Authors

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.

 

___________________________________________

“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.

Flex.

The stream didn’t glow. I stared at it some more, but I was getting only clear water. It flowed from a gap in the rock, forming a narrow but deep current that ran across a massive cavern.

Chomp, chomp…

“Will you please quit doing that?”

Bear raised her bloody muzzle from the stalker’s body and gave me a puzzled look.

“I mean it.”

She licked her lips.

We’d been moving through the tunnels for hours. I lost count of how many stalkers we’d killed. We ran across two silverfish bug things and killed them too. This latest trio of two females and a male died a couple hundred feet into the passageway and I carried the largest body to the stream.

Bear had developed a disturbing liking for stalker meat. Every time we had a fight, and I got distracted, she chomped on bodies like they were premium dog food. She tried to eat the bugs too, but they must’ve tasted foul because she took a bite and never went back for seconds. I had stuck to candy so far, but the Kit-Kat bar was a distant memory. We had run out of water hours ago.

I looked at the stream again. Bear padded next to me, looked at the water, and whined. She’d tried to drink already but I stopped her.

In a perfect world, I would have boiled the water, but I didn’t have any way to make a fire. And even if I could, my plastic hard hat was the only vessel we had. It would melt. Well, I could probably boil water in a canteen… It was moot anyway. I didn’t have a lighter or any fuel. What I had was two empty canteens and a very thirsty dog, who was currently dancing on the bank in anticipation.

 Fuck it.

I nodded at the stream. “Go get it.”

The shepherd bounded to the bank and began lapping up the water, splashing it all over the place.

“Is any of that actually getting into your mouth?”

Bear paused to give me a look and went back to drinking.

I scooted upstream and dipped my hands into the breach water. The stalker blood faded a little. I scrubbed my fingers. There was dark grime under my fingernails, and I shuddered to think what kind of bacteria was breeding there.

I cleaned my hands as best I could, cupped them, and brought some water to my mouth. It tasted clean and cold. Thank god for small favors.

I filled both canteens, filled my hat, and poured it over my coveralls, trying to wash the dried blood from the neoprene. It took forever.  Finally, I straightened. Bear lay next to the water, twitching her left ear.

“We drank, we showered, it’s time for a feast.”

I walked over to the stalker’s corpse, crouched, shifted my sword into a knife, and paused. Bear had been eating them along the way every chance she got, and so far she didn’t have any shivers.

Mmm, raw alien meat.

I didn’t have any choice. If we had found some plants or fruits that were safe, I would have eaten that, but the caves offered mostly fungi. They were conveniently glowing and hellishly poisonous.

“Stalker. It’s what’s for dinner.”

Bear panted.

I stabbed the stalker and gutted it. I was never a hunter. The only skinning I had ever done was limited to removing the skin from chicken thighs from the grocery store. Getting the pelt off took a while. Finally, I cut a ham free and tossed it to Bear.  The shepherd chomped on it.

I carved a paper-thin slice from the other leg and sniffed it. It smelled kind of gamey. Disgusting. It smelled disgusting. Back home, I bought a special composite cutting board just for raw chicken, because I could put it through the dishwasher. All of my wooden cutting boards were scrubbed after each use, and all of my meat was cooked to the correct temperature. I owned three cooking thermometers.

This meat was raw. Not rare. Just raw.

“Tacos would be so nice right now. Or shepherd’s pie. I make really good shepherd’s pie, with creamy mashed potatoes and a crust of melted cheese on top.”

Bear chewed on the stalker ham.

“You know what my favorite dessert is? Sometimes, when life’s too hard, I go to Dairy Queen and get a Turtle Pecan Cluster Blizzard. It has pecans and little bits of chocolate. I don’t really like pecans, and I’m not much of a chocoholic, but there is something about that Blizzard. I could so use one right now.”

My stomach was begging for calories. I’d been hiking for days by now and between the hikes I’d been fighting for my life. My body kept healing my wounds, and all that regeneration had to have a caloric cost.

I was starving. Everything ached. If I flexed right now, the meat would be bright red. I had to eat, or I would become someone else’s dinner. I couldn’t afford weakness.

I surrendered to my fate and bit into the thin slice.

No flash of pain. No broken glass. It tasted vile and it stank, but it was meat. I was squatting by the river in a breach and eating raw meat. I’d gone completely feral.

I would make it out of this cave, and then I would never think of this again.

I chewed the meat and tried to think of something else. Luckily for me, I had plenty to ponder.

When we crossed the stone bridge out of that small cave, I sensed something. It was far in the distance, hidden behind countless cave walls and solid stone, a cluster of… something. I couldn’t quite describe it. It felt almost like a hot magnet. It pulled on me, but not in a pleasant way. It was more like a psychic ache, like a splinter that got stuck in my awareness and now throbbed.

The stalkers and other creatures had kept me busy, so I mostly noted it and kept moving. But right now, with no distractions, it nagged on me. It could’ve been anything, but the most plausible explanation was usually the right one.

I’d become aware of the anchor.

Most of the gate divers never felt the anchor. That awareness usually came with extraordinary power particular to top tier Talents. Not all the top tier guildmembers could feel the anchor, but everyone who felt it was in the upper slice of the talent pool.

I leaned over the stream and tried to look at my reflection. I couldn’t really see myself.  The light was too diffused. My arms and legs didn’t look that different, but then I was wearing coveralls.

I would have to find a reflective surface somewhere. I didn’t want to dwell on it. As long as I still looked enough like myself to be recognized, I would be fine.

The bigger problem was the anchor. It was closer now than when we started. We were walking toward it. I didn’t want to go toward the anchor. I wanted to go toward the gate and the exit. But right now, I didn’t have much choice. Even if I wanted to backtrack, I couldn’t. We had threaded the labyrinth of the tunnels like a needle, and I didn’t remember the way back.

The assault team had taken a route to the anchor that led away from the mining site. In theory, if I found the anchor chamber, I could try to find that route and use it to reach the gate. However, the closer you go to the anchor, the more difficult the fights became.

I had two choices: to wander aimlessly in these caves or to head for the anchor. Even if I failed to find the route the first assault team had taken, eventually Cold Chaos would send in the second-strike team. Joining up with them would be too dangerous. Cold Chaos wanted me dead. But I could either retrace their steps or follow them to the gate, staying out of sight. I’d gotten very good at moving quietly.

The anchor was the only logical choice. I would have to chance it. At least I had a direction now.

Fifteen minutes later, Bear departed to poop in the corner by some rocks and came back.

“Good to go?”

The dog waved her tail.

Maybe we could take a breather…

The cave wall by Bear’s poop moved.

“Come!” I barked.

Bear ran over to me.

The wall trembled and broke apart, cascading to the floor.

I jumped over the stream. Bear leaped with me. We cleared fifteen feet and landed on the other bank.

Chunks of the wall streamed to the stalker carcass. I flexed. Bugs, about a foot across, with a chitin carapace that perfectly mimicked the stone.

I backed away.

The bug whirlpool broke open, revealing a bare skeleton. Not a shred of flesh remained. If we had fallen asleep here…

“I fucking hate this place. Come on Bear. Before the cave piranha bugs eat us too.”

I headed into the gloom, my loyal dog trotting at my side.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 7 Part 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

If you stop skritching, I will kill you. Also, if you don’t.

Oooh, catch 22 FTW!

I like skritches and wouldn’t kill anyone.

Samesies. Not, that anyone ever skritches me.

Dramatic Purple Performance Piece! What? Did I miss something?

I’ve become quite bad at updating, and I’ve added a prompt in my diary to write something at the end of every month.

This is a catchup, so what has happened this year?

The Long Way Home

The fourth book of the series, Don’t Stop Now, has been finished and edited and is sitting on the Amazon servers collecting pre-orders.

https://mybook.to/TLWH4-DSN

This takes the intrepid crew of the Dark Phoenix (formerly the Acid Penguin) into the heart of the Inner Worlds. Those star systems aren’t as rich and stable as Jan and Bjorn expected, and the best flow of commerce is all against their direction of travel.

But they find one good turn deserves…

Ah. Not quite. Well, it would be difficult to say they get an easy good turn back, but life does become very shady and interesting for a while.

And then they’re in the depths of the Inner Worlds, where evil and corruption sink into the very fabric of star systems.

Warning, this book ends on a cliffhanger. Mwah ha ha ha!

I did write half of this on the newsletter, so followers there will recognize the early episodes. I’m not using the newsletter for TLWH any more. It made great sense at the time, but I can’t juggle so much these days.

There are a couple more books in this series to complete the arc of returning to Calloway and saving their colony (and rescuing that lost colony too).

I’ve also bundled the first 3 books together into a boxset. Link below.

https://mybook.to/TLWH-Boxset1

Amber Farrell – Paranormal PI – Bite Back

Well, I’m making progress with #9, but summer is here, and the delay in completing TLWH4 means that BB9 is slipping from Q3 to Q4 this year. As ever, there are a tangle of threads to weave into order and the pace has to be kept up.

Amber and Bian have the initial meeting of the new Assembly to host in Denver, which itself is full of problems for both of them, but Amber also has to persuade the Were Confederation to attend, and she can’t simply ignore the war with Basilikos while the Assembly sits. Nor can she refuse to assist as Emergence seeps into the highest levels of government, not forgetting there’s the investigation of who exactly was behind the whole of Matlal’s undercover operation in the States … who gave the orders for her to be treated like a lab rat by the late Colonel Peterson? Who could be so high in the administration of the Department of Defence that they could authorize that?

And all the while, her friends are increasingly worried about her: her state of mind, and her soul itself.

Bite Back 9 is my highest writing priority this year. Big and twisty, folks.

In the background, I’ve also bundled all 8 books together in a boxset. There are readers out there who don’t want individual books, even long ones, they want LOTS and LOTS of words. It just so happens that the 8 major novels amount to over a million words, so that should keep them happy. If you know of any ‘whale readers’, here’s the link

https://mybook.to/BB-Boxset1-8

There are at least 2 more books in the Bite Back series.

And now to my poor orphans. Firstly, the other two series which I have promised I will get to…

Bian’s Tale

I loved writing the first book. (A good thing because my editor made me rewrite it about 3 times).

I loved the research, and it was necessary because 1890s Saigon isn’t the most accessible of eras & places. I have a huge box of books (some of them in French), videos in DVD and VHS(!) format, TV recordings, entire battered notebooks, travel guides, etc. etc.

I found the box stuffed away in the back of the attic a couple of weeks ago.

Why?

Because when I released Bian’s Tale 1, The Harvest of Lies… it disappeared with barely a ripple. I don’t think the writing is bad, or the setting is too unusual. (Although someone complained of the evidence of too much research, lol). But I think I got the marketing wrong (cover, advertising etc.).

While I was still finding that out, for a few weeks, I was running on the enthusiasm of the first book, and outlined five others, and I wrote some of book 2, The Words of the Dead. Then I put it aside because the response to book 1 was so bad, and eventually I tidied the research away into the attic.

All that said, with the resurgence of Bite Back, now people are discovering The Harvest of Lies and complaining about the non-appearance of book 2.

I will return to The Words of the Dead. I hope next year. There are 5-6 books in the series which will take Bian through to the point where she is appointed Diakon of House Altau, with maybe an epilogue that shows Bian’s point of view at that first meeting with Amber described in Sleight of Hand.

The Harvest of Lies is at:

https://mybook.to/THoL

Among the Stars

Another orphan series. The first two books were written as episodes which I posted on WordPress and made available in newsletters.

Book 1, A Name Among the Stars, was a definite success. I wrote it as a bit of an experiment, which freed me from the concept of narrow genres and writing styles. Book 1 was a deliberate attempt to write a mash-up of a Regency romance and Science Fiction adventure, in the first person, in the present tense. It was great fun to write. I thought it was going to be a stand-alone, but enough people asked for more, and so I wrote A Theat Among the Stars. The complexity of the story required the addition of multiple PoV characters, with Zara remaining in the first person and other PoV characters speaking in the third person. All fun to write as well.

Readers liked A Threat Among the Stars, but not in the numbers to make book 3, A Ship Among the Stars, a high enough priority.

I have written some short stories which form part of book 3, and I do want to finish this series, but it’s definitely a ‘next year’ thing.

There are a couple more books in this series.

The first two are at:

https://mybook.to/Among_the_Stars

Other Orphans

Stand Up

An unnamed sequel to Change of Regime

Newsletter stories (monthly)

A host of others.

Yes. I know. I hate not finishing things. I will get through everything, but I started a slow writer and I haven’t got any faster!

I mentioned in January’s list that I had fewer books to recommend in February and March. I read a lot but didn’t finish some of the books, and the ones I did finish, I didn’t really like well enough to recommend. As I tell my writing students, you have to stick the landing. And some of those landings really missed. A few of the others just bored me. I faded out as I went along and realized I didn’t want to read the book anymore. (I do that by grabbing other books, starting those, and realizing that I’d rather be reading them.)

I have stories here from 2 different Best American Mystery & Suspense, but I’m not recommending either volume, since I didn’t read a lot of them. The stories seemed child-cruelty heavy or animal abuse heavy, and I’m not really into either of those things. And there’s some I’m not fond of the kind of noir in either of them. So it’s up to you if you get these two volumes. 

So here’s what I liked back in February…

 

February 2025

Bernier, Ashley-Ruth M., “Ripen,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. When editors are lazy with the Best Americans and do not put the stories in any kind of reading order, the opening story is a real crapshoot. I’m always braced for something that does not give me any ideas as to the way the volume will go. As a result, I approach the first story with trepidation, and usually that trepidation is justified.

In this volume, though, the first story, “Ripen,” is well written, powerful, and memorable. I was happily surprised by the entire thing. The setting is rich, the characters vivid, and the story itself strong. Read this one.

