Jane realized that, like beauty, fear was in the eye of the beholder. And when she gazed into the face of the snarling wolf, she felt none. Instead, what rose like bile in her throat was shame, as those steely and unmoved blue eyes asked a question she had no answer to.

“Why do you get to rule over us?”

Standing before the mother wolf’s pack of thirsty fangs, humanity’s dominance made less sense...

I don’t know if you loved me, or if the person I thought I loved ever existed. But the grief is in not knowing, of living in the question of whether we are dead to one another or not.

I didn’t realize I was leaving until you were already gone. I thought we were both just growing up. But it was me outgrowing you, while you carved me out piece by piece and built your new self atop my bones. I feel...

Jake insisted that his Iron Man poster remain hung above his bed, so it was the last thing he saw before going to bed and first thing he woke up to. But the day after his 7th birthday, the poster looked strange — no longer a comic book but now a cut out of a real-life Iron Man on the cover of a magazine called GQ.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that, somehow, the wish he’d made while blo...