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Here’s a promo video for Vesper’s Polish translation of Stinger that was posted by mroczne_strony!

https://www.robertmccammon.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/mroczne_strony_602a2ada705b4af4bbbc4044882c789e.mp4

House Andrews are deep in the editing cave for Maggie. How deep? They shared an update yesterday on Facebook:

A lot of work, but of course what we take from it is a very chalant OMG OMG OVER EIGHT HUNDRED PAGEEEEES! WE SHALL DEVOUR!

No? Just me? Hehe.

But that takes a lot of effort. I am their herald today, conveying their apologies that they will not have time for a Wednesday post.

Instead, I’d like to ask you something I’ve been curious about: what do you do in your every day life to add a bit of whimsy to it?

This was a post a while ago on TikTok and I’ve had the most lighthearted few moments reading the comments. For example, someone shared that they meow songs to their cats “so they can hear the lyrics in their own language“. Others that they “put on pyjama sets the night of fresh sheets, so they can have ‘fancy sleep’” or “when it’s time to wash the dishes, I tell them it’s bath time“.

I realised I’ve been doing this since I was a child: whenever there’s a storm out, I fling out my hands (dramatically, of course) and call out “WINDS!” and when the wind intensifies, I feel like a powerful witch. Nowadays, I also look expectantly at Mr Mod R until he acts impressed with my magical powers.

So, what are the small things you do that are perhaps silly, but bring you a bit of joy in a world where it’s increasingly hard to find some?

The post Busy, busy first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This is the full cover dust jacket for the hardcover of Heir of Light. I would have posted it when I posted the paperback full cover, but I just received it today, so I’m posting it now. The text should be the same on the cover flap as it is on the trade paperback. And now I’m going back to the joy of copy-edit reviews for Wild Road >.<.

Pita Cardenas finds herself with the toughest case of her career. The only attorney in the small town of Rio Gordo, she decides to fight the biggest railroad company in the state to get compensation for the widow of a man who might have raced a train.

Everyone thinks the man guilty. Even Pita believes that. But the truth, once discovered, proves far more complicated that Pita could have imagined.

Another powerful and haunting mystery story by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Discovery” was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Short Story.

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

Discovery By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“OVER THERE.” Pita Cardenas waved a hand at the remaining empty spot on the floor of her office. The Federal Express deliveryman rested a hand on top of the stack of boxes on his handcart.

“I don’t think it’ll fit.”

It probably wouldn’t. Her office was about the size of the studio apartment she’d had when she went to law school in Albuquerque. She could have had a cubicle with more square footage if she’d taken the job that La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia offered her when she graduated from law school five years before.

But her mother had been dying, and had refused to leave Rio Gordo. So Pita had come back to the town she thought she’d escaped from, put out her shingle, and had gotten a handful of cases, enough to pay the rent on this sorry excuse for an office. If she’d wanted something bigger, she would have had to buy, and even at Rio Gordo’s depressed prices, she couldn’t afford payments on the most dilapidated building in town.

She stood up. The Fed Ex guy, who drove here every day from Lubbock, was looking at her with pity. He was trim and tanned, with a deep West Texas accent. If she had been less tired and overwhelmed, she would have flirted with him.

“Let’s put this batch in the bathroom,” she said and led the way through the rabbit path she’d made between the boxes. The Fed Ex guy followed, dragging the six boxes on his hand truck and probably chafing at the extra time she was costing him.

She opened the door. He put the boxes inside, tipped an imaginary hat to her, and left. She’d have to crawl over them to get to the toilet, but she’d manage.

Six boxes today, twenty yesterday, thirty the day before. Dwyer, Ralbotten, Seacur and Czolb was burying her in paper.

Of course, she had expected it. She was a solo practitioner in a town whose population probably didn’t equal the number of people who worked at DRS&C.

People had told her she was crazy to take this case. But she was crazy like an impoverished attorney. Every other firm in New Mexico had told her client, Nan Hughes, to settle. The problem was that Nan didn’t want to settle. Settling meant losing everything she owned.

Pita took the case and charged Nan two thousand dollars, with more due and owing when (if) the case went to trial. Pita didn’t plan on taking the case to trial. At trial, she wouldn’t just get creamed, she’d be pureed, sautéed and recycled.

But she did plan to work for that two grand. She would spend exactly one month filing motions, doing depositions, and listening to offers. She figured once she had actual numbers, she’d be able to convince Nan to take a deal.

If not, she’d resign and wish Nan luck finding a new attorney.

Her actions wouldn’t hurt Nan. Nan had a spectacular loser of a case. She was taking on the railroads and two major insurance companies. She had no idea how bad things could get.

Pita would show her. Nan wouldn’t exactly be happy with her lot—how could she be, when she’d lost her husband, her business, and her home on the same day?—but she would finally understand how impossible the winning was.

Pita was doing her a favor and making a little money besides.

And what was wrong with that?

***

At its heart, the case was simple. Ty Hughes tried to beat a train and failed. He survived long enough to leave his wife a voice mail message, which Pita had heard in all its heartbreaking slowness:

“Nan baby, I tried to beat it. I thought I could beat it.”

Then his diesel truck engine caught fire and he died, horribly alive, in the middle of the wreck.

The accident occurred on a long stretch of brown nothingness on the New Mexico side of the Texas/New Mexico border. A major highway ran a half mile parallel to the tracks. On the opposite side of the tracks stood the Hughes ranch and all its outbuildings.

Nan Hughes and the people who worked her spread watched the accident. She didn’t answer her cell because she’d left it on the kitchen counter in her panic to get down the dirt road where her husband’s cattle truck had been demolished by a fast-moving train.

And not just any train.

This train pulled dozens of oil tankers.

It was a miracle the truck engine fire hadn’t spread to the tankers and the entire region hadn’t exploded into one great fireball.

Pita had been familiar with the case long before Nan Hughes came to her. For weeks, the news carried stories about dead cattle along the highway, the devastated widow, the ruined ranch, and the angry railroad officials who had choice (and often bleeped) words about the idiots who tried to race trains.

It didn’t matter that the crossing was unmarked. Even if Ty hadn’t left that confession on Nan’s voice mail (which she had deleted but which the cell company was so thoughtfully able to retrieve), trains in this part of the country were visible for miles in either direction.

The railroads wanted the ranch, the cattle (what was left of them), the life insurance money, and millions from the ranch’s liability insurance. The liability insurance company was willing to settle for a simple million, and the other law firms had told Nan to sell the ranch, and pay the railroads from the proceeds. That way she could live on Ty’s life insurance and move away from the site of the disaster.

But Nan kept saying that Ty would haunt her if she gave in. That he had never raced a train in his life. That he knew how far away a train was by its appearance against the horizon—and that he had taught her the same trick.

When Pita gently asked why Ty had confessed to trying to beat the train, Nan had burst into tears.

“Something went wrong,” she said. “Maybe he got stuck. Maybe he hadn’t looked up. He was in shock. He was dying. He was just trying to talk to me one last time.”

Pita could hear any good lawyer tear that argument to shreds, just using Ty’s wording. If Ty wanted to talk with her, why hadn’t he told her he loved her? Why had he talked about the train?

Pita had gently asked that too. Nan had looked at her from across the desk, her wet cheeks chapped from all the tears she’d shed.

“He knew I saw what happened. He wanted me to know he never would have done that to me on purpose.”

In this context, “on purpose” had a lot of different definitions. Ty Hughes probably didn’t want his wife to see him die in a train wreck, certainly not in a train wreck he caused. But he had crossed a railroad track with a double-decker cattle truck filled carrying two hundred head. He had no acceleration, and no maneuverability.

He’d taken a gamble, and he’d lost.

At least, Nan hadn’t seen the fire in the cab. The truck had flipped over the train, landing on the highway side of the tracks, and had been impossible to see from the ranch side. Whatever Ty Hughes’s last few minutes had looked like, Nan had missed them.

She had only her imagination, her anger at the railroads, and her unshakeable faith in her dead husband.

