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

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

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

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

 

The Bride Case By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the only damning detail.

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

Which, by the way, was not a crime.

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

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

He only questioned it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The entire courtroom seemed to be holding its breath.

We stayed that way for ten minutes.

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

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

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

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

“She said she’s here,” he said.

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

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

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

“And…?” the judge asked.

“And she insisted she needed to be here.”

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

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

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

“Yes, Your Honor,” Lucinda said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bride didn’t seem to hear him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucinda stared at me, her bottom lip trembling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped talking and looked at me expectantly.

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

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

“But it was,” she said. “I—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes filled with tears.

“You don’t hate me?” she asked.

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

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

And sure enough, I was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t like feeling like an idiot.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even so, he startled me with his first question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What made this different?” Abrimowitz asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Raylin was doing was not one of those ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which was probably true.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

“Did you want to be?” Abrimowitz asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raylin lifted her head. “Um, objection?”

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

“Um…his answer?”

Laughter rippled through the courtroom, including the jury box.

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

“Um…all of it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was a strange set-up,” I said.

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

Raylin should have objected.

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrimowitz did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Mrs. Monroe stood up.

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

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

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

I shrugged at him, and he glared at me.

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

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

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

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

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

“That doesn’t look good,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Justice is blind,” I said.

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

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

“I’m the one who was shot,” I said.

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

“It did,” I said. “It does.”

His eyes narrowed. “But…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Law’s not a job for me,” I said.

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

“All right,” I said. “I won’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing.

Most of what we do means nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

I would absolutely do so again.

___________________________________________

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

The Bride Case

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

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

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

Also:

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

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

Something was stalking us through the tunnels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear ripped into her slab of meat.

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

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

I chewed and waited.

Nothing.

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

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

The shepherd glanced at me.

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

 Bear grinned at me.

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

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

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

I was Sadrin.  I am Sadrin.

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

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

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

What did that woman put into my head?

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

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

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

Maybe I would get some answers there.

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

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

“Rest.”

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

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

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

I went cold.

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

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

Malcolm. This was the original assault team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could we get down there? Was it physically possible?

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

Nowhere near long enough.

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

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

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

So fucking close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light on the helmet sputtered and died.

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

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

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

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

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

Bear wagged her tail.

“Come on, Bearkins.”

I started forward and Bear chased after me.

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

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

ARRRRRRRRRR!

Not relevant. Also, chill!

Like diss?

Oooh, yeah, exactly like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi, everyone.

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

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

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

Chris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elias nodded to him. “Good news?”

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

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

“No, Peter is two years younger.”

“Is he a Talent?”

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

“What is he doing there?”

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

Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.

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

Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.

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

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

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

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

Gambled. The man was dead.

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

“How deep is the hole?”

“Twenty-three million.”

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

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

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

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

“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.

“Of course he is.”

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

“The auditor…”

“Already got her, sir.”

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

“It is.”

“Are they having an affair?”

Leo blinked. “They are! How…”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is legal aware?” he asked.

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

“Jackson?”

“No news yet.”

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

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

“Speak of the devil.”

He took the call.

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

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

“Good to see you as well.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is my brother?” Yasuo asked.

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

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

“I’ll mention it.”

“Good-bye and good luck.”

“You as well.”

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

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

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

Everything would fall into place once they entered the gate.

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

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

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



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



Really cool employees you got there, Barnes & Noble!

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

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

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



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

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

-Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who can keep up?! Not moi.

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

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

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

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

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

That is all.

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

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

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

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

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

Prologue I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she was committed now.

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

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

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

Prologue II

The knife felt solid, real in his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you want?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resolute didn’t hesitate. “Anything.”

Chapter One

“You said yes?”

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

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

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

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

Emily looked down. “It took a while.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily grinned. “You’re pregnant again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Something Blue By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know him?” Amelia asked.

“Should I?” Gram said.

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

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

Very seriously.

Too seriously.

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

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

“You’ll see,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” Gram said. “With Willard.”

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

Gram never remarried.

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

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

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

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

“Ralph,” Amelia said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I knew what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I loved him.”

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

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

Not good enough for you, Gram had said.

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

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

So?

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

Gram!

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

Gram!

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

I don’t want to know, Gram.

You should listen, honey.

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

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

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

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

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

A mutual friend.

Not Gram.

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

A serious failing.

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

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

You wanted to know about Ralph.

