Authors

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.

I love villains. I love writing them. I love reading them. I love seeing them brought to life on big screen and small.

Well, let me modify that. I love villains in fiction and movies and television shows. I can’t stand real-life villains. (In the interest of keeping things civil, I won’t name any of the real-life villains I have in mind, even the one whose name rhymes with Peon Husk.) But a good fictional villain can make even the most mundane of stories shine. And a boring or ineffective villain can ruin an otherwise effective narrative. Over the years, as a reader, teacher, and editor, I have seen many beginning writers undermine their stories by making the same mistakes in the development of their antagonists.

What qualities make a villain compelling? I intend to dive into that. Who are some of my favorite villains? I’ll get into that, too. But let me offer a few quick points up front. I don’t think much of the all-powerful-evil-through-and-through villains one often encounters in the fantasy genre. Sauron, for instance — the evil god whose world-conquering designs lie at the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — is, to my mind, a very boring villain. He’s really powerful, and he’s really, really evil. And yes, he’s cunning, which is a point in his favor, and he’s scary (or his minions are). But beyond that, and unless one has gone back and read all his backstory in The Silmarillion, there isn’t really much to him. He lacks dimension and complexity.

So, let’s begin there. In my opinion (and yes, ALL of this is just my opinion), villains should be complex. There should be more to them than mere evil. Their backstory should contain the seeds of their villainy and the twisting of their world-view. Because let’s face it, most of the villains we encounter and create do some pretty messed up things in pursuit of their agendas. They’re not all there sanity-wise. But how they wound up there ought to be an interesting tale in and of itself. And the fact that their actions are working at cross purposes with those of our protagonists should not mean they can’t have some normality and even joy in their lives. They can and should have people and things that they love. They should be relatable for our readers. One of my very favorite villains is Brandan of Ygrath, the emperor-sorcerer who is the villain of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. He is charming, brilliant, loving with those he cares about, handsome, refined. He is also ruthless, merciless, temperamental, and unpredictable. He does horrible, cruel, vicious things for reasons that are both understandable and insufficient. He is nearly as easy to like as he is easy to hate.

Too often, I see young authors make their villains unintelligent and unsubtle. They give their villains lots of power, but then undermine that power by making their machinations transparent. Villains, I believe, need to be canny, keen of mind, creative. Their schemes should be the stuff of genius. Remember the old Adam West Batman series? I used to watch it after school when I was little. Invariably, Batman’s foes would leave him in a situation where he wasn’t dead yet, but he would be soon. They were sure of it. So they didn’t need to wait around to make sure. They could leave, and eventually, the pendulum on the giant clock with the medieval axehead attached to it would cleave the masked crusader in two! And, of course, their premature departure gave Batman and the Boy Wonder the opportunity they needed to escape their less-than-certain deaths. Stupid villains were entertaining and convenient when we were kids watching bad TV. But for more sophisticated fiction, stupid villains will ruin a good tale.

Think of it this way: Assuming that our protagonist eventually manages to overcome the villain in our story, the power AND intelligence AND shrewdness of the bad guy reflect well on our good guy. The easier the villain is to defeat, the less challenging their plot against the world, the less impressive our hero appears when they prevail. When we build up our villain, when we make them really smart and really cunning, our hero’s victory becomes that much more of an achievement. Consider it narrative mathematics.

Some of my favorite villains from my own work? Quinnel Orzili from the Islevale Cycle (Time’s Children, Time’s Demon, Time’s Assassin), Saorla from the second and third books in The Case Files of Justis Fearsson, and, my absolute favorite, Sephira Pryce from the Thieftaker books. Yes, she later become something other than a pure villain, but that was basically because she became SO much fun to write that I had to find a way to keep her around and relevant.

My favorite villains in the work of others? I already mentioned Brandan of Ygrath. John Rainbird, from Stephen King’s masterpiece, Firestarter, is a terrific villain. Smart, brutal, and yet also human. In Catie Murphy’s marvelous Negotiator trilogy there are two supernatural “bad guys,” Daisani and Janx, whose personal rivalry threatens the fabric of the mortal world. Their mutual animus and their own needs and desires humanize them and make them terrific foils for Magrit Knight, the series’ protagonist. And I would add that a certain writer I care not to mention in light of recent revelations has created some truly amazing villains. Too bad he wound up being a villain worthy of his own undeniable storytelling talents.

So, make your villains relatable, make them canny and dangerous and terrifying, and make their eventual defeat a true achievement for your protagonist. And try not to be villainous yourself.

Advice for this week. Cheers!!

Prologue I

From: The United States and the Protectorate War. Baen Historical Press. 2070.

It cannot be denied that the United States of the early thirties was a deeply divided society, in a world that was increasingly fragmented, hostile and/or fundamentally opposed to American values. The recent election had brought many of the tensions threatening American stability into the open and the victory of President Hamlin, a well-meaning and decent but ultimately ineffectual politician unwilling or unable to confront the problems facing the United States, did nothing to calm the roiling fury under the surface. Prone to dithering, lacking any real power base, it seemed likely his first term would be his last. Indeed, even his own party was preparing to primary him rather than take the risk of letting him seek re-election.

Political deadlock in Washington owed much, it should be acknowledged, to the simple fact the United States was not in any physical danger. Chaos along the Mexican border and turmoil in the Caribbean did not post any significant threat, certainly not one that threatened the political or bureaucratic elite in Washington. Simmering tensions in both the Ukraine and the South China Sea – and, of course, the Middle East – might draw attention briefly, only to be dismissed as the United States returned to contemplating its internal problems. Talk of civil war, never far from the surface, seemed to ebb and flow with the tides. The paralysis in Washington seemed to ebb and flow with the tides.

It was the worst possible time for the United States to face an Outside Context problem, an invasion from another world. But there was no choice.

The Protectorate knew nothing of America’s problems when they transposed their assault force into our dimension. Through sheer luck, the Protectorate Expeditionary Force arrived right on top of a small town in Texas – Flint – and rapidly secured the area, while probing the surrounding region and hacking the internet to download as much data as possible. They had assumed theirs was the only timeline that had enjoyed an industrial revolution and it was a surprise to discover that our world was a technological civilisation, if one nearly a century behind their own. Their commander – Captain-General James Montrose – had no intention of retreating, let alone opening peaceful contact and developing diplomatic relationships. He had come to make his name through conquest and determined to do so. His brief attempts at diplomatic outreach were nothing more than a bid to buy time.