Cho, Winston, “AI: The Ghost in Hollywood’s Machine,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. (This story online has a different title.) Fascinating piece that could have been written about any emerging technology, really. AI will change how business gets done all over the planet (is changing?), and Hollywood is no different. It will make some things easier to “film” such as massive crowd scenes (already is, in fact) but it might cost a lot of jobs. As in a lot of jobs. And the kind that normally don’t get taken by technological change…as in the jobs of creatives. I think we’ll see a lot of these articles in the future as we try to figure out how to live with this newest thing in our lives.

Cobo, Leila, “Guarding Celia Cruz’s Legacy,” Billboard January 11, 2025. Fascinating interview with Omer Pardillo, who manages the Celia Cruz estate. It’s about how he got the job, how he goes about maintaining the estate, and the heart of the estate. He lists where the revenue comes from. He says it’s mostly from recording royalties and brand partnerships. It’s really fun to see his joy at all of the success the estate’s been having. At one point, he states that it’s not bad for an artist who’s been dead for 21 years.

Cole, Alyssa, “Just a Girl,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby, Mariner Books, 2024. This story, written as a series of online TikTok posts, DMs, texts, emails, and online articles, is devastating and heartbreaking and extremely powerful. Tiana, her first year in college during Covid, starts posting updates on TikTok, and gaining a following. She tries a dating app, encounters a gross guy, and calls his yuckiness out on her TikTok…and then he and his friends start going after her. Everything spirals after that. What’s amazing about this story is that you can see the joy leaching from this young woman as she realizes how terrible the world can be—and how dangerous it is for young beautiful women. Highly recommended.

Freimor, Jacqueline, “Forward,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. Normally, I wouldn’t read a story that looked dense and difficult, but the format (and the footnotes) are the point of the story. It’s an amazing work of fiction, with a great reveal. Yes, it takes concentration to read it, but it’s really worthwhile.

McClintock, Pamela, “Ryan Reynolds Multitasks Like a Mofo,” The Hollywood Reporter,  December 13, 2024. There’s a lot of fascinating quotes in this interview with Ryan Reynolds, whom The Hollywood Reporter dubbed their Producer of the Year. He does a variety of things besides act, and seems to enjoy all of them. The quote I like the most is at the end:

…it’s all an emotional investment. If you can create emotional investment in anything, any brand, it creates a moat around that brand that really, I think, facilitates the resilience and allows it to weather the storms in the bad times. And yes, that’s the part I love.

I think I love it too, although not as much as actual writing and making things up. Still, lots of good stuff to think about in this interview.

Zeitchik, Steven,“The Other Rebuild,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2025. 2025 has been such a shitshow already it’s hard to remember that the LA Fires happened only a few months ago. We seem to be moving from tragedy to tragedy, heartbreak to heartbreak, every single day, and we lose track of what others have gone through. A number of my friends went through the fires and fortunately, in this round of the climate change blues, very few of them lost their homes. (I can’t say that about previous California fires.) But everyone’s mental health took a nosedive. Many moved to different digs in the same town while others are leaving their LA h

I know we don’t normally do posts on the weekend, but Mod R is off anyway, and if I do it on Monday, our newsletter will eat the post. We can only do one post a day or it loses it.

Hidden Legacy in Dutch.

Love Books has collaborated with So Many Pages to release this beautiful special edition of Hidden Legacy in Dutch.

Verschijningsdatum: 17-07-2025

Pre-order actie: bestel dit boek bij So Many Pages en je ontvangt automatisch de artprint ‘Baylor Sisters Portrait’ van Luisa Preissler bij je pre-order! Zo lang de voorraad strekt, exclusief bij So Many Pages en exclusief bij de pre-order.

Romantasy must-read! Een verslavende slow burn van internationale bestsellerauteur Ilona Andrews.

Click to Preorder

The Inheritance Release Date

As of now, we are aiming for July. We are desperately trying to finish, but last week was just difficult for many reasons. We will have ebook and print. The audio will come out later. We are in talks for the split narration audiobook, that will feature a woman reading Ada’s parts and a man reading Elias’ parts. We can’t announce anything more concrete until all details are finalized and the contracts are signed.

The length will be around 50K, which is shorter than Magic Claims but longer than Magic Tides.

As always, while most of the story will be released on the blog, a chunk of the finale will be held back for the official publisher version.

I need to reach out to my CEs to see if anyone has an opening.

This Kingdom Needs an Astronomer

We have three moons. They are at different orbits and positions so they are not always in the same phase. Does anyone know of a calculator that would let us ballpark the moon phases and calendar? There has got to be some sort of tool where you can plug in your month length and calculate things for a hypothetical planet, right?

The post Housekeeping Saturday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This month has been way better than last month. Though it would be hard to get much worse than last month.

But now, it's almost Omega's turn to fly the ship! He's so excited that he promises not to appear over you as you sleep​, whispering into your ears with six mouths. As long as you preorder. If you don't buy the book, he promises nothing.

Writing The Pilot was an interesting challenge, mainly because of all the interruptions over the last half a year. I did enjoy writing Omega, though. Especially his backstory. Probably my favorite scene to write was a flashback to before Omega had powers, because you get to see him act like a lunatic but in a more human way.

While enjoyable, he's still hard to write as the central character of a book, because Omega doesn't care about anything. Or does he? Yes he does, because otherwise there would be no story, but bringing that out was Interesting Challenge #2.

Interesting Challenge #3 will be writing the next book, because we'll get to explore some COOL NEW THINGS that I won't SPOIL because they're SPOILERS for the ending of this one.

Besides putting a book up for preorder, the coolest thing I did this month was go to Epic Universe, the new theme park in Orlando.

I know they already had Super Nintendo World in Japan and California, but I hadn't spoiled myself, and my first time walking into the Mushroom Kingdom was literally breathtaking. It took my breath. I shed a single nostalgic tear.

The entire park seems like it's tailor-made to appeal to me specifically. The worlds are themed after Wizards, Dragons, Monsters, and Nintendo. This is the park that my eight-year-old self sketched in a notebook.

For real, the entire park is incredible. And we got in when it was raining and therefore not hot or crowded, which is a Florida life hack for theme parks.

-Will

P.S. The Chocolate-Covered Pretzel Oreos sound like they wouldn't work, but they are delicious.

Hello! I’m frantically packing for my upcoming tour but wanted to give you a final reminder about the WE COULD BE MAGIC preorder campaign. If you’re in the US or Canada, preorder your copy and upload your receipt to receive these special items :

• An adorable scrunchie set inspired by the book

• An exclusive digital sneak peek of THE HOUSE SAPHIR (my next fairy tale retelling, coming out this fall!)

BUT HURRY! This campaign closes June 2 at 11:59pm ET.

A swoon-worthy young adult graphic novel about a girl’s summer job at a theme park from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer.

When Tabitha Laurie was growing up, a visit to Sommerland saved her belief in true love, even as her parents’ marriage was falling apart. Now she’s landed her dream job at the theme park’s prestigious summer program, where she can make magical memories for other kids, guests, and superfans just like her. All she has to do is audition for one of the coveted princess roles, and soon her dreams will come true.

There’s just one problem. The heroes and heroines at Sommerland are all, well… thin. And no matter how much Tabi lives for the magic, she simply doesn’t fit the park’s idea of a princess.

Given a not-so-regal position at a nacho food stand instead, Tabi is going to need the support of new friends, a new crush, and a whole lot of magic if she’s going to devise her own happily ever after. . . without getting herself fired in the process.

With art by Joelle Murray, the wonder of Sommerland comes to life with charming characters and whimsical backdrops. We Could Be Magic is a perfect read for anyone looking to get swept away by a sparkly summer romance.

How to get your swag:

1. Preorder your copy via my Bookshop.org store (or wherever you normally purchase your books).
2. Submit your receipt here. US/Canada only. See link for full details.

See you on tour! Make sure you check out the special tour linktree for individual event details and ticketing.

Do you follow me on Instagram? If you don’t yet, you’re going to want to as there will be a rom-com giveaway featuring WITH A LITTLE MAGIC, INSTANT KARMA, and WITH A LITTLE LUCK. Coming soon for my Instagram followers.

Until next time, happy reading and I can’t wait to see many of you on the WE COULD BE MAGIC tour!

With love,

Marissa

The post Will I See You On Tour? first appeared on Marissa Meyer.

Mod R is taking time off, so I’m moderating. I know she sometimes explains why a comment was pulled. I don’t have time, unfortunately, so if your comment disappears, it was probably really off topic or it might have gotten flagged as spam.

Elias studied London from across the conference table. The man was lean, in good shape, with an expensive haircut and the kind of face most people would describe as attractive. He seemed ten years younger than his forty-five, and the way he sat, although not overtly confrontational, signaled that he was neither nervous nor afraid.

It was that easy confidence, coupled with innate ability, that first prompted Elias to promote London to leader of Assault Team 4 five years ago. People looked at London, saw that he wasn’t frightened, and trusted him to take them into the breach and bring them safely out. London appeared capable and stable, and in practice and training matches he outperformed most of the other higher tier Talents. A perfect candidate to lead an assault team.

He saw London differently now. What he’d previously mistaken for confidence was instead an ever-present air of polite entitlement. London lost most of his team, people who counted on him to keep them from harm, and he had escaped uninjured. Most guild members in that position would be sweating bullets right now.  Not London.

He held himself as if this was a meeting of equals instead of a subordinate who’d made a major mistake and his boss who was not inclined to let it pass. He wasn’t impatient – that would’ve been impolite and London was never impolite.  Rather he managed to make it clear that he considered this entire process a formality, a series of tedious procedural steps, at the end of which he would be released with all his troubles swept under the rug and forgotten.

On paper, he and London were not dissimilar. Both blade wardens, both in their mid to late 40’s, both with nearly a decade of gate diving. At one point, years ago, the gap between their abilities had been much shorter.

Elias had grown in power every year. Nine years after his awakening, he was stronger, faster, and more experienced than when he had started. He learned to imbue his blade, so his weapons cut through solid steel and stone. His shield lasted a full five seconds longer now than it had when he’d walked into his first gate, and each second was hard won through grueling training and life and death battles.

London hadn’t progressed at nearly the same pace. It might have been the limitations of their inborn abilities, but Elias had come to suspect that it was a limitation of will. London was happy in his current position within the guild. He was well compensated for taking a relatively low risk role, he had no immediate supervisor breathing down his neck, and he rarely spent a night in the breach. Elias could see the appeal. But he also knew that he, himself, would never be satisfied with just that.

He’d thought about it while rereading London’s file. Alexander Wright came from an upper middle-class family, had gone to a boarding school, followed that with Cambridge, and ended up with a job in finance. Affluent, comfortable, respectable, just as expected. Unfortunately for Wright, the market collapse following the first gates’ bursting bankrupted the firm he’d worked for and wiped out his personal wealth. He was forced to pivot.

This struggle was short-lived, since he’d conveniently awakened to his talent. Six months later he was in the US, making a name for himself as London, moving from smaller guilds to more prominent ones, until a Cold Chaos recruiter scouted him six years ago.

That seemed to be a trend with London. He led a charmed existence. It wasn’t that he didn’t experience adversity, it was that when a crisis occurred, another opportunity always presented itself. He was expected to do well and always land on his feet and had no doubt he would.

Elias had been in a state of crisis from the moment the gates opened. It never stopped. No exit ramp appeared, and if it had, he wasn’t sure he would’ve taken it.

 His grandfather was a carpenter who got drafted during WWII and served with honor. His father enlisted in the Navy to escape Vietnam, because he knew he would eventually be drafted and wanted to choose where to serve. He ended up going career, retiring 20 years later, and picking up a civilian contractor job at the Department of Defense. Elias himself had gone to Virginia Military Institute, and his big rebellion consisted of accepting a commission in the Army instead of the Navy, partially to spite his dad. He was the first college graduate and the first officer in four generations of McFernons. To him, striving for advancement was a given. You always wanted to be better, to do more, to get that next rank, to excel, and to matter.

No matter where life took them, London would always slightly look down on him.  The condescension of classism was so casual, London himself likely barely registered it. Normally Elias didn’t give a fuck what London – or anyone else – thought of him, but right now he needed to remind the escort captain of their respective roles.  This wasn’t a business meeting.  London wasn’t doing him a favor. He was called out on the carpet and had to account for his actions. The man was entirely too comfortable, and when people felt that comfortable, lying was effortless.

Elias would’ve liked to have this conversation back at HQ instead of Elmwood Library.  It would’ve set a proper tone, but he, Leo, and London needed to remain on site. The protocol dictated that if an entire assault team was lost, the gate had to be guarded at all times in case of a sudden rupture. Elias had taken a very short excursion to the HQ today, because it was absolutely necessary, but from now on he and every other guild member were gate-bound.

Library or not, Elias needed to deliver a powerful, precise punch and knock the man off balance or he would never get to the bottom of this mess.

Elias leveled a heavy stare at London. “Is this another Lansing? If it is, you need to tell me now.”

London went pale.

That’s right.  Remember how you landed in your current spot. Remember why you’re no longer the assault leader.

London leaned back in his chair, his expression indignant. “How much longer? How many times do I have to prove myself? Will you ever let it go? What do I have to do?”

Too easy. “Not losing an entire escort team and most of the miners would be a good start.”

The words hung between them.

The door swung open.  Leo entered the room and sat on London’s left. They had coordinated this prior to the interview.

“That’s unfair,” London said. “Nobody could have stopped that. You couldn’t have stopped that.”

“I would have tried.”

“And you would have died.”

Elias pointed to the survey of the mining site printed on a large posterboard. “Walk me through it.”

London glanced at Leo. “I already spoke to the Vice-Guildmaster.”

