The alley is dark, and the air is stale with the sweet perfume of restaurant dumpsters and urine. Night shift, ain’t it grand?

One of the uniforms guarding the crime scene goes through the motions with me after I flash my shield.

“Detective Ace Heart.” She takes a moment to verify my ID before entering me into the log. Her gaze drifts to the single red heart on my chest, not that anyone couldn’t make me out for a card by the square of my shoulders.

Is anyone from Homicide on the scene? I ask.

“Detective Thompson was here. You just missed him.”

Of course, it had to be Thompson. I haven’t dealt with him much, but everyone knows he’s no friend to rabbit-holers. “He say anything?”

She hesitates.

“Spit it out,” I say. I don’t want to spend all night playing tea party out here on the sidewalk.

“He might have said a few colorful words about flat-men. No offence, Detective.”

“None taken,” I assure her. I’ll save my offence for Thompson. And I’ll explain it real clear next time I run into him at Shenanigans.

If Jack left it for me, then there’s no doubt someone from the other side of the rabbit hole is involved. I let the uniform get back to holding up the nearest wall and head down the alley. At the far end, three bodies are waiting for me: two rabbit-holers and one human male.

A playing card with a red and white pinwheel pattern across his back lies face down in the muck. He’s been cleaved clean in two, and I don’t even bother to glove up for a closer examination. I won’t know if they’re a number or a face card until the medical examiner arrives hours from now and gives the ‘okay’ to turn them over.

The human is a few steps away. This one is sunny-side up, with his baby blues staring deep into the stars. I hit my light to get a better look-see. There are faint ligature marks and bruising around his throat. He must have had a terrible singing voice, because the killer went out of their way to shut him up hard.

I turn to my right to size up our final contestant. It’s a pawn. The marble-white chess piece has a ruby red gash on the side of its head. A fist-sized stone is sunk into the dumpster ooze nearby, and it’s splashed in matching red decor. I shine the light along the victim’s outstretched arm and catch a glint of steel in his hand. It’s nothing more than a scratched-up pig sticker.

But these three aren’t the only ones in the alley. The entire time I’ve been walking the crime scene, someone’s been hiding behind one of the dumpsters watching. They were quiet, but not quiet enough.

“I know you’re there,” I don’t even say it too loud, just matter-of-fact. But when they try to call my bluff, I scoop up a pebble and ping it off the metal bin. “Don’t make me come down the rabbit hole after you. Step out nice and slow with your hands where I can see ‘em.”

My breath catches when a girl in a blue dress and white pinafore appears.

All of a sudden, I’m back in Wonderland with the Queen of Hearts shouting at me to take her head.

She stops at the corner, still half-hidden in the shadows.

I let out a breath that I didn’t even realize I was still holding—a sigh of relief that floats long and loose into the stagnant night air. It’s not her. Not this time. Not Alice. It’s just another damn pinafore girl, a pretender, a Wonderland tourist.

“All the way out,” I tell her.

I hit her with my beam, and that’s when I see a little splatter of blood on her as well.

“Please don’t shoot,” she says.

My .38 police special appears in my hand out of cautious habit, but after I size her up, I send it back to the ether.

“How long have you been here?” My light travels down the length of the alley until it hits a brick wall, and I confirm my suspicions. There’s no other way in or out.

“A while, I guess.”

“Were you part of this?” I point in the general vicinity of the dead bodies.

“No, not really, I—” And then the water works start.

I offer a handkerchief and wait for her to wipe away the tears.

She stares at me reluctantly, so I let the silence stretch out until she gets back to talking. “I wanted to find a shortcut to River Street, and when I came down the alley, I found these three arguing.”

“Who threw the first—” My light flashes from stone, to card, to knife, “—punch?”

“Well, the chess piece shoved the man to the ground, and when he got back to his feet, the man had a rock in his hand, and he—” she sobs, and blows her nose.

“—bashed the pawn’s brains in,” I offer.

“That’s right,” she says, “and then the card threw himself at the man and started choking him. It all happened so quickly, you understand. And then a knife appeared, and the pawn slashed the card. There was so much blood.”

She wails some more into my now ruined hanky. I take a moment to re-examine the three corpses. It’s plausible. I’ve seen weirder things happen on both sides of the rabbit-hole, and don’t get me started on Looking-glass Land. No wonder Thompson left this one for me.

“And that blood splatter on your pinafore?”

She clutches the hem of her dress and pulls it taunt and searches about until she spots the droplets. “From the blow to his head, I think.”

I don’t tug any further on that thread for now. Again, it’s plausible. Instead, I point to the blade in the pawn’s hand. “And this is the knife he used to kill the card?”

“Yes, that very knife.”

“You’re sure?” I ask again. I get a double nod for my trouble.

I holler for the uniform to join me from where she’s barely being useful out on the sidewalk, talking to passersby.

“Put the cuffs on her,” I say when she reaches us.

“What?” the pretend Alice sputters. “Why?”

A hatchet appears in my hand as if summoned out of mid air, which it sort of was.

“You see, Alice,” I say with no small amount of sarcasm as I pluck my handkerchief out of her hand. I drag it across the blade of my axe, and we all watch as the fabric parts in twain as though it had always been two pieces. “A vorpal blade like mine doesn’t cut so much as it simply… undoes a thing. If the shiv in the pawn’s hand made the slash, that poor card would be as torn and tattered as the Mad Hatter. But it’s not. It’s badger hair smooth.”

The waterworks stop, and I catch the moment when her eyes smolder between defiance and defeat. Now she doesn’t resemble Alice at all.

“I’m betting when the sun comes up, and the rest of the Looking Glass Unit rips this alley apart, we’re gonna find a second blade, a vorpal blade, aren’t we? So, what was this really about? Bandersnatch smuggling? Or maybe a potion deal gone bad?”

The uniform pats the girl down and finds a baggie of diced mushroom caps and a wad of cash hidden in the pockets of her pinafore.

Her shoulders sag, and it slowly sinks in that the game is up. She kicks rocks but then lifts her chin to meet my gaze. “Well, there is nothing like cutting down the competition with a friendly game of rock, paper, scissors,” she says with a shrug.

I shake my head. “But nothing beats vorpal, does it, Alice?”