President Hamlin dithered, as was his wont. Flint was surrounded and sealed off by the United States Army, but there was no attempt to demand access to the occupied town or seek confirmation of the tale the diplomats had been told. Unsure of what he was dealing with, Hamlin ignored the advice of his Vice President – Felix Hernandez – and his military officials, refusing to countenance either a more aggressive approach or a pre-emptive strike. It was not until a refugee fleeing the town accidentally started a brief engagement that rapidly spiralled out of control that the military was permitted to take a harder line, too late. The PEF attacked with a fury and technological edge the defenders couldn’t match, rapidly overrunning the army positions and expanding into Texas. A combination of computer hacks and cruise missiles strikes further weakened the United States, making it difficult to coordinate any response.

On paper, the PEF was greatly outnumbered. In practice, their advanced technology and cold-blooded ruthlessness allowed them to crush resistance, eventually seizing Austin and threatening nearby states before America learnt how to fight them. The sheer force of their attack weakened both the United States and its global allies, while their diplomatic contacts with hostile states – and covert operations within America – raised the promise of reinforcements and even American surrender. Their ability to land almost anywhere – showing off their power by attacking New York – cowed Hamlin. Believing the war to be lost, with the arrival of a second invasion force in the Middle East, he made overtures to Montrose.

This was too much for Felix Hernandez and his growing cabal. They started making urgent preparations to remove President Hamlin from power, preparations that were ironically detected by the PEF and used to justify a strike into Washington itself. With only limited understanding of how the American government worked, the PEF moved to seize the White House and the President, intending to use him as a puppet. The plan misfired. The assault force found itself trapped in Washington, and the relief force was forced to fight its way through the city in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to save it. Casualties were heavy on both sides, including Hamlin himself, but the PAF suffered its first real defeat.

As Felix Hernandez took the Oath of Office, and James Montrose secured his position by scapegoating another officer, they both knew the war was far from over.

Prologue II: Timeline A (Protectorate Homeworld)

It was deeply frustrating, Protector Julianne Rigby reflected, that they couldn’t know what was happening on the far side of the dimensional wall.

The Triumvirs of the Protectorate had been reluctant to concede that they had to trust the men commanding the crosstime expeditionary forces. It put a great deal of power in the hands of men who were incredibly ambitious, who had been chosen for their ambition and determination, and there was always a risk of one or more commanders going rogue. There was no way around it – the researchers had yet to develop any sort of crosstime communications device that didn’t require a gate – and yet it was deeply frustrating. London had been able to direct operations around the globe and beyond, from the moment radio had been invented, and to find themselves out of touch with their commanders was galling. There was just no way to know what was going on.

Her lips thinned as she studied the image on her display. Captain-General James Montrose was tall, dark and handsome, handsome enough to make any woman feel a draw even if she was old enough to know better. He was a brilliant commanding officer, driven by a compulsive thirst for victory – and the rewards that came with it. Granting him command of a crosstime invasion force had always been a gamble, although there were limits on just how much power he could claim for himself before reinforcements arrived. The Protectorate was the only timeline that had mastered steam, let alone coal and oil and nuclear power. There was little he could do to build a power base for himself in a world where the most advanced device known to exist was a waterwheel …

Or so they had thought. Castle Treathwick had been rotated into Timeline F and a sizable chunk of the timeline had been rotated back into the Prime Timeline, including pieces of a town and a large number of inhabitants. They had been rounded up very quickly and interrogated – of course – and the town remnants had been hastily searched for anything useful, from books to maps and charts. They’d expected little, but they’d hit the motherlode. The town didn’t just have a public library, a rarity outside the Prime Timeline; it had computer databases and records and a great many other things that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Timeline F was a technological society. Their advancement appeared to have come in fits and starts – the sociologists were already producing theories to explain how the widespread degeneracy had retarded technological development – but there was no denying the Protectorate Expeditionary Force faced a foe far more capable than any before. Montrose’s orders for such a contingency had been vague, if only because no one had really thought it would ever happen, and he’d clearly taken full advantage of the latitude he’d been granted to launch a war. Julianne wasn’t surprised. A man as ambitious as Montrose wouldn’t back down unless he was confronted by an equal or greater force, and that was clearly lacking. Indeed, the second set of kidnapped locals – rotated into the Prime Timeline as the second invasion force was dispatched – had confirmed it. The war appeared to be going well.

Julianne felt her mood darken as she studied the political map. It looked absurd, putting the lie to the theory that technological advance would bring about planetary unity, but there was no denying it was real. Hundreds of nations, some with nuclear weapons; their world divided so completely it would be laughably easy to turn them against one another. The combination of superior military force and advanced technology would be quite enough, turning local nations into allies that would be discarded or subjected the moment they were no longer useful. And yet …

Her intercom bleeped. It was time.

Julianne keyed her console, then sat back in her chair as the other two Triumvirs flickered into existence in front of her. The holograms looked faintly wrong, as always, something that had always made her smile even though she understood the reasoning behind it. The Protectorate had more than enough computing power to fake almost any communication, with minibrains playing the role to near-perfection, and a transmission  that looked too good to be true would be regarded with extreme suspicion until it was checked and cleared. The council had the finest experts in the known multiverse working for them, yet as technology advanced the technology to fool it advanced too. Julianne would have preferred to hold the meeting in person, but that wasn’t an option. The degenerates of Timeline F were a technological civilisation. The gap between them and their masters was wide, but not wide enough. Given time, they would develop their own crosstime capabilities. They already knew it was possible.

“Parliament is pleased,” Protector Horace Jarvis said, curtly. “That doesn’t bode well.”

“No,” Protector John Hotham said. “But is that a bad thing?”

Julianne shrugged. Jarvis had openly admitted he didn’t trust Montrose, while Hotham argued Montrose could be trusted to serve the Protectorate as well as himself. Julianne had been the deciding vote and it had been impossible to avoid acknowledging that Montrose was very much a two-edged sword. He could cut their enemies, but he could also turn on his masters. It had been a calculated risk, one that – in hindsight – might have been a mistake. Given control of a civilisation that could actually support his forces, Montrose could go rogue. He was certainly charismatic enough to convince many of his subordinates to follow him.