Those were not enough to win a case of this magnitude.

If someone asked Pita what her case really was (and if this imaginary someone could get her to answer honestly), what she’d say was that she was going to try Ty Hughes before his wife, and show her how impossible a defense of the man’s actions that morning would be in court.

And Pita believed her own powers of persuasion were enough to convince her jury of one to settle.

***

But the boxes were daunting. In them were bits and pieces of information, reproduced letters and memos that probably showed some kind of railroad duplicity, however minor. A blot on an engineer’s record, for example, or an accident at that same crossing twenty years before.

If Pita had the support of a giant law firm like La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia, she might actually delve into that material. Instead, she let it stack up like unread novels in the home of an obsessive compulsive.

The only thing she did do was take out the witness list, which had come in its own envelope as part of court-ordered discovery. The list had the witnesses’ names along with their addresses, phone numbers, and the dates of their depositions. DRS&C was so thorough that each witness had a single line notation at the bottom of the cover sheet describing the reason the witness had been deposed in this case.

The list would help Pita in her quest to recreate the accident itself. She had dozens of questions. Had someone inspected the truck to see if it malfunctioned at the time of the accident? Why had Ty stayed in the truck when it was clear that it was going to catch fire? How badly had he been injured? How good was Ty’s eyesight? And how come no one helped him before the truck caught fire?

She was going to cover all her bases. All she needed was one argument strong enough to let Nan keep the house.

She was afraid she might not even find that.

DRS&C’s categories were pretty straightforward. They had categories for the ranch, the railroad, and the eyewitnesses.

A number of the witnesses belonged to separate lawsuits, started because of the fender benders on the nearby highway. About a dozen cars had damage—some while they were stopped beside the road, and others because they’d been going too fast to stop when the train accident occurred.

Pita started charting the location of the cars as she figured this category out, and realized all of them had been in the far inside lane, going east. People who had pulled over to help Ty and the railroad employees had instead been dealing with accidents involving their own cars.

A separate group of accident victims had resolved insurance claims: their vehicles had been hit or had hit a cow that had escaped from the cattle truck. One poor man had had his SUV gored by an enraged bull.

Cars heading west had had an easier time of things. None had hit each other and a few had stopped. Of those who had stopped, some were listed as 911 callers. One had grabbed a fire extinguisher and eventually tried to put out the truck cab fire. That person had prevented the fire from spreading to the tankers.

But the category that caught Pita’s attention was a simple one. Several people on the list had been marked “Witness,” with no accompanying explanation.

One had an extra long zip code, and as she entered it into her own computer data base, she realized that the last three digits weren’t part of the zip code at all.

They were a previous notation, one that hadn’t been deleted.

Originally, this witness had been in the 911 category.

She decided to start with him.

***

C.P. Williams was a Texas financier of the Houston variety, even though his offices were in Lubbock. He wore cowboy boots, but they were custom made, hand-tooled jobbies that wouldn’t last fifteen minutes on a real ranch. He had an oversized silver belt buckle and he wore a bolo tie, but his shiny suit was definitely not off the rack and neither was the silk shirt underneath it. His cufflinks matched his belt buckle and he twisted them as he led Pita into his office.

“I already gave a deposition,” he said.

“Before I was on the case,” Pita said.

His office was big, with original oil paintings of the Texas Hill Country, and a large but not particularly pretty view of downtown Lubbock.

“Can’t you just read it?” He slipped behind a custom-made desk. The chair in front was made of hand-tooled leather that made her think of his impractical boots.

She sat down. The leather pattern bit through the thin pants of her best suit.

“I have a few questions of my own.” She took out a small tape recorder. “I may have to call you in for a second deposition, but I hope not.”

Mostly because she would have to rent space as well as a court reporter in order to conduct that deposition. Right now, she simply wanted to see if any testimony was worth the extra cost.

“I don’t have that much time. I barely have enough time to see you now.” He glanced at his watch for emphasis.

She clicked on the recorder. “Then let’s do this quickly. Please state your name and occupation for the record.”

He did.

When he finished, she said, “On the morning of the accident—”

“I never saw that damn accident,” he said. “I told the other lawyers that.”

She was surprised. Why had they talked with him then? She was interviewing blind. So she went with the one fact she knew.

“You called 911. Why?”

“Because of the train,” he said.

“What about the train?”

“Damn thing was going twice as fast as it should have been.”

For the first time since she’d taken this case, she finally felt a flicker of real interest. “Trains speed?”

“Of course trains speed,” he said. “But this one wasn’t just speeding. It was going well over a hundred miles an hour.”

“You know that because…?”

“I was going 70. It passed me. I had nothing else to do, so I figured out the rate of passage. Speed limits for trains on that section of track is 65. Most weeks, the trains match me, or drop back just a bit. This one was leaving me in the dust.”

She was leaning forward. If the train was speeding—and if she could prove it—then the accident wasn’t Ty’s fault alone. He wouldn’t have been able to judge how fast the train was going. And if it was going twice as fast as usual, it would have reached him two times quicker than he expected.

“So why call 911?” she asked. “What can they do?”

“Not damn thing,” he said. “I just wanted it on record when the train derailed or blew through a crossing or hit some kid on the way to school.”

“You could have contacted the railroad or maybe the NTSB,” she said. “They could have fined the operators or pulled the engineers off the train.”

“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

“Because I wanted the record.”

And because he repeated that sentence, she felt a slight shiver. “Have you done this before? Clocked trains going too fast, I mean.”

“Yeah.” He sounded surprised at the question. “So?”

“Do you call 911 on people speeding in cars?”

His eyes narrowed. “No.”

“So why do you call on trains?”

“I told you. The potential damage—”

“Did you contact the police after the accident, then?” she asked.

“No. It was already on record. They could find it. That attorney did.”

“I wouldn’t know how to compute how fast a train was going while I was driving,” she said. “I mean, if we were going the same speed or something close, sure. But not an extra thirty miles an hour or more. That’s quite a trick.”

“Simple math,” he said. “You had to do problems like that in school. We all did.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But it’s not something I would think to do. Why did you?”

For the first time, he looked down. He didn’t say anything.

“Do you have something against the railroad?” she asked.

His head shot up. “Now you sound like them.”

“Them?”

“Those other lawyers.”

She started to nod, but made herself stop. “What did they say?”

His lips thinned. “They said that I’m just making stuff up to get the railroad in trouble. They said that I’m pathetic. Me! I outearn half those walking suits. I make money every damn day, and I do it without investing in any land holdings or railroad companies. They have no idea who I am.”

Neither did she, really, but she thought she’d humor him.

“You’re a good citizen,” she said.

“Damn straight.”

“Trying to protect other citizens.”

“That’s right.”

“From the railroads.”

“They think they can run all over the countryside like they’re invulnerable. That train pulling oil tankers, imagine if it had derailed in that accident. You’d’ve heard the explosion in Rio Gordo.”

Probably seen it too. He had a point.

“Tell me,” she said. “Is there any way we can prove the train was going that fast?”

“The 911 call,” he said.

“Besides the 911 call,” she said.

He leaned back as he considered her question. “I’m sure a lot of people saw it. Or you could examine that truck. You know, it’s just basic physics. If you vary the speed of an incoming train in an impact with a similar truck frame, you’ll get differing results. I’m sure you can find some experts to testify.”

You could find experts to testify on anything. But she didn’t say that. She was curious about his expertise, though. He seemed to know a lot about trains.

She asked, “Wouldn’t a train derail at that speed when it hit a truck like that?”

“Actually, no. It would be less likely to derail when it was going too fast. That truck was a cattle truck, right? If the train hit the cattle car and not the cab, then the train would’ve treated that truck like tissue. Most cattle cars are made of aluminum. At over a hundred miles per hour, the train would have gone through it like paper.”

Interesting. She would check that.

“One last question, Mr. Williams. When did the railroad fire you?”

He blinked at her, stunned. She had caught him. That’s why DRS&C’s attorneys had called him pathetic. Because he had a reason for his train obsession.