The Broken Queen of Hearts

If you enjoyed Rock, Paper, Vorpal then put your eyes on a full-size Ace Heart mystery. The Broken Queen of Hearts is available on Amazon. (And if you’ve already gone down that rabbit hole, then thanks again. There’s a mug with your name on it waiting for you at Shenanigans.)

Available now in eBook and paperback at Amazon.

PURCHASE ON AMAZON

A mad scientist. A twisted family. And worst of all: a meddling cat.

When Dr. Morcant Hollow returns to the family manor, he expects to find his father dying (or, with any luck, already expired). Instead, he is greeted with an empty journal, sullied experiments, a missing brother, an oddly silent butler, and an amber cat intent on outwitting him at every turn.

The tables are turned with the discovery of the Slingshot Time Machine (patent pending). One lightning strike and an ill‑considered launch later, Morcant hurtles into the recent past where he finds himself face‑to‑face with an adversary equal to himself in every regard.

A brisk, 60‑minute tale of darkly comic sci‑fi misadventure, mad science gone awry, and one infuriating amber cat who may be the most dangerous mind in the manor.

Available Now on Amazon

I got out of the shower to find the dragon leaning against the vanity. He wasn’t good with personal boundaries either. “Okay, now, what the hell did you do to Wanda?” I asked.

“It’s nothing. Well, nothing I can’t fix at least.”

I stopped in the middle of pulling on my jeans and twirled my finger in the universal signal of ‘get to the point.’

“What?” he said.

Apparently, dragons aren’t from our universe.

I spoke slowly. “How did you make Wanda’s blouse disappear?”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Ya, ya, you’re never trying to. What happened?”

“Wanda was at the bus stop when I headed out this morning—”

A thought occurred to me. “What did you go out in public as?”

“A dog. Now stop interrupting. As I was saying, she was at the bus stop, and we struck up a conversation.”

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t anybody notice that she was talking to a dog?”

“That’s nothing, have you seen Joe from downstairs? I heard him talking to God last week. Can you believe it?”

“Wanda,” I prompted.

“Right. She was at the stop, and it turns out she hadn’t brought a jacket. I wanted to be a gentleman—”

“Don’t you mean gentle-dragon?”

“Bugger off with that again. Don’t you have any new jokes?”

I pushed him out into the hall so I could get in front of the sink to pretty myself up. “Okay, so how does Wanda not having a jacket lead to you making her top disappear?”

“Well, I didn’t really make it disappear. I changed it into—”

“—into a disaster,” I finished for him.

He snorted, and this time a plume of smoke did escape and set off the alarm. I yanked off my clean t-shirt, and frantically waved it at the smoke detector until it accepted my surrender and fell quiet again.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No worries.” I pulled my shirt on for the second time and returned to my beauty routine. “Now, about Wanda.”

“She said she was chilly and regretted not bringing her jacket, but she didn’t want to be late for an appointment and couldn’t go back for it. So, I offered to make her one.”

“Uh huh. And then?”

“Well, I wrote the word across her back, but it didn’t turn into a coat like it was supposed to. It was a frilly skirt-like contraption instead, and it appeared on her bottom half instead of her top.”

I stopped teasing goop into my hair and stared directly at him. “Please tell me she had something on underneath.

“She did. Some sort of holster contraption.”

“It’s called a bra,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it. She was screaming something about everyone seeing her in her bra.” He pointed to the smoke alarm. “She sounded more wretched than that bloody thing.”

The red LED on the alarm flickered in response, and he quickly lowered his claw.

I was missing something as usual. “So, how did you mess this one up? What did you write?”

“Petticoat,” he said. “It sounded pretty. I thought it would be a cute jacket that would go with her skirt. I still don’t quite get how that ended up as the frilly thing.”

I couldn’t even laugh at this stuff anymore. “I don’t even need to google this one. A petticoat is a skirt, kind of.”

“How on earth is a petticoat not a coat, but a skirt?”

“It just is.”

“I am so tired of you people and this insufferable language.”

“Well, now you have to fix it, or Mrs. Maple will lock you in a room with Fluffy.”

#

We knocked on Wanda’s door.

“You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” the dragon said.

“What are you talking about?” I whispered.

“That gunk in your hair—and whatever it was that you sprayed on yourself in the bathroom—it’s not working. You can’t transmogrify away all that ugly.”

He held a claw up for a high five, which is actually a high three in his case. But as usual, he completely failed to grasp the nuances of when a high five is, and is not, appropriate.

I left him hanging with a resounding “nope.”

We both stowed any further nattering when her door opened partway. She hid behind it with a bath towel clutched in front of her, the white straps of a bra disappearing over each shoulder. “Oh no, not you again.”

“She’s talking to you,” I said. “Hey, Wanda.”

“Hey, Whitty.”

“I’m very sorry,” the dragon said, “but Mrs. Maple asked if I could try to fix things. I would have earlier, but, well, you were busy running and screaming.”

“You turned my top into a bottom, you idiot.”

I wasn’t sure if she would cry or put a hex on him. The first would lead to consoling her, and the other might result in my roommate wetting himself. It was a win-win for me.

“Uh, that was an unseen complication due to the stupidity of your English language,” he continued.

“What are you—” she turned to me, “what the hell is he talking about?”

I gave her my best gosh-golly-gee shrug with a sympathetic smirk. “He tried to turn your blouse into a petticoat.”

“He did turn it into a petticoat!”

The dragon interrupted us. “If I may. I thought a petticoat was an actual coat.”

“Maybe if we could come in?” I asked.

“Whatever,” she said, but stepped aside and let us enter.

Wanda’s apartment was the opposite of our own in every conceivable way. Not only was the layout reversed, but the counters were spotless, the table tidy, and the shelves with their assorted knick-knacks were well organized. You could eat off her floor. In that way, our apartments were identical.

“Listen, not to be dense here, but why haven’t you put on another top?” I asked.

That’s when she did begin to cry. I stepped towards her, but the dragon beat me to it and slid a mottled arm around her shoulder. I made a mental note to explain the virtues of being a good wingman later on.

“In here,” she said.

Wanda wiped her eyes on her towel and led us into the bedroom. She grabbed a red button-up blouse from the bed and put it on. I was about to ask again what the problem was, but when her fingers got to the fourth button, the blouse came away with a tear. In the blink of an eye, it flipped down her torso as if pulled by invisible hands, and remade itself into a frilly petticoat of the same bold red. The room was littered with crumpled petticoats of every color. I picked up a sheer black number off the floor, wondering what it might have been.

