• The Plague of Blackwood Manor
    I found the first one in the scullery. It was three days after Sir Sebastian returned from India, and the house was still settling into its old rhythms after the disruption of his absence. I had risen early, as was my custom, to inspect the kitchens before the cook came down. The gas lamps were still dim, casting long shadows across the flagstones, when I saw her—Martha, the kitchen maid—lying...
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  • THE ETERNAL REST
    The call came at 2 AM, the kind of hour when bad news always arrives. Lieutenant James Gold rolled out of his bunk at the Illinois State Military Reserve headquarters, grabbed his coat, and listened to the telephone on the wall. "Gold here." "James, it's Morton. You need to come to my office. Now." General Morton Chase—retired, now president of Illinois State University, but still carrying...
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  • The Keeper of Lost Souls
    The fog that night was the colour of bruised flesh, thick enough to swallow a man whole. I pulled my coat tighter and walked through the narrow alleys of Whitechapel, the cobblestones slick with rain and something darker. Seven years inside Newgate had taught me to read a city the way other men read books. Every shadow had meaning. Every sound told a story. The letter that had brought me to...
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  • The House on Blackwater Bayou
    The house sat on the edge of Blackwater Bayou like a woman who had inherited a fortune she did not want and could not refuse. It was large -- not mansion-large, but plantation-large, the kind of size that implied generations of people living under the same roof, eating at the same table, sharing the same secrets. The cypress trees surrounded it the way guards surround a king who has stopped...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    The Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks along Cypress Lane did not sway so much as it hung, like laundry left to dry on a line that had not been pulled in thirty years. Bell Thorne stood on the porch of the house that had been her family's for four generations and watched the rain fall in sheets that turned the dirt road into a river, and she thought about how water, left long enough, could...
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  • The Zero Sum Game
    ## Act I: The Outset The bunker was a concrete cube buried three hundred feet beneath the surface of a nameless desert. There were no windows, no clocks, and no names—only designations. Subject 42, formerly known as Julian, sat on a steel cot, staring at the flickering fluorescent light on the ceiling. He had been here for three years, part of a "behavioral study" on the effects of prolonged...
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  • The Edge of Knowing
    I. I woke in darkness. The water was at my waist and the walls were concrete and I did not know where I was. My name—no. I do not know my name. I know I am a doctor. A psychologist. I treat trauma. Post-traumatic stress. I sit in a chair and listen to people tell me about the things that broke them and then I try to put them back together. The water was cold. It moved slowly, like something...
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  • The Starlight Project
    Eleanor Vanderbilt did not believe in ghosts. She believed in ledgers, in property holdings, in the solid arithmetic of wealth. But when Nick Callahan described the man on Long Island—the man who claimed to have found a crack in the universe—she felt something she could not name settle in her chest. "Tell me again," she said. Nick shifted in his chair. The Vanderbilt drawing room was warm and...
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  • The Rust King
    (Act I: The Iron Grip) The town of Oakhaven did not breathe; it wheezed. The air was a thick soup of sulfur and oxidized iron, and the only thing that grew in the soil was resentment. Leo was a man of the assembly line, a cog in a machine that had stopped producing anything but misery. He lived in a trailer that smelled of damp cardboard and old grease, his days measured by the rhythmic thud of...
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  • The Gilded Cage of Reason
    The city of Aethelgard was a monument to the Enlightenment, a place where reason was the only currency and logic the only law. In Aethelgard, the "Academy of Pure Thought" governed every aspect of existence, from the architecture of the streets to the frequency of the citizens' heartbeats. To feel was to be inefficient; to love was to be irrational. Julian was the Academy's most celebrated...
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