Blood Pact Quotes

The moments that define lives aren't always obvious. They don't scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there's no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren't always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. "I'll go first.

The moments that define lives aren't always obvious. They don't always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there's no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren't always protracted, heavy with meaning.

With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

I command the Cike.” Chaghan looked sideways at her. His expression was grim. “You are going to paint the world in Altan’s blood, aren’t you?” “I’m going to find and kill everyone responsible,” said Rin. “You cannot stop me.” Chaghan laughed a dry, cutting laugh. “Oh, I’m not going to stop you.” He held out his hand. She grasped it, and the drowned land and the ash-choked sky bore witness to the pact between Seer and Speerly.

This wasn’t what she expected. Never, in her wildest dreams. This... this was the Blood Queen of Garbhán Isle? Scourge of the Madron lands? Destroyer of Villages? Demon Killer of Women and Children? She who had blood pacts with the darkest of gods? This was Annwyl the Bloody? Talaith watched, fascinated, as Annwyl held onto Morfyd the Witch’s wrists. Morfyd — the Black Witch of Despair, Killer of the Innocent, Annihilator of Souls, and all around Mad Witch of Garbhán Isle or so she was called on the Madron lands — had actually tried to sneak up on Annwyl to put ointment on the nasty wound the queen had across her face. But as soon as the warrior saw her, she squealed and grabbed hold of her. Now Annwyl lay on her back, Morfyd over her, trying her best to get Annwyl to stop being a ten year old. “If you just let me—” “No! Get that centaur shit away from me, you demon bitch!” “Annwyl, I’m not letting you go home to my brother looking like that. You look horrific.” “He’ll have to love me in spite of it. Now get off!” ... “Ow!” “Crybaby.” No, this isn’t what Talaith expected. Annwyl the Blood Queen was supposed to be a vicious, uncaring warrior bent on revenge and power. She let her elite guard rape and and pillage wherever they went, and she used babies as target practice while their mothers watched in horror. That’s what she was supposed to be and that’s what Talaith expected to find. Instead, she found Annwyl. Just Annwyl. A warrior who spent most of her resting time reading or mooning over her consort. She was silly, charming, very funny, and fiercely protective of everyone. Her elite guard, all handpicked by Annwyl, were sweet, vicious fighters and blindingly loyal to their queen.

If I were a vampire, I'd want to bite someone. I'd be thirsty for blood," I said in a last ditch attempt to interject reason into a discussion that had devolved into the absurd. "You will come into your true nature," Lucius promised. "You are coming of age right now. And when I bite you for the first time, then you will be a vampire. I've brought you a book— a guide, so to speak—which will explain everything—" I stood up so fast my chair tipped over, smashing to the floor. "He is not going to bite me," I interrupted, pointing a shaky finger at Lucius. "And I'm not going to Romania and marrying him! I don't care what kind of 'betrothal ceremony' they had!" "You will all honor the pact," Lucius growled. It wasn't a suggestion.

The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning.

And with his death, the war of ravens and envoys and marriage pacts came to an end, and the war of fire and blood began in earnest.

One of the best things about Ardie was that she could be just a little bit mean exactly when Sloane needed her to be. Sloane's most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together. It was the closest thing she knew to a blood pact that didn't involve knives.

Even without the Grand Reclaimer bond, Helen, you are my heartbeat. My pulse. You are the fire in my blood and the laughter in my soul.

When he’d first joined the Blood Pact

The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. “I’ll go first.

They turn the water off, so I live without water, they build walls higher, so I live without treetops, they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine, they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere, they take each last tear I have, I live without tears, ...they take my heart and rip it open, I live without heart, they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future, they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends, they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell, they give me pain, so I live with pain, they give me hate, so I live with my hate, they have changed me, and I am not the same man, they give me no shower, so I live with my smell, they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers, who understands me when I say this is beautiful? who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms? I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand, I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble, I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love, my beauty, I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears, I am stubborn and childish, in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred, I practice being myself, and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me, they were goaded out from under rocks in my heart when the walls were built higher, when the water was turned off and the windows painted black. I followed these signs like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself followed the blood-spotted path, deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself, who taught me water is not everything, and gave me new eyes to see through walls, and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths, and I was laughing at me with them, we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal, who understands me when I say this is beautiful?