“And now you’re speaking to me.”  Elias leveled a heavy stare at London and paused to let the weight of his words sink in.

The escort captain shifted his weight to the side, leaning to his left in the chair, and crossed his arms. If they were standing instead of sitting in the office, his shield would be up.

 Elias leaned forward, taking up more of London’s view, communicating that the table between them wasn’t much of a barrier. His speech was unhurried.

“You know what’s so easy about telling the truth? It’s always the same. You don’t have to think, you don’t have to keep track of it. It never changes. Start with the moment you entered the gate. You were four minutes behind schedule. Why?”

London sighed. “Ms. Moore had an emergency phone call regarding her daughter. I judged it to be in the best interest of the guild to allow her to resolve that situation before we went in. That way she could be more fully focused on the assessing.”

Elias had spoken with Adaline’s children this morning, after he drove to HQ at sunrise. Haze had put them into the HQ’s guest apartments, and when Elias came to visit, he was greeted by two scared kids and an upset cream-colored cat. The cat hissed at him. The children wanted to know if their mother was dead.  He wanted to know that too.

“What happened next?” Elias pressed.

“We entered the breach and proceeded to the mining site.” London pointed to the survey. “We walked for approximately twelve minutes. The transit was uneventful. Seven minutes in we encountered a group of deceased hostiles, which identified as a variant of Moody’s stalkers…”

The story was largely the same as the notes Elias had read: they got to the site, started mining, then five hostiles emerged from the tunnels and slaughtered everyone. According to London, he saved whom he could by collapsing the entrance. This time though, he mentioned the gold in addition to the adamantite.

“You omitted the discovery of the gold in your original interview. Why?”

“It was not relevant. I was focused on conveying the nature of the threat.”

“Fourteen people died or are presumed dead,” Elias said. “Everything is relevant.”

“I know,” the exasperation was clear in London’s voice. “I can count.”

He wasn’t completely lying, Elias reflected. His physical responses when recounting the attack matched those of someone who lived through a near death experience. Whatever happened scared the hell out of London, and that was precisely the problem.

At his side Leo sat slightly straighter. Elias kept looking straight ahead. No, not yet.

“In your opinion, was the mining site secure?”

London unlocked his teeth. “No.”

“What steps would you have taken to make the mining site secure?”

“I would have collapsed the north access tunnels.”

“Why didn’t you?”

London grimaced. “It wasn’t my call.”

And it went exactly the way Elias expected it to go. London was shifting as much of the blame on Malcolm as he could get away with, and Malcolm wasn’t here to defend himself.

Elias glanced at Leo. Now.

“Did you review the survey with Assault Team Leader Malcolm?” Leo asked.

“I did. You have a record of that meeting.”

“Did Malcolm specify how he selected the mining site?” Elias asked.

“Again, you have the record of the meeting. He selected the site based on the visible mineral deposits of malachite and copper-bearing ores in the walls, the size and relative stability of the cavern, and the proximity to the gate.”

“Were you aware of the risks the tunnels posed?” Leo asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you raise those concerns with Malcolm?” Elias asked.

“I did.”

“What rationale did Malcolm give you for leaving the tunnels intact?” Leo asked.

“He thought he might require an alternate route to the anchor.”

“Why not just collapse the tunnels and dig through if needed?” Elias asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you collapse the tunnels after getting to the site?” Leo asked.

London stared at him for a second. “Because it is not my call.” He bit the words off.

“The security of the mining site is your call. You are responsible for the safety of the escorts and the miners,” Elias countered. “Do you understand the scope of your duties, Escort Captain Wright?”

London glared at him. Angry red blotches colored his face.

“Malcolm wanted to keep the tunnels open. I brought up the possible risk. Malcolm reiterated his desire to keep the tunnels open. The survey showed no predators larger than the stalkers, and my team was well equipped to handle the stalkers. I requested a secondary sweep of a half mile from the entrance to the tunnels. The scout confirmed the sweep was done. You are not going to hang this on me. Malcolm fucked up. Malcolm is dead.”

It was all pouring out.  They broke him.  

“We can split hairs all day, but in the end, all of us in this room know that the ultimate responsibility lies with the assault leader.  As the escort captain, I must maintain a good working relationship with the assault leader. That is the system that you put in place. You put Malcolm in that position, and you put me in my position.”

Shifting the blame again. If it wasn’t his fault, it was Malcolm, and if it wasn’t Malcolm, the system and the guild were to blame.

“Malcolm and I respected each other. I was not going to go behind his back, because I had to work with him in the future. I brought three people out with me, three people who otherwise would have been dead. I am not going to take the blame for what happened. This outrage and scrutiny are disingenuous. A fatal event happened; people died. People die in breaches every day. This was no different. Either get used to it or get out of the game.”

London’s brain finally caught up with his mouth. He shut up.

Nobody said anything.

“You can judge all you want,” London said. “But you weren’t there. You didn’t see them. The speed… They were so fast, they blurred. My reaction time is half that of an average human and I couldn’t follow it. Elias, seriously, whatever assault team would have been in that fucking cave, none of them would have made it. You want me to say I ran? Yeah, I did. Like I told you, I saved who I could and got out.”

Elias leaned forward. “Look me in the eye and tell me that everyone else in that cave was dead when you threw the grenade.”

“They were dead. All of them. The miners, the K-9, the scout – everyone was dead. I saw the DeBRA cut to pieces. You have my word.”

They hounded London for the next ten minutes, but they didn’t get anything else. Elias knew they wouldn’t. In the end, they told him to stay put at the site and let him go.

Elias leaned back in his chair. London was lying. It was in the eyes. That direct unblinking stare when he said, “You have my word.”

“It wasn’t the gold,” Leo muttered.

“It wasn’t.”

London’s demeanor confirmed what Elias already deduced from the record of the survey meeting. He didn’t know about the gold, and he didn’t see it as relevant.

No, this problem ran deeper.

Leo steepled his fingers, his tone methodical, almost clinical.

“Assault Team 3 is the best performing team in the yellow and orange tiers. Malcolm and London worked together frequently. London saw him as his professional equal. In his mind, they were laterally positioned. If he pushed against Malcolm, there would’ve been tension and conflict. London abhors tension. He didn’t want to rock the boat. Was it a misguided professional courtesy?”

“And professional arrogance,” Elias said.  “You heard him.  Nothing larger than a stalker was found.  Breaches are unpredictable.  Nothing can be taken for granted. He’s grown complacent.”

Leo’s eyes flashed with white. “He’s lying.  I can’t prove it, but I feel it.”

“It’s the lack of guilt,” Elias told him. “You go in and lose your whole team. You’re going to be pretty fucked up. Maybe catatonic. I’ve had to put people on suicide watches before. He’s too aggressive, too confrontational. He’s absolved himself of all responsibility. He’s right about one thing – I put him into that position. The buck stops with me.”

“It’s been three years since Lansing,” Leo said. “He hasn’t fucked up until now.”

“That we know of. One of two things happened in that breach.  Either London is telling the truth, and he is a hero who saved three miners, or he is a coward who abandoned his team to their death.”

“Which do you think it is?” Leo asked.

“I think he saw something that terrified him, and he bugged out. The only way to prove what happened is to examine the mining site and the bodies, assuming there is anything left of them. I need cause to remove him from his position.”

“And with Melissa backing him up, we don’t have any.” Leo frowned. “If we demote him, it will look like we made him into a scapegoat.”

“That’s not our biggest problem. If we demote him without proof, he will jump ship to Guardian or any other guild willing to take him.  He looks good on paper.  He will aim for the escort captain again, because he likes that job, and the next time shit hits the fan, more people will die.” Elias exhaled. “We need to get into that breach ASAP.”

“Agreed,” Leo said.

“Did you find Jackson?” Elias asked.

“Not yet. We’re doing everything we can.”

“I know.”

Sitting on his hands was driving him out of his skin, but going into that breach without a healer was suicide. Whether London lied or told the truth, something took out Malcolm’s assault team.  He couldn’t risk any more lives.

“You need to rest, sir,” Leo said quietly.

Elias looked up. Outside the window the morning was in full swing. He’d slept four hours in the last forty-eight.

“We have bunks set up downstairs,” Leo said. “If anything happens, if I hear anything, I’ll wake you up.”

Elias didn’t feel like sleeping, but his body needed it, and he knew he would pass out the moment his head hit a pillow.

“Wake me up as soon as you find Jackson.”

“I will, sir.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 7 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Last night, in the middle of the tornado warning alert and our phones and our alarm system screaming in unison that a tornado is imminent:

Gordon: Is that a tornado siren of a flash flood siren?

Me: Who knows?

Kid 2. Kid 2 knows. They used to just do sirens for the tornados, but now they added flash floods, and so the tone of the siren is different. Apparently, that was the flash flood siren.

We’d managed to catch Batty, our outside cat, and secured her in the laundry room. The trust is broken again, and she will have to get over it for the next 6 months, but she didn’t fly into the storm. The tornado and hail missed us, so hey, it’s a good day. So on brand for Central Texas though. Any other day – sunny, hot, blue sky. Memorial and 4th of July – massive thunderstorm every year.

Gordon is recovering from surgery. We had to take the original bandage off and sealed the incision sites with waterproof bandages so he could take a shower, and his incisions are dry, the right color, and seem to be healing well. He can raise his arm all the way up, but the shoulder is still tight. He’s been going to physical therapy and his post-op is next week. Hopefully they will clear him for swimming, because that really seemed to help.

Yesterday Grace Draven came over before the storm, and we hung out and talked shop. I’m so excited for the new novella she is working on. It’s a brand new world and it is so shiny.

In other news, we are engaged in a tower-defense military campaign called, “Protect the bird feeder.” We both really like watching birds from the office window, so we set up a birdfeeder. We get all kind of birds and it’s awesome. We also get squirrels and the deer, who wreck the birdfeeder. The deer are the worst, so we now installed some strategic garden fencing around the bird feeder in concentric circles so they can’t step over it.

The squirrels are a bigger problem. Protecting against them is impossible so instead we settled for the misdirection.

Look how cute he is at his picnic table.

The post If You Can’t Win, Bribe first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Today, the 27th of May, is my wedding anniversary. Today, the 27th of May, is the Guy Gavriel Kay book launch for Written on the Dark, which is being held at the Merrill collection of Speculative Fiction. I’d link, but it’s a ticketed event (tickets were free), that is entirely fully booked. I could have squeaked in as a bookstore employee, except, see above. Wedding anniversary. HOWEVER, today is also the release day for Heir of Light. Heir of Light should, as of today, be available for purchase at all ebook sellers, and also, bookstores. There’s a hardcover and trade paperback version of the book, and the interesting thing — to me, book geek — is that the hardcover has the half-title … Continue reading →

All serious runners know about snot rockets. At least in pre-pandemic times, they did.

But one particularly talented runner relishes snot rockets more than others.

When he turns up dead, the list of potential murderers runs longer than the list of medals he collected over the years.

But when an investigative journalist sees the true crime potential of the case, what she uncovers surprises even her. 

“The Demise of Snot Rocket“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Demise of Snot Rocket By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Let’s be honest: It was gross even before the pandemic shut everything down and made us aware of just how dirty the world—and our habits—were.

Runners, especially distance runners, didn’t have time to blow their noses, so they would press one nostril closed, and forcibly exhale whatever was in the other nostril, while moving on a trail. Sometimes that exhalation worked, and sometimes it didn’t. If it didn’t, the runner wiped his sleeve (and yeah, “his.” It was usually a guy) across his face.

Anything to prevent stopping. Anything to preclude carrying tissue or wipes, which you couldn’t dispose of anyway on a trail. Sometimes you could toss the tissue into an open garbage can on a run in a neighborhood or an urban area, but that meant carrying the wet slimy thing for blocks or more, and no one did that.

Instead, they sent snot flying out their noses, and hoped no one would see it.

This happened so often that it had a name: The Snot Rocket.

Fun, right?

Not possible while wearing a mask. And afterwards—who knows? No one is confessing now. If snot rockets have returned, no one will admit to it, when they all laughed about it before.

This story takes place before.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if it had happened after. Would Snot Rocket have changed? Would he have coped? Would he have become even more obnoxious?

We will never know.

****

To clarify a few things: Yes, I knew a guy named Snot Rocket. Not named by his parents. Named by all of us in the city who raced (reluctantly) at his side. A few of us tried to have him banned from local races, but we couldn’t for two reasons.

1. He was good. As in always finished in the top five good.

And…

2. Everyone did it. Even the people who lied and said they didn’t do it.

I did it on one particularly long trail run when I was in the woods in the rain by myself and my nose wasn’t having it. My choice was a leaf or a snot rocket and, dear readers, I chose the rocket. The leaf could’ve given me poison ivy or poison oak or bugs or something. The snot rocket itself was a one and done.

It did leave me feeling…curiously elated.

I’m a woman of a certain age, raised by an OCD mother in a time before anyone knew what that was. I follow (most of) the rules, and that includes not expelling snot into the wild. (It also includes not discussing snot, but I think we’re beyond that in this post-2020 world, right? We discuss fluids and filth all the time now. All. The. Damn. Time.)

All those years of running track in junior high (yes, I’m old enough not to call it middle school), high school, and college—thank you very much—before Title IX funding amounted to much of anything. I wasn’t good enough to go on to regional and national competitions, where you actually got a bit of money.

But, in the early days of running, I was good enough to compete in local races with the men, often as one of the few women. Early on, I was in the top ten, but age eventually moved me to the top twenty and then the top thirty, and finally I became Queen of my Age Group, always smoking the other women in my age range by a significant, noticeable amount.

I can’t tell you when Snot Rocket joined our merry band of local runners. One day he was there, and the next day (probably) we were all discussing how disgusting he was.