She snatched it out of my hand. “Do you mind?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to get an idea of what happened here.”

The dragon had picked up a white one and was sniffing it. “It’s been transmogrified.”

“You think, Einstein?” Wanda and I said simultaneously.

The dragon eyed us.

“What’s wrong with him?” Wanda whispered to me.

“He’s confused. You can tell the way the bridge of his nose wrinkles.”

She laughed through the last of her tears, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her.

“Are you two about to mate?”

“Eww.” Wanda crinkled her own nose.

“Well, thank you for that,” I said to both of them.

The dragon ignored us and went back to sniffing petticoats and muttering to himself about what could have gone wrong. Wanda busied herself folding each one and stacking them on a chair. She still held the towel in front of her, but as she leaned down to pick up another transmogrified shirt, it fell open and revealed a cute little mole in the center of her back above some faint scratch marks.

“Wanda, I don’t want to sound weird—”

“Too late,” the dragon remarked.

I ignored him. “Do you mind if I check your back. I think I have an idea about how the genius did this.”

She looked like she might say no, but then she shrugged and pulled her hair forward over her shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Perhaps you’d like to stop leaking pheromones and tell me what you are doing?” the dragon said.

The lines were pale, but there it was, the word petticoat in the dragon’s horrid handwriting. I pointed to show him what I found. “Right here. You basically carved the word into her back with your claw.”

“Oh,” he said.

“That’s it? ‘Oh?’” I said.

“Well, it’s rather excellent, actually. I didn’t know I could endow a spell onto an object in your language. This opens up all sorts of opportunities.”

“Can you turn our thirty-two-inch TV into a sixty-inch?” I asked as my interest piqued.

“Well, no,” he conceded, “but I can turn Mrs. Maple’s cat into a hairless wonder.”

“Don’t mess with the cat.”

“Hello!” Wanda glared at the two of us over her shoulder. “How are you going to fix this?”

The dragon rubbed a finger under his chin and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

Wanda spun towards him, but he was oblivious to all the signs of a woman who was about to level everything around her. That hex was coming soon.

“Well, perhaps we could remove it,” the dragon mused.

“With what?” I asked.

“Wanda, do you have a cheese grater?” he asked her.

“No, you idiot!” she screamed.

“Well, there’s no need to be insulting. I thought almost everybody had one in their kitchen. Hang on. I’ll go get ours.”

“No! I meant you are not using a cheese grater on me.” She turned to me. “Is he always this dense?”

“Yes.”

She turned and picked out a white bottle from a row of neatly arranged concoctions on her dresser. “Try this.”

The dragon went to take it from her, but she pulled away. “Not you,” she said, and pushed it into my hands instead. “If you think you can handle it?”

“This isn’t one of your potions, is it? Should I be wearing gloves or something?”

The last shreds of her already frayed patience threatened to completely unravel. “It’s just moisturizer.”

I squirted a dab into my palm and rubbed the lotion across the scratches on her back. “There, try that.

Wanda pulled one of the three remaining blouses off a hanger in her closet and slipped it on with her eyes shut. She began to button it up, slowly at first, and then as fast as her fingers would allow, almost unbelieving when she made it all the way to the top.

“Oh God. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“Now,” Wanda said to my roommate, “what are you going to do about my ruined wardrobe?”

The scales on the dragon’s snout wrinkled again. “Well, I suppose I could try turning them back into whatever they might have been. What was this one?” the dragon said, holding up a pale yellow petticoat.

“It was my favorite T-shirt.”

He laid it out on the bed and traced out some letters while chanting and making a few gestures with his other claw. What a crock.

It turned itself inside out, revealing a pale yellow t-shirt with a brown blotch on the front.

“Was it like that before?” he asked.

“No!” she screamed.

He glanced at me. “T-e-a shirt?”

Wanda snatched it out of his hand and headed out of the room. “Never mind, I’ll throw it in the laundry.”

Once she was gone, he gave me a wink. “That was for you. I think fixing this could take a couple of nights. Maybe you could offer to buy her dinner?” He grinned, horribly, showing me all of his teeth, and then held up a claw for a high five.

Mrs. Maple stood in the middle of the building lobby with a hand on each hip, almost like she had a premonition that I would be walking through the front door that very second.

“Mr. Whitmore, you need to get your dragon under control.”

Now, let me set the record straight. First off, he’s not my dragon; he’s my roommate. And second, I had a better chance of controlling the weather. But I wasn’t about to argue with the world’s most curmudgeonly landlady about the finer points of rooming with the world’s dumbest transmogrifying dragon.

“What’s he done now?” I asked. I hated that part of me was actually curious. “On second thought, Mrs. Maple, I don’t want to know. He pays his own way, he’s not my problem.”

“He tried to help Wanda from 3B with her outfit this morning, and poof, next thing you know, the poor girl’s blouse vanished right as she was stepping onto the bus. I had to send one of the other tenants out to rescue her from the hoots and hollers of a few of the more classless men. Which is to say, all of them.”

Ah, not Wanda. Why did he have to mess with Wanda? I’d been working up the courage to ask her out for weeks (well, more like months). She was fantastic: dark hair, dark eyes, and sure, she was a witch who dabbled in some slightly dark arts, but the tonic she brewed for my hangover last New Year’s Eve was a lifesaver. My roommate, on the other hand, seemed to dabble solely in the idiotic arts.

“I’ll talk to him, you have my word.”

“What I’ll have is you and your dragon out on your rumps if I have any more girls weeping in my lobby.” She turned away towards her office on the main floor.

“He’s not my dragon,” I called after her as she stalked away. “He actually came with the apartment.”

Her office door slammed behind her in answer.

I took the elevator, but when it started to shudder, I decided to jump out with Mr. Twick on the fourth and risk the stairs. I’d been trapped on the mechanical wonder between floors twice before.

It was only three flights; surely I could make it without becoming part of this week’s magical mishap statistic. But I wasn’t home free yet. When I made it to the apartment, my key got stuck in the deadbolt, and the dragon didn’t answer.

“A little help here?” I shouted through the door.

Every second I stood out in the hall increased my odds of succumbing to whatever one of the wizards on our floor was brewing. The air was taking on a green tinge. I really didn’t want to find out what super keen magical catastrophe awaited me.

