Dragon Cursed Series Box Set Books 1-5

By Mia Hall

Dragon Cursed

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

 Senior skip day. Things that can go wrong:

An explosion renders your hometown into a war zone.

Your twelve-year old brother vanishes.

The place your brother vanished in is full of dragons.

The guy that helps you find your brother is hot. But he has wings. And scales. Yeah, he's a dragon.

And, oh yeah, those dragons think you're their salvation.

And by the way, you're invited to a ball, in your honor.

Meanwhile your hometown is still in ruins.

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

Exactly.

 

Dragon Fated

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

What happens when one hot dragon turns into two? What happens when you have feelings for both, one who is supposed to be your sworn enemy and the other who is the son of the man you can't trust?

Lily finds herself out of the majestic city of dragons and in a frozen tundra, where not only the environment is hostile but so are many of the inhabitants. She's introduced to new forces and old allies as she tries to maneuver through the new expectations her role calls for.

Now she's got to figure out which dragon to trust, and which dragon to give her heart to.

 

Dragon Arisen

Between a rock and a hard place… and two dragon shifters.

 Lily's betrothed to one dragon shifter, and in love with another…

Cade's chosen to dedicate his life to fighting heinous monstrous enemies in the Aboveground, but his heart has never been able to leave Lily behind. 

When news of the battles and causes that Cade and their friends are facing reaches Lily, she has to decide between breaking a blood oath and joining the resistance in the Aboveground. 

An unexpected ally brings her the means to make a choice. 

Which dragon shifter will Lily join, and what fate will humanity suffer at the cost of blood oaths and betrothals?

 

Dragon Blood

 Lily is lost without her staff, but she doesn't exactly tell Cade that's why she's going to Onifall, letting him think that her mission is to visit Ceana and Declan.

Cade's consumed with jealousy that she will be visiting with her former betrothed and his arch nemesis. It's a destruction that a man doesn't need when he's facing lethal necromancers in battle.

Sightless and angry at the world, Declan is hell-bent on self-destruction and taking his ire out on the new witch charged with healing him.

 Aras is a Dusk Elf on a mission to save his sister's life. Deceiving Oriana doesn't sit well on his conscience, but a brother's got to do what he can to save his sister.

 

Dragon Gift

The series that brings dragons and witches together in the underground beneath a war-torn beach town in Texas continues.

Aras has lost Oriana's trust, but he still needs her blood.

Cade's jealousy over Lily's attempts to stay in touch with Declan can put him and the entire cause at risk if he can't keep his mind in the battle that they are facing.

Cade finds himself even more distracted when his cousin Donovan wants to join the cause, and Cade personally determines to train him for the upcoming battles with the necromancers.

Declan's desire to find a poison to help with the cause could spell the end for him and Eva.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MiHaP
• Release date: Apr 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201713737

Book preview

Dragon Cursed Box Set

Dragon Cursed Box Set

Books 1-5

Mia Hall

Contents

Dragon Cursed

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Dragon Fated

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Dragon Arisen

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Dragon Blood

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Dragon Gift

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Afterword

Copyright © 2017, 2021 by Mia Hall

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Dragon Cursed

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

---

Senior skip day. Things that can go wrong:

---

An explosion renders your hometown into a war zone.

Your twelve-year old brother vanishes.

The place your brother vanished in is full of dragons.

The guy that helps you find your brother is hot. But he has wings. And scales. Yeah, he’s a dragon.

And, oh yeah, those dragons think you’re their salvation.

And by the way, you’re invited to a ball, in your honor.

Meanwhile your hometown is still in ruins.

Worst. Senior. Skip. Day. Ever.

Exactly.

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---

Covers by Ammonia Book Covers

1

Lily

If they don’t shut up, someone’s going to call the cops.

That wouldn’t serve us very well. In fact, that would throw my pitiful excuse for a life into a pandemonium I didn’t need.

I could hear my two best friends ragging on each other from my bedroom window. I tried to tune them out. I really did. But God, they wouldn’t quit.

Alecia and Brad were going at it, and as usual, I was the target. That would change though, soon enough, it always did. They’d start in on one another, then come back to me after a short spell.

"Come on, Lily. I seriously… don’t understand what’s taking you so long." Alecia’s voice.

I resisted the urge to yell out to them to shut up.

This was going to be a fun day. A heck of a fun day. I wouldn’t let their squabbling or loud voices ruin it.

Unless someone calls the cops on us for disturbing the peace.

Girls, right? What can you say? Can’t live with them, can’t live without putting up with their incessant need to plan and primp. Am I right? Brad’s voice this time.

He was kidding, I could hear the mirth in his voice. And I could also hear the serious crush he had on Alecia.

"You are aware that I’m a girl, right? I mean you have noticed that before, haven’t you?" Alecia’s pout could be heard, even from up in my bedroom.

What? Brad mock-shouted at Alecia. He probably only got an exaggerated eye roll and the ghost of a smile in return. You’re trying to tell me you’re female? How is this possible? When did this happen? Do your parents know?

I bit back a laugh and waited for Alecia’s response.

Ha ha, you’re so funny, Brad. How you’ve gone this long in life without having a girlfriend is totally beyond me. Like, for real. It’s a travesty. A national tragedy, even. She did sarcasm even better than I did sometimes.

It really is, isn’t it? Now can we stop picking on how lame I am and go back to picking on Lily for how long it’s taking her to get ready? I liked that much more. It was definitely more fun for me.