He had men for hands. It only took a few days all told before the posters came to a man with a throat-cut tattoo and fuck-you-money ambitions. Addresses were compiled. Plans made. Weapons secured. Blood pacts sealed. His will be done.

The moments that define lives aren't always obvious. They don't always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there's no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren't always protracted, heavy with meaning.

The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between

His shoulders sagged a fraction. “No one ever wants to make a blood pact. We could invoke ancient spirits to hold us to our vow instead. I have some necromancy books at home. But I have to hide them behind my calculus homework; otherwise, my mother finds them and throws them out.

Well…” Annabelle looked from one expectant face to another, unable to keep from grinning. “If the three of you are willing, then so am I. But if we’re to make a pact, shouldn’t we sign it in blood or something?” “Heavens, no,” Lillian said. “I should think we can all agree to something without having to open a vein over it.

Under the terms of the pact, the prince’s firstborn daughter would be sent north at the age of seven, to be fostered at Winterfell until such time as she was old enough to marry Lord Cregan’s heir.

We were molded to hurt, cut, and deceive, but no matter now much Father hoped it'd be against each other, it never has been. We made that pact years ago. In blood. In darkness. In agony. We're a Cerberus - three heads, one heart.

THE FORTRESS Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood. I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep. On the right, the scrub pine tree waits like a fruit store holding up bunches of tufted broccoli. We watch the wind from our square bed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty. My child, since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the wind, clean as oilskins. No, the wind's not off the ocean. Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago. The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing. Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land. Outside the bittersweet turns orange. Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat branches, finding orange nipples on the gray wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself. Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking in the tide; birches like zebra fish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed, one time, from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

I am becoming pagan, Fraser wrote, that first winter. Here, in this muddy brown monotony, where blood’s the only colored thing. There is no God here, only the moon and the sky. And so I have made a pact with the moon. On clear nights she will bring me to you.

IT IS an intoxicating moment in a love-affair when, for the first time, in a public place, in a restaurant or a theatre, the man puts his hand down and lays it on the thigh of the girl and when she slips her hand over his and presses the man’s hand against her. The two gestures say everything that can be said. All is agreed. All the pacts are signed. And there is a long minute of silence during which the blood sings. It was eleven o’clock and there was only a scattering of people left in the corners of the Veranda Grill.

This is my last cry, as my last blood flows. Then, O my Tyrians, besiege with hate His progeny and all his race to come: Make this your offering to my dust. No love, No pact must be between our peoples; No, But rise up from my bones, avenging spirit! Harry with fire and sword the Darden countrymen Now or hereafter, at whatever time

There is an unspoken pact that women are supposed to follow. I am supposed to act like I constantly feel guilty about being away from my kids. (I don't. I love my job.) Mothers who stay at home are supposed to pretend they are bored and wish they were doing more corporate things. (They don't. They love their job.) If we all stick to the plan there will be less blood in the streets.

The last time he had done this, when Chris was just a child, he’d hung the signs every twenty feet or so. This time, he hung a sign on every single tree. They rustled in the light wind, a hundred yellow warnings, garish and obscenely festive against the dark trunks. James stepped out on the road to look at his handiwork. He stared at his signs, thinking of amulets carried, of red worn to ward off the Evil Eye, of Hebrews painting lamb’s blood on doorposts, and he wondered what, exactly, he was trying to keep away. THEN 1989 Chris huddled beside Emily, their hands twined together around the telephone receiver. “You’re chicken,” he murmured, as the dial tone swam in his ear. “Am not,” Em whispered. There was a pickup on the other end. Chris felt Emily’s fingers flutter above his wrist. “Hello?” Em lowered her voice. “I’m looking for Mr. Longwanger.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua's violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the "ban" (herem). Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to "devote" (HRM) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice. Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a specular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams' horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been "devoted" to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites "enforced the ban on everything in the town, men, and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all." But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attached Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: "The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand all (the) people of Ai." Finally Joshua hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to "a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.