A bad reason.

“That was a long time ago,” he whispered.

But she still might be able to use him if he had some kind of expertise. If his old job really did require that he clock trains by sight alone.

“What did you do for them?”

He coughed, then had the grace to finally meet her gaze. “I was a security guard at the station here in Lubbock.”

Security guard. Not an engineer, not anyone with special training. Just a guy with a phony badge and a gun.

“That’s when you learned to clock trains,” she said.

He smiled. “You have to do something to pass the time.”

She bit back her frustration. For a few minutes, he’d given her some hope. But all she had was a fired security guard with a grudge.

She wrapped up the interview as politely as she could, and headed into the bright Texas sunshine.

And allowed herself one small moment to wish that C.P. Williams had been a real witness, one that could have opened this case wide.

Then she sighed, and went back to preparing her case for her jury of one.

***

Most everyone else in the witness category on DRS&C’s list was either a rubbernecker or someone who had made a false 911 call. Pita had had no idea how many people reported a crime or an accident after seeing coverage of it on television, but she was starting to learn.

She was also learning why the police didn’t fine or arrest these people. Most of them were certifiably crazy.

Pita was beginning to think the list was worthless. Then she interviewed Earl Jessup Jr.

Jessup was a contractor who had been on his way to Lubbock to pick up a friend from the airport when he’d seen the accident. He’d pulled over, and because he was so well known in Rio Gordo, someone had remembered he was there.

When Pita arrived at his immaculate house in one of Rio Gordo’s failed housing developments, she promised herself she wouldn’t interview any more witnesses. Then Jessup pulled the door open. He smiled in recognition. So did she.

She had talked with him in the hospital cafeteria during her mother’s final surgery. He’d been there for his brother, who’d been in a particularly horrendous accident, and who had somehow managed to survive.

They hadn’t exchanged names.

He was a small man with brown hair in need of a good trim. His house smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and aftershave. The living room had been modified—lowered furniture, and wide paths cut through what had once been wall-to-wall carpet.

“Your brother moved in with you, huh?” she asked.

“He needed somebody,” Jessup said with a finality that closed the subject.

He led her into the kitchen. On the right side of the room, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls. A dishwasher peeked out of the debris. On the left were frames for lowered countertops. Only the sink, the stove and the refrigerator remained intact, like survivors in a war zone.

He pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table. The table was shorter than regulation height. An ashtray sat near the end of the table, but no chair. That had to be where his brother usually parked.

Pita pulled out her tape recorder and a notebook. She explained again why she was there, and asked Jessup to state some information for the record. She implied, as she had with all the others, that this informal conversation was as good as being under oath.

Jessup smiled as she went through her spiel. He seemed to know that his words would have no real bearing on the case unless he was giving a formal deposition.

“I didn’t see the accident,” he said. “I got there after.”

He’d missed the fender benders and the first wave of the injured cows. He’d pulled up just as the train stopped. He’d been the one to organize the scene. He’d sent two men east and two men west to slow traffic until the sheriff arrived.

He’d made sure people in the various accidents exchanged insurance information, and he got the folks who’d suffered minor bumps and bruises to the side of the road. He directed a couple of teenagers to keep an eye on the injured animals, and make sure none of them made for the road again.

Then he’d headed down the embankment toward the overturned truck.

“It wasn’t on fire yet?”

“No,” he said. “I have no idea how it got on fire.”

She frowned. “It overturned. It was leaking diesel and the engine was on.”

“So the fancy Dallas lawyers tell me,” he said.

“You don’t believe them?”

“First thing any good driver does after an accident is shut off his engine.”

“Maybe,” she said. “If he’s not in shock. Or seriously injured. Or both.”

“Ty had enough presence of mind to make that phone call.” Everyone in Rio Gordo knew about that call. Some even cursed it, thinking Nan could own the railroads if Ty hadn’t picked up his cell. “He would’ve shut off his engine.”

Pita wasn’t so sure.

“Besides, he wasn’t in the cab.”

That caught her attention. “How do you know?”

“I saw him. He was sitting on some debris halfway up the road. That’s why I was in no great hurry to get down there. He’d gotten himself out, and there wasn’t much I could do until the ambulance arrived.”

Jessup had a construction worker’s knowledge of injuries. He knew how to treat bruises and he knew what to do for trauma. He’d talked with her about that in the cafeteria, when he’d told her how helpless he’d felt coming on his brother’s car wrapped around a utility pole. He hadn’t been able to get his brother out of the car—the ambulance crew later used the jaws of life—and he was afraid his brother would bleed out right there.

“But you went to help Ty anyway,” Pita said.

Jessup got up, walked to the stove, and lifted up the coffee pot. He’d been brewing the old-fashioned way, in a percolator, probably because he didn’t have any counter space.

“Want some?” he asked.

“Please,” she said, thinking it might get him to talk.

He pulled two mugs out of the dishwasher, then set them on top of the stove. “I thought he was going to be fine.”

“You’re not a doctor. You don’t know.” She wasn’t acting like a lawyer now. She was acting like a friend, and she knew it.

He grabbed the pot, and poured coffee into both mugs. Then he brought them to the table.

“I did know,” he said. “I knew there was trouble, and I left.”

“Sounds like you did a lot before you left,” she said, trying to move him past this. She remembered long talks about his guilt over his brother’s accident. “Organizing the people, making sure Ty was okay. Seems to me that you did more than most.”

He shook his head.

“What else could you have done?” she asked.

“I could’ve gone down there and helped him,” he said. “If nothing else, I could’ve defended him against those men with guns.”

She went cold. Men with guns. She hadn’t heard about men with guns.

“Who had guns?” she asked.

He gave her a self-deprecating smile, apparently realizing how dramatic he had sounded. “Everyone has guns. This is the Texas-New Mexico border.”

He’d said too much, and he clearly wanted to backtrack. She wouldn’t let him.

“Not everyone uses them at the scene of an accident,” she said.

“If they’d’ve been smart, they might have. That bull was mighty scary.”

“Who had guns?” she asked.

He sighed, clearly knowing she wouldn’t back down. “The engineers. They carried their rifles out of the train.”

She raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say.

He seemed to think she didn’t believe him, so he went on. “I figured they were carrying the guns to shoot any livestock that got in their way. Made me want my gun. I’d been thinking about the accident, not a bunch of injured animals that weighed eight times what I did.”

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“It was a judgment call,” he said. “I was watching those engineers walk. With purpose.”

As she listened to Jessup recount the story, she realized the purpose had nothing to do with cattle. These men carried their rifles like they intended to use them. They weren’t looking at the carnage. After they’d finished inspecting the train for damage, they didn’t look at the train either.

Instead, they stared at Ty.

“For the entire two-mile walk?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessup said. “That’s when I decided not to stay. I thought Ty was going to be fine.”

He paused. She waited, knowing if she pushed him, he might not say any more.

Jessup ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that in situations like this tempers get out of hand. I couldn’t be the voice of reason. I might even get some of the blame.”

He wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. He hadn’t touched the liquid.

“Besides,” he said, “I could see Ty’s cowboys. They were riding around the train and heading toward the loose cattle near the highway. If things got ugly, they could help him. I headed back up the embankment, went to my truck, and drove on to Lubbock.”

“Then I don’t understand why this is bothering you,” she said. “You did as much as you could, and then you left it to others, the ones who needed to handle the problem.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I tell myself that.”

“But?”

He tilted his head, as if shaking some thoughts loose. “But a couple of things don’t make sense. Like why did Ty go back into the cab of that truck? And how come no one smelled the diesel? Wouldn’t it bother them so close to the oil tankers?”

She waited, watching him. He shrugged.

“And then there’s the nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” she asked.

“I get into my truck, and as I slam the door, I hear a gunshot. It’s half a second behind the sound of the door slamming, but it’s clear.”

“Did you really hear that?” she asked.

“I like to think if I did, I would’ve gone back. But I didn’t. I just drove away, like nothing had happened. And a friend of mine died.”

