Authors

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

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.

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

Exciting news from our friends at Graphic Audio: the full-cast dramatized adaptation of White Hot, Hidden Legacy Volume 2, is officially available for preorder on the GA website, with the release landing in your ears on September 4th!

The preorders on Audible & co should appear late next week, because we’re getting preferential treatment hehe. Usually, we wouldn’t see the September preorder data for another month or so, but GA are making a special exception for the Horde. Just for being our awesome selves. Or maybe because they fear our uprising, who can really tell. It’s a mystery.

And then we’ll have samples and ferrets, and cookies and Leon, and ferrets and samples, and sirens and Bunnys and Rogan POVs and ALL the stuff. Fluffy!

“But Mod R, w*iting? Again?! Change the tune!”

A-HA. You know what we don’t have to be p*tient for? Small Magics in dramatized adaptation, the latest in the Kate Daniels world releases by the spectacular Nora Achrati and golden team.

It comes out tomorrow, June 12th and can be found on the GA website and all usual other retailers. Nora will be taking a small break from kicking butts as Kate, and then we’ll get both Wilmingtons AND Blood Heir in the first half of 2026.

Now. Speaking of hot issues, here’s another emerald blazing problem for you (see what I did there?). I need to tap into Horde wisdom.

I’m *officially* out of the loop on email etiquette trends.

I learned English in school, in the former Eastern Bloc. For over two generations, our knowledge of English was preserved in academic isolation, untouched by anything as messy as the reality of how people actually talk. My teachers, who’d never even met a native English speaker, drilled into me the importance of ‘Dear Sir/Madam‘ and ‘Yours Sincerely‘ from textbooks older than my mother. In my culture, formality means politeness. The more you respect someone and the bigger the age difference or favour you’re asking, the more you ramp it up.

Which means I arrived in England 16 years ago perfectly primed to be an anachronistic little ball of passive aggressiveness.

Who knew ‘Yours sincerely‘ basically means ‘I want to hit you with a chair‘? I found that out the hard way.

I got by with Regards (kind, warm and otherwise) for a while until a work colleague pointed out it’s the embodiment of the side eye emoji. You might as well ‘per my last email’ someone.

I’ve been Best and Best Wishing for a couple of years. Happy insert-day-of-week! Times are hard, don’t judge. I knew it was boring, but I thought I was safe. Gen Z comfortably fires off ‘I hope this email doesn’t find you. I hope you’re free’, ‘Please hesitate to contact me’ and ‘Unhingedly yours’. I’m not there yet. I can’t even bring myself to XOXO, Gossip Mod.

Mr Mod R peeked at my email this morning and let out a chuckle (blood-curdling in hindsight). “Best wishes. Harshhhhh. What did they do?”

gif of Jennifer Lawrence desperately asking “What do you mean?”

Who can keep up?! Not moi.

I trust your collective brilliance to guide me out of email faux pas territory. Drop your favorite email openings and endings in the comments below. Help me keep the Horde’s chalant-but-kind reputation intact.

Mod R, signing off (with whatever you tell me is cool)

The post White Hot GA Preorder and Being Trendy first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Check out the first two chapters of Oaths & Vengeance, along with character art and a world map for the series.

I have it on good authority that This Kingdom just popped up on Edelweiss.

That is all.

The post This Kingdom Is Up For a Preview first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

After a cataclysmic interstellar war that came very close to exterminating humanity, the Daybreak Republic has risen from the ashes and embarked upon a mission to unite hundreds of human colony worlds under its banner, in hopes of preventing a second and final conflict that will complete the destruction of the human race. But not everyone agrees that the empire’s ends justify the means.

Daybreak has never faced a peer power, but as the rebels along the Rim start to get organised –backed by shadowy figures who may lurk far closer to the core worlds – it is only a matter of time before the Yangtze Sector, perhaps the entire Daybreak Republic, is plunged back into war, a war that will leave the sector in ruins and spark further conflict elsewhere. In a desperate bid to prevent an explosion, Commander Leo Morningstar sets off to infiltrate the rebels and locate their bases before all hell can break loose, unaware that it may already be too late …

And that the greatest danger is the one that lurks in plain sight.

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from Amazon US, UK, CAN. AU, or Books2Read.

Prologue I

Only one person knew where the Hierarchical Fortress truly existed, the one person who sat at the top of a hierarchy of powerful, ambitious and unscrupulous magicians. Everyone else only gained access to the complex though magic, using the hierarchical soulmark to set the coordinates and teleport to the right location without ever knowing where they were going. It galled Nine, in so many ways, that she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was, even as she prepared herself for the contest of a lifetime. If she won, she’d be the first amongst magicians; if she lost …

No. She refused to consider the possibility. She would not – she could not – have issued the challenge if she hadn’t thought she would win, that she would rise to the top herself or confirm, once again, that the one at the top was worthy of his post. The challenge was in the best interests of herself, but also in the best interests of the Hierarchy. The soulmark demanded no less.

She felt nothing, but calm anticipation as she made her way through the maze of corridors. There were no adornments in the Hierarchical Fortress, no decorations to remind the occupants of their power and place, nothing those insecure in their rule might need to prove themselves to sceptical eyes. The Hierarchy needed no proof, beyond its power; anyone who trod the halls knew where they belonged, beyond all doubt, and cared little for the judgement of others. The stone walls, magic running through them to ensure none but the Hierarchy ever set foot within the complex, were utterly unmarked, impossible to navigate without the soulmark. She felt it pulse as she reached the top of the stairs and walked down into the bowels of the world. There were no guards. No checkpoints. No one, but the Hierarchy walked these stairs.

The arena was miles below the ground, a simple stone chamber protected by the strongest and most subtle of spells. Wards flickered on the stone, barely visible even to a skilled magician … a reminder, once again, that true power lay not in flashy displays but acts that could change the world. Most magicians would overlook the fortress, if they happened to be searching the area, and the few who might see through the outer layer of deception wouldn’t live long enough to report to their superiors. They wouldn’t be killed or permanently transformed so much as they’d be erased from existence, ensuring that very few even remembered they existed.

Nine smiled, coldly. If you have enough power, you can do anything. And soon I will have the greatest power of all.

She allowed the smile to linger on her face. The Hierarchy wielded power and influence on a scale few could imagine, keeping its mere existence a secret from most while trading knowledge and power with the few who did know they existed in exchange for raw materials or later favours that might be worth two or three times what they’d paid for it. The magical families kept the deals, for fear of what would happen if they didn’t; they knew, even as others didn’t believe that the Hierarchy even existed, that it had agents scattered across the world, men and women who could extract revenge on anyone who tried to go back on the deal. It was thrilling to realise that she stood at the heart of a locus of power, one that was all the more powerful for being invisible to the average magician, let alone the mundanes. The secret rulers of the world couldn’t be overthrown if no one even knew they existed, let alone how easily they could pull strings to influence events to their heart’s content.

The soulmark burnt, briefly, as she waited, taking a long breath as the seconds ticked by. It had been nearly forty years since she’d been recruited, thirty since she’d passed the final tests in the school and graduated to take the soulmark and become a true Hierarchist. She had lost track of the classmates she’d killed or sacrificed in a desperate struggle for power, long forgotten any sense of morality she had had … she’d even forgotten her name and family, when the soulmark had been bound to her very soul. The memories darted through her mind – a weak girl who’s only use had been sacrifice, a boy who had been bound to her service – and vanished again. The world was red in tooth and claw, a reality the Hierarchy refused to pretend didn’t exist even as the magical families and monarchies clung to their warped moralities. There was no right or wrong, no objective sense of justice, merely power and the will to seize it, to take the world by the throat and bend it to your will. Today, she would rise to her apotheosis, or embrace her nemesis. Either way, the Hierarchy won.

Magic flickered through the air. Zero stood there, watching her with an utterly unreadable expression. He looked completely harmless, a doddering old man far past his prime, but Nine refused to be fooled. Being underestimated was always safer, in the long run, and few survived an encounter with the most powerful magician in the known world. His white hair and wrinkled skin masked true power, his footsteps echoing with surprising purpose even as he leaned on a cane. If he truly needed it, Nine would be astonished. Zero had more than enough raw power to prolong his life for centuries.

She didn’t know his story. She guessed it was very like her own.

Zero straightened, his eyes lingering on her. “You have come to challenge?”

“Yes.” Nine felt her heart begin to race, even as she prepared herself for the greatest fight of her life. The soulmark prevented all underhand techniques, from poison to blackmail, ensuring she had to play fair and follow the rules. She needed to win through raw power and magical cleverness, not cheating. The restriction made sense. If she wanted to win, she had to deserve it. “I have come to take my place at the top.”

Zero smiled. “And you have not yet reached your limit?”

Nine took a breath. She’d been a Thousand, then a Hundred, and finally climbed up into the Ten. She had had her ups and downs, she couldn’t deny it, but she’d never run into anything that could stop her climb. Her path was marked with dead bodies, the two Hierarchists she’d killed to claim their former places and countless others, people who’d served more as raw materials for her spells than anything more meaningful. She cared nothing for them, merely for her climb to the top. The very highest level was beckoning to her. And all she had to do to take it was to kill the man in front of her.

“No.” Nine met his eyes evenly. “I have not.”

“Very good,” Zero said. His tone was sincere. He too was devoted to the goals of the Hierarchy. His soulmark would allow no less. If she was his superior, it was right and proper she should take his place. His death was unfortunate, but she had to gamble everything to win everything. “If that is your choice, step into the ring.”

Nine didn’t hesitate. She could have backed out at any moment, remaining a lowly Thousand, or Hundred, or even a Ten. Or she could have retired, giving up her rank and settling into a comfortable life where her subordinates weren’t trying to kill her. The thought wasn’t remotely temping, not when the very highest post of all was within her sight. She wanted, she needed, to claim it for herself. She could no more back down than she could cut her own throat.

She stepped forward, feeling the magic envelop her the moment she crossed the line. They’d unleash terrible forces in their bid for supremacy, but those forces would be contained within the wards. The fortress itself would remain unharmed, waiting for its new mistress to claim her throne. Anticipation swelled within her as she felt her magic rising to the challenge, a hundred new spells bristling to kill. She had pushed the limits as far as they could go, incorporating lessons from the New Learning and Magitech into her preparations. Zero was not someone to underestimate, of course not, but using Magitech concepts would catch him by surprise. Decades, perhaps centuries, of experience couldn’t have prepared him for a new branch of magic that was only a couple of years old.

“It is time,” Zero said. He couldn’t decline the challenge, he couldn’t even surrender. His soulmark made sure of it. “Let us see …”

He stepped across the line. Nine didn’t hesitate. She raised her power and cast the first set of spells in one smooth motion, a combination of lethal and illusionary spells crackling against his wards. She hadn’t expected it to work, she certainly hadn’t expected to win in the first few moments of their duel, but knocking him off balance could only work in her favour. She’d woven cancelation charms into her barrage, hoping to cripple his retaliatory strike. There was no way to take his prepared spells down completely, not without knowing how to break into his protective aura, but …

She blinked as the spellware simply came apart, spell components and incants bristling in front of her before shattering into nothingness. No … being absorbed, her neatest tricks taken to pieces, studied in the blink of an eye and then added to Zero’s own skills. A flicker of doubt ran through her as she cast a second set of spells, resorting to brute force while preparing something a great deal more subtle. Raw magic crashed around Zero, bouncing off the wards and spiralling through the air … his hands moved in a simple pattern, absorbing or channelling the power she’d thrown at him. It was an impressive demonstration of his abilities, a sight few had seen and fewer still could master. Nine wondered, just for a second, if she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d unleashed enough power to shatter a town and he was playing with it as if it were water.

And she was committed now.

She reached for her magic and crashed forward, using herself as a decoy while trying to inch spells around behind him and slip into his back, tearing his charms apart from the rear. Zero stepped forwards, his raw magic slamming into hers, challenging her on multiple levels and pushing her to breaking point. Nine kept forcing herself forward, knowing there was no other way out, and felt his wards start to shatter. She was breaking through!

She felt a moment of relief, of victory, before his face shifted and started to change. Horror ran through her as she stared at her worst nightmare, at … she realised, too late, that they’d all been fooled, that she’d made a dreadful mistake. The Hierarchy wasn’t what they’d thought it was and now … she was doomed. There was no escape. Multicoloured light flared around her, a final mocking reminder of her own failure …

And then the world went away in a final – endless – moment of pure agony.

Prologue II

The knife felt solid, real in his hand.

Resolute stared at the blade for a long moment, willing himself to muster the nerve to stab himself in the chest or cut his own throat or something, anything, other than living the rest of his life a powerless mundane, a helpless beggar on the streets of a town so far from Celeste it had never impinged on his awareness. He didn’t even know the town’s name, when his desperate flight from Zugzwang had taken him down the river and into the larger down, but … he stared at the blade and lowered it, unable to force himself to take that final step. He had fallen as far as a magician could fall and yet he couldn’t end it. He was a failure, a failure so complete he couldn’t even kill himself. His existence was over and yet it would never end.

Despair howled at the back of his mind as he sagged to his knees. He’d never known what it was like to live on the streets, not until he’d been stripped of his power and tossed out to live life as a powerless mundane. His fine clothes had been stolen long ago, the handful of garments he now wore so disgusting he could no longer bear to smell himself. The good food and drink he’d enjoyed back home was nothing but a memory now, leaving him forced to beg for something – anything – to keep himself alive. He’d learned harsh lessons in the last week, learnt to spend what little money he had before it was stolen, learnt to keep his food to himself … learnt that no matter what happened, there was always further to fall. Two gangs of beggars had kicked him out, a third had demanded a price he was unwilling to pay, if he wanted to find shelter with them. And yet, part of him knew it was just a matter of time before hunger and cold drove him back to them, to offer anything they wanted in exchange for a few hours of warmth. It was an unbearable thought.

He’d ruled a city. Now, he was a beggar.

Sheer hatred burned through Resolute, mingling with shame. There was no one he could turn to for help. None of his old clients would lift a finger to assist him, if they knew what had happened. He’d preached the gospel of the strong having the right to dominate the weak for so long that he had no doubts about what would happen to him, now he was one of the weak himself. His old allies would laugh when they heard, then turn away to keep from losing their power themselves. A magician who lost his magic was an object of scorn and pity, a cripple in a world that was very unkind to those with disabilities, and no one dared look too closely for fear it was catching. For all he knew, it might be. He had thought himself the epitome of magical power and yet Emily had stolen his magic, leaving him helpless and alone.

She hadn’t killed him. He knew it hadn’t been an act of mercy.

The hatred grew stronger, mingled with helplessness. Emily was powerful, personally and politically, and now he had no power at all. He knew the way to her tower, he knew enough tricks to get through the outer layer of defences, and … and then what? She could destroy him with the flick of a finger, or turn him into a slug, or something – anything – he couldn’t hope to stop. Perhaps she would curse him, as so many mundane residents of his city – his former city – had been cursed. It had seemed funny back then, little tricks to put the mundanes in their place and remind them they only lived in the city of sorcerers through sufferance. Now … he knew better. It wasn’t funny at all. But it was far too late.

He clenched his fists, then opened his fingers and moved them in a simple pattern. It was a very simple spell and his movements were perfect, but nothing happened. Of course not. He’d lost his magic, leaving him begging for scraps while Emily took his city for himself. He had no idea what was happening in Celeste, nor did he know how to get back there, but he knew power all too well. Emily would take the city, because she had power and knew how to use it. Resolute had no idea why she’d pretended not to be the inventor of Magitech – the idea of a mundane inventing a whole new branch of magic was just absurd – but it hardly mattered. She would take the city and reshape it in her image, while he lived and died on the streets of a nameless town. He shivered. It was supposed to be summer, or so he’d been told, and yet it was cold. He didn’t know if he’d live through the winter.

She has my daughter too, he thought, helplessness gnawing at his mind. He knew what he’d do to the child of a rival, and he knew Emily would do no less. She’ll ruin her life because she can and …

“My,” a calm voice said. “A bit of a come down, isn’t it?”

Resolute flinched. He’d spent most of his life in warded chambers, places where even a powerful magician would have trouble entering without setting off the alarms. He hadn’t grown used to the sheer lack of safety on the streets, even in alleyways. The thugs who’d stolen his clothes and beaten him up had taken him by surprise, and yet … it wouldn’t have mattered if he had had any warning. They would have still thumped him. He was surprised they hadn’t killed him.

The man behind him was a stranger, he realised numbly. White hair, kindly face … probably a mask hiding a far darker reality. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. It could easily be both.

“What do you want?”

“Such a question.” The man cocked his head. “You ruled a city. You had all the magic you could ever want. And now you’re grubbing in the dirt.”

Resolute flushed, his stomach growling angrily. “What do you want?”

“You could spend the rest of your life here,” the stranger pointed out. “Grubbing in the dirt … you’re not the best state, you know. You won’t last a year.”

“I know.” Resolute felt despair, once again. He’d been portly a couple of weeks ago. Now … he could feel himself losing weight, his skin starting to sit oddly on his bones. “If you’re here to gloat, get lost.”

The stranger laughed. “I’m not here to hurt you, Grand Sorcerer. I’m here to give you an opportunity for revenge. On Emily and everyone else who did hurt you.”

Resolute laughed, bitterly. It was rare for a magician to lose their powers, rarer still for them to regain their magic. He’d only heard of it happening once and … in truth, he wasn’t sure it had happened at all. The rumours about Emily losing her powers had lost steam once everyone saw her casting spells once again, not making any attempt to hide her power. The Cognoscenti had decided it was just another malicious rumour, one of millions that burst into the light and excited everyone before vanishing as quickly as it came. Resolute saw no reason to doubt it. He’d seen Emily using magic himself.

And yet, he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Can you give me back my magic?”

The stranger smiled. “In a manner of speaking, Grand Sorcerer, but there will be a price.”

