7:00 PM

Margaret Ashworth had killed the lamb at four hundred twenty-five degrees for exactly twenty minutes then three hundred fifty degrees for exactly eighty minutes and it was perfect and she knew it was perfect because she had done this forty-four times before, once every New Year's E...

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I lay in the cedar brake where my grandfather had denned before me and I did not move. Movement cost heat. Heat cost calories. And I was six days past my last calorie — a frozen rabbit I found under a deadfall, already dead, wh...

If you’ve never seen a dragon try to hold a quill, you’ve missed one of the quiet tragedies of the post-clause era.

Thundros Cloudbelch—a name that sounded like a weather complaint and lived up to it—was hunched over a wrought-stone desk at the Smokevault Retreat Hall, scowling at a blank she...

"Stay down, everyone. Face on the floor, hands on the back of your head. That’s it. You're doing good. Be smart, and nobody dies today."

Sal makes a fist, pumps it up and down rapidly, military tactical hand signal: Time to go. Hurry up.

Rhett — carrying two large, black, ballistic-nyl...

"Miss, we don't serve his kind in this bar." The bartender looked at Susan, not at me, just twitched his head sideways in my general direction, then pointed at the sign: 'No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service ... oh, and No Synths Served'. 

"He doesn't drink," Susan said. "Doesn't eat either. He's a...

Look at this coin. Go ahead, take it, hold it.

It is made of pure silver. Can you see how old it is?

The image that is stamped on the front is the head of an emperor who lived more than two thousand years ago.

Yes, two thousand years is a really long time, but even before then a lot had hap...

"Give me what I want, and no-one gets hurt."

"I know that voice." Marshall Calhoun swiveled on the barstool. "Silas McReady. Ol' Lead Heart."

"In the flesh."

"Been a while."

"Fifteen years, Ethan. Long time."

"What's with the gun, Silas?"

"Wanted to start this off on the right foot. Hear...

    The traveling salesman was alone in the train compartment, still shaken from what he had seen. Why had she done it?

     "May I join you?"

     Not waiting for a reply, the man in black sat down across from the salesman, but did not introduce himself. In fact, he turned his head to look ...

“I give up! It’s all shit!”

“Pardon?”

“I said that out loud, didn’t I?” The burly, bearded man knocks back the last slug of the cheap whiskey, motions at the bartender for another, and swivels on the bar stool, eyes bleary.

“Of what do you speak?” The small man with the fantastic mustaches ...

The sunset makes the darkening sky blush and adds rose highlights to the emerald water. A young couple, a man and a woman, perhaps in their early twenties, tanned and trim, golden-skinned in their bathing suits, have their beach blankets spread on the white sand. They sit close together, facin...

The Bear Inn, Oxford, Nazi-Occupied Britain, 1947

SS-Sturmbannführer Ewald von Haupt walks into the pub.

In one moment, a pleasant, warm cacophony — loud voices, clinking glasses, laughter, singing — in the next, a chilled sudden silence, heads turning and all eyes darting in the tall, b...

From the diary of Kermit Roosevelt, the second son of Theodore Roosevelt, found in the estate of his younger sister, Esther Roosevelt.

Sunday, February 27, 1927, Rondônia, Brazil

Thirteen years the nightmare has haunted me. 

I have blamed myself, pushed everyone away — everyone except...