He didn’t say anything else. She took another sip of her coffee, careful not to set the mug to close to her recorder.

“No one else reported gunshots,” she said.

He nodded.

“No one else saw Ty outside that cab,” she said.

“He was in a gully. I was the only one who went down the embankment. You couldn’t see him from the road.”

“And the truck? Could you see it?”

He shook his head.

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and it’s driving me insane.”

***

It bothered her too, but not in quite the same way.

She found Jessup in DRS&C’s list of 911 nutcases. He’d been buried among the crazies, just like important information was probably hidden in the boxes that littered her office floor.

No one else had seen the angry engineers or Ty out of the truck, but no one could quite figure out how he’d made that cell phone call either. If he’d been sitting on some debris outside the cab, that made more sense than calling from inside, while bleeding, with the engine running and diesel dripping.

But Jessup was right. It raised some disturbing questions.

They bothered her, enough so that she called Nan on her cell phone during the drive back to her office.

“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report for Ty?” Pita asked.

“There was no autopsy,” Nan said. “It’s pretty clear how he died.”

Pita sighed. “What about the truck? What happened to it?”

“Last I saw, it was in Digger’s Salvage Yard.”

So Pita pulled into the salvage yard, and parked near a dented Toyota. Digger was a good ole boy who salvaged parts, and when he couldn’t, he used a crusher to demolish the vehicles into metal for scrap.

But he still had the cab of that truck—insurance wouldn’t release it until the case was settled.

For the first time, she looked at the cab herself, but couldn’t see anything except charred metal, a steel frame, and a ruined interior. She wasn’t an expert, and she needed one.

It took only a moment to call an old friend in Albuquerque who knew a good freelance forensic examiner. The examiner wanted $500 plus expenses to travel to Rio Gordo and look at the truck.

Pita hesitated. She could’ve – and should’ve – called Nan for the expense money.

But the examiner’s presence would raise Nan’s hopes. And right now, Pita couldn’t do that. She was trusting a man she’d met late night at the hospital, a man who talked her through her mother’s last illness, a man she couldn’t quite get enough distance from to examine his veracity.

She needed more than Jessup’s nightmares and speculations. She needed something that might pass for proof.

***

“I can’t tell you when it got there,” said the examiner, Walter Shepard. He was a slender man with intense eyes. He wore a plaid shirt despite the heat and tan trousers that had pilled from too many washings.

He was sitting in Pita’s office. She had moved some boxes aside so that the path into the office was wider. She’d also found a chair that had been buried since the case began.

He pushed some photographs onto her desk. The photographs were close-ups of the truck’s cab. He’d thoughtfully drawn an arrow next to the tiny hole in the door on the driver’s side.

“It’s definitely a bullet hole. It’s too smooth to be anything else,” he said. “And there’s another in the seat. I was able to recover part of a bullet.”

He shifted the photos so that she could see a shattered metal fragment.

“The problem is I can’t tell you anything else, except that the bullet holes predate the fire. I can’t tell you how long they were there or how they got there. They could be real old. Or brand new. I can’t tell.”

“That’s all right.” A bullet hole, along with Jessup’s testimony, was enough to cast doubt on everything. She felt like she could go to DRS&C and ask for a settlement.

She wasn’t even regretting that she hadn’t worked on contingency. This case was proving easier than she had thought it would be.

“I know you asked me to look for evidence of shooting or a fight,” Shepard said, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let it go at that. The anomaly here isn’t the bullets. It’s the fire itself.”

She looked up from the photos, surprised. Shepard wasn’t watching her. He was still studying the photographs. He put a finger on one of them.

“The diesel leaked. There’s runoff along the tank and a drip pattern that trails to the passenger side of the cab.”

The cab had landed on its passenger side.

“But the fire started here.” He was touching the photo of the interior of the cab. He pushed his finger against the image of the ruined seat. “See how the flames spread upwards. You can see the burn pattern. And fuel fed it. It burned around something—probably the body—so it looks to me like someone poured fuel onto the body itself and lit it on fire. I didn’t find a match, but I found the remains of a Bic lighter on the floor of the cab. It melted but it’s not burned the way everything else is. I think it was tossed in after the fire started.”

Pita was having trouble wrapping her mind around what he was saying. “You’re saying someone deliberately started the fire? So close to oil tankers?”

“I think that someone knew the truck wouldn’t explode. The fire was pretty contained.”

“Some people from the highway had a fire extinguisher in their car. It was too late to save Ty.”

“You’ll want your examiner to look at the body again,” Shepard said. “I have a hunch you’ll find that your client’s husband was dead before he burned, not after.”

“Based on this pattern.”

“A man doesn’t sit calmly and let himself burn to death,” Shepard said. “He was able to make a phone call. He was conscious. He would have tried to get out of that cab. He didn’t.”

Pita was shaking. If this was true, then this case went way beyond a simple accident. If this was true, then those engineers shot Ty and tried to cover it up.

Ballsy, considering how close to the road they had been.

But the other drivers had been preoccupied with their own accidents and the injured cows and stopping traffic. No one except Jessup had even tried to come down the embankment.

And the engineers, who drove the route a lot, would have known how hard that truck was to see from the road.

They would have figured that the burning cab would get put out once someone saw the smoke. No wonder they’d lit the body. They didn’t want to risk catching the cab on fire, and leaving the bullet-ridden corpse untouched.

“You’re sure?” Pita asked.

“Positive.” Shepard gathered the photos. “If I were you, I’d take this to the state police. You don’t have an accident here. You have cold-blooded murder.”

***

The next few weeks became a blur. DRS&C dropped the suit, becoming the friendliest big law firm that Pita had ever known. Which made her wonder when they’d realized that the engineers had committed murder.

Either way, it didn’t matter. DRS&C was willing to work with her, to do whatever it took to “make Mrs. Hughes happy.”

Nan wouldn’t be happy until her husband’s killers were brought to justice. She snapped into action the moment the state coroner confirmed Shepard’s hunches. Ty had been shot in the skull before he died, and then his body had been burned to cover up the crime.

If Nan hadn’t worked so hard and believed in her husband so much, no one would have known.

The story came out slowly. The train had been speeding when Ty crossed the tracks. Williams’ estimate of more than 100 miles per hour was probably correct—enough for the railroads to have liability right there.

But the engineers, both frightened by the accident itself and terrified for their jobs, had walked the length of the train to Ty’s overturned truck and, finding him alive and relatively unhurt, let their anger explode.

They’d threatened him with the loss of everything if he didn’t confess that he had failed to beat the train. He’d made the call to satisfy them. But it hadn’t worked. Somehow—and neither man was going to admit how (not even more than a year later at sentencing)—one of the rifles had gone off, killing him. Then they’d stuffed him in the cab—whose ignition was off—poured some diesel from the spill on him, and lit him on fire.

They watched him burn for a few minutes before going up the embankment to see if anyone had a fire extinguisher in his car. Fortunately someone did. Otherwise, they planned to have someone drive them the two miles to the engine for the train’s fire extinguishers.

The engineers were eventually convicted, Nan got to keep her ranch and her husband’s reputation, and the railroads kept trying to settle.

But Pita insisted that Nan hire an attorney who specialized in cases against big companies. Pita helped with the hire, finding someone with a great reputation who wasn’t afraid of a thousand boxes of evidence and, more importantly, would work on contingency.

“You sure you don’t want it?” Nan had asked, maybe two dozen times.

And each time, Pita had said, “Positive. The case is too big for me.”

Although it wasn’t. She could have gone to La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia as a rainmaker, someone who brought in a huge case and made millions for the company.

But she didn’t.

Because this case had taught her a few things.

She’d learned that she hated big cases with lots and lots of evidence.

She’d learned that she really didn’t care about the money. (Although the ten thousand dollar bonus that Nan had paid her—a bonus Pita hadn’t asked for—had come in very handy.)

And she learned how valuable it was to know the people of her town. If she hadn’t spent all those evenings in the cafeteria with Jessup, she wouldn’t have trusted his story, and she never would have hired the forensic examiner.

