Authors

A desert lake. A severed arm. A thousand questions.

Las Vegas summer sun bakes Metro Detective Sofia Herrara as she carefully steps her way to solving this murder mystery, while protecting herself, her partner and the department.

From water wars to the mob, good guys to bad, she’ll follow the clues to answer these pressing questions:

Whose arm? Who died? And—most importantly—why?

“Body Parts & Bathtub Rings“ is available for one week on this site. It’s available in Crimes Against Nature, edited by Robert Lopresti. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Body Parts & Bathtub Rings By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

The skin on the hand remained intact, although it was pale and bloated. Black hairs curved out of the base of the fingers and along the wrist. The body was missing, but the wedding ring studded with three visible diamonds wasn’t. The diamonds sparkled.  This hand hadn’t been in the water long, which was both good and bad.

Las Vegas Metro Detective Sofia Herrara pulled gloves onto her own hands, the heat of the day making the task harder than it should have been. Her own hands were slightly swollen and just a little bit damp. Sweat trickled down her back despite the loose weave long-sleeve shirt she wore. Her dark khakis were probably sweat stained as well behind the knee. Part of the problem was her heavy boots, which required thick socks just to keep the blisters away. Her feet were hot, she was hot, and it would only get worse.

She was crouched in the midday sunlight at the edge of Lake Mead. Her wide-brimmed hat cast shade over the rocks of what had once been the lakebed. The water pushed against larger rocks about a foot away.

The water glistened as if the sunlight made it happy. Sunlight in July did not make Sofia happy. She had given her standard issue water bottle to her partner, Zach Gelb, to hold while she examined the crime scene. If, indeed, this could be called a crime scene. The crime had clearly happened elsewhere.

Zach had taken a few steps away from the scene to talk on his cell. He had his back to her, but he was standing still, not pacing, trying to act like this was a crime scene as well.

The sun was so high that Zach didn’t leave much of a shadow. There was, essentially, no escaping the sun out here at this time of day, which was usually when the lake was the emptiest—at least of locals. Tourists, on the other hand, had no idea what they were facing when they encountered the desert sun, the water, and the increased elevation.

The third person in their group knew that better than she did. The park ranger who had called the hand in, Roberto Bonetti —Call me Berto— had been out here for most of the morning as he waited beside the hand to preserve the scene.

He wore the National Park Ranger’s standard summer uniform, a tan shirt with tan slacks and boots as heavy as hers. His hat wasn’t thin and floppy like hers and would have made her head sweat.

Maybe he was used to this heat, although she had no idea how anyone could be. He did have two water bottles attached to his utility belt, along with some hydration packs and a small emergency kit. She hadn’t asked him how many times he had found dehydrated tourists suffering from heat stroke, but she suspected it was quite a lot.

The three of them were now waiting for the Clark County Coroner’s Office to send someone here. Technically, the ranger should have contacted them immediately, but this wasn’t Berto’s first rodeo. He could see that the hand was suspicious. Or rather, what was visible of the arm was suspicious.

The wrist was intact, but the forearm wasn’t. And it hadn’t been cleanly cut. It had been ripped through. The bone, which was what she had to go on, was jagged.

Which made it suspicious, and because it was, Berto knew that a detective would be needed. So he had called Metro first, and then called the coroner.

Sofia was grateful for that because the faster they all moved on this the better. The last thing she wanted was for the media to get wind of a severed hand discovered at Lake Mead.

As Lake Mead’s water levels had dropped due to the drought conditions of the past twenty-plus years, more and more bodies—or parts of bodies—got discovered. The national press corps went nuts a few years back when a body in a barrel turned up. That body was at least forty years old and most likely the remains of someone who had run afoul with the Las Vegas mob.

Since then, every single grisly discovery on the shores or sticking out of the water got the press’s attention. It would only be a matter of time before someone heard of this one.

Thank heavens, though, this hand had been discovered by a ranger and not a tourist. At least Sofia wasn’t dealing with social media postings and the hasty arrival of the local news channels. She’d faced that last fall when a skull was discovered by a couple hiking the lake bed. Turned out that skull belonged to a local man who had drowned while jet skiing in the 1990s, but it took a while for the DNA testing to come back, which meant she had to endure weeks of speculation and interviews about contract killings and the violence that was part of Las Vegas’s past.

She always tried to steer the discussion away from that and toward the changes in Lake Mead. The lake she remembered from her childhood was gone; what she saw was a tiny expanse of water revealing more and more of its lakebed.

A white “bathtub ring” encircled everything, marking where the waterline had been when she was a little girl. Even back then, though, Lake Mead was considered the deadliest national park in the United States. There had been more deaths at Lake Mead in the past two decades than at any other national park. She had actually looked that statistic up because she’d gotten so many questions about the deaths and discovered that Lake Michigan was the deadliest lake, but it wasn’t a national park site.

