There it was. Some of that tightly-wound tension in his back and shoulders eased. Salem had done this to himself, he guessed, by being the go-to meme guy when you needed one. He'd spent so long making sure nothing passed his lips that wasn't mummified in seven layers of irony, and he'd understood th...

The hysterical laughter almost came back. Salem felt it welling up, but it stuck in his throat. All that came out was a wheeze. "You really think everyone else dropped everything at the first hint, huh," he said, and his voice was bitter and wobbly in a way that he'd have absolutely died o...

A thin giggle, dancing on the verge of hysteria, escaped Salem. "Yeah," he said. "You just want to help. I know." He didn't lower the gun from his temple. She was so close to him, hands on his shoulders. As close as he had been to Shu in those last moments. "And you can't. Y...

"No," Salem said, frustrated into honesty. His arm was trembling too, from the pain and strain of injury and exhaustion. The end of the gun wavered. This was familiar, yes, but not the same. It hadn't been the same the last time they'd met in this church. That first moment, the first line ...

"Hit and a miss," Salem muttered as Julia pushed past, like he didn't pose any real obstacle at all. It was the brief moment of physical contact that really threw him off-balance. It was casual, unconcerned. The way you'd push past someone in the school hallway. It was the first time since...

"Do you actually care what I want?" Salem's tone wasn't accusatory, just curious. Her flippancy should have irritated him. She'd gotten a little too big for her boots since catching a pie to the face instead of a bullet. He thought about pulling the handgun from his coat pocket, but his li...

"Don't need to be like that?" Salem echoed. "Babe, I've always been like this." He let his hand drop to his side and closed his eyes. "Just like you've always been the way you are." Again and again they'd come back to this. Maybe Julia supposed that the third time was t...

It really felt like she should have been silhouetted against the setting sun, like the flare should have stayed hanging in the sky to provide ambient lighting. Julia, ascending the hill at whenever in the afternoon, with the echo of that call already faded, felt far too normal. Salem rose to his fee...

There. A red star on the horizon. “This is the Interpol Incident Response team and SEALs. Your collars should no longer be active and you are not being monitored. Please make your way to the beach as soon as possible. You're going home.” Salem stared, and he'd always considered religion a fairy tale...

((Salem Fox continued from the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream )) The cold was twice as miserable after the brief reprieve Salem had spent cocooned in the hot spring. The trek back to town was nothing to write home about compared to all of the others he'd made over the past several days, b...

Salem, are you awake? Get dressed. We’re going to the hos pit al ((Salem Fox continued from And the universe said 'I love you' )) He had known this was coming eventually. Salem was a logical person. He was intelligent and mature for his age; basically every parent-teacher conference since the dawn ...

Any satisfaction Salem might have felt as Beatrice toppled over was destroyed when her own bullet ripped through his arm, tearing a chunk out of his bicep. If he'd had time to prepare, he would have tried not to scream; as it was, his shriek echoed off the mountainside before finally getting swallow...

Maybe this was the closest thing Kai had ever had to a religious experience. He knew deep down. He knew what was coming next. But the light of the fire and smoke dancing on the water's surface reminded him bizarrely of the stained glass windows of a church for the few moments he had left. Maybe it w...

Salem had always been gifted with words, written and spoken. His retort to Beatrice reflected that. "Shut the fuck up, Jul-" He realized what he was saying in the middle of saying it and caught himself, but there was no real recovering from the slip. He covered for it instead with a burst ...

Salem's smile went brittle around the edges when Beatrice started up with the same kind of garbage that Julia had spouted at him. It faded from his face fully as she went on, until he was left staring up at her with a blank face. The wind whistled between them for several moments before he gathered ...