Lol, I love the word 'excerpt'.
Okay, so The Coffinmaker's Son is the sequel to a lost book that I had written, then something happened and now I don't have it. I don't remember what happened, I either accidentally deleted it all or it was lost in The Great Harddrive Crapout of 2010.
So, for your reading entertainment, or not, is the first chapter of The CoffinMaker's son! Totally unedited, revised, or otherwise. So that's why it sucks.
I looked at myself in the mirror, glaring at the girl who glared back. Her freckles were gone. Her tan, erased. Her hair, the same reddish auburn it had always been.
Was that a zit? Yep, definitely a zit. Great. Right next to the red mark that told all what I was.
I looked over at a few boys who stared at me and my mark outright, watching me like they'd never seen a Nightingale on TV or in a magazine. I smiled at the lightly, and they waved awkwardly.
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. How long was he gonna make me-- oh, there he was. Thom looked over to me with the same look I'd come to expect from him, just his face, little emotion. But a smirk when he saw me. I gave him a hug and kissed his cheek as I dropped my powder into my purse. “A purse,” he noted. “My little patient seems to have girled up while I've been out.”
“Yeah, well. . .”
“She won't tell me anything,” he said, turning to the counter.
“Can I get a white chocolate mocha? Hot, please,” I said to the girl taking my order. “Sounds like we've got a problem then.”
“Those things are pure sugar and caffiene, Rose.”
“What are you, my primary care guy?” I asked. The good doctor had a bad habit of reminding me that I was slowly killing myself with my multiple bad habits, including my addiction to sweets and my lack of exercize. I think he did it because he thought it made me mad and thus kept me from getting too comfortable with him.
He forgot that I was an ageless size eight and didn't care anymore how much people lectured me.
“Where's Chris?” he asked.
“Didn't want to come. He got an X-Cube and he won't stop playing Black Duty 4.”
We wandered to the park, and his face got serious. “She's got numbers three hundred strong,” he said. “Half Rogues and half Nightingales. That, and a few Atlantians.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
“It's a loose alliance. Half of them hate each other. She's appealed to the Nightingales . . . bigotry, and to the Rogues weaknesses. She knows how to twist people around, it's amazing.”
“What about you?” I asked. “You two meet under the mistletoe?” I teased.
“Not yet. She doesn't trust me enough yet. But it's only been a month. And mind you, Christmas is two months away.”
“I know, I was teasing you,” I said, hugging my coffee. It was biting cold, and I pressed my coffee to my cheeks to warm them.
“Asking for a scarf wouldn't kill anyone, Rose,” he said irritably, wrapping his around my face.
“Who are you, my mom?” I asked.
“No, the Doctor.”
“Hah.”
We both paused as we looked down the streets of the Lavonne capital of Calais. “Is that a giant white deer?”
The animal walked lazily down cobblestone streets, blue in the weak autumn light. But the deer, and all it's other, slightly smaller friends, were definitely pure, sparkling white, aside from the ends of their spindly legs, splashed with mud.
“White stags. . .”
“Yeah, I see that. um. . . aren't they fake?”
“Do they look fake?”
“No.”
“I swear, the thing was like, nine feet tall at the shoulder! Just, y'know, parading down the streets like, 'yeah, I'm a deer, wassup?'. It was so weird.”
“Better get used to weird, kiddo, it's a weird world you're living in.”
“Thanks, as if Mrs. Tweedybopper wasn't reminder enough,” I said as I glanced behind me to the woman who was dancing around her parlor, whooshing past the door occasionally with a bolt of some rare silk in her arms. “There's no explanation for that lady,” I said, brushing my bangs aside and entering the last combo on my controller.
“Best nine out of ten.”
“Dude, I am officially the master of Gurren Tekken 2. Nay, of all combat games in history. Pay up,” I said, holding out my hand.
Chris rolled his hazel eyes and dropped a small stack of flashcards into my hand. “You suck,” he stated blandly.
“Yep,” I agreed. “But, like, seriously, why is it not weirding you out that there were giant deer in the city?”
“Because they come down every year, Rose,” he said as he walked out of the sitting room and started downstairs. “They march through the city when they migrate to Washington for the Winter.”
“I heard that like, King Arthur went hunting for white stag.”
“Yeah, too bad there hadn't been any in England for over two hundred years. Poor sap.”
He dug through the refrigerator and pulled out a container of leftovers from the other night. “Why are we here, Chris?” I asked.
“Um, because you live here and this is where we keep the X-Cube?”
“I know, but that's not what I meant. I meant why didn't I go stay with Jamie or Wycliffe?”
“Don't tell me you're feeling guilty? Rose, come on, their grown men. If you want to live with one of them, then what's the other gonna do?”
“I know, but I feel like if I choose one to live with that it's gonna get complicated, and I do not need complicated.”
“What's complicated?” asked Indira as she walked in.
“Einstein's theory of relativity,” stated Chris blandly, and she smiled at him. “No really, what is it?”
“My life, friend who was once friend of my enemy. I don't need it more complicated, and I was explaining this to the grasshopper who-- don't eat all the food in the house!” I whined.
“What!? I'm starving!”
“Then go raid your own fridge!”
I sighed and rolled my eyes as I pulled a soda out of the fridge. Mrs. Simone had a fondness for the old fashioned glass bottles, and I asked Chris to open mine wordlessly, which he did.
Indira looked around a little awkwardly. She hadn't mastered the friendly silence yet, just the scary one. She wasn't used to not being threatened twenty-four-seven, and I worried about how it was affecting her. After she'd had her loyalty betrayed by her old boss, Cornelia, she wasn't quite ready to trust anyone or offer her loyalty, and was staying in the Nightingale Palace.
“”Oh, your father said to give you this,” she said, handing me a slip of paper. “He wants to meet with you and Chris tonight.”
“Will there ever come a day when I know first?” I asked.
“Nope.”
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