Her mom had been right, all those years ago. Rio Gordo wasn’t a bad place. Yeah, it was impoverished. Yeah, it was filled with dust, and didn’t have a good nightlife or a great university.

But it did have some pretty spectacular people.

People who congratulated Pita for the next year on her success in the Hughes case. People who now came to her to do their wills or their prenups. People who asked her advice on the smallest legal matters, and believed her when she gave them an unvarnished opinion.

Her biggest case had helped her discover her calling: She was a small town attorney—someone who cared more about the people around her than the money their cases could bring in.

She wouldn’t be rich.

But she would be happy.

And that was more than enough.

 

____________________________________________

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

 

“Discovery”

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November, 2008.
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Brandon Alms/Dreamstime

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

Last April, after a grief-filled winter, and a previous fall that was more difficult than I could possibly describe, Nancy and I went to Italy for three weeks — a long-delayed trip that had once been intended as a celebration of our 60th birthdays, both of which were more than a year passed by then.

While in Italy, we spent four lovely days in the ridiculously picturesque city of Venice, and while there, we took a day to visit Murano, a portion of the city that is renowned for its glass factories. It is, if you are not familiar with the history of glass-making in Venice, home to the Murano Glassworks, one of the most renowned glass producers in the world. It is also a gorgeous part of the city. We had a great time there, walking around, looking in shops, getting some food, enjoying the play of color and light on the waterways and old buildings. We watched a glass-blowing exhibition at the Murano factory, and bought many gifts for friends and family back home, as well as for Nancy.

While walking around, searching for a small souvenir of my own, I stopped in at a modest shop on a square, and found, among other things, several small squares of glass in which were embedded finely-wrought images of bare trees. I was captivated and started up a halting conversation with the shop’s owner, who spoke only a bit more English than I did Italian. We managed to communicate, though, and had a very nice exchange. The works in question, it turned out, had been done by the man’s father. He shaped the trees out of strands of steel wool and then placed them in small molds which he filled with melted glass. Each image came out slightly differently. All of them were delicate and beautiful and utterly unlike anything else I had seen in Venice (or anywhere else, for that matter).

I bought the one you see in the photo here. It is small — only 2 1/2 inches by 2 inches — and it is signed — etched, actually — by the artist. I don’t recall what I paid for it. Honestly, I don’t care. I love it. The man wrapped it up in tissue paper, took my payment, and I left his shop, likely never to see him again.

I kept it wrapped up even after we returned to the States. My plan was to open it once we were in our new house, which is what I did. It now sits in my office window, catching the late afternoon sun. And it reminds me of so much. That trip to Italy, which marked the beginning of my personal recovery from the trauma of losing Alex. That day in Venice, which was gloriously fun. The conversation with the kind shopkeeper, whose love for and pride in his father was palpable throughout our exchange. More, that little glass piece is an image of winter, and it sparkles like a gem when the sun hits it. It reminds me that even after a long cold winter, a time of grief and pain, there is always new life and the joy of a new spring.

A cliché, to be sure. But as with so many clichés, it’s rooted in truth.

That little tree — the simplicity of steel wool preserved in glass — brings me joy and comfort all out of proportion to its size and cost. I think Alex would love it, too.

When we were getting ready to move, Nancy and I unloaded a lot of stuff. We talked often of the joy we derived from “lightening our lives,” culling from our belongings items we no longer needed or wanted. And I am so glad to have done that work. But I will admit that I still get great pleasure out of many of things we kept, including little tchotchkes (Yiddish for “trinkets” or “little nothings”) like this one.

Wishing you a wonderful week.

It’s Reader Question Monday. We might have to do a Reader Question Wednesday as well, as we received many questions about Amazon and digital ownership.

You mentioned in the introduction that you usually publish a scene but this time would publish a full chapter. It made me wonder if, when planning a book, you explicitly plan for two scenes to a chapter, which seems to be your usual (though not always). Is it a thought out plan or just your natural writing rhythm?

We don’t plan a book in chapters, not do we stick to any rules regarding how long the chapters are or how many scenes they have. Chapters happen because it feels right to have a natural break in the narrative. We have a rough road map of where we are going, but when it comes to actual writing, we plot in chunks.

For example, the current Hugh chunk is

Aberdine sends people -> Hugh goes to Aberdine – > confrontation with the mercenaries.

Originally, we planned on summarizing the Aberdine delegation arrival and kind of stuffing it as a mini-flashback into the scene that opened with Hugh riding toward Aberdine. There didn’t seem like there would be enough happening during that initial meeting to warrant its own scene.

However, as we started writing it and unpacking all of the emotional undercurrents, it grew into its own chapter. This is the joy of writing: the unexpected discoveries.

Why don’t you let people point out the typos?

Because the comment section degenerates into a nitpicking session and then different writing experts start fighting with each other. This is the first draft; it is fragile and unpolished, and too much criticism will kill it. You are seeing it as it is, with all of its flaws. If you want the cleaned up version, you will have to wait until release. Muhahahaha!

So Hugh 2 is being rewritten? In 2020 it was announced that the release was on hold because it was a dark story and the world was in a dark place. I thought that meant it was done. It’s been five years, so when I look around to see if I missed anything it sounds like it may be in progress?

No. Hugh was never written, but we knew what we needed to write and at that particular time, we didn’t have emotional fortitude to do it. Writing books requires a huge emotional investment, because we, as writers, live through he character emotions so we can accurately portray them on the page.

Life interferes as well. Sometimes stuff happens to knock you off your writing rails. Yesterday we didn’t get any writing done because we email the comments from the site to ourselves and Mod R for moderation, and we have to use SMTP for that, because WordPress just kind of quit sending comments to us. For no apparent reason the SMTP callback is failing.

Despite 5 hours with host support chat, it is not fixed. They tossed me back to the SMTP plugin support, which has yet to respond. I wasn’t in the mood to write witty banter after that. I was just tired and needed some tea.

Why don’t you and Gordon make more videos where you talk about writing?

This is one is a little out of the left field. I’m guessing this must’ve come about because of the keyboard typing video. Being a writer and being an influencer are two different things. Writers primarily market their books by doing yet more writing, and influencers primarily provide entertainment while also marketing a product either directly or through ads. Some people admirably combine both.

We are not that great on camera, and we are not very entertaining. We would make terrible influencers. Neither of us has those particular skills and talents. Thankfully, we are not celebrities by any measure, so that is not required of us.

Our posts are mostly about what we do: things we write, things we cook, build, crochet, and so on. It’s less about being a writer and more about the work itself or the process. We try to maintain that boundary between product and person.

Basically, you get enough of me carrying on on the blog. You don’t need us on your YouTube.

See you on Wednesday!

The post Hugh and the Distressing Lack of Videos first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Oh, hell, is it Monday again? I’ve got nothing.

Gzzznorkzzzzzzzzz

I vote we bag it for the week.

I have a tail!

Yeah, the last list from 2024. Finally. I thought maybe I would just punt this one, but I like sharing what I’ve read that I’ve liked. So I didn’t want to lose all of these to extreme busy-ness. I barely remember September, so I can’t give you lots of comments. I do know that I had almost no sleep, so any reading I got done was stolen from other projects.

I am not going to include the articles here, like I usually do. In the spirit of kicking 2024 to the curb, those are going to be sacrificed. So here are the three books that I loved in September…

September 2024

Balogh, Mary, Always Remember, Berkeley, 2024. Mary Balogh writes in series that focus on a particular family. I liked how this series started, and wrote about it in several of the Recommended Reading Lists. This book, about Ben Ellis, who has a charming daughter and is one of the more interesting characters in the series, is a personal favorite. I felt sad when I finished this one. Balogh had been promising this romance throughout the series, and it was satisfying when she finally got to it.

King, Stephen, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. This isn’t a short story; it’s a novella. King excels at the novella form. I read the entire short novel in one sitting, uncertain where any of it was going. There’s always an edge in King’s fiction, a feeling that one wrong move and the story will collapse. I felt that here, but the story never made the wrong move. It’s powerful and worth the price of the entire collection.