And when the deaths were put into a context, such as the number of deaths versus the number of visitors, the deaths were a tiny tiny tiny percentage. Last fall, she’d had all of those numbers at her fingertips, because she was so annoyed by the discussions of the mob and the murders and the deaths. She’d actually snapped at one reporter: How come you care so much about these so-called mob murders and not the bathtub ring around the lake? That’ll lead to hundreds if not thousands of deaths in the Las Vegas Valley if the drought continues…

She got pulled off of media duty after that, and no one sent her to Lake Mead again. Until now.

Although, to be fair, she wasn’t even sure this was a homicide. Not yet. For all she knew, the arm could have been severed in a boating accident. If someone got too close to a boat propeller or maybe got their arm entangled in an anchor chain, the force might sever the arm.

She was going to have to find out if local hospitals had treated someone with this kind of severed limb. If the arm’s owner had assistance from someone who knew what they were doing, the owner might’ve made it to a hospital before bleeding out.

Might was the operative word, though. The chances of surviving a severing like this would take skill and luck. There were ambulances parked in strategic areas around the lake, but a bleed-out like this one would need attention immediately. Just getting from one part of the lake to another might take five minutes, and then there’d be a hike to the water itself.

She didn’t really expect to find the owner of the arm alive, but she couldn’t rule it out.

She felt a half second of irritation. The coroner should have been here by now, considering the fact that Berto had called them right after her. But she knew it could sometimes take a while for the coroner to free up enough staff for an investigation. The last time Sofia had responded to a case out here—a case of simple murder, it turned out, one fueled by beer and fisticuffs—it had taken the coroner’s office nearly ninety minutes to arrive.

She braced her gloved hands on her knees and stood up. Her calves ached from the crouch. She used to be able to hold that position for an hour or more. Now, fifteen minutes nearly wrecked her.

Berto was standing near the shore—if one could call it that. He was staring at the other side of the water, where a couple of people—teens maybe?—were playing on the large rocks near the waterline.

“Berto,” she said.

He turned. His face was ruddy, his skin leathery from too much time in the sun. He had old eyes, which relieved her. She hated dealing with people who had not been on the job long.

He walked over, glancing at Zach, who was still on the phone. That did not bode well for the coroner’s arrival.

“I need to ask a few baseline questions,” she said, removing her small notebook from her pants pocket. The leatherette cover was damp. She clicked the pen attached to the notebook with a small plastic cord. Usually, Zach gave her crap about that.

He looked over, waved his phone at her as if to say, I can’t come yet, and grimaced in annoyance. She gave him a tiny nod. They’d worked together for years, so she didn’t have to tell him to get to her side as soon as he could.

Berto waited patiently.

“Tell me again how you found this hand.” She asked the question a second time for two reasons. The first was simple; she hadn’t had her notebook out when she originally spoke to him, although she suspected Zach was recording the encounter.

The other reason was she wanted to make sure that Berto gave her the same story, with few embellishments.

“I was walking my beat.” He had already warned her he used a lot of police shorthand because he found it more convenient. He had worked as a police officer back in the Midwest, so he knew procedure—and apparently liked the lingo. “I saw something white and flat on the rocks there. It looked organic, but I couldn’t be sure. And I didn’t smell it. Normally when you see something that white, the smell of decay hits you first.”

She waited, pen poised. He hadn’t given her this much detail before, but it was consistent with what he had already told her.

“I walked down to it, saw that it was a human hand, and called it in.” He nodded toward that hand. “You know the rest.”

She didn’t, though. He had spoken to dispatch, then to Zach, and then to her when she had arrived. The story probably seemed like old hat to Berto already.

She needed to move him off of that, distract him a bit. “When was the last time you were in this part of the park?”

He blinked, tilted his head just a little, clearly considering the question.

“Had to be a week ago,” he said. “We try to see everything, keep track of it all, but we’re dealing with a million and a half acres. We can’t monitor all the changes, especially not with visitors.”

“How early in the morning do you walk this?” she asked. Because it had to be morning; every local knew that this time of day could prove deadly quickly.

“In the open like this?” he asked. “As early as I can. Usually sunrise.”

“You called us at nine,” she said. It had taken her a while to arrive—first because of the drive and then the walk to this part of the park. She had given Berto permission to leave the area, but he hadn’t. He had been in this sun for hours now.

He didn’t even look wilted. She was becoming a puddle.

“I did,” he said. “I was just finishing up the rounds. I was planning to go to the station for a while, maybe have some ice coffee, maybe something to eat before I handled whatever crises arose for the day.”

“Ice coffee,” she muttered.

“It’s not as good as it sounds,” he said. “We just pour brew coffee over ice. Nothing fancy.”

“I’ll take not fancy at the moment.” She smiled at him. Then she let her smile fade. “You haven’t found other body parts, have you?”

“No,” he said. “Not recently, and not, y’know, something like this one that hadn’t been in the water long.”

She nodded. She had had Zach dig into recent findings at Lake Mead while they drove here. There had been a lot of body parts—apparently, the lake released its bodies in chunks—but nothing in the past few months. So, this confirmed what Berto was saying.

Now she got to the question she wanted to ask.

“The hand’s a yard or more from the water line,” she said. “How do you think it got here?”

He glanced at the water, the reflection of its surface lightening his skin just a little. Then he shrugged.