It wasn’t just that he expelled goobers loudly and with great enthusiasm, it was also that he seemed to have an endless supply of them. It got so none of us ever wanted to run near him. Either side was a danger zone, and in front of him, well, sometimes you didn’t know you were hit until you got home and peeled off your sweaty race shirt.

He’d probably be arrested now. Arrested and charged with assault.

Back in the day, we discussed it—those of us who had to share the road with him. Half of us thought he used it as a race strategy to keep path clear.

When I ran past him (and I didn’t do it as frequently as I would have liked; he was faster than me), I would make sure I was at least a yard away from him—off trail, on the sidewalk, wherever I could go and still be on the path for the race, so I wouldn’t get disqualified.

Social distancing before we ever heard the term.

Of course, that zigging and zagging added a tiny bit of distance to my run, which I resented, and so did everyone else who used that same strategy. Some of the men claimed they didn’t care. They claimed they would run past him, and not worry, because they were already sweat-covered and dirty.

But I saw them in real time: they’d pass as far from him as possible, and if they were ahead of him, they had to expend extra energy just to keep the distance.

No one wanted to get too close. And I think that extra energy cost some of Snot Rocket’s competitors the race. They didn’t have anything left in the tank when they got close to the finish line, and he would zoom right past them.

There was no proving it, of course.

But Snot Rocket’s personal habits and his consistent wins did not endear him to the local runners. Particularly when he would brag to anyone who could stomach listening about how great he really was.

He had—he said—thousands of finisher medals. Some in boxes, and the best ones—the “coolest” ones hanging from hooks on his walls.

He died, with three of those medals around his neck, and no other medal in the house.

But I get ahead of myself.

***

I’m an investigative journalist. Not the kind you’re thinking of—the old-fashioned Woodward and Bernstein model, supported by a sympathetic paper filled with heroic and compassionate leaders who really didn’t care about the bottom line (and yes, that was fiction, but it was a fiction we all bought). I did work for the Gray Lady once upon a time, until her D.C. rival poached me. I stayed there until I’d had enough of the insularity and constant political doublethink. Then came the rabid nightmarish shock that was the first few months of the Trump era.

My marriage of long-standing broke up over (among other things) politics—his were red, mine weren’t. So, I quit the day job and moved west, heading to yet another storied newspaper just in time for it to get sold and close.

I landed on my feet more or less, and became part of an online collective that partners with media outlets all over the world. We do the research and some of us also do the writing, and both organizations get the credit.

It pays less than I made in D.C., but the work is more flexible, and the cost of living here is lower.

I ran back east, so it was only natural to join running organizations here. I signed up for every race I possibly could and as a result met the other slightly obsessive runners in the community, some of whom were fast like Snot Rocket and some of whom were nice, like the bulk of the folks running the show.

I didn’t get involved with anyone—wasn’t that interested, really—but had a pretty fulfilling life. Research, writing, and running, plus living in a place where I didn’t have to talk politics 24/7, made life a lot more pleasant than it had ever been before.

I also had the freedom to set my own schedule, which actually allowed me to run as many races as I could find. I preferred 10K because it was just long enough to challenge me, but short enough to allow me to have the rest of the day to do something else if I so chose.

It also meant that I got to meet a lot of elite runners, because 10Ks were usually attached to the big races. We had only three Boston Qualifiers in this city, but that was three more than most places.

I’d run Boston half a dozen times, including the year of the bombing. But Boston lost its allure for me, partly because I was on the team that ended up reporting the bombing. I heard stories of loss and heartache, heroism and strength, and pretended for those few years that it hadn’t had an impact on me.

But after I moved, and qualified in my age group, I couldn’t bring myself to go. It wasn’t an east-west thing either, or the idea that I had to travel long distances. My stomach knotted and my mouth went dry even thinking about it.

Every year, the Boston Qualifiers were fraught. Runners shoved their way into separate starting corrals, yelled at volunteers, and sometimes tried to shoehorn their way into a pace group they hadn’t signed up for.

I tried to stay out of their way, but that year, the year Snot Rocket died, I failed at keeping my distance.

That particular race had a new director who was a bit clueless. The corrals snaked through an industrial park, doubling back on themselves. Unlike most large races, the corrals didn’t have makeshift barriers to keep runners from sliding into another grouping. The director apparently expected people to police themselves.

My corral for the 10K was across a narrow strip of parking lot away from the lead-off runners for the actual marathon. My corral was quiet. Most people in a 10K maybe cared about a personal best, but they really weren’t there for a make-it-or-break-it chance to run the race of their dreams.

Those in the marathon line were there to win, or to PR and get in the race of their dreams, particularly those in that first corral. Like so many big races of its type, this one offered hefty prize money for the finishers. The qualifiers went down by age group, but the actual runners—the ones who traveled from city to city collecting trophies and prizes—well, they needed to focus on their race rather than some kind of squabble about times and spots in line.

I was just trying to focus on my race when I noticed Snot Rocket was in the middle of the shoving match.

I started watching like a kid drawn to a school fight. I actually had a dog in the hunt or skin in the game or whatever cliché you wanted to drum up. Not because I wanted Snot Rocket to win, but because I was curious about what he was up to.

He was screaming at one of the runners, spraying visible spittle all over him, just from the force of his verbal outburst. The runner—a tall skinny White guy, who looked like he ran professionally—screamed back.

I couldn’t make out the words, but these guys were serious. They were furious at each other.

Snot Rocket shoved the other guy first, right into the crowd of elite runners. They paid attention for the first time, glaring at the two of them. One of the exceptionally tall and thin runners, a man who looked vaguely familiar, raised his hand, and waved it—not to get the attention of Snot Rocket and the other guy, but to get the attention of the volunteers.

One of the volunteers responded immediately, which told me that the vague familiarity I felt actually meant something. The runner really was one of the elites, and more than that, one of the people the race was honored to have in its lineup.

That volunteer disappeared into the crowd, and I couldn’t follow his yellow jersey to see where he went, because I’m not exceptionally tall or tall in any way, shape or form.

Snot Rocket and his squabbling buddy didn’t even seem to notice. The squabbling buddy shoved Snot Rocket. Snot Rocket tripped backwards, and probably would have fallen if he hadn’t been in such good physical shape.

No one tried to break them up. No one wanted to get involved. Or maybe, no one wanted to get injured just before a race.

Finally, a couple of people wearing yellow security jerseys waded into the crowd. One of them grabbed Snot Rocket by the arm. He shook them off, and turned toward them, utterly furious. I was finally able to see his face.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” he said loud enough for me to hear.

The security official said something in response, and reached toward Snot Rocket’s bib. Snot Rocket stepped backwards again, only this time he backed into another security official.

Two more security officials were talking with Snot Rocket’s opponent. The opponent shook them off and tried to move forward in the crowd, but the crowd closed around him. No one let him get to the front of the line.

Snot Rocket wasn’t watching any of that. He was arguing with security now, only softer, so I couldn’t hear.

“Never seen that before,” said the woman next to me. She was thin and slight and wore the race T-shirt with an additional tech shirt underneath. It promised to be cool for this run, but I never wore the extra shirt. I always got too hot at races.

“Me, either,” I said and turned away, so that I could see the rest of the fight. Only the fight was done now. Snot Rocket was being led down that strip of unmarked parking lot, walking between two security officials, his head down.

I couldn’t see Snot Rocket’s opponent anymore, but the crowd had closed back up, and they were all facing forward, going through their pre-race rituals while they waited for their corral’s starting gun.

“I wonder what that was all about,” the woman next to me said.

I could have told her about Snot Rocket, about how unpleasant he was and had always been. I could have engaged in polite speculation, since we had to wait another thirty minutes before we started moving—provided the 10K went off on time. That would depend on the full and half marathoners.

Technically, we started on a different block from the full and half folks, and went a completely different direction to stay out of their way. We’d join each other nine miles into their race—and then our group would veer off, and head toward the finish line via a different route again.

I didn’t expect to see Snot Rocket again, because he was a marathoner and, I thought, had just managed to get himself disqualified from the race.

But I did see him, just before I joined the marathoners at mile marker nine (the race used the marathon numbers, not numbers for the rest of us). He was loping like he always did, making it look easy. His hair flowed backwards, his arms were relaxed at his side, and he had a half-smile on his face.

He looked nothing like the man who had been shouting so loudly that spit came out of his mouth. He actually looked content.

I watched him run as the road I was on headed toward the road he was on, and I envied his perfect stride. I didn’t register anything else except a mild curiosity about how he managed to stay in the race after that egotistical display and why he was looking so content with himself.

I had been a bit unsettled from his fight; I would have expected him to be more than a bit unsettled. I would have expected him to be deeply disturbed, maybe running a bit too fast to get rid of the adrenaline from the fight itself.

And then I joined the crowd and didn’t think about him at all. I concentrated on finding my lane, where I could keep a steady pace and stay out of the way of the full and half marathoners who didn’t need some pokey 10K runner to screw up their PR.

That’s the thing about running. People are polite, generally. And if they have conflicts, they leave them off the course. This isn’t one of those confrontational sports like hockey or football. It’s something most people do for themselves, including the elites. Yeah, there’s money involved, but mostly, there’s bragging rights. And bragging rights mean even more.

And that was all the thought I gave him that morning. Maybe I didn’t even go that far. I enjoyed my race, got my finisher medal, noted that I had won my age group, and waited for the 10K medal ceremony, which was taking place long before any of the full marathoners even thought of crossing the finish line.

Then I went home, finished up an article on the impact of California fuel regulations (sometimes my job is not fun), and poured myself a glass of California chardonnay to celebrate a good day well lived.

The next day, the authorities found Snot Rocket dead. Strangled in the living room of his own house.

***

Of course, I didn’t find out for nearly a week. I didn’t know Snot Rocket’s real name; I never had the desire to ferret it out. So when people talked about Dave dying, I didn’t know that Dave—he of the very ordinary and forgettable name—was Snot Rocket.

I didn’t learn that until the running group met at our favorite park for our 7 a.m. weekend run, and we were greeted by an exhausted-looking detective.

He was sitting on a concrete picnic table—on the table itself, feet on the concrete bench. He clutched an extra-large to-go cup of coffee like a lifeline. He actually wore a suit, although it was cheap and baggy, as if he had lost weight due to a serious health condition. His hair was thin, and his face was thinner. The suit called attention to him—who wore a suit to a park at this time of the morning?

We all shot him nervous looks as we mingled and talked. And when zero hour arrived—7 a.m. on the nose—he stood up and ambled over to us.

I cringed. I always do when a non-runner stranger decides to talk with our group. That person usually wants to know what running is like or if we’re racing or how he can actually get into the daily habit without doing any of the work.

Only this guy flashed a badge, introduced himself as Detective Conners, and said he was looking into the death of Dave Pyron. Most of us glanced at each other in confusion, and probably would’ve told Conners that we didn’t know any Pyron, until Roscoe Carter raised his extremely thin eyebrows and said, “You mean Snot Rocket, right?”

We all whipped our heads toward him, and a few of us expressed incredulity that Snot Rocket was named Dave. Finally, Conners hauled out a photograph—fortunately one taken from Snot Rocket’s house, not the photo of him strangled—and we had to agree: yep, Dave and Snot Rocket were one.

None of us wanted to give up our morning run, so we invited Conners to join us, which he declined. Instead, he offered to interview us one by one as we returned. Apparently, he too thought this was a race, not a group venture. A few people normally would have sprinted out, but no one did this time, because no one wanted to be first to talk with the detective.

We left in a mass and returned in a mass. I hung back. I wanted to watch this guy work. My reporter’s instinct had flared up and I found myself wondering if there was a story here I could use.

Conners got to hear stories about snot going awry, about Snot Rocket’s interminable arrogance, and about his winning ways. Conners asked a few questions, mostly about Snot Rocket’s relationships, which most of us knew nothing about.

Roscoe said Snot Rocket (or rather, Dave. Roscoe called him Dave) had had two live-in girlfriends over the course of the past ten years. All of the relationships had ended badly (what a surprise). And when the last one cratered three years ago, Snot Rocket swore off relationships forever—and, according to Roscoe anyway, seemed to live up to that vow.

I had taken a seat on a nearby picnic table, nursing a Gatorade that I had brought with me, as I listened to the questions. I had learned the fine art of eavesdropping as a young reporter, and it had never failed me.

Some of the questions Conners asked were routine—Who are you? How well did you know the victim? When did you last see him?

But one question got a snort or a half-laugh from every single person he asked it to. Do you know anyone who disliked Dave?

The answers seemed planned, because they were the same, almost with the same wording: Everyone disliked Dave.

Everyone.

Which was how I would have answered the question, given a chance.

But Conners got halfway through the scrum of runners before looking at me.

“Learn anything from your eavesdropping?” he asked.

I knew better than to be surprised at the observation powers of investigators. Much as I complain about the politics in D.C., I met a lot of career folk who saw everything. Many of those people were inspectors general or worked in the various inspectors general offices. They didn’t miss a trick.

“The only thing I’ve learned today is Snot Rocket’s real name,” I said.

“Not a fan?” Conners asked, waving me over, so that I would sit near him, like all the other people he had interviewed had.

“No,” I said.

“So I don’t suppose you ever saw his house,” Conners said.

“I didn’t know he had a house until someone said he died in it,” I said.

Conners nodded. He wasn’t taking notes, but he had his iPhone on his knee. Even though the screen was dark, I would wager the thing was recording.

“What’s your interest in all of this?” he asked.

“Curious, I guess,” I said.

“Eavesdroppers are usually more than curious,” he said. “So, again, what’s your interest?”

“I’m not sure I have one,” I said.

“Not sure,” he repeated, as if he didn’t understand that. “How come?”

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I have credentials in my car if you want to see them.”

