LAYLA I felt like a sack of potatoes slung over his shoulder. Heavy, awkward. I hated how natural it must have felt for him to carry me like that, as if I weighed no more than a bag of grain. My hips, my thighs, the round swell of me — all of it made me…
The blistering sun hung high over the jagged ridges of the Sierra Madre mountains, casting long, dark shadows into the dry, unforgiving valleys below. Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, hat firmly on his head and leather whip coiled at his side, navigated his way up a narrow mountain path. His boots kicked up fine dust as…
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KHURZOG My blood was still pounding from the fight. Every muscle in me buzzed, hot and sharp, the stink of blood thick in my nose. The Twins lay sprawled on the sand like broken carcasses, dragged out by handlers who could barely lift them. Their blood clung to my knuckles, drying sticky, and I didn’t…
Five years before things got weird, Bob got fired from the FBI for “attitude problems” — which, to be fair, he still had. Five months before anyone started asking questions, a college kid vanished. Five weeks before the dean started sweating, the frat boys at Delta Omicron Theta started reporting ghosts, glitches, and spontaneous nosebleeds…
LAYLA The speakeasy’s velvet and jazz vanished the moment I stepped below. Down here it was raw concrete, iron cages, smoke so thick it hung like drapes from the ceiling. The roar of men rolled off the walls, sharp with the stink of sweat and spilled whiskey. Blood already stained the sand. Betting slips crumpled…
MAEVE Of all the things I could have imagined going wrong today—red wine spilling, dead flowers, maybe even the cake collapsing—this wasn’t one of them. I stand here, in the middle of the forest clearing, surrounded by towering pines and ancient oaks. The moon, blood-red and ominous, hangs overhead like the universe is in on…
KHURZOG The club always smelled wrong. Smoke and gin, piss-slick sweat, too much perfume trying to cover rot. The band in the corner crooned slow jazz, but it couldn’t bury the stink bleeding up through the floorboards. Old beer, old blood. You never forgot the pit was right under your boots. Light broke in shards…
In the heart of winter, when the world should have been shrouded in snow, a rider approached the ruin, her cloak snapping in the cold wind. It was Daella Snow, a bastard of the North, though her name was more whispered than spoken in noble halls. Dark hair framed her face, streaked with snowflakes that…
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