Tempest Rising

But the next noise to echo through the hall was one I was pretty sure I recognized. It was the unmistakable sound of the shit hitting the fan.

She liked a very particular kind of plot: the sort where the pirate kidnaps some virgin damsel, rapes her into loving him, and then dispatches lots of seamen while she polishes his cutlass. Or where the Highland clan leader kidnaps some virginal English Rose, rapes her into loving him, and then kills entire armies Sassenachs while she stuffs his haggis. Or where the Native American warrior kidnaps a virginal white settler, rapes her into loving him, and then kills a bunch of colonists while she whets his tomahawk. I hated to get Freudian on Linda, but her reading patterns suggested some interesting insight into why she is such a bitch.

I'd just met a talking garden gnome and the nightmare version of My Little Pony.

I wasn't running now so much as stumbling quickly, panting like a geriatric lion.

Did you just wipe your nose on me?" he asked, finally.

People are heavy when they're dead. I also nearly ralphed every time I caught a glimpse of the skin flap flapping, and I'd seen enough CSI to know that my stomach contents could be used to link me to the site.

He chose to eat his tart off my thighs, which I think we both enjoyed.

I'd managed to snatch a few more hours of rest, which was all I needed, so I felt fine despite our marathon evening of debauchery.

So, once again, I ignored my poor, repressed libido--which was currently clamoring for me to lure Ryu behind the counter and knock him out with an unabridged dictionary in order to make him mine--and went ahead and started in on what he wanted to know.

Your mother and I had a child because we wanted to share our love with someone, not because we wanted a nurse to take care of us in our old age.

Who tries? You try, your dad tries, average people try. And for their attempts at goodness, average people are mugged by strangers, molested by predatory uncles, massacred by their own governments.

I never meant that," [Anyan] said, eventually. "I've never thought you were pathetic and I don't consider you half of anything." His voice was sad, the tone familiar yet unidentifiable that I wanted to scream. "You're Jane," he concluded, "and that's enough." He looked over at me, his face shadowed but his eyes still visible.