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

Well, Scott should be obvious too.

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

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

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

And Amelia had given up.

Gram pulled into a driveway and stopped.

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

Gram shut off the car.

“This can’t be it,” Amelia said.

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

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

She was enjoying that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie Danner had to be Amelia’s age.

Or younger.

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

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

Amelia sat too.

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

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

“What do you think?” Gram asked.

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Amelia mumbled.

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

“I was young,” Amelia said.

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

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

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

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

Not without Gram correcting her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was.

No one could ignore Gram for long.

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

“Damn close,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

“How is that relevant?” Amelia asked.

“She just told you,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course not,” Amelia snapped.

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

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

“Peer pressure?” Gram said.

Amelia ignored her.

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

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

“Amelia—” Gram said in her sternest voice.

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

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

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

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

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

“Long grain, brown, or instant?”

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

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

“Have what?”

“Why you don’t have children.”

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

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

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

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

Gram shut up.

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

“All of those were results,” Sophie said.

“Of instant rice?” Amelia asked.

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

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

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

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

“Amelia,” Gram said.

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

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

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

“Yes,” Sophie said.

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

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

“Oh, for godsake,” Amelia said.

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

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

“What do I think?” Amelia asked.

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

“So why didn’t you marry again?”

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

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

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

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

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

Amelia sighed. The reasons for that could be a hundred fold. It might simply be that Sophie’s group of clients were self-selecting for the desire to make their marriages work. It might be that they were a statistical anomaly.

It might even be that the superstitions and her wardings worked.

Amelia didn’t care. She wasn’t going to follow dumb superstitions, and she wasn’t going to listen to a woman who hadn’t made a good marriage herself.

“I’d like to leave, Gram,” she said, and headed for the door. When she reached it, she turned and saw Gram give Sophie an envelope. Gram was apologizing for Amelia’s rudeness as Amelia left.

Amelia went down the cracked stoop to the gravel drive. Birds flying overhead, going to the Horicon Marsh, cawed. A slight breeze blew over her, and it blew away the stale air from the interior of the house. She had never acted like that around Gram before. In fact, she rarely lost her temper at all. But she didn’t like the pap this woman had been serving, and she couldn’t remain silent about it.

Somehow, the silence made her feel as if she were perpetuating the beliefs.

And she couldn’t. She couldn’t change her plans no matter how much Gram wanted it. This was Amelia’s wedding, the one she was planning with Scott. And it was her marriage, with Scott. And it was up to them to make it work. If they failed, she didn’t want to hire Sophie to scan their wedding pictures. Amelia wanted a real human accounting, a way of knowing where she and Scott had gone wrong.

The door closed behind her. She cringed, then turned. Gram was walking alone down the short sidewalk. She was clutching her purse to her chest. “I’d like you to drive,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Gram,” Amelia said as she started across the gravel.

“Don’t be,” Gram said. “This had the desired effect.”

Amelia stopped. “What do you mean?”

“You won’t talk to me,” Gram said. “You let me blather, and you smile and say, ‘Yes Gram’ as if I’ve already gone senile. Well, I haven’t. And you made a terrible marriage the last time, even though you’re not willing to admit it, and I didn’t want you to make a terrible marriage this time.”

“Sophie’s ideas are not what I need,” Amelia said.

“I know, and thank God for that,” Gram said.

The breeze blew Amelia’s hair in her face. She brushed it back with her left hand. “I thought you believed Sophie.”

“Oh, I think she has a valuable talent. I think she has the ability to make people see their future marriages clearly. I think if I had brought you here when you were going to marry Ralph, you would have decided to call off the wedding.”

“So you don’t buy this blue thing, this bird seed stuff.”

“No,” Gram said. “I wore black when I married Willard, or don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” Amelia said. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“It means,” Gram said, “that you’re sad about the wedding, maybe even that you’re doing it against your will.”

“But you loved Willard.”

“Of course I loved Willard.”

“And you were the happiest I ever saw you that day.”

“Of course I was,” Gram said.

“Then that just proves that Sophie’s wrong.”

“No,” Gram said.

“No?” Amelia asked.

“No,” Gram repeated. “It means that when I came to see Sophie and we discussed the wedding, I realized how much I wanted my marriage to be successful, and how hard I was willing to work to make it go that way. Which, if you’ll recall that little speech you gave us in there, is exactly what you said about Scott.”

