stillsostrange

Austin peeps! I'll be at Elysium tomorrow night for my birthday! Come hang out!

And now the first line meme, since everyone else is doing it, and I am nothing if not ovine. Not that it makes any difference, since I'm in serious committed book relationships for another year.

Novels:

The Bone Palace

That summer, pestilence stalked Erisín on bronze wings. In a city named for the Saint of Death, built on the bones of its founders, no street was too rich or too humble for black-lipped Erishal when she sought new souls for her retinue. But this plague came from the south, borne in a merchant ship that slipped through a lax quarantine. Now it droned above the streets in clouds of midges, and spread below from the bites of fleas.

That afternoon, it stalked the palace.

Kingdoms of Dust

He was dreaming when they came for him.

(This is almost certainly not the real first line, but I have a scene I hope to repurpose, and it consoles me to pretend I have a start for the book)

Dreams of Shreds & Tatters

Halloween night, and parties staggered down Granville Street--clubs full of sequins and feathers, costumes and paint and masks. People dressed in shiny new skins, searching for opportunities to shed them. Groping hands and sticky candy kisses, tricks and treats in darkened corners.

Mist & Chill

The Terminal is a dive on its best day.

Even in the lands of flesh it's a dump, a ratty narrow brick and cement place with a single pool table and a cheap precarious stage in the back to hold cheap precarious bands who can't find anyplace better to play. Shitty sound system and shittier plumbing, flickering arrhythmic lights. Fliers plaster the walls, some decades out of date, bands and DJs no one's heard of fading and crumbling and drifting like dead leaves.

(totally not happy with that one)

Prayers to Broken Stone

Springtime in Paris, the cruelest month come and gone, but storms still linger. Tonight rain washes the city, speeding the Seine in its rush to the sea. In the Left Bank, it pours from the gutters and drips from curling wrought iron balconies to splash against the cobbles below. Moisture darkens white walls, new paint and plaster over centuries-old bones. Pigeons sleep beneath the eaves, fat on café crumbs, violet-grey wings folded tight against the chill. And in her apartment on the rue du Dragon, Holly sits beside an open window and watches the rain.

Pinion

Lilah runs and darkness follows.

Branches and briars tear her, rip skin and skirts, and sap clings sticky as blood in her hair. A familiar path, one she's followed unthinking day or night more times than she can count. But now fear blinds her, turns Ogilvie Park's winding trails into a too-dark nightmare maze.

Spiral

The sky hangs dark and swollen overhead, scraping its belly over the spires of Prague. Bianca pauses to wipe her boots on the mat, groceries balanced on her hip. The rain has slacked, of course, now that they've reached the apartment. Water trickles through her hair, warm by the time it drips down her neck and under her collar. She really should buy an umbrella.

The YA novel that will not be called The Night Garden

The bombs fell again that night.

Mad Max Beyond Ragnarok

The stallion came with the dawn, and the rising sun flung his shadow before him over the cracked and dusty ground.

Short Stories:

"Music From a Farther Room"

Alex found his wife waiting on the threshold, at the divide between memory and dream. He was used to finding her here, one of the many memory-ghosts to haunt these halls. But this was different. The door she stood in was one he couldn't cross.

"Bone Garden"

They found the girl unconscious on the back doorstep an hour before dawn.

Nothing unusual, someone passed out in this neighborhood, but she looked too tattered and threadbare for the usual clientele, or for the sort who might linger behind a theatre after a show. Gentian scanned the empty street behind them: shops closed, windows shuttered against the cold, frost-slick cobbles glazed with lamplight. Drunken laughter and voices carried from the next block, but the alley behind the Rhodon was silent.

"Flood"

Nan doesn't mean to fall asleep--she never does. But Evie's soft breath and the steady creak of the ceiling fan lull her, till her eyes sag and the worn paperback slides from her fingers.

"Teneral"

"Take off your mask," the arachne tells me.

"Needlepoint"

You wake crumpled on the floor, legs folded awkwardly and one arm twisted behind your back. The room is dark and still, except for the green blink of the timer behind your right eyelid.

"Red Is the Color"

I wake with the taste of storms in my mouth and screams echoing down the hall. Slow and dream-sticky, and for a second I don't know where I am, but I'm still on my feet with my gun in my hand before my eyes are all the way open.

"Serpentskirt"

All Souls Night and the gutters still brim with shed Hallows skin. Broken glass crunches under Jane's boots as she carries an amp to the van, glittering beside limp feathers and cracked sequins, tattered black and orange fliers. One hell of a party, she heard--Sixth Street is still subdued and sleepy. But even for the day after Halloween and a Monday to boot, the crowd is still better than last night's in Dallas.

"Snakebit"

The horses are restless.

The sound of snorts and hooves tangles through Lanie's nightmares, familiar dreams of fire and smoke. She wakes with a start, sweat sticky on her neck and back. Beside her, Merle stirs with a muffled curse as one of the horses whinnies.

"Waiting For the Train"

When it's raining here, you hear the trains. You can hear them other times too, with the tracks so close, but the dusty heat of summer bakes the sound out of the air, till it gets buried under cars and trucks and TVs and voices and all the other small-town noises. But when the rain comes, and the trains come, the whistles carry all over, low and mournful and rumbling in my chest.

I miss short stories...