“It could’ve washed up in a boat wake,” he said. “Lots of speed boats create their own waves. Or it could’ve been a bird.”

“A bird?”

“They find all sorts of things. Then, if something startles the bird, it’ll drop whatever it’s carrying. I’m surprised there haven’t been any birds around this. But, I guess, there’s no soft tissue—eyeballs, whatnot. That’s less interesting to them.”

If he was trying to gross her out, he had failed. She’d probably seen everything he had and more. She had no idea where he had worked with the police in the Midwest. That covered a lot of ground, from small towns to cities like Chicago or Detroit.

“I was thinking the hand looked pretty fresh,” she said. “You think maybe someone dropped it here so that we could find it?”

“No.” His response was swift. “If they wanted someone to discover the hand, they would have gone to, say, Echo Bay. It’s the boat launch with the fewest restrictions right now, so too many people frequent it.”

“You think someone would know that?” she asked.

“Detective,” he said, with just a tiny hint of contempt, “if you came up here for something other than bodies, you’d know it too. We deal with a lot of complaints about the declining water level and the restrictions on people’s boats. We encourage everyone to come, but we really can’t accommodate them anymore.”

By the end of that little speech, the contempt had vanished. Maybe she had misread it. Maybe she was hearing frustration or anger.

“Talk to me about emergencies,” she said. “What happens with the serious ones?”

“Well,” he said, “we can’t help with most of those. The drownings are usually over before we’re notified. And if someone tries to kill themselves, we find out when the family realizes they’re missing. Usually we don’t learn someone’s a danger to themselves until deep into the investigation.”

“What about something like this? Something that involves a serious wound or a broken limb or a heart attack?”

Berto tipped the brim of his hat back just a bit. “If they call us, we can dispatch one of the ambulances. If the ambulance heads to Boulder City, it might be a while before another arrives to replace it.”

“Does that happen a lot?” she asked.

“Mostly in the spring,” he said. “It’s our busiest time. I’ve been lobbying for more medical services. But you know the whole drill about funding.”

“I do.” She looked down at that hand. “An ambulance couldn’t come down the path we walked.”

“No,” he said. “But a stretcher could. We’ve done it countless times.”

She crouched again, and tried to peer under the hand. If an ambulance had responded to something near here, the EMTs would have put the hand on the stretcher to cart it back. Once at the ambulance, they would have put the hand on ice.

Not to reattach the limb, should they locate the owner, but to take DNA and fingerprints off it, if possible.

Zach half-walked half-slid his way toward them. He was wearing dress shoes instead of his normal boots. He had initially thought he was going to be in court this morning. Considering the sweat stains on his white shirt and the fact that he was using his hat as a fan, he probably would have preferred testifying to this.

“Coroner’s assistant got lost,” he said. “I had to talk them through the directions. They should be here at any moment.”

“Good,” Sofia said, “because I was just beginning to wonder if we could find something to shade this hand from the sun.”

Something that wouldn’t contaminate it further.

A clatter sounded behind them. Sofia turned. A coroner she didn’t recognize was coming down the path sideways to accommodate the slight decline. Behind him was another person, wearing light clothing and a hat with a brim so low that Sofia couldn’t really see who that was either.

Both were carrying equipment. The person in the back had a white-and-blue cooler that was reflecting sunlight.

Zach went up to greet them. He had been talking to them on the phone, so he would handle it from here.

Sofia looked at Berto. “You feel like sharing some of that delicious ice coffee?”

He smiled at her, surest proof that he had seen everything. No newbie smiled like that over body parts.

“I’d be happy to,” he said, “if only to see what a glutton for punishment you really are.”

***

The ice coffee left her a little too jazzed, but it was not the highlight of the ranger station. The highlight was the aloe cream that she apparently needed despite her sunscreen and warm-weather gear. She had been in that sun too long.

All she ended up with, though, was a slight headache that lunch would cure. Zach didn’t stay long with the coroners and met her at their car.

He was already inside, AC running, when she approached. When he saw her, he scooted to the passenger side, and grabbed his laptop.

“We have an I.D.,” he said.

She handed him aloe. He lathered his skin while she backed the car out of the lot.

“Fingerprints?” she asked.

“Yeah, they were able to get some.” He grimaced. He hated watching the techniques that the coroner’s office used. If Zach could avoid working with the bodies, he would. “His name is Elias Venegas. He was reported missing three days ago by his wife.”

She pulled out of the lot and headed back toward Boulder City, taking her time because she knew that some drivers—usually tourists—were all over these roads.

“Why was he fingerprinted?” She pulled off her hat and tossed it in the back seat, then set the AC on frigid. The aloe had helped, but she was definitely burned. The touch of the sun through the window was irritating.

“He was bonded and certified. He went through all kinds of vetting.” Zach stared at his computer screen. “He was a well-known landscape artist who specialized in creating desert gardens.”

She glanced at Zach sideways. He was frowning. She was frowning.

“So, you’re thinking, accident?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Zach said. “It’s weird. The wife reported him missing when he didn’t come home from work a few days ago.”

“Where’s work?” she asked.