“When we’re done,” he said. “You doing a story on Dave?”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “But there might be something here. True crime is a big beat, and this has some interesting angles.”

“True crime,” he said, as if I had pissed all over his salad.

“I’m always looking for stories that will help our company continue its award-winning investigative journalism,” I said.

“This isn’t an award-winning scoop,” Conners said. “Just a squalid murder of an apparently unpleasant man.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it as award-winning,” I said. “We have to pay the bills. True crime can do that.”

“Even if you’re a suspect?” he asked.

I smiled at him, condescendingly. I had perfected that smile over decades, starting during my young, perky and cute decade. Then the smile let my interview subject know all those questions I had asked him—those hard-hitting ones?—they hadn’t come from my bosses; those questions had come from me.

Later, that smile got me through doors that would have been closed to anyone else. I had become old enough to seem like someone, and I had that kind of face—the kind that looked like it had once been famous but was no longer.

Now, I had aged into the strong mother figure and that condescending look shamed more than one person into cooperating with me, even though they never should have.

“I’m not a suspect,” I said.

“I’m the one who makes that determination,” he said, maybe a tad defensively.

“I’ve heard enough to know your timeline,” I said. “I was working—at the office—during that ten-hour window. I had been busy the day before and the day after, and once again, I never knew Snot Ro—I mean Dave—even had a house.”

Conners’ eyes narrowed. He didn’t like my tone. I didn’t really care.

“You know I’ll check, right?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

Conners took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if he were trying to control his annoyance. “So what can you tell me about your friend Dave?”

“First of all,” I said, “he wasn’t my friend Dave. Secondly, I can tell you the man was a pig.”

“To you?”

“To everyone,” I said. “You know the derivation of his nickname, right?”

“Actually, no,” Conners said.

Non-runners. They weren’t up on the slang. The nickname would have told him a lot had he been part of the community.

So I explained it all to him—the nickname, the behavior, the possible advantages it gave Snot Rocket in a race.

“Yet you let him join the group here,” Conners said.

“If he was a member of this group, it predates me,” I said. Then I had to give Conners my personal history. He got more and more tense as he heard my CV, particularly when I mentioned which papers I had worked for.

Yeah, he’d check on me, but he was also savvy enough to know I wouldn’t lie about that. Which meant I was a lot more impressive than I looked. And a lot more of a threat to his investigation. If I was going to write a story about it, I wasn’t just some hack threatening to make sure he handled the case right; I was going to write something that would be read.

“This group run was a recurring event in his computer calendar,” Conners said.

“Sounds like maybe he hadn’t updated the calendar in a while,” I said.

“Sounds like,” Conners said, as if he agreed with me. But his tone was distracted. He was watching the rest of the group, most of whom were fidgeting. We had all budgeted time for the run and maybe breakfast afterwards, but after that we wanted to get on with our day.

He looked back at me. “When was the last time you saw Dave?”

I wanted to be obnoxious and say I never saw Dave, I didn’t know a Dave, I would never socialize with a Dave, but I didn’t say any of that, because that was when I remembered the Boston Qualifier.

I got that image of Snot Rocket’s perfect form, the way he glided down the road, weaving his way in and out of the other runners as if he was gifted and they were mere mortals.

I would never see that again. And that, of all things, made me just a little bit sad.

“Well?” Conners asked.

“Last Sunday,” I said. And then I told him, not about seeing Snot Rocket run, but about that fight in the corral, and security dragging him off. And then I mentioned that Snot Rocket ended up running the race after all.

I finished with this. “No, I don’t know who he was fighting with. No, I don’t know what they were fighting about. I could tell they were really mad at each other, and their behavior was really out of bounds for any race I’d ever been part of. I have no idea what the security arrangements were at that race. I do know it had a new director, and that most people working the race were volunteers. I know they have records of everyone’s times, and a lot of photographs. In fact, all of these races are well documented because not only are there official shots, but participants take a lot of pictures as well.”

I stopped at that point, because I had nothing to add except speculation and while speculation was fun, it wasn’t really productive, not with a detective, except maybe to indict me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

He had a few more questions for me, none of which I considered relevant or important, and then he moved on to the remaining few. I listened to the questions, heard the same or similar answers, and started packing up to leave.

He never did ask anyone if they had been to Snot Rocket’s house or if they’d seen his medals or even if they had seen him be violent. It was as if the story I had told about the Sunday before hadn’t registered in Conners’ brain.

Or maybe he didn’t want to influence anyone.

I found it curious though, and I worried that he had mentally dismissed me because of my age, my gender, or maybe even my status as a reporter.

He never looked at me again, even as he wrapped up and headed to his car. I gathered my Gatorade bottle so I could toss it, and as I did, Roscoe joined me.

“What did you make of that?” he asked.

He knew some of my history, knew that I was a reporter, and probably surmised that I had some experience with the police that he didn’t have.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” I said, “except that they’re investigating.”

“He didn’t seem all that invested, though, did he?”

People who read and watch a lot of television expect police detectives to work on one case at a time. Instead, they work on dozens, and never give any case much time. Except the high-profile ones. That Conners spent this morning here, waiting for us, but didn’t seem all that interested told me that Snot Rocket’s murder was a weird death, but not significant enough for the brass to pay attention.

Conners would want to close the case to get his closure rate up, but that was all. It was going to be hard for anyone to care about Snot Rocket. He wasn’t the most charming of men alive, and there was no family that I knew of to clamor over solving his death.

“He spent a lot of time with us,” I said, not liking being in the position to defend Conners.

“Yeah.” Roscoe frowned. “I just get the sense this one is going to just slide into the unsolved pile.”

I nodded. “I suspect you’re right.”

***

I didn’t ask Roscoe why he cared. At that point, I wasn’t sure I did either. But as time went on, I found the murder niggling at me. The fight. The medals. The pointed message of the strangulation.

It wasn’t that I cared about Snot Rocket as much as I cared about something else: Someone had murdered a person I knew.

I’d met a lot of people connected to murders over the years, but only after the fact. I never knew the victim. I was never involved in the early stages. I only got involved later on, when the death became a story.

My reporter brain was noodling this one. We were always being admonished to take initiative, to look for something that might make the company money as well as something that would cost the company money.

All of us, the investigative reporters, were good at spending money so we could chase the best stories, the kind that won Pulitzers and Edward R. Murrow awards. But I noted that the reporters who stayed with the company weren’t just the award winners. Unemployed award winners were thick on the ground these days.

The company held onto the reporters who could do both—win awards and make money. I hadn’t had a moneymaker in a while.

I figured this story might do the trick.

***

I pitched it that Monday with the title “Death of a Weekend Warrior,” about a lonely guy with no social skills who spent all his time running and collecting medals, a guy who ended up dying horribly. I told my boss that this might be an Unsolved Mysteries kind of thing, and he reminded me that we were in early days. Maybe it would end up being a series.

In that conversation, I learned he was also flirting with a new podcast, one that would capitalize on the true crime podcasts that were getting turned into books and films and cultural conversations at the time.

My boss also pointed out, in that cold dispassionate way journalists had of discussing uncomfortable (and often unsaid) things, that Snot Rocket didn’t have any family to object to his portrayal. My boss reminded me to document, document, document, but he also told me that speculation was possible in this instance—and he said so in a way that encouraged it.

I wasn’t comfortable with that, at least not at the time, but apparently I can be persuaded. The deeper I got into the case, the more I found my way to the dark side.

***

I started, like I always do, with what the internet could tell me. Snot Rocket did not have a public-facing Facebook account. He didn’t seem to be on Twitter or Instagram or any other social media site that I could find. He did have several professional accounts with places like LinkedIn, but those looked corporate, as if his bosses had mandated them and he had to follow a template.

From them, I learned that he worked in some engineering field with a technical specialty that I didn’t really understand. The corporation he worked for spanned the globe, doing all kinds of building and other projects. On none of these sites was it clear what kind of work he did—whether it was building something or backup work or design. He didn’t seem to travel for the job, which made some kind of sense, because this city is big enough to have all sorts of engineering and construction work, enough to keep an entire flood of people busy for years.

I looked up his ex-girlfriends, but they didn’t have much of a social media presence either. The one who did keep her photographs current seemed to delete her past with regularity. If I wanted to track her relationship with Snot Rocket—or, um, Dave—I could do so, but that would require a lot of digging into the Wayback Machine Internet Archives or other places that kept track of the world as we once knew it.

I nearly gave up there. I mean, why write a story about a man that no one liked, a man who had filthy personal habits, and did his best to shove people away from him, a man who was murdered for his efforts?

And every time I got to that last bit, I realized that was why. Snot Rocket had pissed off a whole slew of people. This was rather like a game of Clue. Who hated him enough to finally off him—and in the most personal way possible?

I sat at my desk with a yellow legal pad after doing my preliminary search, and doodled what I did know, not just about Snot Rocket, but about the killer as well.

I knew that the killer knew Snot Rocket. The killer clearly hated Snot Rocket. The killer used Snot Rocket’s most treasured possessions (I assumed) to actually kill Snot Rocket. Then, the detective thought, the killer stole those possessions, except for the ones that had strangled the life out of Snot Rocket.

I also figured that the killer was tall—at least as tall as Snot Rocket. I couldn’t imagine someone short standing on a chair, with his (her?) hands clutching a ribbon around a medal and pulling that ribbon tight enough to strangle Snot Rocket. I figure that the killer had to be strong as well, because Snot Rocket—well, anyone, really—would have fought like hell to avoid being strangled like that.

Unless he was unconscious. Since I did not, at the moment anyway, have any access to Snot Rocket’s autopsy report, I did not know if he was drugged or unconscious when that medal (those medals?) got wrapped around his neck.

I would need that information eventually, but first, I was going to work on who Snot Rocket was.

I was about to give up on the internet side of Snot Rocket’s life when I realized I hadn’t even gone near the entire treasure trove of internet research that would give me everything there was to know about Snot Rocket. Not Dave the Engineer, but Snot Rocket, the runner.

As I had told Detective Conners, most of racing had gone online in the last 20 years. From race results to photographs to vanity selfies (with other people in the background), the internet held a virtual wealth of information about runners, racing, and more.

Hell, I’d been in Boston after the bombing, and between the video surveillance from stores and official cameras, and the cell phone photos and videos of the race, the authorities were able to track down the bombers in record time. I had contributed a handful of photos to the authorities at their request—after the suspects were caught, but as the prosecution was putting their case together.

Even though I was a reporter, I had been in the race, and had no trouble parting with what could have been key evidence, something I might not have been able to do had I actually been a reporter on the story.

I learned though. I learned the value of other people’s moments, the way that those moments captured one whole hell of a lot more than the photographer realized.

It took three full days of work, searching for races with Snot Rocket’s real name in them. Some of those races weren’t easily searchable—especially later races. Early on in the century, the internet was a lot cruder than it is now. If a race wanted to post results, they did so on a page on their website.

Sometime around 2010, those pages became private. You had to be part of the race or someone who knew how to get into those private pages to see them. Fortunately, I’d hacked a number of them, not because I was trying to get a story but, for one reason or another, my own listing in a race didn’t give me access to those pages. So I learned how to get access without waiting for one of the organizers to give me permission.

Now the race pages were on some dedicated site, one that you only learned if you actually paid for the race. Those would have been tough to find except that innovation had only come about in the last few years, and in the last few years, I had met Snot Rocket, and we were often in the same race together.

I worked from those backwards, developing a system: I looked up Snot Rocket—Dave—by name to find out where he finished. His finisher spot—almost always near the front—then provided his bib number. In the more recent races, I could search official photos by bib number, catching a glimpse of Snot Rocket throughout the race.

The later photos usually showed a man running alone. One of the photos actually caught him launching a snot rocket, and I marked it. I wanted Detective Conners to see it. There was no one else in the frame, though, so I doubt that particular loogie was heading toward anyone else.

Photos of these races showed him at the starting line, usually standing by himself, sometimes holding one of his ankles as he stretched. The photos at the end of the race showed him grabbing his medal from the volunteer handing them out—no graceful bow of the head so the medal could go around his neck, no smile. Just a gimme that now kinda yank.

Then Snot Rocket would walk away, usually out of the frame. Some photos at various races caught him on the way to the parking lot, medal clutched in his fist. A few showed him in the crowd. Often, it seemed, he went to the timer’s tent to see where he placed. If he was first, second or third, the spot that would give him an award, he would grab that early so that he could leave.

He almost never climbed on the podium—if, indeed, there was a podium. He always walked to his car, medals clutched in his hand as if he had stolen them.

He didn’t seem to get any joy out of collecting those medals. He had the same grim look of determination on his face that he had had at the start of the race, as if whatever prompted him to run hadn’t been satisfied by the simple act of completing the race.

The photos started to change four years back. He looked less Snot Rocket and more Dave. His hair was lighter, trimmer, and once in a while, he grinned as he crossed the finish line, pumping a fist or slapping someone else—a guy I didn’t recognize—on the back.

A closer look at some of the finisher photos showed Snot-Dave talking with people as he got a bottle of water out of the ice chest or waited to get on the finisher podium.

Eventually, I started to recognize the people around him. A dark-haired thin-faced woman, who was not wearing racing clothes, and another couple, both of whom seemed to be runners. They had bibs, usually wore the race’s T-shirt, and often wore compression pants. They talked and laughed with the thin-faced woman, who didn’t seem to smile all that much.

Indeed, her eyes had a wary, tired look, but I couldn’t see the source until I went farther back.

Farther back, she too wore racing clothes and an extra twenty to thirty pounds. That weight looked good on her. She smiled more, and that made her pretty. Often, she looked up at Snot—well, Dave. He looked more like a Dave here—with something like love and affection.

