The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) by Brenna Yovanoff Tessa Gratton Maggie Stiefvater Read Free Book Online

late bell.

    She opens her makeup case and gets out a pale, iridescent liner. She draws a shimmery line around my eyes, then follows it up with a smear of glitter and candy-pink shadow. She does my eyelashes and my cheeks, rubbing in cream blush until I am very, very pink.
    “There,” she says, stepping back. “Now you look like me.”
    I don’t, but I do look different and kind of harmless. Even though I wear makeup sometimes, it never looks this soft when I put it on myself.
    Valerie takes a deep breath, zipping her makeup case. “Here, stand right here and don’t move. I want to try something.”
    So I stand with my arms at my sides, watching as she walks circles around me.
    “Perfect,” she says under her breath, and her voice is shaking a little. “You really do look just like me.”
    Her voice is so dark and ferocious that I flinch. I start to tell her no, that I’ll never be as pretty as her. I’ll never be Valerie, who is indeed perfect, even though her eyes are strangely red. Her mouth is working like she’s trying not to bite her lip.
    “Are you okay?” I ask.
    She shakes her head and swallows hard. I half expect her to start crying.
    Instead, she hauls back and punches me in the face.

DATE WITH A DRAGON SLAYER
by Tessa Gratton
    This is a pretty Maggie story. I mean, it’s a story I think I would’ve written if I’d been Tessa instead of Maggie. Something about the banter and the teen voice and the angst seems very...I might just pretend I wrote it. Sometimes that happens when I’m remembering Merry Fates stories: I remember a Brenna story as a Tessa story or a Tessa story as one of mine. Sometimes I find stories of mine that I don’t remember writing. I always thought they were Tessa’s or Brenna’s. Basically what I’m saying is this is a very Maggie story, and if you ever ask me about it in person, I might lie and tell you I wrote it. —Maggie
    One Monday I sat down at seven in the morning to write my story, and five hundred words later I deleted everything. I started over, and after nine hundred words realized everything was wrong. By noon I’d scrapped three stories, and by three I was lying on my living room floor in utter despair that I’d have to post a piece of crap because nothing was working. I stared at my ceiling and decided I wanted to write about lying on the carpet in despair. Only, for a better reason than writer-fail. Somehow, I pulled this story about courage and assumptions and dragons out of my butt. And it’s my favorite ever, basically. —Tessa

    S ean Hardy is a dragon slayer.
    It was a small dragon, only about the size of a barn, but still. He killed it. They mounted its head on a flatbed truck and drove it around the country. Annie and I paid five bucks each to slip into a dark tent smelling of mold and musty seashells—it had been a saltwater dragon—for three minutes. They flashed the lights on and off and shot trails of fog at your ankles like they needed to make it scarier. The head just sat there, maw half open and greenish teeth filed down so nobody accidentally cut themselves and sued the carnival. Annie cowered back, hands clutching at her purse strap, but I reached out and touched its nose, just over the left nostril. The scales were rubbery there, and surprisingly soft. It reminded me of my dog’s belly.
    . . .
    Turned out, Sean Hardy came from a long line of dragon slayers, but he hadn’t known it. They weren’t Sigurd’s line or from any of the well-known Giant Killer clans. It was only this branch of a long-forgotten family that, back in Eastern Eurland in the fifteenth century, made a name for themselves going up into the mountains and returning with a horse-load of dragon eggs and hearts. One of their youngest daughters married a skald who moved to Eirelann and went native. They immigrated to the United States about three generations back and lost all the stories from back in Eurland. But Sean Hardy’s father did have a dragon tooth with one