were just like most other teenage girls; shopping

cheer practice was over. “Most likely,” I replied, stretching

He's gotten into your head, too. Richard. You're a part of his insanity now.” I shook my head. “The plan was my idea. My uncle wouldn't go along with it, so he put me in touch with Richard. Richard said he didn't have an opinion on way or the other, he just said he didn't see a problem with a man taking his own vengeance.” Now it was her turn to shake her head. “Two men who've both seen terrible things in their lives, and they let a young man, with his whole future ahead of him, throw away any chance at a normal life, and you don't think you're being manipulated?” I was taken aback by this. “I can't imagine my uncle would let me get manipulated by someone like Richard. It doesn't make sense.” She leaned in to me now, only inches away. Her stare was shocking, piercing in its intensity. “Richard has made a pact with Death. He sold his soul, and to keep the Grim Reaper from collecting on the deal, Richard keeps feeding people into the mouth of Hell. It doesn't matter if he pulls the trigger, if you do it for him, or even if it's you who dies. Everyone who comes into contact with him gets sucked into oblivion. You, your uncle, everyone.” There was the beginning of a laugh in me, but it died when I realized she wasn't kidding. “Sold his soul?” I said. “You can't really mean that. No one makes a pact with Death. That doesn't even make sense.” She sat back. “There are certain men, certain violent men, who live through the blood and the death all around them, surviving when they should’ve died a hundred times. These men have made a deal, a pact, with Death. In exchange for their lives, they must offer up lives in return. It is an old magic. A dark magic, a warrior's magic. That is the magic of blood and murder, and Richard has practiced it all his life. He’s a sorcerer. A vampire. He may never die, he has seen and caused so much death.” She was breathing hard now, her eyes wild. For no reason I could fathom, the skin at the back of my neck and along my arms prickled, the hairs standing on end. An idea came to me. “The brotherhood,” I said.

Even though I was very young, I still remember some of the men who would come into my village, the soldiers, the death squads. Most were nothing but jackals, men who killed and raped and looted for fun, because it was the easy thing to do. But some of the killers, they had a fear about them, like an aura of death. They would look at you and your blood would turn to ice and your heart would feel like it had stopped beating in your chest. Those were the men who killed and killed and would never die themselves, time after time. Whether they knew it or not, they had made a pact with the Reaper, a pact to stay alive as long as they kept sending souls in their place.” “And you think Richard is like these men?” “Don't you? Killing is like breathing to him. He has bathed in the blood of countless murders. I have seen him kill three times, and on each occasion, he should have died time and again, but the other men were a heartbeat too slow, or the bullets a few inches to the left or right. No man is so lucky for so long without something making that luck for him.” “Do you think he is evil?” “Killing and evil are not always the same things. I do not think he is a good man, but I don't think he is an evil man, either. I think he is like an earthquake, or a bolt of lightning. If you are in his sights, you die. The only question is, what put you there.” “Do you feel the same aura around Richard that you felt around those men in El Salvador?” “You are comparing a candle to the sun. Those other men, they were apprentices in the ways of Death. Richard is a master.

Blood Pact probably wouldn’t even notice if it got trashed, it wasn’t like their members frequented it.

These layers, my son, touch, feel, smell They’re not of the ice, nor of the earth, but are the battered surface of shields These layers, my son, are waves of our enemies’ blood an ocean of rage and vengeance, marooned on these shores of bronze and wood These layers, my son, are your inheritance

Crows feed on corpses, on the slain, whose blood forever marks the ground we are all happy to call our land But they’re not alone; beside them, crouched, crawling, delighting in the misery, we find politicians.