Amelia turned slightly so that her hair wouldn’t keep blowing in her face. “You could have just asked me.”

“I did,” Gram said. “You always told me that he was a nice man and I shouldn’t worry, which is exactly what you said about whatshisname.”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph,” Gram said and shook her head. “How you could marry a name like that, I’ll never know.”

“Don’t start, Gram.”

Gram shrugged and walked to the car. Amelia hurried behind her. Gram climbed into the passenger seat and stuck the keys in the ignition. Amelia slid into the driver’s side.

“You mean you went through this whole charade just to learn if I loved Scott and would work on our marriage?”

“Yes,” Gram said.

“Why?”

“You mean besides the fact that I love you and want only the best for you?”

“That goes without saying, Gram,” Amelia said. She pushed the seat back so that her knees weren’t crammed into the steering wheel.

“Well,” Gram said, “it’s because you’re nearly forty. If I had married Willard when I was forty—and I knew him then—we would have had thirty wonderful years together instead of five. Five simply wasn’t enough. Thirty wouldn’t have been either, but it would have been better—”

Her voice broke. Amelia put her arm around Gram’s shoulder and pulled her close. “All I wanted,” Gram said against Amelia’s collarbone, “is to make sure you have a Willard in your life. Every girl deserves at least one.”

“I do, Gram,” Amelia said softly.

“I know that now,” Gram said. She pushed away and dabbed at her eyes with her thumb. “Will you drive? I have bridge club at seven.”

“Sure, Gram,” Amelia said.

She turned the key and the car started, its motor humming. She took a deep breath.

“Gram,” she said. “Thanks. No one has ever given me a gift like this.”

“What gift?” Gram asked.

Amelia turned slightly in her seat. “I thought you said this was a present.”

“The visit was and you didn’t want it.”

“But you gave it to me anyway.”

“You shouldn’t thank me for something you didn’t want.”

Amelia frowned. “But it turned out all right.”

“Well, it did, but that’s no reason to thank me.” Gram pushed a button on the door, and her window came down, letting in that errant breeze.

“Why not?”

“It worked because of you, my girl,” Gram said. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Amelia stared at her for a moment, still uncertain about what to make of her Grandmother, even though they’d been close her entire life.

“I suppose you and Scott will want to visit me,” Gram said, eyes still closed.

“Of course,” Amelia said.

“Regularly,” Gram said.

“Yes,” Amelia said.

Gram sighed. “Then I’ll have to move.”

“Why?”

“Or raise my chandelier. Which will be cheaper, do you think?”

Amelia put the car into reverse. “Raising your chandelier.”

“Good,” Gram said. “I rather like the house.” She opened her eyes. “I think you should let me drive.”

“No, Gram,” Amelia said.

“Then get us out on the highway, my girl,” Gram said. “Time’s wasting. You young people never understand how important these small moments are.”

Amelia grinned. “I think we do, Gram,” she said. “I think we do.”

 

___________________________________________

“Something Blue” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Something Blue

Copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW, June, 1998
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2018 by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © inarik | Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

A late start this morning, sorry.

Many of you mentioned wanting an art book. From Candice Slater:

I am humbled by the BDH’s support. Their ongoing encouragement brings me great joy.  I fully intend to research future print options, but can make no specific promises as yet due to my lack of knowledge in this area.

If Candice decides to do a calendar or an art book, you will be the first to know, because we will announce it right here.

“What the hell was that?”

Bear panted at me.

“I said stay. I know you know what stay means. I didn’t say run into the fight and bite the giant wasp.”

Bear looked completely unrepentant.

“You’re a butthole. That’s your name from now on. Bear Butthole Moore.”

Butthole padded over to me and sat with a big canine grin on her face.

“What are you so happy about? I’m mad at you. At least have the decency to look embarrassed.”

Bear twitched her ears. Bear and decency clearly had nothing to do with each other.

I looked up. And forgot to breathe. Above me, the chamber climbed to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, expanding into a wider space. Long spiral ledges of something that looked like paper wrapped around the perimeter of the cavern, and between them huge luminous crystals glowed with pale yellow light. Far above, at the very top, a cluster of paper tubes hung together, some sealed with pale paper caps, others empty, their edges ragged. It was like standing inside a gargantuan conch shell, and it felt otherworldly, like a cathedral.

Regret pinched me. I destroyed this.

Yes, it was beautiful, but the spider herders deserved to harvest their eggs in peace, and I needed to get home. I had to get the coral egg and get out.