I pounded with my fist. “Anytime soon would be great.”

A sane person might wonder why I would choose to live in an apartment building for the magically gifted. And by gifted, I mean challenged. I only agreed to assume the lease from my cousin because she assured me that her shape-shifting roommate was always good for half the rent. This alone hoisted him above some of my past roommate greats like Drug-Dealer-Dan and Girlfriend-Stealing-Sid.

As it turns out, there were additional incentives to living with a dragon: he ate intruders, the rats kept a respectful distance, and he had a fragile armistice with the cockroaches that ensured a bug-free dining experience. But apparently answering the door was not on his list of services rendered.

When it became clear he wasn’t coming to my rescue, I went with Plan B and hoofed the door with my boot while twisting the key. The deadbolt finally snapped open, and my key lived to turn (or not turn) another day.

“Hey, thanks for the help,” I called out.

There was no answer.

“We need to talk about Wanda. Mrs. Maple is pretty pissed.”

I peered past the kitchenette and into the glorified broom closet that was our living room. I didn’t see the dragon anywhere.

I slid off my jacket and poked my head into each bedroom, but still no dragon.

He wasn’t nestled anywhere on the bookcase, and three days’ worth of dirty dishes kept him off the counter. Maybe he’d turned himself into a squirrel and gotten trounced by Mrs. Maple’s cat again. The last bout had left him with a tattered tail, a bruised ego, and a blood oath claiming right of vengeance. I looked forward to the inevitable rematch.

A sigh came from the floor in front of the couch.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Don’t ask,” the dragon moaned. “How bad is it?”

I picked him up off the carpet. “Well, you’re leafy green with reddish stalks. Did you try to turn yourself into rhubarb?”

I rolled him over until I found his face on the underside of the largest leaf.

“That’s better,” he said. “I’ve been staring at the rug since lunch. It’s a good thing that you never clean; I only survived by licking up that spot of salsa from last night.”

“Glad I could help.”

I took him to the kitchenette and cleared a spot for him on the counter amid the clutter. “Now, how did you turn yourself into rhubarb?”

He sniffed. “Well, I wasn’t trying for a vegetable at all, you understand, so I don’t know what could have gone wrong.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was feeling a little emasculated after last week’s row with the cat—”

“I don’t know if you can be emasculated, can you? Perhaps you felt de-scaled?”

He hates dragon puns.

“Do they enjoy your delightfully witty rapport at the office while you saunter past the cubicles pushing your mail cart?” He didn’t wait for my reply. “I was feeling emasculated after the cat—”

“Fluffy,” I offered.

He pointed a wilted stalk at me. “Do you want to hear how I became a rhubarb or not?” Normally, this is where a little gout of flame would shoot from his nostril and set off the smoke alarm, but apparently being a vegetable had its limitations.

He glared at me, but continued. “I thought I’d transmogrify back into my natural form, but with a little extra panache.”

Now, I don’t understand much about the arcane abilities of dragons, but it seems to revolve around a single word, followed by a lot of lip pulling and inquisitive stares. The word acts as the focal point. He would write it down, or, depending on his current state, I would write it down for him. Then he would read it out loud or mumble it under his breath like a thespian trying to find an emotional connection with his subject. I am pretty sure that most of it was theatrical dragon baloney.

“So, what was the word?”

“Charred,” he said. “Like a charred steak, or burnt meat—that kind of thing. A scentual ode to dragons.”

“Scentual is not a word.”

“It should be,” he said.

“Anyway, what went wrong? Did you get distracted by a salad or something at the last second?”

“Don’t be daft, you jackass.”

I threw my hands up in surrender. “No need to get bent out of shape. Where did you write it down?”

“On the coffee table.”

I carried him all of four steps back into the living room and plunked him down.

“There, by the corner.”

I examined his scribbling in the dust and then dug my phone out of my pocket.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just a sec...”

He rustled his leaves at me. “Come on now, what is it?”

“Well, you wanted to be a charred dragon, and you are.”

He cocked his leafy face to the side. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“The word you wanted is c-h-a-r-r-e-d, not c-h-a-r-d.”

“Well, what’s a chard then?”

“Here,” I said. “I think I found your cousin.” I turned my phone to him and showed him a picture of some chard, the vegetable, with its reddish stalks and green leaves. “But at least you got part of it right, you do seem to be a little singed around the edges.”

“Oh, for Pete’s—”

“Pete’s Dragon?” I couldn’t resist.

I think he tried to leap at me. But instead, he wobbled a little, fell forward, and screamed something about murder into the tabletop while I laughed uncontrollably from the couch.

“Are you about done?” he finally asked when he was able to roll himself over. “Go get a pen and paper so I can undo this.”

It didn’t take long to get him sorted back out into his usual scaly form, but it was minus the intended panache. The word for this, in case you are wondering, is: dragon. Nothing fancy. You would think it would be something to inspire terror, like Dragon the Mighty, Lord of Flames, or even his own name (which he refuses to use). Back home, every dragon’s name is unique, but apparently, here his name is quite common, and according to him, it would be demeaning to be lumped in with common humans. I figure him for a Carl, or maybe even a Herb.

So, in the end, I wrote ‘dragon’ on the notepad on the fridge and propped him up on the floor. He mouthed the word, and even though he’d done it a hundred times before, it still required flailing his leaves about like a head of cabbage gone mad.

“Get on with it already,” I said, but it was nearly over.

The slender stalks of chard lengthened into limbs and a tail, and the singed leaves multiplied and spread, becoming hard green scales. When he was finished, he stood around the same height as me, give or take a foot, depending on how he chose to coil his neck. He claimed he liked to slouch down to fit in with us humans, but I suspected it was because he kept banging his head on the doorway.

He shook out his scales. “What’s for dinner?”

“Not salad,” I said. “And we’ll have to eat later. I need to get cleaned up before we go and fix your other mess.”

I don’t think he heard me. His head was already buried in the fridge.

READ PART 2 - The Problem with Petticoats

I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life. I’m a Gen X’er, so that should give you an idea of what kind of timeline we’re talking about. As a kid, I’d tried to write. I swear. But TV got in the way. As a teen, I wrote terrible poetry, some of which I still have and desperately need to burn next camping trip. In my twenties and thirties, writing disappeared from view. It was the road less traveled that I wanted to go down, but couldn’t. I was busy establishing a career, then maintaining my career, until entering the final stage—loathing career.