“His offices are in downtown Summerlin.” He tapped the laptop. “Looking at the missing persons filings now. The intake officer said the wife was adamant that her husband wouldn’t disappear on her.”

A four-by-four passed her on a narrow corner, a boat attached to the back swinging into her lane. She barely had room to get out of the way and stay on the road.

“Jeez,” Zach said, sounding panicked. But Sofia’s heart rate hadn’t even gone up, which was why she was driving, and he was not.

“The report?” she asked.

“The intake officer was pretty diligent, even though he didn’t believe the wife,” Zach said.

Years ago, Sofia had worked Mis-Pers. Nearly everyone claimed that the person wouldn’t disappear without telling anyone, and usually they were wrong.

But to go from Summerlin to Lake Mead was a deliberate trip.

“Was he entertaining clients?” she asked.

“No,” Zach said. “He’d gone to visit a client.”

“Who?” she asked.

“The wife didn’t know but said the client was a really important one.” Zach scrolled along the laptop’s pad. “No one asked or explained what ‘important’ meant.”

So now the question became, should they call the wife and tell her about the body part just to get answers? Or did they leave that part out of this?

Sofia wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet about the hand.

“Contact his office, find out where he went,” she said. “And check the hospitals, see if this Venegas guy is in any of them.”

“The report says the wife already did,” Zach said.

He hadn’t worked Mis-Per, so he didn’t know that sometimes people called in a missing person’s report after killing someone, just to cover their butts.

“Start with Boulder City,” she said, “and then go to Kingman, Laughlin, Bullhead City. Places the wife wouldn’t have thought to check, if she had no idea he was at Lake Mead.”

“Hospitals first?” Zach asked. He sounded irritated, but he didn’t say anything. After all, she couldn’t check any of this, since she was driving.

“Yeah,” she said.

He tapped on the keyboard of his laptop, then picked up his cell with a sigh.

She dodged another four-by-four with a boat behind it, shaking her head as she did so. Who came out here in this heat? It had to be tourists.

An ancient RV weaved across the road before her, and she leaned on the horn, hoping to get their attention. She did. They snapped to their lane.

But as they went past, she frowned at it.

Trucks, RVs, boats. Lots of equipment, lots of empty spaces. No one thought twice about all of those vehicles heading to the lake. No wonder so many bodies turned up.

It wouldn’t be hard to transport them from somewhere else.

She didn’t say anything about that, though, because Zach was deep in his conversation with the hospital in Boulder City. He wasn’t having any luck.

She doubted he would.

Something about Venegas’s job and the fact that he worked in Summerlin made her think he was dead before he got to the lake.

But she would wait on what the coroner had to say. Sometimes cases surprised you. She hoped this wouldn’t be one of those.

***

They stopped at a local fast-food chicken place in Boulder City. She promised Zach a milkshake. He’d contacted all the hospitals in the area, and none had any record of an Elias Venegas, nor did they have a record of a John Doe who had come in missing a hand.

As she and Zach headed inside, they saw a sprinkler head near the edge of the door, leaking water all over the parking lot. She sighed and signaled Zach to get lunch while she asked for the manager.

When an older woman with a manager’s tag stuck her head out of the back area, Sofia said, “You know you have a leaking sprinkler, right?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “People’ve been telling us.”

Which meant it had been going on for a while. “You realize you can be fined for excess use, right?”

“I won’t be fined,” the woman said, and walked away.

Sofia sighed again, knowing she couldn’t let that go. Too many people failed to report. She went back outside, took a picture, and sent it to the Southern Nevada Water Authority. They would know what to do.

Then she joined Zach at the table. He’d already picked up the food.

“This guy, he’s a big deal,” Zach said in between bites of a chicken tender. “The mucky-mucks in town, they all hire him to transform their lawns into a desert oasis.”

He had to be half-quoting some promotional something or other. Sofia took her orange tray and pulled it toward her, grabbing a fry as she did so.

“His fees are astonishing,” Zach said. “I mean, hell, I’d just lay ratty Astroturf instead of pay for this.”

“Or pull up the grass yourself,” she said.

“Yeah,” Zach said with a grin. “Desert landscaping done easy.”

Nevada had passed a law as the drought crushed everything, forcing residents to get rid of what the state termed “decorative grass” by the end of 2026. Some people were doing that already. Others were pressing for a variance.

She tried not to follow any of that because it irritated her too much. What was wrong with people? They lived in a desert, and water had been scarce from the start. In the 1990s, predictions were that Las Vegas wouldn’t make it another ten years because of a lack of water, so the city embarked on a recycling program.

Now, all water used indoors was recycled. The problem was things like that broken sprinkler. Outdoor water was one-time use only, although there were measures trying to reform that as well.

“Lemme see what he charges,” she said.

Zach spun the laptop around. Venegas’s website was beautiful, high-end, and filled with lovely pictures of various landscapes. He hadn’t called himself a landscape artist. Architectural Digest had.

This guy was one of the top landscape designers in the country. A guy like that didn’t go on a jaunt to Lake Mead in the middle of the week.

“Find out if anyone is actually in the office,” Sofia said.

She had a feeling, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. Not yet.