Resolute didn’t hesitate. “Anything.”

Chapter One

“You said yes?”

Emily blushed as Alassa leaned closer, smiling so widely her face seemed to glow from within. “You said yes?”

“I did,” Emily said. Caleb had asked her to marry him and … she’d said yes. “I … I’m going to get married!”

Alassa squealed. Emily felt her face grow redder. She hadn’t quite realised just how important her wedding would be, to her friends as well as the happy couple, or just how delighted they’d be to hear she was tying the knot. It was hard to believe it, hard to accept how many people thought they had a right to be involved … she told herself not to be silly. They were her friends and yet … she wondered, suddenly, if they should just elope. It wouldn’t be that hard to arrange a quick wedding in some out of the way place, get it over with before everyone else tried to get involved.

“You and Caleb make a cute couple,” Alassa teased. “I’m glad you finally got around to admitting it.”

Emily looked down. “It took a while.”

“Obviously so,” Alassa said. “I knew I wanted Jade the moment I laid eyes on him.”

“It was different for you,” Emily pointed out. The less said about Alassa’s wedding, the better. “You needed to convince your father as well as Jade.”

She felt a flicker of sympathy. Jade was powerful as well as skilled and yet … his lack of aristocratic blood had both hampered and helped him, when he’d faced King Randor to ask for Alassa’s hand in marriage. The advantages of having a husband who didn’t have awkward relations were matched, perhaps outweighed, by the lack of any real connections to any other kingdoms. Or centres of power. King Randor had agreed, but Emily was sure he’d spent hours weighing up the pros and cons before giving his approval. The certain knowledge Alassa was likely to go ahead anyway had weighed on his mind.

“So do you.” Alassa was suddenly serious. “You are a great noblewoman, you know.”

Emily rubbed her forehead. She found it hard to think of herself as someone important, certainly someone born to power and privilege … because, in the end, she hadn’t. She had been a nobody on Earth, a person destined to live and die without making any kind of impact on the world around her. The idea she was now so important that her wedding was a matter of state security, that her marriage needed the approval of her closest friend … it was absurd. And yet, it was real.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. She’d put Alassa in a bad spot and she knew it. “I didn’t mean to cause you trouble.”

Alassa poked her in the chest. “It isn’t a problem,” she said, deadpan. “Thankfully, you came to see me first.”

She painted a look of mock outrage on her face. “You did come to see me first, right?”

“Yes.” Emily hadn’t meant to discuss her wedding, not when there were more important problems to address, but it had worked out in her favour. “You’re the first person to know. Except us, of course.”

“Of course.” Alassa met her eyes. “You did think about the political implications, right?”

“They never crossed my mind,” Emily admitted. “I didn’t think of them …”

She sighed, inwardly. They were friends, but they also had a relationship as subject and monarch. A baroness needed her monarch’s approval to marry and not asking for approval was more than just a failure to follow the proper etiquette, it was a sign she no longer felt she needed to consult the country’s ruler before taking the plunge. An overmighty aristocrat would become a serious threat to the kingdom’s stability, forcing the monarch into a confrontation that would do immense damage even if the monarch won … or worse, leave the aristocrat alone and confirm for all time that he couldn’t bring a rogue nobleman to heel. If word had gotten out before it was too late …

“There’s no real reason to disapprove.” Alassa ticked off points on her fingers as she spoke. “Caleb’s family are well known and respected, as well as powerful. He’s a magician himself so he’s effectively your social equal regardless of his roots. Being a child of Beneficence may cause problems, but he’ll be your legal consort rather than lord husband so those issues can be smoothed over. At worst, they’ll strip him of his citizenship … not a problem given that he lives in Heart’s Eye now. You don’t get to make alliances with other nobles, and I imagine a few will be pissed you didn’t choose them, but …”

She shrugged. “These issues can be smoothed over.”

Emily snorted. “If they wanted to marry me, or have their sons marry me, you’d think they’d make more diplomatic approaches.”

She rolled her eyes. She’d found the correspondence potential husbands and their families had sent to Void, thousands of letters from the great and the good and those with delusions of grandeur. Some had offered vast sums for her hand in marriage, others had argued or pleaded or even resorted to threats … brave of them, she supposed, when Void had been the most powerful magician in the Allied Lands as well as her legal guardian. Some letters had made her violently angry, others had made her cringe. It was bad enough being courted by men old enough to be her father, who seemed to think she should be flattered by the attention, but far worse to read letters written on behalf of sons, grandsons and nephews. She hoped to hell the writers had at least asked their relatives before trying to arrange their marriages …she doubted it. She’d recognised a couple of the names and one, a former student at Whitehall, preferred men to women. He wouldn’t have kissed a woman even if he were offered a kingdom.

Poor bastard, she thought. Most aristocratic marriages were arranged, but still … it was neither nice nor kind. If he’s married off now …

She put the thought aside. “My neighbours will be pleased.”

“If they can’t have you,” Alassa agreed, “at least their rivals can’t have you either.”

She smiled, then sobered. “That’s a relief.”

“I guess so.” Emily ran her hand though her hair. “Would you have given your blessing to the match if I had?”

Alassa looked back at her. “Would you have listened to me if I had?”

“I don’t know,” Emily admitted. If her heart had wanted such a young man, would she have defied her best friend as well as her monarch? Or … or what? “I’m glad it didn’t happen. I don’t want to know.”

“Now, you’ll be wanting a big wedding,” Alassa continued. “Everyone will be invited, of course.”

Emily felt her heart sink. She should have expected it. An aristocratic wedding was one hell of a social event and she was high enough to make her wedding the social event of the year. She would need to invite every last nobleman in the kingdom, as well as senior magicians from right across the Allied Lands, and if she missed even one it would be a grave insult. So would failing to attend after receiving an invite. She would have to invite people she didn’t know or want at her wedding, and they would have to attend despite not wanting to … she shook her head in annoyance. The merest hint of exclusion would cause problems that would linger for years, perhaps decades. She knew some family feuds that dated all the way back to a wedding held so long ago that everyone involved had been dead for centuries.

“We could just elope,” Emily offered. The logistics were going to be a nightmare. “Or hold the wedding somewhere hard to reach …”

Alassa snorted. “There are people who would crawl over broken glass to attend your wedding,” she said. “And it will be my pleasure to arrange it for you.”

“You don’t have to,” Emily said. “If I …”

“There are hundreds of people who know you and love you who would want to attend,” Alassa pointed out. “Me, of course. Imaiqah and Jade and Frieda and … everyone. Even Marah, if she shows her face once again. And you can’t invite just your friends, for fear of insulting everyone who isn’t invited. The wedding won’t just be about you and him, but everyone.”

“Charming.” Emily shook her head. “How many deals were made at your wedding?”

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands,” Alassa said. “I couldn’t tell you. So many people, meeting together on neutral ground, bound by the ceremonial rules of weddings … not that some people bothered to keep them. I think … there’s really no way to avoid it. Sorry.”

Emily sighed. The rules were very simple. Weddings were supposed to be joyous occasions and no one was supposed to fight, no matter the cause. Bitter enemies were expected to sit down together and be reasonably courteous and polite to one another, no matter how much they’d prefer to draw their swords and fight to the death. It provided cover for all sorts of private meetings, backroom wheeling and dealing … even discussions and relationships between people who could never meet in public, certainly not as equals. A wedding could give birth to several more, as young boys and girls were allowed to meet under supervision while their parents discussed the terms of the marriage contract. It wasn’t unknown for diplomats to use the opportunity to talk openly, while maintaining plausible deniability. Everyone knew it happened and everyone turned a blind eye.

“Look on the bright side,” Alassa added. “You’re bound to be given hundreds of gifts.”

Emily looked her in the eye. “How many of your gifts remain untouched?”

Alassa shrugged. She and Jade had been given thousands of gifts, mostly chosen to showcase the giver’s generosity rather than anything practical. A handful were useful, or had some degree of sentimental value; the remainder had been placed in storage, kept solely because the giver would be mortally offended if they were passed on or simply discarded. Emily found it hard to comprehend the mindset of someone who thought a portrait of himself was a suitable gift, but she supposed it could be worse. Probably. A handful of aristos had offered gifts that were little more than white elephants, designed to be impossible to refuse and yet expensive to keep.

“I can pass them on to you, if you like,” Alassa said. “You want a genealogy dating back a few thousand years?”

“Not if I can help it,” Emily said. The aristos claimed they could trace their bloodlines back for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but she was fairly sure the detailed family trees were little more than nonsense. Reliable history went back five hundred years at most and that was being generous. Anything earlier than that had gone through so many interpretations it was dangerously unreliable. “Was that the most useless gift you were offered?”

“Probably.” Alassa shrugged. “You just have to put up with it.”

“Or I can ask for no one to offer gifts,” Emily said. “They can donate to my charities instead.”

Alassa widened her eyes in mock shock, her tone brimming with faked outrage. “But they’ll be denied the chance to show off their wealth and power!”

Emily had to smile, although it wasn’t really funny. “They can show off by donating to the charities I support,” she said. It was about the only traditional role for an aristocratic woman she’d embraced. “And the money can go to a better cause then gold-studded toilets and portraits I don’t want to hang in my halls.”

“I did hang a painting of Lord Fowler in mine,” Alassa said. “Jade uses it for target practice.”

“Better not tell him that,” Emily teased. Lord Fowler was a notorious bore. “What did you tell him.”

Alassa smirked. “I think he’d be happy knowing his portrait is hanging where I can see it.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Emily said. “Is it at least a good portrait?”

“I don’t know who sat for it,” Alassa said. “But I’d bet it wasn’t Lord Fowler.”

Emily nodded in agreement. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of portraits of her running around the kingdom and very few looked even remotely like her. Some artists were working from descriptions, others were using their imagination to the point they got just about everything wrong. Hair colour, skin tone, dress sense and breast size and eye colour … she wondered, sometimes, if the paintings had been of someone else and simply renamed to suit a new customer. It defied belief that someone could hang a portrait of a woman who looked like Emma Watson right next to a portrait of someone who could pass for Freema Agyeman and insist they were the same person. But they did.

She let out a long breath. “Don’t go mad. Please.”

“Go mad?” Alassa blinked. “Why would I?”

“The wedding, I mean,” Emily said. “I don’t want it to be crazy. Just …”

It wasn’t going to work, she knew, even as she spoke. There was no way Alassa could avoid making a big song and dance out of it, no matter what Emily said. People would talk if she hosted a small wedding, people would insist it was a subtle punishment to Emily, perhaps even a sign they were no longer friends. And then the people who had assassins and broadsheet writers on the payroll would start thinking they could take advantage of the crisis, even though the crisis existed only in their minds. Alassa would be derelict in her duty if she didn’t put on a wedding that would satisfy the craziest bridezilla.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Alassa said. Her lips twisted. “No one will mind if I make it more about the kingdom, and me, then you. Or him.”

Emily suspected she knew a lot of aristocrats who’d be irked at the suggestion their wedding should be about someone or something else, but … she didn’t care.

“Of course, you’re going to have to decide where you want to hold the main ceremony,” Alassa continued. “Here? Cockatrice? Heart’s Eye? Or even Whitehall? The Grandmaster would have to give permission, of course, but I can’t imagine him saying no. You’re the most famous magician in living memory, so …”

“I’ll think about it later,” Emily said, holding up a hand. “Just … remember I’m not marrying myself. There’s someone else involved.”

“Caleb will be fine,” Alassa promised. “I’ll make sure he has something to do.”

“Trying to scare him off, are you?” Emily met her eyes. “Caleb isn’t Jade, you know. He won’t like being put on a pedestal.”

“Jade’s not fond of it too,” Alassa said. “But that suits us both fine.”

Emily nodded in sympathy. Zangaria had never had a female monarch until Alassa and it wasn’t easy for a young woman to rule alone, while her husband was expected to be the power behind the throne. Alassa was lucky Jade had no inclination to rule, no conviction he was entitled to be in charge because he had a penis. He’d been to Whitehall, where any belief in inherent male superiority would have been squashed by female tutors and students, and besides, he had very little to prove. He didn’t need to dominate his wife … not like Lord Darnley. Mary Queen of Scots had been a poor judge of character, right from the start, but her second husband had been a fatal mistake. The only good thing he’d done had been fathering her child.

Alassa met her eyes. “You do realise you’ll be expected to have children?”

Emily felt a complex mixture of emotions. She wanted children and yet she feared becoming her mother, a drunken sot who’d abandoned her daughter to the tender mercies of her stepfather. Caleb wanted children too … did he? They’d never really talked about it. And … she didn’t like the idea of needing to have children, even though her barony needed a heir. The closest thing she had to a child was Frieda and they weren’t blood relatives. God alone knew what would happen if she died without issue.

“It has been made clear to me,” she said, sourly.

She felt her lips twist in bitter annoyance. The Cockatrice Council had petitioned her to get married. Or adopt. Or something – anything – that ensured she’d have a legal successor to continue her work. Her modern sensibilities insisted they were out of line for even suggesting she had a duty to have kids, her awareness of the political realties made her all too aware they had a point. If the barony was handed over to someone new, the council might find its freedoms severely limited, perhaps even crushed. There would be civil war and no matter who won, the land would be devastated.

“I’ll see what happens,” she said, after a moment. The idea of childbirth scared her, even though she could be sure of the very best medical care the world could provide. “Is that acceptable?”

“You’ll find that having kids changes you,” Alassa said. She pressed her hand lightly against her abdomen. “I haven’t told anyone yet, but …”

Emily grinned. “You’re pregnant again?”

“Thank so.” Alassa smiled back. “It’s not customary to announce a pregnancy until the first three months have passed …”

“I know.” Emily didn’t take offense. She understood the reasoning all too well. A royal child, even a second-born, would alter the line of succession, forcing everyone to adjust their plans accordingly. Better not to confirm there was a child on the way until the healers were sure the pregnancy would last. “I hope it goes well for you.”

Alassa sat back. “I suppose,” she said, as the bell rang. “Dinnertime. Jade will be there, to offer his congratulations. And then you can tell us why you really came here.”

For Amelia’s second marriage, Gram gives her a visit to a wedding counselor. Not a marriage counselor, but someone who will advise how to achieve a perfect marriage through the perfect ceremony.

Superstitious nonsense, Amelia thinks, although she doesn’t want to offend Gram. But as the meeting progresses, Amelia realizes what the perfect wedding means—and why Gram wants her to have one.

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

 

Something Blue By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

“Gram,” Amelia said for the fifteenth time. She was hunched in the passenger seat of her grandmother’s 1968 Cadillac, elbow catching on the armrest’s silver ashtray. “I don’t need a marriage counselor.”

“Wedding,” Gram said, perching her right wrist on the top of the steering wheel while she pushed up her glasses with her left forefinger. “Wedding counselor. And you do, girl. You didn’t listen to me that last time.”

Amelia sighed. Her grandmother would never let her forget the divorce, not because Gram disapproved—she’d been through three husbands herself—but because Gram said that Amelia had made a fatal mistake.

She had looked behind her as she walked up the aisle.

Gram had said that meant Amelia would regret her wedding day for the rest of her life. And Amelia did regret that day, more than she could ever state to her improper and fun-loving grandmother.

Gram fishtailed around a corner, honked at a ten-year-old boy on the side of the tree-lined country road, and waved. The kid, looking startled, waved back.

“You know him?” Amelia asked.

“Should I?” Gram said.

Amelia shook her head. All her life, she had lived in awe of Gram. When Amelia was a little girl, Gram ironed the curls out of her still-black hair, and wore mini-skirts showing off legs that were better than those of most teenagers. When Amelia was a teenager, Gram wore hip-huggers and floral print shirts, but eschewed granny dresses because she’d already worn them in a previous incarnation. When Amelia got married the first time, Gram had shown up at the wedding with six pierced earring holes in each ear, and new diamond studs in each.

Now Gram wore her gray curls in an above-the-ear bob and was talking about getting her eyebrows pierced. She was dating two different men: a real estate broker twenty years her junior, and a retired pilot ten years her senior. Neither man knew of the other, and Gram had hilarious stories about sending one man out the back door as the other man came in the front. Gram had nothing against extra-marital sex, even in these days of AIDS, but she did take marriage seriously.

Very seriously.

Too seriously.

First she tried to talk Amelia out of this second wedding, but since Amelia couldn’t be talked, Gram was determined to make her do it right.

“Where are we going?” Amelia asked, as she peered out the window. When she had finally agreed to come along with Gram, she hadn’t expected to leave Beaver Dam, let alone find herself in the middle of the Horicon Marsh. She had memories of the Marsh that dated back to when she was a little girl. Gram had been on husband #2 then, and they had lived in Theresa, just north and east of the Marsh. Whenever Amelia’s folks took her there, they always stopped on the side of the road, hoping to see wild birds in the reed-filled water. Sometimes they did. Usually they didn’t.

“You’ll see,” Gram said.

“Gram, if we go much farther, I’m going to insist on driving.”

“And who, I want to know, is missing points from her license?” Gram snapped. “Certainly not the elderly woman driving the car.”

Amelia sighed and sank lower in the front seat. Yes but, she thought and didn’t say, who has twenty-twenty vision? Who’s not wearing bifocals that constantly slip to the edge of her nose? Who drives with both hands on the wheel? Certainly not the elderly woman driving the car.

Maybe that was the problem. Gram said whatever she thought, but Amelia never spoke back to her grandmother. And Amelia was three years away from forty. It was time she spoke up.

Besides, she was beginning to get carsick from the pine-scented air fresher hanging from the rearview mirror.

“Gram,” Amelia said. “If this wedding counselor is so good, how come you didn’t use her?”

“I did,” Gram said. “With Willard.”