But in my forties, writing circled back around in the form of a useful midlife crisis. And of course, having barely bothered to actually write most of my life up until that point, I dove right into the deep end and attempted a novel.

It went better than expected. I managed twenty thousand words, completed the first act, and had a solid outline for the rest of the story… but something wasn’t right.

During this process, I snooped around different writing forums and picked up a few tricks. But the more I learned, the more I realized how damaged my manuscript was. That realization felt overwhelming. I trudged along a little further, but when you are only able to churn out a meager few hundred words a day, it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

And that’s when I switched to short stories. Temporarily. At least, that’s what I told myself.

My plan was solid. The writing forum I was lurking on held monthly writing contests, combined with rounds of critiquing by the other members. I’d take a year, write some short stories, learn, and then come back to my novel.

And to my surprise. It worked. Sort of. Mostly.

There is a lot to be said for taking a much smaller piece of writing through the process of drafting, revising, editing, critiquing, crying, followed by more revising and editing. And then immediately taking everything you learned and applying it to the next project.

My first story, Dwarves, Elves, and Consultants, was under two thousand words, and in the course of a month or two (it’s hard to recall exactly all these years later), I learned a metric fuck-ton. (A metric fuck-ton is about half of an imperial fuck-ton, for any American readers.) The process started to make sense. My craft improved. So I wrote more short stories.

I started to submit to various fiction markets. Because, dammit, if I was going to go through the gauntlet pounding out all this brilliance, I sure as hell was going to torture as many faceless editors with it as possible. I earned a whack load of rejection letters, and much like Stephen King hung his from a nail, I did the modern digital equivalent and banished them to a folder in my email.

But then the damnedest thing happened. I received an acceptance. (I have a special folder for those, too, but it’s much smaller.) The crazy bastard on the other side of the equation paid me $100 USD for my story, which, to a Canadian, is like being paid in gold doubloons. It took three years to get that first sale. But then shortly after, I sold a few more.

Now let’s be clear. I was never able to land an acceptance from a high-paying prestigious pro-market. I am a mediocre word-writing guy, and semi-pro is the lane I drive in. I’m fine with that.

Being a published semi-pro short story writer was fantastic. All my writer friends were familiar with all the markets I was submitting to. They were envious when I landed a sale. I assume. I’ve never been anything less than envious when one of them beat me out for a particular anthology call. I could look in the mirror and call myself a writer. I mean, readers were reading my stories. Right?

Well, maybe.

Here’s the cold, hard truth about semi-pro short story markets (as I see it; your results may vary). Almost no one is reading small, token, and semi-pro fiction markets. It always felt like the audience was other writers—the ones who made that issue alongside you, writers looking to submit in the future, and the writers who got rejected. Those, especially, are reading your story, cursing your name, and sharpening their pencils. And they are not sharpening those pencils to write with… they have keyboards for that.

Other writers were the only people commenting online about my stories. They were the only ones liking or reposting on social media. So I did some mild off-the-cuff half-assed research and concluded that there is, in fact, an easy way to calculate how many people read your story at any given semi-pro e-zine or anthology.

Take the number of acceptances for that anthology and multiply it by two. The writer of the story and their mom. And then generously add in the entire number of rejected authors that submitted alongside you. (Angry and bitter readership is still readership.) And that’s it.

Let’s put it into a proper mathematical formula:

Writers + Writers’ Moms + Rejected Authors = Total Readership.

“Now I feel sad,” you say.

Well, hold on to that thought, because it gets worse. (This is where the “tragic deaths” come in.)

It turns out that when you have a barely read semi-pro market, the editors grow weary of the constant slush and the grief of dealing with writers and their moms. At some point, they close their doors. After all, many of them are writers themselves with their own dreams to pursue. Sure, they keep the website live so readers can still find your story… for a time. Until they stop paying the website hosting fee. Then one day, you click through the links of your published work on your author site (which also doesn’t have any readership), and you find your story has been cast aside into the nether—error 404, not found .

But do not despair, fellow word-writing person. As with all things in life, it’s (mostly) about the journey and not the destination, although the destination is pretty sweet too, even though it is destined to die.

Short stories are about learning the craft in small bites. It’s about growing a thicker skin, a thousand words at a time. You’ll develop a nice hat collection along the way: writer, editor, marketer, PR person, therapist (you’ll get very good at this last one as you will have many writer friends). The pay will be cheap, the readership will be your mom, and the glory will be fleeting. But with all that said, you should consider putting yourself through the gauntlet. Take your licks. Cut your teeth. Become a better semi-pro writer.

Besides, I bet your mom loves reading my stories.

Pike looked from the pine cone in his hand and gazed up at the magician who had given it to him. The twig of a mage smiled through a wispy beard. How the hell was he supposed to fight to the death with a small green pine cone fresh off the bough?

“Really?” he asked.

The twig shrugged. “Those are the rules. You are an arborist of Leaf and Limb, are you not?”

Across the fighting pit, a big man was receiving his weapon from another robed magician. He bleated like a deranged goat and raised a hammer to cheers of, “Plunk! Plunk! Plunk!”

“Why does he get a hammer?” Pike asked the twig. “Seems a little unfair.”

The magician glanced over his shoulder and then shrugged. “He’s a smithy, a sworn man of Anvil and Hammer. Hence, the hammer.” The twig’s grin broadened.

“Give him the damn block then.”

The twig shook his head. “We’ve awarded the anvil before; you wouldn’t want that. It was surprisingly effective and quite messy.”

“Well, as a man of Leaf and Limb, I’m going to need you to cut me a limb. A branch of stout oak will do just fine—and make sure it’s about two knuckles thick.” He pressed his own thumbs together under the magician’s nose.

“You’ve already been granted a boon from your own sigil.” He stopped speaking long enough to poke at the leaf and limb woven into the breast of Pike’s tunic. “It’s right there, a pine cone dangling from a limb.”

He was about to tell the twig where to plant the pine cone, but before he could utter another word, the magician vanished from the pit with a flourish of his cloak and plume of smoke. The crowd in the gallery above roared their approval at the showmanship. Pike looked up at the mob and bit his nail at them, a beggar’s gesture, but he expected the magicians and apprentices, familiars and talents, and assembled mundane admirers of the arcane to know what it meant.

