The garrote was made of fine silk laced with steel wire, designed to choke bloodlessly.  Its ends were looped to small grips of cherry wood.  Otranto had crafted it himself over a period of three weeks, designing for speed and efficacy.  Still, the target was thrashing hard enough that the smooth handles were biting his palms.  He drew harder.

We pass the last of those who have preceded us, those who crossed into the warped, rippling landscape without the benefit of protective magic. Father stops to examine a grotesquely deformed skeleton. The bleached bones are twisted and swollen; the skull cave-like. Of necessity, I halt too, but I already know this poor warped cadaver is neither Mother nor my sister.

Seven subjects, Ethan thought. One of them a child. All of them physically torn into two distinct beings: a functional husk, and an abomination. He had read the doctor's journal. The subjects had come from different families, different boroughs, different backgrounds. None of them had known any of the others. All of them Raah?

Rosco guessed he’d have to handle the situation, what with the sheriff being away down the Mile and all. He stepped out into the main road that ran down the middle of Gutshank, population one-hundred-fifty-three, and rested a hand on the pearly handle of his revolver. Tried to look mean, like his Pappy would’ve done.

Once home, I cannot stop thinking about two things: the bird and the poster. I am not sure which one disturbs me more. I don't tell anyone, not even Gordon. He doesn't speak to me of what we saw either, but there is still a conversation there, every time we look at each other. In his eyes I see the same thing that must linger in mine. Questions and hurts. Have we been made only to be sold?

The dispensary was so organized it made my skin creep. Give me a hovel little better than a roofed-over hole and a crone with teeth as black as night. She’d hardly care what you bought or why; might even give you more if you spoke straight to her. No one likes a liar, but life forces you to it.

Parry cursed, volubly, inventively, the words triply profane between those lips; Rusk leant forward and watched, fascinated, as he strained to summon magic from his pores, sweating it out like blood while continuing to damn Rusk at every turn. It crept along every limb, polishing his sickness away, burnishing him 'til he gleamed like metal heated too high to touch.

He always let me lay down on his back as he walked, or sink my hands into his fur. I missed this when I lost him, more than the nights he would come right into my bed, with the bare body of a man. Those were slick and tender nights, nights of human lust and comfort and skin. But when he let me up on his back and took me to his berry patches—blackberry, thimbleberry, salmonberry, huckle and elder and mora—those afternoons I still long for. To be held by a bear—this made me feel as though I might belong.

"Good work, men! Aside, now, Who-else." Benny assumed Who-else's place at the apparatus, which the first-year gratefully surrendered. Benny pressed his upper teeth into his lower lip and pressed the ivory on-and-off switch. Though he did not betray his fears, all four present of the quint held their breaths.

Adda looked up and down the snowy lane, but Grandma Marit had already disappeared into the darkness. The only movement came from flickers of firelight sneaking out of neighbors' windows. The darkness groaned in annoyance at the tittering flickers, who flitted up and down the sides of the box-like wooden homes. The flickers skipped over the ground and tickled Adda's feet, even through her heavy boots.

Masaru peered past the struts and wires between his biplane's wings, trying to take the sight in. The tower's base was a madman's helter-skelter ziggurat, made of impossible stone blocks the size of townhouses, that cut a swath across the city's snow-covered grid of tenement blocks and terraces. From the ziggurat’s peak, the ragged-toothed tower reached up to a dark stain of cloud fixed in the sky directly above.

"Stolen," the General hissed. "Stolen!" he shouted, enraged. "It was Easric Dane, I know it! Upon my soul, it must have been he!" Not only was it awful, but Pearl couldn't possibly be suggesting there was any truth to it. Earsic thought of drowning the book in the river. But Pearl Snow had a wicked pack of cards. They brooked none of Easric's sass and weren't lightly ignored.

No. 17596 let the book fall out of his hands. It would tell him what? It would tell him that the world went on—that somewhere, out there, men and women were carrying on their affairs while he sat alone in his cell, sentenced to ruminate in silence and isolation.

Suddenly a horrible sense of disjunction came over her—looking around the sunny dining room, she seemed to see with a strange doubled sight the wreckage beneath: a thick layer of dust, shattered tables lying on their sides, broken windows, gaping holes in the walls, the beautiful rosewood sideboard wrecked, with its doors hanging off and its mirror cracked—

As Knowe hikes fast over the plain and down the heather-thick slope to the farms spread out along the low lands, she almost laughs thinking: of course a ghost is the first person to want her singing.

Her fingers dance in swoops and waves, cutting runes into the powder.  It's odd to see.  Hands usually draw with inks or chalk.  Powder and silver-tipped slippers are for simple gestures in duels, when there is no time to stoop and paint.  With my warped foot, dueling is an impossibility, but I have seen her practice countless times.

The neighborhood was dark and insalubrious; if it had not been for the sake of Professor Haversham's scientific endeavors I would never have ventured into its foul-smelling streets in the daytime, far less at night. He, however, appeared to have no such misgivings but looked about him with interest. "Now to find a public house of suitable character," he said. "Not too difficult in this area, I should think."

"I don't rightly care where he came from—he's one more person to keep watch on." Gwen nudged Corwyn toward the stairs that led belowdecks. Her voice was dark as she added, quietly, "I am not fond of new wrinkles on a job."