Willard. Well, there was no arguing that then. Willard had been Gram’s third and last husband. The love of her life. Willard had been three hundred pounds of extremely nice male who had treated Gram with the respect—and caution—that any wild animal deserved. Willard had stayed with her for five years, then died of heart failure in his sleep one cold November night.

Gram never remarried.

Even though she’d had regular “visitors” from that December on.

“I want you to have what Willard and I had,” Gram said into Amelia’s silence.

“I do,” Amelia said. “Scott’s wonderful. He’s the nicest man I know.”

“He’s the nicest man you know now,” Gram said. “But you used those exact same words about Whatshisname.”

“Ralph,” Amelia said.

“Ralph.” Gram shook her head. “You know, you should pay attention to names. They’re a sign. How could you fall in love with someone named Ralph? The name is slang for—”

“I know,” Amelia said. That joke had ceased being funny in the first month she dated Ralph. “And he was the nicest man I knew. Then. Scotty’s nicer.”

“Ralph was not nice,” Gram said. “Ralph only pretended to be nice.”

“If he only pretended to be nice,” Amelia said, “why’d you let me marry him?”

“Who could stop you? Besides, you knew.”

“I knew what?”

“That it was a mistake. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have looked back.”

Amelia sighed. Gram had a superstitious streak that was a bit surprising given her practical and adventurous nature. When she played gin, she never touched the cards until the last one was dealt, thinking that to peek beforehand would ruin her luck. When one famous person died, she always expected two more in related fields to go because, she said, famous people died in threes. And she never went into New Age stores that carried crystals because, she said, too many crystals in one place affected her psychic energy. Amelia had always thought that meant Gram shouldn’t go into jewelry stores either—and she should stay away from the salt and sugar aisles in the grocery store, but Gram never quite got the connection.

“Gram, I looked back,” Amelia said, “because of you.”

“Don’t go into that again,” Gram said.

“I did,” Amelia said, “because you whispered that my train was wrapped around my heels.”

“I was in front of you at the time. I didn’t expect you to believe me.”

“Gram,” Amelia said. “My train was not wrapped around my heels.”

Gram shrugged, then turned the wheel slightly with her wrist, following the curve of the road. “So my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.”

“Gram, that was fifteen years ago. Is your eyesight worse now?”

“No,” Gram said. “It got better. The miracles of modern science.”

Amelia tilted her head back in the seat. “Gram, I’m beginning to think you did that on purpose.”

“So what if I did?” Gram said. “You shouldn’t’ve married a Ralph.”

“I loved him.”

“You only thought you loved him, dear,” Gram said. “Trust me, I know.”

Amelia closed her eyes and gave up. She loved her grandmother dearly but sometimes there was no arguing with her. Especially when Gram’s mind was made up, as it had been from the first day she met Ralph.

Not good enough for you, Gram had said.

He’s the CEO of a software company, Gram, and that’s a burgeoning industry. We’ll be rich by the time I’m thirty.

Rich isn’t everything, my girl, Gram had said. Besides, you’ve got twice the intelligence he does.

So?

So, you’ll get bored. And I’ll bet he’s not good in bed.

Gram!

Believe me, I can tell which ones are, my girl. He’ll be finished before you’ve started.

Gram!

Think I don’t know about such things? Your grandfather—

I don’t want to know, Gram.

You should listen, honey.

No, Gram. I really don’t want to know.

But Gram had been right. The software company went belly-up, Ralph was a poor conversationalist, and he approached sex like it was a one-minute mile. But how was Amelia supposed to know? He’d looked good on paper, and she’d been good herself. She’d been the only girl she knew who’d been a virgin when she got married.

The first time, anyway. This time, she test-drove the model before she decided to live with it. Scott was six-foot-seven with gentle brown eyes and a smile that softened his already round face. He was not graceful, and during the first hour she knew him, he’d hit his head on the doorway into the restaurant to which they went on a blind date, shattered the crystal chandelier, and accidentally kicked over another diner’s chair—two tables away. After that debacle, they decided that Scott was not meant for fancy restaurants. He was more at home—well, at home—where the doorways were high enough, the light fixtures were made of plastic, and the other diners, when invited, were used to Scott kicking them under the table.

He was not athletic, except in bed, and he was at least as smart as she was. She’d compared their IQs. And he was a successful geneticist at the University of Wisconsin—a good researcher and one of the best teachers in the department.

He was also shy, which she saw as a good point; it had prevented him from asking other women out. She wouldn’t have met him at all if a mutual friend hadn’t forced them to see each other.

A mutual friend.

Not Gram.

Gram was still skeptical. She didn’t see any fireworks, she said. No spark. He was smart, yes, but how was he going to use those smarts? And he lacked people skills. Always a failing, she said.

A serious failing.

But he’s good in bed, Amelia had said.

I don’t want to know, Gram had said with a familiar tone of distaste.

You wanted to know about Ralph.

I wanted to warn you about Ralph, Gram had said. That one was obvious.

Well, Scott should be obvious too.

Gram had shrugged. If the size of his hands are any indication, she said, of course he’s—

Gram, Amelia had said. Don’t go there.

You’re the one who mentioned it, Gram had said.

And Amelia had given up.

Gram pulled into a driveway and stopped.

Amelia had been so caught up in thoughts of Scott that she hadn’t been paying attention. Now she looked at her surroundings. They were still on the highway, but just past the marsh. They hadn’t reached a town yet, or if they had, she couldn’t tell. The driveway Gram had pulled into was more like a gravel yard. It extended three car lengths in the front, and at least two car widths. At the far end of the driveway was a brown ranch house that badly needed paint. Two flower boxes sat outside, with dead flowers wilting over the sides. A rusted tricycle lay on its side beneath the only tree, a weeping willow that looked as if it too were on its last legs.

Gram shut off the car.

“This can’t be it,” Amelia said.

Gram gave her a withering look. Amelia had cringed from that look her whole life. It meant I certainly hope you’re not going to make comments like that when we’re inside.

Amelia ducked her head and mumbled, hoping Gram would take that for an apology. Actually, Amelia felt that Gram owed her an apology for wasting her day and forcing her to go to a place she had no desire to go. She could have stayed home and caught up on her soaps. Her new job in the research area of the Department of Natural Resources gave her bank holidays off, and she felt as if she were only working half as hard as the rest of the population.

She was enjoying that.

Gram opened her car door and got out, her tennis shoes crunching on the gravel. Amelia had worn suede boots, an obvious mistake in this environment. The boots had no real sole and were designed for city walking—pavement, carpeting, with plenty of rests in between.

She felt each stone in the gravel as clearly as if she’d been barefoot.

“No dawdling,” Gram said as she scurried for the front door.

Amelia suppressed a sigh. She wanted to dawdle. She wanted to get back in the car, and head for the marsh. Even that would be more interesting than this place.

She picked her way across the gravel. By the time she reached the stoop, the door was already open. A middle-aged woman with light brown hair was smiling at Gram.

“Mrs. Sparks,” the woman said, and Amelia was surprised to hear, not the flat vowels of the Midwest, but the clipped tones of an upper class British accent. “And I suppose this is your granddaughter.”

“Yes,” Gram said. She held out a hand, as if Amelia’s slow approach to the porch had been intentional. “Amelia, say hello to Sophie Danner.”

Amelia smiled and said hello just as her grandmother had asked. Sophie Danner was not what Amelia had expected. She had thought to see a woman of her grandmother’s age and of the temperament common to most women of that generation—most women but Gram.

Sophie Danner had to be Amelia’s age.

Or younger.

Sophie stood away from the door, and Gram went in, as if she had done so a hundred times. Amelia followed, wincing at the stale smell of boiled cabbage and garlic. Sophie herself smelled faintly of sweat as if she’d been cleaning house or sitting in the sun, and hadn’t had time to shower yet. She wore a faded gold t-shirt with a logo Amelia had never seen before, and blue jeans one size too small. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were painted a vivid green.

“Do make yourself comfortable,” Sophie said. She cleared some papers off the red and black plaid couch, and tossed them on the floor. They covered a gray carpet that was so thin that Amelia could see the wood underneath. Sophie took more papers off the matching easy chair, and sat down.

Amelia sat too.

Gram was thumbing through a pile of pictures scattered on the dining room table. “Your latest project?” Gram asked.

“No, no. It was an unsuccessful. The wife wants me to see what went wrong, to see if the problem was in the ceremony or the man.”

“What do you think?” Gram asked.

“Upside down flowers, no wedding cake, and no rings,” Sophie said. “Of course they weren’t going to last the year.”

Amelia suppressed the urge to groan, and then wondered how she had gotten in the habit of suppressing all her reactions around Gram.

“My granddaughter,” Gram said, “doesn’t believe in this.”

“Wedding counseling?” Sophie looked shocked. “Your grandmother told me about your turning to look at the back of the church at your last wedding. Of course it failed.”

“Of course,” Amelia mumbled.

“It’s good you divorced him. Regret is a terrible thing to stare at day in and day out.”

“I was young,” Amelia said.

Sophie smiled and clapped her hands together. “Of course you were,” she said. “It’s amazing what we learn as we age. It’s rather difficult to admit we don’t control our universe, but once you’ve made that admission, you can slip right over it, and control the things you can control. Right?”

“Right,” Amelia said, not understanding a word Sophie had just said.

“Good.” Sophie leaned forward. “Let’s discuss your plans.”

Gram was holding a picture and peering over its edge at Amelia. In a moment of weakness, Amelia had blabbed all the plans to Gram. Amelia couldn’t well lie about them now.

Not without Gram correcting her.

And Amelia had never been fast on her feet, at lying in any rate.

“I suppose you want to hear the unusual parts first,” she said, looking at Sophie.

Sophie pursed her lips together. “Actually,” she said, “Let’s talk intent. Church wedding or civil ceremony?”

“I hardly see how that’s relevant,” Amelia said.

“You’d be surprised,” Sophie said. “The church often counteracts superstition.”

“So you recommend a civil ceremony?” Amelia asked.

“Of course not,” Sophie snapped. “I prefer church. It makes my job so much easier.”

“Counteracts, Amelia,” Gram said as if that clarified the matter.

“Oh,” Amelia said, sounding as dumb as she felt. “Church. Scott’s parents insisted.”

“His parents are still alive. Good,” Sophie said.

Amelia frowned. She wasn’t that old, was she? Old enough to make the groom’s parents survival suspect?

“Look,” Amelia said, wanting the experience over with, “why don’t you just tell me what you need to know and I’ll tell you what Scott and I decided. How’s that?”

“Charming,” Sophie said. “It’ll work best for all concerned.”

Gram humphed and set the pictures down. She stayed in the dining room, though, as if she expected her presence to be a distraction.

It was.

No one could ignore Gram for long.

“Tell me about your dress,” Sophie said. “I do hope you didn’t chose white. You were married before, and therefore you’re not a virgin, are you?”

“Damn close,” Gram said.

“Gram!” Amelia felt her face flush. “No, I’m not a virgin—” and her flush grew deeper as she wondered how many secrets of her life she was willing to tell this woman “—and my dress is not white, although I’m not sure how that matters.”

“In this country, white is for virgin brides. But if you’re not a virgin, and you wear white, someone will die before the year’s out.” Sophie spoke of the impending event with unearthly calm.

“Someone? Who someone?” Amelia said. “The wife? The husband?”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “Generally the husband. You know that white is the color of mourning in China, don’t you?”

“How is that relevant?” Amelia asked.

“She just told you,” Gram said.

Amelia clasped her hands tightly in her lap. She was doing this for Gram, she reminded herself. It was one short afternoon out of her life. She was doing it for Gram.

“My dress is blue,” Amelia said. “It’s real simple with—”

“Blue?” Sophie said. She shook her head. “That won’t do, young lady.”

Now Amelia was a young lady? This from a woman about her own age. This time she did look at Gram, and let all her annoyance show. Gram shrugged and picked up one of the discarded pictures, feigning interest.

“What’s wrong with blue?” Amelia asked, knowing she was opening a door that should have remained closed.

“Blue,” Sophie said. “It’s a sign that your lover has been untrue.”

“Oh, come on,” Amelia said. “How can that be? What about something borrowed, something blue?”

“Something old and something new.” Sophie leaned back on the couch. “Yes, I can see how you’d perceive that as a conflict. All those things are required for the perfect ceremony, but they’re generally small, you know, like a ribbon of blue through a garter. It’s rather like Jimmy Carter; it gives the husband permission to have lust in his heart, but not anywhere else. An entire dress, however, an entire dress is another matter. Has Scott been unfaithful to you, my dear?”

Scott? Gentle, gawky Scott who couldn’t talk to a woman he was attracted to without accidentally breaking half the objects in the room around him? Scott, who confessed the night he fell into bed with her (literally fell; he got tangled in his pants) that he’d only slept with one other women in all his forty years, and he hoped she wouldn’t think him too inexperienced? That Scott?

“Of course not,” Amelia snapped.

“Fiancées are often the last to know,” Sophie said.

“Why in God’s name would a man get married if he were having an affair when he was engaged?” Amelia asked.

“Peer pressure?” Gram said.

Amelia ignored her.

Sophie just stared at her. “There is no understanding men, is there?”

“No.” Amelia stood. “There’s no understanding you. Why would what color I wear at my wedding affect the rest of my life?”

“Amelia—” Gram said in her sternest voice.

“Don’t lecture me,” Amelia said, rather surprised at her own forcefulness. “I have a right to know. What does it matter?”

“Your wedding day is the most important day of your life,” Sophie said, “and that plays a part in the power of the superstitions attached. They work. You’ll see. I can even point to one in your life—”

“Yes, yes, the infamous looking back down the aisle, as if I believe that,” Amelia said.

“No, although that is a good example,” Sophie said. “I suspect another one influenced you even more. Did they throw rice or bird seed at you and your first husband as you left the ceremony?”

“Rice,” Amelia said, feeling rooted to the spot. Why couldn’t she get away from this place of perverse craziness?

“Long grain, brown, or instant?”

“I don’t know, probably instant knowing our friends,” Amelia said.

“Well then,” Sophie said. “There you have it.”

“Have what?”

“Why you don’t have children.”

“How do you know I don’t have children?”

“Because your guests threw Minute Rice,” Sophie said.

“Probably explains other things as well,” Gram said.

“Gram,” Amelia growled, startled to hear the same tone in her own voice as the one Gram often took with her.

Gram shut up.

“That’s not proof of anything,” Amelia said. “We used birth control. We didn’t have a lot of sex after a while. All of those were factors.”

“All of those were results,” Sophie said.

“Of instant rice?” Amelia asked.

“Of course,” Sophie said. “The tradition is bird seed to promote fertility. Many children which was the point of marriage, at least when the tradition was developed. That got converted to rice, which was less effective, and so many people throw that chemically treated stuff, which is not effective at all.”

“My god,” Amelia said. “Gram, are you paying this woman for this nonsense?”

“That’s none of your business,” Gram said. “This is a present.”

“Some present,” Amelia said, out loud. Then she realized what she had done, and the realization scared her. Apparently the days of stifling her responses to Gram were gone. “Do you actually believe this crap? If I wear white, my husband will die. If I wear blue, he’ll have an affair. If I fail to provide my guests with bird seed, I won’t have children, as if the tubal ligation I had three years ago will have nothing to do with it.”

“Amelia,” Gram said.

“No,” Amelia said, not willing to stop, even though she knew that was what Gram wanted. “I can’t believe you’re perpetrating this—this—this—garbage. Marriage is about choice. It’s about choices made every day, by people with guts. People make mistakes, and they live through them. Not because they wore blue at their wedding, but because they chose to. They decided to work on the marriage, they decided to stay together, they decided to continue loving each other.”

“It is not that simple,” Sophie said, holding up a hand.

“Is what I’m saying simple?” Amelia asked. “It sounds a lot harder than trying to make one day of your life perfect. I’m sorry to insult you ladies, but do you really expect me to believe I have no control over my life? That everything is governed by superstition and the simple things we do to ward off the evil eye?”

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“Are you even married?” Amelia asked her. The sarcasm that came out of Amelia’s mouth was an unfamiliar, at least around Gram. Amelia only used that tone at work, and then she used it with microbes that didn’t belong in people’s water supplies, things that she didn’t expect to appear in her electron microscope.

“I’m divorced,” Sophie said, head down.

“Oh, for godsake,” Amelia said.

“It’s not what you think,” Sophie said.

Amelia looked at Gram who was standing straight as a post, the photographs bending in her hand.

“What do I think?” Amelia asked.

“That these things didn’t work for me,” Sophie said. “But I discovered Wedding Counseling after my divorce.”

“So why didn’t you marry again?”

“Because it’s more likely for a woman my age to be killed by terrorists—”

“I hate that statistic,” Amelia said. “Every single woman over thirty recites it like it’s the damn Bible, and no one remembers that that study was disproved. The methodology was faulty.”

She had yelled the last. Her words echoed in the small living room. The flush she had felt earlier returned to her face.

“I’m sorry about your gift, Gram.” Then she bowed slightly to Sophie. “And I’m sorry if I insulted you. But this just isn’t for me.”

“It should be,” Sophie said. “I haven’t had a failure yet, not in 152 consultations.”

Amelia sighed. The reasons for that could be a hundred fold. It might simply be that Sophie’s group of clients were self-selecting for the desire to make their marriages work. It might be that they were a statistical anomaly.

It might even be that the superstitions and her wardings worked.

Amelia didn’t care. She wasn’t going to follow dumb superstitions, and she wasn’t going to listen to a woman who hadn’t made a good marriage herself.

“I’d like to leave, Gram,” she said, and headed for the door. When she reached it, she turned and saw Gram give Sophie an envelope. Gram was apologizing for Amelia’s rudeness as Amelia left.

Amelia went down the cracked stoop to the gravel drive. Birds flying overhead, going to the Horicon Marsh, cawed. A slight breeze blew over her, and it blew away the stale air from the interior of the house. She had never acted like that around Gram before. In fact, she rarely lost her temper at all. But she didn’t like the pap this woman had been serving, and she couldn’t remain silent about it.

