CHAPTER ONE

  The Miracle

  III

  Ez brandished the knife, its handle slick with sweat. She could feel the heat from the fire scalding the backs of her legs. The hornets advanced slowly, their antennae waggling. Then, as if some signal had been given, all three pounced on Ez at once.

  She might have stood a chance if she’d been armed with her bow at a distance. As it was, only dumb luck saved her from decapitation. She slashed wildly, the knife glancing off a hornet’s armor at the same moment it knocked her feet out from beneath her. A second hornet struck her squarely between the shoulder blades with a leg as hard as a fencepost, flipping her end over end, and the third hornet’s mandibles snapped shut in the empty space, exactly where her head had been a millisecond earlier.

  Ez slammed to the floor. Dazed, she rolled onto her back and saw her own frightened reflection, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over in a pair of compound eyes the size of watermelons. Her hand was in the hornet's blind spot. Without thinking, Ez buried her knife in the gap between its head and thoracic armor. The monster jerked away, unpinning her, but shearing the blade cleanly off its handle in the process. Ez scrambled to her feet and dealt the creature a ferocious kick that sent it crashing into the table, launching dinnerware in all directions. The hornet lay writhing where it had fallen, unable to rise.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Ez spun around to find the other two descending upon Wilburn, who had seized the fire poker and was wielding it like a sword. He managed to land a satisfying smack, but for all the effect it had, he might as well have been beating a rock. The axe Ez used for log-splitting was leaning in the corner. In a single motion she grabbed hold of it and swung, bringing it down with a wet crunch that clove a hornet’s head in two. The final hornet whipped around, slapping Ez with its abdomen and hurling her against the wall. Her vision flashed.

  She slid to the floor and must have blacked out for a second, for the next thing she saw was the poker sailing out of Wilburn’s grasp. It spun through the air and landed with a clatter, out of reach. Wilburn stumbled backward, his face shocked and hopeless; he could not retreat further without stepping in the fireplace.

  Thrumming its triumph, the hornet reared up on hind legs, its abdomen quivering grotesquely as a drop of violet venom oozed from the tip of its dagger-sized stinger. Ez dove, knowing it was too late, her final prayer that she might take the sting herself, buying Wilburn a chance to flee.

  It all happened in an instant. Just as the hornet struck, the cottage's front door was blasted off its hinges; it came wizzing through the air, missing Ez by a whisker, and slapped flat against the floor—directly on top of the hornet. The effect was like that of a boot stomping a jelly donut. Green slime splattered everything within a ten-foot radius, dousing the fire and drenching Ez and Wilburn.

  There followed a moment of profoundest shock, during which the only sound was the drip-drip of bug guts raining from the ceiling. Then, in unison, mother and son turned to the open doorway, where stood a most familiar stoop-shouldered figure. Gramma Fark shrugged off her traveling cloak and folded it neatly over one arm before stepping across the threshold. She surveyed the destruction with her usual pursed-lipped expression of maternal disapproval. Then she clucked her tongue and shook her head the way she always did and said, “Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do.”