Border, KS

The woman looked young; her hair had the kind of fineness that one associates with youth. It was like corn silk, and it looked like it wanted to float on the light breeze that was breathing against them. For a long moment Walter didn’t know whether or not to point his gun at this random […]

Reverend Morrison’s cabin was about thirty minutes outside of town, in to some of the small hills in the surrounding farm country. Until he’d moved here, Walter wouldn’t have assumed there were any hilly places in Kansas—it had the reputation for being scientifically flatter than a pancake, after all. But as it approached the borders […]

The conference room at the Border PD station had slowly taken on the characteristics of a war room over the weekend. Or perhaps the famed Situation Room at the White House, although Walter had never actually seen it except in movies and television. A map lined one wall with pins in it showing the locations […]

Walter stepped back in to the same conference room where they had started this whole thing. It seemed like it had been twenty years ago that Ashland showed up, although he knew that it hadn’t been. Before the press conference he had managed to get in to the green dress uniform he kept in his […]

“The hell I am,” Walter responded immediately, looking to Leah to see if it was a particularly odd joke. The rest of the room was deathly silent, as befit their circumstances. Antigone and Siobhan were looking at him with owlishly large eyes, and he had to shrug at them. Leah walked over to him and […]

“Glad to see the hospital hasn’t changed in a couple of hours,” Walter grunted to himself as he pushed in through the door. The call had come in over the radio while they were driving, that the Marshal had been taken to Border General and that he was in critical condition. They had promptly done […]

Somebody had once told William that grenades were nothing to be afraid of. “Just a little bit of heat and light.” He hadn’t been afraid of them—he’d just had a healthy caution born of war movies and the fact that they were literally designed to blow people up. Of course trying to explain that respect […]

Walter lost track of how many different fights he had been in. It was possible that he had never been in so many different fights in one day, let alone in a few hours, at any point in his life. 32nd and Main had turned in to the West District Police building, which had turned […]

“Does your mere presence make Vampires flee?” Walter asked as the closet door closed behind them. He knew he would only have a few seconds, so he asked the first question on his mind. “And where are we going?” Morgan shot him a look and a little bit of a grin. “Of course it does—I’m […]

Chapter 10: Battlefields A fight, a battle, has a flow to it. Not just a momentum in the sense of one person having the upper hand, but an ebb and flow to it. Half of being successful in battles, Walter knew, was following that ebb and flow and knowing how to take advantage of it. […]