Somehow, the silence made her feel as if she were perpetuating the beliefs.

And she couldn’t. She couldn’t change her plans no matter how much Gram wanted it. This was Amelia’s wedding, the one she was planning with Scott. And it was her marriage, with Scott. And it was up to them to make it work. If they failed, she didn’t want to hire Sophie to scan their wedding pictures. Amelia wanted a real human accounting, a way of knowing where she and Scott had gone wrong.

The door closed behind her. She cringed, then turned. Gram was walking alone down the short sidewalk. She was clutching her purse to her chest. “I’d like you to drive,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Gram,” Amelia said as she started across the gravel.

“Don’t be,” Gram said. “This had the desired effect.”

Amelia stopped. “What do you mean?”

“You won’t talk to me,” Gram said. “You let me blather, and you smile and say, ‘Yes Gram’ as if I’ve already gone senile. Well, I haven’t. And you made a terrible marriage the last time, even though you’re not willing to admit it, and I didn’t want you to make a terrible marriage this time.”

“Sophie’s ideas are not what I need,” Amelia said.

“I know, and thank God for that,” Gram said.

The breeze blew Amelia’s hair in her face. She brushed it back with her left hand. “I thought you believed Sophie.”

“Oh, I think she has a valuable talent. I think she has the ability to make people see their future marriages clearly. I think if I had brought you here when you were going to marry Ralph, you would have decided to call off the wedding.”

“So you don’t buy this blue thing, this bird seed stuff.”

“No,” Gram said. “I wore black when I married Willard, or don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” Amelia said. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“It means,” Gram said, “that you’re sad about the wedding, maybe even that you’re doing it against your will.”

“But you loved Willard.”

“Of course I loved Willard.”

“And you were the happiest I ever saw you that day.”

“Of course I was,” Gram said.

“Then that just proves that Sophie’s wrong.”

“No,” Gram said.

“No?” Amelia asked.

“No,” Gram repeated. “It means that when I came to see Sophie and we discussed the wedding, I realized how much I wanted my marriage to be successful, and how hard I was willing to work to make it go that way. Which, if you’ll recall that little speech you gave us in there, is exactly what you said about Scott.”

Amelia turned slightly so that her hair wouldn’t keep blowing in her face. “You could have just asked me.”

“I did,” Gram said. “You always told me that he was a nice man and I shouldn’t worry, which is exactly what you said about whatshisname.”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph,” Gram said and shook her head. “How you could marry a name like that, I’ll never know.”

“Don’t start, Gram.”

Gram shrugged and walked to the car. Amelia hurried behind her. Gram climbed into the passenger seat and stuck the keys in the ignition. Amelia slid into the driver’s side.

“You mean you went through this whole charade just to learn if I loved Scott and would work on our marriage?”

“Yes,” Gram said.

“Why?”

“You mean besides the fact that I love you and want only the best for you?”

“That goes without saying, Gram,” Amelia said. She pushed the seat back so that her knees weren’t crammed into the steering wheel.

“Well,” Gram said, “it’s because you’re nearly forty. If I had married Willard when I was forty—and I knew him then—we would have had thirty wonderful years together instead of five. Five simply wasn’t enough. Thirty wouldn’t have been either, but it would have been better—”

Her voice broke. Amelia put her arm around Gram’s shoulder and pulled her close. “All I wanted,” Gram said against Amelia’s collarbone, “is to make sure you have a Willard in your life. Every girl deserves at least one.”

“I do, Gram,” Amelia said softly.

“I know that now,” Gram said. She pushed away and dabbed at her eyes with her thumb. “Will you drive? I have bridge club at seven.”

“Sure, Gram,” Amelia said.

She turned the key and the car started, its motor humming. She took a deep breath.

“Gram,” she said. “Thanks. No one has ever given me a gift like this.”

“What gift?” Gram asked.

Amelia turned slightly in her seat. “I thought you said this was a present.”

“The visit was and you didn’t want it.”

“But you gave it to me anyway.”

“You shouldn’t thank me for something you didn’t want.”

Amelia frowned. “But it turned out all right.”

“Well, it did, but that’s no reason to thank me.” Gram pushed a button on the door, and her window came down, letting in that errant breeze.

“Why not?”

“It worked because of you, my girl,” Gram said. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Amelia stared at her for a moment, still uncertain about what to make of her Grandmother, even though they’d been close her entire life.

“I suppose you and Scott will want to visit me,” Gram said, eyes still closed.

“Of course,” Amelia said.

“Regularly,” Gram said.

“Yes,” Amelia said.

Gram sighed. “Then I’ll have to move.”

“Why?”

“Or raise my chandelier. Which will be cheaper, do you think?”

Amelia put the car into reverse. “Raising your chandelier.”

“Good,” Gram said. “I rather like the house.” She opened her eyes. “I think you should let me drive.”

“No, Gram,” Amelia said.

“Then get us out on the highway, my girl,” Gram said. “Time’s wasting. You young people never understand how important these small moments are.”

Amelia grinned. “I think we do, Gram,” she said. “I think we do.”

 

___________________________________________

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

Something Blue

Copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW, June, 1998
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2018 by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © inarik | Depositphotos

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.

A late start this morning, sorry.

Many of you mentioned wanting an art book. From Candice Slater:

I am humbled by the BDH’s support. Their ongoing encouragement brings me great joy.  I fully intend to research future print options, but can make no specific promises as yet due to my lack of knowledge in this area.

If Candice decides to do a calendar or an art book, you will be the first to know, because we will announce it right here.

“What the hell was that?”

Bear panted at me.

“I said stay. I know you know what stay means. I didn’t say run into the fight and bite the giant wasp.”

Bear looked completely unrepentant.

“You’re a butthole. That’s your name from now on. Bear Butthole Moore.”

Butthole padded over to me and sat with a big canine grin on her face.

“What are you so happy about? I’m mad at you. At least have the decency to look embarrassed.”

Bear twitched her ears. Bear and decency clearly had nothing to do with each other.

I looked up. And forgot to breathe. Above me, the chamber climbed to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, expanding into a wider space. Long spiral ledges of something that looked like paper wrapped around the perimeter of the cavern, and between them huge luminous crystals glowed with pale yellow light. Far above, at the very top, a cluster of paper tubes hung together, some sealed with pale paper caps, others empty, their edges ragged. It was like standing inside a gargantuan conch shell, and it felt otherworldly, like a cathedral.

Regret pinched me. I destroyed this.

Yes, it was beautiful, but the spider herders deserved to harvest their eggs in peace, and I needed to get home. I had to get the coral egg and get out.

“Come on, Butthole. Let’s find what we are looking for.”

The ledges were paper, but they were the sturdiest paper I had ever seen. It had no problem supporting my weight. First, I walked up the ledges to the top, severed the cluster of pupae and let it fall to the ground. I didn’t need any more worker wasps hatching while I rummaged around their house. Then I searched the nest top to bottom.

I found the stolen spider eggs glued to the walls still in their web cocoons. Each egg had a bunch of blue coconut-sized spheres by it – the wasp egg sacks containing larva. In some places, the sacks had hatched into fat three-foot-long grubs resembling maggots and were feeding on the spider eggs.

The lifecycle was clear. The wasps stole the spider eggs and left them for their young. Once the wasp larvae hatched, they would eat the spider eggs and grow until they formed a pupa and finally matured into adults. The spiders weren’t the nest’s only prey.  I found three stalker corpses and bodies of four goat-like animals the size of a small deer, all glued with that same rough paper near the egg sacs.

Most of the spider eggs were empty or dark. I destroyed any wasp sacks or larva I came across.

The coral egg had been hidden away near the top of the nest, in a curve of the chamber, with a single egg sack attached to the wall next to it. Perhaps food for the new queen. I killed the wasp egg and gently removed the spider egg from the wall. It was smaller than the others, more like a soccer ball than a beach ball, and it felt warm and surprisingly light. I focused on it, activating my talent. A tiny life slept within, safe in a shell of nurturing liquid.

Oh.

The cream eggs came from the spiders. This one didn’t. This was one of them, a baby spider herder. A creature of an alien civilization, not just a sentient or a sapient, but a sophont not born on Earth.

I sat down and looked at it. A child separated from its parents, stolen to become wasp food and be devoured by grubs before its first moment of awareness.

It was so much.

For millennia, humans were terrified of being eaten. It was the most primal of our fears.  It drove our progress and our relentless pursuit of technology. We conquered the planet to keep our children safe from the predators that roamed in the night. We thought we put this anachronistic horror behind us. And then the gates appeared, and the ancient fear came roaring back. Once again, we were scared that monsters would appear and devour our children, and all of our weapons and all of our progress would do nothing to stop it.

I hugged the egg gently and stayed like that until the inner storm passed inside me. I would get back to my children. And I would return this child back to its family.

In total I found five spider eggs that were still glowing, including the coral one. Now, I had to get them out and get down to the bottom of the cavern without getting killed. I needed a rope.

Well, there was a lot of spider silk around.

I cut a tendril of the spider thread from one of the hollowed-out cocoons on the wall and pulled on it. It came loose, dragging chunks of wasp paper with it. It was about the width of a thick thread and feather-light.

I flexed. 1.8 mm in diameter, slightly thinner than cooking twine. Wow. The tensile strength was off the charts. 

I weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds before the breach. I checked my weight regularly. The DDC gym had an abundance of scales. The DDC monitored all government-employed gate divers for any unusual changes. They checked weight and height every three months, bloodwork every six.

I focused on myself. One hundred and fifty-one pounds. A six-pound weight loss. As I suspected, all that healing and fighting came with a price. This tiny strand of spider silk would hold ten times my weight. The eggs weren’t heavy, only large. That just left Bear.

I glanced at the dog and froze.

Ninety-four pounds.

That couldn’t possibly be right. I had checked her before and she was at eighty-two pounds. She had gained 12 lbs. It wasn’t possible. Even if my sense of time was completely off and we’d been in the breach for a week, a dog couldn’t just gain twelve pounds in seven days.

“Bear, come here, girl.”

The shepherd trotted over. I ran my hand over her body, feeling her flanks and back under the fur. There wasn’t much fat there, quite the opposite. She was on the leaner side. Judging by feel alone, she could use a few more meals.

I tried to recall her general dimensions, and they popped into my head from memory.

Bear was two inches taller and three inches longer.

I struggled to process it. She was taller and longer, which meant her bones elongated. Growing that fast should have put a huge strain on her body. 

It had to be stalker regeneration. She’d been eating every chance she got, and her new accelerated healing must’ve been putting these calories into her growth.

I flexed again, focusing in on her, looking for any abnormalities. Perfectly healthy. Nothing strange. Just a very large dog. Also, her harness was on too tight.

I loosened the belts as much as I could. I would need the harness to get her down to the floor of the cavern, but once we cleared that hurdle – assuming we survived – I would have to take it off. It was already pinching her body. If she got any bigger, it would hurt her.

There was nothing I could do about Bear’s explosive growth. It was what it was. One thing for certain, I needed to feed her better. If she was growing, she would need more calories. The next time we downed a stalker or maybe one of those goat things, I would let her eat all she wanted.

For now, I had to concentrate on making a rope. The twine-sized spider silk would hold my weight, but it would also cut my hands. I had to make it thicker and figure out some way to shield my fingers.

I pulled on the silk, and it came loose. If my luck held, it would be one long rope, and I had a lot of cocoons to work with.

#

The rope took a lot longer than expected. I must’ve been at it for about three hours, but in the end, I didn’t just have a rope. I had two, braided together from several lengths of the spider twine. I also made a net sack into which I loaded the spider eggs, all but the coral one. That one would come down with me. I pried a paper cap off the cluster of tubes I had dropped to the ground. It was thick like canvas, but flexible, and I managed to work it into a crude sack. I put the coral egg into it and secured it with Bear’s leash.

Bear trotted out of the cave and came back in. She started doing it a few minutes after I began working on the rope. I read somewhere that German Shepherds liked to patrol. Nothing could get onto the ledge from below and if something came in from the tunnel, we could hold it off here in the nest, so if patrolling made her feel better, there was no reason to keep her from it.

I coiled my ropes and walked onto the ledge. Below us, about one hundred yards away, the spider herders blocked the floor of the cavern. There were seven of them and behind them massive white spiders splattered with black loomed at least twenty feet high.

Okay then. This altered things.

Bear stared at the spider army and let out a quiet woof.

“Yes. I see.”

I went back inside the cave, grabbed the queen’s head, and dragged it toward the gap.  It barely fit, but finally I managed to push it through. I grabbed it and strained. The head was surprisingly light. I jerked it up above my head.

Look, I killed your enemy.

The spider herders watched, impassive.

I hurled the queen’s head off the cliff. It smashed onto the rocks below.

No reaction. Not exactly promising. I’d hoped for a cheer.

I picked up my ropes and walked along the ledge away from the flowers. Bear trotted after me.

We cleared the blossoms. I picked a large boulder, tied one rope around it, secured the other rope around a different chunk of stone and went back to the wasp nest to get the eggs. When I came back, the spider herders had moved directly below my ropes, arranged in a perfect crescent, with the monstrous spiders behind them.

I flexed. Some pollen had gotten on the eggs in the net sack. I waved my hands over it, trying to clean them. The pollen was featherlight, and after a couple of minutes most of it was off. I tied the rope to the net sack containing the four regular eggs, tied the other end of it around a rock, and held the sack above the drop.

Still no reaction.

I gently lowered the sack down. The rope was long enough. The trick was to keep from bumping the eggs against the cliff wall.

Nice and slow.

A spider herder stepped forward. I lowered the sack into their arms. The herder sliced at the rope with their hand, cutting the net sack free. There was no tug, no pull. One moment the weight of the eggs was on the rope and the next it vanished. The spider herder moved to the back with their prize, and I pulled the rope back up.

I still had the coral egg, Bear, and myself.

Bear would have to be next. I looped the rope around the rock three more times, then wrapped it around her, threading it through her harness. 

“You will be okay, girl. I’ll be right down.”

I took a deep breath and gently lowered Bear off a cliff, supporting her weight with my arms. When she was about three feet down, I backed up, strung the rope over my shoulders, and began to let it out, little by little, foot by foot, going as slowly as I could. If I was the old me, there was no way I could’ve done it. She would’ve been too heavy.

I ran out of rope and looked down. I’d calculated correctly. Bear was hanging about six feet off the ground. Letting her down all the way would’ve been a dangerous gamble.  Bear was smart but she was a dog. There was no telling what she would do when facing giant spiders and weird looking beings. She could wait for me like a good girl, or she could decide it was biting time and get herself killed. Leaving her hanging was the safest choice. The spider herders made no move toward her and if the rope snapped and she fell, she wouldn’t get injured.

It was my turn. I hung the sack with the last egg around my neck, threading one arm through so Bear’s leash crossed my chest. The egg was now on my back in the sack. I grabbed the second rope. I had never rappelled off anything in my life. Hell of a way to start learning.

It was easier than I thought. The first time I had pushed off a little too hard, but by the fourth bump I got the hang of it.

Push.

Push.

Push.

My feet met the solid ground. I let go of the rope and turned around. The spider herders stood motionless. They were almost eight feet tall, and they towered over me, menacing and silent, their faces hidden behind veils. Only the eyes were visible, two of them per face, large, narrow, with a strange-looking white iris on a solid black sclera that didn’t seem the least bit insectoid.

I lifted my paper sack off my back, pulled the paper open, and held the coral egg out.

“Bekh-razz.” My voice sounded ragged.

The spider herder in the center stepped forward. I’d flexed. My talent slid over the spider herder, and I knew he was male and the staff in his hand, with the symbols etched into its shaft, meant he was in charge of this cluster.

The herder’s robe stirred softly, as he moved and I realized that the humanoid shape was an illusion. The top half of him, the upright half, seemed human. His arms, unnaturally white, were long and thin, and his hands had six segmented fingers, each tipped with a black claw. He seemed to float forward rather than walk, and as he moved, I glimpsed the outline of four segmented legs underneath the pale silk.

Soft voice issued forth from the spider herder. “Horsun, gehr tirr did sembadzer.”

Something inside me recognized this language. The steady cadence sounded so familiar. I knew the words but their meaning kept avoiding me, as if I was trying to hold on to slippery, wet mud.

“Dzerhen tam dzal lukr tuhta gef.”

I used to speak this. Long time ago.  I just forgot how… No, wait, it wasn’t me.

“…Dzer lohr dzal, Sadrin.”

Me. I was Sadrin. That was more than a name. It was an occupation… no, a purpose. This was my goal in life. It was why I existed. The core of my… The understanding slipped away from me, and I almost growled out of sheer frustration. So close.

Something tore in my mind like a piece of paper and suddenly some of the clicks and odd syllables made sense.

“…  hyrt argadi…”

Daughter. Argadi meant daughter. I saved a female child.

“…Argadi dzal to na yen sah-dejjit…”

Sah-dejjit. Friend. They considered me a friend.

“Dzer meq dzal bekh-razz danur. Bekh-razz danir.”

Safe passage for now and forever. Oh.

The spider herder pointed at my left arm. I stepped forward and held it out. The light on his staff flared into a needle-thin orange beam and hit my arm. Pain lashed me. I grit my teeth.

The light died. A narrow scar marked my arm, twisting into a flowing symbol. My talent focused on it.

The vision burst in my mind. Groups of spider herders, one after another, different landscapes, different times, all nodding and parting to let me pass. I had been given a great, rare honor.

The words formed on my lips on their own.

“Adaren kullnemeq, Sindra-ron. Sadrin issun tanil danir.”

Thank you for the priceless gift, children of Sindra. I shall be forever grateful.

