He watched the audience on his monitors, anticipating their response to Ava’s idea to beautify the Outsider. He predicted it would elicit a thunderous response from the crowd. He was impressed with her ingenuity and looked forward to getting to know her. He checked the time—they were already two ...
Grace looked at the council members, hoping to find at least one ally in the group. She felt a growing concern about President Jordan’s apathy. He had barely acknowledged her presence. Faraday stepped closer to the trial box. “Do you have anything to say, Miss Strader?” &n...
The determined scamp had finally reached his limit on the rejection meter. The one-sided love affair started twelve years earlier on the first day of kindergarten, when Mona, the redheaded firecracker, took his bag of apple slices and ran around the playground taunting him. Throughout elementary ...
Only fifteen years old, yet her eyes are weary and worn. My dear Lillian. She’s seen things, way too many things for someone her age. How am I supposed to tell her that everything’s going to be okay when it’s so far from it? Nothing is okay––not if we stay here in Los Angeles. We need to get out ...
But that’s where I was on that dreary summer day––the day everything changed. Crow and I were playing a heated game of dominoes on one of the sticky bar tables in the back of the dank hole. Crow only went by his last name. I say the game was heated not because of the competition, but for the sexu...
But it was the end of the world and sometimes that was how these things went. Ransom was a sixty-three-year-old retired farmer, living in a secluded spot in the woods somewhere in Lake County. He wasn’t retired by choice––the workhorse was no quitter––he had lost his Ohio dairy farm when the big...
We didn’t know it was the last time we’d meet there, or the last real cigarettes we’d smoke together. We just knew it was the first day of summer break, and the first year none of us had summer school. We wanted to commemorate the occasion. With the Repatterning in effect, we didn’t have too much...
The entire place was empty because Rocco had told them we had police business. We stood near the round bar in the center of the elegant room and waited. I stared up at the stained-glass dome, clearing my head while Rocco and Julian chatted quietly.When Lucius Diamond entered restaurant at 6 a.m.,...