“The prize is worth some risks,” she mused. “If we gain control and open permanent gates …”

The vision unfolded in front of them. The Protectorate ruled four timelines, three populated by primitives and one apparently untouched by intelligent life. It was difficult to uplift the locals of the first three timelines, leaving them fit only for brute labour that could be carried out far more efficiently by machines. A population that actually understood science, and didn’t think aircraft were the chariots of the gods, was a population that could actually achieve something. All they needed was proper guidance, something the Protectorate was happy to provide. An influx of labour from Timeline F could turn the earlier timelines into genuinely productive parts of the empire. It would happen without them, of course, but not in her time.

“If,” Jarvis pointed out.

Hotham snorted. “They’re a hundred years behind us, at least! They pose no threat.”

“Montrose does not have unlimited manpower. Or industry.” Julianne knew why. “They could trade a hundred of their tanks for every one of his and still come out ahead.”

“And if Montrose wins, will he turn on us?” Jarvis leaned forward. “He’s already popular. He could declare himself a warlord, declare independence, if he secures the timeline before we can open permanent gates.”

Julianne kept her face expressionless as Hotham started to splutter. The hell of it was that Jarvis had a point. Montrose’s exploits had been widely reported and even though the reports were incomplete – they could hardly be otherwise – they had made him a hero. The media was already telling the world about his glorious victories, no matter that there was no independent verification of anything they’d learnt from the second set of prisoners. Parliament had passed a vote of thanks, while ambitious politicians were lining up to praise Montrose and demand the government work faster to save Timeline F from itself. The reports of widespread degeneracy had shocked Parliament, not without reason. The analysts had recovered enough pornographic material from the captured computers to shock even hardened spooks. She shuddered to think what such exposure was going to their children.

“He’s not going to be happy working his way up the ladder, not after conquering a world,” Jarvis said. “Why would he step down?”

“He’s too loyal to go rogue,” Hotham insisted. “Julianne?”

“There are two problems,” Julianne said. “The first is that the war is not yet won. It is unlikely in the extreme that the United States of America” – an absurd concept, to one born in the Prime Timeline – “has surrendered. Montrose cannot have won. Not yet. We owe it to him to provide as much support as possible, even if we don’t entirely trust him.”

Hotham glowered. “And the second?”

Julianne braced herself. “Montrose could lose.”

“What?”

Julianne honestly couldn’t tell which of the men had spoken. Perhaps it had been both. The Protectorate hadn’t lost a battle in nearly a hundred years. There were few primal states capable of putting up even the slightest resistance, if the Protectorate decided to squash them, and none of the timelines they’d discovered earlier had enjoyed even the slightest concept of modern technology. The Protectorate had grown too used to its tradition of victory, to regarding war as a game and expansion as their natural right. The war games were as realistic as possible, pitting different units against their peers, but there were limits. It was difficult to imagine what it might be like to face a society that not only understood technology, yet could also mass-produce their own weapons and work to duplicate the Protectorate’s. It had never happened before.

And we don’t know how long it will take them to devise their own plasma cannons or antigravity systems, she thought. The researchers hadn’t been able to offer any sort of reassurance. There were too many unanswered questions for them to be sure of anything. How long will it take them to duplicate the Crosstime Transpositioner and reach our world?

“There is no way they can defeat us,” Hotham snapped. “Montrose can hold his position indefinitely.”

“We dare not assume so,” Julianne said, tartly. “The enemy has nukes. And ballistic missiles.”

“The Castles are capable of withstanding a nuke,” Hotham said.

“The degenerates only need to get lucky once,” Julianne said, keeping her voice calm. “We are committed to war now. We have no choice. We must support Montrose.”

“We’re already preparing the third invasion force,” Jarvis said. “The commander can be given orders to relieve Montrose.”

“For what?” Hotham’s face darkened. “What crime has he committed?”

“He arguably exceeded his orders,” Jarvis snapped.

“Arguably,” Hotham repeated. “Parliament will not agree.”

Julianne suspected he was right. Montrose had orders to be diplomatic – or to blow up Castle Treathwick – if he encountered an equal or superior civilisation. A primitive civilisation would pose no challenge, beyond a minor logistics headache. But one advanced enough to be useful without being advanced enough to be dangerous … Montrose had either been very brave or very stupid and no one would know for sure, not until the war was over. He might have done the right thing.

“We can convince Parliament,” Jarvis said.

“We cannot convince his supporters,” Hotham countered. “They’ll revolt.”

“And the last thing we need is a struggle for command authority in the middle of a war,” Julianne agreed. It wasn’t just Montrose. By long custom, a Captain-General had the right to nominate his subordinates, promising them a share in the new timeline in exchange for their service and support. Montrose hadn’t secured all of his choices, but he’d managed to get enough in place to ensure relieving him would be very tricky indeed. “If the enemy takes advantage of it …”

She let her voice trail off, suggestively. No previous opponent had been able to take advantage of command disunity. They’d lacked the insight to know when it was happening, or the ability to influence their betters. This group of degenerates might be … well, degenerates, yet that didn’t make them stupid. They might be as cunning as any primal, with the technology to make themselves really dangerous. The hell of it, she reflected, was that they’d probably been committed to war from the moment Castle Treathwick was rotated into the new timeline. The Protectorate needed neither competition nor subversion. And it would get both, if they failed to bring the new timeline under control.

The argument went on for hours, but the outcome was inevitable. The war would go on.

But in truth, Julianne reflected as the meeting finally came to an end, the matter was out of their hands. And had been so for months now.

Chapter One: Jubal, Texas, Timeline F (OTL)

This isn’t right, Sergeant Callam Boone thought, as he surveyed the deserted ruins of a once-proud town. This isn’t America.

He kept himself low, eyes sweeping the street as the small team lurked in the shadows. Jubal had been a prosperous town once, with a factory and a thriving population and everything they needed to support themselves, from a school to simple and affordable housing. It would have made an ideal retirement town, if the factory hadn’t shut down and plunged the town into a nightmare from which it had never recovered. The majority of the inhabitants had moved out, leaving a few stragglers mired in hopelessness and despair. It had been galling to watch the collapse of so many communities, to see people struggling with alcohol and drugs because they had little hope of ever bettering themselves; harder still to hear the lectures from snooty university lecturers, reporters, politicians and other rich and privileged men north of Richmond who had no idea what it was like to grow up in such a community and cared less. It was easy to see why so many of the remaining inhabitants had joined the enemy work gangs, even though it was technically treason. What had the United States done for them?