This we do know: Cregan Stark and Jacaerys Velaryon reached an accord, and signed and sealed the agreement that Grand Maester Munkun calls “the Pact of Ice and Fire” in his True Telling.

Mussolini was tempted to revert to his old anti-Nazi stance but convinced himself that to renounce an aggressive policy now, along lines parallel with Hitler’s, would be equivalent to turning his back on the whole revolutionary project of Fascism and the totalitarian state, the same as giving in to the hated peace-loving Italian bourgeoisie. Thus when he and Hitler met in May 1939, Mussolini insisted on going beyond Hitler’s suggestion of a formal diplomatic alliance, asking instead for a complete military alliance that could be called the “Pact of Blood.” This was more than Hitler had asked for, since technically it bound Italy to go to war whenever Germany did, and he changed the name to the less melodramatic “Pact of Steel.

To Spell A Sentence by Stewart Stafford Spell conjured and created, A magnum opus bittersweet, The sinister minister at work, His face reddened from heat. A leading light's shady grasp, Blood pacts with monstrosities, Freefalling drunk into darkness, On trade winds of pomposity. Battering ram breaches discovery, A beaming grin breaks the sweat, Dark entities screech their claim, Swept down to Hell as a new pet. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

What an idiot I am. I created a pact with children. Not even a blood pact but a vow that yields nothing for my kettle or Wake. A vow born of weakness. But a vow all the same. I will not fail them, no matter the cost.

What would you say I should do?” I asked. “Say no. That’s what I’d say you should do.” “I cannot do that.” “You don’t make deals with the Orders. Never. And it’s not even as if it’s a blood pact or anything that would stop Nura from going back on her word. Not that she even gave you her word. She’ll try.” He scoffed. “Please.

Today, after all, was lining up perfectly. He had received a letter from Nura that morning detailing the — rather exciting, by the sound of it — events that had occurred at the Mikov estate. Tisaanah had proven herself to be every bit as powerful as he hoped she would be. So powerful, in fact, that he was actually glad that she had proposed a blood pact. Normally, Zeryth tried to avoid getting himself wrapped up in such things. But after what he had seen in Threll, he now found himself awfully relieved that she was bound by blood not to act against him. But it was the bit about Maxantarius that Zeryth found especially intriguing. He had not wanted to involve Maxantarius in this at all. He was too unpredictable, too unabashedly vitriolic towards the Orders, and, most importantly of all, Zeryth found the idea of spending extended time in his presence to be about as appealing as the idea of stabbing both of his eyes out and then eating them. For the life of him, Zeryth had not been able to understand why Nura would bring Tisaanah to Max, of all people. And once Tisaanah had proven herself, he had been adamantly opposed to allowing Max to remain involved, at least not without many precautions. Zeryth was not about to let himself get stabbed in the back by Maxantarius Farlione, of all rutting people. It would just be too great of an indignity to lose a decade-long feud on top of the already significant indignity of being dead.

And you didn’t tell me any of this because you were bound to silence,” I whispered. “You made a blood pact.” “Yes. They said that it needed to remain secret. And at that point, I would have agreed to anything to get it out of me. Hell, it didn’t seem like such a terrible thing, to never speak of it again. And their final gift was the perfect cover story. My father was a Ryvenai noble who was a close personal friend of the king. There were plenty of people on both sides who would have loved to see the Farlione family wiped out for that alone. And just like that, the murder of the Farliones became just another unfortunate wartime tragedy.

In sullen light of the inauspicious day. Now, free, by hazard's quirk, from the common ill Knocking our brothers down, we strike a stance Most mock-heroic, to cloak our waking awe At this rare rumpus which no man control : Meek and proud both fall; stark violence Lays all walls waste; private estates are torn, Ransacked in the public eye. We forsake Our lone luck now, compelled by bond, by blood To keep some unsaid pact; perhaps concern Is helpless here, quite extra, yet we must make The gesture, bend and hold the prone mans head And so we sail toward cities, streets and homes Of other men, where statues celebrate Brave acts played out in peace, in war; all dangers End: green shores appear; we assume our names Our luggage, as docks halt our brief epic; no debt Survives arrival; we walk the plank with strangers