He usually had an arm around her, pulling her close. They would share water bottles, pose with their finisher medals, holding them up to the camera or mug with them on their foreheads or wrapped around their arms like matching bracelets.

Even farther back, there were the photos of young love, the meet-cute that every rom-com has, only here, the couple would have that awkward leaning into each other stance that people who were attracted but hadn’t yet committed to anything often had.

Before that—about ten years back—Dave ran with a group of young men, none of whom looked familiar. And before that, he would show up at races with a young woman (who had to be his age) who would stand at the sidelines, arms wrapped around herself, mouth a thin displeased line, as if she didn’t want to be anywhere near sweaty runners so damn early in the morning.

Roscoe had said Snot Rocket had two girlfriends. I wagered I had seen them both. Only one had been serious, and the other had been a flirtation, something that young people got into before they knew themselves well enough to know in the space of a conversation or two or three that the attractive person they were talking with wasn’t really right for them.

I made a list of all the people he seemed to socialize with, and if they had a bib number, I wrote those down too. Then I worked recent to less recent, trying to figure out who his associates were.

They weren’t as good at running as he was, that was for certain. They were recreational runners who usually ended up in the middle of the pack. Except for the final woman, the woman with the thin face, who lost twenty to thirty pounds. She did well in her age group, often placing first by a long distance.

Her name was Noelani Kahale, and, as her name suggested, she was originally from Hawaii. She had a huge social media presence, but it confused me. Her photographs were full of Dave. Noelani and Dave, running on the beach. Noelani and Dave, laughing before their sunrise run. Noelani and Dave, entwining their matching finisher’s medals at the end of races.

It wasn’t until I looked at the dates that I realized the posts I was seeing on all her platforms were five years old

There was nothing new.

Some people vanished because they closed or abandoned their online accounts. Others watched their lives to go hell and didn’t want to chronicle that.

I suspected something else though. Noelani had gone from a healthy tanned woman to a too-thin rail of a person who did not participate in runs.

I searched for her on the internet, and found the obituary almost right away.

Noelani Kahale, dead of lung cancer at 35. The obituary mentioned that she hadn’t been a smoker, and there was no obvious cause of the disease. It urged everyone to give to various cancer organizations and research foundations that were searching for causes of lung cancer in nonsmokers.

She had no children, and was not married. Her parents had brought her back to Oahu, and buried her there.

There was no mention of Dave or running or anything personal about her.

The friends had a big social media presence as well, and, it seemed, they had moved onto triathlons. They did not seem to participate in any of the local runs.

But I had found them, and I knew they might be helpful.

So I called, and left messages, asking for an interview, not mentioning Dave. Three of them never returned my call.

The fourth, the woman in the shot with Dave and Noelani and another friend, called, and set up a meet at a local coffee shop for the following day.

She assumed I was interested in her recent triathlon finish which was good enough to qualify for one of the bigger races in the fall. I let her hold that assumption. It was always easier to talk with people when they were unprepared, instead of prepared.

I also set up an appointment with Detective Conners—only I told him that I was officially covering the story, and that I would want whatever information he could give me. I would, I said, let him know what I had discovered as well.

He hadn’t sounded happy, but he hadn’t told me to stop investigating either. My sense that he was overwhelmed and not that interested in this case persisted, just in the ways that he addressed me or seemed to need reminding about the case itself.

I put my annoyance at him aside, and focused on the first interview. My subject, Jenna Wasserman, also had a large social media presence, with lots of friends and lots of activities. The man she had been with in those photos with Dave had vanished from her social media pages a few years back, so I assumed a breakup.

But I made notes, just in case.

I wrote those on paper, because I planned to use my phone to record the interview, just like I had done for more than a decade.

If she didn’t like that, I would record anyway, and call it all deep background.

***

The early morning meeting came after both of our runs. We were both rosy cheeked and bright-eyed, but we had both changed into business casual—khakis and somewhat dressy shirts.

She was on her way to the bank where she worked in the loan department, and I would go back home to make notes after the interview was over.

The coffee shop we met in was a wannabe Starbucks not far from my place. The baked goods were sinful and delicious, but the coffee was always watery and unimpressive. I liked the blueberry muffins, and had learned to order an iced tea with them.

Jenna ordered her standard coffee drink, took one sip, made a face, and set it aside. She said nothing about the quality, though, for which I gave her silent props.

She looked even more fit in person, and she had that glow that distance athletes often had, that sense of comfortable athleticism that gave her a grace with every single movement.

I asked if I could record, and told her I would take notes by hand as well. She had no problem with that. And because she was so cheerful and pleased about an interview, I did ask her about her athletic career—her recent success at triathlons, and the upcoming big race. I liked her enthusiasm.

I was sorry that I was going to have to squash it.

“I’m not just here about the triathlon,” I said to her. “I assume you heard about Dave Pyron.”

“No,” she said, with a slight frown. “What did he do now?”

Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

“He died three weeks ago,” I said. “I thought you would have heard.”

“Died?” Her frown grew. “No, I hadn’t heard. Why did you think I would?”

I decided to save the well, he was murdered. It was all over the news for a little later. Instead, I said, “Because I saw photos. I thought you were friends.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “We were never friends,” she said. “He was friends with my ex-boyfriend, Calvin.”

“You didn’t like him?” I asked.

“Calvin?” she said, deliberately misunderstanding me.

“Dave,” I said.

Her lips thinned. “I liked him a lot that first year. He took great care of Noelani.”

“When she was so ill,” I said, guessing.

Jenna nodded. “He did everything for her. He made sure she had everything she needed, he worked with home health care, he even paid for hospice when she lost her medical insurance.”

That was not the man I had expected. “But…?” I asked.

“Her parents,” Jenna said. “I blame them.”

“For what?” I asked.

“They did nothing.” There was anger in her voice, and her eyes flashed. “Nothing. They wouldn’t help financially, they didn’t come out for her surgeries, and when she was dying, they didn’t come to visit.”

I felt that tingle I both loved and hated, the journalist moment—the one that says, This is a great story, and I loved great stories. But I also knew that this was someone’s life we were discussing, and someone’s pain, and for that reason, the tingle irritated me.

“Then,” Jenna said, her voice getting louder, “they commandeered her body, and they could. Because she didn’t have a will or anything, and they were her next of kin.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

“They took her to Hawaii and buried her there, even though she wanted to be cremated. Dave told them—hell, we all told them she wanted to be cremated, but they didn’t listen. They didn’t even acknowledge Dave. He went out for the funeral only to find out that they didn’t even hold one. Just some ceremony at the grave site that she didn’t want.”

Jenna leaned back, and let out a small “whew,” then gave me a tiny smile.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m still mad about it all.”

She sipped the coffee and winced.

“I’ll wager Dave was too,” I said.

“He was livid. And not just at them. At everything.” She shook her head. “Everything was unpleasant with him. Everything. We would go to races, and he got viciously mean. Noelani had made him promise he would keep going. They were collecting medals from races all over, especially the ones you had to qualify for.”

“Like Boston,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, like Boston, which they did, and New York, which has some weird system that they couldn’t get through. And they were going to hit every Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon around the world, so now he was assigned to do that, and he just got angrier and angrier.” She wrapped her hands around that coffee cup, and then seemed to recall that she didn’t like it, and shoved the cup aside.

“So the medals were…?”

“Theirs,” Jenna said, threading her hands together on top of the table. “I kinda got the sense he resented it all, but he couldn’t get out of it.” She shrugged. “We all tried. We talked to him, and that didn’t do any good. It just made him madder. We suggested that he quit running for a while, and that really infuriated him. We suggested therapy—or I did—and jeez, I’ve never had anyone yell at me like that in my entire life. It was awful and scary, and for a minute, I actually thought he would hit me.”

That did not surprise me, given the level of anger I had seen at the Boston qualifier. It had seemed as if Snot Rocket had a deep well of anger that looked like it was infinite.

“That was the last time I saw him,” Jenna was saying. “I refused to go to runs if he was there, and that pretty much destroyed my relationship with Calvin.”

“He continued to go to the runs?” I asked.

“For a while,” she said. “Then he even gave up. I think I could’ve handled that, but he told me that I overreacted to Dave, that Dave wouldn’t hurt anyone, and I disagreed. I hate it when people tell you you’re overreacting and they weren’t even there.”

“He was nowhere around when Dave challenged you?” I asked.

“We were at a run, so Calvin was there, but he wasn’t right next to me. He couldn’t hear anything. And later, after we broke up, he called to apologize. I didn’t take the call but here…you can hear it for yourself.”

She took out her phone, opened it, and scrolled through the screen with her thumb. I didn’t say anything, not even to comment on the fact that she had saved a message from someone she ostensibly was no longer interested in.

“Here it is.” She set the phone between us, and clicked on a voicemail message.

Hey, Jenn, it’s me. I owe you a major apology. You said Dave was scary, and I told you that was an overreaction, but I was wrong. I should’ve listened to you. I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry.

Then there was some phone noise, as if he half-expected her to respond. And finally, he hung up.

“Did you call him back?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I learned long ago that guys like that think they’ve wised up, but they never do. He’d make the same mistake. He did make it a few times earlier, usually on smaller stuff. This was one that made me scared, and he dismissed it, and I decided that he wasn’t for me.”

I made some sympathetic noises, which were not fake. I was sympathetic, just not as interested in that part of her story.

“Would you mind giving me Calvin’s number?” I asked, just in case it was different from the one I had.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He moved out of state nearly a year ago. He wouldn’t know what happened to Dave any more than I do.”

“But Calvin can give me some background,” I said.

Her lips thinned. “I suppose. Just don’t tell him you got the number from me. I don’t want him to think I hung onto it or anything.”

I almost said, But you did hang onto it, and then I changed my mind. It was her business, and it had nothing to do with the story I was working on.

I thanked her, and ended the meeting. Then I got into my car and checked my notes on my laptop. The number I had for Calvin was the same one that Jenna had given me. He hadn’t answered before, and I doubted he would answer now. But I called and left another message.

Then I drove home. I had two hours before my meeting with Detective Conners. I needed some think time. Something about my meeting with Jenna bothered me.

I had just lugged my laptop and purse into the kitchen when my cell rang, with the ringtone I reserved for people I don’t know. I set everything on my already overcrowded table, and then found the phone inside my purse, barely managing to answer before the call went to voicemail.

“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “This is Calvin.”

I sank into a nearby chair. I hadn’t expected him to call. I thanked him for his call, then asked if I could record our conversation.

He paused for just a moment, then said, “Ah, what the hell.”

So I hit the record button and put the phone on speaker. He asked a few questions about Dave’s death, which I answered, and then he confirmed Jenna’s information, almost verbatim.

“So, here’s the weird thing,” Calvin said. “I don’t talk to him for years—I mean, we’re in separate towns, you know? Then he calls me out of the blue.”

Calvin was using present tense. Dave’s death hadn’t registered with him yet, even though he had known about it before he called.

“I’m all like green,” Calvin said. I wasn’t sure I understood him, and was about to say so, when he added, “I mean, I even work in the industry. We’re both engineers but on different sides of the environmental divide, if you get me.”

I finally did. I made an affirmative noise.

“So, he says, you always wanted me to get rid of the medals, melt them down. Can you give me the name of the company that does that? So I do.” Calvin sounded reflective. “I thought it was weird, you know. But I also figured he was finally moving on from Noelani. And maybe it was time, since he’d been so angry for so long.”

“Did you ask him about that?” I asked.

“Naw,” Calvin said. “We’re not that kind of friends, never really were. And besides, he hung up right after. It felt…I don’t know…abrupt, weird, off somehow.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“About a month ago,” Calvin said.

Not long before Snot Rocket died. That seemed odd.

“Can you give me the name of the company?” I asked.

“Yep,” Calvin said. “That’s the only reason I called. I was looking online at the stories about the murder and they mentioned that someone stole his medals. No one stole them. He’d gotten rid of them.”

“How do you know that for sure?” I asked.

“I got a friend who works there,” Calvin said. “I asked him to watch out for them.”

“Because you wanted to keep track of the medals?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t believe Dave would go through with it,” Calvin said. “But he did. It was one of the bigger hauls of medals that the company ever got.”

We talked a bit more, and then we ended the conversation. The medals weren’t stolen. They had been melted down. Snot Rocket was redesigning his life—whatever that meant.

I called Detective Connors and told him what I learned about the medals. He was already ahead of me on that. They’d found a receipt in Snot Rocket’s office for the medals, sent by the company shortly after they arrived.

“Still leaves us at square one, though,” Detective Conners said.

“Not really,” I said. “Let’s still meet in an hour. Bring me photos of the medals that strangled him.”

“They weren’t used to strangle him,” Conners said. “They were just hung around his neck.”

The way someone did when they finished a race.

“Bring them anyway,” I said. “I’ll bring my computer.”

“And what good will that do?” Conners asked.

“You’ll see,” I said.

***

We met at a different coffee shop, one he had chosen that wasn’t far from the precinct. The coffee shop was a lot more utilitarian. It clearly predated Starbucks. There was a menu for specialty coffees, but the menu itself seemed to discourage trying them. I got a bottle of water, which seemed safest, considering the filthy state of the yellow walls and linoleum floor.

I found one table that didn’t have crumbs, but I still wiped it off before I sat there. I put a napkin underneath my laptop. I’m not usually that fastidious, but some places just inspire extra precautions.

Conners came in, ordered “the usual,” and sat down across from me without picking up anything from the counter, clearly expecting someone to bring his order.

He slapped some pictures at me. They had been printed on a high-quality printer, showing the medals front and back. One medal was a finisher medal, the kind everyone got. The other was a third-place medal from the same race. And the third wasn’t from any race at all. It just looked like a race medal. Someone had engraved World’s Biggest Asshole on the back.

That detail hadn’t made the news, and I could see why.