Yeah, Alecia replied with more sarcasm—so thick it could have been cut with a knife. "I just bet you did. You’re right, though. She’s been up there for about a century. Lily! Earth to Lily. We’re waiting here. And it’s not like we have all day." Alecia’s voice grew louder with each word.

Actually, I yelled back, leaning toward the open window of the shitty apartment building I called home. It is. That’s the whole point of Senior Skip Day.

Oh. Alecia, I do believe you just got burned. I could just see Brad moving his hand in the hand signal for burn.

Shut up, Brad. Sometimes you’re so dense it makes me want to scream.

Oh yeah? Well, I may be dense, but you just got burned.

My friends continued to bicker, and I shook my head, laughing quietly.

Brad Arbor and Alecia Bell were my best friends in the whole world. Even a couple stories up, without being able to see them at all, I knew exactly what they must look like down there.

The two of them would be lounging in the front seat of Brad’s Jeep, in the alley beneath my bedroom window, with Alecia tapping her woefully chewed nails impatiently. She wasn’t a girl who was good at waiting, not for anything, and the fact that she hadn’t marched up the stairs to bust down my door was a miracle.

Some people might have found her impatient, and yes, bossy was a word they might also use, but I just thought it was funny. Probably, in part, because she was so little.

She was barely five-foot-two, with big blonde curls, and even bigger blue eyes. She looked like a little doll—Brad was fond of describing her as small, but mighty. That was a comment that always got an eye roll from Alecia, but I knew she secretly liked it. Not because she had told me or anything. I could just tell.

Seeing her next to Brad was actually quite comical all by itself, come to think of it. He was six-foot-three at eighteen—towering over Alecia by more than a foot. He had messy auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes that always looked like he was laughing. When he was little, he had been a pudgy kid and had gotten made fun of for it, but as he got older, he kind of stretched out. By senior year, he was one of the better-looking guys in school. Girls drooled over him in the halls, and he had no idea. He was super chill, pretty much the opposite of Alecia’s Type A personality, which was part of why they got along so well.

Plus, I was pretty sure he was in love with her.

Actually, scratch that.

I knew he was in love with her, and she felt the exact same way. Again, I didn’t know this because he had told me, and not because she had told me, either.

I could just see it.

They were my best friends, had been from practically the moment my broken little family moved to Houston.

For years, the three of us had been constantly together, just like the three musketeers. I wouldn’t have been a very good friend if I hadn’t been able to see the way they felt about each other, would I? Nope, not a very good friend at all.

Lily. Alecia pulled me from my reverie. Come downstairs. Right now.

Jeez, Alecia, you’re being pretty harsh, even for you, Brad chastised her.

Come on. Alecia gave as good as she got. You must be ready to go too, right? I mean, right? The traffic is going to suck.

Maybe not, Brad shot back.

I silently sent my thanks to him for buying me a few moments longer to find socks.

"Please, this is Houston. Of course, the traffic is going to suck. Traffic in Houston always sucks. It’s like it’s state-mandated or something. Somewhere, some evil little bastards are holed up in secret offices passing laws that the traffic in Houston will suck or else, and they’re laughing at all of us poor suckers who are stuck driving in it."

Alecia, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you’ve got to lay off the crime TV, okay? I think it’s doing funny things to your brain.

Lily. Alecia again.

I grimaced. They were going to get me in trouble with the neighbors. Mr. Jones, on the first floor, was always griping about noise.

As if summoned, the screeching began.

Will you please shut the hell up down there? People’s tryin’ to sleep up in here. Goddamn. Damned kids, should be in school. Gonna call the police, you just see if I don’t. That was Mr. Jones, the charmer.

I wanted to yell at him to go get his bottle and drink himself into oblivion, but I held back. Mostly because he’d complain. If we had any more complaints, we were facing eviction. Again. I couldn’t have that.

And my little brother would be devastated. He liked his teacher, and that was rare for him.

Plus, I couldn’t have him calling the police. Nor could Brad and Alecia. That’s all we needed, the cops, truancy, that hassle.

Brad and Alecia knew my precarious situation at home, I’d warned them not to get me into hot water.

Eureka. Socks! They didn’t match, but who cared? I’d be barefooted before long, dragging my toes through the silt that Galveston Beach liked to call sand.

There were a couple of beats of silence, followed by another neighbor’s disgruntled yelling, and then I could hear Brad and Alecia whispering to each other, laughing in that excited, nervous way people got when they believed they had narrowly escaped real trouble. Even getting yelled at by a crazy guy was fun for them, at least when they were together.

I sighed, allowing myself to have just a minute of feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for my friends, because I was. I knew the two of them would share their feelings for each other any day, and not a minute too soon. They were going to make a totally adorable couple, and I thought they were perfect for each other.

That being said, I didn’t have any prospects anywhere in sight. Not even the hint of a prospect, and I would have been lying if I said that wasn’t a bummer.

I was one day from my eighteenth birthday, and I had never had a boyfriend, not even anything close to a boyfriend.

Not even a kiss.

It’s not like I was desperate or boy-crazy or anything, but still, it wasn’t awesome, either.

Okay, maybe it kind of sucked.

Despite the fact that my increasingly impatient friends were still downstairs waiting and were very likely to piss the neighbor off again, I stopped and stared at myself in the mirror.

It was something I had developed a habit of doing. I would just stand there in my bedroom mirror, doing my best to look at myself objectively.

If I was being honest with myself, not cocky, but honest, I had to say I wasn’t a bad looking girl. I was actually sort of… well, I was sort of pretty, although even thinking it made me feel funny and blush furiously.

