COVER

Fluff

RavensDagger

To my dear mom,

without whose love and attention,

I would have finished this book in half the time

PROLOGUE

Anxiety

Emily endured her mother’s hug, then squeezed her eyes shut as her cheeks were pecked. When, finally, she was released, she took a step back and crossed her arms to ward off the September chill.

“So, ah, this is it?” she asked.

Emily looked over at her parents. Her mom, short and kind of frumpy, was wearing the sort of dress that had gone out of fashion sometime in the late sixties. Her dad, tall and wide-shouldered, could have been one of the hockey players on campus if it weren’t for the premature balding of his dirty-blond hair.

“You know our number,” her mom said.

Emily nodded. “It’s never changed.”

Her mom sighed, then pulled her into another hug. “It never will. You call, okay? Day or night. Even if it’s just to talk. Mom will be there for you if you have any problems with your schoolwork or—” She tittered. “Or problems picking the cutest boy.”

Emily could hear her father’s knuckles popping and held back the tiniest smile. Teasing her dad had been something of a hobby when she was young. She knew that he dreamed of giving some boy the shovel talk, but high school came and went without it ever happening.

“I . . .” She swallowed. “I love you.”

Her dad smiled just a little, his stoic face cracking for a moment.

And then Emily had to endure more hugging.

She closed her eyes and prayed to whoever would listen that no one had seen her. Having her dad trade dorky jokes with some of the boys while helping her carry her things had been mortifying enough to keep her hiding in her blankets for a week.

When the hugging was over—and her dad had patted her head as his own little way of showing that he cared—the family pickup revved up and drove off. Emily found herself standing alone.

Alone for the first time since . . . since forever.

She looked around her, taking in the ancient stone buildings of the old campus, some of them next to modern steel and glass buildings. All of them were surrounded by winding cobbled paths that made room for tough old trees. She eyed the shadows, the few people walking around, and the open blue sky; then she shivered.

Emily had heard stories about girls on campuses like this one getting harassed and hurt. She had tried not to hear, had tried not to feed her anxiety, but the little snippets she overheard were preying on her now.

She tugged her long, pleated skirt down a little so that it dipped lower and closer to her ankles, then pulled down the hem of her sweater.

Turning, she faced the direction of her dorm and started moving. Her Mary Janes clicked across the pavement with a nervous pitter-patter that mimicked the hummingbird beat of her heart. She didn’t like being out in the open, not if she could avoid it. She didn’t like being indoors all that much either. Emily found just a few places comforting, none of which were anywhere near here. She tamped down the temptation to pull out her cell and call her mother and put the whole thing off.

It was too late for that. Her parents had sacrificed too much to get her into the school, and her future depended on her at the very least trying to pass all her courses.

Emily walked with a hand over her stomach, as if that could hold all the butterflies in place.

A few blocks and a parking lot later, she was at her dorm. The large brass plaque at the base of the building declared it to be the Quantum Mothman House. An auspicious name for a dorm, Emily thought. It was one of the newer buildings, built with money donated from some of the older local Heroes to promote higher education.

It was a bit pricey, but her father had insisted that she have the best they could afford. The fact that she didn’t need to stay with a roommate reassured both her and her dad.

The front door unlocked with a swipe of her phone over a panel jutting out next to it, and she slid into the lobby only to freeze up the moment she was inside.

The lobby was divided into two sections. On the one side were some public restrooms and a small kitchenette that had a little fridge and some microwaves. On the other was a lounge with a big-screen TV, some couches, and a couple of square tables surrounded by benches. She’d seen people playing cards or looking at their phones while the TV blasted the evening news the first time she visited.

It was louder than she liked, but people had been minding their own business then. Now there were banners strung across the square ceiling tiles, and a few balloons added a bit of a festive air to the otherwise plain room.

Emily had the impression that everyone and their friends were there. Thirty people, all packed into a small room, some of them carrying red cups, others glass bottles. There was a sickly sweet scent to the air, a mixture of store-bought pastries, alcohol, and sweat that made her stomach twist.

“Hey!”

She turned to find a tall Black girl walking her way with a gleaming smile. “You’re in five-oh-one, right?”

Emily’s mind blanked. “Five . . . oh, my room number. Um. Yes?”

