I will not fail.
The words burned like a thousand suns in Zolin’s mind as he knelt on the cold stone floor of the priest house.
It had been a long five days. Zolin was exhausted. Blood trickled down his neck from the piercings in his earlobes. He glanced around at the ash-smeared faces of his fellow priests. A few men met his eyes. Some whispered prayers underneath their breath. Most ignored him. Zolin recited his mantra in the privacy of his own skull.
“I’m so drunk,” Ross says, a smile spreading across his thin lips at the same speed at which his orange-yellow eyes are sliding shut. They’re nearly amber, but I think they’re too saturated with color for that. I only manage to look away once those eyes are pleasantly closed, focusing my gaze on the floor between my feet.
When I was fourteen we moved to the middle of nowhere, Maryland. My mother committed suicide about a year earlier; I was the one to find her. Add in my affinity with ghosts… I couldn’t stay there. I took to spending more nights at friends’ houses than at my own by the time we moved.
It all started when the guy walked into Chris’s bakery.
It was a Saturday morning — Saturdays were always busy and exhausting, but Chris liked them because the customers were lazy and in a good mood, all about the fancy drinks and decadent sweets. Chris thought that life was good as long as you had some decadence in your food.
After Chris had spent five straight hours preparing cherry pie and molten chocolate cakes and obsessing over his bread crust, Nick had thrown him out of his own kitchen and ordered him to have some coffee and to stop driving her mad. Chris thought –yet again– that he should fire her, but then he would actually drive himself crazy from too much work, and also he could swear her scones were magic.
Mom stands in the doorway with her coat half on. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”
We have been over this a dozen times since she and Dad decided to take Jared to dinner and a movie, and maybe ice cream afterward for his birthday. Connor steps out of the kitchen. His long, blond hair is up in one of those butterfly clamp things, showing off his delicious neck. He rolls his eyes at me like he can read my mind. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Mom,” that’s what she wants him to call her even though she is my mother. “Thank you so much for allowing Reid and me this time together. We haven’t been alone since before the holidays.”
Morning’s Porridge, Whistlecakes, The Pauper’s Dream, The Virgin’s Dream, Fig Sweets
Gilfaethwy had once assured him, with the bright-eyed sincerity of unshaken faith, that his people’s Goddess amply rewarded honest men.
Lately, Aenfrith was almost inclined to believe him. Because if there was any justice in the world, someone needed to reward honest men for going to all the trouble, and nothing mortal had ever bothered to do so.
The only thing that earned him so much as a pat on the head from his Imperial masters were as many not-quite-lies as he could spin right along the knife-edge of falling over into falsehood. Gilfaethwy believed in him so purely and unreservedly that he couldn’t bring himself to wound him with the crueler truths. His twin Gwion wouldn’t trust anyone who was bedding his brother even if the heavens opened up and buried them in an avalanche of holy white rose petals. Eathlwine took everything, true or false, with the same dry skepticism.
Cocktail: Honeydew Basil Mojito, Appetizer: Honey-Garlic Asparagus, Farfalle with Asparagus, Sugar Snap Peas, Lemon, and Parmesan, Dessert: Chocolate-Dipped Bacon Roses
The last day Stacey walked into Jules’ workshop with bags under his eyes and a new tattoo was simultaneously the best and the worst day of Garrett’s life.
“Oh, honey,” said Cory, who knew the signs by now. She put down the potato cannon blueprint she’d been sketching and gave him a big hug, standing on her tip-toes so her arms got all the way around his neck. “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself.”
“Looks like she’s stopping it for me,” Stacey sighed, patting Cory’s back. “She’s getting married next month. But hey, look, testosterone!” He unzipped his pants.
The men walk into the pill house, and for a moment nobody notices them. They’re just two more bodies in a place where everyone’s eager to look the other way. If they’re too well-dressed, with their pinstriped jackets over navy silk changshan and feathered fedoras, well, a lot of people here like to look like money whether they are or not.
A pill pusher nearly collides with the smaller of the two men, jostling the black case he is carrying. She starts to laugh and apologize before she recognizes the emerald-green kerchief tucked into the front pocket of the man’s jacket. Her eyes widen. She seems caught between a shriek and an apology. As if in compromise, she manages the latter in a rising tone of voice. “S-sir– I’m sorry, sir, can I help you with something?”
A century earlier, everyone in the vicinity would have ducked and run for cover the moment Pierce Jouel’s horse clip-clopped its way into town; as it was, they all just hushed as the thirty-foot RV with Ontario plates came to rest in its designated parking spot, and a low murmur went up through the crowd that someone ought to tell Benjy Murchoe who’d just pulled in.
There wasn’t much to do in that part of West Texas, even when an international chili championship was in town, and so watching Pierce and Benjy go at it had become something of a spectator sport among Terlingua regulars, predictable enough that some had even started to joke years back — well out of Benjy’s earshot, of course — that the organizing committee put it on the event’s official program: Mouth-Off, Tuesday, 2PM (Or Whenever Pierce Gets Here). A few of the jokers had even gone so far as to tell Elmyra, Benjy’s wife, who had laughed herself nearly sick over it and then made them all swear up and down not to point it out to him, lest her husband become self-conscious and deprive them all of the annual event’s main entertainment.