Plunk leveled the hammer at Pike and then charged across the pit with an arching overhead swing. Pike made sure his head wasn’t there to meet it. The weapon wasn’t much as far as hammers went: it was smallish with a rounded head, the kind used by metal workers for denting and shaping. But he was pretty sure it would do that and more to his skull.

He sidestepped another blow and cursed as he went.

The hammer wouldn’t kill him with one hit; it probably wouldn’t even knock him out. It would only stun him and take his wits, leaving him a teetering oak, ripe for the felling.

He danced backwards with the pine cone at the ready, while the brute, Plunk, regained his footing and roared again.

It wouldn’t end with a second strike either. That one would tear open a gash across his brow and drive him to his knees while he desperately tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes.

Before Plunk could close again, Pike hurled the pine cone at the smithy. Maybe it would knock out a tooth, or if the druids willed it, it would go down his throat and he’d choke on it.

It did neither.

It smacked the oaf under the eye with less notice than a pestering horsefly, then plummeted to the ground and lay in the dirt at the man’s unshod feet.

Pike cursed the cheering men and women of magic and then spat on the floor of the pit. He smiled when it elicited a course of jeers.

Plunk menaced with the hammer only a few paces away.

A third blow from the maul wouldn’t do much more to end him, but it would bring the darkness. It was somewhere in the next half-dozen strikes that mercy would be granted, and his brains would be mixed into the dirt. Maybe his head would leak enough fluid that the pine cone would take root and sprout into a tree—a cursed tree, to spite the lot of them.

This would be the last time he trifled with magicians.

Unless he survived.

Then he was going to come back with as many axemen and rootsingers as the Guild of Leaf and Limb could spare. And they wouldn’t come with little green pine cones.

Plunk took a moment and hollered to the cheering crowd. Then he turned and charged again. The hammer cut through the air in a sweeping blow aimed for the ribs. Pike rolled underneath it with a surprising agility. He drove into the smithy at the hip and sent his opponent crashing to the floor.

The odds-makers abruptly stopped barking out their lopsided bets. They didn’t understand a damn thing about being an arborist.

He leapt from his crouch and landed with his knee sunk into Plunk’s gut, howling a mocking bleat of his own while the air bellowed out of the flailing giant.

No apprentice of Leaf and Limb became a journeyman without knowing how to handle himself amidst a swarm of wood sprites. And every arborist alive bore a scar or ten from the ashen claws of an angry dryad.

He pried the sunken pine cone out of the dirt with his fingers and then held it in front of the wheezing man’s face so that they could both examine it.

“Sorry about this, Plunk,” Pike said. He held his weapon between a thumb and forefinger and placed the hard tip against the felled man’s brow. Plunk gave a strangled laugh as he looked at the useless green pine cone pressed between his eyes, unable to grasp his own fate.

Until Pike reached down and picked up the hammer.

Ace Heart is haunted years after he escaped his role as executioner for the Queen of Hearts. But now, on this side of the rabbit hole, he scratches out a living as a police detective assigned to the Looking Glass Unit. When the Unicorn turns up dead, he is called in to work the case alongside a human partner with a sore spot for flat-men.

Detective Jack Thompson and Ace have a history of trading cheap shots, and both are itching for an excuse to boil over. With hatchets swinging and heads rolling, they’ll have to put aside personal quarrels and past demons to uncover the truth behind the killings. But no matter the outcome, one thing is for sure—this ain’t Wonderland.

Henry Diamond was waiting for us in the hall with a sword in his hand and stark raving fear in his eyes.

“Drop it, Diamond,” Thompson shouted.

I backed him up. “You heard him, Henry, lose the blade.”

Henry wasn’t home. His eyes stared off past us all the way back to Wonderland. I shouted at him again, but invisible strings bound him tight to the Broken Queen’s hand. He ran at us with the sword flailing from side to side—he was no headsman, I’ll tell you that much.

If you’d like to see how Ace Heart and Jack Thompson ended up here, pick up a copy of this action-packed hard-boiled Wonderland noir.

Available now on Kindle Unlimited or in eBook, paperback at Amazon.

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The spade made a hollow ‘thunk’ as it hit wood. Elias dreaded what would come next. A man could hang for grave robbing if there was a sheriff about to arrest him for it. Praise his luck, it was the sheriff who lay in the coffin beneath him.

The night hadn’t given up the day’s heat, and his shirt was soaked through. Wiping his brow became pointless. He reached out of the hole for another drink from his skin, but found it near empty. Now that the task was at hand, water wasn’t what he wanted anyway; a bottle of coffin varnish would have been the smarter choice.

The witch had been very clear. Bring her the dead sheriff’s boots, and don’t disturb nothing else. It still took another hour to get it done—the lid wouldn’t pry, and in the end, he had to use the spade to smash it to pieces. The stench and rot were already so bad that he made sick until there wasn’t anything left in his guts. When his dark work was done, he thanked the lord that the boots had come off without a fight.

She waited by the campfire away from her hovel, staring into the flames. “You have what I sent you for, boy?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and dropped the boots. “But I don’t understand how this will help me when I’m staring down a Crawford Brother come noon tomorrow.”

She ignored his remarks and stirred the dying embers with her cudgel before handing him a clay bottle, already uncorked. “Drink this. It’ll taste as wretched as the sheriff surely smelt, but you’ll need to drink it down all the same.”

He brought it to his lips without question. It seemed a small thing after digging up the dead. He was wrong. He would rather have slept beside the sheriff’s corpse than stomach the foul draught, but she held him with a wicked glare until he finished.

“Good,” she said, and took the earthenware bottle back from him.

“What was…” He never finished the question. The stars above spun in a single sweeping arc until his face met the dirt.

Only the campfire and the dead man’s boots heard her answer. “Sleep, boy. And I’ll give you a fighting chance against the Crawfords, as promised.”

The water was cold; the old hag must have drawn it straight from the river. She cackled in delight as Elias sputtered awake, half drenched and lying on her stoop.

He stood up, his heels knocking heavily on the wooden planks. The soft, broken soles of his ropers were gone, replaced by the stiff leather boots of the sheriff.

“Why did you put these things on me? Christ, they were full of worms, and worse.”

He bent down to pull them off and then stopped as a pale silver shadow wisped around him before disappearing again. “What was that?” he asked, looking at the witch.

She didn’t flinch. “’Twas him that wore the boots before you.”