The spider herders moved aside, and the sea of spiders behind them parted before me.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 8, Part 1 and 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

The title speaks for itself. These are recent epiphanies I’ve had. Some are profound others less so. Enjoy.

Last weekend, at ConCarolinas, I was honored with the Polaris Award, which is given each year by the folks at Falstaff Books to a professional who has served the community and industry by mentoring young writers (young career-wise, not necessarily age-wise). I was humbled and deeply grateful. And later, it occurred to me that early in my career, I would probably have preferred a “more prestigious” award that somehow, subjectively, declared my latest novel or story “the best.” Not now. Not with this. I was, essentially, being recognized for being a good person, someone who takes time to help others. What could possibly be better than that?

Nancy and I recently went back to our old home in Tennessee for the wedding of the son of dear, dear friends. Ahead of the weekend, I was feeling a bit uneasy about returning there. By the time we left last fall, we had come to feel a bit alienated from the place, and we were constantly confronting memories of Alex — everywhere we turned, we found reminders of her. But upon arriving there this spring, I recognized that I had control over who and what I saw and did and even recalled. I avoided places that were too steeped in hard memories. I never went near our old house — I didn’t want to see it if it looked exactly the same, and I really didn’t want to see it if the new owners made a ton of changes! But most of all, I took care of myself and thus prevented the anxieties I’d harbored ahead of time from ruining what turned out to be a fun visit. I may suffer from anxiety, but I am not necessarily subject to it. I am, finally, at an advanced age, learning to take care of myself.

Even if I do not make it to “genius” on the Spelling Bee AND solve the Mini AND the Crossword AND Wordle AND Connections AND Strands each day, the world will still continue to turn. Yep. It’s true.

I do not know when or if I will ever write another word of fiction. But when and if I do, it will be because I want to, because I have a story I need to tell, something that I am certain I will love. Which is as it should be.

The lyric is, “She’s got electric boots/A mohair suit/You know I read it in a magazine.” Honest to God.

I am never going to play center field for the Yankees. I am never going to appear on a concert stage with any of my rock ‘n roll heroes. I am never going to be six feet tall. Or anywhere near it. All of this may seem laughably obvious. Honestly, it IS laughably obvious. But the dreams of our childhood and adolescence die hard. And the truth is, even as we age, we never stop feeling like the “ourself” we met when we were young.

Grief is an alloy forged of loss and memory and love. The stronger the love, and the greater the loss, and the more poignant the memories, the more powerful the grief. Loss sucks, but grief is as precious as the rarest metals — as precious as love and memory.

As a student of U.S. History — a holder of a doctorate in the field — I always assumed that our system of government, for all its obvious flaws and blind spots, was durable and strong. I believed that if it could survive the War of 1812 and the natural growing pains of an early republic, if it could emerge alive, despite its wounds, from Civil War and Reconstruction, if it could weather the stains of McCarthyism and Vietnam and Watergate, it could survive anything. I was terribly wrong. As it turns out, our Constitutional Republic is only as secure as the good intentions of its principle actors. Checks and balances, separation of powers, the norms of civil governance — they are completely dependent on the willingness of those engaged in governing to follow historical norms. Elect people who are driven not by patriotism but by greed and vengeance, bigotry and arrogance, unbridled ego and an insatiable hunger for power, and our republic turns out to be as brittle as centuries-old paper, as ephemeral as false promises, as fragile as life itself.

I think the legalization of weed is a good thing. Legal penalties for use and possession were (and, in some states, still are) grossly disproportionate to the crime, and they usually fell/fall most heavily on people of color and those without the financial resources necessary to defend themselves. So, it’s really a very, very good thing. But let’s be honest: Part of the fun of getting high used to be the knowledge that we were doing something forbidden, something that put us on the wrong side of the law. It allowed otherwise well-behaved kids to feel like they (we) were edgy and daring. There’s a small part of me that misses that. Though it’s not enough to make me move back to Tennessee….

I’ll stop there for today. Perhaps I’ll revisit this idea in future posts.

In the meantime, have a great week.

I control the tunnel, all will love me and despair!

Dude, drama much?

Tunnel shmunnel, ruling the stair is real power.

Sure, let’s go with that. Wake me when it makes a difference.

DIE FEATHERY NEMESIS! DIE!

Hi, everyone

As you may have noticed, I have been having some problems with this blog. My antivirus software keeps sending alerts, suggesting a phishing scam, and I am not the only one having these problems. The helpdesk insists there is nothing wrong on their end, and while I have reported it to Norton as a false positive so far they haven’t cleared it or confirmed what is actually wrong. I’ve only been able to get into the blog through iPad, which isn’t much good for editing, and the WordPress app.

I’m hoping to get this problem fixed, but so far no luck.

Accordingly, I have opened a Substack (link below) and I have tried to transfer the mailing list from the blog to Substack. Hopefully, if you were subscribed, you should be able to receive emails from Substack without any further problems. If you weren’t subscribed, please take this opportunity to sign up.

https://chrisnuttall.substack.com/

I need to say at this point that I cannot guarantee any paid-subscribers content only. I don’t feel confident in my ability to maintain a steady stream of posting to justify charging access – I have thought about offering draft chapters to subscribers, but they won’t have been edited let alone fixed, so I’m reluctant to do it. If you do take a paid subscription, you are supporting me but you are not necessarily getting anything in return.

(On the plus side, you will help keep me writing.)

Depending on what happens, I may try to keep this blog updated. I still get comments via email even if I can’t see them on the browser. However, I have no idea how that will work out.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you on my new Substack.

Christopher Nuttall

PS – upcoming …

You know it’s a really good sign that a typically boring entities such as a corporation is really interesting and informative when Drucraft is involved! Can’t wait to see next’s week on The United States and presumably other countries or international Megacorps!

Quick question both here and in Book One there have been mentioned of factions in the US and the UK Board, are they as organized as the Light Council factions in Alex Verus? Or are they more informal such as specific Houses or Corporations being aligned on an issue that effect how the sell their sigls?

I crouched on a narrow stone ledge protruding above a vast cavern. Bear lay next to me gnawing on a stalker femur.

Long veins of luminescent crystal split the ceiling here and there and slid up the walls, glowing like overpowered lamps, diluting the darkness to a gentle twilight. My talent told me it was Fos stone, a breach mineral that shone like a flashlight. The biggest Fos stone I had seen until now was about the size of my fist.

 Two hundred and sixty-two feet below us, at the bottom of the cavern, enormous lianas climbed the stone wall, bearing giant flowers. Each blossom, shaped like a twisted cornucopia, sported a funnel at least ten feet across and fifteen feet deep, fringed by thick, persimmon-colored petals that glowed weakly with coral and yellow. It was as if a garden-variety trumpet vine had been thrown into the chasm and mutated out of control into a monstrous version of itself.

Strange beings moved along the cavern floor, clad in diaphanous pale robes. Their torsos seemed almost humanoid, but there was something oddly insectoid about their movements. They strode between the flowers, carrying long staves and pushing carts.

As I watched, one of them stopped at the opposite wall far below and tugged on the long green tendrils dripping from a large blossom. A spider the size of a small car slid from the flower. It was white and translucent, as if made of frosted glass.

The being checked it over, prodding it with a staff topped with a large chunk of colored glass or maybe a huge jewel. My talent couldn’t identify it from this distance. The spider waited like a docile pet. 

The being dipped a slender appendage into their cart, pulled out a glowing fuzzy sphere that looked like a giant dandelion, and tossed it to the spider. The monster arachnid caught it and slipped back into its flower.

The spider herder moved on to the next blossom.

It was surreal. I’d been watching them for about two hours and my mind still refused to come to terms with it. There were hundreds of flowers down there, and most of them held spiders. The herders had been clearly doing this for a long time – their movements were measured and routine, and they had made paths in the faintly glowing lichens sheathing the bottom of the cavern.

I was watching an alien civilization tend to its livestock.

“Do you know what this is, Bear? This is animal husbandry.”

Bear didn’t seem impressed.

If I had to herd spiders, this would certainly be a good place. From this angle, the cavern looked almost like a canyon, relatively narrow with steep, mostly sheer walls. They had a water source – the narrow ribbon of a shallow stream twisted along the cavern’s floor. I couldn’t see any other entrances, although there had to be some, probably far to the left, behind the cavern’s bend. If stalkers or other predators somehow invaded, they would be easy to bottleneck. It was an ideal, sheltered location except for one thing.

Another spider herder emerged from behind the bend on the left. My ledge ended only a few feet away on that side so I couldn’t quite see where they came from. This one was pushing a larger cart.

“Here we go,” I murmured to the Bear.

She flicked her ear.

The spider herder paused. Above them, about forty feet off the ground, a large blossom glowed with gold instead of red. The being raised their staff and leaped at the wall, clearing ten feet in a single jump. The spider herder climbed up the vine, shockingly fast, reached the flower, and thrust the staff into the blossom.

I glanced to the right. Across the cavern, a fissure split the wall near the ceiling, a crack in the solid stone about eight feet tall and five feet across at its widest.

Nothing moved. The fissure remained dark.

The spider herder swirled the staff as if scraping the pancake batter out of a bowl.

The fissure stayed still.

The spider herder pulled his staff out. Three dense clumps of spider silk hung suspended from the staff, glowing softly with cream-colored light. They were about the size of a beach ball.

A segmented body squeezed out of the fissure and dove, three pairs of translucent wings snapping open in flight. A wasp-like insect the size of a kayak zipped through the air, glinting with blue and yellow like a blue sapphire wrapped in gold filigree.

Bear jumped up and growled.

The spider herder saw the wasp and scrambled down, but not quickly enough. The giant insect divebombed across the cavern, hooked one of the spider eggs with its segmented legs, tearing it from the bundle, and shot up, buzzing along the wall into a U-turn. A moment and it squeezed back into the fissure, taking its prize with it.

The spider herder stared after it for a long moment, climbed down, and deposited the two remaining egg sacks into their cart.

I had seen a similar scenario play out hours ago, when I first found the cavern. I had backtracked since then, exploring as many of the tunnels around it as I could. All of them either dead-ended or led to a narrow, bottomless chasm that ran parallel to this cave. I returned to the ledge a while ago and have been sitting here since, observing and deciding how to proceed.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. The anchor was still straight ahead and to the left of me, radiating discomfort. I opened my eyes. I was looking right at the bend of the cavern.

If we wanted to get to the anchor, we would have to pass through this underground canyon. There was no way around it. Backtracking wasn’t an option. We were truly lost at this point.

Unfortunately, I had a feeling that the spider herders wouldn’t welcome our intrusion into their territory. 

Another wasp squeezed out of the gap and dove down, aiming for the cart. The spider herder let out a loud clicking sound. A green spider the size of a donkey raced around the bend of the cavern and leaped into the air, knocking the wasp into the wall. The insect and the arachnid tumbled down through the vines and rolled onto the floor. The wasp jabbed at the spider with a stinger the size of a sword, but the spider clung to it and sank its fangs into the wasp’s neck. The insect’s head fell to the ground.

The spider herder made another clicking noise. The green spider abandoned the wasp and scuttled over to the cart. The herder pulled out a glowing yellow globe and tossed it to the spider. The arachnid caught it and ran back around the bend.

“Look, Bear, your cousin from another dimension got a treat.”

Bear tilted her head.

The spider herder leveled their stave at the wasp’s body. A moment passed. A bolt of orange lightning tore out of the gem and struck the carcass. The insect sizzled and broke into dust.

The activation time was a bit long. The wasps would have no trouble evading, considering the delay it took to fire, but once the beam hit, the results were devastating.

If Bear and I strolled down there, assuming we somehow got down off the ledge, trying to make our way past the herders would be impossible. Between the green spiders and that orange lightning, we wouldn’t get through, not without some serious injuries.

I glanced at the fissure. There was a wasp nest behind it. Spiders were excellent wall climbers. Theoretically, the spider herders could mount a full assault against it, but there were three problems with that.

First, the fissure wasn’t wide enough. The wasps were long and narrow, and they folded their wings to get through. The white spiders would never fit. The green ones could try to squeeze in there, but they would have to enter one at a time, and the wasps would swarm them. 

Second, the wasps could take flight if they detected the assault and simply wait it out. The spiders couldn’t sit by that wasp nest indefinitely, and waiting by it exposed them to the aerial assault.

And third, the entirety of the wall around the nest was sheathed in mauve flowers. Toward the top, where my ledge met the fissure, the wall wasn’t strictly sheer. It broke down into a series of outcroppings, and the mauve flowers clung to the rocks like some deadly African violets. There was no way to approach the nest without going through them.

When one of the white spiders popped out of the highest flower, I had a chance to scan it. They were not immune to the pollen. It would short-circuit their nervous system. The spider herders and the wasps were at a standoff.

When I first stumbled onto the cavern, I got another vision. A group of three spider herders, their veils shifting in the wind of an alien world with a mass of giant spiders behind them; someone with human arms offering a carved wooden box to them; the leading spider herder accepting it; the spiders parting; and a single word spoken: Bekh-razz. A gift for the safe passage.

I would have to offer a gift to cross.

The spiders couldn’t get to the nest, but I could. The ledge I was on curved along the wall all the way to the nest. It was barely seven feet wide near the entrance to the hive. I wouldn’t have a lot of room to work with.

I got up and walked along the ledge toward the fissure.  

Bear dropped her bone and trotted after me. I halted by the first clump of mauve blossoms and flexed.

They glowed with pale lilac. I split the glow into individual layers of light blue and pink. The blue told me they were still mildly toxic to both me and Bear, but nothing our regeneration wouldn’t take care of, and the faint pink let me know that if properly processed, the plant could be used as contact analgesic. Made sense. That’s why we didn’t notice the effect pollen had on us until it was too late.

The wasps displayed hive behavior. I didn’t need a vision to clear that up for me.  It was obvious from their patterns. That meant that the moment I attacked the nest, every wasp would fight to the death to kill me. I had no idea how large that nest was. Or how many giant wasps waited inside. I had to be very sure, because once I started, there was no stopping. Earth wasps were vindictive, and it was safer to assume these would be, too. Even if I ran away, they would chase me through the caves and there was no passage narrow enough to lose them anywhere around this cave.

The nest rumbled.

I dropped to the ground. “Down.”

Bear hugged the ledge with me.

“Good girl,” I whispered.

A large wasp squeezed through the gap and took off, vanishing around the bend. 

I wonder how they know when the eggs are harvested? Do the eggs emit a pulse or something…

A hoarse shriek echoed through the cavern. That was new.

The wasp zipped back toward the nest, carrying another silk-wrapped spider egg in its claws. The egg glowed with coral pink. I flexed, focusing on it, but the wasp was too fast. Half a blink, and it squeezed into the nest.

I’d seen them steal three eggs besides this one, and nobody screamed the first three times. Also, the rest of the eggs glowed with cream, not pink. There was something special about this egg.

This was my best chance. I had to act now or find a different way.

I flicked my wrist, elongating the cuff into a sharp, two-foot blade shaped like a machete. Bear let out a soft, excited whine.

“Shhh.”

I padded through the flowers, my dog trailing me.

This was a foolish plan.

Ten yards to the nest.

Five.

Three.

Something rumbled within the fissure.

I cleared the distance between me and the gap in a single jump.

A wasp thrust out of the gap. I swung the blade and lopped its head off. The blue and yellow body crashed down, and I grabbed it with my left hand, yanked it out of the fissure, and sent it flying to the ground far below.

Bear broke into barks. There goes our element of surprise.

The entire nest buzzed like a tornado spinning into life. Another wasp shot through the fissure, and I cleaved it in half, my sword cutting through the segmented thorax like it was butter.

#

“Sir?”

Elias’ eyes snapped open. Leo hovered in his view.  Elias sat up.

“We found Jackson,” the XO said.

#

Two wasps tried to squeeze through the gap at the same time and got stuck one on top of the other. I twisted the sword into a spike, skewered the top one, because it was closer and let its dead weight push the second wasp down. It struggled, pinned to the ground, and I hacked at it. 

The buzzing was deafening now.  The walls of the fissure vibrated as the enraged hive mobilized for an all-out assault. Next to me Bear barked her head off, flinging spit into the air. She wasn’t just a dog, she was a guild K9, trained to alert when the breach monsters came near. The monsters were here, and she was alerting everyone.

I grabbed the body of the top wasp, pulled it out of the fissure, and hurled it over the edge.

#

“He’s been detained by the authorities in Japan.”

It took Elias a moment to process that tidbit. “On what pretext?”

“They claim he entered a luxury restaurant, ordered a high-quality cut of Wagyu beef, washed it down with Yamazaki Single Malt 55-Year-Old Whisky, which retails for 400K a bottle, and walked out without paying.”

“They’re saying he dined and dashed?”

Leo smiled. Technically, it was a smile, but it looked more like a predator baring his teeth.

#

Bodies clogged the fissure, drenched in hemolymph. I stabbed and hacked into the pile up, yanking chunks of the insects out.

Seven wasps.

Eight.

Twelve.

#

“Jackson? The vegetarian who drinks one beer a year and only under duress?”

“Yes, sir. Our Jackson.”

Elias hid a growl. It was a retaliation for Yosuke.

Two years ago, a star Void Ronin, a top tier Talent, had a falling out with the largest guild in Japan and quit. They blacklisted him. No other guild in the country would hire him. The idea was that the pressure of unemployment would force him to crawl back home. Yosuke called their bluff. Cold Chaos welcomed him into the fold eighteen months ago. He was enroute to Elmwood now from another gate and was due to arrive tomorrow.

Publicly, Hikari no Ryu said nothing. Privately, the guild wielded a lot of power in Japan, and they were pissed. Elias thought that they reached an understanding regarding this matter. Apparently, he was mistaken. It didn’t matter. Elias had never regretted the decision, and he wasn’t about to start now.

“Have they made any demands?” he asked.

