Ravenspell Book 3: Freaky Fly Day Read Online Free Page B

then the entire landfill began to shudder and seethe. Everywhere, as far as her multifaceted eyes could see, flies began to rise to her call—hatching from rotting burritos, climbing out of old tin cans, struggling up from all of the stink and sewage left by mankind.
    There were trillions of them, flies of every kind—horseflies and bluebottle flies, houseflies and sand flies, white flies and fruit flies.
    The morning suddenly began to buzz as if in anticipation, for the wings of flies hummed incessantly.
    “I am Belle Z. Bug, Lord of the Flies,” the monster fly roared. “The end of all who oppose us is at hand. The heavens shall be our throne, and the earth shall be our footstool!”

Chapter 4
    THE TOAD WARRIOR
    Armed with sharp claws, rows of teeth, and poisonous skin, the African cane toad is the most vicious member of the toad family and is almost impossible to get rid of.

    Yet it has become a favorite of sugar cane farmers around the world, and farmers have introduced it in the Americas and Australia, for it is the only animal known to eat the voracious cane rat, which has been known to devastate entire fields of sugar cane.

    The largest known cane toad was found in Australia. Weighing nearly twenty-four pounds, the locals nicknamed it “Toad-zilla”!
—FROM THE RAVENSPELL COOL BESTIARY
    It is a well-known fact that Oregon is one of the rainiest states in all of North America. In fact, it is said that people in Oregon never get a suntan—instead they just rust.
    But what is not so well known is that the state has a small desert smack dab in the middle of its wettest rainforest, up near Dallas, Oregon. The desert is very small indeed—only about the width of an umbrella. Nevertheless, while the rest of Oregon floods each winter, this desert has gone over two hundred years without getting blessed by a single drop of rain.
    It is called Dinky Desert, and Oregon’s Bureau of Oddities considers it to be one of the state’s greatest treasures—right up there with the Monroe Bigfoot Wildlife Refuge, where one can go to see thousands of wild bigfoots out in forests dining on fern sprouts, salmon berries, and often shaking down campers for Twinkies.
    Dinky Desert has been measured and studied by scientists for years. There are no trees above it to give it shelter, no mountains or rocks nearby to keep it dry. Indeed, many a scientist has gone out during fierce thunderstorms and used lasers to verify that while the rest of the ground around the desert got drenched, not a single raindrop landed on Dinky Desert.
    Back in the 1940s, Albert Einstein himself was hired to figure out the odds that every single raindrop falling for two hundred years would somehow miss that spot, and he found the odds so difficult to calculate that he developed a severe cramp in the left temporal lobe of his brain that bothered him until his dying day, giving him nervous twinges.
    Ultrasound scans of the sands beneath the desert, taken in 1989, revealed a single curiosity—the bones of some very large toads.
    The desert itself is surrounded by a chain-link fence, provided by Oregon’s Bureau of Oddities, who thoughtfully provided a sign declaring the desert a state monument. Unfortunately, the marsh grass, cattails, and wild blue mountain irises that surround the desert grow so tall that no one can see the sign.
    So it was that that night, under the cool light of ten thousand stars, a shadow took shape above the Dinky Desert. It was a shadow shaped like a tall man who wore a black robe that swept to the ground. His deep hood covered his face, but his skeletal hands poked out of the ends of his long robes. He raised a finger that was nothing but bone, and a hissing voice whispered, “Arise, O wind! May the heavens shake and thunder. Awaken, O my foul servants!”
    With that, a small storm arose. It was very tiny indeed, about four feet across, and weather trackers who saw it on radar imagined that it was only a lonely goose flying