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Updates on paperbacks available for the Dragon's Breath Series and details on my next novel, Oaths & Vengeance.

(Skull with Cigarette by Vincent Van Gough)
Let's start with the understanding that even the framing of this title is disingenuous and lacks nuance. What is good art? Or, for that matter, a bad person? Are we defined by our worst actions? Can people change?
It all has to do with the way we relate to the person being defined. From the vantage point of someone who has been harmed by another's “bad behavior,” it's easy to see how one might label their perpetrator and similar people as bad. Juxtapose that to a loved one who knows the “bad person” outside of the context of their actions. I assume their view of the bad actor will be more nuanced and leave room for that person to be more than their actions. 
What happens when we consume someone's bad actions from the sidelines? Do we empathize with the victim and label their victimizer a bad person? Do we identify as a person who loves or likes the victimizer and leave room for them to be more?
I think this choice is an individual one. However, just because a choice belongs to an individual doesn't mean it won't come with social consequences. There are many factors at play when deciding how to relate to an artist who has acted badly in a public way: - personal trauma, - political stances, - parasocial relationships.
If you decide to publicly consume and support art produced by a “bad person,” many of the same factors that came into play when people defined their view of the artist will also factor into how they view you. This is not a value statement of whether or not that should be the case. It is instead an observational statement. 
Everyone has trauma, and we use our experiences to evaluate whether the people in our lives are safe. Those who have experienced trauma related to the harm an artist inflicted on their victim(s) often feel obligated to use people's public opinions of bad actors as a factor in judging whether someone is a safe person in their lives.
For example, if you post your Hogwarts house in your social media bio, a trans person or trans ally may take that public support of Harry Potter and by extension, JK Rowling, as a statement of support for her transphobic views and behaviors. Do they know you, your views, and your personhood based on a silly comment about something you related to as a child? No, they don't have a full picture of you as a person. However, they might not have the luxury to give you the benefit of the doubt when there is rampant violence and hostility aimed at trans people. They may feel they have to read the signs of how you present publicly to determine whether you would be a safe person.
Likewise, if you continue to review Neil Giaman’s works in light of the many accusations of sexual assault, survivors of sexual assault might reconsider their relationships with you.
Just because you can compartmentalize a person’s art from their actions doesn’t mean everyone can. Or wants to.
As our online presence grows, the rate at which we form parasocial relationships with public figures has deepened. Celebrities share their diets, their romantic lives, and embarrassing stories of who they were as a child, and we believe we know them. We grow attached because their art has meant so much to us, and we feel an emotional resonance with them as an artist. 
Due to our increasingly parasocial relationships with public figures, many of us struggle when we learn about their bad behavior. Their actions don't comport with the people we built up in our heads. So when someone speaks negatively about them, we respond as if someone is attacking a friend or family member rather than criticizing a stranger. This may lead to us giving an abuser more credit while we discredit their victims. 
(Image credit Joss Whedon Twitter)
So what does this all mean? Does this mean I am telling everyone to stop reading Neil Gaiman, listening to Michael Jackson, and watching Joss Whedon movies?
Not necessarily. I believe that the consumption of art is a nuanced decision. We should consume art created by people we disagree with. I also think we should take into account whether the bad actor is financially benefiting from our consumption and if supporting them might help them continue their bad behavior. 
In the case of J.K. Rowling, she benefits financially with every new Harry Potter project, and uses her money to support anti-trans groups and legislation. In fact, she has publicly announced her intensions to use her profits from the new HBO series to create an anti-trans advocacy organization. As opposed to Michael Jackson, who is no longer alive and can no longer financially benefit or cause harm.
Additionally, we have to consider private vs. public consumption. In what venue are we consuming art, and will there be people that can be negatively affected by our consumption in those spaces? In general, we need to think about our public consumption as an action and consider the consequences of it.
There is a difference between rewatching Annie Hall in the privacy of your home and doing a deep-dive YouTube review on the “brilliance” of Woody Allen’s script. We throw up signs every day of who we are, whether it is the cover of the book we have on the train or the post we make about how much we enjoyed a controversial video game. Just as we are free to choose the art we consume, others are able to make judgments about what that might mean about who we are.
Fair or not, it's true.
It can hurt when someone we felt a kinship with is accused of doing something terrible and the art we loved is subjected to mass critique. However, in most cases, we do not know the accused. So I personally try to think about the choices I make in relation to their art, how I display my choices to the world, the messages I am sending, and negotiate if I am comfortable with the consequences of my choices. 
Some like to reframe all of these discussions as cancel culture. However, I would argue people have been making decisions about what art to consume and how to consume it since the beginning of art. The factors at play are different. The public nature of our consumption is different. But there have always been reasons why people make choices about art and peer pressure surrounding those choices. 
I would argue the framing of things as cancel culture has more to do with who is being critiqued rather than the act of critiquing. Oscar Wilde was jailed for his sexuality, and I have no doubt that became a factor in how or if people read his works. Neil Gaiman has been accused of horrific sexual abuse and violence. However, he is a rich, straight, white man, and we have only recently begun to hold those with the most power accountable in public ways. The act of turning public critique on artists with more power in society is newer.
At the end of the day, I don't think anyone should dictate how others consume art. However, I do think that our choices, especially those we make in public, have consequences.
I read a quote, and I wish I could credit it but have been unable to find it again, that helped me think about my personal approach to art I have loved created by artists who have done great harm. "Don’t put your nostalgia for a piece of art over the reality of other people’s futures."


Official Author WebsiteRead Fantasy book Critic's review of No Heart For A Thief
OFFICIAL AUTHOR INFORMATION: James is a nerd with a head full of stories and limited time to put them on the page. He grew up in Grand Rapids, MI, spending an excessive amount of time at a local community theater where he developed his affinity for storytelling. This affinity grew into a deep admiration for language and spoken word poetry while studying mathematics and education at the University of Michigan. He firmly believes that art—even silly books about magic, or maybe especially silly books about magic—has the ability to tell stories that sink beneath the surface.

The Wild Road should now be available for order or purchase (or special order), in the format of your choice. The exception, sadly, is audible.com. The audiobook has propagated to other retailers, but audible.com still doesn’t show it. I don’t know when it will go live. From my end, the only thing that’s waiting is audible.com approval. Both the hardcover and the paperback should be available for pre-order and order, as will the ebook at all of the vendors. This is the second novel in The Burning Crown. It’s shorter than the first book (which was 304k words), but short is offered in a West context. I had really hoped to have the book available earlier, but end of 2024 and … Continue reading →

She looks innocent—a bride in a frilly white dress on her way to her wedding. Until she curses out a parking meter, and heads, angrily, into the courthouse.   One jaded defense attorney notices her, but only as a curiosity. He saw brides every day in Las Vegas. He has no idea that, in the next few hours, this bride will change his life. Forever.

“The Bride Case” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Bride Case By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I first saw her on my way to work, and I thought nothing of it. Well, not nothing. I noticed her, because how can you miss a middle-aged white woman in a frilly wedding dress, cursing at a parking meter?

But I truly thought nothing of it, because I live in Las Vegas, the city with a wedding chapel on every corner, particularly downtown, where the Justice Center is.

The Justice Center, which I must visit weekly, whether I want to or not.

It was one of those rare gray Mondays where the mood of the sky matched the mood of everyone who had to show up in court that day. I lived in a condo in one of the nearby downtown high rises. I bought the place when I was newly single and not thinking, back when I believed I could walk to work, even when the temperature was 115 degrees.

I regret the decision, particularly since my office is a half mile south, in the pretty little neighborhood some wag dubbed Lawyer Row. I can park down there. I can park in my condo building. But I can’t find on-street parking at the Justice Center unless I show up super early, which means—yes, indeed—that I must walk to work.

Past all the people lucky enough to find a parking space, but so stressed that they can’t figure out the touchless parking meters that the City of Las Vegas installed during the height of the pandemic.

What this means is that those of us in our summer suits, sweating as we lug our required briefcases filled with laptops and actual paperwork because Justice doesn’t believe in the paperless office, schlep past the frustrated soon-to-be late folks at the parking meters.

Even if I had been inclined to stop, I wouldn’t have, not for this woman, because she was cursing, and shoving the meter with the flat of her hand. At the time, I didn’t blame her. Apparently, she had opted for an early morning wedding, and she was going to be late.

I did wonder why she was there alone—no bridesmaids, no kids, no friends—but I’ve seen stranger things near the wedding chapels. Actual fights, men pacing and smoking as if their partner wasn’t going to show up, people so drunk that I wasn’t sure they even knew each other.

I wondered about her…and then I walked past, and noted all of the TV live remote vans. Every single local news channel was represented.

The savvy morning crews knew that they had to arrive before seven to get the prime parking spots. Each van had its favorite place, so generally, I only noticed them if they had to park elsewhere. Only one did, not too far from the angry bride.

I didn’t see any reporters though, just camera crew. Which wasn’t that unusual this time of the morning. The reporters often got dropped off about an hour before whatever court appearance they were covering. No sense having the talent wait around.

Although I doubted there’d be much waiting that day. The case they wanted to see was mine, and it was particularly made-for-TV. A five-year-old cold murder case had been supposedly resolved when Metro arrested a former city treasurer.

I’m not even sure this would’ve been news back when Vegas was mobbed up. There was an assumption that everyone was corrupt in those days.

But now the city prided itself on being squeaky clean, and this treasurer—who had been fired for cause three years ago—had already proven himself a bit too shady to fit the city’s new image.

The problem wasn’t that he was shady. The problem was that he wasn’t a criminal, at least as far as I could tell. Granted, I’m a defense attorney, not a mind-reader.

But this guy—Derek Hiess—had no extra money in his bank accounts. He had no extra bank accounts. I work for a large law firm, famous in the area for handling only the biggest and most difficult cases. This means we have in-house detectives and more computer techs than I want to think about and all kinds of associates who have to do the grunt work.

They all grunted through a lot of work and found nothing that implicated Hiess in anything besides being viciously unpleasant.  Yeah, sure, he was divorced—aren’t we all?—but he made his child support payments, sometimes by the skin of his teeth. He let the ex and the kids get the house; he lived in a small apartment not too far from me, in the newly revitalized Arts District.

Without the child support, his bills were miniscule. With the child support, they were crushing.

That was the only damning detail.

That and the fact that the murder victim, Maise Krause, had been his lover at the time of her death. And the only reason we know their connection is because a city employee stumbled on some video footage of the Helldorado Parade downtown that showed him kissing her. The police hadn’t had that information before, and like a doofus, he hadn’t told anyone he was the last person who had seen her alive.

Which, by the way, was not a crime.

It just seemed criminal, especially since the police had been trying to solve this murder for years now.

I had a number of problems with this case, the first being I really didn’t like Hiess. Even when he was being nice, he had an air of smarm about him. He clearly thought he was smarter than everyone else, including his lawyer, but fortunately for me, he was scared, so he didn’t contradict everything I did.

He only questioned it.

The senior partners at my law firm wanted this case for the publicity. One of them had already spoken to a Dateline producer behind the scenes, sending footage and talking about how this was truly perfect for their brand of true crime. Even if we lost, the theory went, we’d still make bank with all the new clients who would come through the door to have a famous law firm represent them.

That didn’t mean I had to like it. One of the reasons I caught the case is that I have a made-for-TV face. I’m not a good-looking man in person, but the camera does something to my bone structure that makes me look debonair and Cary Grant-ish on screen. If I hadn’t seen the effect myself, I would have thought that this particular case came to me because someone wanted me to lose.

Of course, I hadn’t told Hiess any of this. I gave him the standard defense lawyer speech—come clean with me because we’re better off ahead of the bad news—you know, all that stuff the client never does.

I’d been thinking about that as I headed into one of the side doors at the courthouse, where the reporters couldn’t go. The only bad thing about that door was it was near the 24-hour Marriage License Bureau, and all of those people who were lined up (already! On a Monday!) reminded me of lost hopes and dreams.

I was sure—hell, I knew—that none of them were thinking about the inevitable end of the relationship, which was either death, estrangement, or divorce.

Yeah, I was in a foul mood, but handling a not-guilty for a guy everyone had already pre-convicted never made me feel good.  I could be an in-your-face kinda lawyer and I could be scary when I was doing it, because even though I had a Cary Grant-ish face on camera, in person I still had the muscular beefiness of my football days.

I went through the metal detectors, barely registering the ritual, except to note that on this door, anyway, the line wasn’t too long. At the main entrance, the line sometimes snaked halfway around the block, especially when there was a big jury trial or some high-profile case that allowed a gallery.

Mine wouldn’t have much of a gallery because we were still in preliminary motions. We were of interest, but not enough to attract an incredibly huge crowd…yet.

I wended my way through the hallways. Like most buildings in Las Vegas, this one is full of light, and someone decided that the entry needed some trees. The public areas are some version of the reddish brown that colors the Justice Center’s exterior. Apparently, some designer believed that reddish brown was a lot more cheerful than industrial gray.

Maybe they were right, but something about the design always made me think of a university building rather than a place where half the decisions were about life or death.

The main hallways were filling up with the pre-eight o’clock crowd—the clerks, the bailiffs, the worried-looking new attorneys, and the judges who wanted to get in an early-hour review.

I nodded at the judges, none of whom were robed up yet, so they just looked like ordinary people. I said hi to bailiffs, clerks, and anyone else I ran into weekly, and tried not to grin at the worried-looking new attorneys. I had been them once.

I no longer worried. There was no point. I’d lost cases that were slam-dunks because of some juror who got a bee up their butt, and I’d won cases that no one should have believed because some juror led the charge to convict.

And yeah, that means I think jury trials are iffy propositions.

Like most defense attorneys, I try to avoid them. Like many defense attorneys who are good at oral arguments, I usually end up with a jury anyway.

That’s because, deep down, I’m a performer and the entire legal community probably knows it. Certainly, the partners in my firm do. That’s another reason I end up with assignments like Hiess’s.

Of course, if I wanted to, I could have busted myself down to family law, which meant divorces and child custody and almost no juries. Hell, much of it got settled by arbitration or one-on-one with a judge—if it ever got that far.

The problem I had with family law was simple: Everyone involved believes they’re the good guy. They’re all deserving, and the other side is filled with assholes.

No one thinks about the kids, no one thinks about the truth, no one thinks that hey, if I’m just a tiny bit more reasonable, I might actually walk away from this thing with my ego and my wallet intact.

Of course, for most of these folk, the fight isn’t about the ego or the wallet. It’s about the fight. Which is the flipside of all that good sexual tension. You don’t have to like someone to have sex with them. And when the attraction wears off, you then figure out that you don’t like them, but you had something, and that something was always drama, drama, drama.