Callam spat as he leaned forward, bracing himself. It was dawn, the air light enough to see clearly without NVGs. The street was a wreck, a handful of burned-out cars and houses a grim reminder that the United States was in the grip of a military invasion from another world. The Protectorate – the Puritans, as they had come to be known – had swept through Jubal, blasting aside anyone who got in their way, and then abandoned the town after rounding up the population and moving them south. They had made all sorts of promises about cleaning up the local environment, but they’d done nothing to collect the garbage on the streets or repair the homes for human occupation. Callam felt a hint of shame as the wind picked up briefly, stirring the garbage on the streets. He’d seen such sights in Iraq during the war, but it felt wrong to see them in America. But it was just another sign of hopelessness. It ate people alive.

He glanced back at the rest of the team, then motioned them forward. The four men behind him looked like raiders rather than soldiers, carrying weapons that were surprisingly primitive compared to the high-tech array they’d deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they had no choice. The Protectorate was good at tracking radio signals and any other sort of betraying emission, their visual sensors were better than anything America could deploy. He glanced up into the lightening sky, wondering if there was a drone up there watching them. It was difficult to spot an American UAV with the naked eye, even one large enough to pass for a manned aircraft, and the Protectorate drones were smaller and stealthier. He’d been told the techs were working on ways to detect them, but he’d believe it when he saw it. There was no guarantee they’d crack the puzzle in time to matter.

They advanced forward, skirting the houses and crossing a wrecked schoolhouse that could have passed for Springfield Elementary. A body lay on the ground in front of the gates, so badly decayed it was impossible to tell what had killed it. Callam gave the corpse a quick glance and moved on, wishing there was time to give the dead man a proper burial. Someone had painted a note on a faded sign – SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER – and left it there, exposed to the elements. Callam felt a twinge of something he didn’t want to look at too closely. If the Protectorate won the war, school really would be out forever. Defeat meant the end of the world.

They reached their planned ambush point and slowed, sweeping the surrounding area for possible threats. There were none, the rotting homes seemingly abandoned. He glanced into one and scowled as he saw the handful of faded pictures on the walls, left behind years before the invasion had begun. A young boy growing from a toddler to a child to a teenager to a young adult … he wondered, suddenly, what had happened to the kid and his parents. They’d left their home and then … what? Why had they left in such a hurry?

He checked his watch, then unslung his rucksack and removed the electromagnetic trap. The device looked crude and cumbersome, as if it had been assembled by someone who didn’t quite know what he was doing, but he’d been assured it should work. Corporal Bulgier took the other half of the device out of his bag and emplaced it on the far side of the street, half-hidden by a garbage can. Callam tensed as he triggered the lasers, linking the two halves of the device together. He’d been told the system was undetectable, but it was hard to be sure. The Protectorate had surprised the defenders before and no doubt it would do so again.

“Get into place,” he hissed, just loudly enough to be heard. The ambush site wasn’t perfect, but what was in this day and age? He disliked having to rely on a plan with too many moving parts and he was painfully aware of just how much could go wrong, yet … he’d just have to hope for the best. “Keep your heads down as much as possible.”

“Yes, Granddad,” Corporal Bulgier hissed back.

Callam gave him a sharp look as he found a place to hide. He’d thought himself retired from war, when he’d left the Marine Corps to become the Sheriff of Flint, and if the Protectorate hadn’t invaded he knew it was unlikely he would ever see war again. He certainly hadn’t thought there would be a civil war, even though he’d seen the spreading hopelessness and despair and outright hatred of the federal government. The population was too beaten down to consider revolt, or working on building its own self-supporting networks and having as little to do with the government as possible. And then …

Guilt gnawed at his heart. It had been sheer luck he’d been far enough from Flint to escape, when the Protectorate arrived. Cold logic told him he’d done the right thing in running, in taking everything he’d seen to higher authority, but he didn’t believe it. He felt like a coward, running from danger even as darkness swept over the town that had elected him Sheriff. The folk back home were under the yoke now, a yoke that was oddly light in some ways and very harsh in others. Or so he’d been told. Reports from the occupied zone were vague and often contradictory. He suspected some were little more than enemy propaganda. The Protectorate had had no trouble finding allies, people willing to sell out their country for money, power, or even something as simple as medical care and enough food to fill their bellies. If they had come into the world blind, they knew what they were dealing with now.

And no matter how many times I fight now, he thought, it will never be enough.

His watch vibrated, once. Callam tensed. It was time. He peered forward, half-expecting to see a handful of enemy hovertanks rocketing towards him. The Protectorate could move with terrifying speed and it was certainly possible they’d want to nip any trouble in the bud, although it was unlikely they’d pegged his team as a major threat. Or indeed any kind of threat. Seventy miles to the east, a USMC formation was risking their lives to mount a diversionary attack, to draw the enemy’s attention away from him. The guilt grew stronger, a mocking reminder of his failure. He wouldn’t fail again.

A faint whining noise echoed on the air, sending unpleasant feelings through his body. He wasn’t entirely unaware of sonic weapons, but it was one thing to read about them and another to experience the effect in person. It was disconcerting, even worrying. The sound grew louder as he gritted his teeth, reminding himself he’d been through worse. And yet it made him want to be afraid.

It isn’t real, he told himself, sharply. It isn’t real!

The sound grew more unpleasant as the drone came into view, a tiny flying saucer about twice the size of a garbage can lid. It reminded him of a drone he’d seen during his last deployment, except it was smaller and radiated strobe lights that made it hard to see clearly. He’d thought the drone would be an easy target – he was a very good shot and his team included shooters who were even better – but the combination of lights and vibration made it hard to pick out the actual drone from the blurry haze. His head twanged painfully as a strobe light pulsed against his eyeballs, a grim reminder of just what longer exposure could do to him. If half the tales were true, a protest march in Austin had ended with the protestors comatose, vomiting, or otherwise incapable of offering resistance – or even running – before it was too late.

He looked down, watching as the drone came closer. It was hard to tell if it was being controlled remotely by a distant pilot or operating on some kind of AI, although he supposed it hardly mattered. The Protectorate used the drones to patrol the edge of its sphere of influence, making it clear that anyone who tried to cross no-man’s land did so at severe risk of their lives. Callam ground his teeth in silent frustration, bracing himself as the last few seconds ticked away …

A deafening shriek, almost human, split the air as the trap was sprung. The drone stopped dead, vibrating so violently Callam half-expected it to tear itself apart as it threw sparks in all directions, then crashed to the ground. He ducked down quickly, fearing the drone would carry a self-destruct charge, although he was already too close to be safe. The Protectorate didn’t have lawyers impeding military operations and while they didn’t set out to cause civilian casualties they didn’t let the fear of killing innocents get in their way either. They certainly wouldn’t let it stop them from fitting a self-destruct into their drones.

