Osterley felt Newkirk lean in close, speaking into her ear rather than raising his voice.

"It's unlikely that both Moritz and Yorck are here. We should eliminate the one and find the other."

"But how?"

"Go with Beckton. Provoke them into firing at you.…

In the dark my hands made twisted shapes, more through intuition than direction. They danced like they belonged to a conductor, while my fingers played the air in long strokes like a pianist's. I was aware of their movements but I couldn't see them. They …

The whipcrack sound of a bullet flying past brought Osterley out of her metathaumaturgical musing. She ran forward, tugging Newkirk with her, and they made their way together to an alleyway between their building and the next. A small cluster of green-uni…

Hurrying to the bathroom, I felt like I was going to burst. I prayed that no one was in it and reached for the handle. It was open. I locked it and rushed to the toilet, dropping my pants as I did so.

I had to bending down to raise the seat up. My face…

The cool of the window pane seeped into Roger's skin, bringing blessed cold. In a few minutes it would be too much but for now it felt like relief. Anything to bring down the fever that was overheating his body and stealing his energy. It was worse at nig…

Osterley and Beckton exchanged a practical, functional look. She took a step back, while Beckton made ready his weapon. There were no theatrics, no heartfelt exchanges. Those prone to those gestures were no longer around.

Newkirk nodded, muttering the la…

Cicadas sang in the heat of the day. Mostly. But it was well past sundown and the night was far from silent. It overflowed with strange sounds, as if the darkened woods themselves were awake and agitated. It wasn't just the pulsing buzz of the cicadas e…

Story is marked as mature

He sat in his car, parked in front of a small white house in Podunk, Florida. He had never been here before but he had been assured by the clerk at the sole convenience store on the edge of town that this was the house occupied by the woman who had just w…

The last thing I remembered was driving . . . somewhere. Somewhere important. I think to meet somebody. Through one window, the rocky face of mountain frowned at me in slow motion. Through the other, the sea nodded in groups of white-capped heads that mur…

The two fighters were clumsy. They didn't know that before but they knew it now. Winning a fight was something they'd both taken for granted. With size and power on their side, they hadn't bothered to learn finesse. Mastering a fighting style took time an…

When the moment came to reveal his finished product, he felt trepidation. It was time to face the reality. For better or worse, it was his alone. He had sat there by himself grunting and sweating until he was completely tapped out. His muscles quivered, s…

In the entrance hall of the building, Beckton stayed as flat as possible against the wall and risked a look out of the open doors.

It was chaos. Cars were on aflame, filling the otherwise overcast palette with fiery yellow and rich orange tones. He could…

Osterley approached Newkirk as he placed a sheet of waxed canvas on the floor and unscrewed the cap from a small metal cylinder. She didn't say anything, but smoothed out her skirts and knelt down with him.

The wizard handed her the canister, which she …

Richard stood at the stern of the ship, looking longingly back toward England. He had really hoped to extend his tour of the continent but the untimely death of his father dictated otherwise. His memories of the rough eastward crossing a scant month earli…

Arden Waithe never wanted to be on the boat. Or any boat. His experience had taught him that sailing was misery cubed. The rolling of the ground that never stopped, rising and falling, clenched his stomach inside an iron fist even as it spun his conscious…

Story is marked as mature

The spell took them to a much larger, high-ceilinged room. Beckton could instantly see that they had travelled some distance - they had left a cloudless day for a blustery one, and the air was charged with a stormy potential.

Further along from the circl…

It's difficult to grow up. Shoot, it's difficult to even figure out what that means. I suspect that the act of growing up is rooted in pain. Pain that is unfair, unique to you, callous, and solely your responsibility. From the white-hot shard of ice whose…

Osterley took a much more compact weapon of French design for herself, slipped it into a leather shoulder bag and then they moved straight to the teleport circle for transport. The watch had changed by now, and a fresh-faced youth who looked like he was b…

The preparations were brief and to the point. Broadview insisted that Newkirk take a pistol, which the wizard took with distaste before tucking it into an inner pocket of his jacket.

After a few minutes, Beckton appeared in the company of two military po…

How does this story start? It starts with the thought that my stories rarely lie down in the page in an effective way right from the start, that the story often goes through significant revisions until I find the right beginning. Just as this paragraph …

I'm in a fun house. I've always like how the good ones play with perception. It reminds me of the Get Smart opening: expectation and subversion in a fun way. And they're so enthusiastic. Not the operators necessarily, who've seen this millions of times, b…

In the darkness when man does sleep

and a pallid moon is the only company he keeps

the waves are calm, the silence deep,

but in his dreaming heart is only greed.

Our candles burn low crying tears of soft wax

but we rejoice for it is our time at last.

Tim…

A round-faced man who might have looked more at home in a butcher's or a grocer's shouldered his way in to talk to Newkirk. No divination required; the wizard remembered him from the past. He was an Ultra liason.

"Broadview. How are things at Bletchley?"…