How It All Goes Down
Goblin Fruit
In "Goblin Fruit," we meet an odd sixteen-year-old girl named Kizzy who comes from an Old World family where magic is an accepted part of life. Kizzy just wants to be normal and attractive to boys, though, so she doesn't listen to all the stories about how goblins tempt young girls away. Those stories are all rot to her—even if her dead grandmother used to tell her a tale about how her sister almost had her soul taken by goblins. Eek.
The goblins are super into Kizzy, though, and they know just how to get to her—with a ridiculously attractive teenage boy. She arrives at school one day to find this super handsome new boy named Jack Husk who, despite her outsider status, seems into her. They go thrift shopping together and do a lot of flirting after school. When Kizzy goes home that night, she's full of daydreams and hopes for first kisses.
The next day, she wakes up and finds that her grandmother's knife (which she was buried with) is sitting on her pillow. Huh, that's weird. Kizzy ignores it and gets dressed for school, conveniently forgetting to put the knife in her dress pocket. Along her walk, she runs into Jack. He's waiting for her with a picnic basket, and convinces Kizzy to skip school and go to the cemetery for a breakfast picnic. Is this romantic or creepy? Hrm…
When they get to the cemetery, all of the spirits try to warn Kizzy away from this date, but she ignores the wind and the whispers, and instead she sits down and starts eating the chocolates, cheeses, and fruit that Jack spreads before her. At one point, Kizzy looks at a piece of fruit and she just knows in that moment that Jack is a goblin who is out to steal her soul. But instead of stabbing him with the cheese knife, Kizzy leans in and kisses him. It turns out that she doesn't mind trading her soul… if she gets a first kiss out of it.
Spicy Little Curses Such As These
When this story opens, Estella—an old Englishwoman living in India who acts as Ambassador to Hell (yes, that's a real job)—is sitting with a demon named Vasudev, haggling over the number of children who will be saved in an earthquake. Good times.
Vasudev offers to let all of the children survive if Estella will go ahead and deliver a curse for him. She reluctantly agrees. So she goes to a Political Agent's party, where she curses his new baby daughter with a voice that is so beautiful that it will immediately kill anyone who hears it. To help matters, though, she adds that the baby won't utter a single sound until she's old enough to understand the curse and its consequences.
Seventeen years later, Vasudev is still waiting on his curse to pan out because that girl—Anamique—hasn't spoken a word since her birth. One day, she leaves her diary on a train and a handsome young soldier named James Dorsey finds it. Totally taken with this strange diary girl who writes candidly about her curse, he goes off in search of her. When he discovers her at a garden party, they are immediately smitten with each other; the star-crossed lovers start exchanging letters and seeing each other all the time.
Throughout their courtship, James tries to convince Anamique to speak to him, much to Vasudev's delight. Anamique finally resolves to say "yes" whenever James gets around to proposing marriage.
She throws an eighteenth birthday party, and James heads to it with a ring box in his pocket. Along the way, though, Estella and her bodyguard stop him—they both warn him against letting Anamique speak, urging him to keep her silent if he knows what's good for him.
James goes to the party and proposes marriage, but just before Anamique is about to speak, he kisses her to keep her from saying "yes." This hurts her feelings and she opens her mouth to start singing. Just like that, all of the guests at the party drop dead, and poor Anamique is left with a dead fiancé and dozens of other dead bodies. Some birthday present.
Vasudev is thrilled with the results of his little curse and Estella is furious when she visits him in Hell. Anamique also shows up in Hell, though, determined to find her dead lover. Estella trades her own soul for all of the souls who died at the party, and Anamique gets out of the fiery depths of Hell under one condition—that she serve as the new Ambassador to Hell.
Once she saves all of her loved ones, Anamique marries James and never ever says a word to him again. She also takes up her post as Ambassador to Hell and does an amazing job of keeping Vasudev in check. It turns out that her beautiful voice works wonders on him… and makes it super hard for him to keep carrying out those devious plans. Ha.
Hatchling
A fourteen-year-old girl named Esmé wakes up one morning and finds that one of her eyes has turned blue. Weird. Even weirder, though, is that her mother—Mab—reacts like something horrible has happened. Mab tells her that the demons that used to keep her as a pet, the Druj, are after them now because Mab escaped from them fourteen years ago with Esmé in her belly. Esmé hardly has time to process this strange tale before they're on the run.
In the meantime, a Druj named Mihai is also keeping a close eye on Esmé and Mab… but not with the view of hurting them. When they're almost overtaken by a pack of Druj, Mihai jumps in and saves them both. Then he opens a door to the Druj kingdom of Tajbel (which he helped Mab escape from all those years ago) and takes Esmé with him while telling a panicked Mab to go talk to some dude named Yazad. Um, okay.
Mab goes to Yazad, who tells her that a long time ago, he also had a single blue eye—and that it was because he was incubating the demon Mihai. Um… uh-oh. Things turned out okay, though, once their souls split and Mihai left his body. The same thing has happened to Esmé, except with the Druj Queen.
In Tajbel, Mihai takes Esmé to a chapel where the Druj Queen's lifeless body resides. He then explains that the Queen's soul is inside of Esmé, and that's why Esmé suddenly has all of these memories that don't have anything to do with her life. They're going to go through the process of letting the Druj Queen's soul break away from Esmé's now—and it's going to hurt quite a bit.
The reason that Mihai has been waiting for this moment is because he's been through the incubation process a few times, so he's learned a few things, namely that the Druj used to be human and have souls that allowed them to love. He remembers that when he and the Druj Queen were human, they were married and in love with each other; he wants her to regain some part of her soul and memory so they can be together again. After the Druj Queen returns to her body, though, she screams in rage. Mihai makes off with Esmé before the Queen can hurt them.
Esmé returns to her life with Mab and starts going to school and dating a nice human boy. Mihai, on the other hand, is preoccupied with waiting for the Druj Queen to sort through her emotions and maybe come back to him. One day, an eagle lands on his knee and he knows that it's her. He whispers the magic that will turn her into her human form, knowing that she's returned to him at long last.