Blood Pact We were given the chance to run with the wolves, Swift and Daring, And we lost the pack, We stayed in the frozen forest, Just listening to the distant howls, Of the hunt taking place, East of the River, And, distancing ourselves from the howls, We became the prey, And we were hunted, Bled, Turned into flesh, And we faded away, Our blood cold, The sweet relief of death, However, it did not come, And the blood turned to grass, And the Grass turned to Forest, And the forest turned to desert. And the wolves remained, And the blood remained, Rising and Rising, and, The Blood turned to Sea, And we all had to turn into Fish, To remember that, the Old Blood Pact, Among all, Remains alive, running through the veins, Of those who no longer live.

Even after everything I’ve told her, everything I’ve done, she’s offering to sign another deal with the devil in blood. This time, there will be no breaking the ungodly pact. This time, if she can earn it, she’s mine for eternity.

He and I entered into an unspoken pact, as though a secret handshake had taken place and we would always have each other's back. I started to keep a small shovel in my handbag, and even made friends with the butcher down the road for scrap meat and blood.

Don't Let The Devil Hear You Weeping by Stewart Stafford Don't let the Devil hear you weeping, Or darkness comes as your friend, Saying God sent it to save you, And be with you until the end. Tail wrapped around you snugly, Gripped firmly in meaty claws, Only then get its beastly odour, Against which there should be laws. Dancing the inferno's fiery rim, Spitting bile in your begging bowl, Paper cut, a blood pact union, To steal away your purest soul. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

growled as I sucked harder and Orion growled right back, his hands taking hold of my arm where I still held him and lifting my wrist in a flash of speed. My heart lurched with realisation, but I wasn’t fast enough to stop him before his fangs slid into my wrist and a snarl of victory rumbled through him. Shock rolled through my core as he began to drink, my Elements locking down inside me and my heart thrashing at what we were doing. This was beyond taboo. The Code had been drawn up in part to stop this very thing. Since the height of the blood ages almost two thousand years ago, the practice of forming covens had been discarded as a part of the pact formed to end the bloody hatred between Vampires and other Fae. It was ancient history now, but back then, our kind had built covens by doing this very thing, feeding from one another and forming a bond which linked them closely and made it easier for them to hunt in packs. For years, Vampire covens had roamed the land, killing other Fae with abandon and using their combined ferocity as a unit to spread terror far and wide. It hadn’t been long before other Fae had started hunting our kind, killing them to stop the bloodshed and coming damn close to wiping us out.

A good but plain-Jane drill you prob’ly know pits the shooter against two to four standard IDPA/ USPSA cardboard torso targets. Using a shot-timer like the PACT Club Timer III, from the beep, put two rounds in each, slow enough to assure all hits are in top-scoring zones. Check your elapsed times. Push faster until you start dropping rounds outside the sweet spots, then back off, slow down and work your way up again. Maybe you integrate a reload. It’s sound, but it lacks panache. Kick it up. Between and around those full-size cardboards, add in half-size*, and some 10" and 5" mini-torsos**. Vary your drills; don’t just shoot left-to-right and back again. Shoot the little guys first, then the larger ones or vice versa or “Connor-versa,” which appears to onlookers to be a spazz-pattern. It is actually coldly calculated — by a spazz. Me. The variety is healthy. You can snap-shoot the full and half-size targets, but the minis force you to concentrate, bear down and get squinty. Sure, program reloads in too, and switching from right to left hand. Now add more fun with malfunction drills: Say you have 10 identical 15-round magazines and six inert dry-fire rounds. In six mags, stagger placement of duds, like second round in one, sixth round in another, blah-blah. Then mix the mags up so you don’t know where the surprises are. And on the timer, give yourself no slack for correcting your malf’s. Now for the spicy stir-fry sauce: Between sweeps of the targets, while gripping your pistol in one hand, bring your other hand back, touch your thumb to your nose, waggle your fingers vigorously, and shout as loudly as possible “O ye sinners, now shall ye repent! Let the Great Slaying begin!” or, “For freedom, Fritos and chicken-fried steak!” or, “Back awaaay from the bulgogi and nobody gets hurt!” Note: Never mess with my bulgogi. Never. Or, try shouting “I love you and blood sausage too!” — but shout it in German; makes it confusing and terrifying. Ich liebe dich und blutwurst auch! Exercising exemplary muzzle control and strictly observing all range safety protocols, slump your shoulders, hang your head and slowly turn around, looking dazed, lost, spaced-out ... Then, by degrees, “recover consciousness” and smile. It’s unlikely anyone will be there by this point, so that smile can be very genuine. If any looky-lou’s are still present, they’ll prob’ly be frozen like deer caught in headlights. Perfecto! If you see me at the range and I’m munchin’ a sammich and sippin’ coffee, stop and say howdy. But if I’m shooting drills, well ... Trouble not, etcetera. Connor OUT