“No. Most likely they will hold him and wait for us to come to them.”

Guild politics were convoluted and cutthroat. It didn’t matter which continent. Elias had dealt with worse nonsense stateside plenty of times. But there was an unspoken rule all guilds followed – healers were exempt from all of the political bullshit. They were off limits. You didn’t poach them, you didn’t threaten them, and you didn’t retaliate against them. They chose who they worked for, and if you got a good one, you did everything you could to keep them.

Someone in Japan had just crossed a very dangerous line.

“How would you like to proceed?” Leo asked.

“I’ll make some calls.”

#

The nest lay silent.

Bear was still barking.

“Quiet.”

The shepherd clamped her mouth shut. I listened for the buzzing.

Nothing.

“Stay, Bear. Stay. Stay!”

Bear sat down.

I’d killed twelve smaller wasps, probably workers, and five larger wasps, probably guards. Back home wasp colonies had a queen. She was usually larger than the workers and the guards, and if that held true here, she was trapped within the nest.

I slipped into the fissure, moving slowly and quietly. It was about ten feet deep. Beyond that, the passage widened into another cave chamber steeped in gloom and dappled with pools of pale light coming from above. I flexed. One hundred and twelve yards to the other wall. A lot of open space, and the floor was unnaturally clear. The wasps must’ve removed all of the debris that originally littered the chamber. Once I exited the fissure, I would be exposed.

A step.

Another.

A whisper of something large shifting its weight on the right, just outside the passageway.  I had expected the wasp to strike from above, but it sounded like it was on the ground instead.

I stopped, poised on my toes. My fingers trembled. Fear filled me. I was overflowing with it.

Another faint whisper. The wasp was waiting just feet away, ready to ambush me the moment I entered. I had to rely on speed.

I darted into the nest, angling to the left. A shadow fell over me and I dove forward, rolled, and came back to my feet.

A massive wasp bore down on me. It was as big as a bus, riding on six huge, segmented legs, each armed with two chitin claws the size of sickles.

Crap.

The wasp charged me. It wasn’t flying. It ran across the floor, straight at me, swiping at me with its terrible claws. I darted back and forth like a terrified rabbit.

Right, left, left, too many fucking legs, right…

The wasp swiped at me like a hockey player armed with deadly scythes. It was trying to skewer me and drag me to its terrible mouth where two sets of sharp mandibles would shred the flesh off my bones and rip me apart.

The world shrank to the stone floor of the cavern, the pools of light, and the horrible creature behind me. All my instincts screamed in panic. I had to run away. I had to run from this thing back through the fissure, but I couldn’t find it. The walls were a dizzying whirlwind.

 I was out of breath. I was disoriented. I couldn’t even think long enough to come up with a plan. All I could do was run for my life. Running wouldn’t work for too much longer. I would die here, in this nest.  

Something dark and shaggy shot out of the wall. Before my brain processed what it was, Bear charged at the wasp.

“No! Bear, no!”

The German Shepherd clamped her jaws on one of the wasp’s middle legs. The insect shook it and flung Bear off.

“No!”

One of the wasp’s legs sliced like a scythe. I saw it coming. I had stopped running because of Bear and now it was too late. I jerked back, but not fast enough. The blow swept me off my feet. I rolled across the floor, pain smashing into my side. The wasp reared above me. Its front leg came down like a hammer. One of the two claws pierced my right thigh, scraping the bone.

Bear leaped out from the side and bit the leg impaling me. The wasp queen didn’t even notice. The other claw clamped on my other leg. The ragged chitin sank into my flesh. I felt myself being lifted, up to where the horrible mandibles clicked.

No.

I sliced at the wasp leg pinning me. My sword cut through chitin like it was a twig. The wasp recoiled. I yanked the severed stump out of my thigh and rolled to my feet.

Fuck this shit. Why the hell was I running?

Bear snarled next to me.

The wasp swiped at me with its uninjured front leg. It was huge and fast, but I was faster. I leaned out of the way. The leg carved through the spot where I had been. The wasp swiped again, and I stepped back again, just out of reach.

Strike, dodge. Strike, dodge. It couldn’t touch me.

I flexed, stretching time like a rubber band, forcing my senses into overdrive. The uninjured front leg struck at me, slow like molasses. I cut it, dashed under the wasp, severing the other legs with quick strikes as I sprinted past, and emerged behind the monster insect. A second and it was over. The world restarted, and the queen crashed to the floor, the stumps of her legs jerking in wild spasms.

Bear howled.

I took a running start and jumped. My leap carried me through the air, and I landed on the queen’s fat abdomen and dashed toward her head.

The queen’s huge wings stirred. It was trying to fly.

I slipped on the narrow waist connecting the abdomen and thorax, caught myself, leaped onto the thorax, and scrambled onto her neck.

The wings hummed and blurred like the blades of a helicopter. A gust of wind buffeted me.

I drove my sword into the queen’s neck. It sank through, and I ripped it to the side, carving through the exoskeleton. The queen’s head drooped, and I chopped at the thin filament connecting it to the body.

The head crashed down.

The wings kept going. The headless body rose in the air, carrying me with it. I clung to it. The wasp corpse climbed twenty feet up…

The wings slowed.

The body fell slowly, careened, and landed in a heap. I jumped, rolled to break my fall, and came up in a crouch.

The queen was dead.

#

Elias put away his phone.

“Nice.” Leo grinned.

“They wanted a fight. We gave them a fight.”

All they had to do now was wait.

The post The Inheritance: The Rest of Chapter 7 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I received a surprising number of questions regarding my hair. I’ve addressed it on Facebook, but a lot of people don’t use it. I color my hair because I’m going grey. A lot of people look lovely with grey hair. I’m not one of them. I’ve tried to grow it out and it is terrible on me. My mother was blond, so you would think it would work, but I guess I lean more into my dad’s side of the family.

Anyway, I usually go to a salon and this time I asked for a slightly different color. Everything seemed fine for a few of weeks. I was distracted by work and other things and the hair was the last thing on my mind.

Then we needed a new author picture because ours was too old. And we needed it it kind of quickly because of the UK press release, so I decided that I should probably recolor the hair. As I was examining my lackluster hair in the mirror, I realized that I have a lock of hair that is two inches longer than the rest of what I could see. That was not normal.

I made an appointment at a different salon. They were able to fit me in quickly, so I was really happy about it. I came in, sat down int he chair, the stylist looked at my head and said, “There is extensive damage.”

My hair broke off. We are not sure what went wrong. She thought a wrong developer might have been used by mistake. Anyway, four inches of hair had to go.

Here I am with preliminary cut, looking kind of alarmed. As you can see, I am in my hedge witch era here.

I texted Gordon and told him my hair will be short. He asked if I was getting a “Can I talk to the manager?” haircut. I asked my stylist and she said, “Of course, not.”

I think the hair really turned out. I love the color. I miss the length, but it is healthy, light, and I can still ponytail it.

Here it is in the author pics:

The last time I had my hair this short, I was 12. I was worried about what would happen if it naturally dried, but it’s not too bad. I will just have to style it a bit more for the formal meetings.

And that is the hair saga.

PS. If you are looking for a good salon in San Marcos, Salon MINK is awesome. Ask for Jessica.

The post The Hair Calamity first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I have been struggling a bit with real life, and, as always, am behind on everything. But: The Wild Road will be available on the 17th of June, 2025 (I am practicing 2025 because apparently some part of my brain falls back into 2024 mode. Usually I’ve beaten it out of my head by this time in the year, but, well. 2025.) I won’t be at my usual desk until the 19th of June, which I’ve been told is terrible planning. And it is, but it wasn’t entirely planned >.<. I have a preview of the book, which you can find here. Usually I try to put it up a month before pub date. Did I mention that things have been … Continue reading →

I’m having a blast working on book trailers when WMG does Kickstarters. I just completed this book trailer for Dean’s Kickstarter, which launched today. I hope you enjoy the video and I hope it inspires you to look at the Kickstarter! Lots of cool stuff there. (Click here for the Kickstarter)

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Mary-Jo-Assassin-Book-Trailer-Low-Res.mp4

We are delighted to officially announce that THIS KINGDOM WILL NOT KILL ME – Maggie the Undying volume 1 has found a home with Tor UK.

Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is delighted to announce the acquisition of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, an extraordinary epic fantasy by bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews. Publisher Bella Pagan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Chris Scheina at Tor US for this and two further novels in this trilogy.

The official press release is here.

We are super excited to work with Tor UK. This means more buying options for the UK Horde, like Waterstones, a wider distribution, and a greater availability of the book in ebook and in print. No more waiting for weeks for the books to arrive from the US. No more cancelled orders due to “lack of availability.” Massive win there.

Furthermore, this edition will be specifically geared toward UK readers, and Tor UK is known for releasing beautiful books. They are also known for publishing unusual, out-of-the-box fiction, which means This Kingdom will be in excellent hands. While portal fantasy/isekai trope dominates in anime and comic format, there haven’t been that many attempts to bring it into the literally world, so we are very grateful Tor UK took a chance on it.

Also, we’ve interacted by email, and they are so nice to work with.

On a personal note, neither Gordon nor I believe ourselves to be legendary. We are just very happy that we finally have a UK publisher committed to supporting our books in such a big way.

This brings me to the slightly more bothersome news.

This Kingdom Begs Forgiveness From the UK Horde

This part of the post is for READERS WHO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK.

If you reside in US and/or order from Amazon.com, none of the stuff below applies to you. Your preorders are NOT affected.

If you have preordered This Kingdom on Amazon UK, you probably noticed that your preorder has been cancelled and funds have been refunded. This means that any Amazon UK customers who preordered This Kingdom will need to re-preorder the book.

Before any further explanations, here is the correct Amazon UK link and well as the Waterstones one:

Amazon UK Waterstones

The price is exactly the same. Tor UK was most gracious about making sure that everything matched and the Horde would not lose out.

Why did this happen?

This is one of those cases where the problem is unavoidable, and it’s nobody’s fault. The foreign rights sale process for US titles usually goes like so:

• US publisher acquires the book
• The book is edited
• US publisher formally accepts the manuscript after edits
• The book is presented to foreign (from US point of view) publishers
• Foreign publishers read the book and, hopefully, make an offer to purchase it for their territory

Sometimes a book is really hot, and everybody bids on it sight unseen, but most of the time this is how the foreign sales happen. On the US side, there is a delay between initial signing of the contract and the actual acceptance of the book, which can be months or sometimes years.

Tor US bought This Kingdom 1 year and 4 months ago, in February 2024. Tor UK didn’t have a chance to read the manuscript until this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s US listing went on sale and naturally flowed to Amazon UK. This is standard procedure, because if the foreign rights are not sold in the UK, at least the readers who order from Amazon UK would have a chance to purchase the book from the US.

We are so sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. There was no way to prevent it, but we deeply apologize all the same.

On a personal note, we are so excited for this partnership. If the book does well, maybe we will finally make it over to the UK to meet all of you. Fingers crossed.

The post This Kingdom Finds Home in the UK first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Portia Meadows runs one of the few pet stores that sells familiars to the magical. Familiars—delicate, moody creatures—keep magic clean and pure. To lose a familiar means losing magic. And on a bright afternoon, Portia’s assistant discovers that something essential has disappeared, threatening not just the magical within the store, but throughout the world.

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

 

The Poop Thief By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Okay, this is just weird.”

The voice came from the back of the store. It belonged to my Tuesday/Thursday assistant, Carmen. High school student, daughter of two mages, Carmen had no real talent herself, but she was earnest, and she loved creatures, and I loved her enthusiasm.

“I mean it, Miss Meadows, this is weird.”

Oddly enough, weird is not a word people often use in Enchantment Place. Employees expect weird. Customers demand it. What’s weird here is normal everywhere else—or so I thought until that Tuesday in late May.

“Miss Meadows….”

“Hold on, Carmen,” I said. “I’m with a client.”

The client was a repeat whom I did not like. I’m duty bound at Familiar Faces to provide mages with the proper familiars—the ones that will help them augment their talents and help them remain on the right path (doing no harm, avoiding evil, remaining true to the cause, all that crap). I do my best, but some people try my patience.

People like Zhakeline Jones. She was a zaftig woman who wore flowing green scarves, carried a cigarette in a cigarette holder, and called everyone “darling.” Even me.

I called her Jackie, and ignored the “It’s Zhakeline, dahling.” Actually, it was Jacqueline back when we were in high school and then only from the teachers. The rest of us called her Jackie, and her friends—what few she had—called her Jack.

Whenever she came in, I cringed. I knew the store would smell like cigarettes and Emerude perfume for days afterwards. I didn’t let her smoke in here—Enchantment Place, for all its oddities, was regulated by the City of Chicago and the City of Chicago had banned smoking in all public places—but that didn’t stop the smell from radiating off her.

Most of my creatures vacated the front of the store when she arrived. Only the lioness remained at my feet, curled around my ankles as if I were a tree and Zhakeline was her prey. A few of the mice looked down on Zhakeline from a shelf (sitting next to the books on specialty cheeses that I’d ordered just for them), and a couple of the birds sat like fat and sassy gargoyles in the room’s corners.

Nothing wanted to go home with Zhakeline, and I didn’t blame them. She’d brought back the last three familiars because the creatures had the audacity to sneeze when they entered her house (and silly me, I had thought that cobras couldn’t sneeze, but apparently they do—especially when they don’t want to stay in a place where the air is purple). We were going to have to find her something appropriate and tolerant, something I was beginning to believe impossible to do.

On the wall beside me, lights shimmered from all over the spectrum, then Carmen appeared. Actually, she’d stepped through the portal from the back room to the shop’s front, but I’d specifically designed the magical effect to impress the civilians.

Sometimes it impressed me.

Carmen was a slender girl who hadn’t yet grown into her looks. One day, her dramatic bone structure would accent her African heritage. But right now, it made her look like someone had glued an adult’s cheekbones onto a child’s face.

“Miss Meadows, really, my parents say you shouldn’t ignore a magical problem and I think this is a magical problem, even though I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty certain, and I’m sorry to bother you, but jeez, I think you have to look at this.”

All spoken in a breathless rush, with her gaze on Zhakeline instead of on me.

Zhakeline smiled sympathetically and waved a hand in dismissal. Bangles that had been stuck to her skin loosened and clanked discordantly.

“This hasn’t really been working, Portia.” Zhakeline said with a tilt of the head. She probably meant that as sympathy too. “I’ve been thinking of going to that London store—what do they call it?”

“The Olde Familiar.” I spoke with enough sarcasm to sound disapproving. Actually, my heart was pounding. I would love it if Zhakeline went elsewhere. Then the unhappy familiar—whoever the poor creature might be—wouldn’t be my responsibility.

“Yes, the Olde Familiar.” She smiled and put that cigarette holder between her teeth. She bit the damn thing like a feral F.D.R. “I think that would be best, don’t you?”

I couldn’t say yes, because I wasn’t supposed to turn down mage business and I could get reported. But I didn’t want to say no because I would love to lose Zhakeline’s business.

So I said, “You might try that store in Johannesburg too, Unfamiliar Familiars. You can see all kinds of exotics. But remember, importing can be a problem.”

“I’m sure you’ll help with that,” she said.

“Legally I can’t. But you’re always welcome here if their wares don’t work out.”

The mice chittered above me, probably at the word “wares.” They weren’t wares and they weren’t animals. They were sentient beings with magic of their own, subject only to the whims of the magical gods when it came to pairings.

The whims of the magical gods and Zhakeline’s eccentricities.

“I’ll do that,” she said. Then she turned to Carmen. “I hope you settle your weirdness, darling. And for the record, your parents are right. The sooner you focus on a magical problem, the less trouble it can be.”

With that, she swept out of the store. Two chimpanzees crawled through the cat doors on either side of the portal holding identical cans of Febreze.

“No,” I said. “The last time you did that we had to vacate the premises. Or don’t you remember?”

They sighed in unison and vanished into the back. I didn’t blame them. The smell was awful. But Febreze interacted with the Emerude, leading me to believe that what Zhakeline wore wasn’t the stuff sold over the counter, but something she mixed on her own.

Without a familiar, which was probably why the stupid stuff lingered for days.

“Miss Meadows.” Carmen tugged on my sleeve. “Please?”

I waved an arm so that the store fans turned on high. I also uttered an incantation for fresh ocean breezes. (I’d learned not to ask for wind off Lake Michigan; that nearly chilled us out of the store one afternoon). Then I followed Carmen into the back.

Walking through the portal is a bit disconcerting, especially the first time you do it. You are walking into another dimension. I explain to civilian friends that the back room is my Tardis. Those friends who don’t watch Doctor Who look at me like I’m crazy; the rest laugh and nod.

My back room should be a windowless 10×20 storage area. Instead, it’s the size of Madison Square Garden. Or two Madison Square Gardens. Or three, depending on what I need.

Most of my wannabe familiars live here, most of them in their own personal habitats. The habitats have a maximum requirement, all mandated by the mage gods and tailored to a particular species. Each bee has a football-sized habitat; each tiger has about a half an acre. Most creatures may not be housed with others of their kind, unless they’re a socially needy type like herding dogs or alpha male cats. The creatures have to learn how to live with their mage counterparts—not always an easy thing to do—and its best not to let them interact too much with other members of their species.

Theoretically, I get the creatures after they complete five years of familiar training (and yes, you’re right; very few familiars live their normal lifespan. Insects get what to them seems like millions of years and dogs get an extra two decades; only elephants, parrots, and a few other exceptionally long-lived species live a normal span).

That day, I had too many monkeys of various varieties, one parrot return who’d managed to learn every foul word in every language known to man (and I mean that) during his aborted tenure with his new owner, several large predatory cats, twenty-seven butterflies, five gazelle, sixteen North American deer, eight white wolves, one black bear, one grizzly return, one-hundred domestic cats, five-hundred-sixty-five dogs, and dozens of other creatures I generally forgot when I made a mental list.