Zach looked at her measuringly. He had worked with her long enough to know that she wasn’t going to share her thinking yet. He respected the hunches, but he always wanted to know how she got there, which led to irritated discussions, which neither of them needed right then.

He spun the laptop back toward himself, glanced at the number, and dialed with his thumb. Then he grabbed the milkshake and stood up, heading toward the car.

He had finished eating, and she had just started. She finished in a hurry, headed outside, and slipped into the car’s air conditioning, which was fighting a losing battle with the heat. Records every day this July, and it looked like today would be no different.

“We’re in luck,” Zach said. “One of the associates is waiting for us.”

“Did you tell them why we’re coming?” Sofia asked as she put on her seat belt.

“Didn’t have to,” Zach said. “When she found out who I was, she said, ‘I hope to hell this is good news about Elias.’”

“Did you tell her the bad news?” Sofia asked.

“I didn’t,” Zach said, “because we still don’t know. I mean, maybe…”

Sofia gave him a knowing nod. They did know; they just couldn’t prove anything. And an excess of caution was always the best.

“I just told her we were investigating the missing person report,” he said.

“Was she surprised?” Sofia asked.

“Are rich people ever surprised that someone is doing something for them that doesn’t happen for anyone else?” he asked.

“She’s probably not rich,” Sofia said. “She works for someone.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, “but given how much money that place brings in, she’s richer than we are.”

They were going to have to drive to downtown Summerlin, and the easiest way was to take the Beltway, which would give Sofia exactly no time to go home and clean up. Ah, well. The extra aloe had helped, as had the chocolate shake.

She drove while Zach continued to tap on his laptop, occasionally naming the very famous clients who had hired Venegas. Apparently, the pictures of their properties were gorgeous, if Zach’s enthusiasm was any indication.

She was going to have him look deep into the business’s financials when a call came into her cell. It was the coroner. She put it on speaker.

“Please tell me you found the rest of his body in your cooler,” Sofia said.

“Nope,” the coroner said. “I suspect it’s still in Lake Mead.”

“Really?” Sofia asked. “We’ve been calling hospitals to see if he’s alive.”

“The arm was severed post-mortem,” the coroner said, “and I think severed is the wrong word. I think the chain that was wrapped around it somehow twisted and snapped the bone.”

“Chain?” Sofia asked. Zach was leaning forward, frowning at the car’s speakers as if they were the coroner herself.

“Yeah,” the coroner said. “We found bits of it in the skin and the bone itself.”

“This wasn’t, say, a boating accident? Something got caught in, maybe, a propeller?”

“Well, maybe, in one sense,” the coroner said. “A propeller might’ve snagged that chain and put enough force on it to make it snap the arm.”

“And send it to the shore?” Zach asked.

“Flying to the shore, maybe,” the coroner said. “The hand was dropped from above. There were rocks in the skin, and they came from directly underneath the hand. So it landed with some force.”

“Not deliberately dropped, then,” Sofia said. She wasn’t sure if that was a question or not.

“Well, not unless it was deliberately dropped from some kind of height,” the coroner said. “And given that there was no hills in that part of the beach…”

“Yeah, okay,” Sofia said.

“I’ll have more for you as we investigate, but I thought you’d want to know that this person was dead when he went into the water. Someone wrapped him in chains and probably attached him to something they thought would sink. It probably didn’t go as deep as they wanted.”

“Or they put him somewhere a bit too shallow,” Zach said.

“Maybe,” the coroner said. “But people usually underestimate how much weight it takes to hold a gaseous bloating body underwater. Bodies like that want to float.”

Zach winced. Apparently, he could picture that. If Sofia let herself, she could smell it, which wasn’t something she really wanted to do—not even in her imagination.

“I’ll have more for you later,” the coroner said, “but I figured you would want to know that this guy was already a corpse when he was tossed into Lake Mead.”

“Thanks,” Sofia said, but the coroner had already hung up.

“So,” Zach said, “a murder then.”

“Most likely,” Sofia said.

Whether they could prove it or not would be something else entirely.

***

The offices of Venegas Landscape Artistry and Design were in one of the newer buildings in Downtown Summerlin, near the Las Vegas Ballpark. The entire development was snooty, catering to people with more money than Sofia would ever earn in her lifetime.

The building had opaque glass walls that reflected the mountains. The site looked lovely, except from the parking lot. There, it felt like she had entered a sterile office park that could be in any city.

Inside, the walls belied that impression. The doors opened onto an expensive blue and gray lined carpet. The walls were covered with murals—if one could call a black-and-white gigantic flower a mural.

The offices took up the entire seventh floor. As she and Zach emerged from the elevator, the first thing she noticed was that the art had changed. The walls were covered with photographs of the desert or desert plants. Brown and gray rocks, with a bit of green or gray or the ever-blooming flowers, something she actually loved about this city.

Those images soothed her, which was probably what they were supposed to do. There was another set of smoked glass doors, and as she was about to go through, the doors opened.

A lanky woman with skin so leathery that it looked like it had been glued to her bones came out, right hand extended.

“Officers,” she said in one of those sickly sweet voices that people used when they were uncomfortable.

