I'm super excited to be visiting the fabulous Deanna
Wadsworth's home on the web today! It's truly an honor to be here with such a
fine writer (and sweet person). I'd like to tell you about my new YA fantasy novel,
Pretty Peg.
Blurb: High school senior Josy Grant already had
plenty on her plate before she found the magic puppet theater her murdered
sister left behind. Despite Josy’s grief, the responsibility of taking care of
her family falls to her, and being queer doesn’t make dealing with school any
easier. Things only get worse when sexy new girl Nicky tells Josy her sister
died at the hands of a mysterious figure from the Faerie Realm called the
Woodcutter, and if they can’t stop him, Josy and her remaining sister will be
next.
They have just days
before the Woodcutter strikes again on the autumn equinox, so Josy follows
Nicky into the Faerie Realm to hunt him. Along the way, she discovers Fey gifts
of her own and answers to the questions that have driven the Grant family
apart. Nothing comes for free when dealing with Fey, though, and those gifts
and answers might come at a terrible price.
:
Excerpt from Pretty Peg
I ordered a café au lait and settled in at a rickety table next to the palm tree on the patio. The place to sit at Fern’s Bleedingheart Lounge, café by day, bar by night, was out back. You could watch the outfits coming in the door, and the passion vine-covered chain-link fence kept out the wind. I breathed in sweet steam and stacked my homework in dessert order, English last.
“Josephine Grant.” I looked up. Leaning against
my palm tree, in a David Bowie T-shirt and carpenter pants cut off at the
knees, was Nicky. The girl from school. She had a halo. I looked more carefully
and realized there were white Christmas lights in the tree behind her, making
her curly brown hair glow.
“Guilty. Hi again.”
“Hi. Cool hair, by the way.”
I’d forgotten about my hair. I touched it to
remind myself what was different. Pink, that was it. “Thanks, it’s, uh,
actually my natural color. I’m letting it grow in.”
“So do I get you?” Her dark eyes crinkled.
“Huh?” She
can’t be hitting on me.
She pointed a silver-ringed finger at my bag,
where the drama club flyer was sticking out. “For senior service at the
theater. Don’t tell me you got all beguiled by tutoring or something worthy since
lunch.” She hooked the other chair with her foot and dropped into it.
“Oh right. I actually am a tutor, but yeah.” I
unfolded the pink flyer over my knees and discovered the paper horse from the
puppet theater tucked into it. I must have put it in my bag when I left the
house. Weird. I didn’t remember that.
Nicky snatched the horse out of my lap with a
gasp like she’d been stabbed with a safety pin. “So you know.” Her voice didn’t
rise, but it rang out. A couple at the next table jerked their heads up from
their laptops.
“Know what?” I didn’t like how she’d just
grabbed it like that. My hands went toward hers, but I stopped before I touched
her. Could she tell? About me? That I liked girls?
It didn’t matter. Out of my league. I swallowed
and hoped my face wasn’t as red as it felt.
She turned the horse over, tracing the little
strip of gold tape on the base. “Pretty Peg,” she murmured. Her features were
drawn inward, like she’d forgotten I was there. A ripple went through the
horse’s metallic ribbon mane, and its legs stirred. I thought it was the wind,
and I slapped my hand down on my papers on the cool metal table, but the air
was still and heavy with the smell from the fire pit next door at Vulcan.
She seemed to shake herself back to reality.
She met my eyes. “So you know all about it. We only have a few days.” Her voice
was firm, matter-of-fact.
She must
be off her meds or something. “Uh, I
found this puppet theater last night in my garage. My sister made it. That’s
where that horse came from. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Not the first.” She said it to her hands,
still stroking the horse’s blue spine. Then to me, in a clear voice: “You
really don’t? Know about the toy theater?”
“No.”
“Okay. This is so not graceful. Let me start at
the top. You see, I already know you. Your family. I knew your sister
Margaret.”
I just stared at her. You know my whole family? Something about the calm in her voice
stirred me into a panic. I dropped my hands into my lap, one hot from my
coffee, one cold. I looked at her, her face pleading, dense eyebrows drawn
together over brown eyes that looked bronze in the sun. Her T-shirt collar was
ragged against the smooth V where her collarbones met. The skin there was
darker. I averted my eyes so I couldn’t get caught staring.
Nicky sat up straight then, nodded with her
eyes locked on mine, balanced the horse upright on her palm. Blew out air
through her plump lips. David Bowie rose and fell. “I barely know you, not
really. I know you don’t know me. But I have to tell you something. You’re not
going to believe it, but you have to believe it.”
Margaret
was in the CIA. She’s still alive in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. She was
really a man.
“Okay.” I slurped my drink and made a go-on
gesture with my free hand. “Talk.”
She began, “What you know about your sister’s
life and her death, that’s not the full story. There is a—it’s hard to explain.
Another world beside the one you know. There are creatures you can’t imagine,
tastes that can haunt you until you’re hungry forever.” Her voice drifted off,
and her long fingers drew restless circles in a patch of spilled sugar.
