LITMIR.BIZ

      “Are they destroyed?” the Pale Queen nagged. “Are the new Magnificent Twelve all dead?”

      The Pale Queen could appear in just about any form she chose, but for the purposes of this particular conversation she was wearing one of her favorite forms: as tall as a moderate redwood tree, with a gigantic head—a quite beautiful head in some ways, but with skin so translucent that in the right light you could see the bones of her skull and her jaw and the individual teeth in her head, thirty-six of them in all, each long and sharp and curved back to facilitate the swallowing of large, whole, usually living things.

      Her hair was white. Actually it was colorless if you looked at an individual strand, but taken all together it was white (like a polar bear’s). It went down to her bony shoulders, from which hung a floor-length robe made out of screams.

      Not the sort of outfit you find for sale at your local mall. But the Pale Queen wove reality out of fear and loss and despair.¹

      The dress had a cutaway so that you could see her powerful calves filling boots as tall as city light posts. The boots were dragon skin and used human skulls to make a row of buckles. The toes of the boots were about as big as canoes—sharp, barbed-steel canoes.

      Frankly, Risky thought, the outfit was a bit “young” for her mother. But she wasn’t going to say anything about it unless her mother really annoyed her. She was holding that in reserve.

      “Mother, I said I would do it, didn’t I?” Risky huffed.

      “So, the new Magnificent Twelve have been destroyed?”

      “Are you saying you don’t trust me?” Risky crossed her arms over her chest and actually stamped her foot.

      Like the Pale Queen, Risky could take any form. But generally she preferred to appear as an extraordinarily attractive teenage girl with luscious red hair and eyes so green there was no way they could possibly be entirely human.

      Her dress was a simple, formfitting thing with a neckline that was daring

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