Not every animal was for sale. Some were flawed returns—meaning they couldn’t remember spells or they misquoted incantations or they weren’t temperamentally suited to such a high-stress job. Some were whim returns, brought back by the mage who either bought on a whim or returned on a whim. And the rest were protest returns. These creatures left their mage in protest, either of their treatment or their living conditions.

All three of Zhakeline’s returns had been protest returns although she tried to pass the first off as a flaw return and the other two as whim returns. It gets hard for a mage after a few rejections. Eventually she gets a reputation as a familiarly challenged individual, and might never get a magical companion.

And if she goes without for too long, she’ll have her powers suspended until she goes through some kind of rehab.

Fortunately, that’s never my decision. I’d seen too many mages fight to save their powers just before a suspension: I never want all that angry magic directed at me.

Carmen was standing on the edge of the habitats. They extended as far as the eye could see. My high school assistants didn’t tend the habitats the way that civilian high school assistants would tend cages at, say, a vet’s office. Instead, they made sure that the attendants that I hired from various parts of the globe (at great expense) actually did their jobs.

Each attendant had to log in stats: food consumed, creature health readings, and how often each habitat was entered, inspected, and cleaned. Then they’d log in the video footage for the past day—after inspecting it, of course, for magical incursions, failed spells, or escape attempts.

Carmen had called up our stats on the clear computer screen I’d overlaid over the habitat viewing area. She zoomed in on one stat—product for resale.

I frowned at the numbers. They were broken down by category. The whim returns and most of the protest returns were listed, of course, along with byproduct—methane from the cows (to be used in various potions); shed peacock feathers (for quills); and honey from the bees that had convinced the mage gods to make them hive familiars, not individual familiars.

Those bees only went to special clients—those who could prove they weren’t allergic and who could handle several personality types all speaking through their fearless leader, the sluggish queen.

“See?” Carmen asked, waving a hand at the numbers. “This week’s just weird.”

I didn’t see. But I didn’t have as much experience with the numbers as she did. And, truth be told, I didn’t think her powers were in spell-casting. I believed they were in numerology—not as powerful a magic, but a useful one.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling dense, like I often did when staring at rows of facts and figures. “What am I supposed to see?”

She poked her finger at one of the columns. The lighted numbers vanished, then reappeared in red.

“Available fertilizer,” she said. “See?”

I stared at the category. Available Fertilizer. Our biggest seller because we undercut the competition, mostly so we could get rid of the crap quickly and easily.

“There’s no number there,” I said.

“Zero is a number,” Carmen said with dripping disdain that only a teenager could muster.

“E…yeah…okay.” I knew I was stammering, but the big honking nothingness made no sense. “The assistants haven’t been cleaning the habitats?”

She pressed the screen, drawing down the earlier statistics. Cleanings had gone on as usual.

“So what happened to the fertilizer?”

“I have no idea where the fertilizer went,” she said. “I’m not even sure it came out of the cages. I mean, habitats.”

I had planned to give her a tour of the back, but I hadn’t yet. So she always made the “cages/habitat” mistake, something she’d never say if she actually saw the piece of the Serengeti plain that Fiona, the lioness who liked to sleep under my cash register and Roy, the lion who supposedly headed her pride, had conjured up to remind themselves of home.

Cleaning the habitats was a major job, especially for the larger animals, and usually required extra labor. Entire families came in for an hour or two a night to clean grizzly’s mountainside, especially during blackberry season.

I moved Carmen aside, pressed some keys only visible to me, and looked at several of the previous day’s vids in fast motion. Habitat cleaning happened in all of them.

Habitat cleaners weren’t required to log in what they cleaned unless the item was marketable which poop generally was. Animal poop that is. There’s never a big market for insect poop.

Animal poop (ground up into a product called Familiar Fertilizer) had a wide variety of uses. Mages bought it for their herb gardens. In addition to being the Miracle Grow of the magical world, it also made sure that wolf’s bane and all the other herbal ingredients of a really good potion, magical spell, or “natural” remedy was extra-powerful. Some mages vowed that anything fertilized with familiar poop could be safely sold with a money-back guarantee—especially (oddly enough) love spells.

“Must be a computer glitch,” I said and stabbed a few more buttons.

“Let me.” Carmen got to the correct screens quicker, without me even asking. She knew I wanted to check all that basic stuff—how many pounds of poop got ground into fertilizer at the nearby processing plant, how many pounds of fertilizer got shipped, and how many of our magical feed-and-seed brethren paid for shipments that arrived this week.

Each category had a big fat zero in the poundage column.

“I don’t like this,” I said. “You just noticed this?”

I tried to keep the accusation out of my voice. It wasn’t her job to keep track of my shipments and my various product lines. She was a high school student working two days a week part-time after school.

I was the person in charge.

“I was going over the manifests like you taught,” she said. “I let you know the minute I saw it.”

Which was—I checked the digital readout on the see-through computer screen—half an hour ago, one hour after Carmen arrived.

Pretty dang fast, considering.

“I mean, everything was fine on Thursday.”

Thursday. The last day she worked.

My lunch—an indulgent slice of Chicago pan-style pizza—turned into a gelatinous ball in my stomach. “Can you quickly check the previous four days?”

“Already on it.” She pressed a few keys.

I watched numbers flash in front of my eyes—too quickly for my number-challenged brain to follow. I could have spelled the whole thing, looked for patterns, but I had Carmen. She was better than any magical incantation.

“Wow,” she said after a few minutes. “Those animals haven’t pooped since Friday.”

The gelatinous ball became concrete. I reached for the screen to look at health history, then stopped. A few of those creatures would have died if they hadn’t pooped in three days. Some internal systems were less efficiently designed than others.

Still, I had her double-check the health records just to make sure.

“Okay,” she said after looking at health records from Thursday to Tuesday. “So they all have normal bowel readings. What does this mean?”

“It means that your parents are right,” I said.

“Huh?” She looked at me sideways, all teenager again. She hated hearing that Mom and Dad were right.

“Magical problems become bigger when they are allowed to fester.”

“This is a magical problem?” she asked.

“The worst,” I said.

She continued to stare at me in confusion, so I clarified.

“We have a poop thief.”

***

You find poop thieves throughout magical literature. Heck, you even find them in fairy tales.

Of course, they’re never called poop thieves. They’re “tricksters” who steal their victims’ “essence.” They’re evil wizards who rob their enemies of their “life force.”

Most scholars believe that these references are to sperm, which simply tells me that magical scholarship has been dominated too long by males. (Those inept male scholars don’t seem to be able to read either; a lot of the victims are women who are, of course, spermless creatures one and all.)

The scholars are right in that “life force” and “essence” are often composed of bodily fluids. Some (female) scholars have assumed that this essence is blood, but blood is a lot harder to obtain than the simplest of bodily fluids—pee.

Pee, though, is like all other water. It seeps into the ground. It’s difficult to get unless someone pees into a cup or a bottle or a box. (Or unless you’ve magicked the chamber pot—and there are a few of those stories as well [Those Brothers Grimm didn’t like the chamber pot stories, and so kept them out of the official compilation.])

Poop, on the other hand…

Poop, actually, on either hand is a lot easier to obtain.

Poop, like pee, blood, and yes, sperm, is a life essence. Even in its nonmagical form it has magical powers. It gets discarded only to be spread on a fallow field. The nutrients in the waste material break down, enriching the soil which is often used to grow plants—plants which later become food. The food nourishes the person who eats it. The person’s body processes the food into energy and vitamins and all sorts of other good stuff, and the leftovers become waste yet again.

Most of the non-magical have no idea the power held in a single turd.

Hell, most of the magical didn’t either.

But the ones who did, well, they were all damn dangerous.

And I’d already lost too much time.

***

It seemed odd to call Mall Security at a time like this, but that was the first thing I did. Mine wasn’t the only store with magical creatures.

If someone was stealing from me, then maybe he was stealing from the pet store down the way, the organ grinder monkey show just outside the food court, and the various holiday setups with their real Easter bunnies and Christmas reindeer and Halloween bats. Not to mention all the working familiars accompanying every single mage who walked into the place.

I let Carmen talk to Security. She was young enough and naïve enough to think they were sexy. She had no idea that most of them were failed magical enforcers or inept warlocks who’d been demoted from city-wide security patrol to Enchantment Place.

I stayed in the back room, bending a few rules because this was an emergency. Anyone who took that much poop had a plan. A big plan—or a need for a lot of power.

At first, I figured this thief simply wanted the magical support of a familiar without actually getting a familiar. Magical crime blotters were full of minor poop thieves who stole rather than get a new familiar of their own. They’d mine someone else’s familiar, using the poop as a tool with which to obtain the magic, and no one would notice until that familiar got sick from putting out too much magical energy.

Maybe what we had here was a more sophisticated version of the neighborhood poop snatcher.

Which made Zhakeline a prime suspect.

But Zhakeline’s magic had always been shaky at best, even when she had a familiar. That was why she looked so exotic and had so many affectations.

She had to appeal to the civilians who think we’re all weird. She mostly sold her small magic services to them. If she predicted the future and was wrong or if she made a love potion that didn’t work, the civilian would simply shrug and think to himself Ah, well, magic doesn’t really work after all.

But the magical, we know when someone can’t perform all of the spells in the year-one playbook. Zhakeline barely passed year one (charity on the part of the instructor) and shouldn’t have passed from that point on. But that happened during the years when telling a kid that she had failed was tantamount to murdering her (or so the parents thought) and Zhakeline got pushed from instructor to instructor without learning anything.

Which was one of the many reasons I didn’t want to give her another familiar.

And that was beside the point.

The point was that Zhakeline, and mages like her—the ones who needed the magical power of familiar poop—didn’t have the ability to conduct a theft on this massive scale, at least not alone.

And even if they tried, they’d be better off going to the back yard of a mage with a canine familiar. There was always a constant poop supply, and it provided enough power—consistent power (from the same source)—so that the thief might become a slightly less inept mage, for a while, anyway.

Next I investigated my assistants. Most had no magical powers of their own, but had come from magical families. They knew that magic existed—and not in that hopeful I wish it were so way that a civilian had, but in a this is a business way that led them to peripheral jobs in the magical field.

They worked hard, most had a love of animals, insects or reptiles, and they often had a specialty—whether it was cooking the right kind of pet food or calming a petulant hyena.

I couldn’t believe any of the assistants would be doing something like this because they would have to be working for someone else.

The nonmagical don’t gain magic just by wishing on a powerful piece of poop.

I scanned records and employment histories. I scanned bank accounts (yes, that’s illegal, but remember—emergency. A few rules needed to be bent), cash stashes and (embarrassingly) the last 48 hours of their lives. (Which, viewed at the speed of an hour per every ten seconds, looked like silent movies watched at double fast-forward.)

I saw nothing suspicious. And believe me, I knew what to look for.

Although I wished I didn’t.

***

You see, I got this job, not because I have a particular affinity with animals or I’m altruistic and love pairing the right mage with the right familiar.

I got it because I have experience.

I know how to look for mages heading dark or mages who should retire or mages who mistreat their magic (and hence their familiars). I know how to take care of these mages quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss.

It didn’t used to be this way. In the past, places like Familiar Faces existed on side streets and had just a handful of creatures, few of them exotic. Only in the last few years have the mega stores come into existence at high-end malls like Enchantment Place.

And even though we’re supervised by the rules of the mage gods like all other familiar stores, we’re run and subsidized by Homeland Security—Magical Branch.

(Not everyone knows there’s a Homeland Security—Magical Branch, including the so-called “head” of Homeland Security. Hell, I even doubt the president knows. Why tell the person who’s going to be out in four or eight years one of the world’s most important secrets. Knowing this crew, they’d probably try to co-opt the Magical Branch into something dark. Better to keep quiet and protect us all.

(Which I do. Most of the time.)

My job here is to watch for exactly this kind of incursion. Technically, I’m supposed to report it, and then wait for the guys with badges to show up.

But I didn’t wait for the guys with badges. I doubted we would have time.

(And, truth be told, I did want the glory. I was demoted to this position [you guessed that already, right?] for asking too many questions and for the classic corporate mistake, proving that the boss was an idiot in front of his employees. I’m a government employee and as such can’t be fired without lots and lots of red tape [even in the magical world], so I was sent here, to Chicago where I grew up, to Enchantment Place where I have to put up with the likes of Zhakeline with a smile and a shrug and a rather pointed [and sometimes magically directed] suggestion.)

I toyed with rewinding time in all of the habitats—another no-no, but it would have been protected under the Patriot Act, like most no-nos these days. But rewinding time takes time, time I didn’t really want to waste looking at creatures moping in their personal space.

Instead, I did some old-fashioned police work.

I went back out front where Carmen was still flirting with some generic security guard (and the mice were leaning over so far to watch that I was afraid one of them would fall down the poor man’s ill-fitting shirt) and beckoned the lioness, Fiona.

She frowned at me, then rose slowly, stretched in that boneless way common to all cats, and padded through the portal ahead of me.

When I got back to the back, she was sitting on her haunches and cleaning her ears, as if she had meant to join me all along.

“We have a poop thief,” I said, “and I think you know who it is.”

She methodically washed her left ear, then she started to lick her left paw in preparation for cleaning her right ear.

“Fiona,” I said, “if I don’t solve this, something bad will happen. You might not get a home of any kind and none of the other familiars will be of use to anyone. You might all have to be put down.”

I usually don’t use euphemisms, and Fiona knew it. But she didn’t know the reason that I used it this time.

I couldn’t face killing all these wannabe familiars. And it would be my job to do so. I’d get blamed for the theft(s), and I’d have to put down the creatures affected. It was the only way to negate the power of their poop.

She put her newly cleaned paw down on the concrete floor. “You couldn’t ‘put us down.’” She used great sarcasm on the phrase. “It would set the magical world back more than a hundred years. There wouldn’t be enough of us to help your precious mages perform their silly little spells.”

“Which might be the point of this attack,” I said. “So tell me what you saw the last few days.”

And why you never said a word, I almost added, but didn’t.

“I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m not even supposed to talk with you.”

Technically true. Familiars are only supposed to talk to their personal mages. But I get to hear and every one of them speak when they come into the store to make sure they really are familiars and not just plain old unmagical creatures looking for a free hand-out.

But Fiona had spoken to me before, mostly sarcastic comments about the store patrons. I’d tried pairing her up with a few, but she always had an under-the-breath comment that convinced me she and that mage wouldn’t be a good match.

“I haven’t seen anything,” she said.

“What have you heard, then?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “The system is working just fine.”

That sarcasm again, which lead me to believe she was leaving out a detail or two deliberately, hoping I would catch it.

Damn lions. They’re just giant cats. They toy with everything.

And at that moment, Fiona was toying with me.

“But something’s bothering you,” I said.

“Not me so much.” She picked up that clean right paw, turned it over, and examined the claws. “Roy.”

Roy was the lion to her lioness. He wasn’t head of the pride because there was no pride. We knew better than to get an entire pride of lions into that small habitat. No one would ever be able to see their individual natures—and no mage was tough enough to get that many catly familiars.

“What’s bothering Roy?” I asked.

“Ask him.”

“Fiona…”

She nibbled on one of the claws, then set her paw down again. “There was—oh, let me see if I can find the phrase in your language—an overpowering scent of ammonia.”

“Ammonia?”

“And a very bright light.”

“An explosion?” I asked. Fertilizer mixed with the right chemicals, including ammonia, created the same thing in both the magical and the non-magical world.

A bomb.

Only the magical bomb made of this kind of fertilizer didn’t just destroy lives and property, it also cut through dimensions.

“It’s not an explosion yet,” she said. “He claims he has a sixth sense about things. Or did he say he can see the future? I forget exactly. But it was something like that.”

“Or maybe he just knows something,” I snapped.

“Or maybe he just knows something.” She sounded bored. “He does say that because he’s king of the jungle, the wannabes tell him things.”

Which was the most annoying thing about Roy. He really believed that king of the jungle crap. Too much Kipling as a cub—or maybe too many viewings of the Lion King.

“I should really send you back to the habitat until this is resolved,” I said to Fiona.

She hacked like she had a hairball, a sound she (sort of) learned from me. She thought it was the equivalent of my very Chicago, very dismissive “ach.”

“I’d rather be out front, watching the floor show,” she said.

And I sent her back out there because I had a soft spot for Fiona. Technically, I don’t need a familiar. I have more than a thousand of them.

But if I did need one, I’d pick Fiona.

She knew it and she played on it all the damn time.

I waited until she was through that little curtain of light before I stepped through the hidden door into the habitat area.

It was always surprisingly quiet inside the habitat area. The first time I went in, I expected chirping birds and chittering monkeys and barking dogs—a cacophony of creature voices expressing displeasure or loneliness or sheer cussedness.

Instead, the area was so quiet that I could hear myself breathe.

It also had no smell—unless you counted that dry scent of air conditioning. The animal smells—from the pungent odor of penguins to the rancid scent of coyote—existed only in the individual habitat.

Just like the noises did.

If I went through the membrane on my left (and only I could go through those membranes—or someone I had approved, like the assistants), I would find myself in a cold dark cave that smelled of rodent and musty water. If I looked up, I’d see the twenty-seven bats currently in inventory.

We were always understocked on bats. Mages, particularly young ones raised in Goth culture, wanted bats first, wolves second, and cats a distant third. I’d given up trying to tell those kids to get some imagination.

I’d given up trying to tell the kids anything.

If I went through the membrane on my right, I’d slide on polar ice. Here the ice caps weren’t melting. Here, my six polar bears happily fished and scampered and did all those things polar bears do—except that they didn’t attack me. They didn’t even bare their fangs at me.

I stopped between the two membranes and frowned. Whoever took the poop hadn’t taken it from inside the habitats. It was simply too dangerous for the unapproved guest.