I'd never had an audience like Rebecca Cross. Her shining eyes and respectful silence spurred me to ever greater heights of invention. Ever deeper trenches of imagined horrors. By Friday, I'd pegged half our class as speeding towards some kind of astonishing doom. And Becca was mine. We'd been written off as weirdos together. Together. Some girls treated their friends as athletes in competitive trials, constantly moving them up and down the ranks. But for us best friendship was deadly serious. More permanent than a tattoo. We invented code words and handshakes. We made repeated blood pacts. We scratched each other's arms with pine needles and sipped unholy potions we invented in our parents' gardens out of some nebulous, but passionate desire to show out devotion. We snuck clothes into each other's drawers, so we could swear to anyone who asked (no-one ever asked) that we lived together. Our mom's conducted hush phone calls, worried we'd burn bright then break each others hearts. They set up play dates with other children who never asked to come back. Our parents didn't get it. That was all. They didn't believe you could find your soulmate at six.

More troubling still had been the sickening revelation, in April 1943, that more than twenty thousand Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia had, on Stalin’s orders, been murdered in cold blood by Soviet occupation forces in 1940, during the time of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That disclosure — the decomposing Polish bodies unearthed by the Germans in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, but the Soviets denying culpability

Baltsaros, what have you done? he thought weakly. Run and find me. Run and find me. Run. Jon felt dizzy, the two images of the captain overlapping: one charming and gentle, the other a blood-thirsty murderer. He let out a slow breath, his pulse thrumming in his ears. The monster holding his arms stared at him while the seconds ticked by. Baltsaros was crazy. Tom knew it and had hid the captain’s insanity from him. Jon had to get away, now. Before it was too late. Before Baltsaros finished the job he had started the night they passed the spires. Before he went crazy himself. He had to go. Had to. Jon didn’t move. He simply closed his eyes. The captain loosened his grip on Jon’s arms, and his fingers stroked Jon’s skin softly. He turned Jon’s forearms in his hands and laughed quietly. Jon let out a small gasp as the captain ran a fingertip along the fresh knife wound. “I’m not crazy, Jon,” whispered Baltsaros. The captain touched the healed scar on the inside of Jon’s other forearm, the one that had been made in a tiny room above a tavern half a world away. “You believe in blood magic too, after all.” Jon’s eyes snapped open, and he growled at Baltsaros. “Don’t you dare equate the pact we made with your damned perversions.” He yanked his arms out of Baltsaros’s grasp and pulled himself backwards on the bed.