“Detectives,” Sofia said, pausing between that word and the rest, “Herrera and Gelb.” She deliberately did not give the woman any clue as to who was who.

Since neither of them took her hand, the woman let it drop.

“I’m Louisa Langford,” she said, pushing the smokey door open. “We spoke on the phone.”

She said that to Zach.

“We’ve been worried sick about Elias. He missed several important meetings, and his wife has no idea where he is. I take it you do?”

She led them to a conference room, talking the entire way. The conference room was a glass box. The view was visible from the hallway, but so were the people inside.

Sofia went in and stood near the windows. The heat of the day radiated through the glass, leaving the front of her warm and her back cold in the air conditioning.

“We don’t know where he is,” Zach said, not exactly lying. Sofia could see him reflected in the glass, his body larger than the towers dotting the Strip. “When did you last see him?”

“Three days ago,” Langford said. “He was going to see one of our clients. He was really nervous.”

That caught Sofia’s attention. She turned, so she could see Langford’s face. “Why would a man with his credentials be nervous?”

Langford took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder. Then she made sure her back was to the hallway.

“Look, this client is…” She paused. “I’m not supposed to discuss him or the work, but well, Elias is missing, and I’m scared.”

“Why?” Sofia asked.

Langford gripped the back of a chair. “You know we have a lot of foreign money, billionaires, in Summerlin, right?”

Sofia blinked, trying to follow. “You’re saying your client is a foreign billionaire?”

“I’m not saying that,” Langford said. “I don’t give out client names.”

She let that hang for a moment, but neither Sofia nor Zach jumped on it. They would figure this out, with a warrant if they had to. First they needed to let Langford talk.

“We often don’t meet the actual clients,” she said after a moment, “but instead, we meet the people running their estates. Those people are…protective…of their positions. Apparently, the estate manager, in this instance, was…difficult at best. Elias wouldn’t let any of us near him.”

“Difficult why?” Sofia asked.

“Elias used the word thugs to describe the security. He was worried for anyone on our team to go up there and work. The security is armed and…his word…volatile.” Langford’s fingers dug into the back of the chair.

Interesting, Sofia thought but didn’t say. “So what did they want Elias for?”

“Apparently, someone wanted to change the estate’s landscaping to desert landscaping.” Langford raised her eyebrows. “You’re aware of the Named and Shamed List?”

“Yes,” Zach said without looking directly at Sofia. He knew she didn’t always follow the news. But she was aware of the Named and Shamed List, mostly because it frustrated her. Every year, the Las Vegas Valley Water District released the names of the top 100 residences that used too much water.

The problem was that all of them belonged to the rich, who could afford the exorbitant fines that came with excessive water usage. Sofia was of the opinion that anyone who overused their allotment—in some cases by millions of gallons per year—should have their water shut off until there were changes.

But she wasn’t in charge of that.

“Many of our clients come from the list,” Langford was saying to Zach. “But they’re usually locals who made good and want to change their behavior and cut their water footprint.”

Zach nodded.

“Someone in our current client’s compound wanted to change the behavior there or at least change the unfavorable reporting. Elias was going to essentially say he couldn’t do what they were asking, and they needed to hire someone else.” Her hands ran along the top of the chair as if trying to rub it clean.

“What were they asking?” Zach asked.

“If we could set up a system that made it look like they were using less water without changing the landscaping at all.” Langford frowned. “Of course we can’t, not legally. We’d have to shuffle the water meters and change the way that things are recorded…I’m sure someone could do it, but we certainly can’t.”

Sofia could hear the frustration in her voice.

“So, you fire the client,” Sofia said. “People do that all the time.”

Langford straightened her back. “We do that all the time as well. But this client…” She looked away as if conjuring a memory. “Elias told them he wasn’t interested in working with them. I guess it got heated. When he came back, he was really upset because we’re all about conservation here.”

“Okay…” Zach said, trying to keep his voice level as if he didn’t understand where this was going.

Langford looked at him, her gaze sharp. “Elias was afraid…well, we were afraid…that the water waste would continue. Millions of gallons wasted and untraceable. It’s just…wrong.”

Sofia didn’t see how any of that was worth killing over, though. That thought must have shown on her face because Langford squared her shoulders.

“I know most people think this is silly, but it’s not. Water waste here in the valley is a matter of life and death for all of us. For the city too.” Langford had made a fist with her right hand, and pounded it slightly on the back of the chair. “I know it’s not an immediate problem. People don’t think about the future—”

“What happened?” Sofia asked. She didn’t need the lecture. She did worry about the future, but right now, she needed to focus on the present. On this case. “He was angry. He must have done something.”

Langford nodded, just once. “Something he’d never done before,” she said. “He reported them to the Water Authority so that they could be on the lookout for any kind of tricks. And he was talking to some people with law enforcement ties—lawyers, in particular—to find out if doing such a thing would be fraud on a large scale.”

“Large scale?” Zach asked.

“A felony, to make them stop,” Langford said.

That would make no difference to a foreign national, but it might to the estate manager, if they were local.