“Come on, Butthole. Let’s find what we are looking for.”

The ledges were paper, but they were the sturdiest paper I had ever seen. It had no problem supporting my weight. First, I walked up the ledges to the top, severed the cluster of pupae and let it fall to the ground. I didn’t need any more worker wasps hatching while I rummaged around their house. Then I searched the nest top to bottom.

I found the stolen spider eggs glued to the walls still in their web cocoons. Each egg had a bunch of blue coconut-sized spheres by it – the wasp egg sacks containing larva. In some places, the sacks had hatched into fat three-foot-long grubs resembling maggots and were feeding on the spider eggs.

The lifecycle was clear. The wasps stole the spider eggs and left them for their young. Once the wasp larvae hatched, they would eat the spider eggs and grow until they formed a pupa and finally matured into adults. The spiders weren’t the nest’s only prey.  I found three stalker corpses and bodies of four goat-like animals the size of a small deer, all glued with that same rough paper near the egg sacs.

Most of the spider eggs were empty or dark. I destroyed any wasp sacks or larva I came across.

The coral egg had been hidden away near the top of the nest, in a curve of the chamber, with a single egg sack attached to the wall next to it. Perhaps food for the new queen. I killed the wasp egg and gently removed the spider egg from the wall. It was smaller than the others, more like a soccer ball than a beach ball, and it felt warm and surprisingly light. I focused on it, activating my talent. A tiny life slept within, safe in a shell of nurturing liquid.

Oh.

The cream eggs came from the spiders. This one didn’t. This was one of them, a baby spider herder. A creature of an alien civilization, not just a sentient or a sapient, but a sophont not born on Earth.

I sat down and looked at it. A child separated from its parents, stolen to become wasp food and be devoured by grubs before its first moment of awareness.

It was so much.

For millennia, humans were terrified of being eaten. It was the most primal of our fears.  It drove our progress and our relentless pursuit of technology. We conquered the planet to keep our children safe from the predators that roamed in the night. We thought we put this anachronistic horror behind us. And then the gates appeared, and the ancient fear came roaring back. Once again, we were scared that monsters would appear and devour our children, and all of our weapons and all of our progress would do nothing to stop it.

I hugged the egg gently and stayed like that until the inner storm passed inside me. I would get back to my children. And I would return this child back to its family.

In total I found five spider eggs that were still glowing, including the coral one. Now, I had to get them out and get down to the bottom of the cavern without getting killed. I needed a rope.

Well, there was a lot of spider silk around.

I cut a tendril of the spider thread from one of the hollowed-out cocoons on the wall and pulled on it. It came loose, dragging chunks of wasp paper with it. It was about the width of a thick thread and feather-light.

I flexed. 1.8 mm in diameter, slightly thinner than cooking twine. Wow. The tensile strength was off the charts. 

I weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds before the breach. I checked my weight regularly. The DDC gym had an abundance of scales. The DDC monitored all government-employed gate divers for any unusual changes. They checked weight and height every three months, bloodwork every six.

I focused on myself. One hundred and fifty-one pounds. A six-pound weight loss. As I suspected, all that healing and fighting came with a price. This tiny strand of spider silk would hold ten times my weight. The eggs weren’t heavy, only large. That just left Bear.

I glanced at the dog and froze.

Ninety-four pounds.

That couldn’t possibly be right. I had checked her before and she was at eighty-two pounds. She had gained 12 lbs. It wasn’t possible. Even if my sense of time was completely off and we’d been in the breach for a week, a dog couldn’t just gain twelve pounds in seven days.

“Bear, come here, girl.”

The shepherd trotted over. I ran my hand over her body, feeling her flanks and back under the fur. There wasn’t much fat there, quite the opposite. She was on the leaner side. Judging by feel alone, she could use a few more meals.

I tried to recall her general dimensions, and they popped into my head from memory.

Bear was two inches taller and three inches longer.

I struggled to process it. She was taller and longer, which meant her bones elongated. Growing that fast should have put a huge strain on her body. 

It had to be stalker regeneration. She’d been eating every chance she got, and her new accelerated healing must’ve been putting these calories into her growth.

I flexed again, focusing in on her, looking for any abnormalities. Perfectly healthy. Nothing strange. Just a very large dog. Also, her harness was on too tight.