King, Stephen, “On Slide Inn Road,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. Everyone is fair game in a King story, so I try to avoid some of the ones featuring children. I got sucked into this one right off the bat, though, and read it with one eye closed and my face averted. Memorable, sadly enough.

King, Stephen, “Two Talented Bastids,” You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. In the hands of a lesser writer, this story would have been cliche-ridden and hard to read. Here, it’s touching and one of my favorites in the collection. I’m not going to say anything else for fear of spoiling the story for you.

King, Stephen, You Like It Darker, Scribner, 2024. I think I like Stephen King’s short stories the best of all his works, and I’m a fan. I like almost everything he does. (The Dark Tower series doesn’t work for me, and lately he’s ventured into Covid territory, which I’m not ready for, but mostly, I’ll follow him anywhere.) This entire book is wonderful. I’ve highlighted some favorite stories here, but I can recommend the entire volume as well.

Roberts, Nora, Mind Games, St. Martin’s Press, 2024. I’ve been very disappointed with Nora Robert’s standalone titles the past few years, so I bought this one with trepidation. I felt like she hadn’t been challenging herself in some of the previous books or she lost interest in them or something. They just didn’t have her usual vibrancy. This one does. It was a rich book, difficult to put down, even though I had to because of everything else going on. The perfect escape that makes me look forward to her next…just like it should.

January and February have been chaotic, frenetic, and full of chaos and confusion. And snow. Which, given where I live, is normal, if hugely inconvenient. And copy-edits, which make me pull my hair out. But: I have a full cover for the upcoming Heir of Light. And also: for reasons I’m not clear on, Mira is publishing a simultaneous hardcover release. I think it’s meant mostly for library purchase, but is being offered on Amazon and physical retailers as well. (I personally would not want a hardcover of the second book in a series when the first book didn’t have a hardcover release, but that’s the bibliophile in me.) For those who listen, I can’t quite figure out on short notice … Continue reading →

I had hoped the ‘Sigl Fashion’ option would have scored higher… I figured with the nobility and ultra wealthy type of folks, sigl jewelry would almost reach a ‘crown jewels’ sort of function. You become head of house, or the heir apparent, you get something like a signet ring, like the official ducal seal worked into the ring Paul inherits from his father as Duke Atreides in Dune. Or the signet ring Hadrian wears in the Sun Eater series, as a sign of his status and rank as a Palatine. The King still wears the three feather signet ring of Wales, like he did as Prince of Wales. The new heir or head of house would get the ring, just getting a new sigl created and mounted in the antique setting.

Also, I figured with the younger crowd and the fact some sigls need to be worn close to the skin, that sigl jewelry piercings would be more widespread than they apparently are in the series so far.

If you thought the alien in the last episode gave High Wizard Elron a tough time, wait until you see how the witches handle him in this newest installment.

Thank you for kind comments and support this week. Usually we post scene by scene, but today we will do the whole chapter.

Hugh stepped out of the woods and started up the road to Baile. The old castle rose atop the low hill like some ancient fort built by a Norman knight intent on keeping all he surveyed clenched in his iron gauntlet. It had been born in England, then transported stone by stone to Kentucky and reassembled on a whim of a man with too much money. The Shift had restored its original purpose. It was both a fortified base and a symbol of power.

He once told Elara that the point of the castle wasn’t to hide within the walls but to be worthy of it. The man who controlled the castle controlled the lands around it.

He needed to be that man. Not because he wanted the headache but because maintaining control of their immediate surroundings was the only path to safety. They were too far from any regional authorities, and in the great scheme of things, his fighting force was laughably small. By the latest count he had 348 Iron Dogs. During his time as Roland’s warlord, he commanded 2,400 trained soldiers. Almost seven times what he had now.

The familiar rage shivered deep inside him, hot and angry. He had built the most elite force on the continent and Roland had dismantled it out of cowardice.

Hugh pushed it aside. He needed a cool head for what waited ahead.

Aberdine presented a problem. The small town controlled the only leyline point within twenty five miles. The magic current was the fastest and safest way to reach Lexington or any of the other cities, and Baile depended on trade. Herbs, cosmetics, medicine, all of that flowed out through the leyline and returned as cash and supplies. In the past, Aberdine proved less than cooperative, despite relying on Baile’s medical supplies and booze.

Given a choice, he would have done whatever he could to take charge of Aberdine. In the old days, when Roland’s magic seared all doubt, guilt, and compassion from his mind, he would’ve set the town on fire, built a fort on the ashes, and put a detachment of Iron Dogs into it.

Those days were behind him now. He was a different man, less powerful, without immortality or backing of Roland’s magic, but he had his freedom. It was hard won. He could still feel the void, swirling on the edge of his consciousness, ready to sink its teeth into him if he faltered.

He was also married and charged with defending about 5,000 civilians who depended on his protection and ability to negotiate. The fact that Aberdine sent someone over and asked to see him meant both would be required.

His lovely wife was waiting for him by the castle gates.  She wore a light lilac dress today, and her white hair, gathered into a plait, wrapped around her head like a crown.

He’d half expected her to have been deep in negotiations with whoever Aberdine sent. For some reason, he was happy that she waited for him.

Hugh walked through the gates. She gave him a weary look.

“I heard we have guests,” he said.

“Nick Bishop and two others,” she said.

She looked like something had been eating at her. It bothered Hugh.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Waiting inside.”

They started toward the keep, walking side by side. The bailey was crowded with people hurrying back and forth.  A team of villagers hung fall garlands on the walls.  Another trio had brought a cart filled with bright orange pumpkins and were now arguing over the most picturesque location to position it while an old pinto horse patiently waited for them to make up their minds. A gaggle of tweens carried baskets of chestnuts. The castle was getting ready for Harvest Day.

“What do you think they want?” Hugh asked.

“I don’t know, but Bishop’s arm is in a sling and the other two have bruises on their faces. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

Nick Bishop was Aberdine’s chief of police, National Guard Sergeant, and Wildlife Response Officer, all of which put him in charge of the same six people. He’d met Bishop during the battle of Aberdine. The man kept a cool head and was capable.

If Bishop had showed up, Aberdine had a problem. One that required an Iron Dog kind of solution. This wasn’t about herbs or beer. This was about violence.

Ah. “So it’s that kind of visit, then.”

Elara didn’t respond. She was walking fast, her gaze dark, her lips a thin firm line.

“The herbs?” he guessed.

“That too, but mostly it’s Aberdine.”

They entered the main keep and Elara turned left, down the hallway leading to the visitor room. He remembered it well. When he first came to Baile a few months ago, half-starved and only barely sane with the void gnawing on his soul, she’d put them in that room. And then she made them sit in there, smelling delicious bread baking in the kitchen for half an hour before she came to negotiate.

“What about Aberdine?”

“They sent their Chief of Police. They’re going to ask you for help. They’re going to expect you to take the Iron Dogs, leave the castle, go source alone knows where, and fight.”

“That’s what people usually want from me.”

She stopped and turned to him. “I don’t want you to go.”

Interesting. “I seem to remember a certain woman who demanded that I drop everything and take our troops to defend Aberdine not that long ago. And when I argued against it, she tried to shame me by pointing out that Aberdine was full of babies.”

She raised her head. “That was then and this is now.”

“I’m going to need a little more than that.”

Elara sighed. “Then Aberdine was about to be wiped off the face of the planet. You saved them because it was the right thing to do. But now, since Aberdine survived, they should have the decency to handle their own problems.”

“That depend on the type of problem. There will be times when Aberdine’s issues could become ours.”

“And that’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want you getting hurt, I don’t want any of our people getting hurt, and I don’t want to take in anymore of their people. I just want to celebrate Harvest Day in peace. I’ve had enough of blood and gore.”