“I’m confused,” Sofia said. “If they’re not a client, why did Elias return to the estate after reporting them?”

“They’re still on our books as a client,” Langford said. “Elias was going to give them a list of landscapers to replace him. Only he didn’t make a list. He was going to tell them off. I told him not to.”

She gave them an odd look.

“I was scared for him. I really was. These people aren’t people you cross or confront. They play by different rules.”

“Because they’re armed?” Sofia asked.

“No.” That single word had frustration in it. “Lots of our clients have armed security these days. But these guys—they seem violent.”

“You’ve met them?” Zach asked.

“No,” she said. “Violent was Elias’s word. And I was scared. But he went anyway.”

“And no one has seen him since?” Sofia asked.

“That’s right,” Langford said. “No one has seen him since.”

***

The nice thing about Summerlin was that it was a brand-new planned development. Started in the 1990s, most of the Vegas Valley’s wealthy migrated up there for enhanced security and privacy. The communities were gated, even though the homes were on multiacre estates.

Enhanced security meant cameras. It meant monitors. It meant doorbell cameras and prying eyes, even though the locals wanted privacy. They got it behind their own gates but on the way to and from the gate? They had no privacy at all.

So that was why it wasn’t hard for Sofia and Zach to trace what happened to Elias Venegas. As they drove away from his business, Zach looked up the foreign nationals on the Named and Shamed List. Most had been on the list for decades because no one had been able to shut them down. But the newcomer to the list was a Chinese billionaire who owned casinos in Macao and who had some ownership in one of the casinos on the Strip.

The billionaire had never been to Las Vegas, apparently preferring to park his money here without bothering to visit it in person. But there had been dozens of reports of late-night parties on the estate, lots of random weapons fired, and some generally out-of-control behavior that made the wealthy neighbors nervous.

A new estate manager was hired, and promises were made to the gated community’s board that the estate would clean up its act. Apparently, someone thought that included cleaning up the landscaping.

It took more than a week of careful investigation and several warrants to get information from nearby security cameras. Sofia also got permission to dredge Lake Mead near where the hand had been found.

Sure enough, Venegas’s body wasn’t that far out, in waters deep enough to boat but too shallow to really hide a corpse effectively.

The story, as it came out, was sad and simple. Venegas had gone alone, gotten into a loud verbal disagreement with the estate manager. The fight brought in security, who saw Venegas as a threat, and shot him.

Then the guards were informed as to who he was and what they had done. That night they placed him into a van and drove it to Lake Mead. It showed up on several traffic cams along the way.

The big mistake they made, though, was driving his car along with it. That car was in the lake as well, only it hadn’t been found yet.

Sofia had everything wrapped up within the month. So many employees of the estate saw what happened or were involved, and did not want to get charged with aiding and abetting. That made them talk.

The Chinese billionaire did not help them. He fired the estate manager and put the entire place on the market.

And all of this happened before the media got wind of any of it, which relieved her. It put her in charge of the way that the story got covered.

No one mentioned the severed hand in Lake Mead. That would come out in trial.

Instead, she managed to get a friendly journalist to report on the center of the story—or at least, what she believed to be the center of the story:

Elias Venegas was a passionate defender of the future. He had just run into someone so stuck in the past that they had been willing to commit fraud to make their bad habits invisible to the community writ large.

The story had that focus for two whole days before the preliminary hearings. And then the arm and the body in Lake Mead and the stories about the lake of death began.

Two days were more than she would have gotten otherwise. Normally, she didn’t care about coverage, but in the Lake Mead cases, she did.

She wanted people to understand that bathtub ring. She wanted them to know that the drought situation had long since become serious.

The death of Elias Venegas wasn’t the first death connected to the changes in the climate, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

But it had been dramatic enough to catch the world’s attention—if only for a few hours.

And sometimes, that was all it took.

 

___________________________________________

“Body Parts & Bathtub Rings“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Body Parts & Bathtub Rings

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing

First appeared in Crimes Against Nature, edited by Robert Lopresti, Down & Out Books, 2024

Cover and Layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

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

A massive cavern spread in front of us, awash in bioluminescence like some bizarre rave. It resembled an enormous egg set on its side, with the wider end to the right ending in a solid wall and the narrow end to the left splitting off into several dark passages. The cavern’s floor sloped to the center where a wide stream ran through the cave from left to right. The water was like glass, perfectly clear.

At the banks, the stream branched into several small pools bordered by rimstone dams, some shallow, others deeper. The pools flowed into each other, stretching toward a flat island on our right. The stream split around it and emptied into a lake, its waters moving slowly and disappearing under a spectacular flowstone wall where layers of calcite formed a frozen stone waterfall.

“I need lights, people!” Melissa called out.

The mining crew spread out, planting floodlights along the nearest wall. The portable generator on the central cart sputtered into life, and bright electric light illuminated the cavern. The sloping floor was ridged with calcite, and it looked slick. A good way to break a leg.

“Much better,” Melissa declared. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”

London nodded to the tank. Aaron moved to the left and planted himself in the narrower part of the cave, between the dark tunnels and the mining crew. London stayed at the entrance, guarding our exit route. The three strikers fanned out along the perimeter.

