“I said, ‘If the birds had such kinship that when one of them died, so did the other one, then what did the second firebird lose? Is there a third thing in this world, at least as powerful as Life and Death?’ ” Smithy sighed and rolled his eyes. “I know where this one’s going.” Mara paid no attention to him. She waved at him to hush. “What was it?”

She retraced the same route she and Sam had taken just that morning when the world seemed soft-focused and filled with possibility. The path now seemed dismal and dangerous to her. And she thought to herself that it was strange how quickly the world could shift.

Clingstone’s gaze turned inward, and more gently she said, “It never occurs to people that maybe I’d like to be the reckless one. The disrupter! As the years have passed, I have discovered in myself this . . . energy. Is it anger? A touch of spite? I’m not sure.” She looked back toward the restaurant. The beans on their strings were rippling on a b

He knew it would make no sense to his wife, and having the pages out of his hands made him feel like he’d lost part of himself. Days went by without Julia mentioning the book, and she seemed to go to great effort not to meet his eyes. The fog that had arrived with William’s injury returned to his peripheral vision, like cloud cover circling a mount