A cold sweat poured over Elias, and he struggled to kick off the boots until she took him in hand with a clout to the head.

“Quit stomping around, idiot, and leave the boots on.” She went inside and left Elias scared stiff, but when she came back, it was with coffee and biscuits. “Sit and eat this while you listen.”

He started in on the meal, and soon his gnawing hunger distracted him from the specter that clung to him like molted skin on a rattlesnake.

“His shade is bound to the boots and, in turn, to you while you wear them. The sheriff wasn’t a boastful man, but he was a fast hand with the iron, fast enough to go toe to toe with any one of them Crawfords.” She spat the last as if the name tasted poorly on her tongue. “You let the him guide your hand, and you might live to see tomorrow.”

She looked up to the sky and the sun climbing high overhead. “Best get yourself in the saddle. This is for you,” she said and handed him a gun. “But don’t take your mare, she’s bound to be spooked. Horses have the sight of things— take my mule.”

Elias strapped on the pistol and did as she said.

“He showed!”

He wasn’t sure who yelled, but a murmur rose on its heels and followed him down the street. Most of the town gathered along the walkways. The clever folk stood to the corners where they could duck back if the shooting got wild, but the really smart ones stayed inside and up high, peeking through shuttered windows.

Elias knew he should be terrified, that his innards should be twisting, but the dead lawman was filled to the brim with cold, hard determination. The shade’s emotions soaked into him, masking his fears and filling him with purpose.

As he approached, a Crawford brother stepped onto the road.

“Elias!” a girl called.

He searched the faces of the onlookers until he found her. Mary stood beside her father, tears streaming down a bruised cheek. He could offer her little more than a weak smile.

“You’d best not worry about her,” said the young man across from him. “You’ve got me to deal with.”

Elias was about to offer a smart retort, but the shade spoke.

“Don’t. He’s looking to get you talking, and then he’ll draw on you as he pleases.” The sheriff’s voice was a death rattle whisper through six feet of dirt. “He’s the slowest of the bunch—they think to let the runt notch an easy kill. Now relax, damn you.”

He exhaled and let the emptiness in his chest linger, and then yielded to the specter until it seemed that he wore the dead man like a coat.

Crawford spat when he saw that his bait wasn’t sweet enough. “Fine then, let’s get to it.” His hand lowered while he yammered, hoping to catch Elias unawares, but the sheriff wasn’t fooled. Where the silver shimmer of the shade went, the flesh followed, dead man and living moving as one.

Revolvers came free, and both men fired. Elias had never been so fast, and the youngest Crawford fell dead for it. The rest of the brothers swarmed into the street with their guns, hurling death through clouds of blackened smoke.

The shade had Elias fan the hammer until their lead was spent.

The witch pulled the boots free and said her piece over the boy’s corpse. She threw them in her wagon beside a shovel and a new pine coffin lid. “Don’t worry, Sheriff—it’s only a matter of time till the Crawfords drive another to desperation. We’ll have our reckoning yet.”

She snapped the reins and bade the mule to head for the boneyard.

Kalm looked at the two-headed axe lying in front of him on the boardroom table and wished that he hadn’t left his shield at his desk. Armor was out of the question—his helm and chainmail sat useless in the trunk of his car in the darkest depths of parking level thirty-three, section D.

“…but who is saying that we need to hire consultants?” The vice-queen’s voice cut through him like a dragon’s fang, shedding any further thoughts of his forgotten armaments. Her shrill warble would always herald the change—her mock-charm slithered away to reveal a more suitable growl that lurked underneath.

An idiot coin counter from Treasury made the mistake of opening his trap. “You did, ma’am, at the general meeting you stated—”

“I said nothing regarding consultants. We don’t have the budget for that.”

Her displeasure crept across her features until it corrupted her serene but completely insincere countenance. The thin lacquered lips of her smile disappeared and folded in on themselves until only a thin line of blood red marked the place where she devoured the souls of her staff. Or so the rumors around the keg proclaimed.

“I would never have agreed to consultants.”

Kalm kept his mouth shut but glanced sideways at his manager, Heckler, the only other dwarf in the room. They were both in the meeting where she agreed to hire consultants, and it was indeed her bloody idea.

Heckler hadn’t brought a shield either, but a stout war hammer etched with dwarven rune work leaned against the arm of his chair. “You’re correct, it’s not in the budget, and consultants aren’t required,” he said to placate her.

Kalm hated watching a dwarf capitulate to an elf, but being a dwarf with the company wasn’t easy. Elves did not care for anyone shorter than themselves, and all of her subjects were shorter as far as the vice-queen was concerned.

“Good. No one should be looking outside the organization without my consent.”

Her gaze slid to Heckler as she turned her full attention to the dwarves. For a moment, Kalm didn’t envy his manager at all. Three full stacks of coin could not be worth the dread of reporting directly to the demon-elf.

“The Rune department was commanded to have the new office up and running by month’s end. My people can’t get their work done if you don’t have the runes completed. Why is it not up?” She said.

Heckler glanced at Kalm and smiled before throwing him under the cart. “Kalm, maybe you could outline where we are with this project?” The bastard deflected well, even without a shield.

Kalm straightened the silk tie around his beard and prepared to enter the melee. “We are currently—”

“I don’t care where we are. I want to know where we aren’t,” she spat.

The dwarf leaned with his elbows on the table and looked the point-eared witch directly in the eyes. “We’ve finished rolling out the basic rune structure, and we are waiting for—”

“But why aren’t you done?” she demanded.

“For proper construction and alignment of the runes, we need a lead time of thirty days. The enchantment group came to us with only two weeks’ notice, at that point—”

“And why do you need thirty days?”

“That’s the protocol for requests involving—”

“Who says that’s the protocol?”

“You did!” Kalm’s deteriorating patience began to crack in earnest.

“I think I would know if I’d made that decision.”

His lip curled beneath his mustache, and for a moment, he was glad his axe was on the table and not in his hand.

“You still haven’t explained why you require thirty days.” She was not going to let it go.

Heckler joined the battle again. “Thirty days has always been the lead time for a project of this magnitude.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s thirty days or a hundred days. We can’t communicate with the other offices if you haven’t done your jobs!” The she-elf glared at the dwarves and waited for an answer.

The dwarves glared in return and waited for a question.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well, what?” Heckler said.

