The final call for boarding. She had told herself she wouldn’t hesitate. But she’d been imagining the cheery whistle of a steam train, a conductor’s bellow over a bustling platform. Daylight through the station’s high windows, multiplying its population by… Continue reading

He was made of moonbeams and music notes. He was a sigh only in gardens and on lonely balconies, only outside of parties with enough melody to conjure him. Only with enough of a nimbus of loneliness for a reveller,… Continue reading

The dangers involved in keeping a phylactery were many, of course. As any academy class or pearl-clutching missive would tell you, at length and with some supporting anecdotes that were even true. The benefits were always dismissed as few and… Continue reading

“It’s all right,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt.” He squinted more closely at her than most did when she said that sort of thing. Most, when she said it, leaned back in relief, smiled in faithful praise. Turned whatever… Continue reading

I woke up that morning in what had become the usual sticky haze of dread, five hours of sleep sawn apart by moaning, senseless dreams, to find that the vines had finally started prying their way around the door. A… Continue reading

It was Rochelle’s idea to leave a card out for it. Just a plain, ordinary library card sitting on the checkout desk, with a pamphlet and bookmark and one of those fancy new pens, the whole shebang. It couldn’t hurt,… Continue reading

It seemed like a clever name at the time. Cocking a gun called Just You Wait makes a man a little bolder no matter how many are shooting back at him. But lately, the nickel-wrought wink of that name on… Continue reading