The girl’s smile grew. She gestured to a table near the back that had soda bottles and a cooler sitting on it. “Grab something to drink! We’re having a bit of a meet and greet slash Power Day bash.”

“Power Day,” Emily repeated. She shook her head. Of course, it was the fifteenth of September. She knew that. “Right.”

The girl switched her cup from one hand to another and extended her hand. “I’m Sam.”

Emily looked at the hand. She didn’t want to take it, but not taking it would have been rude. The pressure grew in her chest until her hand snapped out and she took Sam’s hand and shook it up and down. “Emily. I’m Emily. I, uh, need to go to my room.”

“Come back down if you want,” Sam said. “I can introduce you to everyone. Some of the boys are kinda cute.” She wiggled her eyebrows, then looked Emily up and down in a way that made her skin crawl. “Some of the girls are cute too,” she added with a wink.

“Right, right. Thank you.” Emily skittered away as if she were being chased by some monster in one of those horror movies she’d made the mistake of watching once.

She reached the elevator at the back and stepped in at the same time as a young man who tapped the IV button on the panel. “Which floor?” he asked.

Emily had to take a couple of deep breaths before she could reply. “F-five.”

He nodded, tapped the V for her floor, and much to her relief, pulled a phone out and began to stare at its screen. She caught a glimpse of some new article about Power Day and how the local police chief was going to be on the lookout for new Villains, but she averted her eyes as soon as the boy looked her way.

“So, you new here?” he asked.

Emily worked her jaw to answer, but nothing came out. By the time she had worked through the complex mathematics of social dynamics to say yes, the door dinged open and the boy left with a huff.

She swallowed again, huddled herself smaller now that no one was looking, and waited until she got to her floor.

The corridor to her room passed in a flash as she all but ran to her door, unlocked it with another swipe of her phone, and slipped into her room.

It wasn’t her room yet, not in the sense that she felt at home inside it, but it would be one day, she hoped.

Emily had convinced her dad to move up a pair of bookshelves and her favorite chair from back home, a big plush thing made of faux leather that was far too large for someone of her size. She could curl up on it, legs bent under her, and still have room to spare.

The bed off in the corner was a twin that had been left open. It was so much bigger than her bed back home that she knew she’d feel lost in it.

She surveyed the desk, the charging laptop in one corner, then looked over at her little bathroom. It was a bit cramped, but she didn’t need much more than the shower and amenities it had. The room, with its view out into an alley behind the Quantum Mothman building, was more than enough for her.

The sigh that escaped her left with all her worries and pulled a weight off her back. She locked the door, then trudged over to the bed and allowed herself to crash into it.

After a minute of recharging her social batteries from empty to near-empty—which was as full as they would go for her—Emily rolled over and pulled her phone out of her pocket. A scan of WriteIt showed that all the popular threads were about Power Day. People were placing bets and waiting for the new Heroic faces to appear.

She skimmed over a few “If It Happens to You” threads and found a web page filled with images of cute animals doing cute things.

If people were her kryptonite, then pictures of kittens, foxes, and dogs were . . . whatever the opposite of kryptonite was.

Her mind, the part not looping through a series of “aww”s at every picture she scrolled down to, was still working through a few things. She was alone now. No mother to call on, no huge stoic dad to fix every big problem. Just Emily.

Her classes would start in the morning. She didn’t know how to describe what she felt about that but decided to settle on terrified.

When the ball of stress in her stomach grew too large, she set down her phone and jumped off the bed. GIFs of kittens being spooked by tinfoil weren’t doing it for her.

With a long-suffering sigh, Emily undressed, realized she didn’t have a hamper to put her clothes in, and settled for refolding them next to her bed; then she slid on some walrus-print pj’s and settled in. She knew that she wouldn’t fall asleep anytime soon, and that was okay. The internet was a never-ending font of cuddly things to look at.

Eventually, despite the early evening sun still bright outside her window, Emily blinked a final time and slid into a restless slumber.

CHAPTER ONE

Wake Up

Emily’s dreams were all hazy nightmares.

She woke with a bit of a jerk, a sense of wrong racing through her that only faded when she heard the distant honk of a car and the sound of a toilet flushing somewhere. The feeling that she wasn’t home was quickly followed by the realization that she was in her new dorm.