I loosened the belts as much as I could. I would need the harness to get her down to the floor of the cavern, but once we cleared that hurdle – assuming we survived – I would have to take it off. It was already pinching her body. If she got any bigger, it would hurt her.

There was nothing I could do about Bear’s explosive growth. It was what it was. One thing for certain, I needed to feed her better. If she was growing, she would need more calories. The next time we downed a stalker or maybe one of those goat things, I would let her eat all she wanted.

For now, I had to concentrate on making a rope. The twine-sized spider silk would hold my weight, but it would also cut my hands. I had to make it thicker and figure out some way to shield my fingers.

I pulled on the silk, and it came loose. If my luck held, it would be one long rope, and I had a lot of cocoons to work with.

#

The rope took a lot longer than expected. I must’ve been at it for about three hours, but in the end, I didn’t just have a rope. I had two, braided together from several lengths of the spider twine. I also made a net sack into which I loaded the spider eggs, all but the coral one. That one would come down with me. I pried a paper cap off the cluster of tubes I had dropped to the ground. It was thick like canvas, but flexible, and I managed to work it into a crude sack. I put the coral egg into it and secured it with Bear’s leash.

Bear trotted out of the cave and came back in. She started doing it a few minutes after I began working on the rope. I read somewhere that German Shepherds liked to patrol. Nothing could get onto the ledge from below and if something came in from the tunnel, we could hold it off here in the nest, so if patrolling made her feel better, there was no reason to keep her from it.

I coiled my ropes and walked onto the ledge. Below us, about one hundred yards away, the spider herders blocked the floor of the cavern. There were seven of them and behind them massive white spiders splattered with black loomed at least twenty feet high.

Okay then. This altered things.

Bear stared at the spider army and let out a quiet woof.

“Yes. I see.”

I went back inside the cave, grabbed the queen’s head, and dragged it toward the gap.  It barely fit, but finally I managed to push it through. I grabbed it and strained. The head was surprisingly light. I jerked it up above my head.

Look, I killed your enemy.

The spider herders watched, impassive.

I hurled the queen’s head off the cliff. It smashed onto the rocks below.

No reaction. Not exactly promising. I’d hoped for a cheer.

I picked up my ropes and walked along the ledge away from the flowers. Bear trotted after me.

We cleared the blossoms. I picked a large boulder, tied one rope around it, secured the other rope around a different chunk of stone and went back to the wasp nest to get the eggs. When I came back, the spider herders had moved directly below my ropes, arranged in a perfect crescent, with the monstrous spiders behind them.

I flexed. Some pollen had gotten on the eggs in the net sack. I waved my hands over it, trying to clean them. The pollen was featherlight, and after a couple of minutes most of it was off. I tied the rope to the net sack containing the four regular eggs, tied the other end of it around a rock, and held the sack above the drop.

Still no reaction.

I gently lowered the sack down. The rope was long enough. The trick was to keep from bumping the eggs against the cliff wall.

Nice and slow.

A spider herder stepped forward. I lowered the sack into their arms. The herder sliced at the rope with their hand, cutting the net sack free. There was no tug, no pull. One moment the weight of the eggs was on the rope and the next it vanished. The spider herder moved to the back with their prize, and I pulled the rope back up.

I still had the coral egg, Bear, and myself.

Bear would have to be next. I looped the rope around the rock three more times, then wrapped it around her, threading it through her harness. 

“You will be okay, girl. I’ll be right down.”

I took a deep breath and gently lowered Bear off a cliff, supporting her weight with my arms. When she was about three feet down, I backed up, strung the rope over my shoulders, and began to let it out, little by little, foot by foot, going as slowly as I could. If I was the old me, there was no way I could’ve done it. She would’ve been too heavy.

I ran out of rope and looked down. I’d calculated correctly. Bear was hanging about six feet off the ground. Letting her down all the way would’ve been a dangerous gamble.  Bear was smart but she was a dog. There was no telling what she would do when facing giant spiders and weird looking beings. She could wait for me like a good girl, or she could decide it was biting time and get herself killed. Leaving her hanging was the safest choice. The spider herders made no move toward her and if the rope snapped and she fell, she wouldn’t get injured.

It was my turn. I hung the sack with the last egg around my neck, threading one arm through so Bear’s leash crossed my chest. The egg was now on my back in the sack. I grabbed the second rope. I had never rappelled off anything in my life. Hell of a way to start learning.

It was easier than I thought. The first time I had pushed off a little too hard, but by the fourth bump I got the hang of it.