I was of average height, about five-foot-five, with an athletic build. I had loved dancing since I was a little girl, and although we’d never had the money to put me in classes, I’d done my best to teach myself with YouTube videos. So, I had a good body, at least as far as I could tell.

I had brown hair, with a few even lighter streaks, long and usually piled on top of my head in a messy bun. Little wisps of the bangs I was in the process of trying to grow out were always slipping out and falling around my face, causing me to constantly blow my hair off of my forehead. I guess if I had to pick something, I would have said that my eyes were my best feature. They were blue, which was common enough, but they were ringed in gold, flecked with gold. They were beautiful, or so I’d been told. I was always getting compliments on them.

I actually got a lot of compliments from guys, but always the kind that were given on the down low, always sort of secretive.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew why guys didn’t want to be seen with me, why they didn’t want to be caught looking like they had any kind of interest in me. It was because of where I came from. It was because people liked to talk and most of the school had at least heard rumors about the Rogers family, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks with the gimpy brother.

Of course, I would have beaten the shit out of anyone I actually heard calling my younger brother Ricky gimpy, but that didn’t mean the names didn’t get flung around.

Ricky was twelve years old, but the limp he’d acquired as a six-year-old was there to stay. That little gem had been courtesy of one of our stepmom’s boyfriends, a real bastard and a mean drunk who hadn’t liked it when Ricky spilled his cereal. He had broken Ricky’s leg, and although my stepmom had eventually dumped the boyfriend, she hadn’t ever taken Ricky to get his leg fixed. Because of that, it had healed wrong, and it would always show in the way Ricky walked.

Anybody would’ve thought that terrible incident would have been enough to get Mona on the wagon, but no such luck. All she had done was pick us up and move us from Louisiana to Houston, Texas, claiming we could all use a change. Since we didn’t have any money, we’d wound up living in subsidized housing.

And I’d put an end to my YouTubing dance videos and started to YouTube self-defense and martial arts videos. Best I could do, since we couldn’t afford any real classes. I’d gotten pretty good, too.

I had to, since my stepmother’s taste in men never got better.

The only reason Ricky and I were able to go to decent schools was the money our grandmother had put in trusts for just that reason. It was money my stepmom couldn’t touch, the only money she hadn’t used on drinking and the occasional asshole boyfriend.

I was grateful for the school, and I knew Ricky was too, but we also both knew that we were different from the other kids. All of our classmates knew it, too. That was why none of the guys in my classes wanted to date me, even though they had no problem sending me Facebook messages telling me how hot I was in the middle of the night. It sucked, and I couldn’t wait until it was time to go to college.

Once I was in college, it wouldn’t be like this anymore. In college, nobody would have to know where I had come from or how messed up my past was.

Lily? Better make it quick. I won’t be able to contain the beast for much longer.

Hey. Don’t call me a beast.

All right. I shoved my head out of my window this time, responding quickly so that Mr. Jones upstairs didn’t get seriously pissed off again, I’m ready. I’ll be right down.

I took one last look in the mirror, put on a fresh coat of lip gloss, and slung my purse across my body. I preferred cross-body purses. I liked to be able to move as quickly as I wanted to without being bogged down by a stupid bag.

Things had been freaking stressful lately, what with my home life being what it was and school quickly coming to a close, and I was definitely looking forward to a day off. I just had to get past my stepmom first, which wasn’t always the easiest thing to do. Her moods were unpredictable, to say the least.

2

Lily

My stepmom, Mona.

She’d married my dad while I was… I don’t even remember how old I was. My mother died when I was too young to remember.

Then Ricky’s mom left us. Then there was Mona. Then Dad died.

Now it was just Mona. The stepmom from hell, but she was all we had.

I slipped out of my room, calling softly, Mona?

Nothing. She was planted on the couch, a place she pretty much never left unless forced to, her body turned toward the TV.

I took a deep, quiet breath, trying to steady my nerves before talking to her. I loved my stepmom, in that you love what you have sort of way. But she was just so completely unpredictable, and she had been getting steadily worse for about as long as I could remember.

Her decline had started picking up speed after our move to Houston. I’d often wondered if that might have something to do with what had happened to Ricky, what she had let happen to Ricky, but in the end, the reason didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that she really wasn’t much of a parent or guardian at all, at this point. Most of the time it felt like I was the adult and she was the child.

Mona?

Come here, baby, come and look at this.

Oh, boy. I chased the grimace from my face so she wouldn’t read my disappointment.

I could tell what she was trying to say, but her words were already coming out slurred, and as I approached I could see that she had the bottle of vodka on the coffee table, next to a bucket of ice. It was only ten-thirty in the morning. On the plus side, it meant she may not even know what day it is, which meant she wouldn’t realize that I was skipping school and I wouldn’t get any shit for it. That was the only plus that I could see.

The bottle being out already, her slurred words so early, meant it was going to be one of her bad days. I cringed in anticipation of what it would be like when I got home from Galveston. If we were lucky, she would just be passed out. If we weren’t so lucky… well, I didn’t want to think about that. I wasn’t going to think about that, at least not until I had to.

I pushed my shoulders back and walked over to where she sat, bent down beside her to hear her better, and tried to ignore the now very intense stale smell of booze. Probably her Jack Daniels from the other day.

For what might be the millionth time, I promised myself that I would never be like her. I was never, ever going to let something like alcohol completely take over my life.

What is it, Mona? What do you need?

"I don’t need anything; I want to show you something. Look. Will you look at that? Just like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Doesn’t it look just like hers?"

I blinked, totally confused about what she might be talking about. Maybe she was actually going crazy or something. It couldn’t exactly come as a surprise. It was a long time coming.