Hear, therefore, accursed Satan, who art powerless over a servant of God, when, encouraged by his true Lord, he turneth unto another service; in vain dost thou boast of this deed; I command thee to restore it in the name of the Lord, as a Proof before the whole world that when God receiveth a sinner, thou hast no longer any Yule over his soul. I abjure thee, by Him who expelled thee from thy stronghold, bereft thee of the arms which thou didst trust in and distributed thy spoils. Return therefore this deed, whereby this creature of God foolishly bound himself to thy service; return it, I say, in His name by Whom thou art overcome; when thy Power has come to nothing, presume not longer to retain this useless document. By penitence already hath this creature of God restored himself to his true Lord, spurning thy yoke, hoping in the Divine mercy for defence against thine assaults, and assisted by the Most Holy and Glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of God, through whose intercession he shall obtain from Jesus Christ, His Son, that which he himself is not worthy to expect. Through the same Christ our Lord.

Well, Josh McMillan, you've messed with the wrong person. I'm a divorce attorney, and I specialize in digging up shit on people. By tomorrow night I'll know everything there is to know about you, including what blood type you are and whether you've been circumcised." Blair turned to Megan and pointed her finger. "And you better not find out the answer to that question first.

True immortality is the immortality of childhood and adolescence, where you never think you will have to die one day. The phantasm of immortality is merely the price paid for the certainty of dying. And it is ready to pay any price, including that of annihilating itself to achieve immortality. In the past, some were prepared to lose their souls (their hope of eternal life) in a pact with the Devil to enjoy the privileges of mortal existence. Today we are ready to sacrifice any idea of a future immortality for a present corporeal immortality, a perpetual renewal in cloning. Immortality is no longer a metaphor. We want a real immortality, we want a technical incarnation of it here and now. This is the new pact with the Devil, sealed and signed in blood by the human race, which prefers to be cryogenized alive rather than await some hypothetical resurrection of bodies.

What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. We make this last stand as one, you and I, to ensure that our peace will never die. What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours. I have the blood, you have the power. Help us overcome in our final hour,

Written in blood: In olden times in the West people used to say “I put my hand and seal” on a document when signing it. In the East this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient days “signed” important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries and neither, as far as I can tell, was signed in blood, though they do bear signatures of people. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. You were giving away your soul. “The Blood Is the Life.

That there is no consequence to massacring foreigners, our criminal rulers have long known, but they also know that when Pentagon guns are turned on Americans, a good portion of the world will break out in cheers, just as we've whooped and hollered as our tax-paid munitions splattered their loved ones. When blood darkens our streets, our victims will dance in theirs, no doubt, so why are our transfat asses still parked at this sad cul-de-sac as that day of reckoning looms? When you're broke, though, it's hard to move a mile, much less out of the country, so many of us will simply escape into our private universe, inside our various screens, and ignore, as best we can, an increasingly ugly reality. Moreover, some still believe there is no serious decline, while others that a unified fight is possible. For the most hopeless, there is always suicide. This month, a thirty-year-old Bensalem man and his fifty-nine-year-old mother attempted, it appears, a suicide pact by breathing toxic fumes from a borrowed generator. Only she died, however, so now he's charged with her murder. Neighbors said they had fallen on hard times and "had nothing left". Not that long ago, it was highly unusual to have young adults living with their parents, but not anymore. As this trend continues, many Americans will know exactly one house their whole lives, but at least they'll still have a home. Should you be homeless in greater Philadelphia, there is one place you can have a private bed and bathroom for a few hours, at minimal cost. Keep this information in mind, for you might need it. At Bensalem's Neshaminy Inn, you'll only have to cough up $34, including tax, if you check in after 7 a.m. and leave by 4 p.m. This will give you plenty of time to refresh yourself or even have sex, with or without a (paid) partner, many of whom routinely patrol the hallways. Dozing before dark will also spare you from the worst of the bedbugs, and don't even think of complaining about heroin addicts' bloodstains on the walls, no sheet on your bed or used condoms beneath it. You didn't pay much, OK?

There was the jewelled boy with the voice of a nightingale, after all; some sort of modern Bagoas who’d been enchanted to life for an Emperor with alchemy, a blood pact and a bird’s fresh heart, small and slippery as a newly-plucked cherry. When our hero had been a prince, nightingale hearts had been a local delicacy; he remembers the crunch of them between his teeth and gags. The boy was called Artemis and he spoke in cursive, ink and hands, paper and air; the first time he signed shyly in our hero’s direction it was as though his name had been rewritten anew in artificial bone and muscle.