“When will you have the runes ready?”

“Two—more—weeks.” Heckler’s beard puffed out as he spoke each word.

“Two more weeks! But why?” Kalm’s stomach knotted as her voice rose into a familiar angry whine.

“Because it takes thirty days to roll out a new office!” Heckler shouted.

“But why?”

“What do you mean ‘but why’?”

“Why do you need two more weeks?” she asked again.

“Because we are already two weeks into the project, and it will take two more! Heckler turned red under his beard. “That’s a total of thirty bloody days, which is the policy that you set!”

“I don’t care. I want it up by the end of this week!”

“You can’t be serious,” Heckler said.

“Of course I’m serious.”

“It can’t be done without bringing in—”

“No consultants!” Her chair slammed into the wall behind her as she stood.

Heckler hurled his own chair and bared his teeth at the elf. His war hammer began to fall to the floor, and he reached out and caught it by the haft before the weapon could drop.

The room froze. The thin red line, the place where the vice-queen drank happiness, blossomed back into a grin as she stared at the hammer in the dwarf’s hand.

“Are you challenging me, Rune Manager Heckler?”

The seconds uncoiled and stretched until they seemed like minutes. Heckler stood with his fist wrapped around the war hammer, caught in the elf’s web like a fly waiting to be devoured. The only choice left was to yield or to struggle. It wasn’t a hard decision for a dwarf.

Heckler feinted with the hammer and then slammed his empty shield hand into her gut. He laughed as she folded in two and careened into the wall beside her chair.

“Still want it done in a week, witch?” He roared.

The vice-queen stood and smoothed her robes. “Dwarves; all muscle, no brains.” Her hand flicked, and flames rushed towards him.

The dwarf slammed the butt of the weapon down, and the runes etched into the head crackled to life. The fire licked around him with no more heat than a smithy’s forge. “Vice-king Heckler has a nice ring to it, don’t you think, elf?”

“You had one ale too many at lunch if you think that will ever happen, Shorty. I’d sooner bow to a gnome.”

“I don’t care if you’re bent or broken, elf. Do you know what my first decree will be?” Heckler spun the hammer above his head in a great arc and sent it swinging towards the vice-queen’s head.

She smiled as the weapon crashed against the air in front of her as though it had kissed an anvil. “Oh, please tell me, Vice-Gnome Heckler, what will you do?”

The dwarf brought the ancient maul down repeatedly until the vice-queen’s shield shattered. He held the hammer up to her nose. “I will replace your entire bloody department with consultants!”

She grabbed the hammer’s face in her hand and, with a word of power, wrenched it from Heckler’s grasp. “I thought I had made myself very clear about the use of consultants.” The hammer sailed from her hand on a gust of wind and smashed into the dwarf’s chest.

Heckler fell to the floor along with the remains of his career. The vice-queen stood over him like a spider inspecting the small thing that had tried to escape her web. “The only thing you’ll be doing is filling out your workers’ comp forms.”

Kalm slid from the chair. His battle rage simmered, fueled by the grunting and wheezing coming from the floor. The runes on his axe glowed faintly on the table; it beckoned to him, promising to unleash its power if only he would call it to war.

The elf turned to him, unconcerned that he was on his feet. “Now, Kalm, I believe you are the next senior member of the rune department?” Her eyes flashed cold for a moment before her soul drinking, happiness swallowing, red line of a mouth crawled back across her face to twist itself into a mockery of a smile. “Perhaps you could oversee the project while Heckler is on leave?”

Kalm sized up the elf, wondering if she was spent, if a swift fell of his blade would finish what the other dwarf had started. He walked to the table and picked up his two-headed axe in one hand, and when she didn’t flinch, he gave her a curt nod barely noticeable beneath his beard.

“And when will the runes be ready?” she asked, reapplying her charm.

The acting manager of the rune department stared back at the vice-queen and straightened the silk tie around his beard with one hand, and with the other, cleaved the axe into the boardroom table. He smiled when the idiot coin counter jumped and let out a yelp.

“Two—more—weeks.”

“Fine,” the elf said. “But no consultants.”

I could always use a little more time, and it just so happened that the gentleman seated across the aisle from me wore a rather nice black and gold Movado. I wore a flat gray quartz, well-worn and nothing to look at—but it held time to perfection. Only amateurs wore anything with more than a ten-second variance. (Per annum, mind you, not some department store model that could lose thirty ticks every month.)

It wasn't just the old man's timepiece that caught my eye; it was the fact that he was running a full two minutes fast. How long had the fool been walking around carrying all that extra time, oblivious to the opportunities it presented?

"Nice watch you have there," I said, loud enough to get his attention.

He peered over the top of his paper, unsure if I was addressing him or the clueless skirt-and-blouse-wearing office drone to his right. I hid my normal wolfish grin and offered a sheepish smile.

"Your watch—" I said again and brandished my own plain affair. I tapped the face in case my words were lost over the steady click-clack cadence of the train, "—it's very sharp."

His interest piqued, he folded the paper and laid it across his lap. "Not too many young men care to wear a traditional timepiece nowadays."

"Savages," I replied, to which he laughed. When he was done, I continued to soften him up. "May I have a look?"

"Be my guest," he said and extended his arm across the aisle towards me. "But mind the fingerprints… please."

I gave him an earnest nod. "Of course," I replied and took him by the wrist, making a show of examining the face. I oohed and aahed at the fine cut of the inlay and the understated elegance of the black leather strap.

I made sure to hold his gaze fast while my thumb swept counterclockwise over the minute hand as I whispered a perfectly timed incantation.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that last bit," he prompted as he sat back in his seat.

I held up my watch again. "I'm afraid it will be some time before I can afford anything as nice as that."

He laughed at my pun and added his own: "Your 'time' will come, young man."

The brakes squealed, and the train swayed as we entered the station. I was prepared to make my exit, but he rose from his seat instead, and we exchanged goodbyes.

I looked down at my quartz and smiled. One hundred and twenty seconds stitched in time—enough to skip past a problem or even slide back for a quick do-over.

I glanced over my shoulder as the train began to pull away and nearly jumped out of my seat. He stood outside the window and made a show of checking the time. "Thank you," he shouted through the glass, "You've relieved me of the worst two minutes I've had all year. I wouldn't try using them if I were you, though." A wolfish grin split his face as the platform disappeared from view.