Push.

Push.

Push.

My feet met the solid ground. I let go of the rope and turned around. The spider herders stood motionless. They were almost eight feet tall, and they towered over me, menacing and silent, their faces hidden behind veils. Only the eyes were visible, two of them per face, large, narrow, with a strange-looking white iris on a solid black sclera that didn’t seem the least bit insectoid.

I lifted my paper sack off my back, pulled the paper open, and held the coral egg out.

“Bekh-razz.” My voice sounded ragged.

The spider herder in the center stepped forward. I’d flexed. My talent slid over the spider herder, and I knew he was male and the staff in his hand, with the symbols etched into its shaft, meant he was in charge of this cluster.

The herder’s robe stirred softly, as he moved and I realized that the humanoid shape was an illusion. The top half of him, the upright half, seemed human. His arms, unnaturally white, were long and thin, and his hands had six segmented fingers, each tipped with a black claw. He seemed to float forward rather than walk, and as he moved, I glimpsed the outline of four segmented legs underneath the pale silk.

Soft voice issued forth from the spider herder. “Horsun, gehr tirr did sembadzer.”

Something inside me recognized this language. The steady cadence sounded so familiar. I knew the words but their meaning kept avoiding me, as if I was trying to hold on to slippery, wet mud.

“Dzerhen tam dzal lukr tuhta gef.”

I used to speak this. Long time ago.  I just forgot how… No, wait, it wasn’t me.

“…Dzer lohr dzal, Sadrin.”

Me. I was Sadrin. That was more than a name. It was an occupation… no, a purpose. This was my goal in life. It was why I existed. The core of my… The understanding slipped away from me, and I almost growled out of sheer frustration. So close.

Something tore in my mind like a piece of paper and suddenly some of the clicks and odd syllables made sense.

“…  hyrt argadi…”

Daughter. Argadi meant daughter. I saved a female child.

“…Argadi dzal to na yen sah-dejjit…”

Sah-dejjit. Friend. They considered me a friend.

“Dzer meq dzal bekh-razz danur. Bekh-razz danir.”

Safe passage for now and forever. Oh.

The spider herder pointed at my left arm. I stepped forward and held it out. The light on his staff flared into a needle-thin orange beam and hit my arm. Pain lashed me. I grit my teeth.

The light died. A narrow scar marked my arm, twisting into a flowing symbol. My talent focused on it.

The vision burst in my mind. Groups of spider herders, one after another, different landscapes, different times, all nodding and parting to let me pass. I had been given a great, rare honor.

The words formed on my lips on their own.

“Adaren kullnemeq, Sindra-ron. Sadrin issun tanil danir.”

Thank you for the priceless gift, children of Sindra. I shall be forever grateful.

The spider herders moved aside, and the sea of spiders behind them parted before me.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 8, Part 1 and 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

The title speaks for itself. These are recent epiphanies I’ve had. Some are profound others less so. Enjoy.

Last weekend, at ConCarolinas, I was honored with the Polaris Award, which is given each year by the folks at Falstaff Books to a professional who has served the community and industry by mentoring young writers (young career-wise, not necessarily age-wise). I was humbled and deeply grateful. And later, it occurred to me that early in my career, I would probably have preferred a “more prestigious” award that somehow, subjectively, declared my latest novel or story “the best.” Not now. Not with this. I was, essentially, being recognized for being a good person, someone who takes time to help others. What could possibly be better than that?

Nancy and I recently went back to our old home in Tennessee for the wedding of the son of dear, dear friends. Ahead of the weekend, I was feeling a bit uneasy about returning there. By the time we left last fall, we had come to feel a bit alienated from the place, and we were constantly confronting memories of Alex — everywhere we turned, we found reminders of her. But upon arriving there this spring, I recognized that I had control over who and what I saw and did and even recalled. I avoided places that were too steeped in hard memories. I never went near our old house — I didn’t want to see it if it looked exactly the same, and I really didn’t want to see it if the new owners made a ton of changes! But most of all, I took care of myself and thus prevented the anxieties I’d harbored ahead of time from ruining what turned out to be a fun visit. I may suffer from anxiety, but I am not necessarily subject to it. I am, finally, at an advanced age, learning to take care of myself.

Even if I do not make it to “genius” on the Spelling Bee AND solve the Mini AND the Crossword AND Wordle AND Connections AND Strands each day, the world will still continue to turn. Yep. It’s true.

