“They are so cute!”

“Adorable.”

“Look at their little name tags.” Beth picked up the first kitten — gray with white paws, pink nose, and big green eyes. “Graymalkin, is that your name?”

Graymalkin mewed.

“And this one is called ‘Paddock’,” Mac read the name tag as he picked up the black ca...

“We’re screwed.”

The night is black, the road desolate, a seemingly endless stretch of unlit asphalt that disappears into the murk of impenetrable fog.

“We just need to keep heading south,” Brendan says.

“We’re screwed,” Chari says again. “No map, no GPS, we shouldn’t have taken this back ...

Rain falls on his new skin. He feels nothing.

Under cover of the night, he, Isaac Newton, sixty-three years of age in this the Year of the Lord 1706, arrives alone at Woolsthorpe, returning to the old two-story farmhouse where he grew up. In one hand he carries a lit lanthorn, in the other a ...

LOS ANGELES, 2079

NOVEMBER

(TONIGHT)

Oh, I could eat you up. Eat you whole. In one bite.

Valentine smiles to herself, in her close-lipped way, 'pensive' they call it in the publicity sumsen. She always smiles this way. Lips closed. She has beautiful, blinding-white, even teeth, light...

“Where are we?” the old man said.

“In a dark wood.”

“Who are you?” said the old man.

“Just … a brother,” said the young man.

“Stop,” the old man said. “Let me look at you.”

“It is dark.”

“And I am blind. For me it is always dark. I can see with my hands, if you will allow me.”

“Yes.”...

— whoosh —

The 12-foot tenkara fly-fishing bamboo-rod whipped through the air, releasing the thin line that touched down in the stream over twenty feet away.

The rising sun painted the sakura cherry blossoms in the rose color of dawn, reflecting a light pink sheen in the old man’s steel-gray...

BRISTOL COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS

FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 1893

“Mr. Sigerson.”

“Ms. Borden.”

The tall, thin man shook the small woman’s hand.

In the women’s section of the Taunton Jail in Bristol County, Lizzie Borden’s jail cell, located at the south side of the jail, had one grated wind...

"So you're saying it's bigger?" Fabiana asked.

"C-closer," Pomp corrected in his high, soft, slightly-stuttering voice. "The knight is c-closer."

"Very well, closer.” Fabiana leaned in to study the knight in the painting. “But how can that be? Are you saying that someone has altered the painting? ...

When I finally caught up with Brandr, he was having a horn in the darkest, dirtiest mead-hall in the seediest part of Kaupang. Brandr's kind of place. The less light the better, with his scarred-up face and missing nose.

But the golden-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked woman next to him, she looked g...