But then she looked at me, her eyes bugging out of her head in a way that had always kind of freaked me out, and jerked her thumb in the direction of the TV.

I understood then.

She was watching one of those home shopping network channels, some program hawking replicas of famous movie stars’ jewels. At the moment, they were going over a ‘Liz’ collection, and my stepmother was totally enraptured. Her eyes were glassy, like a kid looking in the window of a massive shop window full of candy.

People used to tell me that I looked like her, you know? That was something people used to tell me all of the time, back when I was young. Back before everything started moving around, sagging in the opposite direction of where it was supposed to be.

I know, Mona. You still do, though. You’re still just as pretty as she was. I patted her head, and hoped she’d wash her hair soon.

I guess I’m not being fair to her. Dad’s passing must have hit her pretty hard.

Bah. Come on now. Don’t you think I know when my little girl is lying to me? You’re the one who looks like her now. I might as well have disappeared, you know? Might as well have just disappeared.

Little girl? And resembling her? Mona loved to think that I looked like her. I wondered if she’d ever truly taken a look at me.

I love you, Mona. I gotta go now, okay? You’ll be home when I get back?

Sure, sure. I’ll be around. You go on now. Go on and let your step-mama alone. You’re making me tired.

I stood up and walked quickly toward the front door, trying to ignore the lump rising in my throat. Why was it that every time I went anywhere, I got the uneasy feeling that it might be the last time I saw my stepmom alive? It wasn’t supposed to be like that.

A parent—even a stepparent—was supposed to make you feel safer, not more afraid. I didn’t have a dad anymore, he’d passed long before our move to Houston, so the only parent I had to look after me was my stepmom—the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike from a long, long time ago. Except Mona wasn’t interested in taking care of anyone, least of all herself.

I didn’t want to think about it. This was supposed to be a good day, a fun day. This was supposed to be a rite of passage. It was Senior Skip Day. I was one of those students who almost always did exactly what I was supposed to do. I never turned anything in late, never got sent to the principal or had to do detention. This was my one day to do something rebellious—even if it was widely accepted and expected by the school’s faculty—and I was going to enjoy it. I was determined to enjoy it.

I took the steps down two at a time and threw myself into the back of Brad’s Jeep, ignoring the door handle, climbing over the side.

Brad smirked at me. Sheesh, it sure took you long enough. You’re lucky you got here when you did. Boss Lady over here was trying to get me to take off without you. He indicated Alecia with an incline of his head.

As if, I grumbled, still irritated by Mona’s drinking. You’d think I’d be used to it by now and could let it go a lot easier.

Not true, Alecia bellowed, smacking Ben in the arm with a surprising amount of force for such a petite girl. Don’t listen to him, Lily, he’s definitely lying to you. But for real, what were you doing up there?

Sorry, I said sheepishly, feeling an immense amount of relief just to be out of that sad apartment and with my friends.

Time to get on the way to the beach. Galveston wasn’t the prettiest beach in the entire world, but it was close, and for this day, it was ours.

Freedom felt good, and as Brad shuttled me and Alecia, I slumped down in my seat and let the wind blow through my hair, thinking about the many possible futures that might be laid out in store for me.

I had a pretty good imagination, and the versions of futures I came up with were plentiful and varied.

That being said, nothing I could think of came anywhere close to what was actually going to happen to me.

Nothing in the world could have prepared me for that.

3

Lily

The Frisbee that a couple of guys were throwing skidded to a stop near me, kicking sand all over my leg. I refrained from giving them a dirty look, and then I never had a chance to.

The sound of an explosion was pushed to the forefront of my world.

What was that? Oh, my God, what was that? The question, the look on Alecia’s face, it was the same thing I was thinking. And judging from the look on Brad’s face, him, too.

It was the same thing everyone on the beach, everyone in Galveston, I expected, was thinking. And there were a lot of us. Apparently, it wasn’t only our school who had come up with the idea of spending the day on the beach.

We were already in the first days of May, and the weather in Houston and the surrounding area was already on the verge of unbearably hot. Galveston’s Strand, as well as the beaches themselves, were peppered with all kinds of people. Some of them looked to be tourists, headed out on early vacations to beat the summer madness.

There were young mothers with their children, clumped together with the slightly shell-shocked looks of moms just coming to realize how much energy children actually had.

There were tons our age. Apparently, our school wasn’t the only one with students who felt like taking a trip to the beach. There were high school seniors everywhere—and some kids that were, from the look of it, not even close to being seniors—and all of us had that kind of giddy feeling that came with knowing summer was right around the corner.

For a little while, everything felt kind of perfect. It was one of the rare times when I got to feel like what I was: an almost eighteen-year-old kid. Lying on the beach with my face turned up, the hot rays of the sun soaking into me as I listened to Brad and Alecia bicker, then flirt, then bicker again, and then flirt, I felt good. I felt like things might actually be okay. I was actually starting to think that I might be able to figure out a way to make all three of us okay—me, Ricky, even Mona.

For the first time in a long time, I had hope. So, of course, that was when it happened. That was when everything in my world went completely crazy.

Lily? Lily, what was it? Please, what was it? Alecia was holding onto my upper arm with a death grip. I had to gently peel her fingers away from my skin. There are definitely going to be bruises there, I thought to myself dazedly, and wouldn’t Alecia think it was funny that she had enough strength to do something like that?

It was a crazy thing to be thinking about. This was not the time for me to go all weird and contemplative, and there was a very good chance that a couple of bruises were going to be the least of my problems.

