The Little Woods (The New Apocrypha, #1)

by A.G. Mock

It's indescribable how darkness brings on the feelings which come in the night; how everything changes and becomes more ominous somehow. Normality takes on a different guise as we hide beneath the covers. To protect ourselves. From the things out there...

When he was much younger, Ian had suffered a terrible case of the flu. His temperature had been well over one hundred, and it was only later that he learned just how worried his mother had been. But she never showed it. Not to him, anyway. She stayed with him that whole night, caressing his back and his brow whenever he would wake dripping with sweat from a feverish dream. She would smile at him through the darkness, and it made everything alright. She could always make him feel safe like that.

Matt was a timid outcast, but when he had something to say, he said it with unusual confidence.

Andrew had already fallen back to sleep and was hanging limply from her torso. His arms and legs dangled at her side, secure in the way you can only feel when you don’t even realize that you feel secure.

You could always count on people when you needed them—count on them to be complete and inexorable bastards, that is.

At her desk, she began rustling through the considerable pile of papers which had accumulated in just a few days of being off. Clearly none of her teammates had thought even once about checking on her workload for her. So here it laid, an unapologetic, almost scoffing pile of stark reality. On oh–so–many levels. She asked herself if anyone cared the slightest damn bit at all.

As children they'd found this same unique ability—an inexplicable bond between them, some type of positive vibration—enabled the brothers to have almost entire conversations without saying an audible word.

Uncomfortable silence is a powerful tool in the right hands.

his father who had turned on the radio already set to a Pittsburgh rock station. He had to admit that his dad was pretty cool sometimes. When he wanted to be. But never was, when Ian's friends were around.

He needed to stay focused right now, and brooding over something in the past that was utterly out of his control would not help him handle what was in his control right now:

The only thing he could say to himself to assuage the remorse was that sometimes, the amount of stress piled atop him at work was simply too much. Any additional emotion, good, bad or ugly, was just one straw too many.

God was for those of a lesser intellectual capacity, his father had said. A construct of man to assuage fear in the feeble and excuse guilt in the rueful. Only science and the here-and-now existed. Just be a decent person and always think of the balance of life. There was nothing else.

Always keep an attitude of gratitude, y'know? Life is what you make of it.”

“Evil does not accept the inherent balance of spirit—light and dark, yin and yang—only utter and absolute domination. Extinguishing the light wherever it shines. If we let it achieve that, it's the only way it can possibly ever win.”

The Apocrypha were a set of sacred writings considered too esoteric for any but the divinely worthy. Fragments were discovered in what you will have heard called the Dead Sea Scrolls.