It hit the ground. Callam let out a breath as the whining sound and crazy lighting died away. He hadn’t felt so disconcerted since his first combat patrol, despite the best training the USMC could provide, but the effect was fading rapidly now. He forced himself to stand and hurry towards the drone, feeling an odd sense of unreality nagging at his mind. It felt like gazing upon a scorpion or a spider, an uneasy sense there was something fundamentally wrong about the thing in front of him. Up close, the drone was smaller than he’d thought, the disc studded with sensor arrays and devices that had no obvious function. They didn’t look like weapons. The damage was difficult to assess. A number of tiny arrays looked broken, but he didn’t know enough to tell if there was any internal damage.

Score one for the techs, he thought. They didn’t know how the drone flew – up close, there were no propellers or tiny jet intakes – but they had been sure they could bring the flying saucer crashing down. Whatever they did, it worked.

“Get the body bag,” he snapped. “Hurry!”

“Here,” Corporal Hastings said. The lone woman in the group, she moved with practiced ease to open the black bag and hold it ready. “Hurry!”

Callam nodded. It was oddly hard to touch the drone – it felt like reaching out to pick up a spider, the sensation refusing to abate even as his fingers touched cooling metal – but he forced himself to lift the drone and shove it into the bag. The techs had assured him that the material was designed to block everything from radio to a handful of electromagnetic radiations he’d never even heard of, ensuring the Protectorate couldn’t track their missing drone and throw a missile at it from a safe distance, yet it was impossible to be sure. Six months ago, alternate timelines had been nothing more than bad science-fiction, with evil goatee-wearing counterparts tormenting the main characters before being booted back to their own dimension. Now …

His lips twitched. Do I have a counterpart in their world? One with a goatee?

Callam shoved his empty rucksack to Corporal Hastings, then slung the body bag over his shoulders and stood. He’d expected the drone to be heavier, but it was only lightly more weighty than the dustbin lid it so resembled. He supposed it wasn’t really a surprise. The Marine Corps had been working hard to lighten everything for easier deployment, in hopes of ensuring a major force could get halfway around the world before some local tyrant decided to cause too much trouble, and the Protectorate clearly felt the same way. The rest of the team was already bugging out, as planned. It felt wrong – the Corps did not leave men behind – but there was no choice. The enemy might already be on the way.

He unhooked a grenade from his belt and held it at the ready as he walked away, then removed the pin and tossed it at the crash site. It was unlikely any investigators would believe the drone destroyed beyond all hope of recognition, not if they sifted through the crash site, but it was just possible any distant observers would think the drone had exploded. It might buy a few seconds more as they picked up speed, hurrying towards the extraction point. They didn’t dare risk bringing vehicles too close to the region, not when they’d make easy targets for enemy air power. They had to put some distance between themselves and the enemy before it was too late.

This is America, he thought, with a hot flash of anger. It isn’t right!

Corporal Hastings slowed as the sound of distant gunfire echoed through the air. Callam motioned for her to pick up the pace, even though the air was growing warmer by the second. They were too far from the diversionary attack to hear anything – he thought – but it was impossible to be sure of that too. The shooting could be anything from a local offensive to resistance insurgents or drug or people smugglers taking advantage of the chaos to ply their deadly trade. Or men who thought they were the last free Americans in the world. The army had stumbled across a half-hidden ranch of people who thought the Protectorate had overrun the entire country, if not the entire world. It had been surprisingly hard to convince them that the world had not ended. Not yet.

He cursed under his breath as he heard a distant whine, his ears twitching unpleasantly as he picked up speed.  The enemy might have been diverted or they might not … it didn’t matter. He forced himself to keep going, heading towards the extraction point as the rest of the team hurried elsewhere. They would probably be ignored, he told himself, as he felt sweat prickling down his back. Better they got clear before it was too late.

“Crap,” Corporal Hastings muttered.

Callam glanced back. Two more drones were gliding towards them, moving with terrifying speed. They could have blasted both Americans if they’d wanted … that meant the drones, or their controllers, wanted to take prisoners. Callam wasn’t reassured. The Protectorate was more civilised than many of America’s other foes, but no one had any doubt that any captives would be interrogated and they would be forced to talk. There was certainly no reason to think the Protectorate was be any different. They probably had some super-advanced lie detectors and truth drugs to ensure that whatever they were told was actually true.

He gritted his teeth. “Run!”

The whining grew louder as they ran, the drones getting alarmingly close. He had no idea what they had to capture prisoners – his imagination suggested everything from netting to phasers on stun – but they were running out of time. The noise was making his ears ache, reaching into his brain and making it hard to think … he nearly stumbled, his sense of balance suddenly twisting to the point he almost fell. His muscles jittered painfully, threatening to cramp … it was hard to keep going. He hadn’t felt so sore since his first weeks at Camp Pendleton. He’d thought himself in good shape and yet …

He heard a shout and threw himself to the ground as the RPG team fired, nearly at point-blank range. The RPGs were primitive compared to Javelins and other modern antitank missiles, but that wasn’t a disadvantage against an enemy capable of countering and neutralising most modern weapons. The warheads were touchy too, detonating near the drones even if they didn’t score direct hits. He turned his head just in time to see the drones crashing to the ground.

“Got them, Sarge,” Private Singh snapped.

“Set the charges, then get moving,” Callam ordered. He’d hoped the RPG team would be able to avoid contact and withdraw without being noticed, let alone engaged. They had taken a calculated risk in leading the drones to the team … he told himself, sharply, that they’d done what they had to in order to secure their prize. The drone they’d captured might prove the key to defeating the Protectorate. Might. “We don’t have much time.”

He glanced south, feeling cold despite the heat. Everything looked normal and yet, only a few miles away, American territory was in the iron grip of a crosstime invasion. Six months ago, it would have been unthinkable. The idea was absurd. He snorted as they set the charges and hurried off, leaving them to detonate. The idea of a military invasion of the United States had been inconceivable, after the Civil War.

But a great deal had changed since then.

Mary Beth Wilkins knows she made a mistake the moment she sees her beloved library burn.

She also knows what she must do next to protect herself and her secret. And although she failed to save this library, she has a more important purpose to fulfill—a magical purpose.

If she acts fast.

