'oh fuck', was charitably the only thing going through XXXXXX's head as he watched the body of his girlfriend drop to the pavement, as the rain mixed with the blood, a single bolt of lightning howled it's mournfull wail across a dark and cloudy sky.

When he first laid eyes on her, a thousand memories sprang from the depths of his soul; dying in her arms, killing her, watching her dance in the arms of so many other men who were somehow all the same--but above all, he recalled the curse, and the fact that though her face and hair and height and hands changed, her eyes were always blue, and they never recognized him.

The light from the single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling stabbed him awake.

A normal cop would have been on the talkie asking for backup. Boomer hated backup. He felt it lessened the odds in his favor.

Rain awoke to the usual morning sounds - specifically, the kettle shrieking and Nieva shrieking just as loudly.

The town of Daelnao was a town of happenings that could not be explained, a area of a higher death rate than most, and a place that seemed to find fear in every dark shadow once the night came.

The long tapers flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in the chamber.

Richard Black threw down the letter he had been holding, and swore loudly. "Damn!"

"The queen dies!!" the ancient midwife shouted, and Irguth, king and a bear of a man burst into the bed chambers, knocking a maid to the floor in his effort to make it to the bed, his slender wife's hands knotted in the sheets with pain.

Four cardinals, a rabbi, a Masonic admiral, and a trio of insignificant politicians acting for an Anglo-Saxon corporation brought word to our population, by radio and by billboards, that starvation was a solid possibility.

The forest is silent, waiting, hushed beneath the illuminating orb of a full silver moon and the scudding gray of clouds across the panorama of star-studded sky. Silent, and motionless, except for the occasional sonar squeal of swooping bats safe in the breezy air, except for the shadowed forms of wolves ghosting silent over the leaf-carpeted earth.

From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed.

Silence. Not the heavy silence that causes those within it to think they are absolutely alone, but the kind that is filled with sounds, with the rustling of leaves, with the sound of the wind.

Even in the dark, blood had a completely different feel to it than anything else.