October Girls: Crystal & Bone by L C Glazebrook

spilled from beneath the couch.
    “I can’t leave you alone for a minute without all hell breaking loose,” Minerva said, but her heart wasn’t in it. After all, hell would probably have broken loose even if Crystal had been away.
    That’s just what hell does: it breaks loose. It doesn’t have a whole lot else going on.
    “Give me a hard time later,” Crystal said, straws flying from the broom as she flailed it up and down. “First, we got some housecleaning to do.”
    The male intruder kicked at the tentacle that held him captive, but the Lurken only applied more pressure. Anyone with a lick of sense would have played possum, let his body go limp so the Lurken would go off in search of fresher prey. Despite his lack of wits, he was quite a specimen, and his jeans were snug. As Lurken bait went, you could do a lot worse.
    “Hold on,” she said to him, stepping over the tentacle and heading down the hall.
    “Where are you going?” he yelled, with an embarrassing, near-pubescent crack in his voice.
    “To call in the cavalry,” she said.
    “Momma!” Crystal said.
    “A fat lot of good you’re doing,” Minerva called back. A breeze skirled down the hall from Crystal’s bedroom, carrying the aroma of roses and rot, but Minerva didn’t have time to make sense of it.
    She wheeled into the bathroom and noted with dismay that Crystal had been playing in the potions again. Perhaps the Lurken’s visit wasn’t accidental after all. Crystal could have knocked together an accidental concoction that would draw Lurken like flies to horse dooky.
    Problem.
    The bottle of wog essence had somehow fallen behind the toilet and leaked a good half of its contents. The swampy aroma of frogbirth filled the tiny lavatory. Every decent summoning spell required a foundation of wog, and barely a spoonful remained in the bottle. At the most, Minerva would be able to conjure a were-bunny, and then it would only be effective once a month under the full moon.
    Minerva hurried back into the kitchen, where the struggle continued. “You were meddling,” she called to Crystal.
    “Just peeked,” she answered, still wielding the broom against the aggressive tentacle.
    “This is what happens,” Minerva said, retrieving a butcher knife from a drawer. “You mess around and meddle, and before you know it, you’re dealing with forces beyond your understanding.”
    “You chicks are crazy,” the man yelled, his face red from exertion as he kicked and twitched. The Lurken held tight.
    Crystal jumped forward and smacked him with the broom. “We’re not chicks,” she said. “We didn’t hatch and we don’t go ‘
cheep cheep
.’”
    Minerva chopped the butcher knife against the tentacle, and a purple, viscous fluid welled from the wound. It had the consistency of maple syrup, but smelled of rat rumps and fermented yak milk, both of which she’d had occasion to sample. The drops of purple goo spattered on the floor, collected themselves into tiny balls, and rolled down in the grids of the heating duct that connected to the oil furnace.
    Great. Now we’ll enjoy that lovely Lurken smell all through winter, assuming we survive the night.
    “Make it let go!” With his free hand, the man batted at the tentacle, which had slithered another six inches up his thigh and was threatening to crush some soft bits.
    Minerva was sawing the blade back and forth across the tentacle, wishing she’d taken Ronco up on its offer of a Ginsu knife set for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
    A second tentacle roped from beneath the couch, its tip quivering in the air.
    Make that two knife sets.
    “There’s another one, Momma,” Crystal shouted.
    “It’s the same one twice,” Minerva said, lamenting Crystal’s ignorance. Maybe she should have sped up the apprenticeship, but Crystal had never been strong on book-learning, plus she’d seemed a little more absentminded than usual since her best friend Bonnie had died.
    “Don’t let it get me,”