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

 

The Midbury Lake Incident By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Mary Beth Wilkins had the most perfect library, until one day, in the middle of June, the library burned down.

She arrived at the two-hundred-year-old structure to find the roof collapsed, the walls blackened, and the books…well, let’s just say the books were gone, floating away in the clouds of smoke that darkened the early morning sky.

No one had called her, even though she had always thought of the Midbury Lake Public Library as her library. She was the only librarian, and even though she didn’t own the building—the Town of Midbury Lake did—she treated it like her own, defended it like a precious child, and managed to find funding, even in the dark years of dwindling government support.

She sat in her ancient Subaru, too shocked to move, not just because the firefighters were still poking out of the smoking building as if they were posing for the cover of next year’s Fire Fighters Calendar, but because of all of the emotions that rose within her.

Grief wasn’t one of them. Grief would come, she knew. Grief always came, whether you wanted it or not. She had learned that in her previous life—a much more adventurous life, a life lived, her mother would say (and why, why was she thinking of her mother? Mary Beth had banned thoughts of her mother for nearly ten years). No one could avoid grief, but grief came in its own sweet time.

No, the dominant emotion she was feeling was fury. Fury that no one had called her. Fury that the library—her sanctuary—was gone. Fury that her day—her life—had been utterly destroyed.

She gripped the leather cover she had placed on the Subaru’s steering wheel, so that her hands would never touch metal or hard plastic, and she made herself take a deep breath.

Her routines were shattered. Every morning she arrived before six, made coffee, put out the fresh-baked donuts whose tantalizing aroma was, even now, wafting out of the back seat.

Her assistant, Lynda Sue, would arrive shortly, and then Mary Beth would have to comfort her, since Lynda Sue was prone to dramatics—she had been a theatah majah once, you knoow, deah—and then it would become all about Lynda Sue and the Patrons and the Library and the Funding, and oh, dear, Mary Beth would find herself in the middle of a mainstream maelstrom.

Too many emotions, including her own.

She had made a serious mistake, because her morning routine hadn’t been in her control. That meditative hour, before anyone arrived, would happen at the library, in what everyone called the Great Room, which was—had been—a wall of windows overlooking Midbury Lake and the hills beyond.

Midbury Lake changed with the seasons and sometimes, Mary Beth thought, with her moods. This morning, the lake itself seemed to be ablaze, the reds and oranges reflecting on the rippling water.

Then she realized that the colors were coming from the sunrise, not from the fire at the library, and she bowed her head.

When she opened the car door, a new phase of her life would begin, and she would have to make choices.

It had been so nice not to make choices any more.

It had been wonderful to be Mary Beth Wilkins, small town librarian.

She would miss Mary Beth.

She could never rebuild Mary Beth.

She would have to become someone new, and becoming someone new always took way too much work.

***

She drove back to her apartment, and parked near the secluded wooded area near the two-story block-long building. She often parked there—at least she had kept up that old habit—and knew all the ways to the building’s back entrance that couldn’t be seen from the street.

Then she glanced over the back seat of the car. The donuts. That little incompetent clerk at the local donut shop probably wouldn’t remember her, and as usual, Mary Beth had paid cash. She hoped if anyone saw her, they would think they’d seen her earlier than they had or maybe they would confuse the days.

She hoped. Because she had stopped thinking defensively three years ago. Somehow, she had thought Midbury Lake was too remote, too obscure, too off-the-beaten path for anyone to find her.

Better yet, she had thought no one remembered her. She had done everything she could to scour herself from the records, and she hadn’t used magic in what seemed like forever, so she wouldn’t leave a trail.

The donut aroma was too much for her, or maybe she had just become one of those middle-aged women who ate whenever they were stressed. She didn’t care. She reached into the back seat, nudged up the top of the donut box, and took a donut, covering her fingers with granules of sugar.

She couldn’t fix the library, not without someone noticing.

She bit into the donut, savoring the mix of sugar and grease and soft, perfect cake. She would miss these donuts. They were special.

At least she had already picked a new name. She needed to adopt it. Not Mary Beth Wilkins any longer. Now, Victoria Dowspot. Her identification for the new identity was in the apartment. She should have been carrying it. Yet another mistake.

She also should have been practicing the name in her own mind. She hadn’t done that either. Victoria. Victoria Marie Dowspot.

Another librarian. The kind of single middle-aged woman no one noticed, even, apparently, when her library burned.

She swallowed the fury. That was Mary Beth’s fury, not Victoria’s. She needed to keep that in mind.

Victoria finished the donut, wiped the sugar off her mouth, then sighed. The donuts, comfortable in their box, were just one symbol of all she had to do, how lax she had become.

She stepped out of the Subaru, then pulled out the donut box, and put it in the trunk. No one would accidentally see them there. And there was nothing else in the car that would directly tie it to her, at least from the perspective of someone who didn’t know her.

She had learned, three identities ago, to be as cautious about strange little details as possible. Too bad she had gotten so relaxed here in Midbury Lake. She had already made half a dozen mistakes.

She hoped they weren’t fatal.

She snuck up the back stairs, stepping around the creaks and groans, and quietly turned the key in her apartment door’s deadbolt. She pushed the door open and slipped inside. Magoo greeted her, concern on his feline face. He was a big orange male, battered when she found him, or, rather, when he found her.

He had lived through two different identity changes, the only consistent part of her life. She always thanked the universe that librarians and cats went together like hands and gloves. No one thought anything of a librarian who had cat.

Victoria was just glad she hadn’t brought him to the library of late. That had actually been his idea. He hadn’t liked one of the new patrons, a middle-aged man with an overloaded face—big forehead, small piggy eyes, heavy cheekbones.

She hadn’t like him either, but unlike Magoo, she couldn’t bail on her job.

Until today, that is. And she would bail because they would think her dead in that fire.

She just had to do a few things first.

She had a go-bag in the van she kept in the apartment’s parking area. She paid for the extra space, telling the management the van belonged to her cousin, whom she’d pretended to be more than once. She would use that disguise again today, after she grabbed some food and water for Magoo. Everything else would stay here.

She wouldn’t mind leaving this apartment. It was dark, especially in the winter, but it was heavily soundproofed and, unlike the library, made of stone.

Magoo looked at her, his tail drooping. He knew. He hated what was going to come next, but at least he didn’t run away from her.

She scooped him under one arm and put him in the special cat carrier she had made. It was solid on the inside, but on the outside, it looked like a canvas carryall. And she had spelled it so no one could see a cat inside.

