When a gift is a warning — If Mina had knelt at any other gravestone, she would have missed the locket. She was working on restoring the moss-covered tombstone of Adeline Coombs. The locket lay wedged in the grass at the base of the monument, its gold chain glinting in the late afternoon sun. She eased it…

Our pain makes us who we are — I couldn’t put it off any longer. I would have to tell him the truth. That morning, while my android assistant, Arnie, ran through his usual cleaning routine, he found the dog toy under the bed. I thought he’d make the connection. Instead, his carefully composed face stayed in the…

By the time Charon realized someone had taken his rowboat, there were twenty-two souls stacked on the banks of the River Styx. “You’ll have to ferry them over somehow,” Hades, his boss, commanded. “We can’t have them backing up like that. Don’t want folks to get the wrong idea about…

Fences can’t hide all their secrets — I’ve heard it said that good fences make good neighbors. If that’s true, I suppose the opposite must be as well. Bad fences make for bad neighbors. The guy who moved in next to Miss Dianna wasted no time putting up a fence. It was chain link, cobbled together from…

There’s nothing as dangerous as a lover betrayed — There are five ways to tell if your boyfriend is a vampire. I can think of only three ways to tell if he’s cheating on you. First, he starts keeping secrets from you. I can’t always tell when Derrick’s lying, but I try to keep my eyes open. …

The day before her twentieth wedding anniversary, Doreen Clark traveled alone to the Excelsior Hotel, where ghosts were rumored to roam the halls. …

The stage is forever — The way it started, I just wanted someone to like me. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be more than that weird kid who lived with his grandmother above an abandoned movie theater. When people looked at me, they saw a scrawny boy with shaggy brown hair whose…

We don’t always see the evil inside — They picked up the hitchhiker outside Salado, Texas. Twelve-year-old Kenny, his head hanging out the window like a dog’s, was the first to spot the blind man. He stood on the gravel embankment at the edge of the highway, nothing around him — no gas stations, no fast-food places, no…

On the first anniversary of her daughter’s death, Ginny Stroud drove to the sea. In her late thirties, Ginny had dark brown hair that she kept clipped close to her scalp, like a young boy’s. A thick scar, twisted and rose-pink, traced from her scalp down the side of her…