I was there for the drama before my own hearing since I had already done my prep. I’d promised I’d check in on Lucinda Elbe, who had become a project of mine. She’d moved from commercial and business law to family law because she wanted to make a difference, and I had been the idiot who told her that if she wanted to make a difference, she should quit law altogether and join some nonprofit somewhere.

To my surprise, she had laughed at me and told me that there was room in every profession for a difference, and that was when I got just a little scared.

Here’s the thing about me: I don’t get scared often, but one thing that will set off my inner white knight is an innocent who is about to have that innocence rudely and predictably stripped away.

Elbe would have hated being described as an innocent. She had been a ferocious champion for her commercial clients, but there was a difference between being an attack dog for some business interest, and watching a kid get stripped away from the only parent who loved them because the other parent saw the kid as a trophy to be won over by constant litigation.

At some point, Elbe would get nailed, and it would most likely destroy her, and I wanted to be there to minimize the damage, however I could.

Something about this morning’s case, the final gavel on a divorce, bothered me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew, if anything was going to slap Elbe alongside the head, it would be today.

I slipped into the back of Judge Aranza Castillo’s courtroom. It was one of the smaller courtrooms in the very center of the building, which meant it had no windows. Its setup was what I considered backwards, with the jury box on the judge’s right. The courtrooms I trained in always had the jury on the judge’s left. So whenever I walk into these rooms, I feel a little discombobulated.

The bench was directly in front of me, with Nevada’s blue Battle-Born flag on one side of the judge’s chair and the U.S. flag on the other side. Some judges kept a round clock above their chair, but Castillo preferred the state seal.

Her chair was empty, the bench tidy. The attorneys were in place, with Bruce Laymon on the right, and Lucinda on the left. Lucinda sat calmly, back straight. Unlike most female attorneys, she wore a navy suit with a skirt instead of trousers, and paired it with heels. Her black hair was pulled into a perfect knot at the top of her head, her hands folded over the folders in front of her. A laptop rested to one side of her, and at least two yellow legal pads on the other.

Her client, an older man with badly dyed black hair, mirrored her posture, but not as effectively. He couldn’t sit straight, whether that was because of the extra weight he carried or because he never normally sat that way. His folded hands held a pen and rested on top of yet another legal pad.

Everything here told me that those two expected a fight, but with who I had no idea.

Laymon was a good enough divorce attorney, but certainly not the best. He lost as many cases as he won, and some of the ones he lost were the kind that shouldn’t have been lost at all.

He was the one who looked nervous, and maybe he should have, because his client wasn’t beside him. He clutched a phone in his hand, peering at it repeatedly as if he expected something from it. Then he would look at the door to the judge’s chambers, probably worried that she would emerge while his phone was still visible.

The entire courtroom seemed to be holding its breath.

We stayed that way for ten minutes.

I was about to touch Lucinda on the shoulder and tell her to break a leg, when the court reporter came in. She saw Laymon’s phone and gave him a warning side-eye. A bailiff took his spot near the back, nodded at me, and then turned his attention to the front.

If I wanted to talk to Lucinda, now was the time.

And then it was too late. The door to the judge’s chamber opened, and Judge Castillo swept in. She seemed tall, but that was the robe combined with her athletic thinness. She wore heels so high that I couldn’t imagine how she stayed balanced.

She put folders on her desk, sat down, gaveled the court into session, and then said to Laymon, “Counsellor, where is your client?”

“She said she’s here,” he said.

“Clearly she is not,” the judge said. She shoved her papers to one side and asked, “Did you tell her that you can represent her without her appearing?”

That was a strange question, one judges rarely asked unless there was some kind of problem.

“I did, Your Honor.” Laymon’s voice actually shook. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him sound nervous, even when he let his nervous tics get the best of him.

“And…?” the judge asked.

“And she insisted she needed to be here.”

“Great,” said Lucinda’s client, and he didn’t mean that it was great at all. He sounded concerned.

Lucinda put a hand on his, probably to shut him up.

“Ms. Elbe, make sure your client knows that you speak for him here,” the judge said, without looking at her.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Lucinda said.

Everyone was on edge. Maybe this was the vibe I had gotten from Lucinda at the office earlier. Not that there was some innocence-shattering event about to happen, but that this divorce hearing had gotten so contentious, even the judge was surly.

If that was the case, I really didn’t need to be here. I could get a lot more done prepping one of my other cases before I went into court with Hiess.

I stood up and eased toward the door, hoping the judge didn’t see me. But of course she did. She raised her eyebrows at me, silently asking why I was here. I shrugged, declining to answer. With luck, she wouldn’t ask me anything out loud.

And that luck held. I made it to the door, pulled it open, and nearly got bowled over by the bride I had seen earlier. She smelled faintly of mothballs mixed with very old Chanel No. 5.

She clutched a bouquet of dried flowers, and stalked down the aisle like a demented bridezilla.

“Douglas!” she called at the top of her voice.

The man beside Lucinda shrank into himself, as if he could make himself disappear. Lucinda sat even straighter, but did not turn around.

“Mr. Laymon, get ahold of your client,” the judge said with great irritation.

That was Laymon’s client? That woman who looked enough like the illustrations of Dickens’ Miss Havisham that I was nervous all over again.

“Get ahold of me?” the bride shrieked. “Get ahold of me? He doesn’t want to hold me, and look! I still fit into the dress.”

One of the bailiffs moved forward, but the judge made a surreptitious move with her left hand, stopping him. He stood, hand poised near his weapon, watching the bride.

“Mrs. Monroe,” the judge said. “Please sit down, and let your attorney speak for you.”

“In other words, get ahold of myself,” the bride said viciously. She flounced, and the ruffles on her dress bounced in unison. “I will not put up with this any longer.”

She walked down the aisle toward the lawyers’ tables, her wide skirt brushing both sides of the ineffectual little barriers that separated the attorney tables from the public seating. For a moment, it seemed like she was going to join Laymon, but then she spun and faced Lucinda’s client—who was most likely Mr. Monroe.

“Look at me,” the bride said, running her hands in front of her gown. It had a beaded bodice that looked stiff and uncomfortable, and it trailed into a point on that full skirt.

The dried flowers rustled as she moved. Dead leaves and petals marked where she had already walked. She wore pearl-drop earrings and a pearl necklace that ended in a sedate cross around her neck.

Everyone in the courtroom was looking at her. None of us could take our eyes off her—except her soon-to-be former husband.

“Look at me,” she repeated, with emphasis.

He brought his head up just a little. The second bailiff had moved slightly in front of the judge, who once again waggled her fingers, indicating that he should move away from her. Clearly, she wanted to see this.

Lucinda still seemed preternaturally calm. I’d never seen her like this. Maybe this was what she looked like when she was terrified.

“I know I’m not as pretty as the new girlfriend,” the bride said to the soon-to-be ex, “but you thought I was pretty once.”

My heart sank. I knew that Lucinda had been going through something with this case, but I thought it was normal divorce stuff, not a stunt like this.

“There is no new girlfriend,” the soon-to-be ex muttered.

The bride didn’t seem to hear him.

“The last time I wore this dress, you and I vowed till death do us part,” she said, and shifted the dried flowers.

I caught a glimpse of something conical, and I felt a half second of confusion even as my brain was playing those last words. Till death…

I launched myself forward like I would have done at the snap in a football game. That half second of movement, which didn’t quite count as a false start but probably should have—I had perfected that.

I didn’t see any other movement, but then, I wasn’t trying. My gaze was on those dried flowers, one part of my brain arguing with the other. Because of those metal detectors, what I thought I saw was impossible, right?

But the flowers had lost most of their petals and the leaves had formed a circle on the floor, and the soon-to-be ex was cringing so badly that he was turning into a gigantic ball of terror.

My forward movement was causing the bailiffs to move toward the bride (or maybe me, I don’t know) and I couldn’t find my voice even though I wanted to scream at Lucinda to get down or move aside or duck or something. Part of me was afraid to mention Lucinda’s name at all, because right now, the bride was focused on the soon-to-be ex and mentioning the attorney invited unwanted attention.

As I got close, the bride raised her head ever so slightly. Her gaze met mine.

I’d seen flat eyes like that before. Half the people I defended had eyes like that—emotionless, empty, and somehow calculating.

She dropped the flowers from her left hand, and in her right was a white pistol. I’d never seen a white pistol before. It matched the damn dress.

I was still a yard or so away, but I leapt across the divide, figuring if I could grab the dress, I could bring her down. The bailiffs were close as well, and Lucinda started to turn sideways, so I figured she hadn’t seen the gun at all.

Something banged as I wrapped my arms around a mountain of pearl-encrusted tulle. My shoulder hit against something hard, and then I landed, unable to catch my breath. A lazy thought The air must’ve been knocked out of me reverberated in my head as I stared at a somewhat dirty white pump, abandoned beside me. A foot in white stockings was being dragged backwards and there was another pump being dragged with the white-stockinged foot, and I was sliding along, and I couldn’t quite grab purchase on anything, plus the tulle was covering my face, making everything seem like I was seeing it through white gauze.

Lucinda was shouting my name, some guy was screaming, and the judge’s gavel was banging, banging, banging, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d swallowed some tulle, because I truly couldn’t breathe and then there were people, yelling, and I closed my eyes and…

***

…didn’t open them for three days. So much for my high-profile case. Apparently I had just become a lot more high-profile than my case.

The headlines were nuts. The staid version was a variation on Attorney Shot In Las Vegas Courtroom, but the rest treated what happened that morning like a joke: Divorce, American Style; Angry Bride Shoots The Wrong Lawyer; Former Defensive End Turned Defense Attorney Takes Out Crazed Bride, and so much more.

I would’ve stopped looking, but people were sharing with me, somehow thinking it all cheered me up.

Cheering me up wasn’t possible. I was on my back in a private hospital room (thanks to the power of one of the biggest law firms in town), feeling like someone had taken a chainsaw to my chest. I went from being a man dealing with what he thought was a major irritation (a media circus court case) to a man in the midst of a media circus because he’d—apparently—saved some lives.

I guess I ended up being the unintended victim. The bride had turned toward me at the last second, which meant the gun was pointed at me while I was in the air, and the gun’s only bullet hit me damn near point-blank.

Apparently, it was touch and go for the first day, and less touch and more go on the second, and by the third, they figured I’d live, even though I’d lost part of a lung and had shattered ribs. Breathing was no fun, the press was no fun, and I felt this amorphous anger at everything—while my brain kept replaying that slow-motion sprint with a full-on regret voice-over.

Maybe if I had shouted. Maybe if I had grabbed Lucinda instead. Maybe if I’d yelled for the bailiff. Maybe if I’d screamed, “Gun!”

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

If I managed to silence some of the voices with logic, other ones rise up, revamping the scenario all over again. I needed distraction, but wasn’t sure how to get it.

It’s hard to be distracted when you’re doped up in a hospital bed with only the TV and your thoughts for company.

Obviously, the bride was arrested on the spot. The media somehow got images of that perfect-fitting wedding dress, now bloodstained, and had all kinds of commentary I tried hard not to follow.

The divorce, surprisingly enough, was on hold because the no-longer-soon-to-be ex wanted to renegotiate a lot of things, especially the money, so that he wasn’t paying for the defense of a woman intent on killing him. If I had been healthy, I might’ve helped with that. That case sounded interesting to me—the only interesting part of this whole thing.

I wanted to talk to Lucinda about it, but apparently, she didn’t want to talk to me. She hadn’t shown up at the hospital at all. I didn’t even get flowers from her, and my entire room was filled with flowers, now that I was out of the ICU. Get-Well flowers from friends, Thank-You flowers from some of the people I had (in theory) saved, a big spray of Look-At-How-Rich-The-Sender-Is flowers from the law firm, and an even bigger spray of flowers from one of the TV networks.

I hadn’t read that card yet, but if it was anything like the booking shark who had shown up when everyone thought I was going to die, wondering if I would gasp an interview before I croaked, I suspected that the card wasn’t worth reading after all.

By day four, I was feeling sorry for myself, not just because I was in unbelievable pain and the doctors didn’t prescribe enough painkillers. It didn’t matter how many times I tapped the little button on my drug remote, the pain level remained 350,000 on a scale of one to ten, ten being high.

I toggled between wondering who I could threaten with some kind of lawsuit to get me more drugs and wondering why the hell I hadn’t remarried when I had the chance. At least a wife would have been obligated to sit by my bedside and go through this hell with me, right?

You’re not a hero, a little voice in my head kept repeating, borrowing the long nasal vowels of my Midwestern first (and only) wife. If you had stayed out of the way, one of the bailiffs would have tackled her and no one would have gotten hurt.

That vocal little representative of my former life had it wrong. Someone would have gotten hurt. It just wouldn’t have been me.

Everyone in that courtroom thought they were safe because of the metal detectors and, well, because Mrs. Monroe (whose first name was, I learned through the news reports, Ellen) was batshit crazy, which meant no one thought she had the wherewithal to buy a 3D printer and make a ghost gun that could actually work.

Turned out that Mrs. Ellen Monroe was only batshit crazy when it came to Mr. Douglas Monroe.  In all other parts of her life, she was quite competent. The more I heard about that tortured relationship, the more I suspected that Mr. Douglas Monroe was terrified that his wife would try something—and that she would pull it off.

Lucinda hadn’t said anything about any of this to me or to anyone else I talked with from the firm. Either she thought the kind of cuckoo allegations that Mrs. Ellen Monroe made against her husband were normal angry about-to-be-divorced spouse allegations or maybe Lucinda didn’t want anyone to know that she had ventured into a violent (and eventually quite bloody) version of the Twilight Zone.

Finally, on day six, after the doctors had decided that I needed to sprint across the hospital, which actually meant that my IV and I needed to be escorted around the nurses station by an actual nurse, I finally saw Lucinda.

She missed the heroic walk around my floor, but not the aftermath, me on the bed, gasping like a dying fish at the bottom of a boat. The gasping was, I’d been told, perfectly normal. If I healed properly and worked on my lung function, I would graduate to a more sedate wheeze.

The door to my room was open, but Lucinda peered around the frame as if she expected someone to deny her entry. Or maybe she was seeing if I was actually there, and not dead, or not there and dead, or maybe just sleeping, so she could leave the card she had brought and claim credit for a long and meaningful visit.

When she heard my fish-gasps, she looked like a startled rabbit. Her gaze met mine, and she asked from her perch at the door frame, “Do you need a nurse?”

“Nn-ah-o,” I managed, wanting to tell Lucinda this was normal right now, but not really sure I should say something like that. After all, it might make her feel guilty.

But then, why shouldn’t she feel guilty? I had taken a bullet for her, after all.

I beckoned for Lucinda to come in, and she did, walking like a person on the way to a firing squad. She looked over her shoulder more than once, maybe hoping that someone in authority would tell her I was too sick to talk to visitors.