I sat up, trying to comfort Alecia’s shaking, clinging figure at the same time. I squinted up through my sunglasses and saw Brad standing in front of us. His entire body was rigid, all of his normal easy-going humor erased. He looked like a boy who was trying to be a man. He looked like he was trying to decide whether he should stand up and fight, or run like hell.

For a brief second, I could have sworn his skin went grayish, but then again, that was probably my imagination. Or maybe it was the sun playing tricks on my eyes.

I could sympathize with being confused about whether to run or fight, or what… I knew the feeling.

Brad?

Come on, guys, I think it’s time to get up. Put something on too, okay? Better to be dressed. Don’t want you guys looking any kind of way that could draw extra attention, all right? Just in case.

In case? Alecia asked in a panicky voice that felt like a knife slicing through my heart. What do you mean, in case? In case of what?

I don’t know. I don’t know, okay? What makes you think I know anything you guys don’t? Do you think I have some kind of ESP that lets me in on whatever the hell is going on forty-five minutes away? I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t. I don’t have a clue.

In the middle of pulling my cover-up over my head, I stopped and stared at Brad. He had never spoken to Alecia that way, at least not that I was aware of. That was when I really started to feel afraid. We had all been just hanging out, the day playing out as perfectly as we could have hoped for, when the ground beneath us shook.

The ground actually shook, and for a crazy second, I was sure we were experiencing the first-ever earthquake on Galveston Island. At least, the first I’d ever heard of.

Except this shaking didn’t originate in Galveston.

I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. What we were experiencing was a kind of ripple effect. The shaking we felt was like the furthest rings of the ripples in a pond caused by a falling stone. And it hadn’t just been the shaking, either. The shaking was bad. The massive, deep-sounding boom was worse.

Because the boom didn’t originate in Galveston, either.

It was coming from Houston.

Even an hour away from the city all three of us called home, we could hear this boom, the kind of noise that rattled a person all the way down to their insides.

So sure, the ground shaking underneath us was scary, but the sound was worse. The sound was utterly terrifying. It was the sound that made it clear something was really wrong. The kind of ‘something was wrong’ that people saw on the news in far-off countries they never planned on visiting.

Except this wasn’t happening in another country. This was happening in my home, and I had no idea what was going on.

As I did my best to stay calm, to stay rational, Alecia began to cry. I knew it was the combination of everything going on around her. It was the ground that still vibrated beneath our feet in a way the ground wasn’t supposed to move. It was that sound, a sound I could still feel rattling in my teeth. It was also the way Brad had spoken to her.

I had a feeling that Brad’s tone might have been the thing that had upset her the most. He was always so good with her, always treated her like she was the best thing on the planet, even when they were ribbing each other. Something they did more often than not.

His face fell when he understood what he did. Oh man, come here, Alecia. Come here.

No, she said still crying, her voice sounding sullen like a little kid. No, I don’t want to.

Come on, Alecia, I’m sorry. I’m so freaking sorry.

Alecia went to him then, letting him fold her up in his arms and really starting to sob. Even with everything going on, with the world practically falling down around our ears, I felt a little twinge of happiness for them.

I had a feeling this would be the moment they would point back to in the months, hopefully years, to come. This would be the moment they finally realized they were meant to be more than friends.

About time, I thought to myself with an internal smile. About freaking time.

Then I thought I was crazy for stopping to think about that kind of a thing at all, given the circumstances. Because there was something I hadn’t thought about yet, wasn’t there?

There was something I needed to think about, something very, very important. When it hit me, I felt like a Grade-A idiot for it not having been the first thing to pop into my mind.

Ricky.

What? What’d you say, Lily?

Ricky, I said louder this time, trying my best to keep the panic rising in my chest at bay and doing a pretty poor job, Ricky. My stepmom, too. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on, guys. We need to figure out what just happened, and we need to make sure our families are okay.

Okay, you’re one-hundred-percent right. Hold on, just a second. I’ll call my dad. He’ll know. He’ll explain everything. The look of relief on Brad’s face was complete. I knew he must feel like he was supposed to be acting as the ‘man’ in the situation, which had to suck when a guy was only eighteen and probably every bit as afraid as the chicks he was hanging out with.

But me saying that we needed to know what was happening had given him a course of action to follow, and having that made him feel better. He would call his dad. Brad’s father was a super important lawyer in Houston, one of the biggest ones. He would know what was going on. Of course, he would. I felt hope start to take root in my heart, hope that we were being childish and letting our imaginations run away with us.

It was a hope that was, unfortunately, very short-lived. As Brad held the phone to his ear, that expectant look slowly faded, replaced with one of dumbfounded fear.

I could see what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew exactly what was coming.

There’s nothing.

Nothing? What do you mean, nothing? What does that even mean? Alecia screeched.

Even when I knew what was coming, I still couldn’t believe it.

There’s nothing. No signal. Nothing. Lily, try yours, will you?

I dug my phone out of my bag, knowing it was pointless but doing it just in case. I wanted so badly for this to be no big deal. But I had a gut feeling.

And sadly, my gut feelings were usually right.

I wanted my phone to work and for us to get some information and then all have a good laugh about how jumpy we were being. Too many horror movies, that was all. Too much bad TV. No such luck. I shook my head. Mine’s the same. The phone lines are down. There isn’t any service at all.

I did a slow circle as I spoke, looking at all of the stunned, somehow drugged looking people sharing the beach with us. Many of them had phones clutched in their own hands, some of them even shaking them, slapping their battery packs as if doing so would cause the cell towers to be operational again.

Oh, man. We are so screwed.