The ‘Big Three’ gods – Zeus, Poseidon and Hades – had made a pact after World War II not to have any more children with mortals. We were more powerful than regular half-bloods. We were too unpredictable. When we got mad we tended to cause problems … like World War II, for instance.

In the centuries that followed, even up to the twentieth, Christians wishing to blame the Jews seized on this single sentence. They include some of the most venerated men of the Church: Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom. Even if they conceded that Luke’s grammar was ambiguous, they could nonetheless point to the pressure put on Pilate by the chief priests and the crowd. All the Jews, they argued, had killed Jesus. They had even, in Matthew, explicitly taken his blood on themselves and removed it from the Romans. And they had reaped the whirlwind. Every misfortune that subsequently befell the Jews—from the destruction of Jerusalem to Auschwitz—carried an echo of that invented blood pact from the trial.

The carnival is in full swing around us. Unspeakable depravities are occurring in the shadows behind the tent. Sinister cabals of dark wizards make blood pacts with the mutants on stage. The paranoid hear voices rich with ominous foreboding. Somewhere, someone is getting raped and it may as well be all of us. We're trying to rationalize our way out of a situation where we've been made to believe a moral stand is all that separates us from destruction. But we're fundamentally immoral people. Our morality can be summed up as such: 'I have to get mine.

Hear me, healer. I have need that you hear me. Your trouble must be great that you reach out to those you do not trust. The voice was startling clear in his head; the answer came so quickly that Jacques felt a surge of triumph. He was much stronger, so much more capable than he had been even the day before. Gregori had given him blood; it flowed in his veins, pumped through his heart, restored damaged muscle and tissue. He had forgotten how easily one could communicate. I heard Byron scream. The betrayer has taken him. He must turn him over to the humans before dawn. Dawn approaches now, Jacques. Gregori sounded calm, undisturbed by even such news as this. Then we must find him. Do any of you have the ability to track Byron? Has he exchanged blood with any of you? Only you made a pact with him. If he turned and was unable to seek the dawn himself, he wanted you to hunt him, and vice versa. You did not want your brother or me to have the responsibility for your destruction.

Hear me, healer. I have need that you hear me. Your trouble must be great that you reach out to those you do not trust. The voice was startling clear in his head; the answer came so quickly that Jacques felt a surge of triumph. He was much stronger, so much more capable than he had been even the day before. Gregori had given him blood; it flowed in his veins, pumped through his heart, restored damaged muscle and tissue. He had forgotten how easily one could communicate. I heard Byron scream. The betrayer has taken him. He must turn him over to the humans before dawn. Dawn approaches now, Jacques. Gregori sounded calm, undisturbed by even such news as this. Then we must find him. Do any of you have the ability to track Byron? Has he exchanged blood with any of you? Only you made a pact with him. If he turned and was unable to seek the dawn himself, he wanted you to hunt him, and vice versa. You did not want your brother or me to have the responsibility for your destruction. I cannot find the path for him. Jacques could not keep the frustration and self-loathing out of his voice. You are certain this scream was Byron’s? Without a doubt. We had been talking together only minutes earlier. Shea became distressed; she said someone was watching us. I could detect no one, and Byron showed no uneasiness. Jacques and Shea were moving through the narrowing rock passage upward toward the entrance. Jacques felt the normal restlessness of his kind at the approaching light. We will do our best to seek him as long as we are able. Mikhail’s woman can sometimes track those we cannot. She is very gifted. We will meet you at the cabin. Do you both have dark glasses and protective clothing? Shea does, and I can fashion mine easily enough. She is still too weak to attempt shape-shifting, and she will not go to ground. Nor will I. Jacques heard the echo of Gregori’s derision. Women were to be protected from their own foolish desire to be in the thick of conflict. When you find your lifemate, healer, your own clear thinking perhaps will cloud, Jacques defended himself.