I made myself smile at her, and she gave me one of those full lip movements that meant the person was trying to smile and failing miserably. She was dressed in a blousy dress shirt, black yoga pants that ended at her calves, and athletic shoes with enough foam to mean business.

I had been mistaken in my gasping first impression. She wasn’t carrying a card or flowers or a book or any token at all. Her nails were bitten down, her hair was pulled back, and she had circles under her eyes so deep that someone could have stored golf balls in them.

She grabbed one of the side chairs, pulled it over, and sat down on my non-IV side. Then she grabbed the remote and shut off the TV. I hadn’t had the sound on, but the images had been comforting. I hadn’t shut the thing off since I woke up in the room, so her movement left me feeling a tad bereft.

“You okay for a talk?” she asked. “They said you were, but you’re gray, and —”

I waved a hand, silencing her. I didn’t want to talk about whether or not I was up for a talk. I wanted the talk or I wanted my TV. Really, I wanted to get the hell out of here and never ever ever come back.

She bit her lower lip, watching me use the tricks my brand-new physical therapist had taught me just to get my breathing under control. The physical therapist had come to my room two days ago and given me breathing exercises to prepare me for the day when I could actually go to the physical therapy department.

Lucinda plucked at my arm, focusing my attention. “You don’t look well,” she said, and in that statement was buried an excuse to get the hell out of my room.

Well, I would have said if my breathing had been under control and if I could ever relearn how to say more than three words without inserting a gasp between them, I did nearly die a week ago. So I’m doing okay, considering.

Instead I managed to say, “Ah…m…faahnnn.”

That was me post-surgery. Lots of breathiness, lots of consonants. I sounded like someone from the Deep South, even though I’d never made it past the Mason-Dixon line.

“Okay,” Lucinda said, “but, oh God, I didn’t expect you to look this bad. I mean, you were shot and everything, and I knew it was bad, but somehow I thought since it was a ghost gun, it’d have a ghost bullet or something, and—”

She shook her head, looking young and twisted and sad.

“God, I’m an idiot, aren’t I? I mean, I thought how can a ghost bullet nearly kill someone? I should’ve known.”

Yeah, you should’ve, I would’ve said if I could’ve said it. Instead, I nodded somewhat sagely and let her talk.

My gasping had reduced itself to the occasional much-too-big-for-a-normal-person breath.

“I just—I wanted you to be the first to know.” She was twisting her hands together, something I’d never seen an actual person do with such sincerity. It looked like she was trying to wring water out of them.

I eyed her warily, doing my best to keep my gaze off her twisting fingers.

“I’m—um—quitting the law.” She winced as she looked at me. Her left hand was actually turning white where the fingers of her right were digging in.

I wasn’t surprised. I kinda expected this. I’d seen lesser crises force lawyers to jump from the profession.

Here, she’d seen a friend—or at least a colleague—shot right in front of her because her client had a crazy wife. Lucinda was probably second-guessing herself, and maybe my words about family law were reverberating in her head.

They were certainly reverberating in mine. I had been afraid family law would shatter her. I just hadn’t expected this kind of shattering.

Lucinda stared at me, her bottom lip trembling.

I couldn’t tell if she was going to talk more. If she was, I didn’t want to start, because speaking still took way too much effort.

“I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I?” she asked.

It’s not about me, I would’ve said, if I could have spoken quickly. I was trying to figure out how to dance around all of this, without sounding like an idiot with southern-fried marbles in his mouth, when she added more.

“I mean, you warned me that this was nothing like real estate, and Jesus, what I wouldn’t give for a shady bastard skirting the thin edge of the law right now. I thought they were evil assholes, but this—what she did—she could have killed you.”

Lucinda’s voice had grown softer with each sentence, and I had to strain to hear that last part.

So much of this had probably gone over and over and over in her head, and I was just getting to hear the ruminations. I moved my hand—the one without the IV needle jammed just above the wrist—and I took her hand, squeezing tight.

She raised her head, surprised at me. I’d never touched her before, not in all of our conversations. She probably hadn’t known that a part of me had always wanted to touch her, but hadn’t had the courage. Besides, she was a colleague, and the firm frowned on fraternizing.

And if I had been honest with myself, then I would have known that for the excuse it had been. I too had been damaged by family law, but the family the law had pertained to was mine—those families were mine, really, since the first divorce I went through had been my parents, which had destroyed my mother (and taken away any hope she had of making a decent living while caring for us kids), and the second divorce had been my own—the one I had walked away from, leaving my ex with all the money and the furniture and the house, because I wasn’t going to be like my father.

Lucinda was staring at me, and she was probably thinking that I was thinking about her, which I was, but not in the way that she was probably thinking about it.

“And,” she said, looking down at our hands. “If I missed that, what else did I miss? I mean, her husband did say he was scared of her.”

I almost nodded, but nodding would’ve been the wrong thing to do. I wished I had a voice—a real one—so that we could have a conversation, a real one, but it was going to be hard.

“He wants me to keep handling the divorce, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to go in a courtroom again.”

I didn’t blame her. Time to get counseling, I would have said if I could have. But I didn’t, and weirdly, she got me thinking about returning to the courtroom. I hadn’t given it much thought, but it didn’t terrify me. I wasn’t scared of anything right now, except maybe not being able to breathe properly again.

“And you were right about family law,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking. It’s awful. Oh, God, I keep thinking, what if a child had been involved? What then?”

I squeezed her hand, and managed to say, “Loo…sin…dah.”

She stopped talking and looked at me expectantly.

I held up a finger on my IV hand. It was easier than saying Give me a minute.

“Wha…t…hah…pen…d,” I managed. “Nah…ttt…you…rrrr…fah…l…tt.”

“But it was,” she said. “I—”

“No,” I said, and that word came out clearly, as if I actually could get enough air. “No. The law…”

I had to pause and breathe for a moment. But the words were coming easier. Maybe it was like the physical therapist said. Maybe if I didn’t think about it, I could settle into a breathing routine.

I banished that thought right away, hoping it wouldn’t contaminate the lung capacity I had left.

“…tea…ches…us…that…pee…pl…ahrrr…assholes.”

She let out a whoop of laughter and looked at me in surprise. “The only word you can say clearly is ‘asshole’!”

She laughed like a kid who, for the first time, had heard an adult tell a potty joke.

“Nah…tt…trooo…” I managed. “…sah…ddd…law…too.”

She nodded. “You did,” she said. “You did.”

At that point, I gave up trying to talk. It was too hard. Instead I waved my IV hand at the table across from me, and pointed at the laptop my assistant had brought from the office, even though I hadn’t requested it.

“Cah…nnnn….tt…tt…ahl…kkk,” I said as she handed it to me. I opened it and turned the screen toward her. Then I opened the message program and typed:

What happened is 100% on that evil bride. She made the gun, she brought the gun, she used the gun. If her husband had seen that coming, he didn’t tell you, because clients don’t tell us everything.

As for you leaving the law, that’s a personal choice. I never had the sense that you loved the law the way that some…

I almost typed “some of us” but stopped myself. No need to go for the full reveal.

…do, which means this isn’t a calling for you. So, do what you must.

BUT, and this is important, see a counselor. You’re not sleeping (clearly) and you need to talk to someone who can actually talk back. I’m here to listen, though, and maybe type a message or two.

I barely resisted the urge to add an emoji, which made me realize just how doped up I was because I am not an emoji guy.

I sent the much-too-long text because I wanted her to have it on her phone, even though she had watched me type the whole thing.

Her eyes filled with tears.

“You don’t hate me?” she asked.

I could never hate you, I typed.  I think you’re an amazing woman.

Her cheeks flushed, and one of the tears fell, and she stood up. She said, “I’ll come see you later,” in a tone that made me believe she never would.

And sure enough, I was right.

I never saw her again—even though she texted me and pretended to worry about me and claimed she wanted to make sure I was okay.

I wasn’t okay, but I lied and said I was. Because what else could I do? I reminded her of the worst day of her life, a day she clearly didn’t want to deal with, and I was too sick to put a lot of effort into taking care of her as well as taking care of me.

By the time I finally got out of the hospital, she had quit the firm.

By the time I was home long enough for the home health care aide who visited twice a day to stop visiting at all, Lucinda had taken a new job.

By the time I had my first hey-that-didn’t-hurt-as-much-as-usual physical therapy appointment, I learned that Lucinda’s new job had taken her all the way across the country.

Apparently, she hadn’t thought that detail was worth telling me.

And that was when I sank onto my much-too-comfortable couch and started to shake. I’d been holding it together until then. But the woman I had been trying to help hadn’t seen it worth her time to even let me know the smallest detail about her, and that made me feel like an idiot.

I don’t like feeling like an idiot.

So I did what any good defense lawyer does when someone in the human race disappoints them. I sucked it up and moved on, adding just a bit more cynicism to the suit of armor I had built out of an entire lifetime of cynicism.

By the time I was ready to return to the world full-time, I was a lot more guarded, a lot more snide, and a lot less compassionate for everyone—including me.

Which made me a hell of a difficult witness at the bride’s homicide trial.

***

Yeah, good old Mrs. Ellen Monroe had decided that plea deals were for babies. Apparently, she had told her defense attorneys to fill the jury with women who had gone through a messy divorce because Mrs. Ellen Monroe thought they would understand. Apparently, she had dreams of jury nullification or acquittal by cause or some other such nonsense.

I wasn’t supposed to talk with anyone except the prosecutor, and I couldn’t sit in on the trial because I was a witness. I hadn’t been ordered to stay away from the news on the case, which part of me figured was an oversight and another part—the defense attorney part—hoped that the lack of an order was a careless practice endemic to the District Attorney’s Office.

If it was, I would use it in future cases because, at that moment, future cases were all I had to look forward to. I was currently showing up in the office for a few hours of every day, subjecting myself to over solicitation from my legal secretary and frowns of worry from everyone else, biding my time until I got the medical all-clear for a full-on return to work.

That plastic bullet had done a lot more damage than anyone thought possible, and my recovery was taking more time than my insurance company liked. Fortunately, they were scared of my law firm, since we had successfully sued them more than once for failing to uphold the terms of their policies.

Everyone was worried about me testifying in what the media was calling The Bride Case, but no one could prevent it because—whether we liked it or not—I was the victim. I had a narrative to tell, and sympathy to gain, and I knew I had better do it right.

Knowing and practicing are two different things. My brain knew I had to do everything right, but my heart wanted to see how the case was going. Fortunately, the case wasn’t live-streamed anywhere. The judge hadn’t banned cameras from the courtroom, but she had banned gavel-to-gavel coverage, so the news I gathered was mostly tidbits, the kind of juicy stuff that television stations and online rags used to intrigue their paying customers rather than inform the rest of the public.

Which meant I was more than a little surprised by my surroundings when I was called to the witness stand on Day Two of the trial.

Day Two, 9 a.m., shortly after the court started its session, just like Dan Abrimowitz—the prosecutor—had predicted. He’d said one day for opening arguments and stupid, baseless motions, and the actual meaty part of the trial would start on Day Two.

I hadn’t really figured it would happen that way, because I’d never seen a trial that had gone according to plan. But Abrimowitz seemed to have his finger on this one’s pulse.

I knew that when I walked through the double doors, girding my loins for the inevitable PTSD reaction that Lucinda had mentioned, caused by being shot in my place of employment—a reaction, it turned out, that I didn’t have.

The courtroom was bigger than the one I had been shot in. It was one of the largest courtrooms in the Justice Center, even though it looked like the other one, with the Nevada Battle Born flag and the U.S. flag flanking the judge, a seal over her seat, jury on the wrong side, and large desks for the attorneys. The gallery had more seats, and every single one of them was full.

Reporters sat in the back, cameras were to the side, and my heart sank when I saw cameras from the major national TV networks. That meant this case, with its funky opening, would be on at least one true crime show, and I would get to see myself over and over again, giving whatever testimony was necessary.

Hell, there was probably footage of me being carted out of the Justice Center on a stretcher, considering all the media that had been present that day.

My name had been called before the bailiff opened the doors for me, so people had turned in their seats to watch me walk toward the witness stand. I knew better than to smile at anyone. I kept my gaze on the judge—Carol Siddalli, who had graduated from law school one year ahead of me. She looked older now, her hair cropped like a cap around her head. Her features had hardened, and she had learned how to keep her face expressionless.

There was very little of the woman I had known from late nights at the law review, and I had thought she had looked old then.

As I walked, though, I noted that Mrs. Ellen Monroe had not gotten her jury. It was 60% male, and a goodly portion of those men looked like they did manual labor. The women were evenly divided between twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings, and only one of them was white. She wore a brownish suit coat so old that it was pilled, and a pair of matching pants that were too short for her stick-thin legs.

She was probably not the ideal juror that Mrs. Ellen Monroe had had in mind.

I swore an oath to tell the truth so help me God, hand on the Bible, and expression as sincere as I could make it, and then I sat in the witness box and felt like a fraud.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I’d never sat in a witness box—not to test it out, not as a lark, not even at the bidding of one of my professors back in the day. The chair was surprisingly comfortable, the mic a tad too far away, and the perspective just plain odd.

I could see the entire courtroom, just like the judge could, only from a much lower perspective.

The gaze of everyone in the courtroom was on me, from the jurors to the gallery to the defendant herself. She stared at me as if I had surprised her. I know that we didn’t know each other, but she seemed stunned that I even existed.

Abrimowitz had prepped me pretty well. Just enough so that I knew where he was going, but not enough to make me sound rehearsed.

Even so, he startled me with his first question.

“How’s your health?” he asked as he got up from the prosecutor’s table.

I’m the kinda guy who normally lies and says I’m fine even when I’m not, but he wanted a true answer here, not the macho one.

“I’m still having breathing issues,” I said, “and moving sideways often sends a jolt of pain through me. There was a lot of damage.”

I didn’t look at Mrs. Ellen Monroe when I said that, but even I could hear the fury in my voice.

Abrimowitz had me describe each wound in detail, how it felt to deal with those, and then he asked me to establish my baseline now.

The jury seemed fascinated by all of this. I did my best not to squirm in my chair. Had I been running the defense, I would not have allowed such a detailed and thorough description of the health issues.

Any defense I had run would have stipulated to those points, just to keep the descriptions to a minimum. Descriptions of pain and suffering usually inspire juries to side with the injured party, so long as that person doesn’t whine.

I made sure I wasn’t whining, mostly by not looking at the defendant at all.

“All right,” Abrimowitz said. “You weren’t supposed to be in the courtroom that morning, correct?”

“That is correct,” I said, making eye contact with the jury.

This was the meat of the testimony, at least as Abrimowitz saw it. I figured it could play for either side, if we weren’t careful.

