, Kat, always said Aedan was too full of piss and vinegar to understand when he should quit while he was ahead. The first time Mac heard her say it, her jaw had hung loose in surprise. It wasn’t like her mom to use slang or cuss words. But her mother, a librarian, was quick to point out that Steinbeck used the phrase first. Her mom was funny that way. She would never swear on her own, but if she could find a literary reference to justify it, she dropped little bombs on them, catching them completely off guard.

Her mom was right. Her dad pushed everything too far—his body, his infrequent jobs, his family. That’s why they had to move west. When she was eight, he’d woke Mac in the middle of the night, telling her to pack a small bag because they were going on an adventure.

Driving out of their neighborhood in the dark, Aedan’s eyes met Mac’s in the rearview mirror.

“Well, my little spitfire, if you could go anywhere right now, where would it be?” he asked.

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Mac kept looking at the back of her mom’s head, her flame red hair escaping a hasty ponytail. Mac knew she was crying.

“Mom?” she said.

Aedan reached out and patted his wife’s knee, but she didn’t move.

“C’mon Kitty Kat,” he said.

She shook her head.

“What do ‘ya say Mac ’n cheese? Where to?” he asked, smiling broadly at her in the rearview.

Mac had wanted to make things better, smooth over whatever was happening between her mom and dad, so she’d said the first thing that came to her mind. It was a happy place.

“The beach.”

When she said the beach, she’d imagined the Jersey Shore, but her dad didn’t stop until they reached the opposite coast. It had taken them four days of driving, never stopping at a hotel, but seeing every weird roadside attraction they could find. They ate at greasy diners where her father’s Irish brogue charmed every waitress that took their order.

She grabbed great fistfuls of her hair and and shook her head.

“Idle mind,” she said aloud.

She relaxed her hands and twisted a lock of her long hair. There were auburn strands mixed in with her dark brown, almost black hair. Those strands might possibly be the only physical trait she inherited from her mother, a freckled beauty of a woman. Everything on Mac’s lean, sinewy frame, from her pale white skin to her sea glass green eyes were compliments of Aedan Malone.

Jumping to her feet, she shook her head to clear it. The long stretch of beach was completely deserted except for herself. The humans that were left never came to the beach now because they were convinced some monster was going to crawl out of the ocean and eat them. The thought wasn’t without merit, but Mac couldn’t give up the beach. It was still hers.