by Matt Ryan
“You bitch!” Jackie put her in a head lock.
“What did you tell her?” Leo asked.
“Mark and I had sex last night,” I blurted. Holding a hand over my mouth, I looked at Jackie, shocked.
“Holy shit. He finally gave you the business, huh?” Jackie looked at an embarrassed Mark and held her hand up for a high-five.
Mark batted it down and we all broke out laughing. “Okay, maybe there’s too much honesty going on here,” he said. “We’ve got all this,” he gestured to the town, “to figure out.”
“We’re going to protect it,” I said resolutely, and looked at all of them now gathered around us. “First, we move here. Then, we learn what the circles mean, what they do, and if they help the world or hurt the world.”
“And what about those ones that end the world?” Kylie asked.
“We hide them. For starters, we need to cover every door in this place. Once alchemists figure out this place exists, they’ll be coming.”
“What about the girl in the sky?” Mark asked.
“She’s gone, and I don’t think she’s ever coming back . . . unless we make another philosopher’s stone, which we won’t.”
“Was it Evelyn?” Jackie asked.
I turned to look at her in surprise. “How did you know?”
“We had an encounter or two, back when we were trying to find you. You’re right, she won’t hurt us—not without reason. I don’t think we have to worry about her.”
“Other alchemists are always our greatest danger,” Sarah said. “The hunger for more is in all of us, and Allie is right, when they find out what we have here, they’ll be coming. We need a barrier in place, guards, and we need to decipher what’s in those circles in a hurry.”
“We’ll make this work, we have to,” I said with confidence. No matter what happened next, we would be able to handle it. I had Mark, and I had my friends. For the first time in a long time, I had a family again.
The End
Author note:
Thank you for reading this series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. The whole idea from this series came from the Preston Six series. The two worlds collide and if you are wondering where that Evelyn girl came from, she appears in book five and six in the Preston Six series.
The main idea from this series started with Cathy, Allies mom, destroying the Preston Six’s world and then I worked back from there all the way to Allie sitting in her room, reading books and fantasizing about a larger life that she had.
They say you can see yourself in the characters you write and with Allie I can remember spending time at lunch under a tree, reading a book. I too had thought of going on great adventures as I read Tolkien and Robert Jordan books. I’d write short stories, trying to emulate Stephen King and Dean Koontz and failing miserably but at least I tried.
More than anything, I wrote about friendship. I had a small group of close friends who I always relied on as early inspiration. The stories I wrote in high school would be about my friends fighting against drug dealers and bandits. Or we would go exploring the wonders of some far off place in the world through the strokes of my pen.
Now, I get to write endless adventures for a living and I couldn’t be more grateful to you, the reader. I plan to write for a long time and I hope to create more stories for you. I have so many more adventures planned.
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