Letting the jury see me, letting them know that I saw them, would keep them on our side, I hoped.

“Didn’t you have a big case of your own that morning?” he asked.

“I did,” I said.

“Why weren’t you prepping for that?” Abrimowitz asked.

“I had finished my prep,” I said. “I had an hour or so before court, and I couldn’t be with my client.”

“Still, you could’ve gotten coffee or prepped another case. Instead, you came to watch Mrs. Monroe’s divorce case. Is there a reason for that?” Abrimowitz was covering the bases, trying to make sure he asked the tough questions before the defense did.

“Her lawyer, Lucinda Elbe, worked in our firm. It was one of her first family law cases, and I wanted to let her know that she would do just fine.” I wanted to explain more, but I didn’t. It was essential for a witness to only answer the question asked.

For the first time, though, I was seeing just how hard that could be.

“Do you usually cheer on your colleagues?” Abrimowitz asked.

“In the office, sure,” I said. “But this was the first time I had visited one in court.”

“What made this different?” Abrimowitz asked.

“Ms. Elbe had just made the transition from commercial law to family practice. I was worried about her. Family practice can be emotionally difficult for everyone, even the attorneys involved.”

I tried not to pause in the middle of that, but I couldn’t help shifting my shoulders just a little. Abrimowitz and I had discussed this: We expected a series of objections here.

Had I been Mrs. Monroe’s attorney, I’d’ve objected to me as a witness, objected to everything I said about the courtroom, and definitely objected to the description of the emotions around family law cases.

I might not have won the objections, but I would have screwed up Abrimowitz’s rhythm, and I would have confused the jury. It’s hard to keep track of questions when the opposing counsel constantly interrupts. Sometimes there’s a gap of ten minutes or more between the question and the answer itself.

But there had been no objections, not yet anyway. I resisted the urge to look at Mrs. Monroe’s attorney to see why she wasn’t doing anything at all.

“Please explain emotionally difficult,” Abrimowitz said, all but daring the opposing counsel to object.

He pointedly did not look at the defense table. And it took all of my strength to keep my gaze away too.

So I looked at the jury. Their gazes were firmly on me, as if they couldn’t get enough.

I needed to pretend that I was trying this case—without getting too deep in that pretense, because that might make me screw up as a witness.

Still, I assumed my best talk to the jury voice.

“Family law deals with divorces,” I said. “By the time a couple gets divorced, the arguments are old and the anger is deep. Often, there are children involved and even more often, the situation with the children is dire. The choices that get made in family court can rip your heart out.”

Abrimowitz let that sentence hang. His gaze met mine. He was surprised. He shouldn’t have asked the question in that manner and I certainly shouldn’t have been allowed to opine like that.

“Were there children involved in this case?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Ms. Elbe and I didn’t discuss the details. All I knew was that the case was bothering her more than usual, and I figured she needed some moral support.”

“She didn’t tell you about the clients?” Abrimowitz asked.

“No,” I said. “She barely confided in me.”

“Yet you showed up.” He moved slightly, a signal that he wanted me to focus.

“I did show up,” I said. “I was going to tell her I was in the building, and she could find me if she needed advice or support.”

“You’re not a family law attorney, though, are you?”

“I’m not.”

“I still don’t see your interest here.” Abrimowitz was really pushing this. I wasn’t quite sure why.

“I liked Ms. Elbe. I didn’t think she belonged in family law. I thought it would destroy her, and it did. She’s not practicing anymore. She moved out of state.”

“Ms. Raylin?” The judge’s voice startled me. She was looking at the defense attorney. And that’s when I understood what was going on. This was judicial nudging, basically trying to tell opposing counsel to object.

I stopped talking and waited. Most witnesses probably would have proceeded. For that reason, Abrimowitz made a small movement with his hand, cautioning me to remain quiet.

Raylin, the defense attorney, was a mouse of a woman, with brown hair cut too short, a brown suit coat that was too big on her, brown pants that didn’t quite match, and low-slung black heels that clearly didn’t go.

Her trial bag had accordion files and at least two laptops, and at that moment I realized what she was.

Either she was the cheapest lawyer Mrs. Ellen Monroe could find, or, more likely, Raylin was a public defender.

“Yes, Your Honor?” Raylin sounded surprised that she was addressed at all.

“Do you plan to object?” the judge asked. So much for the nudging.

“No, Your Honor. I told you earlier, I have no objections to this witness.”

Mrs. Monroe looked at the judge with wide eyes, then back at Raylin. Raylin’s head was down, her arm over a yellow legal pad. She seemed to be writing something or maybe she was just doodling.

She didn’t seem to care much, that was for certain.

Which, I must say, pissed me off. Not for Mrs. Monroe, who was clearly guilty, but for my entire profession.

Everyone is entitled to a defense. I believe that like a religious precept. There are ways to defend guilty people. There are ways to protect both them and society.

What Raylin was doing was not one of those ways.

Apparently the judge agreed. “Just because you have no objections to the witness doesn’t mean—”

“Your Honor.” Abrimowitz spoke softly but with some force. That took balls. He was, essentially, reprimanding the judge.

I shook my head, just a little, hoping Abrimowitz saw me.

“Yes, counselor?” the judge asked in a tone so frosty that I had to check my arms to see if I had been coated in ice.

“May I continue?” That clearly hadn’t been what he was trying to say.

“No, you may not,” the judge said. “I need to caution you that some of your witness’s answers are not allowed under the rules. I will not strike those answers, but I do want you both to watch yourselves. Both of you should know better.”

I was used to a judge reprimanding me, and so, apparently, was Abrimowitz because he didn’t look fazed at all.

Mrs. Monroe seemed even more startled than she had a moment ago. The jury was squirming just a bit—each and every one of them—and Raylin, well, she had finally looked up from her legal pad, as if she didn’t quite understand what was going on or what her role was in any of this.

Which was probably true.

“Now you may continue,” the judge said to Abrimowitz.

He took a deep breath, probably to cover for the fact that he too had lost his train of thought. I hadn’t. I had just opined that Mrs. Monroe’s actions, however indirectly, had destroyed Lucinda, something I didn’t know as a fact. That was what the judge objected to, and that was the direction that Abrimowitz could no longer take.

“Are you involved with Ms. Elbe?” Abrimowitz asked.

I was expecting that question. He’d asked it in prep too many times. He clearly did not believe my answer which had been the same then as it was now.

“No,” I said.

“Did you want to be?” Abrimowitz asked.

“No,” I said, aware that was a slight lie. She had caught my attention from the start. When I offered her advice, I had been hoping she’d see me as someone she could rely on. But I hadn’t taken it any farther than that.

“Yet you seem interested in her,” Abrimowitz said.

“I take an interest in a number of my colleagues,” I said. “Male and female.”

“Yet you’ve never come to court before,” Abrimowitz said.

“That is true,” I said. “I’ve never come to court before to watch an attorney I was worried about. And I’ve regretted it in a number of cases.”

“So you were turning over a new leaf,” Abrimowitz said with a tight smile.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” I said. “I just had a feeling that something was going deeply wrong with this case, and I worried that someone was going to get hurt.”

“Ms. Raylin?” the judge asked, nudging again.

Raylin lifted her head. “Um, objection?”

“Based on what?” the judge asked, as a prompt.

“Um…his answer?”

Laughter rippled through the courtroom, including the jury box.

“What part of his answer?” the judge prompted.

“Um…all of it?”

The judge sighed softly. She had tried to make her point and failed. If she continued to prompt, she would be risking a bias allegation on the side of the defense. Right now, the transcript did not show her concern, but if she commented anymore, she could be in trouble. And since Raylin hadn’t cited a reason for the objection, the judge’s response was immediate and logical.

“Overruled,” she said with great disgust. “Continue, Mr. Abrimowitz, but do remember my warning from earlier.”

“Yes, your honor,” Abrimowitz said. He looked at me. “Please confine your answers to what you know as a fact.”

“Sorry, yeah, okay,” I said, trying all the answers because that was safer, especially considering my growing irritation at the damn defense attorney.

I loathed Mrs. Monroe, and yet I was half tempted to leap across the courtroom, sit at the defense table, and take over for the incompetent Ms. Raylin.

Remember, I told you. I have white knight tendencies. In this case, the damsel in distress wasn’t Mrs. Monroe, but the law herself and, in particular, my little corner of it.

“What happened after you got to court?” Abrimowitz asked me.

“It was a strange set-up,” I said.

Abrimowitz walked me through the “strangeness,” constantly referring to my experience in courtrooms as a baseline.

Raylin should have objected.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Judge Siddalli shift more and more as my testimony continued. Yes, we both knew that I hadn’t just stepped up to the line, but I’d crossed several.

Abrimowitz seemed more and more confident as the questioning went on. Mrs. Monroe sank into her chair. She understood that we were harming her, but her lawyer just kept doodling or making notes or whatever it was that she was doing instead of objecting.

The jury was watching me closely, unaware of the drama going on between the judge and the defense.

“Did you see a gun?” Abrimowitz was asking me.

“Yes,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

“The bouquet of dead flowers was falling apart,” I said, “and I saw the white barrel. Only I’d never seen a white gun before, and it wasn’t until she reminded her husband that they had promised to be together until death that I understood what was going on.”

“Before the bailiffs did,” Abrimowitz said. It should have been a question.

“I was watching from a different angle,” I said. “I launched myself—”

“We’ve shown the video,” Abrimowitz said, cutting me off. “The jury knows what you did, and I’m sure everyone around you was grateful.”

“Mr. Abrimowitz,” the judge said, not even waiting for the defense to screw up an objection.

“Sorry, Your Honor,” Abrimowitz said, and focused on me.  “It would seem to me that you and not Ms. Elbe would be the traumatized one from this entire situation. Are you having difficulties?”

I blinked at him. I wasn’t sure what he was driving at since we hadn’t discussed this part.

“Other than my brand-new physical limitations, no,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t help it, because someone really needed to put up a defense, if only for the sake of the law, I added, “But I am left with a question.”

Abrimowitz’s eyes narrowed. He must have heard something in my tone.

“And what is that?” he asked, with a caution in his voice.

“Because I’m considered to be the victim in this case,” I said, “a lot of people have sent me the press coverage of the incident or have talked to me about it.”

The judge had stiffened again. Mrs. Monroe sat very still. Raylin finally lifted her head, frowning at me. I wondered if she was finally forming an objection.

“And I have seen no one ask what I consider to be a salient question,” I said, allowing time for someone to stop me.

Abrimowitz did.

“I’m sure we’ll get to your question eventually,” he said. “Right now, though, I think we’ve covered everything. I have no further questions.”

Then he pivoted and returned to the prosecutor’s table.

“Ms. Raylin, do you have any questions?” The judge asked. Something in her tone led me (and probably half the courtroom) to believe that Raylin was going to decline to cross-examine me.

“Actually, your honor,” she said, “I do.”

Raylin sounded as surprised as I was. But she wasn’t interested enough to stand up. She just leaned forward.

“Mr…um…” She had to look at her notes to find my last name, even though it had been used several times in the past fifteen minutes, and I was the victim. She should have known my name like the back of her hand.

She turned a page, and finally Mrs. Monroe pointed at something on the paper. Raylin nodded, and continued.

“Um… you said you had an unanswered question. What is it?”

I felt a jolt. A defense attorney should never ask a question she didn’t know the answer to. Not ever.

But, in for a penny, in for a pound.

“I’ve been wondering why a woman as obviously competent as Mrs. Monroe would bring a gun to court with the intention of shooting her husband. What had he done to deserve that?”

“Objection!” Abrimowitz yelled so loudly that his voice echoed around the room.

Raylin was waving her hands at me as if she couldn’t believe I had said that.

Judge Siddalli glared at me. “You know quite well that there are no good reasons for killing someone.”

I looked over at her, surprised she had said that. Apparently, her disgust at Raylin had removed half of her judicial filters.

“It would seem, Your Honor, that the State disagrees with you, since many states have kept the death penalty. According to our laws, then, there are many legal reasons for taking someone’s life.”

Her eyes narrowed. I remembered that look from law school. We’d had a lot of late-night law review arguments, she and I. She always quit before I did because she refused to go to the mat on the logical inconsistencies that exist in almost every human-designed system.

“It’s not relevant,” Abrimowitz said. “I want that answer stricken.”

“Um…” a tentative voice said. It took me a moment to realize that voice belonged to Raylin. “I actually…um…think it might be relevant. I mean, if my client had a good reason—”

“It means nothing,” Abrimowitz said. “She shot an innocent man, who for some reason is defending her.”

“Oh, hell,” I said, deciding to undo the damage I had just done. “I’m not defending her. She shot me with an illegal firearm that she brought with the intent to kill her husband. I think I’m within my rights to wonder why she thought the man deserved to die, rather than, say, have all his possessions removed from him in a fairly ugly divorce.”

The jury was staring at all of his. Reporters were checking their phones and notes to make sure they were getting all of this.

And then Mrs. Monroe stood up.

“Because, you imbecile,” she said in that strident voice that still haunts my nightmares, “my husband and I made a vow before God to stay together until death parted us. I didn’t want to be with him anymore than he wanted to be with me, but divorce is a sin. So I figured I’d do God’s bidding—”

At this point, Raylin was shouting incoherently, the judge was pounding her gavel, calling on Raylin to get her client under control, and Abrimowitz was shaking his head as he frowned at me.

I had just guaranteed a conviction for him, taught a young lawyer that she either didn’t belong in this game and/or that she really needed to learn how to advocate for her clients—even the obviously guilty ones.

I shrugged at him, and he glared at me.

The bailiffs swarmed Mrs. Monroe, Raylin finally objected, and the judge loudly informed her that her client could watch from outside the room. Then the courtroom got blissfully quiet, and everyone turned to me, apparently remembering I was still—technically—testifying.

“I want the lawyers in my chambers. Now,” the judge said. “Court is adjourned until nine tomorrow morning.”

Everyone stood and started talking, including the jury, which was a bad sign. I remained in the witness chair as Abrimowitz and Raylin trailed after the judge.

For the first time in a long time, I was happy I wasn’t trying this case. Those two were probably going to be shredded by the judge, and justifiably so.

After the courtroom emptied, I got up, feeling that now-familiar stretching pain in my chest. I managed to get halfway down the aisle when Abrimowitz slammed out of the judge’s chambers.

“That doesn’t look good,” I said.

“Oh, it’s fine,” he said. “We’re going to have a plea, which we should have had from the beginning. And the judge is tearing that baby defense attorney a new asshole. I’d get out of here, though, if I were you, and you better hope you never get into Judge Siddalli’s courtroom again. She’s really mad. At me, at you, and she’s hoping that no one takes this to the judicial review board, because she’s going to look very bad.”