Hell, it was often dangerous for the assistants. I’d had more than one assistant mauled by a creature that didn’t like the way he was looking at it.

And the poop was not registered as collected either. So whoever had taken it had spelled it out between gathering and delivery into the outside system.

I walked between dozens of habitats, trying to ignore the curious faces watching me.

I did feel for the wannabes. They were like children in an old-fashioned orphans’ home. They hoped that someone would come to adopt them. They prayed that someone would come to adopt them. They were afraid that someone had come to adopt them.

And the only way they would know was if I brought them out of the habitat to the front of the store. (Except in the case of the dangerous exotics or the biting/stinging insects. In those cases, the mage had to enter the habitat without fear. That rarely happened either.)

Finally I got to the Serengeti Plain.

Or what passed for it in Roy and Fiona’s habitat. It was kind of an amalgam of the best parts of a lion’s world minus the worst part. Lots of water, lots of space to run, lots of space to hide. A great deal of sunshine and never, ever any rain.

I slipped through the membrane and, because of my past experience, paused.

The first step into Roy’s world was overwhelming. The heat (about twenty degrees higher than I ever liked, even in the summer), the smell (giant cat mixed with dry grass and rotting meat from the latest kill), and the sunlight (so bright that my best sunglasses were no match for it—and as usual, I had forgotten any sunglasses) all made for a heady first step into this habitat.

More than one assistant had been so disoriented by the first step that Roy was able to tackle, stand on, and threaten the assistant in the first few seconds. After you’ve had several hundred pounds of lion standing on your chest, with his face inches from yours—so close you could see the pieces of raw meat still hanging from his fangs—you’d never want to go back into that habitat either.

Unless you’re me, of course. I expected Roy to scare me that first time.

I didn’t expect him to catch me off guard.

So when he did, I congratulated him, told him he was quite impressive, and warned him that if he hurt a human he’d never graduate from wannabe to familiar.

And from that point on, he never jumped on me again.

But he always snuck up on me.

On this day, he wrapped his giant mouth around my calf. His teeth scraped against my skin, his hot breath moist and redolent of cat vomit. He’d been eating grass again. We were going to have change his diet.

“Hey, Roy,” I said. “I hear you have a sixth sense.”

He tightened his jaw just enough that the edges of those sharp teeth would leave dents in my flesh—not quite bites, not quite bruises—for days. Then he licked the injured area—probably an apology, or maybe just a taste for salt (I was instant sweat any time I came into this place).

Finally, he circled around me and climbed a nearby rock so that he would tower over me. If I weren’t so used to his power games, he’d make me nervous.

“It’s not a sixth sense,” he said in an upper-class British accent. That accent had startled me when we were introduced. “So much as a finely honed sense of the possible.”

“I see,” I said, because I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t even been certain he would talk to me, and he’d done so almost immediately.

Which led me to believe the king of the jungle was more terrified than he wanted to admit.

“You realize I am only speaking to you,” he said with an uncanny ability to read my mind (or maybe it was just that finely honed sense of what I might possibly be thinking), “because great evil is afoot, and I have no magical counterpart with which to fight it.”

I almost said, It’s not your job to fight it, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult the poor beast. Instead, I said, “That’s precisely why I’m here. I figured you know what was going on.”

“Bosh,” he said. “Fiona told you. She has a thing for you, you know.”

“A thing?” I asked.

“She wants to be your familiar.” He opened his mouth in a cat-grin. “She doesn’t understand—or perhaps she doesn’t believe—that you have hundreds of us and as such do not need her.”

I nodded because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because I was already thirsty. I’d forgotten not just my sunglasses but my bottle of water as well.

“Well,” I said, “you do know what’s happening, right?”

“Oh, bomb-making, dimension hopping, familiar murder—all the various possibilities.” He laid down and crossed his front paws as if none of that bothered him. “And just you here because you seem to believe that you can save the world all by your own small self.”

“With the help of your finely honed sense of the possible.”

“That too.” He tilted his massive head and looked at me through those slanted brown eyes.

My heart rate increased. Occasionally I still did feel like prey around him.

“Well?” I asked.

“Have you ever thought that your culprit isn’t human?”

“No,” I said. “Demons don’t care about familiars. Only mages do.”

“Really.” He extended the word as if it were four. “Humans generally ignore scat, don’t they?”

“Generally,” I said. “We try not to think about it.”

“And yet those of us in the animal kingdom find within it a wealth of information.”

“Yes,” I said. “But the amount of power it would take to complete this spell tends to rule out anything that isn’t human.”

He made the same hairball sound that Fiona did. They were closer than they liked to admit.

“You humans are such speciest creatures. It doesn’t help that the mage gods allow you the choices and we have to wait until you make them. It leads me to believe that the mage gods are human—or were, at one point.”

I wasn’t there to discuss religion. “You’re telling me, then, that your finely honed sense of the possible leads you to the conclusion that a familiar has done this.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“A creature then. A magical creature of some kind.”

He slitted his eyes, the feline equivalent of yes.

“But you have no evidence,” I said.

“I have plenty of evidence. Consider the timeline. It took you forever to discover this theft, and yet no bomb has exploded. No one has made threats, and no mage has suddenly gained unwarranted power.”

“That’s not evidence. That’s supposition.”

He lifted his majestic head. “Is it?”

“So who do you suppose has stolen the poop—and why?”

He rested his head on his paws and continued to stare at me. “That’s for you to work out.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“That’s correct. I don’t really know.”

“But you’re not worried.”

“Why should I worry? From my perspective, removing the scat is a prudent thing to do.”

I hadn’t expected him to say that. “What do you mean?”

He heaved a heavy, smelly sigh. “I’m a cat who lives in the wild. Think it through.”

Then he jumped and I cringed as he headed right toward me. He landed beside me, chuckled and vanished through the tall grass.

He’d gotten me again. He loved that. He’d probably been planning to jump near me through the entire conversation, his back feet tucked beneath him and poised, even though his front half looked relaxed.

He wasn’t going to give me any more. He felt he didn’t need to.

Cats in the wild.

Cat poop in the wild.

Hell, cat poop in the house. Cats were all the same.

They buried their poop so no one could track them.

The problem wasn’t the poop thief.

The poop thief was protecting the wannabes from something else. Something that tracked through scat.

Something that wasn’t human.

I swore and bolted out of the habitat.

I needed my research computer, and I needed it now.

***

Very few things targeted familiars—or perhaps I should say very few non-human things. And I’d never heard of anything that targeted wannabes, because a wannabe’s power, while considerable, wasn’t really honed.

Wannabes were, for lack of a better term, the virgins of the familiar world.

And nothing targeted virgins (not even those stupid civilian terrorists. They got virgins as a reward).

So when I got out of the habitat, I had the computer search for strange creatures or things that targeted virgins. I got nothing.

Except the search engine, asking me a pointed electronic question:

Do you mean things that prefer virgins?

And I, on a frustrated whim, typed yes.

What I got was unicorns. Unicorns preferred virgins. In fact, unicorns would only appear to virgins. In fact, unicorns drew their magic from virgins.

But the magic was pure and sweet and hearts and flowers and Hello Kitty and anything else treacly that you could think of.

Except if the unicorn had become rabid.

I clicked on the link, found several scholarly articles on rabies in unicorns. Rabid unicorns were slightly crazed. But more than that, they had no powers because no virgin (no matter how stupid) was going to go near a horse-sized creature that shouted obscenities and foamed at the mouth.

That was stage one of the rabies. Unlike rabies in non-magical creatures, rabies in unicorns (and centaurs and minotaurs and any other magical animal) manifested in temporary insanity, followed by darkness and pure evil.

The craziness, in other words, went away, leaving nastiness in its wake.

Minotaurs, centaurs, and other such creatures attacked each other. They stole from the nearest mage—or enthralled him, stealing his magic before they killed him.

But unicorns…

Unicorns still needed virgins.

And the only solution was to steal the powers of wannabe familiars.

Provided, of course, that the unicorn could find them.

And unicorns, like most other animals, hunted by scat.

***

I wish I could say I got my giant unicorn-killing musket out of mothballs and carried it through an enchanted forest, hunting a brilliant yet evil unicorn that wanted to devour the untamed magic of wannabe familiars.

I wish I could say I was the one who shot that unicorn with a bullet of pure silver and then got photographed with one foot on its side and the other on the ground, leaning on my musket like hunters of old.

I wish I could say I was the one who cut off its horn, then snapped the thing in half, watching the dark magic dissipate as if it never was.

But I can’t.

Technically, I’m not allowed to leave the store.

So I had to call in the Homeland Security—Magical Branch anyway. I could have called the local mage police, but I wasn’t sure where this unicorn was operating, and HS-MB had contacts worldwide.

They found four rabid unicorns all in the same forest, somewhere in Russia, along with a few rabid squirrels (probably the source of the infection) and a rabid magical faun that was going around murdering all the bears for sport.

The unicorns died along with the squirrels and that faun. The poop reappeared in my computer system, and went back through the normal channels. That week, we made double our money on magical fertilizer, which was good since we’d made none the week before.

All seemed right with the magical world.

Except one thing.

I dragged Fiona to her habitat so I could confront both her and Roy.

They usually didn’t spend much time together. They blamed it on not really having a pride, but I knew the problem was Fiona. She hated having to hunt for him, then watch him eat the best parts.

She hated most things about feline life and once muttered, as yet another well adjusted young mage took a domestic cat as her familiar, that she wished she were small and cute and cuddly.

She had to fetch Roy. He wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t even attacked me as I entered the habitat—probably because Fiona was with me.

I waited as he climbed to the top of his rock, then assumed the same position he’d been in before he jumped at me. Only this time I was prepared. I had my sunglasses and my water bottle.

I also stood a few feet to the right of my previous position, a place he couldn’t get to from the top of that rock.

Fiona sat at the base of the rock, beneath the outcropping, in the only stretch of shade in this part of the plain.

“You want to tell me how you did it?” I asked when Roy finally got comfortable. He sent me an annoyed look when he realized that I had stationed myself outside of his range. “You knew that there was a rabid unicorn after wannabes, and you somehow got the entire group at Familiar Faces to cooperate with you, all without leaving your habitat.”

Then I looked at Fiona. She had left the habitat. She left it every single day.

The tip of her tail twitched, and she tilted her head ever so slightly, her eyes twinkling. But she said nothing.

Roy preened. He licked a paw, then wiped his face. Finally he looked at me, the hairs of his mane in place, looking as majestic as a lion should.

“I am king of the jungle,” he said.

This is a plain, I wanted to point out, but I didn’t for fear of silencing him. Instead I said, “Yet some of the other familiars don’t live in habitats like yours. The snakes, for example.”

He yawned. “The unicorn wasn’t after them.”

“But the animals?” I asked.

He closed his great mouth, then leaned his head downward, so that his gaze met mine. “The Russian Blues are refugees. You didn’t know that, did you?”

I got two domestic cats—purebred Russian Blues. Most purebred cats aren’t familiars—they have the magic bred out of them with all the other mixed genes—but these Blues were amazing. And pretty. And not that willing to talk, even when they knew it was the price of gaining a mage.

“Refugees?” I said. “They were adopted before?”

“Their mages murdered by the new secret police for being terrorists. I thought you checked all of this out.”

I tried to, but I never could. Animal histories weren’t always that easy to find.

“They’d heard rumors about something rabid getting into an enchanted forest somewhere in deepest darkest Russia. Then some young familiars—what you call wannabes—withered and died as their powers were sucked from them over a period of months.”

He tilted his head, as if I could finish his thought.

And I could.

“So the Blues suspected unicorns,” I said.

“There were always rumors of unicorns in that forest,” he said, “but of course, none of us had ever seen them. For normal unicorns, you need virginal humans. None of us had encountered abnormal unicorns before.”

I did the math. The Blues had arrived last Thursday, which was the last day Carmen had worked before Tuesday, when she discovered the problem.

“You went into protect mode immediately,” I said.

“It is my pride, whether you admit it or not.”

I didn’t admit it, but I understood how he thought so. He needed a tribe to rule, so he invented one.

“I still don’t understand what happened. You don’t have the magic to make other animals’ poop disappear.”

“But they do,” he said.

“I know that.” I tried not to sound annoyed. He was toying with me again. I hated being a victim of cat playfulness.

“So how did you tell them what to do?”

He opened his mouth slightly, in that cat-grin of his. Then he got up, shook his mane, and walked back down the rock. He vanished in the tall grass, disappearing against its brownness as if he had never been.

“He could tell me,” I said.

“No, he can’t.” Fiona hadn’t moved.

I let out a small sigh. He hadn’t been toying with me. She had.

“You did it,” I said.

“Me and the bees,” she said. “They’re creating quite a little communications network with those hive minds of theirs. They send little scouts into the other habitats every single time you go from one to the other. The ants too. You really should be more careful.”

I felt a little frisson of worry. I had had no idea. I didn’t want the bees to get delusions of grandeur. I already had to deal with Roy.

“You told them to spread the word.”

She nodded.

“And you told them how the animals could hide their poop.”

She inclined her head as regally—more regally—than Roy ever could.

“Why?” I asked. “You had no guarantee of a threat.”

“This is the biggest gathering of the Hopeful on the globe,” she said. “Of course we are a target.”

She was right. I sighed, took a sip from my water bottle, and frowned. This entire event had opened my eyes to a lot of scary possibilities, things I had never considered.

We were going to have to rethink the way we handled waste. We were going to have to protect the poop somehow, and I didn’t want to consult HS-MB about that. They’d have to hold hearings, and the wrong someone could be sitting in.

I didn’t want us to become a magical terrorism target, nor did I want us to be a target for every rabid unicorn in the world.

I would have to set up the systems myself.

“You need me,” Fiona said, “whether you like it or not. You can’t have pretend familiars. You need a real one.”

She was making a pitch. Cats never did that. Or they only did so if they believed something was important.

“Why here?” I asked. “I’ve found you some pretty spectacular possible mage partners, and you’ve turned them down.”

She wrapped her tail around her paws and stared at me. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

Then she said, “This is my pride. Roy might think it his, but he’s a typical lion. He thinks he’s in charge, when I do all the work.”

She raised her chin. That tuft of hair that all lionesses had beneath looked more like a mane in the shade than it ever had. It made her look regal.

“Well,” she added, “I’m not a typical lioness, content to hunt for her man and to feel happy when he fathers a litter of kittens on her only to run them out when they threaten his little kingdom. I don’t want children. And I want to eat first.”

“You can do that with other mages,” I said.

“But I won’t have a pride. Don’t you see? I’m the one who spoke to the Blues. I’m the one who keeps track of those silly mice—even though I want to eat them—and I’m the one who calms the elephant whenever she has the vapors. No one credits me for it, of course, but it’s time they should.”

No one, meaning me. I hadn’t noticed, and Fiona was bitter. Or maybe she just felt that I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.

“Besides,” she said, “it’s hot in here. Can we go back to the air conditioning?”

I laughed and stepped out of the habitat. She followed.

“I’ll petition the mage gods,” I said.

“I already did.” She was walking beside me as we headed toward the front room. “They said yes. I put their response under the cash register.”

We went through the portal. The mice were having a party on top of the cheese books. One of the snakes was dancing too, trying to come out of its basket like a charmed snake from the movies. The dance was a bit pathetic, since the snake was the wrong kind. It was the tiniest of my garden snakes.

They all stopped when they saw me. I looked toward the mall’s interior. The customer door was closed and locked and the main lights were off. The closed sign sat in the window.

Carmen had gone home long ago.

I went to the cash register and felt underneath it. Some dust, some old gum—and yes, a response from the mage gods, dated months ago.

“You took a long time to tell me this,” I said to Fiona.

She wrapped herself around the counter. “You should clean more.”

Come to think of it, a few months before was when she really started muttering her protests out loud. In English. She was doing everything felinely possible except blurting it out that she was now my familiar.

I had never heard of a familiar picking a mage.

Although that wasn’t really true. The familiars always made their preferences known. I knew how to read the signs. For everyone, it seemed, but me.

“Do you regret this?” Fiona asked quietly.

“Hell, no,” I said. “Your brilliance averted a major international incident and saved the lives of hundreds of familiars.”

“Don’t you think that makes me deserving of some salmon?”

I almost said I think that makes you deserving of anything you damn well please, and then I remembered that I was talking to a cat. A large, independent-minded, magical cat, but a cat all the same.

“Salmon it is,” I said and snapped a finger. A plate appeared with the thickest, juiciest salmon steak I could conjure.

I set it down next to her.

“Next time,” she said, “you’re taking me out.”

“Restaurants don’t allow animals,” I said. “At least, not in Chicago.”

“I wasn’t talking about a restaurant,” she said. “I meant a salmon fishery or perhaps one of those spawning grounds in the wild. I heard there’s a species of lion who hunts those grounds.”

“Sea lions,” I said. “You’re not related.”

She chuckled, then wrapped her tail around my legs, nearly knocking me over. Affection from my lioness.

From my familiar.

However I had expected my day to end, it hadn’t been like this.

Carmen was right. This day had been weird.

But good.

“So are you going to promise to take me to a fishery after the next time I save lives?” Fiona asked.

“I suppose,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

Fiona licked her lips and closed her eyes. The mice started dancing all over again, and chimpanzees came out of the back to see what the commotion was.

After a weird day, a normal night.

And I found, to my surprise, that I preferred normal to weird.

Maybe I was getting soft.

Maybe I was getting older.

Or maybe I had just realized that I was a mage with a familiar, a powerful smart familiar, one I could appreciate.

One who would keep me and my animals safe.

One who would rule her pride with efficiency and not a little playfulness.

I could live with that.

I had a hunch she could too.

 

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

The Poop Thief

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Enchantment Place, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Kodo34/Dreamstime

 

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.