That much she had kind of expected. She had never spent that many nights away from home, but on the rare occasion her family went on vacation, she always had that sense of being misplaced on waking up.

Emily looked at her clock, realized that she hadn’t actually set it up yet, then pulled her phone from the crack between the mattress and bedframe. Raising her head, she gave it a tap and read 6:34 on the top of the display.

Her head fell back onto her pillow. She had her first classes at ten. Sleeping a bit more was possible, but she wasn’t tired, just lethargic and more than a little nervous.

With a heavy sigh, Emily climbed out of bed, picked out her toiletries from a still-packed box, then slumped her way toward the bathroom.

She set her pj’s aside first. They were clean enough to be worn one more time, she figured, and she still didn’t know too much about the laundry situation. The shower wasn’t as warm or as strong as back home, but she didn’t mind. Her blond hair took some scrubbing to look nice and neat, then she was out of the shower and wrapping a pair of thick towels around her waist and her hair.

Her last stop was the mirror, where she brushed her teeth.

The brush fell into her sink, dropped when her hands went slack.

Eyes that were still misty locked onto the reflection in the mirror. Not of her own freckly, still-pudgy face, but on the words hovering above her head.

Emily Wright

???, Level 0

She took in a deep breath, then another. “No,” she said.

Her denial didn’t do anything to the words hovering there. A shivering hand wiped the smog off the glass. All it did was make the hovering words shift along with her.

She wondered if it was a projection, some fancy hologram, but the words had to be written backward for her to read them in the right order when reflected.

Emily’s eyes screwed shut. She went over the facts like her counselor had once taught her. It had been an exercise to keep the stress down.

Fact one: There were words above her. The kind of words that appeared above the heads of Heroes and Villains when they wanted them to.

Fact two: It had been Power Day when she went to bed the night before.

Fact three . . .

Emily grabbed the edge of the sink, then noticed her toothbrush. Carefully, she pulled it out of the sink’s hole, wiped it clean, then spat into the sink. A simple gesture, one she’d done a thousand times before. It felt wrong to do something so normal while her life was falling apart.

“No, no, it’s . . .”

She swallowed and ignored the minty freshness of it. Another exercise came to mind. The old three-tens trick. How would this impact her in ten minutes? In ten days? In ten months?

In ten minutes, she’d be . . . screwed. In ten days, likewise, and in ten months, her life would probably be ruined.

Emily felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes. None of the answers were good. The exercise had made it worse.

She wanted to rush to her phone and look up a guide. Some sort of “I woke up with powers, now what?” but she knew that half the responses there would be excited cheers from idiots, and the other half strongly worded suggestions from the government to join up right away . . . or else.

Her mom . . . couldn’t fix this. Her dad wouldn’t know where to begin.

She stumbled into her bedroom and got dressed with manic energy, clothes pulled from every box she could find until she was in a long skirt and a nice blouse with a warm cardigan to go over it. The outfit didn’t expose any skin beyond the nape of her neck, and it was all in somber colors that would blend in.

And then she was dressed for a class she might not be able to attend, not if there were literal words hovering above her head.

Sure, there were some open Masks out there, people with powers who didn’t care if people knew who they were out of costume. She didn’t want people to notice her at the best of times.

Emily went over what she knew, which wasn’t all that much. One thing she did know, though, was the magic word, the one that could give away a Mask with only two syllables.

“Status,” she whispered.

A screen appeared before her.

Her eyes glazed over, and she stumbled back until her rear found its way onto her bed. Only then did she actually read the screen before her.

“Oh god,” she said.

Fate accepted!

Rolling for alignment.

The screen warped into a simple bar. To the left, the word Alignment; to the right, a mass of words spinning too fast to read, which would determine just how ruined her life would be.

The spinning words wound down, ticking by at a pace that was slow enough for her to make them out. There were a few that were more common. Hero. Martyr. Savior. Vigilante . . . and then the words clicked to a stop.

Congratulations! Your ideal morality is . . . Villain! A life of crime and destruction awaits you!

Emily brought her hands to her face in time to smudge some of the tears welling out of her eyes. “No, no, no,” she said.