“She should,” I said. “And that defense attorney—”

“—is none of your damn business!” Abrimowitz took a step toward me, right hand closed into a fist. “What the hell were you thinking?”

I opened my mouth to answer but he held up that hand, palm open now.

“No, don’t tell me,” he said, then shook his head. “Because it makes no sense. She shot you, for god’s sake. What the hell?”

I didn’t think he wanted to hear the white knight speech, the I love the law corollary, and the someone had to do it justification. So I shrugged.

“Justice is blind,” I said.

“Not when it lost half a lung and spent six months recovering,” he snapped.

He was breathing hard, and we were staring at each other. His face was red, and I was remarkably calm.

“I’m the one who was shot,” I said.

“And that should piss you off,” he said.

“It did,” I said. “It does.”

His eyes narrowed. “But…?”

“But a bad, lazy defense pisses me off more,” I said.

“You want her to go to jail, don’t you?” he asked.

I paused, then thought about it. As I did, I suddenly became aware of my breath. It didn’t work the way it used to. My lung capacity was down by one quarter, and my ribs would never entirely heal right. Any exercise took more effort than it did before I got shot.

Not to mention the nightmares and the pain—Christ, the pain, especially on those nights alone, when there was no one to distract me.

I read legal history those nights. Stupidly enough, I believe in this system. I think it’s the best one I’ve read about, and for it to work, someone has to defend the Ellen Monroes of the world.

Not doodle on a legal pad and say um too many times, but to actually defend her. To find the best solution for all involved, whether that was a plea or a good attempt at jury nullification or just a straight conviction with the death penalty off the table.

“I don’t care if she goes to jail,” I said, surprising even myself.

“What?” Abrimowitz brought his head back so hard I thought I heard his neck creak.

“It’s not going to change anything for me. She shot me. I nearly died. I have a shit-ton of scars and I’ll never be able to breathe easily again.” I sounded a little breathy as I said this. “Lucinda lost her ability to practice law because she’s terrified of the courtroom. Last I heard, Judge Castillo is on leave. I have no idea what happened to the husband—”

“He moved, after the divorce was final,” Abrimowitz said.

“—so everything is different for him too,” I said. “Those are facts. What happens to Ellen Monroe means nothing to us. It does mean something to the future, though. With luck, she won’t shoot another man again or make another gun. She’ll be off the streets, and with even more luck, she won’t be in a cell with someone who’ll get out and refine her techniques for getting a ghost gun into the courthouse.”

Abrimowitz frowned at me, then slowly shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

I shrugged again. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. But that didn’t matter either.

“Law’s not a job for me,” I said.

“Don’t give me that ‘it’s a calling’ bullshit,” Abrimowitz said.

“All right,” I said. “I won’t.”

Then I turned my back on him and walked out of the courtroom.

Law wasn’t a calling for me. Isn’t a calling for me. It’s a framework, a way of understanding the world. It is logical (for the most part), built on other pieces, and fastidiously guarded by a precious few.

If I had to compare it to anything, I would call it a religion. Not the wave a Bible and thump your chest, filled with emotion and the holy spirit kind of religion.

The studious kind, the kind that tries to figure out the place of humanity in the world, in a vain attempt to make sense of our existence.

I smiled at myself as I hit the main hallway that led to the front doors. To walk this way, I had to pass the courtroom where I got shot.

Lives changed in courtrooms, sometimes dramatically, like mine did, and sometimes in the routine administration of justice.

That is how it should be, in my world anyway.

It puts logic on chaos, a way of making the inexplicable seem important.

But only because it needs to be done right. And this one hadn’t been.

What happened if Ellen Monroe’s husband deserved to die for the things he did? We would never know. And Ellen Monroe wasn’t talking about them, not in ways we understood.

He should’ve been called as a witness. He should’ve been part of her defense—not financing it, not even as moral support, but as a small fact to cast doubt.

What kind of woman dresses up in her wedding dress on the day of her divorce? What leads her to that? And why don’t more women do it? Or more men, for that matter?

What caused Ellen Monroe to snap when hundreds of thousands of others never do?

Those questions fascinate me, and they don’t get answered in the wrong kind of criminal proceeding.

But there’s no one I can tell this to, no one else whom I know who will understand.

My somewhat monastic servitude to the law has become more devoted in the time since the shooting than it was before the shooting—and I think on that servitude often, especially as I look at the courthouse where it all happened.

The constructs we build. The choices we make. The vows we break.

In the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing.

Most of what we do means nothing.

But looking at the grand scheme of things is as futile as retrying Ellen Monroe.

It’s the little things that matter, the tipping points, the moments that might send us all over the edge.

We’re waiting there, in our metaphorical wedding dresses, cursing parking meters, and wondering how we got there—and knowing, deep down, that we got there step by step, building blocks the same way the law builds precedent, one small choice at a time.

I don’t think about Ellen Monroe when I breathe. I think about the law.

I think about the people who die for their religion each and every day. I took a bullet for mine, and I would do so again if the opportunity arises.

I would absolutely do so again.

___________________________________________

“The Bride Case” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Bride Case

First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2024
Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout © copyright 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art © copyright Canva

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Mod R would like to remind you that the cheesecake procedures have been set out in Chapter 5 if you are going to obsess need a refresher.

Also:

I don’t really need to explain the FU involved in putting the healer whom your rival is desperately expecting onto a flight using the slowest route possible because you want to make things harder for them. Yes, they could’ve put him on a private jet but they deliberately chose not to. It’s a power play. We all get it. I hope.

I raised my head from the body of a lake dragon and listened. Next to me, Bear stopped chewing. Her ears twitched.

Something was stalking us through the tunnels.

We left the spider herders behind three days ago. I still didn’t have a watch, but I’d needed to rest three times. The last time we bedded down, Bear started barking halfway through. She’d bark, I’d wake up, we’d both peer into the darkness, and then she would settle down and we would go back to sleep. I thought it was some monster making circles around us, but it didn’t feel like that anymore. It felt like something was deliberately hunting us, something smart and patient. Our hunter stayed just out of range. Sometimes I would feel a flicker of a presence, and then it would be gone.

I pushed hard after resting, going through the tunnels and caverns at top speed. I thought we’d lost them. Apparently not.

Bear went back to munching on lake dragon steak. The wasp queen was a watershed moment for me. Until that point, I viewed myself as prey. I tried to avoid fights, and I assumed that everything we met was stronger than me.

I was still cautious, but reality had finally set in. I was faster and stronger than a lot of things in this breach, and my injuries healed within hours.  I no longer went around. I cut through. And when something managed to get too close, my monster dog tore it to pieces. Bear grew another two inches and reached 99 pounds. The scaredy-cat shepherd who hid behind me when we started was long gone. Now when Bear sighted an enemy, she held herself like an apex predator. When she sensed a fight coming, her tail wagged and her bright eyes seemed to say, “Oh boy, I wonder if this one is yummy.”

Perhaps sensing a change, the stalkers gave us a wide berth. We killed an  oversized serpent the size of a power pole, a handful of the silverfish bugs, some tentacled thing which I couldn’t identify, and now a lake dragon who tried to ambush us on the shore of a deep pond. This one was smaller than the first, but it still made us work for the win. We paused to rest, heal, and eat, and now our unseen tracker caught up.

I shifted the bag on my back. Before I left, the spider herders gifted me a backpack made of spider webs. It was weightless and damn near indestructible. Right now it contained a section of one of the ropes I made, my helmet and Bear’s leash and harness. I had no idea why I kept that stuff around. The rope could prove useful, but the harness didn’t fit Bear anymore and the helmet mostly got in the way now. I saw better without its light. My eyes had completely adjusted to the darkness. I was pretty sure I’d passed the human threshold of night vision days ago.

I cut a paper-thin slice from the lake dragon’s flank and chewed it.

“Bear, either this dragon tastes like chicken or I’m losing my mind.”

Bear ripped into her slab of meat.

“Compared to the stalkers, it’s downright delicious.”

The more casually we acted, the closer the hunter would get. I took another bite. Come on over, it’s just me and my puppy having a picnic. Join us, won’t you? We are harmless, I swear.

I chewed and waited.

Nothing.

Hard to look harmless when you are snacking on a monster the size of a moving truck and leaving a trail of bodies in your wake.

I leaned back against the rock. “I’m happy, Bear. My stomach is full, I drank some water, I got to rest, and neither one of us is hurt.”

The shepherd glanced at me.

“When you are young, you think that happiness is made of big triumphant moments. Getting your driver’s license. Graduating. Getting accepted into a college of your choice. Your wedding day – that’s a big one. But when you get older, you realize that those are the moments you remember, but they are so rare. If you want to be happy, you look for joy in small things. A cup of favorite coffee. A good book. Vegging out on the couch after a long, hard day at work.  Some people might say those are moments when you are content, not happy.  But I will take what I can get, and right now this is a moment.”

 Bear grinned at me.

“When we get out and I get back to my kids, now that will be a huge moment. You will like them, Bear. They will like you, too, because you are the best girl ever.”

I would walk out of this gate no matter what it cost me. Even if I was no longer the same Ada who had entered. And when we did exit, Bear would be coming home with me. I would pry her away from the guild no matter what it took. After all, I was sadrin now.  I would think of something.

Sadrin.  The word turned over in my mind. One of my coworkers back at the agency had a crystal cube on her desk with dichroic film paper inside of it.  When she turned it, the color would change. The same section of the cube could look blue or red or yellow depending on the position and the light. Sadrin was like that.

I was Sadrin.  I am Sadrin.

There was a world of meaning in that world, but I couldn’t decode it. It felt at once weighty and ephemeral, something I should know, something I already knew, something I had to discover… It was breaking my brain in the same way the lectures on quantum physics I attended as part of the DDC training.  The electron was both a particle and wave, light was a quantum field, and I was sadrin.

It was the same strange feeling when I spoke to the spider herders. I knew what I said and I was understood, and yet, I didn’t speak their language.  It was more like I formed an intent to communicate gratitude and something in my mind put it into the appropriate sounds.

Technically, that was how speech worked in general. We formed intent to speak, and our body produced the sound, but when I spoke English, that process was instant. With the spider herders, I felt that neural connection happen in slow motion. It was disconcerting.

What did that woman put into my head?

Bear trotted to the pond, drank, and ran over to me. It was time to go.

We trekked across the cavern to another tunnel. I closed my eyes for a moment, checking the position of the anchor. Yep, still straight ahead. It was very close now and it had gotten more distracting. I’d compared it to a psychic splinter before; that splinter had become infected. It wedged itself in my consciousness and throbbed.

The anchor was usually well protected. I had leveled up, figuratively speaking, but I wasn’t sure I could take whatever guarded it. A part of me wanted to try. Wanted something to be there, something I could cut down. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to punish whoever created the breach in the first place by killing their prized bioweapon or if I wanted to prove something to myself because deep down, I was still scared. Dwelling on it wouldn’t do me any good. The anchor was our destination. We would get to it.

Maybe I would get some answers there.

The tunnel ended and Bear and I walked onto another stone bridge. An oval cavern stretched out on both sides of us, not very large but deep, about one hundred feet across and twice that down. The narrow stone bridge spanned it just off center. On the other side, another tunnel waited.

We kept walking, sticking to the center of the path. We were about halfway across when I caught a glint of something below.

“Rest.”

Bear lay down. We were working on new commands. So far, she got rest, up, and back. That last one was especially useful in a fight. I had no idea how hard it was to train a dog, but cute puppy videos on Instagram taught me that it required repetition. Command, compliance, reward, rinse and repeat. It took Bear only five repetitions to learn a command, and once she learned it, it stuck. I was sure it wasn’t normal, but nothing had been since I walked into this breach. Normal had packed its bags and left the building.

I knelt and carefully leaned over the edge to look down.

Bodies sprawled below. Human bodies in the familiar indigo of Cold Chaos.

I went cold.

They lay strewn around the bottom of the cave like Noah’s action figures thrown onto the bed. Some were missing limbs, some had been cut in half. It looked familiar. I had seen this at the mining site. This controlled carnage. One slice, one death.

I forced myself to focus on the corpses.  They were too far to fully analyze, but I noticed that when I measured distances with my Talent, it gave me a moment of enhanced distance vision. The body directly under me was lying on its back.  I flexed, and for a split second my talent grasped its face.

Malcolm. This was the original assault team.

Something flashed by Malcolm’s body. I concentrated on it. The cheesecake stone.

My heart hammered in my chest. As soon as London made it out, the gate coordinator would have gone into the breach and activated the cheesecake, the signal stone, twin to the one that was now blinking below me. Even if London died, the mining team would have failed the check-in on the hour, which would lead to the same outcome – the cheesecake would be activated, triggering a response in the stone carried by the assault team.

At that point, the assault team would have turned around and marched back to the gate. They never made it, which meant they were either already dead by the time the cheesecake started flashing, or they were enroute back to the gate when they died.

The gate was less than two hours away. Had to be.

If I could get down there, I could walk out of the breach in two hours. Bear and I would be out of this nightmare. We could go home.

I scrambled from the edge and sat, trying to get a grip. I had to calm down.

Could we get down there? Was it physically possible?

I crawled back to the edge and looked down again, measuring the distance with my talent for the second time. Two hundred and eleven feet. The rope in my backpack was only fifty feet long, whatever the spider herders helped me cut from the length I used to rappel down the cliff.

Nowhere near long enough.

I could jump pretty far now, and a drop of thirty feet wasn’t out of the question. But that and my rope still only gave me eighty. I would need one hundred and twenty-seven feet. At least.

I surveyed the walls. Sheer. No way to climb down. Even if I somehow strapped Bear to myself, we wouldn’t make it.

I felt like screaming. We were so close. Damn it.

So fucking close.

I looked below again, surveying the bodies, the floor, the walls…

I had to let it go. There was no way down. We couldn’t afford to sit here wasting time and energy obsessing over it.

I felt the weight of someone’s stare.  The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.

I concentrated. The hidden watcher was across the cavern, perpendicular to the bridge.

Slowly I reached into my backpack, pulled out my hard hat, slid the selector on the light to maximum beam, and jerked the helmet up.

Across from us a face with two shining eyes peered at me through the gap in the far wall. My Talent grasped an outline of a long humanoid head. A blink and it jerked out of sight, behind the stone.

The light on the helmet sputtered and died.

“And now we know we haven’t lost it, Bear.”

Something was following us. Not just something. Someone. And they glowed bright red.

Red meant value. Our hunter offered something useful, something that, judging by the intensity of the color, we desperately needed.

I set the useless helmet on the bridge and got up. The anchor was still pulsing on the edge of my awareness.

“If we find the anchor, maybe we can find a way down.”

Bear wagged her tail.

