Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets -- a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faerytale creatures whisper strange tales to those wh...
It all started when I was eight years old, on a school trip to the Mausoleum. My mom was there to chaperon my class, and it was nice, because she held me when I got nauseous on the bus. I remember the cotton tights all the girls wore, and how they bunched on our knees and slid down, so that we ha...
SNYDERThe screech of a small child being tortured woke Lexa. At least, that was what her alarm sounded like at four in morning. I feel your pain, girlfriend, she muttered under her breath as she swatted the clock before her roommate could growl.Why? Why did I ever volunteer for the five a.m. shif...
He saw everything—always had, probably always would—but it didn’t do him or anyone else much good.Josh Tarnell assumed the knock at his front door at 8:30 pm was the pizza guy delivering his pepperoni deep pan: extra cheese, easy on the sauce. He threw a robe on over his boxer briefs and pulled t...
You know this because across the white panel at the bottom of the square image, that name is written. It doesn’t seem likely that Marie wrote it herself. This hand is sure and forward-slanting, the pressure so confident that the pen point has engraved the paper with its en-guarde “t.” Marie looks...
Each town I passed through was duller than the last, until I got to Budapest, which was considerably less exciting than Boise, Idaho, on a Tuesday afternoon.I passed by an old rundown arena that did double duty, hosting hockey games on weeknights and dog shows on Saturdays, then walked by the onl...
Jack seemed composed, but I felt certain it was playacting. Who could stay calm considering the terror of facing Dame Nightingale? I was afraid of her even before her letters had shown me a true depth of her passion — and I now knew of how much love and, conversely, hatred she was capable. Now I ...
He appeared to have gone to the market the day before, and she inhaled the smells of foods she could not consume—figs and pomegranates, fresh berries and coconut milk. She was satisfied with the smell alone.She thought that the figs—dark-red, almost purple—looked like tiny hearts, and the juice o...
Vimbai ran from one window to the next, clearing away either meat or succulent green tendrils that always grew across the panes when she was not watching, anxious for any sign of motion. But the waves masked whatever trail the house had been leaving, and she feared that they had stalled or the ro...
The whole world he sees is fallen like some Babylon torn down by bitmite builders, scoured by scarab seraphim. In the thick of flowing black, he can make out the ruin, the rubble, the jut of a skyscraper impossibly angled or the bulk of a new rookery grown out of long-abandoned docklands. A motor...
The great brass and enamel model of the heavens swept through its rotation with little ticks from within its base. Etched in gold and silver, the signs of the zodiac wrapped in a band so that, even in daylight, an astrologer could see where the planets lay. Lit by the sun streaming in through the...