RAYA BANKS

“Hurry! Intruders in the castle!” A large-breasted woman dressed as a Walmart version of Lady Aphrodite screamed, promptly before her head was snatched up by a shadowling.

The Burning City banquet hall was being attacked! It had taken longer than I would have liked for me to realize it.

I had seen the creatures, one of them, standing haunched in the obsidian blackness beyond the blue-tinted window panes of the banquet hall tower.

I had been distracted by Alpha Nikolai’s angular face, the incandescent din of his baritone that buzzed deliciously in my ears and thought the beings as phantoms of my imagination.

Not until they moved, the...