“Margaret was killed in Afghanistan while she
was working with Doctors Without Borders. In the spring.” Saying “in the
spring” made it easier on whoever I talked to. If I said “on March 20, 2012,
five months and six days ago, on the road near her office, after curfew.” I
usually got a follow-up lecture about prescription medication or the five
stages of grief. I was doing fine on my own. I missed Margaret, but I had my
hands full taking care of Mom.
Besides, I didn’t want to start getting deep
into my own feelings. That raw egg could break at any time.
Nicky shifted in her chair and met my eyes. She
clasped her hands together on the table and said, “I’m really sorry to take you
by surprise with this. Your sister was loved, you can’t imagine. But that’s not
exactly what happened to her.”
“So she was up in some kind of rave scene? Like
drugs?” My heroic sister was a drug addict. It made a twisted kind of sense:
look at Mom’s deep and abiding relationship with prescription painkillers.
Nicky was laughing. “Oh, there are folk who
would not be flattered by that. No.” She drew in a long breath through her wide
nostrils. “Did Pretty Peg—did Margaret ever talk to you about magic?”
“Magic. Nope.” I was annoyed. This conversation
was going in a sales-pitch direction that didn’t make me comfortable. I hoped
she wasn’t going to ask me to go to the Wiccan bookstore or accept Jesus into
my heart.
“Your sister was—hurt when she was a child. By
someone close to her.” She looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I was
pretty clear on what she was talking about. It was the big family deal, the
other subject we didn’t discuss because it made Mom cry. When he was sixteen
and she was twelve, Robert molested Margaret. That was why he and my dad moved
out. Mom and Dad decided it was best to isolate him from the rest of us instead
of putting him into the system. They weren’t technically divorced, but you
couldn’t deny that our family was broken.
Nicky went on: “She escaped into a kind of
magical place—well, the whole world has magic. She escaped to our world. And
the Fair Folk came to love her. Oh, I knew this would be hard to explain.”
“Fair folk? You mean like carnies?” My mind
showed me a movie of Margaret with a trucker’s hat and a smoker’s cough,
selling tickets to a rickety roller coaster. No way.
She kept talking as if I hadn’t interrupted.
“And she loved them too, but she got caught up in some trouble she never should
have been part of.” Now she met my eyes with her wide round ones. “And she
died.”
I was getting angry. “Look, Margaret got killed
by some random guy. He hasn’t been caught. They did think it could be an
insurgent, but it could just as easily have been some psycho. They have those
everywhere. A lot of people are willing to believe something like that could
only happen in a place like Kabul, but there’ve been close to a hundred murders
so far this year in Oakland alone, not to mention all the—”
She cut me off. “She was killed by the
Woodcutter. An enemy of the Summer Folk.” She passed a silver-ringed hand
across her mouth when she looked at the confusion that must have been on my
face. “My people. You would call them fairies.”
Oh.
She’s messing with me. That’s what this is. Furious tears blurred my eyes, and I tilted my head back so she
wouldn’t see. I said to the palm leaves over my head, “Okay. I’m going home.”
When I was sure I wasn’t going to really cry, I started pulling my books
together, not looking at Nicky. I added, “So that whole drama club thing was
fake?”
“I confess I thought if I could get you to the
theater, I wouldn’t have quite so much to explain. I shouldn’t have pretended.
Please. Listen. I came here to help.” She held down my spiral notebook as I
tried to slide it toward me.
“Yeah, I really don’t need help.”
“You actually do, and you don’t know you do,
and that makes it worse and more dangerous. Just let me explain.” The steely
note in her voice made me stop moving and watch her face.
“I’ll buy that you knew my sister, or you know
something about her, or whatever, but she’s gone. Leave her alone.” I stood up.
“Meet me at the theater after school tomorrow,
and I can show you what I’m talking about.” She held my gaze with brown dog
eyes, liquid and too beautiful to be wasted on a mean crazy person.
I looked away. “Oh, too bad. Tuesday’s actually
my support group for people who believe in unicorns.”
“You think the dolls in the toy theater are
being moved by Pretty Peg.”
My mind went swimmy as I worked that out. I hadn’t
told anyone besides Laura about the puppet theater.
But yes, that was what I secretly half
suspected, even though I knew it was impossible. That my dead sister was
somehow talking to me.
“How do you know about that?” I asked.
“Just come tomorrow. Come and I’ll show you.
You do need our help.” Her voice was pleading. She stepped in closer, and I
smelled cinnamon.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. But we can protect you.”
“Protect me from what exactly?” I slung my bag
across my chest.
She took a breath and pierced me with a look.
“Not just you. You were right about one thing. The Woodcutter was never caught.
He’s looking for you and your sister Laura.”
Skye Allen has had short fiction published in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and Of Dragons and Magic: Tales of the Lost Worlds and poetry in Insomnia and Sinister Wisdom.
She works as a singing teacher and occasionally performs Irish music
around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife, two
cats, and four chickens. Pretty Peg is her first novel.
You can find Skye Allen online here:
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