At that moment, I realized how much people—including me—relied on our technology, and how lost we were without it. Nobody had even moved more than a couple of steps. We were all just standing around like cattle, waiting for someone to tell us what to do.

Come on, guys, I said in a low, urgent voice I hardly recognized as my own. We need to go. Like, now.

Go? Alecia asked in a whimper.

Brad pulled her in even closer.

Where are supposed to go? We don’t even know what’s happening, she continued.

"You’re right, we don’t, and neither do any of the people around us. Do you see them, Alecia? Are you seeing this? Nobody has moved, at least not yet. But they will. People are going to start to panic, and I have a feeling it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. We need to get out of here while we still can. If we wait much longer, there’s going to be a stampede, and we’ll be stuck here. I don’t know about you, but if something really bad is happening, I don’t want to be stuck on an island."

I saw the horror of that thought dawn on both of their faces. I wasn’t trying to freak them out, not really, but they needed to realize that being stranded on Galveston Island was a real possibility. It wasn’t like there were a whole lot of ways to get off of it, after all, and that one big bridge wasn’t meant for the kind of traffic a mass exodus was going to cause. If we were going to go, we needed to do it, like, yesterday. I gathered up the towels and nodded at Brad to grab the cooler.

I gave them a steady look, trying to seem as calm as I could. What I had said was right, we needed to go, but if at all possible we needed to do it without drawing any more attention than absolutely necessary. I had an awful vision in my mind of us getting up to go and starting a kind of stampede where every person on the beach was trying to get out at the exact same time.

It was going to happen, that was inevitable, but I was hoping to get on the road while everyone was still too stunned to move.

Luckily, Alecia and Brad seemed to catch my drift without me having to say anything, and they followed me quietly, all three of us walking slow and steady, as if we didn’t have a care in the world.

It felt like it took a thousand years to get to the car. Miraculously, by the time we’d strapped ourselves in, nobody else on the beach had taken our lead yet. It was the eeriest feeling, like the whole world had been put on pause except for the three of us. I was grateful for the head start, but it was still an unpleasant sensation. It made the sense of dread all that much worse, and it was already pretty freaking high to begin with.

It wasn’t until we were pulling out of the parking area and onto the street that we heard the first scream. Alecia flinched in the seat in front of me. Brad grabbed her hand and held it tight, his knuckles turning white.

I twisted around in my seat, not wanting to see what was going on, but powerless to stop myself from looking. Whatever spell had held everyone where they stood had broken. There was that first scream, then another, and then the panic began in earnest. What looked like a hundred people, probably many more than that, all started to move at the exact same time. People were getting knocked over, some of them trampled by the people running just behind them.

I faced forward again.

There was nothing I needed to see back there. It was every bit as terrible as I had imagined it would be, but I didn’t need to see it.

Everything I needed was in front of me, starting with getting back to Houston.

4

Lily

The radio stations had no reception. None. Were they even working at all? Brad kept fidgeting with the buttons and got a big fat nothing.

Oh, my God. This is—it’s—oh, my God. Alecia had calmed down some on the ride, and when she spoke again, it was with the dull tone of someone in shock.

Not that there was much of anything else that needed to be said about what we were looking at. Oh, my God pretty much summed it up.

Things had gone pretty smoothly for the first part of our drive. There were a couple of other cars that had the same idea as us, knowing how important it was to move as quickly as possible, but for the most part, the roads had been pretty good.

The closer we got to Houston, however, the less true that had become.

And what we were looking at now? There were almost no words to describe it.

It was more like a war zone than the city we had grown up in. I hadn’t moved to Houston by choice, and I’d never thought I had much love for the place, but seeing it like this made me want to cry.

That’s how things always go, isn’t it?

So often a person didn’t realize how much they cared about something until it was gone.

What happened here? Brad’s voice was thick with emotion and confusion. I had a feeling his thoughts were moving along the same line as my own.

Alecia, after her oh, my God comment, had gone silent. She only looked out the window, face pale and eyes wide.

It really was like a war zone. The streets we drove through were broken and cracked, the sidewalks totally demolished in some places. It looked like there had been an earthquake, although a little voice in my head told me it was something else, something not quite so easily explained.

It was starting to get dark, a darkness that seemed to be both descending and deepening with unnatural speed, and the whole city was falling dark. The power was out. It wasn’t just in certain pockets, or certain neighborhoods, either. From what I could tell, the power was out in the entire city. The only lights to see by were the multiple little fires that had popped up, either due to disaster, or man-made.

There were people, too. There were people out on the streets in a way I hadn’t ever seen before. They moved like zombies, walking right down the middle of roads, heedless of the cars that might be trying to drive there.

It looked to me like the rules most of us followed, or at least tried to follow, from day to day had ceased to apply. People were doing whatever they wanted to. I realized just how dangerous that was when Brad stopped, beating his steering wheel in frustration as a herd of people stumbled across the road in front of us.

Shit, he shouted, beating the steering wheel a few more times for good measure, don’t they see that there’s a car here? Don’t they know this is a road? For driving.

I don’t know if they do, at least not anymore. I’m not sure they have much of a clue what’s going on. I could feel the tension in the car, knew that my friends didn’t like hearing that, but they couldn’t exactly deny it.

At the moment, we were driving through a neighborhood called the Heights. It was one of the nicer neighborhoods in Houston, my favorite neighborhood, actually. No way did I live there, it was much too expensive for that, but I lived in an area of downtown that was close enough for me to reach the Heights by bike. It was the kind of neighborhood I imagined myself living in when I got older, when I was successful and free of my not-so-awesome childhood.