I raised my gaze to Conners.

“We figure they’re all fake,” he said.

“They’re not,” I said. I recognized the first two. They were from a Boston qualifier nearly a year ago. I had the same finisher medal on my wall. I’d actually fingered the age group medals before the race, hoping I’d make my time, because those medals were pretty.

These weren’t medals you could find easily, and I knew, because I had researched it, that Snot Rocket hadn’t received any age group medals in that race at all—which was odd. He’d been placing well in other races at that point.

I looked up third place in all the male age groups first, just on a hunch, but I didn’t recognize anyone.

Then I stopped. “How did Dave die?” I asked. “I thought you said he was strangled with the medals.”

“That’s what the officers who answered the call thought. We let it stand, figuring we’d release cause of death when we had our suspect in hand.”

I nodded. “You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

“Blunt force trauma to the side of the head,” Conners said. “He fell or was pushed and banged his temple on a table. Whoever was there didn’t call for help—which might’ve actually saved him. Instead, they propped him up, put the medals around his neck, and left. He wasn’t found for three days.”

“You’re saying he was alive when that person left?” I asked.

Conners nodded. “Probably not conscious though. The ME thinks he lived another five, six hours or more.”

I couldn’t help myself. I shuddered.

“So,” I said, thinking about all that calculation I had done for strength and height, “it could’ve been a woman, then.”

“Hmmm,” Conners said non-committally. Which was a confirmation, in its own way.

I spun the laptop around and went through the podium photos, showing him the third-place finishers in all of the age groups. He stopped me after I had shown him the forty-to-forty-five age groupers.

“Can you email me the link to all of this?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and did it as we were sitting there. “You know who did it.”

“Maybe,” he said, slapped down a five for his non-existent “usual,” and left.

I studied the pictures. I didn’t recognize anyone. But I went through the names, and scanned social media, just because I was feeling a tad off. What I had thought I knew, I hadn’t known, and what I hadn’t known turned out to be important.

I found her in the thirty-five to thirty-nine age group. McKenna Granchester. She mentioned on several of her sites that she’d discovered someone new, that he was kinder than the other men she had known, and he was a runner.

And the real tell? She said she was helping him overcome a big loss. She tried to convince him to get rid of the past—to Marie Kondo it, in other words, get rid of all the clutter, stop hanging onto the loss, and move forward. He refused.

She wrote on Facebook: Some people just need to be pushed. He found the service that would recycle his stuff. I just mailed it all off one afternoon. He’d said he was going to do it; now he’s mad that I did. That’s weird, right?

People weighed in. They always did. And I didn’t care what they said.

I was just imagining the conversation. She’d gotten rid of his possessions, his memories of Noelani, the one thing Noelani had made him promise to continue.

He had a terrible temper, one that had scared Jenna, one that had upset the entire running group, and half the people who raced with him.

I couldn’t imagine what he would have done when he discovered that McKenna had sent his memories to be recycled.

The argument was for the cops to figure out, if they could. Had Snot Rocket pushed her first? Or just screamed in her face, like he had done with Jenna? Had McKenna pushed him away, which was what people seemed to do with him.

He probably tripped, fell sideways, and hit his head. And if she had called 911 right there, everything would’ve been all right.

But she had to put the medals on him—her medals, as a kind of fuck-you. And then she left him to die.

I got up, brought Conners’ five to the cash register, and left, feeling vaguely sick to my stomach.

I knew how to write this, once I got the information I needed from Conners, once she got arrested and the case started wending its way toward trial.

An angry man fell in love, lost the woman he loved, tried to rebuild but got angrier and angrier. Met another woman, thought maybe she was the one, and instead, she proved how very wrong he was.

He’d been trying to move forward—and that attempt failed.

***

Which is how I wrote the story. Without a mention of his nickname, although I did mention the snot rockets. I had interviews with a number of people, including the guy who pushed him at that last race. They’d gotten into a fight over starting position. Snot Rocket believed the guy had cheated and moved up several slots.

After I talked to him, I believed the guy had too.

That didn’t make Snot Rocket likeable. He had been an arrogant asshole, and he remained one. I empathized with a lot—the loss of medals, the loss of control—but not the way he responded.

And the anger, the anger was problematic.

I wrote the story. McKenna not only got arrested and immediately pled to manslaughter (from Murder 2), and she went away, and the story caused enough of a blip that I was able to keep my job through the next round of layoffs.

All of that, a month or two before the pandemic shut down everything, including racing. Everything except the media company I worked for. Suddenly, I had more to do than I had ever planned—none of it weird click-bait homicide stories.

With so much death in the U.S., no one really cared about strange little murders anymore. We were all trying to survive.

And yet…I find myself thinking about him. Snot Rocket. Not who he really was, but who he presented as at the races.

That filthy habit of his, the one that brought his nickname, has become something else in this post-COVID world. People are getting arrested for spitting on others.

And had races resumed, and had he not reformed, and had he been murdered then, think of all the people who would have had motive. He might have made them sick. He might have killed their loved ones.

And the way his grief had taken him, he might not have cared.

Not that it matters, because he died in the pre-COVID world. Along with his filthy habit.

The demise of the snot rocket came after the death of Snot Rocket. But not long after.

And neither, I must report, caused not a ripple in the world we find ourselves in. No one misses them. I get the sense that no one thinks of them, besides me.

We actually lived that way—with free-floating snot rockets and spittle and petty jealousies and shoving matches over medals. We lived that way, and saw nothing wrong with it.

In a world we no longer recognize as our own. In a land so far away it feels like another century.

I can’t say as I miss it.

But I think about it.

All the damn time.

 

___________________________________________

“The Demise of Snot Rocket“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Demise of Snot Rocket

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Collectibles, edited by Lawrence Block, Subterranean Press 2021
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Americanspirit/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.

It is a holiday in US, so we are taking it easy and the installment is on the short side. Happy Memorial Day.

Something wet my hand. My eyes snapped open. Sometime between the waves of shivers and searing pain, my will had given out and I’d fallen asleep.

Bear lay next to me, licking the dry stalker blood off my hand. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw me stir, she sat up and panted.

My back ached, but the suffocating fatigue was gone. I felt strong again.

I flexed. No glitter. In her or in me. We had beaten the flowers.

For a few moments I just sat there, happy to be alive.

Bear danced from paw to paw, looking at my face as if expecting something.

“Are you thirsty?” I took off my helmet and poured some water into it from the canteen. She lapped it up.

The gashes on her shoulder and back had closed. I parted her fur to check. There was a narrow, pink scar, but even that was fading.

What was it Elena said about the stalkers? They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming.

I still had one stalker heart left. I focused on it, pushing as deep as my talent would let me go. The heart unfurled before me, not just glowing, but splitting into layers of different properties, each with its own color, as it had done when I panicked trying to diagnose Bear. It felt like the most natural thing now, as if my talent always worked this way.

I studied the layers. The toxicity was first, an electric blue. I used to see it as a simple glow. Occasionally I got swirls of color varying in saturation and vibrancy, which my brain somehow interpreted into data, but what I saw now was nothing like it.

My father used to collect topographic maps, detailed reliefs of mountain terrain in different parts of the world, with contour lines and color-coded heights: lighter color for the greater elevation, medium for the mid-lying areas, darker for the valleys. This was exactly like that, except I knew that the valleys were a healthy baseline, and the peaks indicated how much toxins affected a particular body system. Nervous and integumentary systems were barely influenced, the digestive and respiratory were moderately impacted, but the poison wreaked havoc on the endocrine, exocrine, muscular, and circulatory systems.

And I somehow knew that the integumentary system was comprised of skin, hair, nails, sweat, and oil glands. Yesterday I had no idea what that word stood for.

There was no point in puzzling over that. The more pressing issue was that the stalker hearts should’ve killed us. They didn’t. Why?

I focused on the next layer, the one glowing with pale pink under the blue. There was that unsettling feeling of falling through the glass floor again. Another relief, in red this time. It took me a moment to figure it out.

Regeneration.

I hadn’t seen it before, maybe because I was too focused on countering the poison. The stalkers were damn near indestructible. We’ve been targeting the glands in their neck, but given time, they would regenerate those. You had to deal enough damage to cause actual clinical death, otherwise no matter how badly they were wounded, they would bounce back. Good to know.

But the regeneration on its own couldn’t counter that shocking toxicity. More, that was not the way biology functioned. Eating cobra meat didn’t magically give you the ability to produce snake venom. Eating the stalker hearts should’ve just poisoned us, but instead both I and Bear healed our wounds and purged the poison.

On the other hand, regular biology couldn’t account for the emergence of the Talents, compound fractures healing in 7 hours, or a glowing gem passing through solid bone. We were in Arthur C. Clarke territory. Any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, and this was magic.

I sorted through my environment until I found some pollen traces and split that into layers as well. The toxicity was off the charts. I tried to look at the two of them together, the heart and the pollen, by superimposing one on to the other, but the picture was too complex. After a few seconds, both sets of layers collapsed, and I saw white again. This time I was blind for at least a minute. I had to be careful not to push myself too far.

The best I could figure out was that mixing the pollen and the stalker blood somehow negated their mutual harm while boosting the regenerative properties of the stalker’s heart.

It was a miracle that we survived. A roll of cosmic dice.

Once my vision returned, I flexed again. A quick scan of Bear and my body showed if not outright immunity, then a high resistance to both poisons. We could likely stroll through the flowers now, not that I would risk it unless we absolutely had to, and eating the stalker meat should be safe. At least in theory.

The memory of the horrible battery acid taste sliding down my throat made me shudder.

I checked my shoulder. The bite had knitted closed. The gashes on my legs from the claws had healed too. I had escaped death. Again. I couldn’t tell if it was the magical gem or my newly acquired regeneration. Possibly both.

Bear licked the hat clean and looked at me.

“More?”

I poured a bit more water out. She lapped it up.

My mouth was dry, too. I tipped the canteen and finished what was left. We would need to find a water source soon. Also, I was hungry. So very hungry. I’d taken my watch off because it broke, so I had no idea how much time had passed. I should’ve checked the bodies for a watch, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

 It felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. The stalker heart weighed about 2 pounds, and I had eaten a whole one just like it. I should’ve been full, but instead I was starving.  Water, food, exit. I needed to find all three.

There was something on the opposite wall. Some sort of shapes…

I picked up the hard hat and flicked the light on. 

Cave drawings, depicted in rust red and blue. A procession of some kind of beings, resembling raccoons or foxes, maybe? They were leading weird looking donkeys.

Danger.

A vision unfolded in my mind. A caravan of fluffy creatures departing, some being wrapped in rags begging on the street, and a feeling of alarm. Not deadly danger exactly but ruin. Financial ruin.

The vision faded.

“What do you think this is all about, Bear?”

The shepherd wagged her tail.

“Yes, I don’t know either.”

The woman who called me her daughter, the four-armed killers, and now the foxes, all distinct and morphologically different. Three separate species. Representatives of three civilizations? Or was it one complex society?

What the hell was on the other side of the breaches?

I had no answers and more pressing things to worry about. We had one canteen of water left, so we needed to get a move on. If we found a water source, I would need to wash up. My coveralls were drenched in stalker blood. My hair was bloody too and it stuck to my face and neck. I hooked the empty canteen back to the loop on my coveralls, put the hard hat back on my head, and nodded to my dog.

“Once more into the breach. Living the dream.”

Bear wagged her tail, and we started across the stone bridge.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

I get high with a little help from my friends.

I’m gonna try with…what’s the next line?

He is very trying, you have to give him that.

I have no friends only adversaries and adoring subjects.

The stone bridge stretched in front of me. It was only twenty-seven yards long, but it felt like a mile. I shuffled across it, one foot in front of the other, my body weak and exhausted, and poor Bear heavy like an anchor in my arms. She was still breathing. I felt her every ragged breath. She was shivering and sometimes she would yelp, but she was still alive.

Almost there.

One step at a time. Almost made it.

Just a little further.

The little cave gaped in front of us. It was a nearly circular depression in the rock, about fifty feet across, its walls smooth, its floor empty.

I tried to set Bear down, but my legs gave out, and we both collapsed. I pulled myself upright and unhooked Bear’s leash from around my neck. Three stalker hearts tumbled to the ground. I had cut them out along the way, strung them onto the leash like fish, and then I put that grisly necklace around my neck. It was the only way I could carry it.

I chopped one heart into small pieces. My hands felt so heavy and clumsy. I scooped a handful of stalker stew meat and shoved it in my mouth.

It burned like battery acid.

I swallowed. Fire sliding down my throat. I chopped the meat smaller. The last thing I needed was to die choking on stalker’s heart.

The pieces of raw flesh landed in my stomach like rocks. My hands trembled.  I retched and forced it back down.

I’d managed to down one and a half hearts before the shivers came.  Cold clutched at me.  My teeth chattered, my knees shook, and I could not get warm. I slumped against the cave wall, shuddering. Bear trembled, turned, and crawled to me.

Tears wet my eyes. 

Bear slumped against me and rested her head on my thigh. I petted her. We shivered together. Time stretched, each moment sticky and viscous.

The shivers came in waves now. They washed over me, broke into stabbing pains, faded, and came again.

I had to stay awake. Something told me that to sleep was to die.

I shook Bear. She looked at me with her warm eyes.

I forced my quivering lips to move. “You have to stay awake.”

The shepherd looked at me.

“Stay with me. I’ll tell you a story. You were born into this new age. Your parents were probably born into it as well. You don’t know but it didn’t use to be like this. It used to be… nice.”

I stroked her fur with trembling fingers.

“I remember when the first gates opened. The government called them anomalies back then. One of them was right downtown. The military cordoned it off. Shut down half of the business district.

