The roar of the crowd began to grow. He heard them harmoniously stomping their feet in a rhythm that cried out for battle. Gabe glanced across the arena to several cages that were shielded by large cloaks. Whatever was inside was clearly becoming agi...
People spend half of their free time drinking alcohol and the other half watching totally sober people on television. And they want to be those people, live those lives. Ever wondered why we rarely see a person actually drinking alcohol on television...
Here’s to a tasty lunch,” she says, winking at me. It’s the strangest thing, but I actually feel my body respond to her. Beneath their lace prison, my nipples harden and send a jolt of arousal across my midriff and down to my thighs. I take a l...
Where's Magnus?" he said. AS he looked toward the kitchen, Clary saw a bruise on his jaw, below his ear, about the size of a thumbprint. "Alec!" Magnus came skidding into the living room and blew a kiss to his boyfriend across the room. Having discar...
During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm—soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain—like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds s...
Well, well, well. Tickle my Elmo ass silly. I was sitting across from a person who enjoyed talking to dead people, and if they wouldn’t talk, then by God, he’d just wake their corpses up instead. Next to him was a moody, chain-smoking vampire who...
Skulduggery stood among the ruins of what had once been a sofa. Valkyrie raised an eyebrow. 'I was trying to make up the sofa bed so you could get some rest,' he explained, and pointed to the second sofa across the room. 'Unfortunately, it would appe...
I start to cross the street, stop, turn back. "You are not what I thought." He smiles. A devastatingly beautiful smile. I race across the street to my apartment building, to home, to safety. Because that smile scares me for reasons I can't explain. I...
I started to walk away, but she [Clarisse] called out, "Percy?" "Yeah?" "When you, uh, had that vision about your friends..." "You were one of them," I promised, "Just don't tell anybody, okay? Or I'de have to kill you." A faint smile flickered acros...
Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, acros...
He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't ...
It's amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my pa...
It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long perio...
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, ...
The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistin...
Most intellectual training focuses on analytical skills. Whether in literary criticism or scientific investigation, the academic mind is best at taking things apart. The complementary arts of integration are far less well developed. This problem is a...
I swallowed hard, a hot flush blazing a trail across my skin. Reminded me of that old television show, Bonanza. You know, the one with the burning map and the lively western tune? Yeah, my skin was that map, but the song blaring in my head leaned mor...
She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hop...
The image of him shifted with the violent frenzy of leaves. He was there and he wasn’t, as the leaves whipped and the lightning fell away in a slow strobe effect across the expanse of sky. How he had gotten up there, I had no idea, but he had been ...
Here… our failures are known to every Tom Dick and Harry while our successes fall only on deaf ears. It’s death, hostile civilians, greedy politicians, and more death, and forget about love. You could be here now and across the world in 11 minute...
This was the kind of guy who should be someone's first love. Someone who brought you flowers and refilled your water glass without your having to ask. Someone who watched you across the crowded rooms just to make sure you were okay. Someone who loved...