“Come on, Bearkins.”

I started forward and Bear chased after me.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 9 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Daikon is a sweeping and suspenseful novel of love and war, set in Japan during…

The post Spotlight on “Daikon” by Samuel Hawley appeared first on LitStack.

Have you ever considered the benefits of a good life insurance policy?

ARRRRRRRRRR!

Not relevant. Also, chill!

Like diss?

Oooh, yeah, exactly like that.

Art imitating life imitating art imitating…. Screw it, pour one for me.

 Buy A Forbidden Alchemy

FORMAT/INFO: A Forbidden Alchemy will be published on July 1st, 2025 by Saga Press. It is 480 pages long and available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: One simple test has the chance to change your life forever. In a matter of seconds, you discover if you are a magical Artisan or a non-magical Crafter. Nina and Patrick are just children when they undergo their test - and discover a secret that changes their lives forever. Over a decade later, the two are reunited as the country is embroiled in revolution. Nina is an Artisan trying to hide from both sides of the war, while Patrick is a leader of the Crafter revolution. After all these years, will their bond stand the strain of conflicting loyalties? Or will the sides of the war keep them apart?

A Forbidden Alchemy is a slow-burn fantasy romance that swept me off my feet. It takes its time to build up the dynamic between the two characters, first introducing you to them as children, when a formative event shaped their lives forever. When Nina and Patrick are reunited, you can feel the weight of history each carries. They’ve both done things to survive that they aren’t proud of. They're each living with the consequences of their choices that fateful day as children, and it has shaped them in very different ways.

It's the differences that keep the romance a slow dance between Nina and Patrick. Although they sparked a bond as children, they haven't seen each other in over a decade. Can they trust each other? Where do their respective loyalties lie? Would one of them put the other above their ties to any family or faction? While they figure out their hierarchy of trust and priorities, Nina and Patrick keep each other at arm's length. Watching those walls slowly crumble is what makes the eventual romance (and brief spice) worth it.

Supporting this romance is the moody and desolate world this story is set in. The bulk of the book takes place in an area that resembles a rural England mining town in the early twentieth century. It's the kind of town where the majority of men are involved in the dangerous work of mining, where people live in constant fear of hearing of a devastating tunnel collapse. The landscape is harsh and unforgiving, and full of windswept moors, the perfect backdrop to a romance fraught with tension.

While A Forbidden Alchemy is a fantasy story, it's a fairly low-magic one, largely due to the fact that it is primarily set in a non-magical Crafter town. The magical Artisans exhibit an affinity for manipulating some sort of element, metal, or other singular material. Nina, for instance, is an earth charmer (essentially an earth bender), while rapid communication throughout the country is facilitated by those who have an affinity for ink and can manipulate it across great distances. Their abilities are used infrequently enough that I sometimes found myself forgetting there was magic in this world, even though the clash between Artisans and Crafters drives the heart of the story.

But at the end of the day, the magic doesn't matter as much because the fight between Artisan and Crafter is really one of class warfare. The Crafters do the back-breaking work that keeps the nation functional, while the Artisans live in luxury, making occasionally useful things, but often things that are just pretty. It's the classic recipe for an uprising.

At the center of it all is Patrick, the heart of a workers' uprising. He's the cold leader of the town who will make the impossible choices so that life is better for the families that come after. He's brutal when he has to be and brooding most of the rest of the time, and yes, it's absolutely catnip for me.

Nina, on the other hand, is out for herself. Not in an actively malicious way, but in that passivity of "I don't want to rock the boat if it's going to mean bad things for me." To be fair, the more we see of her backstory as the narrative unfolds, the more we see how much she has lived in constant fear the last several years, despite being an Artisan. Gaining the confidence to work on behalf of others is as much about facing her own fears as it is about growing a conscience.

My only real flaw was the fact that I ended up having to yell at certain characters for naivete towards the end of the book. While I can see the plot reasons certain choices were made, I found myself banging my head against the wall as I foresaw the inevitable fallout from those decisions.

CONCLUSION: That said, A Forbidden Alchemy may be my first Stacey McEwan but it certainly won't be my last. I found myself completely hooked by the writing and was desperate to pick it up at every opportunity. Truly, my biggest gripe with the book? That it had THAT ENDING and now I have to wait many, many months to see where things pick up in the sequel. I'm ready for the next installment of inevitable drama and angst to be injected into my veins NOW.

 

Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City (TSR, October 1985)

Greyhawk…

A cruel city.

A harsh, pitiless city for a young orphan boy with no money and no friends — but plenty of enemies!

Enter the Old City of Greyhawk, that marvelous place where dreams — and nightmares — come true. Travel through the world of Oerth along with Gord, the boy who becomes a man as he fights for his survival in a world of mysterious wizards, fearsome monsters, dour dwarves, and beautiful women.

[Click the images for Greyhawk-sized versions.]

Interior art for Saga of Old City by Clyde Caldwell

For Oerth is a world where a man’s eyes always watch the shadows… and a man’s hand is always on the hilt of his dagger.

Here, at last, is adventure enough to last a lifetime — perhaps a very short lifetime!

Gord the Rogue #1: Sea of Death (New Infinities Productions, June 1987). Cover by Jerry Tiritilli

Such fond memories of the Gord the Rogue series, by the incredible Gary Gygax. I think my favorite was Sea of Death. Gary was definitely inspired by his pal, Fritz Lieber, as Gord the Rogue was a lot like The Gray Mouser.

Jeffrey P. Talanian’s last article for Black Gate was a look at the Dragonslayer RPG by Greg Gillespie. Jeffrey is the creator and publisher of the Hyperborea sword-and-sorcery and weird science-fantasy RPG from North Wind Adventures. He was the co-author, with E. Gary Gygax, of the Castle Zagyg releases, including several Yggsburgh city supplements, Castle Zagyg: The East Mark Gazetteer, and Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works. Read Gabe Gybing’s interview with Jeffrey here, and follow his latest projects on Facebook and at www.hyperborea.tv.

A small section of the cover with the wasps on it.

The sketch of the cover for the Inheritance features an interior of a cave. Bear and Ada are silhouetted on the ledge looking into a vast cavern where a couple of wasps are flying in the distance. More than one answer is allowed. If you are reading it through the email and getting code salad, click this link to vote.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

In the interests of not making Mod R work on the weekend, comments are locked.

The post Very Important Poll: Yes Wasps or No Wasps first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Boys from County Hell (Six Mile High Productions, April 2020)
and Twilight (Summit Entertainment, November 21, 2008)

20 vampire films, all first time watches for me.

Come on — sink ’em in.

Boys from County Hell (2020) – Prime/Shudder

Ah, British and British-adjacent horror comedies. When they’re done right, there’s nothing better, and this one is done right.

I had a blast with this one, I’d put it right up there with the likes of Dog Soldiers, Grabbers, Shaun of the Dead, Doghouse, Severance, and The Cottage. They all have something in common; a close-knit group, localized setting, extreme gore, and flowery language.

This one takes place in Northern Ireland in a verdant county of farmers, builders and heavy drinkers. Moffat & Son are construction workers, tasked with paving the way for a hugely unpopular bypass that is not only going to tear up some fields, but will also destroy a long-standing cairn said to be the resting place of a vampire. The legend hangs so thickly in this county that Bram Stoker himself was influenced by it when passing through, and was compelled to write a book. Indeed, the local pub is called the Stoker and garnished with Spirit Halloween props to draw the tourists in.

Naturally, once the cairn is indeed demolished, all hell breaks loose, and the Moffats, along with their friends and colleagues, must survive the night against a terrifying entity.

The horror is indeed horrific, with the usual viscera spiced up with some truly ghastly blood weeping (from every orifice), and Robert Strange (known for orcs and aliens) is suitably creepy as Abhartach, the vampire. The rest of the cast is stellar, with my personal favorites being Nigel O’Neill (Mandrake) as Francie Moffat, and Louisa Harland (Orla in Derry Girls) as Claire, although I don’t want to downplay the rest of the players — everyone was spot on and their dialogue cracked me up several times.

Really enjoyed this one — highly recommended.

9/10

Twilight (2008) – Prime

I guess this watch-a-thon is as good a time as any to view this one, a film as adored as it is vilified. I really don’t have any strong feelings either way about this film; I didn’t think it was very well made, but I didn’t hate it, so I think I’ll just address the big issues that swirled around it at the time.

Sparkly vampires: Meh, not a deal-breaker. I actually didn’t mind this idea as it was in keeping with Stephanie Myer’s new vampire mythology. I wasn’t a big fan of all the brooding though — definitely a case of too many surly faces.

Rob Patts and Kris Stew: I really like these two — Pattinson was my favorite actor in 2019 (The Lighthouse), and Stewart has been solid from Underwater onward. However, in this film they are not directed well and come off as overly miserable, more than they needed to be.

Team Jacob: Ah, bless him.

Vampire skills: The super-speed and wire work were awful (SFX-wise), especially for a 2008 film. And I didn’t see a single fang. Boo.

The tone: Hated the colour-grading, Catherine Hardwicke’s direction was bafflingly stuffed with nonsensical camera moves, and the editing was dire. Stilted, awkward dialogue. Also, dull narration.

Good points: I really liked the dynamic between Bella and her estranged dad (Billy Burke, excellent), and of the Cullens Alice (Ashley Greene) was fun.

I am fully aware that I’m not the intended demographic for this film, but there have been plenty of other YA romance flicks with supernatural elements that I have enjoyed a lot more.

Oh well, crossed off the list.

6/10

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (H264, September 3, 2023)
and You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In (Alenu Entertainment, March 15, 2024)

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023) – Crave/Max

This is a French Canadian film, as is evident by the liberal use of subtitles and poutine.

Sasha is a teenage (68) vampire, part of a loving family who are concerned that she still hasn’t killed her first human. Problem is, Sasha doesn’t want to. She gets sick at the idea, and prefers to slurp from blood bags while brooding around town in the evenings. Eventually her family intervenes, and she is sent to live with her more bloodthirsty cousin in the hope she can be weaned off the bags and onto jugulars.

Sasha is having none of it, and continues to despair, until she runs into a young man who is tired of life. This is Paul, a lonely and picked-upon high schooler with a fondness for rocks and a personal bully who fills his shoes with queso. Sasha and Paul appeal to each other’s plight, and a plan is hatched to help Paul fulfill his final wishes before Sasha finally earns her fangs.

This film is a vibe. By which I mean if you like awkward non-romances with furtive glances, unsubtle metaphors, sitting on the edge of beds, symmetrical compositions, good lighting, a great soundtrack, and the occasional neck-nibble, this is for you. Did I mention it’s hilarious? Well it is, in a gently dark way. Its look is simultaneously harsh and dreamlike, and the two leads (Sara Montpetit and Félix-Antoine Bénard) are perfect (if this was remade in the U.S., the leads would be Kristen Ritter and Nicholas Hoult).

I loved it — but your experience may differ.

9/10

You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In (2024) – Tubi

Awkward title aside, this has all the tiresome social media subplots you would expect from a 2024 film. A bunch of old friends meet up somewhere in Italy for Rochelle’s wedding to Richard, former boyfriend of main protagonist Kelsey. Kelsey has arrived with her gay best friend, Blake, and they join Rochelle and bachelorette party organizer Jenny on the beach. Kelsey isn’t wearing the right attire to be in any of their photos (Rochelle has her 123 million followers to think of) so she wanders off into town where she meets Gianni, the resident Van Helsing, who warns her of ‘evil’ and gives her Chekov’s pendant.

Of course, Kelsey meets Victor (do vampires have any other names? I’d love to see a vampire called Nigel), who is the owner of the villa they are all staying in. Absurdly, Victor has to wait for them to invite him into the building he owns, and from that moment on, he pursues Kelsey (who is the spitting image of his centuries-old lost love) while the others scramble about.

It’s all extremely unoriginal and tiresome. Rochelle doesn’t want to call the cops (after finding her murdered friend) because that will impact her follower count, Blake just wants to get into Gianni’s pants, and Victor is the least charismatic count I’ve ever seen, all blinding white teeth and Jason Priestly hair.

There are parts that I enjoyed; the direction is decent, the setting is suitably gothic, and Kelsey and Blake are quite fun to watch, but overall it’s a bit of a Mills & Boon arm-chewer.

5/10

Count Dracula (Hemdale, 1970) Count Dracula (1970) – Tubi

Billed as a slavish reenactment of the original Bram Stoker novel, Jess Franco’s take on the story reveals why Dracula works better when it’s adapted with a little pzazz. True, Coppola also stuck closely to the original text, but he was wise enough to sprinkle in plenty of hot actors, rampant knockers, and Tom Waits.

This version, faithful as it is, is rather dull and (somewhat appropriately) lifeless. Big Chris Lee takes it all very seriously, and you can tell this film was important to him after the lurid camp of his glorious Hammer films (which he wasn’t finished with), but this results in a limp-fanged count with barely any physical presence. Herbert (Phantom of the Opera) Lom is fine as Van Helsing, and Klaus (Nosferatu) Kinski was an inspired choice for Renfield, but neither actor was really let off the leash and allowed to demonstrate their natural nuttiness.

Despite some distracting crash-zooms and swish-pans, the film looked quite nice given its abundance of spiders and webs, and I did enjoy Bruno Nicolai’s score, but when all’s said and done, this one was about as memorable as a digestive biscuit.

5/10

El Conde (Netflix, September 15, 2023) El Conde (The Count) (2023) – Netflix

What a way to end this project. Pablo Larrain, a Chilean director known previously to English-speaking audiences for biopics such as Jackie and Spencer, returns to a subject he previously dissected in an earlier film, No, the subject being Augustus Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990.

However, rather than a narrative formed from the facts of Pinochet’s attempts to cling to power, El Conde takes place in a surreal alternate universe where Pinochet is a centuries-old vampire who has finally grown weary of immortality. His offspring are gathered to his remote estate, along with his wife and man-servant, to discuss his final plans for the division of his ill-gotten gains, but the accountant that has been hired to help is secretly a nun assassin, ready to drive the demon from his soul.

Bickering leads to bloodshed and loyalties are trampled underfoot as the elderly patriarch both yearns for death but also takes off at night to find new victims to sate his taste for heart smoothies (quite literally). It’s as weird as it sounds, and it just gets weirder, especially in the third act when another political figure appears on the scene (there’s a reason why the English narration sounds like Maggie Thatcher).

The film itself, shot in stark black and white, was nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, and it’s easy to see why. Everything, from the use of lighting to the shot compositions, is sublime, and the acting is great all round, not least from Jaime Vadell as the elderly monster.