“At first, everyone was alarmed. There was news coverage, and theories, and the markets crashed. But the gate just sat there, not doing anything. Roger and I drove by to look at it. It was huge. This high-rise-sized, massive hole in the middle of the city, swirling with orange sparks, strange roots and branches twisting along its boundary, just out of reach. I remember feeling this overwhelming anxiety. Like looking at the tornado coming your way and not being able to do anything about it.

“I asked Roger if we should move. And he said, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ Roger was my husband and my best friend. Neither of us got along with our parents. I have no siblings, and he didn’t talk to his brother, so it was the two of us against the world. We discussed it on the way home. Our jobs were here. We’d just bought the house two years before. Tia was doing well in school. Roger’s company was twenty minutes from the site, and I was north of it, so if something happened, we’d have time to get out. We decided to stay.

“For two months the gate just sat there. People stopped talking about it, except to complain about the traffic. Then one day – it was a Monday. I don’t know why crap like this always happens on Mondays – one day, I had this long Zoom meeting with the San Diego office, trying to sort out the new advertising campaign. I kept hearing raised voices and then San Diego went offline.

“I came out of my office. Imagine the conference room crammed with terrified people, and they are all staring at the screen, glassy-eyed and completely quiet. There was a newscast on tv, and the journalist sounded so high-pitched, she was squeaking like a terrified mouse. The anomaly had burst and vomited a torrent of monsters into the city.  Downtown was a warzone. Bodies torn apart, cars upside down, and creatures that had popped straight out of a nightmare streaming across the screen…”

I remembered the burst of hot electric panic that shot through me. I knew in that moment that whatever plans we made and the future we thought was coming, had just died, smashed to pieces with a hammer of an existential threat.

“I stumbled away from the room and called Roger. He answered right away. He said, ’Pick up the kids and go home. Straight home, Ada, no stops. I’ll get there as soon as I can.’”

My eyes had grown hot. I swiped the tears off with the back of my forearm. My fingers were stained with stalker blood, and I didn’t want it in my eyes.

“These are angry tears. The fucked up thing is, I remember his voice, Bear. I remember how he sounded. Strong and sure. And I miss that. I miss that voice, I miss the old him, and he is a fucking shithead, and I will never let him back into our lives, but there it is.”

I swallowed and checked Bear. She looked at me. Still alive.

“I left the office. The streets were choked with cars. I’m on the corner of Grace and Broadway, right by that pancake place, and a cop is in the middle of the intersection, and this herd of people just tears out of nowhere and stampedes down Grace. The crowd runs past, and the cop is on the street on his back, not moving. I saw that man being trampled to death. Then a body falls on the street from above. I look up, and there are six legged things crawling on the building to my right and yanking people out of the windows, and up ahead, just past the IHOP, there is a high-rise apartment building. And it shakes, Bear, and then people start raining from it, jumping in desperation and just smashing onto the street. And I know it’s about to fall, so I jerk my wheel right, and tear down Grace Street in the direction the stampede had come from, because I have no place to go, and something tells me not to follow the crowd. It was hell on Earth, Bear. I don’t know to this day how I got out.

“I picked up Tia, made it to Noah’s daycare, grabbed him, and drove home on autopilot. At some point we passed Target, and it was on fire. We get to our house and huddle in the bedroom on the bed. The kids are scared, so I turn Netflix on and for some reason it is still streaming despite the world ending. We watch and wait.”

I sat in that bedroom and thought what life would be like if Roger died, and every time I imagined losing him, it felt like someone had cut my soul with a knife. Until today, those were the worst two hours of my life.

“Finally, I hear the code lock, and then Roger walks into the bedroom, wild eyed, disheveled, but alive.”

The relief had been indescribable.

“I hug him, but he doesn’t hug me back. He just stands there, stiff. I thought he was in shock. I make some frozen pizzas, we eat, and we stay with the kids watching Netflix.  Roger is distant. It’s like he’s gone into some inside place where nobody is welcome. At some point he leaves the bedroom. I wait until the kids fell asleep, check my phone for news, and then look for him.

“He is sitting on our front porch. He has a pack of cigarettes, and he is chain smoking, one after another. He quit when I was pregnant with Tia. Ten years later, that fucking pack still bothers me. I didn’t make him quit. He chose to do it. Either he had a secret pack – and who keeps a hidden pack of cigarettes for 6 years? – or he’s been smoking on the side and hiding it from me. Why?

“Anyway, I tell him what I saw on my phone.”

That conversation was branded into my memory. I could recite it word by word and in an instant I was right there, back on that porch, with the night encroaching onto the city and the blaze of orange in the distance, where Target was still burning hours later.

“They are saying that the anomalies are gates that lead to some other world or dimension. There are twelve gates in the US. Our outbreak is fifteen percent contained. They think they’ll have it under control in forty-eight hours.”

“Nothing is under control.” His voice was almost a snarl.

I reached out to take his hand.

He shifted away.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what you saw, but I’m so sorry.”

“I took 90 home,” he said. “The traffic stopped. Everything stopped. And then the things came. They went after the ones who got out of their cars first. Then they figured out that we were in the cars. I saw them rip a man apart right in front of me. They threw him on my car. His guts fell out of his body onto the glass. His intestines were sliding on the windshield, and he was still alive. I just sat there and watched him die.”

Roger stabbed the cigarette out on the step, crushing it.

“I sat there like that for three hours, waiting for them to find me. I didn’t know if you and the kids were dead or alive. I didn’t know if you made it home or if you were stuck like me. And the whole time I had this voice in the back of my head telling me that I needed to get the fuck out and take care of my wife and kids. I needed to nut up, get out of the car, and go find you.”

Oh my God. “You made it home. That’s all we wanted.”

He didn’t look like he heard a word I said.

“And then I thought, what if you were already dead? What if I never found you? And you know what I felt?”

I couldn’t tell if he wanted an answer. “No.”

He looked at me, and his eyes seemed feverish. “I felt relief.”

“What?”

“I felt relief. A burden lifted.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. Adaline, why would I lie about this now?”

I stared at him, stunned. What do I do with this? How do I fix it?

“The world is ending. This right here…” He held his hands out and circled the street. “This is done. It’s over. It’s over for all of us.”

“I think you’re still in shock.”

“Maybe. But I see things very clearly now. We are living on borrowed time. There will be more of these holes. They’re not just going to give up. We can’t beat them. I don’t know how much time we have left. Six months, a year, a week. Nobody knows.”

I’d gone strangely numb. A part of me knew he was talking and making words, but none of the sounds made any sense.

“I’m going to live whatever time I have left on my own terms. Doing what I want.”

He fell silent and looked at me. This was the part where I had to say something.

My voice came out wooden. I was so calm, and I had no idea why. “And what is it you want, Roger?”

“Not this.”

“Ah.”

“Not anymore.”

“Is there room for me and the kids in this new life on your terms?”

“No.”

The word lashed me.

“We’ve been together ten years. If you don’t want to be married, that’s fine, but you don’t get to just quit being a father. The kids have known you their entire lives. They won’t understand, Roger. They need you.  I need you.”

“It’s not about you or them. This is about me. I need something else.”

“Tia loves you. Noah adores you. That little boy can’t wait for you to come home. Every day he does a little dance when he sees your car in the driveway. You know what Tia told me while we were waiting for you? She said, ‘Don’t worry Mom, Dad will kill all the monsters.’”

Roger shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t kill any monsters. I didn’t save anyone. I just froze. And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life feeling like a coward.”

“So, you’re just going to abandon us? To whatever happens?”

A hint of something cold and vicious twisted his face. “I have a right to be happy. For however long I have left. I’m going to grab my happiness and hold on to it while I still can. This is done. We are done.”

“What am I supposed to tell the kids?”

“Whatever you want.”

He got up and went inside.

“And now you know how my marriage ended, Bear. I’ve had a decade to think about it.  I understand it better now. I was able to drive away from the slaughter. I escaped. He couldn’t. He just sat in that car stuck and waiting to die, and it must’ve occurred to him that he was doing that exact thing in his life. He must’ve realized something about himself that neither he nor I knew until that moment.”

I stroked Bear’s fur.   

“He’s down in Puerto Rico. He owns a boat and takes tourists out to the reefs to snorkel with manta rays. He is exactly where he wants to be. And until today, I was where I wanted to be. I manifested as a Talent three years after that first gate break. Yes, I got this job for benefits and pay, because I have bills and kids, but there are other ways to earn money. I do it because every time I find adamantite or aetherium, it makes us a little stronger. It gives us a better fighting chance to repel this invasion, and I will keep finding this shit until all the breaches are broken and all the gates are closed, so my children can have a safe, boring future.”

I realized that I was snarling and took a deep breath.

“I don’t blame Roger for the divorce. I blame him for being a shit father. I’ve tried, Bear. I’ve sent emails, I texted, I offered phone calls. He didn’t respond. The only communication from him was through the child support payments. That’s how I knew he was still alive.”

Another shudder twisted me.

“He works as little as possible, so he makes just enough to survive and maintain the boat. At first he was sending $200 a month, then $100 per month, then he stopped. I kept offering to send the kids to visit him or inviting him to visit us, and he cut that off. He said he didn’t want to see them. I finally had enough and had my lawyer email him an affidavit to relinquish his parental rights. I thought it would shock him into having a relationship with our kids. It came back as a scan in twenty-four hours, attached to a blank email, signed, notarized and witnessed by two people. He wanted to get rid of Tia and Noah that much.”

I gritted my teeth.

“I didn’t tell the kids, but I have the Death Folder on my desktop, with insurance, and the will, and all that crap. Tia knows about it, and that affidavit is in there.  Once my death is announced, they will learn that their father doesn’t want them. My children will think they don’t have anyone left in this world. People break promises all the time. Roger promised to love me. Melissa promised to be my friend. London promised to protect me.

“Promises must be kept, Bear. Especially to children. I promised Tia I wouldn’t die in this hellhole and I meant it. We are going to survive. We will get out of here if I have to crawl on my hands and knees all the way to that damn gate.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

 Here is a snippet from the story Rolling Tide of Darkness:

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UO5-16 Destroyed Hyperbridge Star System, Upsilon Sector

 

The first Necron-Xeno alliance convoy arrived in the destroyed star system with the usual explosion of expended energy as they exited hyperspace.

There were twelve ships in the convoy; they immediately sent out four cruisers to scout ahead of them. The rest of the task force then reoriented and set sail for the neighboring star system. It would take a few hours to cross to a point where they could jump into hyperspace once more.

Hazel Irons III was awake upon their arrival. The second generation clone was eager to get started. She knew there was a ticking clock; she needed to prove herself to her queen before an ansible transport arrived and the link to the alliance was established.

She also needed to set her hooks into the sector quickly. She was aware that their partners would no doubt be sending their own expedition. After all, they had been the ones to send the first two Preserver ships and find the partial hyperbridge to the virgin sector.

Her lips quivered in a smirk. Well, virgin to her queen for the moment. But like many virgins facing invasion, it would not be a virgin for much longer.

Soon the rather small and mostly unpopulated sector would be conquered and added to the collective. It would become a place for the alliance to grow more ships and fighters for the war to consume the galaxy. It would be a new unknown front against the Federation forces in the Tau sector.

All of that had to wait, however. She had a mission to perform. To do that, she had to push and exercise her limited initiative to dig her hooks into the sector as quickly as possible.

Once the Necron and AI navigators were ready, the ships jumped into hyperspace once more.

~///*\\\~

UR34DP-17 Empty Star System -Necron Cryptorium Preserver II

 

Cerberus, the Guardian of Tomorrow, stomped through the hidden base’s alabaster and black marble corridors to the command center.

He didn’t need to move in haste but did so because of the urge to do something, even if it was little.

“Report,” he barked, red eyes glowing with anger and purpose.

“Ship arrival detected,” a Necron voice whispered.

“Multiple ships detected,” another voice stated.

“Passive sensors are too far out to get a definitive identity,” the first voice whispered.

The knight paused and turned to the Caretaker as she gently laid a hand on his arm as if to brush past him. She glided into the room and then paused.

“Defense is my domain,” he warned.

“So be it. If we are in need of defense, you will of course be in command. But for the moment, we continue to hide.”

“Agreed,” the knight commander growled.

~///*\\\~

Hazel noted that there was no attempt to contact them upon arrival. That was irritating. She had been warned that the base was hidden. “Olly olly in free,” she whispered.

She saw the Necron ship captain turned to her.

She shrugged. “Worth a shot,” she joked. He did not react to her attempt at levity.

“Tough crowd,” she said as she looked around the room. “Have we established that there is no one else in the star system?”

“Confirmed,” a Necron sensor tech reported.

She looked to the captain. “May I suggest we transmit our IFF and any codes to get the Cryptorium to report its presence?” she asked mildly.

The Necron ship captain went over to his throne and tapped in a command. After a moment, a pulse could be seen echoing out from the flagship in a wave. A second pulse of information followed a moment later.

Attempting to make contact with the Cyptorium was important in the grand scheme of things, Hazel noted. The question was would they reveal their presence?

~///*\\\~

The Caretaker was on hand when the signals came in. The first identified the ships as from the alliance; the second was a command to contact the ships. That would of course reveal their location within the star system. “It has been confirmed. They are friendly and are aware of our presence,” she said with a look to the knight.

The rest of the council had been woken from their stasis slumbers and were present.

“Do you concur that they are not a threat.”

“They are not a threat … for now,” the knight ground out, clearly unhappy with anyone knowing of their location.

~///*\\\~

The ruling council was wary of the order to reveal themselves. Instead, they bounced a signal off of several rocks to hide their location.

The bounces delayed the conversation. It was ultimately in their favor; other than the order to reveal themselves, the newcomers did not have any other codes or a message from the Gravemind or Guiding Intelligence.

~///*\\\~