“Ante Up” • by Pete Wood

Lord Drax chewed his mutton sandwich and tried to pretend he hadn’t just bet the castle deed on a royal flush that never materialized. His opponent, the crown prince, must have more powerful magic.

Drax couldn’t stall forever. His black cat, his familiar, rubbed against his legs. Drax petted the magical animal and uttered an incantation for the dark forces to rescue him from his ace-high poker hand.

The prince glared. “Show me your cards.”

The sun disappeared behind black clouds. The wind howled. Two quick booms.

Lightning hit the castle, shattered the ancient stone walls. The poker table fell into a fissure.

§

Drax, clutching the now worthless deed,  watched his castle burn.

He vowed never to ask the forces of darkness for another favor.

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Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.

For the past two years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles, and now with Tales from the Brahma, a shared world saga that features the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Jason Burnham, and of course, Pete Wood. We suspect that Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.

Pete insists that any connection between this story, all of this past week’s stories, and his story “Take Me to Your Litter Box,” is purely coincidental.

Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker.

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction piece playing off at least two of the following key words: cat, poker, storm, sandwich.

More stories to come next week!