I think my love for the area was part of what made seeing it like that so jarring. This neighborhood full of good, decent people. It always looked so beautiful and picturesque, but at the moment, it was a lot more like a scene out of one of those post-apocalyptic movies.

Maybe the fact that it was usually such a friendly, nice neighborhood made it harder for the inhabitants to deal with whatever awful thing was happening. So there they were, walking the streets, looking around them like they had no idea who or where they were.

I felt terrible for them and opened my mouth to say something to Brad about my observations, when something slammed into the hood of Brad’s car. All three of us jumped, and I let out a little yelp of surprise and fear, an act I immediately regretted, though it wasn’t like I planned it. Something told me that it was beyond important for me to get a really good grip on myself, on my emotions. Something told me that was a skill I was going to need in the future.

When I looked up, I saw three lanky guys, somewhere between boyhood and manhood, doing their best to surround the car. God, what I would have given at that moment to have some street lights. The ordeal was made infinitely more frightening because it was in such deep dark.

Yo. You, why don’t you step out of the car.

Yeah, man, why don’t you step out of the car? Bring your little girlfriends with you.

Brad froze.

Alecia and I froze.

It didn’t seem like this was even happening. It had to be some kind of a bad dream, and if I closed my eyes and opened them again, I would be on the beach waking up from an unpleasant nap.

When I saw the third guy—the guy who had pounded his fist on the car and hadn’t spoken a word—pull out a gun, and I knew it wasn’t a dream, after all. He had the strangest grin on his face, almost sad, like he wished he wasn’t having to do such an unpleasant thing. When he made eye contact with me, my heart stopped beating in my chest. It was yet another moment where I got the impression that time was standing still, and that the decisions I made before it started moving again were terribly important.

No hard feelings, right, sister? Nothing against you and your friends. Just how things are in a state of emergency, right? Each of us out for ourselves. The boy-man with the gun gave me another sad smile, his friends laughing hysterically as if he had just made the funniest joke in the world.

I didn’t see anything funny, but what he said got to me.

A state of emergency.

I guess I had already known that was what we were in, but there was something about hearing it out loud. We were now in a state of emergency, which meant looting, crime, all of those things from the movies.

That’s what was happening. These guys were going to get us out of the car and rob us. If we were lucky, they would only take the car afterward. Cars were going to become a big commodity if things kept going the way they were. If we were unlucky, they would pull us out of the car, take what they wanted, and shoot us like dogs in the street.

It wasn’t like there were going to be any cops that came after them and told them to stop and put their hands up. There was probably so much crime going on in the city, a city with a disturbing amount of crime on a normal day to day basis, at the moment that the chances of these boys getting stopped or caught were one in a million. If we got out of the car, we were going to be in major trouble.

All of a sudden, I understood what we had to do. Up to this point, I hadn’t been treating the situation with the seriousness it deserved, but I finally got it.

I knew things were do or die.

Go, Brad.

What? What did you say? He glanced back at me.

Go, I said a little bit louder, still quiet but with enough force to make Alecia turn to look at me with incredulous, uncomprehending eyes. Go, now. Don’t wait for them to move, because they aren’t going to. Just put your foot on the gas pedal and floor it.

Are you crazy? If I do that I’m going to hit them. I can’t just hit them. That’s illegal.

Yeah? Yeah, you’re right, it is. As is shooting somebody, but I don’t see any cops, do you? If you don’t want to listen to me, you don’t have to. But they’re going to hurt us, or at the very least take your Jeep. So, if you want to wait around and take a gamble, go ahead. But if you want to make it out of this alive, go.

Brad went.

Alecia let out a scream and covered her eyes, but Brad did exactly as I told him to.

He put his foot on the gas, not hard enough to shoot forward at sixty miles an hour, but still hard enough to scare the guys who were bothering us. They jumped aside, shouting profanities, and as we sped off past them, they started to shoot at us.

Luckily, they weren’t very good shots, but it was still totally terrifying.

I had been right.

Those guys would have shot us, no problem. They would have shot us because times like this were the times when lawless people thrived. We were in a state of emergency, all right, and we were all going to have to adjust our way of thinking about the world.

After that, we rode in silence. It didn’t feel like there was a whole lot left for us to say. We’d almost run someone over, been shot at. Ever since then, we’d been taking the backroads, the roads we thought would have the least amount of traffic. It took forever, and we were all on edge the entire time, but nothing else happened. We could hear people screaming in the distance, more gunshots, but nothing else actually came out to try and hurt us.

At least not yet.

After what felt like centuries, we got back to my building. I was fighting back waves of panic at that point, thinking about Ricky and Mona, and I hardly stopped to say goodbye to my friends.

That was something I would come to regret later. These two people, they were the people I cared about more than anyone in the world, other than my family.

I should have stopped to say a proper goodbye, but how could I possibly have known the way things would go?

I couldn’t get up the stairs fast enough. Never in my life had I wished for the elevator to be in working order more than I did in that instance, and every step I took felt like it was taking forever.

I could hardly get the key into the lock when I arrived at my front door, my hands were trembling so bad, but I did. I flung the door open, running inside without bothering to shut it again. The panic was complete by then, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore. Like there was an elephant sitting on my chest and that if I didn’t get it off soon, I was going to suffocate.

And it would all be over.

5

Lily

M ona. Mona, are you here? Ricky?

It was so dark inside, so terribly dark, and it only made the feeling of suffocating worse.

Why hadn’t my stepmom gotten out some candles or something? I knew she had them, lots of them. It wasn’t because she was the type to be prepared for a disaster or anything like that, she was way far from being that kind of a person.

