Exotics #1: The Floating Menagerie

Spies. Kids. Magic.
Rachael Baptiste's mom disappeared a week ago. Nobody knows what happened.
Her second-grade classmate, Raul, breaks into Rachael's house...and tries to steal her mom's password.
When he is hunted down by giant talking dogs, Rachael follows him and discovers that Raul and her mom have a magical sickness that lets them turn into animals, or Exotics.
A group of evil Exotics, the Shadow Dogs, kidnap Rachael and Raul to a mysterious ship and try to force them to tell them her mother's secrets...but Rachael's not talking.
Instead, she's trying to find a way to escape the ship and rescue the Exotic kids trapped on board!

DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer, editor, and book designer living in Colorado. She started out as a farm girl in the middle of South Dakota, went to school in Vermillion, SD, then gravitated through Iowa to Colorado, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
She now writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and mystery for adults under her own name; adventurous and weird fiction for middle-grade (8-12 year old) kids under the pseudonym De Kenyon; and various thriller and suspense fiction for her ghostwriting clients under various and non-disclosable names.
Her latest book, Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, combines two of her favorite topics-zombies and Lewis Carroll. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Penumbra, Crossed Genres, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and more.
Her website and blog are at www.WonderlandPress.com. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.