I looked at Harmony. Harmony looked at Gary. She knew he’d overreached and blown it. So did Lars. Only Gary himself was too dumb to figure it out. I cleared my throat.
I liked my old place, a rehabbed motel room in the shadow of the Vegas strip. Really felt like home—until a psycho half-demon pitched a Molotov cocktail through my window.
I felt like the sheriff in an old Western, gearing up for a showdown at high noon, only to find out the black-hat outlaw accidentally fell off his horse and died from a concussion on his way to the gu...
I explained Crime 101 to the kid. Guns escalate things. They’re only good for crowd control. We’re going in after closing hours, so we don’t need crowd control. Yeah, Augie said, but what about securi...
I could imagine I was on a college campus, if it weren’t for the fences, the gun towers, and the razor wire.
His eyes bulged. How the hell…who are you people? She’s the right hand of a demon prince, I told him, and I’m her boyfriend. Probably should have found that out before you blasted me with a fire hose,...
Hey, Nadine? I said. She glanced my way. I normally have strong objections to hitting a woman, I said, but if you talk to my girlfriend like that again, I could see myself getting over it real fast.
He was a rogue agent, acting without my prince’s sanction. Also, we wrote a letter of apology. Don’t know what else you want from us. That’s funny, I said. I didn’t get one. Did you send it to my old...
Can he? Margaux said. I shrugged. He wouldn’t be the first racket boss to get taken down in Vegas, not by a long shot, but he’s got access to the kind of resources no human gangster could dream of. Bu...
A woman dressed for tennis and clutching a digital camera did a double take, looking at the suited thugs and then at me as if wondering if she’d seen me on television. No, no, they’re not my bodyguard...
You must understand, Mr. Faust, that this is not the only world that exists. Like the petals of a snowflake, other dimensions weave and lace around our own, sometimes touching our planet, sometimes vi...
You can’t take a life—good or bad, whether they’ve got it coming or not—you can’t take a life without burning out a little of the light in your heart. And you’ve only got so much light.
Whatever you did, man, you laid her to rest. I didn’t lay Stacy’s soul to rest. I sent her to hell. It wasn’t my finest hour.
We believe in keeping up with the times, she said. It’s not all backward Latin and slaughtered goats.
There’s no council of wizened wizards overseeing the world of magic, no hidden academies where bright-eyed and precocious youths learn the secrets of the unknown. What we do have is a collective desir...
Rare. Rare as pirate gold. Just wave a candle in its general direction.
It wasn’t…it wasn’t anything personal, he finally said. Funny, I told him. When somebody tries to screw somebody else over and fails hard? That’s always the first thing out of their mouth. ‘It was onl...
If I was bound for hell, I’d drag her down with me.
I realize you’re a politician, so this is a new concept for you. ‘Cooperating’ means actually doing what you’re supposed to, not just saying you will and then weaseling out.
I knew a junkie when I saw one, and this guy was a long-term member of the heroin weight-loss program.