9/10

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part I
You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part II
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?
Fan of the Cave Bear
There, Wolves
What a Croc
Prehistrionics
Jumping the Shark
Alien Overlords
Biggus Footus
I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie
The Weird, Weird West
Warrior Women Watch-a-thon

Neil Baker’s last article for us was Part II of You Can’t Handle the Tooth. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits. (AprilMoonBooks.com).

THE GOLDEN COMPASS Envision Worlds, People and Happenings You Would Never Conceive on Your Own…

The post The Mysteries of “The Golden Compass” | His Dark Materials Part 1 appeared first on LitStack.

Hi, everyone.

Over the past couple of months, I have been working with Jacqui Venturini, a very talented artist, to develop a comic book adaption of The Zero Blessing. It’s been a very interesting experience so far, and it has been remarkable to see my characters come alive on the page. (See below images). So far, we’re looking at around four comics for the entire book.

This obviously isn’t free, so here’s the question. How many of you would be willing to back a kickstarter (or something along those lines) for this project? I’m not sure what rewards there’d be yet – copies of the comic itself, obviously, perhaps also copies of the novel itself – so any suggestions for rewards would be warmly welcomed.

Take a look at the images below and let me know.

Chris

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

The Bachelorette Party by Camilla Sten

Mogsy’s Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Minotaur Books (June 10, 2025)

Length: 304 pages

Author Information: Website

I’ll kick this off by saying I’ve previously read two of Camilla Sten’s books and was looking forward to her take on a locked-room mystery in The Bachelorette, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t love this one. While I get that the genre comes with certain conventions and stylistic conventions, I felt the story lost a lot of that eerie, spine-tingling magic I’d come to associate with and love about the author’s work.

That said, the premise certainly grabs your attention. Ten years ago, four childhood friends vanished without a trace after their annual girls-getaway to a secluded island nestled off the coast of Sweden. Later, it was determined that the women must have met their ends in a tragic boating accident after a night of drinking and partying, their bodies lost to the sea. However, not everyone was convinced by the official story. For some, the unanswered questions, lack of evidence, and suspicious silence surrounding the incident felt just a little bit too tidy.

One of these individuals is Tessa, a former true crime podcaster whose career was recently derailed by a recent scandal. Desperate to get her life back on track, she seizes upon the opportunity to solve the decade-old mystery when her best friend Anneliese invites her to her bachelorette party. As luck would have it, the celebration is taking place at a slick new yoga retreat on the very same island from where the four women disappeared. Even more fortuitously, the retreat is run by the sister of one of the missing women, giving Tessa potential access to someone with intimate knowledge of the case. But things don’t go quite as planned. One of the rules for this spiritual weekend is a strict no-phones policy, cutting the party off from the outside world. What was meant to be a peaceful escape quickly turns into a claustrophobic nightmare as one of the guests turns up dead, and it becomes clear that the tragedy from ten years ago might not have been an accident after all. It seems history could be on the verge of repeating itself, and Tessa needs to find out why.

The Bachelorette Party had its moments, but where it felt weaker to was in the execution of the plot twists and the overall structure of the novel itself. While using dual timelines by flipping between past and present to tell a story isn’t uncommon to see in the genre these days, there was something off about it here that made me think it was more unnecessary. The past thread was almost too bland and when the time came to tie it to Tessa and her friends in the present, and I was left with an underwhelming “that’s it?” In particular, the ending was lacking the impact I was hoping for. As they say, go big or go home, and to be honest, something more outrageous or an over-the-top reveal might have been a better fit for the tone the book had been building toward.

I also had a tough time connecting with most of the characters. Tessa was the only one who stood out, owing to the fact she is one of our main POVs who had an actual backstory. But beyond her, I’d be hard pressed to remember many of the names of the rest of the group, who pretty much faded into the background like set dressing. Sure, group dynamics were present, but instead of an authentic circle of friends, they felt more like a scripted version of how our media culture thinks women behave at a bachelorette party. In fact, the whole situation felt oddly detached from the setting, as these characters could have easily been plucked from any reality TV show or soap opera. With so little to the characters, it was hard to care when things started going wrong.

That said, there were a few highlights. The island setting was perfectly atmospheric and struck a nice balance between eerie isolation and quiet natural beauty. The book was also well-paced without getting too bogged down in unnecessary exposition. Even the red herrings and side plots were engaging in their own right and kept me interested even when they later turned out to have little to do with the main mystery. It might not have been as thrilling as I’d hoped, but it was a decent page-turner that was still entertaining.

Overall, The Bachelorette Party is a fast read and would make for a pretty solid pick for the beach. It’s light, binge-worthy, and not too demanding on a brain that’s on vacation mode. Though it’s not as clever or unique as I’ve come to expect from Camilla Sten’s previous work, it’s at least full of tension and great drama when it’s at its best. Fans of locked-room mysteries might still find it enjoyable, if you don’t mind a bit of predictability.

Mod R would like me to remind you that Malcolm was the guy who led the original assault team into the Elmwood gate. Unfortunately with the breaks between installments, people forget who is who.

• Malcolm – leader of the assault team who discovered gold but didn’t say anything and we don’t know why
• Jackson – Cold Chaos’ missing healer, still detained in Japan
• Yosuke – Cold Chaos member who was blacklisted by a Japanese guild and now works for Elias
• Leo – Elias’ second in command, Vice-guildmaster of Cold Chaos

Finally we are using stock images today, because Candice is working on the cover, so we can get the preorder/order up for you.

The weight room at the Elmwood Park Rec Center was small, but it did have a bench press. The gym stood empty. No civilian in their right mind would risk being this close to an active gate. Elias loaded 4 plates on each side of the bar. 405 lbs. He would need an extra 200 lbs to really get going, but there were no plates left. A light workout it is.

Elias slid onto the bench, took a close grip with his fists nearly touching, lifted the bar off the rungs, and slowly lowered it to about an inch off his chest. He held it there for a few breaths, slowly pushed it up, and brought it back down.

The workout wasn’t planned, but sitting on his hands was getting to him. He had to let off some steam or he would explode.

Thirty minutes later, he had finished with the chest press and the leg press machine and was on the dip bars, with 4 plates chained to him, going into his second set of fifty dips, when Leo walked into the gym carrying his tablet. The XO looked like a cat who’d caught a mouse and was very satisfied with his hunting skills.

Elias nodded to him. “Good news?”

“In a manner of speaking. Malcolm has a brother.” Leo held up his tablet. On it a man strikingly similar to Malcolm smiled into the camera, poised against a forest. Same height, same lanky build, same dark hair and brown eyes. If you put him into tactical gear, Elias might have mistaken him for the Elmwood gate assault team leader.

Elias kept moving, lifting his body up and down, the plates a comfortable weight tugging on him. “Are they twins?”

“No, Peter is two years younger.”

“Is he a Talent?”

Leo shook his head. “He is a biologist. He spends most of his time in Australia.”

“What is he doing there?”

“Trying to contain an outbreak of chlamydia in koalas.”

Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.

 “Apparently koalas are highly susceptible to chlamydia,” Leo said. “The latest strain is threatening to make them extinct in New South Wales.”

Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.

“Interesting fact,” Leo continued. “Dr. Peter Nevin can apparently be in two places at once. Here he is speaking at the National Koala Conference in Port Macquarie in New South Wales.”

He flicked the tablet and a picture of Peter Nevin at the podium slid onto the screen.

“And here he is in Vegas after losing $300K at the poker table on the same day.” Leo swiped across the tablet, presenting a picture of Malcolm exiting a casino, his face flat.

Elias ran out of dips, jumped to the floor, and began to unchain the weights. “Malcolm gambles under his brother’s name.”

Gambled. The man was dead.

“Oh, he doesn’t just gamble. When Malcolm lands in Vegas, a siren goes off and they roll out the red carpet from the plane all the way to the strip.”

“How deep is the hole?”

“Twenty-three million.”

Elias took special care to slide the weight plate back onto the rack. Breaking community equipment would not be good. Except that whatever pressure he’d managed to vent now doubled.

Twenty-three million. Over 3 times Malcolm’s annual pay with the bonuses.

Malcolm was a gambler. Everything suddenly made sense. If the motherlode of gold wasn’t an exaggeration, Malcolm could’ve walked away with a bonus of several hundred thousand.

The casinos had to know who they were dealing with.  Nobody would allow a koala scientist to carry that kind of debt, but a star assault team leader from a large guild was a different story. If they had any decency, they would’ve cut Malcolm off, but then they weren’t in the decency business.

“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.

“Of course he is.”

And they would let him dig that hole deeper and deeper. Why not? He’d become a passive income golden goose. And all of this should have been caught during his audits. Those payments had to have come from somewhere, and Malcolm would’ve been at it for years. Any bookkeeper worth their salt would’ve noticed a large amount of money going out.

“The auditor…”

“Already got her, sir.”

Her? Malcolm’s auditor was a man… and he had retired two years ago. The Guild must’ve assigned him to someone else. “Is it Susan Calloway?”

“It is.”

“Are they having an affair?”

Leo blinked. “They are! How…”

“Three years ago at the Establishment Party. He got two drinks, one for his wife and one for Susan, and when he handed the champagne to her, her face lit up. Then her husband returned to the table, and she stopped smiling.”

He had reminded Malcolm and Susan separately after that party that Guild Rules applied to them. The guild had a code of conduct, and every prospective guild member signed a document stating they read it and agreed to abide by it during the contract stage. Cold Chaos didn’t tolerate affairs. If both parties were single, relationships between guild members were fine, but cheating on your spouse, in or outside of the guild, would result in severe sanctions. 

Adultery undermined trust, destroyed morale, and eroded the chain of command. If you didn’t have the discipline or moral code to remain faithful to the one person who should’ve mattered most in your life, how could anyone rely on you in the breach, where lives were on the line?

Both Malcolm and Susan swore nothing was going on, and Elias hadn’t seen any signs of trouble since. Meanwhile Susan quietly became Malcolm’s auditor and chose to ignore his gambling.

Elias hid a sigh. Some days he was just done.

“Is legal aware?” he asked.

“Yes. They do not believe that the casino will attempt to collect against Malcolm’s estate. They’ve gotten enough money from it already and hounding the widow of a dead Talent is a bad look. Not to mention the fraud involved in all of this.”

“Jackson?”

“No news yet.”

“It won’t be long now,” Elias told him.

Elias’s phone chimed as if on cue. He glanced at it. An 81 dialing code. 

“Speak of the devil.”

He took the call.

Yasuo Morita appeared on the screen, a trim man in his forties, dark hair cropped short, a shadow of a beard darkening his jaw and crow’s feet at the corners of his smart eyes.

“Elias. Good to see you,” Yasuo said. The Vice-Guildmaster of Hikari no Ryu spoke English with the barest trace of an accent. 

“Good to see you as well.”

“Your healer is on a plane heading home. My people sent over the flight information.”

Out of Yasuo’s view Leo waved his tablet and nodded.

“This was not done at our request,” Yasuo said. “Someone got overzealous in currying favor. This mistake has been corrected. You surprised me. Nicely done.”

“Glad to know I can still keep you on your toes.”

Yasuo smiled. “It won’t happen again.”

There were a couple dozen high-profile US-born Talents working in Japan. This morning nine of them simultaneously asked for leave and booked tickets home. It was a hell of a statement and it looked impressive, but it wasn’t made for the sake of Cold Chaos. The Guild sandbox was small and great healers were rare. Especially healers like Jackson who went out of his way to step in during an emergency. Elias had called every Talent who knew Jackson or benefited from the healer’s involvement. Some knew the healer personally, others through family members, but all agreed that interference with healers had to be off limits.

Explaining all of this to Yasuo was unnecessary. They were much better off letting him think that Cold Chaos had extensive reach.  

“How is my brother?” Yasuo asked.

“Yosuke is well. He’s been promoted to the lead damage dealer of the Second Assault Team.”

“As he should be. When you see him next, I hope you will do me the favor of reminding him that our father hasn’t seen him in two years.”

“I’ll mention it.”

“Good-bye and good luck.”

“You as well.”

Elias ended the call. “When does he land?”

“He’s on the 6:30 pm flight out of Narita with an overnight layover in Hong Kong. He should land in Chicago at 2:25 pm the day after tomorrow. I will start the prep,” Leo said.

Finally. They would finally crack this damn breach. Elias squared his shoulders. 

Everything would fall into place once they entered the gate.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 8, Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Cover for Sailing to Byzantium by Brian Waugh
Cover for Seven American Nights by Bryn Barnard

Seven American Nights was originally published in Orbit 20, edited by Damon Knight and published by Harper & Row in March, 1978. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Seven American Nights is the first of two Wolfe stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Sailing to Byzantium was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in February, 1985. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter.  Sailing to Byzantium is the second of five Silverberg stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series and aside from the proto-series Laumer novel, it is the first time an author has been repeated.

Wolfe’s story opens with a short note from Hassan Kerbelai indicating that he is sending the travelogue of Nadan Jaffarzadeh back to his family, noting that Jaffarzadeh seems to have gone missing. The final paragraphs of the story are focused on Jaffarzadeh’s mother’s reaction to the travelogue. The majority of the story is Jaffarzadeh’s description of his first week visiting America.

The American Jaffarzadeh is visiting, however, is one in which the United States failed generations earlier. The Washington, D.C. he travels through is referred to as the Silent City, containing the remnants of the great federal buildings. Although he travels through the ruins and visits a park that he warns is dangerous, the majority of his time in Washington is spent attending the theatre.

During his first day of touring, he notices a man working in one of the buildings in the silent city. He runs into the man at the theatre and learns that he is working on a machine that can emulate handwriting, essentially what we would recognize as an AI with an autopen ability.

After that early visit to see a production of Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, he develops an infatuation for the leading lady, Ardis Dahl. That infatuation drives the remainder of the narrative as he begins to stalk her, attending subsequent nights at the theatre, trying to find where she lives, and eventually meeting one of the other actors, Bobby O’Keene, who offers to introduce Jaffarzadeh for a price. When O’Keene tries to pick Jaffarzadeh’s pocket, the police become involved, O’Keene is arrested, and eventually, Dahl tracks down Jaffarzadeh to get his help releasing O’Keene.

The story is told in the form of Jaffarzadeh’s journal, beginning with his arrival aboard a ship and ending after he begins a relationship with Dahl. However, Wolfe introduces several subtle clues throughout the story, in his choice of plays, the descriptions of characters, and incongruities in the way Jaffarzadeh describes things, that indicate that the seemingly straightforward tale is much more convoluted that it would appear.

Upon reading the story, it appears that Jaffarzadeh is somehow the victim of a scam perpetrated by the acting troupe, possibly in conjunction with the manager of the hotel who first sent him to the theatre. However, Wolfe’s choice of plays, one that deals with a traveler attempting to provide a war, the other about a woman who vanishes, indicate that something far more sinister is taking place. Two of Jaffarzadeh’s fellow passengers to America make appearances late in the story. Are they part of the plot? Are the police involved? What about the functionary who sent the journal on to Jaffarzadeh’s family? Wolfe doesn’t offer any real answers and the text, itself, can offer up a Rashomon-like series of answers, none of them more correct than the others.