Ah. He got it now. For him, blood and gore were business as usual. The battle with Nez, terrible as it had been, was just another fight. He had personal stakes in that one, and he’d almost died, but at the core he was a soldier. An enemy attacked, they fought, they won. Next.

Elara didn’t fight those kind of battles. She avoided them unless she was backed into a corner, which was why she and her people migrated from place to place until they found Baile. Any time they came in conflict with the locals, they picked up and moved on. She married him to break that cycle.

His prickly wife, as tough as she pretended to be, was scared.

“They’re here,” he said. “Let’s hear them out and then we can decide, together, if we’re going to do anything about it.”

She gave him a suspicious look.

“I promise you that if you really don’t want me to go, I won’t.”

She took a step forward, closing the distance between them, and put her hand on his forehead. Her fingers were cool and dry, and he had the absurd urge to take her hand and kiss it.

The swirling, writhing chaos spreading, engulfing him…

Nope.

“I don’t have a fever.”

She stepped back. “I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

“Noted.”

They looked at each other.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Wait, are we acting like a married couple?”

“Oh, shut up.”

She turned and stomped down the hallway. He followed her.

The scent of freshly baked bread floated on the draft. He could practically taste the crispy crust.

“Loving couple in three, two….” He murmured.

“One,” she finished.

The doors of the visitor room stood wide open. He let her enter first and stepped inside behind her. The long rectangular room held an oversized table built with old wood. The Aberdine delegates, Bishop and the two other men, sat at the table, helping themselves to a platter of fresh bread, cheese, sausage, and fruit.

There was a subtle psychology at play here. She brought them in, she made them wait, she fed them. It wasn’t just hospitality. Elara was positioning Baile as the benefactor of Aberdine. There was something almost feudal about it. The lord and lady of the castle receiving vassals in need of assistance. If they chose to grant their ask, the relationship between Baile and Aberdine would be cemented. Not neighbors. Not equals. Protector and protected.

Hugh hid a smile. That’s my girl.

He couldn’t let all of that effort go to waste.

#

Hugh raised his large arms and gave Bishop a big toothy grin. “Bishop! It’s been too long!”

Elara almost winced. She should have been used to him by now, but his instant transformations still took her by surprise. A moment ago, in the hallway, he was quiet and serious, and he sounded sincere. And now he’d turned into a loud, affable, slightly oblivious bro host with the emotional depth of a wooden spoon.

Hugh squinted at the table. “Love, couldn’t we get the guys some beer?”

“Of course, honey.” She nodded at Natasha waiting in the other doorway.

Hugh landed in a chair and spread out. She stood next to him. The nervous energy inside her roiled. Sitting down wasn’t in her right that second. She could barely keep from pacing.

Hugh grabbed a bread roll, tore it in half, stuffed some cheese into it, and took a bite. “So, what are you guys doing here?”

Bishop gathered himself, as if preparing to jump over a pit studded with spikes. His left arm was in a sling and his face was bruised, his dark brown skin almost purple over his left cheek. The other two didn’t look much better.

The unease spun inside her like an animal with sharp claws. When Nez captured Hugh at the end of the battle, his vampires had dragged him to some old building in an abandoned town miles away. She had gone to get him, and when she tore into that building, she found him chained and bleeding. They had hung him by his arms, and his body looked battered beyond repair. They had beaten him to the very edge of death. When she wrapped her power around him, he was almost gone and she carried him, limp like a ragdoll, all the way back to Baile hoping against all odds that he would live. He was so strong, the strongest man she’d ever met, and she had felt his life slipping through her fingers. He could have been gone forever.

Never again.

Hugh frowned. “Wait a minute. Bishop, what happened to your arm? Have you guys been having fun without me?”

Fun? You ridiculous oaf. She almost clenched her fists and forced herself to smile instead. “Hugh, dear, maybe we should let them tell us why they’re here?”

“Oh, yes.” Hugh rearranged his face into a serious expression. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

The two men with Bishop stopped eating. The Chief of Aberdine’s police cleared his throat.

“We’re being extorted.”

Her stomach dropped. She hated that, hated the anxiety and how it made her feel. It was so much simpler before, when Hugh was an irritating but necessary jackass she had to tolerate. Somehow he had become her jackass. And now they would try to drag him into their mess.

“Extorted by whom?” Hugh asked.

“The Drakes. Mercenaries from Indianapolis,” Bishop said.

“They came down from up north three weeks ago,” the man to Bishop’s left said. He was in his forties, broad and blond. “At first they asked if they could pitch their tents in the fallow field by the wall. Now they want us to put them up and feed them through the winter.”

“How many?” Hugh asked.

“Seventy to eighty people,” Bishop said. “They’re armed and trained. Apparently the other half of their outfit is on its way.”

Eighty people. Even if they minded themselves, Aberdine couldn’t support that. And they wouldn’t mind themselves. Aberdine didn’t have a police force strong enough to keep them in check. They would start to swagger. They would start to demand and take. There would be theft, there would be assaults and rape. Then there would be murder. Here, isolated in the Knobs, there line between mercenary and bandit was very faint.

“Have you petitioned Lexington?” Hugh asked.

Bishop nodded. “National Guard won’t come unless there is an incident. Right now, it’s just squatting. A civil matter. Non-violent.”

Elara knew exactly where Aberdine stood. She and her people had been in a standoff just like that more than once, when someone wanted them to leave. Somebody would have to die or be seriously injured before the authorities intervened, and it wasn’t worth it. Her people were precious. She had chosen again and again to just move on. But Aberdine didn’t have that option. Where would the whole town go with winter a month away?

They would have to rescue Aberdine. She saw it with crystal clarity, and she hated it. First, they couldn’t allow the Drakes to control the leyline. Second, they couldn’t permit Aberdine to turn into a mercenary town. Those places popped up from time to time, lawless settlements that drew every lowlife in the state until it became too much and either National Guard or DCI, Department of Criminal Investigations, busted them. If they let Aberdine devolve into that, sooner or later the mercenaries would start eyeing Baile. They would need space and a good defensible position, and the castle would prove too tempting.

All that aside, morally they couldn’t allow Aberdine’s people to be run off their own land. As Hugh pointed out, there were children in that town. Families. They didn’t deserve any of that.

A careful knock sounded through the room. Lamar paused in the doorway. Hugh waved him in without turning.

“Who is running the show?” Hugh asked.

“A man named Polansky,” Bishop answered.

“Calls himself the Falcon,” the dark-haired man to Bishop’s right said.

Lamar leaned to Hugh and murmured something in his ear. Hugh nodded.

“Ex-marine, big guy, always sunburned, looks like he bites bricks for a living?” Lamar asked.

“That’s the one.”

“I thought once you were a marine, you were always a marine?” Hugh said.

“They kicked him out,” Lamar said. “Conduct unbecoming.”

“Meaning?” Hugh asked.

“His definition of acceptable civilian casualties was too broad for the Corp.”

Hugh looked at the three men. All humor had disappeared from his face. His gaze was hard and heavy. “And what would you gentlemen like us to do about this unfortunate development?”

“We’ve been authorized by the town to pay you a substantial sum to help us resolve this crisis,” the blond man said.

A mistake, Elara thought. They should not have opened with that.

Bishop gave him a warning glance. The man clamped his mouth shut.

“We are not for hire,” Hugh said.

He spoke in an unhurried, almost lazy way, but the temperature in the room had dropped by about ten degrees.

The blond man paled.

“And if we were, you couldn’t afford us.”

Silence claimed the room, siting on the table between Hugh and the Aberdine men like a cement block.

Bishop cleared his throat again. “We know you’re not for hire. The money would be just to offset any costs.”

That was her cue. “We don’t need Aberdine’s help with that.”

Hugh reached for her hand, took it, and brushed his lips on her fingers.

Ridiculous. She’d make him pay later.

He was still holding her hand and showed no signs of letting go. “My wife is quite right, gentlemen. We are not destitute. We can cover our own costs.”

“We would be happy come to an agreement regarding our western woods,” the dark-haired man said.

