Catori ran through the woods, her arms and legs pumping as hard as her sixteen-year-old muscles could move. She could hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears, and her lungs burned with the effort to suck in more air. …

Piotr Kowalczyk lived by a simple mantra, “Sweep and live.” He was an old man, nearly sixty-five, in July 1943 when the Nazis had rounded up all two hundred and thirty-five people in his small village of Michniów and executed all but the two dozen or so who were sent…

Reed gripped the Mossberg shotgun in his hand as he quickly moved through the brush. A cruel smile crossed his lips as he heard the nearby whimpering and snarling that signaled he had caught a wolf in his trap. …

Katerina turned her head to hide her tears in the straw-filled pillow as she clutched her favorite doll, Sarah, close to her chest. She always tried to be brave for her parents and older sister when they hid in the cellar. …

Ruadan reigned in the horse and brought the cart to a halt as he looked out over the sea. The small island of Ynys Lannog was a dark shadow in the water on this moonlight night. A gentle, salty breeze blew off the water and made his beard flutter against…

The man had begun to hear the drumming three weeks earlier. Until that moment, he had to admit; things had not been going his way in the fourteen months since he ended his service as a US Army Ranger. …

Aelwyn leaned heavily on his birch staff, running his hand over the crude carving of a crow’s skull as he watched the muscular warrior run up the wooded path of the hilltop. Cawrdaf and the two young warriors running behind him held swords glinting brightly in the moonlight. …

Chrysame did not remember the day she was born in Thessaly, but she had heard the story often enough from her mother. She had been born on the night of a full moon, and as she came into this world, her mother said the torches in the room flickered, and…

A cold wind blew down from the icy peaks of Mount Tahoma, fourteen thousand feet above the rocky riverbed, as the black bear stepped slowly from the forest. The bear stopped to look at the brightly shining full moon that illuminated the clear December sky. …