I do not know when or if I will ever write another word of fiction. But when and if I do, it will be because I want to, because I have a story I need to tell, something that I am certain I will love. Which is as it should be.

The lyric is, “She’s got electric boots/A mohair suit/You know I read it in a magazine.” Honest to God.

I am never going to play center field for the Yankees. I am never going to appear on a concert stage with any of my rock ‘n roll heroes. I am never going to be six feet tall. Or anywhere near it. All of this may seem laughably obvious. Honestly, it IS laughably obvious. But the dreams of our childhood and adolescence die hard. And the truth is, even as we age, we never stop feeling like the “ourself” we met when we were young.

Grief is an alloy forged of loss and memory and love. The stronger the love, and the greater the loss, and the more poignant the memories, the more powerful the grief. Loss sucks, but grief is as precious as the rarest metals — as precious as love and memory.

As a student of U.S. History — a holder of a doctorate in the field — I always assumed that our system of government, for all its obvious flaws and blind spots, was durable and strong. I believed that if it could survive the War of 1812 and the natural growing pains of an early republic, if it could emerge alive, despite its wounds, from Civil War and Reconstruction, if it could weather the stains of McCarthyism and Vietnam and Watergate, it could survive anything. I was terribly wrong. As it turns out, our Constitutional Republic is only as secure as the good intentions of its principle actors. Checks and balances, separation of powers, the norms of civil governance — they are completely dependent on the willingness of those engaged in governing to follow historical norms. Elect people who are driven not by patriotism but by greed and vengeance, bigotry and arrogance, unbridled ego and an insatiable hunger for power, and our republic turns out to be as brittle as centuries-old paper, as ephemeral as false promises, as fragile as life itself.

I think the legalization of weed is a good thing. Legal penalties for use and possession were (and, in some states, still are) grossly disproportionate to the crime, and they usually fell/fall most heavily on people of color and those without the financial resources necessary to defend themselves. So, it’s really a very, very good thing. But let’s be honest: Part of the fun of getting high used to be the knowledge that we were doing something forbidden, something that put us on the wrong side of the law. It allowed otherwise well-behaved kids to feel like they (we) were edgy and daring. There’s a small part of me that misses that. Though it’s not enough to make me move back to Tennessee….

I’ll stop there for today. Perhaps I’ll revisit this idea in future posts.

In the meantime, have a great week.

I control the tunnel, all will love me and despair!

Dude, drama much?

Tunnel shmunnel, ruling the stair is real power.

Sure, let’s go with that. Wake me when it makes a difference.

DIE FEATHERY NEMESIS! DIE!

Hi, everyone

As you may have noticed, I have been having some problems with this blog. My antivirus software keeps sending alerts, suggesting a phishing scam, and I am not the only one having these problems. The helpdesk insists there is nothing wrong on their end, and while I have reported it to Norton as a false positive so far they haven’t cleared it or confirmed what is actually wrong. I’ve only been able to get into the blog through iPad, which isn’t much good for editing, and the WordPress app.

I’m hoping to get this problem fixed, but so far no luck.

Accordingly, I have opened a Substack (link below) and I have tried to transfer the mailing list from the blog to Substack. Hopefully, if you were subscribed, you should be able to receive emails from Substack without any further problems. If you weren’t subscribed, please take this opportunity to sign up.

https://chrisnuttall.substack.com/

I need to say at this point that I cannot guarantee any paid-subscribers content only. I don’t feel confident in my ability to maintain a steady stream of posting to justify charging access – I have thought about offering draft chapters to subscribers, but they won’t have been edited let alone fixed, so I’m reluctant to do it. If you do take a paid subscription, you are supporting me but you are not necessarily getting anything in return.

(On the plus side, you will help keep me writing.)

Depending on what happens, I may try to keep this blog updated. I still get comments via email even if I can’t see them on the browser. However, I have no idea how that will work out.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you on my new Substack.

Christopher Nuttall

PS – upcoming …

You know it’s a really good sign that a typically boring entities such as a corporation is really interesting and informative when Drucraft is involved! Can’t wait to see next’s week on The United States and presumably other countries or international Megacorps!

Quick question both here and in Book One there have been mentioned of factions in the US and the UK Board, are they as organized as the Light Council factions in Alex Verus? Or are they more informal such as specific Houses or Corporations being aligned on an issue that effect how the sell their sigls?