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Even though the hunters had been doing their work for twenty-five years, since the turn of the millennium, not every poor, dead thing in the world had been snuffed out the way some thought ghosts should be.

We sat at the table and started eating as fast as the boys racing makeshift bum boards down the road during the Tablas de San Andrés festival. Except there was nothing at the bottom to cushion our fall.

Worst part is, there’s a good chance that you’ll get used to the constant pain just as the chemicals stop working their magic. Anyway, yeah, I had to stop. Three months was all I could take. I looked at my nipples, and somehow convinced myself that they were going to stay like that. Like, what if I was the exception, the only person on earth who co

No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and estate agents sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.

One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated t

And before Kay can think about how he’s going to kill it, the dragon leaps upwards, beating the smoke down with its wings. With a few good strokes it’s high in the air, trailing its long body behind it, rising on the column of heat from the burning tower. And then it’s gone, high above the smoke. Far too high for him to see where it is going. ‘What

A cornered animal will turn around and bite. The three of them knew immediately what had cornered Professor Jung. It was the power of civilization, an invisible power. The force that makes you offer up your things to be stolen, without the powerful needing to threaten or order. The magic that makes you destroy political enemies and muzzle detractor

‘I’m not a hero. I’m not like Kay.’ ‘I reckon that might be where we went wrong the first time,’ says the child, ‘creating heroes. Reckon we should have trusted normal people to guard the gate in the first place. Reckon that’s what we should do now.’

The need to justify and its sister frailty, the need to boast, were lethal weaknesses in SOE,