She knew exactly what they were talking about. The land between Baile and Aberdine was almost all dense forest, but there was a stretch of meadows right near the property border, on Aberdine’s side. The meadows produced particularly good blueflower.

It was one of those plants that popped up after the Shift, nourished by magic. Blueflower provided relief from arthritis. They had tried to cultivate it before and failed. It could only be gathered in the wild and no matter how long they searched, they never found another spot on their own land. She had tried to license foraging rights, and Aberdine had turned her down cold. They hadn’t been pleasant about it, either.

It would be nice to have that plot. But there were bigger things in play. Aberdine always viewed them as unclean and lesser. There was a reason why they opened with the money. If they agreed to be hired, it would put Aberdine and Baile in employer and employee positions, with employer holding power. Now that that attempt failed, they were trying to bargain as equals.

No, this could not be a transaction. It had to be a favor. Aberdine had to owe them. That was the only way they would be secure.

High squeezed her hand gently. She looked at him and saw a silent question in his blue eyes. It almost killed her, but she gave him a tiny nod.

 A hint of a smile tugged on the corner of his mouth.

“Do we need any more woods, love?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“You’ve tried to get foraging rights before,” the blond man said. He had to be their comptroller or something.

“I did. As I recall, Aberdine doesn’t want dirty, pagan witches in its woods. Isn’t that right?”

The delegation winced in unison.

“That was the old mayor,” the dark-haired man said. “He has left town. Aberdine doesn’t not condone that sort of small-minded prejudice.”

Since when?

“As I recall, we tried to help you before. We sent people to reinforce your magic wards, and you blocked their way and threw rocks at them,” she said mildly.

The delegation stared at her. At least they had the decency to look uncomfortable.

“We apologize,” the dark-haired man said.

“That’s very nice of you,” she told him. “I will let Will know. He has a scar from the rock on his forehead. Your apology will be a great comfort.”

More silence.

“That was then, this is now,” Bishop said.

Hugh looked at her.

Don’t even think of saying anything.

“Look, I’ll level with you,” Bishop said. “We can’t get them out ourselves. We’ve tried.”

He pointed to his arm.

“They’ve stopped pretending to be polite. They’re going to start looting and pillaging next, and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them. Will you please help us?”

Silence stretched for a long moment.

Hugh grinned. “All you had to do was ask. Of course we’ll help you. After all, we’re neighbors, aren’t we, honey?”

“We are,” she said.

 “There you have it. My wife is a very forgiving woman.”

He would leave right away. She could feel it. “Will you be back in time for dinner?” Go there, do your Hugh thing, and come right back.

He kissed her fingers again and gazed at her, his face a picture of adoring devotion. “Will you make me something delicious to eat, love?”

“Of course.” She had plenty of poisonous herbs left over…

Hugh rose to his full height. “Let’s go see about these mercenaries of yours.”

The post It’s Hughday Again! Chapter 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

In our defense I thought Byron implied that knowledge about the Winged was known in the Drucraft world, I believe he mentioned the Mountains and the Cathedrals to Lucella and there seems to be mythological figures mentioned like Ogun and Perun that seem to be gangs/criminals/pseudo Cults. So just general information that isn’t too spoilery since they are so powerful and influential some information must be known to the average drucrater without going to overboard, kinda of how the average person knows Special Forces exists but not know how and where they function.

But aside from that looking forward to learning about the Corporations Essentia capacity Branch affinities and the rest!

(I will miss learning about the Drucraft branch affinities with their cultural associations plus what planets the rest are associated with, I want to know how far out we get possibly to Uranus or Neptune or if the Moon and Earth count for ones.)

1. Essentia Capacity
2. The Board
3. Sigil Recycling
4. Attunement

If you're missing the Dragon's Breath world and anticipating Galadon, here's your chance to read the first chapter. More details on the spin-off novel in the post.

In reply to Bill.

1. Corporations
2. Board
3. Sigh Recycling

It is freezing here in Texas. We had a 40 degree temperature drop, and now we are sitting at 24 degrees. You know my prayer. Hold, grid, hold.

The Price of Printed Books

Is it true that the price of printed books will rise?

Yes. Most of the books are printed in China or on paper imported from China. When the new tariffs go into effect, the prices will increase. It is very difficult to shift that production chain. The publishers tried during the pandemic and we had delays across the board. The Ingram Spark, print-in-demand publisher used by a lot of self-published authors, already announced the anticipated price hikes.

How much more will they cost?

We don’t know. Could be a couple of bucks, could be more. There is no way to tell yet. Nobody is happy about this situation, but that is the way it is. The cost of tariffs is passed onto the consumer, and we have to make at least $1 off each printed self-published book, or we cannot afford to continue.

A reminder: the political ban is still in effect.

Kindle USB

Let me say upfront, before there is a panic: this will not affect most people, because most of us do not bother with it. If you are wondering if this will affect you, then you probably haven’t used this feature before.

Most people either read their Amazon books on Kindle or on Kindle app. I use the Kindle app primarily, because I tend to read on my iPad or search the books for work on my computer. My books sit in my cloud library until I’m ready to download them to my device.

Some people back up their books to a USB device, meaning they download those files to a storage drive or a USB stick. A loose equivalent would be buying a movie on Amazon and burning it onto a DVD to keep.

Amazon is doing away with that ability. It goes away on February 25th.

Let me reiterate: most of the users will not be affected. You can still email the book files to your kindle, you can still download the books to your kindle, and they will still be available in app. If you haven’t downloaded books to store them somewhere else before, you will not notice.

Why is Amazon doing this?

Although we buy books on Amazon, our actual ownership is more similar to renting. We buy access to that book for as long as Amazon has it available. Amazon wants to make sure you continue to give it your money. If you delete your Amazon account, all of your books will disappear with it.

We have seen this model before with Audible, which is now owned by Amazon. When you buy audiobooks on Audible, you accumulate credits and if you cancel your account, you lose access to all of your purchases and credits. It’s an effective way to keep consumers tied to you. (Please see correction on this in the comments. Apparently, deleting the Audible account doesn’t prevent access.)

It does afford some flexibility. Amazon periodically pushes updates to these books. We have updated our books before because of typos or some inadvertently poor word choice or something the readers pointed out. If a publisher pulls out and takes their titles with them, Amazon wants to be able to disappear them from your library so not to be in breach of contract, etc. But mostly it’s about money and keeping you locked into the Amazon ecosystem.

Downloading these books to a storage device safeguards against that. If this is a concern, you have until February 25th to download your titles.

How?

Here is a video explaining how to do it. We have no idea if the software he recommends for bulk downloads is good, so we do not endorse it. Please do your research: Amazon’s New Kindle Rule.

Thank you to Jennifer Thomas from the Facebook Fan Group for bringing it to our attention.

Please do not email to Mod R asking her how to download your books to the storage device. The gentleman explains it in the video. We love you, but we cannot serve as Amazon tech support. We are not qualified.

Maggie Updates

The final content edit pass for Maggie’s book has landed. So much work has gone into this monster of a manuscript, and if it was printed, I would be lifting it above my head the way Moses in the movies lifts the stone tablets.

It means we are close to the manuscript being accepted for publication. It also means Gordon and I have a ton of work ahead of us to try to clean the story up. This is kind of our last chance to make large edits.

It is very exciting. We had a title conference and a cover conference, and now we are waiting to see what the art department is going to come up with. It is almost a book. Woo!

The post Kindle USB, The Price of Books, and Other Things first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

1. Corporations
2. Branch affinities
3. Essentia capacity

1. Sigl fashion (as a silversmith, I find this interesting and important)
2. Sigl recycling
3. Branch affinities

Update: Thank you so much for all of your support, guys. You are genuinely awesome and kind people. We are both lucky to know you. We finished the scene, it worked out well, so we are going to keep going and hopefully will stay on track for Friday.

There was a post here about something someone said, but it doesn’t seem important anymore. We are driving on.

Comments are locked because Mod R is working on something else and I do not have the time to devote to moderating at the moment.

The post Stupid Rubbish first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.