It wasn’t the end of the world. Just because the system said one thing didn’t mean that she had to follow what it said. She didn’t need to play its game. Plenty of people received powers and went on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

She shut her eyes as hard as she could, but it did nothing to stop the telltale impression that something was waiting for her.

When she opened them again, another prompt was waiting for her.

You have one Power Slot waiting for unlock. Unlock your first Power now?

She shook her head.

The prompt didn’t go away.

Emily wanted to shove it all aside. To go back to bed and wake up as just another normal girl with perhaps a few minor disorders that could be treated with some therapy and a bit of experience.

She had dreamed of being a Mask, of course, of shrouding herself in an identity that didn’t have any of her problems, but as she’d grown up, she discovered that that wasn’t for her, that she . . .

Power Slot point spent! Unlocking new Power!

“What?” she squeaked. She hadn’t agreed to that!

Congratulations! You are now Level 1. Power unlocked!

Emily stared around her room, expecting at any moment for something awful to happen. She swallowed, then poked at her bed. Nothing. Then she poked her thigh. Also nothing. The world didn’t feel any stranger than it already had. Was it all a stress hallucination? She knew it wasn’t but . . . “Status?”

She blinked. That . . . didn’t seem all that bad. She didn’t know what kind of power Sister Summoning was, but it sounded . . . nice? It wasn’t Demon Summoning, or anything that sounded outright evil. Did it let her teleport people?

The one skill on the list, Create Sister, didn’t seem to indicate as much.

And, just on thinking about it, a new screen opened.

“Oh,” Emily said.

She considered—actually considered—using her new power. But as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she crushed it. There was no time for that. She had classes in . . . in less than three hours, and she would need to cross half the campus to get there.

Maybe she could find a counselor? Were they obligated to report to the police?

A distant rumble had her looking around. She wondered if it had been an explosion. She was still wondering when her phone buzzed.

To All: Please stay indoors. The HRF is on-site. All current classes are suspended until 9 a.m. All classes after this time are to resume normally.

There went her plans to get to class early to maybe build up the courage to say hello to her professor.

Emily fidgeted on the spot. Another boom rocked the dormitory windows.

New Quest!

Fighting Good

Join the battle against the forces of good.

Reward: +3 Skill Upgrade points per Hero incapacitated or killed. Villain +4 per kill!

Accept? Refuse?

“Refuse!” she squeaked. “I-I can’t fight Heroes. I don’t even know what Create Sister does,” she whined to the box.

And then, as the words escaped her lips and an inward rush of wind filled the room, she realized her mistake.

For better or worse, a sister was coming.

CHAPTER TWO

Don’t Panic

Emily decided, quite sensibly, not to panic.

The breeze shifting around her room settled, and Emily shivered as the air stilled. She sat on the edge of her bed, her hands folded on her lap and her breath coming in deep gulps.

Skill: Create Sister successful!

Emily stared at the woman, no, the girl, standing before her where no one had been a minute ago.

She was on the shorter side, with a squat figure and big chubby cheeks framed by brown hair that was cut off at neck length. Emily would have placed her at thirteen or fourteen, with some growing left to do. She had a simple beige T-shirt with the word Bear on it in big letters over a pair of green cargo shorts.

She looked, at least to Emily, like any other teenage girl. That is, if the girl hadn’t had a pair of rounded ears poking through her hair and a few words floating about her head.

??? Wright

WereBear, Level 1

Emily looked away from the hovering words. The girl yawned. “What do you want me to do, Boss?”

“What?” Emily asked. She didn’t know why she was surprised by the girl talking. She should have expected it, really. “Wh-who are you?”

The girl blinked slowly. “I dunno. You haven’t named me yet.” She reached under her T-shirt and scratched at her tummy. “So, we’re gonna do that?”

“Name you?” Emily asked.

It kind of made sense. She’d never been one for games and such, but she knew that naming pets was normal. But this was a girl, an actual human . . . maybe. People didn’t name other people, not unless they were naming a baby, and that was a comparison that Emily was really, really not ready to make.

The girl nodded. “Yeah. I mean, unless you’ve got something else that needs doing?” She looked around the empty room as if to confirm that there really wasn’t anything to do.

“I . . . how?” Emily asked. She shook her head. That was moving ahead too quickly. She had to figure things out. “Can I . . . unsummon you?”

“Nah,” the girl said.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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