Magoo made one soft sound of protest, but he went in willingly enough. She put one bag of his dry food in her real carryall, along with two extra cans of his wet food. Then she grabbed two of his toys, the ones he played with the most, and packed them as well.

Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at the remaining cat toys, scattered on the hard wood floor. The toys were battered and well loved, and she had to leave them behind.

Funny, how the emotion rose over Magoo’s things, and not her own. She had worked on staying unattached for so long that she didn’t mind leaving her possessions behind. She minded leaving his.

She stood. She had hoped she could stay in Midbury Lake. After so many years, she had thought she could. But she should have known that disaster would follow her.

It always did.

She made herself take a deep breath, then ran a hand over her forehead. She went into the bedroom, smoothed the coverlet on the bed because she didn’t want anyone to think she was a slob, not that it mattered. It wasn’t her after all; it was Mary Beth.

Then she peered out the bedroom window, with its view of the parking lot. She couldn’t see the Subaru, but the van looked just fine.

No one else stood in the lot either. So, it was now or never.

She clenched a fist and focused her ears on the Subaru. Then she slid her right fingernails along her thumb, mimicking the slow opening of a trunk lid. She heard it unlock, and squeal open.

For the first time, she was happy she had never used rust remover. Sometimes it was the little things that allowed success.

Always, it was the little things.

Then she scooped her left hand downward. She could feel the donut box, even though it was far away. She levitated it, seeing it in her mind’s eye, and waited until it was over the trees before igniting it. Then she sent it to the library, as fast as the breeze could take it.

If anyone saw the burning box, they’d think it sparks or debris from the library fire, or a figment of their imaginations.

The box arrived, and she lowered it into one of the still burning sections, careful to keep it away from firefighters.

Then she closed the trunk lid, and leaned on the windowsill.

Her heart was pounding as if she had run five miles. She had trouble catching her breath. Sweat dripped from her forehead.

She was out of practice on everything, and that wasn’t good. She really had become complacent.

And she still had some magic to go before she could quit.

She wiped off her forehead with the back of her hand, then crouched beside the bed. She removed a locked box with her many identities and two dental models of her mouth.

Her hand was shaking as she removed one of the dental models. This was the tricky spell, and she was tired from the easy one. She had to make real human teeth out of one of the models. Then she had to send it to the library, and lower it into one of the still burning sections. If there were still-burning sections.

She had been moving awfully slowly.

She grabbed the glass of water beside her bed. The glass was smudged. Magoo had probably stuck his little face in it, just so he could touch the water with his tongue.

Even so, she needed the refreshment, so she drank. The water was warm and stale, and she thought she could taste cat saliva. Probably her overactive imagination.

She drank the entire glass, then set it down, and squared her shoulders. She held the dental model, squinched her eyes closed, and imagined it as bone, yellowed with age and tarnished with plaque.

She opened her eyes. She was now holding a mandible instead of a model. It actually looked like someone had ripped teeth from her mouth.

She shuddered just a little, opened the window six inches and stuck her hand—and the teeth—outside. Then she sent them to the burning library.

Her mind’s eye showed her that one section still burned. She lowered the teeth there, snapped the mandible in half, and let it fall. It didn’t matter if it hit someone. They wouldn’t know what it was. They would think it was just debris.

She shut off her mind’s eye for the second time, leaned back, and felt her legs wobble.

If only she could sit for twenty minutes. But she couldn’t. She had to get out of here before someone remembered her, before someone decided to check up on her.

That fury rose a third time—no one was thinking of her at all—and then she remembered that it played to her advantage.

She wiped a shaking hand over her forehead, and turned around.

That hideous man with the overloaded face was standing in the doorway, holding Magoo with one hand. If anything, the man looked even more menacing than he had in the library.

And Magoo seemed remarkably calm. He hated being held without having someone support his back feet.

And he hated this man.

She held her position, as if she were frozen in fear. Her heart was pounding too hard. She hated it when someone snuck up on her, but that was her fault. She hadn’t retuned her ears.

Even when she was trying not to be careless, she was being very careless indeed.

“Making your escape?” the man asked. “You’re a little slow this time, Darcy, aren’t you? Complacent. It trips up escapees every single time.”

Her heart pounded harder. He used her real name. She stared at Magoo, whose ears were flat.

Then she made herself swallow against a dry throat.

“Put him down,” she said, careful not to use Magoo’s name. She didn’t even have to work at making her voice quaver. “He didn’t do anything.”

“True enough,” the man said. “He isn’t even a real familiar. And even though he’s lived in close proximity to you for—what? a year?—your magic hasn’t rubbed off on him.”

The caveman’s numbers were wrong. She wasn’t sure if that was deliberate. She wasn’t sure if he had said that to get her to correct him. She wasn’t going to correct him.

Because Magoo was a familiar, but she had cloaked him long ago. And he had clearly practiced his itty bitty magic more than she had. He had made a doppelganger, and that doppelganger was at least a year old. How often had Magoo used that doppelganger with her, so that he could do whatever it was he did when he didn’t want her to catch him? Enough so that this doppelganger had some heft and a tiny bit of catlike life.

Good for Magoo, sending the doppelganger out when he heard the caveman come through the door.

Or was the creature that the man held actually Magoo?

Her heart rate spiked.

She was going to have to use her mind’s eye to check, which meant magic, which meant even more doors opening, more people coming for her. Those tears pricked her eyes again.

“What do you want?” she asked the man, even though she knew.

“We need you back in Alexandria,” he said.

How many times had she heard that answer in her nightmares? And for how many years? Ever since she had inherited the library. The real library and all of its knowledge, once thought lost.

Her stomach twisted. “And if I don’t go?”

He raised Magoo—or the Magoo doppelganger—and shook him slightly. The cat made a mew of protest. Unless the man had magicked Magoo, that really was the doppelganger. The actual Magoo would’ve bitten the man’s fingers off.

“Do you really want to test it?” the man asked.

She clenched her fists. No, she didn’t want to test it. And no, she didn’t want to deal with the man either, because that would mean fire, and if she somehow set this place on fire, and the library was already burning, then that would draw attention to Mary Beth Wilkins, and Darcy (no, Victoria. She had to think of herself as Victoria) didn’t want any attention ever falling on Mary Beth.

“What do you get paid if you bring me to Alexandria?” she asked, not willing to say, Bring me back, because that would imply that she had left, and in actuality, she had never been to Alexandria. The library had. The library was born there, and parts of the library died there. Her ancestors managed to save some of it—much of it—during the four different times it burned.