But she was a bit of a hoarder, for specific things, anyway, and candles happened to be one of the things she liked to collect, the word she always used any time I hinted at the idea that she might have a problem with hoarding things. I knew there had to be close to three hundred candles stashed throughout our sad little apartment, quite possibly more. So then why was it so freaking dark inside? Why hadn’t she lit a candle or five?

And what about Ricky?

It was way, way past the time when school should have been let out, and one of his friends’ moms always drove him home from school. If push had come to shove, he could have walked home. We were honestly close enough for that.

So then why hadn’t he gotten out some candles and lit them?

Sure, there were some twelve-year-old kids who wouldn’t have thought to do that, who would have just panicked when the world started falling apart, but Ricky wasn’t that kind of a kid. All of that terrible stuff with my stepmom’s boyfriends and Ricky’s leg had made him wise well beyond his years. Ricky would have known what to do. He would have lit the candles and waited for me to get home. If it was dark like this, that meant he wasn’t here to do it. Either that, or he was home, and for some reason, he couldn’t do it.

"Mona. Ricky. Where are you guys?"

A moan from the direction of the couch caught my attention, and I hurried that way.

It was too dark, though, and I caught the corner of the coffee table and went sprawling. Something rolled off over the edge, clunking me on the head, only serving to compound my frustration.

Until I realized that it was a candle, that is, and then I was over the moon.

I got up on my hands and knees, feeling around of the table’s surface for one of the many lighters Mona kept lying around. With my luck, this would have been one of the days when she went on her rare cleaning binges and put them all away, but in this matter, it seemed that luck really was on my side. It only took a moment or two of blind groping before my palm landed on a lighter and I got the candle lit.

After a second of my eyes fighting to adjust to this new source of light, I looked back to the couch, almost afraid of what I was going to find.

Mona. Oh, God, Mona. What the hell?

She wasn’t hurt, nothing like that thank god, but she was very much passed out. She was on the couch, flat on her back with an empty handle of a bottle Jack clutched in her hand. From the looks of it, she hadn’t slowed down after I had left for Galveston. If anything, she must have sped up, and with the amount that had been left in the bottle when I’d walked out the front door and the fact that it was now completely empty, she had probably spent her entire day drinking.

She was passed out cold.

It seemed likely to me that she had been out since before the explosion that had rocked our world and made it feel like it had broken it in half. She probably didn’t even know there was anything out of the ordinary going on. Didn’t know that her twelve-year-old stepson, the one who was handicapped because of a man she had brought into our lives, hadn’t even made it home.

I was so angry at her that I stood up quickly, grabbing the other candle off the table and lighting it to use as a makeshift torch. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t going to find Ricky. If he was here, he would have said something by now. But I had to be sure. Somebody had to try and look after him, and clearly that somebody wasn’t going to be my stepmom.

And besides, if I stayed where I was, kneeling beside my drunk, passed out stepmother, I would do something I regretted.

I wanted to punch her.

Settle down, Lily, I cautioned myself.

Once again, I reminded myself that now was not the time to lose my cool. Actually, it had never before been so important that I keep a level head. That was going to be an imperative if I was going to navigate my little family to a situation that was at least halfway safe.

Ricky? You here, buddy?

Nothing. It didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t there. Ricky was a sensitive kid, much more sensitive than I was. Neither one of us enjoyed Mona’s excessive drinking, but it was way harder on him than it was on me. Some of it was because he had suffered the worst violence as a result of Mona’s wild behavior, but I was pretty sure it was more than that.

I thought that being around Mona when she got the way she so often did—when she got the way I had no doubt she had been earlier in the day—was pretty awful for him.

It hurt his heart.

I could see it in his eyes when he looked at her.

It hurt him and so he would do his very best not to have to be around it at all. He would hole up in his room, hiding under his bed or in a closet with a flashlight and the comic books he loved so much. When he didn’t like the world he found around him, he would make one for himself that was better.

Maybe that was all that was going on now. Maybe he was just in hiding, and a thorough searching of the apartment would reveal him to me.

Not so.

I looked under every bed, in every closet. I looked in every little nook and cranny of the sparse, dingy apartment. I looked in places a kid his age couldn’t possibly fit, and when I didn’t find him in the apartment, I went down to the laundry room, just to make sure he hadn’t felt the need to go hide there.

Nothing.

As much as I wanted him to be, Ricky just wasn’t there. I sprinted back up to the apartment—there was too much adrenaline pumping through my body for me to be tired—and skirted the coffee table, careful to avoid running into it and knocking over the candle.

The last thing I needed was to start some kind of a fire. I knelt beside my stepmother again and looked into her face, trying very hard to feel compassion for her along with my disbelief and anger.

Mona. It’s time to wake up now, okay? You’ve got to wake up. You’ve got to.

Nothing. She didn’t even flinch, like even the unconscious part of her that was still an adult, and a mother figure didn’t hear me calling.

Normally, I would have just rolled my eyes and gone about my business, but that kind of thing just wasn’t going to fly.

For once in her life, I needed my stepmother to act like a grown-up, even if I had to drag it to her kicking and screaming.

Mona. Mona, this isn’t funny. You need to wake up. You’ve got to help me find Ricky, okay? Something’s wrong. Something is very, very wrong out there and I can’t find Ricky anywhere. So, get up.

Still nothing.

I shook her, gently at first and then with increasing roughness. Finally, I resorted to actually slapping her across the face, hoping that it would be enough to jolt her out of whatever drunken stupor she was in, but it got me nowhere.

Mona was out cold, and apparently, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

I was