The Highlands of Scotland are a place where the wind remembers the names of the dead. Elspeth lived in the shadow of Blackwood Manor, a decaying pile of grey stone that seemed to lean away from the light. She was the last of a line cursed by a pact made in blood centuries ago. Every fifty years, the blood of the firstborn daughter would awaken the Beast—a shapeless, furred horror of hunger and...
The message began in Berlin on October twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-two, as a simple instruction typed on a teletype machine in the basement of a government building on Unter den Linden. The message was eleven words long. It read: deliver the package to the contact at the checkpoint without delay. The message was encoded in a standard cipher, encrypted by a machine that had been used for...
The Carpathian Mountains are a place where the wind sounds like a funeral dirge and the forests are thick with things that avoid the sun. In a castle that clung to the cliffs like a dying parasite lived Isolde. She was a creature of breathtaking, predatory beauty—a "Blood-Siren" whose song could lull a man into a state of absolute ecstasy and absolute submission.
Isolde didn't hunt for...
The rain in Los Angeles always smelled like wet asphalt and bad decisions. Jack Morrison knew this because he had spent the last three nights sleeping in his car on a street that had no name, watching the rain turn the parking lot into a mirror that reflected nothing worth seeing.
Three months ago, he had come home from the war with a clean discharge, a medal he did not want, and a girlfriend...
In the glass towers of Midtown Manhattan, power was the only currency that didn't depreciate. The Sterling family owned half the skyline, but their empire was built on a foundation of mutual hatred. Elias Sterling was the anomaly—the youngest son who preferred the company of his senile father to the bloodsport of the boardroom.
The Patriarch, Arthur Sterling, was a ghost of the man who had...
(Romantic Redemption)
The air in Tuscany tasted of rosemary and old stone. Luca lived in a villa that had once been a monastery, a place of high ceilings and golden light. He had been the adopted son of a cold, calculating banker in Milan, a man who had viewed Luca as a project in social climbing.
"You are a blank slate, Luca," his father had said. "I will write a history of success upon you."...
I.
Tommy Chen was seventeen and Chinese and what did he know? That was the question he asked himself every day at his father's grocery store on Mulberry Street, and the answer was always the same: he knew how to watch.
The store was small — maybe four hundred square feet, with shelves of rice and beans and dried mushrooms lining the walls and a counter that had been polished smooth by thirty...
Forty-seven days. That's how long it took for Daniel Cross to realize that memory was not a recording but a reconstruction, and that every time he recalled Laura, he was not remembering her but rebuilding her, brick by brick, from fragments that were always slightly wrong.
He was a neuroscientist. He had spent ten years studying the hippocampus, the neural pathways that encoded episodic memory,...
The London of 1890 was a city of rigid lines and velvet curtains. Lady Gwendoline was the undisputed queen of the social season, a woman whose approval could make a career and whose frown could destroy a dynasty. She was a master of the "Social Game," a complex system of cues, whispers, and strategic alliances.
But Gwendoline had a secret: she was an entity of pure social energy, a "Glamour"...
Dr. Amara Osei stood on the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, looking at the temperature gauge that read negative twelve degrees Celsius, and thought about how the numbers on that gauge existed in two states simultaneously. The reading was both accurate and meaningless, both a precise measurement of atmospheric temperature and a data point that could not capture the actual experience of standing...
Henry Whitmore stood behind the plate-glass window of his office on Wall Street, looking down at the ants of men scurrying between the banks on Exchange Place. It was November 1887, and the cold that swept down from the Hudson River carried with it the promise of a hard winter. Henry was forty-seven years old, and he had spent twenty-three of those years building the Whitmore Transportation...
The house was not a house so much as a skeleton of one, ribs of rotting timber exposed where the siding had fallen away, windows like empty eye sockets staring out across the cotton fields that had not grown cotton in thirty years. Eliot Beauregard stood at the gate and looked at it and felt the weight of a hundred and sixty-three years of Beauregard blood pressing down on his shoulders like a...
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