Seven American Nights feels incomplete. Not only does Wolfe not provide answers to the many questions that are implied, but rarely stated, but he ends the story with Jaffarzadeh’s mother’s not knowing his fate, but knowing he is alive. The reader, on the other hand, is not so sure. Even if Jaffarzadeh can be trusted, and by his own words he notes that he hasn’t included the entire story and has removed pages, the possibility that someone else, possibly even the machine his friend was working with, wrote parts of the journal mean it cannot be trusted.

The described arrest of O’Keene after he tried to pickpocket Jaffarzadeh, in which it is clear that if Jaffarzadeh doesn’t swear out a complaint, the police will arrest him anyway and trump up the charges, coupled with the inability to discover where he is being kept or what happened to him, has chilling parallels with the current situation in which ICE is arresting people and deporting them without due process. Within the context of the story, it also sets the expectation that if the authorities determine that Jaffarzadeh must be removed, there is nothing that anyone could do to stop them or reverse his arrest.

The strength of Seven American Nights is the very infuriating ambiguity with which Wolfe has carefully laced the story.

Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine February 1985 cover by Hisaki Yasuda
Orbit 20 cover by an unknown artist

The strength of Seven American Nights is the very infuriating ambiguity with which Wolfe has carefully laced the story.

Silverberg’s world of Sailing to Byzantium is reminiscent of the fin du siècle decadence of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time, which I recently re-read. While Moorcock viewed the world of ever-changing landscape from the point of view of one of the period’s denizens (or citizens as Silverberg calls them), Silverberg’s protagonist, is in the time traveling role of Moorcock’s Mrs. Amelia Underwood. This change makes Silverberg’s world more interesting since it allows the story to offer its own contemporary judgement of the citizens’ self-indulgence.

Of course, Silverberg’s story shares its title with a poem by William Butler Yeats in which Yeats also explores the concepts of immortality, art, and the idea of a paradise. Silverberg has selected as his point of view Charles Phillips, who, without knowing how or why, has been pulled from twentieth century New York to this new world. Phillips moves from city to city accepting of the immortality which seems to exist for the citizens and trying to find his own place among the glories or the past recreations.

When the story opens, he is visiting Alexandria at its height, exploring the Pharos and the library in the company of his lover, Gioia. During this visit, Phillips shares with the reader what he knows of this world. The population of citizens numbers in the low millions. Only five cities exist at any time and they are recreations of historic cities, at the moment the novella begins they include New Chicago, Alexandria, Changan, Asgard, and Timbuctoo. Eventually one of those cities will be dismantled and replaced with another city. These citizen are staffed by “temporaries,” sort of synthetic humans or automatons, Phillips isn’t entire sure.

Even as he enjoys the climb to the top of Pharos, he yearns for a Byzantium which hasn’t been built, but which he is sure will be in time. Before it can be, he and Gioia travel to Changan to enjoy the court of the Chinese Emperor. Their visit there is made more memorable by the fact that Gioia’s friends have arranged from them to be treated as honored guests by the Emperor. During their visit, Phillips begins to see the world beyond the façade. When the Emperor, who is merely a temporary, is not actively engaging, he practically seems to turn off.

The real surprise comes we he sees signs of aging in Gioia, something that shouldn’t happen to the immortal citizens of this era. Gioia leaves him, but arranges for him to have a friend, Belilala, as a companion. Unable to understand what is happening, Phillips chases after Gioia, learning from Belilala that Gioia is a rarity, a citizen who can age and die. Phillips chases after Gioia, despite her stated desire not to see him, reminiscent of Silverberg’s own Born with the Dead, which was the first of Silverberg’s novels to be reprinted in the Tor Double series.

Phillips quest of Gioia introduces him to two other visitors such as himself. The first, Francis Willoughby, is from the late sixteenth century and can’t fathom of the world of miracles Phillips attempts to describe them living in. He is convinced he was simply drugged and dragged to an India ruled by Portuguese (they meet in a recreation of Mohenjo-daro, which replaced Timbuctoo). The second visitor Phillips meets is from a period in his future. Y’ang-Yeovil of the Third Septentriad. Y’ang-Yeovil reveals more about the mechanics of the world, and the manner in which visitors are brought into it, causing Phillips to have an identity crisis of his own.

Eventually, Phillips is able to confront Gioia about her desertion of him and her own aging. While Phillips may be a minority as a visitor, Gioia is a very different type of outsider. A citizen, her recessive trait that causes her to age means that she is still seen as an outsider with little recourse or others who share her affliction. Phillips actually quotes the Yeats poem and Byzantium becomes a promised land where a solution to her affliction might become a possibility, allowing Gioia and Phillips to have a life together without worry of out-aging the other.

The world Silverberg built is a strangely ephemeral world in which the only permanence are its citizens. He focuses on two individuals who lack the immortality that almost everyone else in the world enjoys, and each of them must figure out how to come to terms with that fact in their own way, both coming from very different places. Although it doesn’t seem likely, their story introduces true affection into the world.

Some of the novellas collected in any given volume of Tor Double have links to each other. In the case of this book, both the Wolfe and Silverberg novellas are travelogues of a future earth, with Wolfe exploring the remnants of a post-US Washington and Silverberg looks at a future world that recreates the past.

The cover for Sailing to Byzantium was painted by Brian Waugh. The cover for Seven American Nights was painted by Bryn Barnard.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Galactic Empires, Volume One and Two (Orbit, October 1976). Covers by Karel Thole

My fellow Canadian James Nicoll continues to be one of my favorite SF bloggers, probably because he covers stuff I’m keenly interested in. Meaning exciting new authors, mixed with a reliable diet of vintage classics.

In the last two weeks he’s discussed Kate Elliots’s The Witch Roads, Axie Oh’s The Floating World, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s Aunt Tigress, all from 2025; as well as Walter Jon Williams The Crown Jewels (from 1987), Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952), C J Cherryh’s Port Eternity (1982), and John Brunner’s 1973 collection From This Day Forward. Now that’s a guy who knows how to productively use his leisure time. Not to mention caffeine.

But my favorite of his recent reviews is his story-by-story breakdown of Brian W. Aldiss’s massive two-volume anthology Galactic Empires, which made me want to read the whole thing all over again.

James opens by reprinting the famous letter Ursula K. Le Guin sent to Harcourt senior editor John Radziewicz, when she was asked to provide a blurb for Volume 1 of George Zebrowski’s new anthology series Synergy: New Science Fiction. It didn’t go well.

Ursula Le Guin letter to Harcourt senior editor John Radziewicz

As James notes,

Modern readers might be surprised at the almost complete lack of women in the two volumes (or they would be, if the books were not long out of print). Older readers, aware of Le Guin’s response to a later Aldiss-helmed anthology, will be less surprised.

On to the stories.

Back covers to the Orbit paperback editions of Galactic Empires, Volume One and Two

James covers every one of the stories in this massive anthology. Here’s the highlights.

VOLUME ONE

I remembered Volume Two as the stronger of the two. That’s not quite correct. Both have their weak stories (“Foundation,” in the absence of other material, “Escape to Chaos,” not to mention that terrible van Vogt story) but both have works such as ​“Brightness Falls from the Sky” and ​“Final Encounter” that I enjoyed encountering again…

“The Star Plunderer” • (1952) • novelette by Poul Anderson — a Technic History story

Alien slavers descent on decadent, weak Earth, little suspecting that their actions will provoke the rise of the TERRAN EMPIRE! The guy does not get the girl. There are enough Anderson Guy Doesn’t Get the Girl stories for an anthology. I wonder why?

“Foundation” (1942) • novelette by Isaac Asimov — a Foundation tale

Endangered due to the slow collapse of the Empire, the Encyclopedists on distant Terminus discover the true reason that their science colony was founded. Without the context of the other Foundation stories, this one seems oddly anti-climactic. Yet it seems to have been wildly popular back when.

“Resident Physician” (1961) • novelette by James White — a Sector General story

What led a terribly ill immortal alien to turn on its physician? And can the staff of Sector General solve the mystery, given they’ve never previously encountered this species? One has to admire how calmly the staff of Sector General take being presented with what amounts to a demigod, especially an angry, apparently homicidal demigod. One of the principal characters in Sector General stories is psychology section-head Major O’Mara, described thusly:

“(O’Mara) was also, on his own admission, the most approachable man in the hospital. O’Mara was fond of saying that he didn’t care who approached him or when, but if they hadn’t a very good reason for pestering him with their silly little problems then they needn’t expect to get away from him again unscathed.”

Has anyone ever proposed a Sector General TV show with Hugh Laurie playing O’Mara?

“Planting Time” • (1975) • short story by Pete Adams and Charles Nightingale

A starfarer stumbles across a potentially profitable and most certainly lascivious previously unknown lifeform. People in the 1970s were extremely horny. No, even hornier than that. However, many men didn’t especially care for that whole needing to chat up partners first nonsense.

Galactic Empires, Volume Two, US paperback edition (Avon Books, March 1979). Cover by Alex Ebel VOLUME TWO

“Down the River” • (1950) • short story by Mack Reynolds

Humans are, in order, astonished to discover they are subjects of a galactic empire, offended that they are being traded from one empire to another, and alarmed by revelations concerning their new masters. This is an example of a ​“how would you feel if what you routinely do to others was done to you?” story. It’s not subtle because readers would miss the point if it were and probably most of them did, anyway.

“Final Encounter” • (1964) • short story by Harry Harrison

In the thousand centuries since faster than light drive gave humanity the stars, humans have never encountered intelligent aliens. Now on the far side of the Milky Way, they have. Or so it seems. Whether or not the odd beings are human or not turns out to be surprisingly easy to determine with a simple DNA test, so the big puzzle about which the story is constructed is easily resolved. What I found fascinating as a kid was how Harrison understood that due to the sheer size of the Milky Way (to quote George R. R. Martin):

“There are many ways to move between the stars, and some of them are faster than light and some are not, and all of them are slow.”

“Lord of a Thousand Suns” • (1951) • novelette by Poul Anderson

Humanity’s fate depends on a technological ghost left by a long-dead, all-powerful alien civilization. Anderson is the author I depend on to grasp space and time’s scales, so it’s odd and distracting that his protagonist seems convinced that dinosaurs walked the Earth only a million years ago.

“Big Ancestor” • (1954) • novelette by F. L. Wallace

Many worlds have human races, and while some are more highly evolved than others, all are clearly kin. What glorious race planted colonies in the long-forgotten past? The answer is astounding! Well, technically, the answer is galactic, as this story appeared in Galaxy, not Astounding.

The full review is well worth your time. Check it out here, and do yourself a favor and make it a habit to stop by James’ blog here.

We covered both volumes of Galactic Empires as a Vintage Treasure way back in December 2021.

 

The Bloodless Queen is an odd, melancholic near-future sci-fi standalone about two parents determined to…

The post Spotlight on “The Bloodless Queen” by Joshua Phillip Johnson appeared first on LitStack.

 

Charming the Orc's Mate (Silvermist Mates #2)by Chloe Graves
What is it about:Even fate needs a little shelf-help sometimes.
CarissaInheriting a bookstore in a magical town was my childhood dream, but the reality of settling my great-aunt's estate is more hell than happily-ever-after. Between chaotic finances and pre-booked events I can't cancel, I'm counting the days until I can flee back to my ordered life in Seattle and a waiting job offer.
But selling the store gets complicated when one distractingly handsome orc from my past keeps showing up to help—and I'm running out of reasons to say no.
TorainWatching my brother find his mate left me hungry for my own. Then "little Carrie" storms back into my life, those prim lips curved in a shush, and my mate bond ignites with a roar.
The quiet girl who shared her cookies has grown into a goddess of fitted skirts and perfectly pinned hair. She wields spreadsheets like weapons, bringing order to chaos while every buttoned-up inch of her makes me burn to watch her unravel.
When a snake of a developer plots to steal her inheritance, they'll both learn that this orc's patience has limits—and I'm not letting anyone write my mate out of our future.
But I'll savor showing her that the messiest stories make the sweetest endings.
Charming the Orc's Mate is a spicy monster romance featuring a cinnamon roll orc who's definitely not too loud in libraries, a control-freak heroine whose ordered life needs a little chaos, and a magical small town that refuses to let go of its bookstore. Expect fated mates, forbidden kisses in the stacks, and grumpy/sunshine romance with a dash of childhood friends.
What did Voodoo Bride think of it:Yet another enjoyable read that didn't reach the heights of Vexing the Grumpy Orc.
I had thought I'd love this one when I discovered it centered around a bookstore, but even though that was a large part of the plot, I couldn't really connect with Torain and Carissa. Am I turning into a grump who only connects with other grumps? I sure hope not.
I still enjoyed the story and romance well enough, make no mistake, I just felt like some spark was missing for me. 
I did pick up book 4 in this series afterward to see how I would like that one. Review coming soon.
Why should you read it:Cinnamon Roll Orc

Hello friends and fans of my older brother's weird brain! NotWill here for the second blog this year. That is not normal, do not expect many blogs that aren't written by Will.

Two weeks ago we had a HUGE breakthrough with Barnes & Noble in terms of getting Will’s books stocked on their shelves. They ordered thousands of copies of each Cradle book for, from what we can tell, the purpose of being able to stock on shelves nationwide.



I spent the majority of last week driving to 22 different stores around Florida to gather information as to why the mass order happened (turns out we just have the best fans ever that buy Will’s books wherever they’re seen) and ask our local stores to stock Cradle. Most of the B&N’s either had Unsouled on the way to the store to be stocked or ordered copies at my request.



Really cool employees you got there, Barnes & Noble!

This was a gigantic win for us. It’s been years in the making of switching from print-on-demand books to better quality stock that bookstores would be willing to carry. With this order at B&N when you buy a Cradle book, it will automatically restock at that store. That is why this is even more exciting than just a single large order!

I talked to managers at a lot of these stores and it is extremely rare for indie publishers to be stocked in B&N. So THANK YOU to all the fans that voraciously buy Hidden Gnome books! You have no idea what it means to us.

Now you should start seeing “Will Wight” on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble, which is the coolest thing I’ve ever written. You might start seeing Will Wight himself on the shelves too, because he hides between copies sometimes.



If you don’t see the books, you can ask a manager to order them if you’re so extrovertedly inclined (this should work at your local indie bookstore as well). Cradle is in B&N warehouses nationwide.

This is one small step for indie publishers and one giant leap for Hidden Gnome Publishing!

-Sam