But they had learned to never, ever put the books back on the shelves, because doing so brought out men like this one. And sometimes started fires.

She took a deep silent breath, then flashed her mind’s eye for a half second, looking past the man, seeing what his powers were, and seeing if that creature he held was the real Magoo.

The man had less power than he thought he did, and the creature wasn’t Magoo. Magoo was crouching motionlessly in his carryall.

She retracted her mind’s eye, but the man had noticed.

So she stood taller, and let her power thread up. Without planning it, she extended one hand and sent a ball of flame to the man so quickly that he didn’t have time to scream before it engulfed him.

His mouth opened, then his face melted as his entire body incinerated.

She stopped the fire before it destroyed him completely. The stench of burning meat and grease filled the air.

Magoo sneezed.

The man’s body had toppled to the hardwood floor, and the flames had left a serious scorch mark. She walked over to the body, and poked it with her foot.

She had needed a body. Actually having one would be so much better than those stupid teeth had been.

She bent over him, and separated the top of the skull from the jawbone. She left the top of the skull to float just above the body. Then she removed some small bones from the feet and the hands, not enough to show that the hands were bigger than hers, but enough to show that the hands were human. She took a small portion of a rib as well.

She compiled them into a little ball, covered them with a cloak, and sent them, still steaming, through the still-open window. She monitored them as she sent them to the library, and let them tumble into the section where she had sent the teeth.

Then she uncloaked them. Their steam mixed with the smoke of the still-smoldering section.

She shut off her mind’s eye and took a shuddering breath, then wished she hadn’t. It tasted foul, like rotting meat. She licked her lips.

Her neighbors would notice that odor.

She used the last of her energy to cremate the remains into little bits of nothing, careful to contain the fire. Then she put it all out, staggered into her kitchen, and took out a broom and dustpan. She swept up the ash, and dumped it into the toilet in small sections, flushing several times so that it wouldn’t clog up the system.

By the time she was done, she was woozy with exhaustion. She hadn’t used that much magical power in years and years. And using it had opened the door to more interlopers like the man who had just died.

She ran a hand through her hair and looked in the mirror. Shadows under her eyes, and a face smudged with ash. She washed off her skin, then staggered into the kitchen and drank an ancient bottle of Ice Blue Gatorade. It helped, a little.

In the living room, Magoo mewed. It was probably a get-me-out-of-here mew, but she took it as a move-your-ass mew. Because she had to.

She really had been careless. Not just here, but at the Midbury Lake Public Library.

That fire. It had to be her fault. Not because she set it, but because she hadn’t monitored the books. With all the interest in the history of the ancient world these days, particularly the history of religion as it pertained to modern times, someone had probably ordered a book through interlibrary loan that she hadn’t seen.

A paper book, one that shouldn’t be on the shelf of a library where she worked. A paper book about paganism or magic spells or showing ancient scrolls. The kind of book that had actually been in the Library of Alexandria in its heyday or in the Serapeum just before it was destroyed.

The kind of book stored inside her memory, in a locked area, where she couldn’t touch it. Like the women before her, all of them, from the same family. She likened that locked area to a computer chip. It contained knowledge and power, but only tapped that knowledge and power when something demanded them.

She had put herself in a position where nothing would tap the knowledge, or she thought she had. But she hadn’t done enough. She should have kept an active inventory on the books that her family guarded. She hadn’t, and it had caused this.

Because, whenever one of the old books hit a shelf, or a facsimile of one of the old books hit a shelf near a library repositorian (like her), the ancient spells revived, the ones that had actually destroyed the library. If the books from the Library of Alexandria reappeared on shelves, those shelves were supposed to burn.

Her family, one of the 16 ancient families that guarded the library’s knowledge, had never been able to counter those spells. Her grandmother had died trying, so her mother simply avoided libraries, bookstores, and any other place where books gathered.

Darcy had embraced libraries, but she had been cautious.

Not cautious enough though, since that horrid man had found her. And she had destroyed her favorite little library by not monitoring what crossed its shelves.

She went back into the living room. The carryall was inching its way across the floor. Apparently Magoo had had enough.

She crouched beside him and put her hand on his back through the soft side of the carryall.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We still have to go.”

Before someone caught her again. Before someone took her back to Alexandria. Before someone tried to take that chip of library knowledge out of her brain, and destroy it entirely. Or, worse in her opinion, tried to revive it all at once, and use it for the wrong purpose—whatever that purpose might be.

She put on the wig and hoodie that marked her as Mary Beth’s cousin, then grabbed both carryalls and walked to the door. The apartment still smelled faintly of greasy meat, and there was a lingering bit of smoke.

That was on her. It was always on her.

The magic inside her wasn’t her own. It wasn’t even the library’s. It was an ancient evil spell, designed to destroy the very things she loved.

Books.

Maybe the next time she stopped somewhere, she wouldn’t become a librarian. Maybe she would run a movie theater or open a donut shop. Or maybe she would spend her days in genteel poverty, sitting in a coffee shop and watching the world go by.

She had a lot of time to think about it, and a long way to drive. Where to, she didn’t know. She would wait until she deemed herself as far from this place as possible, in a location that seemed as far from Alexandria as possible.

Then she let herself out and walked down the stairs, quietly, so as not to disturb the neighbors, who were already gathering around the front of the building. She could hear the conversation: they thought the stench was coming from the burning library.

Let them.

People always misunderstood why libraries burned. They blamed old paper or faulty wiring. They never blamed the ignorant, who deemed some knowledge worthy and some too frightening to know.

She wished she could defend that knowledge, but all she could do was protect it, and hold it, until someone else came up with a solution. And when the time came, she would pass that little kernel on to some other member of her family, who would adopt the burden and treasure it.

Like she had adopted Magoo.

“Come on, kiddo,” she said to him as they headed to the van. “Adventures await.”

And she hoped those adventures would be of the gentle, placid kind. Like summer mornings staring at a still Midbury Lake.

One could always hope. Because hope was what kept the bits of the library alive. Hope that one day the spells would lift, one day the library would be reunited, and one day the books would return to the shelves.

And she would never ever have to grieve again.

 

____________________________________________

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

The Midbury Lake Incident

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Dimdimich/Dreamstime
Uncollected Anthology logo art © Tanya Borozenets/Dreamstime
Uncollected Anthology logo design © Stephanie Writt

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.