It was my turn to shine. The cavern walls were awash with swirls of bright green mixed with rust-colored metallic deposits. Promising.

I took a deep breath and flexed.

The official term was talent activation, but to me it felt like flexing a muscle I didn’t normally use. The world turned crystal clear. The edges of the rimstone dams and contours of the flowstone waterfall came into sharp focus, as if I’d adjusted my eyes to higher resolution. The outlines of individual mineral deposits glowed slightly.

I focused on the closest wall, scanning and evaluating, sorting through different hues. Malachite, copper-rich chalcopyrite, decent but not exciting. Cuprite, quartz, calcite, trash, garbage, junk…

A patch of funky plants to the left glowed with dull, pale yellow. Healer Slipper. A weird variant, but definitely in the same ballpark as the more common varieties. If processed, it would yield a potent broad-spectrum antibiotic. A decent haul, if nothing else showed up.

In the wake of the gate catastrophe and the emergence of the Talents, humanity had tried to find some frame of reference. We settled on video games. A lot of the Talent classification mirrored the familiar game classes: tanks, healers, scouts, and so on. The closest video game match for my talent would’ve been appraiser, but the government nixed that one because it didn’t sound heroic enough and was too “materialistic,” which was utterly hilarious considering what I did. Unlike Melissa, who only sensed ores and only when she was on top of them, I evaluated everything in my environment, organic or inorganic.

So far, the cavern has been relatively disappointing. Usually, orange gates offered a little more. I pivoted slightly, turning away from the wall.

The inside of the stream lit up like a Christmas tree. Well, that was something.

“Gold in the water,” I announced. “Check the pools.”

“Go!” Melissa barked.

The miners scrambled over calcite walls. The pools directly in front of them ran a little deeper, and the water came up to their thighs.

Sanders thrust his hand into the pool and pulled up a tangerine-sized gold nugget. “Holy shit!”

The mining crew erupted into a controlled frenzy. Half of the miners went into the pools with buckets, while the other half positioned themselves on the shore, emptying the buckets into wheelbarrows.

I kept scanning. Gold was okay. Just okay.

“We got time, people,” Melissa called out. “Don’t hurt yourself. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

A bright swath of deep crimson flared on the edge of my vision. The colors of the glow didn’t always make sense, but red usually meant something valuable. I turned slowly, following it, and focused. A thick vein running from the center of the cavern all the way to the far wall…

It couldn’t be. I squinted at it to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

No, it was there. And the crimson got deeper at the other end of the cavern.

“Melissa?”

“Yes?”

“Dump the gold.”

The mining crew stopped. Sanders closed his fists around a handful of nuggets and hugged them to his chest. Gold fever was a real thing. Something about the bright shiny yellow metal made people lose their minds.

I pointed to the beginning of the vein along the wall of the island, by the two pools closest to the shore. “Adamantite. From here to there. Solid, less than a foot down. We’ll need more carts.”

Melissa splashed into the stream to the adamantite vein buried under calcite deposits and put her bare hands onto the stone. She grunted, squeezed the rock surface with her fingers, shook from the strain, and stumbled back.

“Goddamn! Team One here! Team Two there! I want those drills running five minutes ago!”

The gold went flying. The mining crew grabbed their drills. Safety glasses and noise-dampening headphones went on, and they waded into the river and attacked the dams and the island.

Gold was expensive but adamantite was twelve times more valuable, because it could be refined into adamant. In the same family as osmium, adamant was incredibly durable. Adamant-enhanced armor could withstand machine gun fire. Adamant-coated blades cut through solid metal and monster bones like butter, without losing their edge.

We found it rarely and usually in small deposits. A cubic yard of adamantite was a record-breaking haul that would mean a big bonus for every guild member that entered this breach. We had a lot more than a cubic yard here. In all of my time crawling in and out of the breaches, I had never found a vein half that large.

The drills chiseled at the rock with a dull roar. The first chunk of adamantite fell free, a dark, almost black basketball-sized rock that looked like frozen tar in the crystal-clear stream. The drills stopped as everyone stared at it. Melissa tried to lift it out of the water, couldn’t – it was ridiculously heavy – and laughed.

“We’re gunna be rich!” someone yelled.

“Ada, I love you!” Melissa declared. “Marry me!”

“Sorry, I don’t want to ruin such a good friendship.”

People laughed. Next to me, London cracked a smile.

“Friendzoned,” Melissa groaned.

“It’s not you, it’s me, Mel. I’m the problem.”

More laughter.

Melissa shook her head. “Back to work, people! And someone help me with this rock.”

The miners resumed their drilling.

The vein continued under the stream, veering across the cavern floor to the left and behind the far wall. Getting adamantite from under the water would be cumbersome, and our time was short. The wall deposit lay deeper, but it was a better bet.

I went down the slope to the water. The best place to cross was to the left, by Aaron, where the stream was relatively shallow. I headed there and waded in, careful where I put my feet. The rocks were damn slippery, and the water came up past my knee. Magnaprene wasn’t the most comfortable fabric, but it was waterproof.

I hiked over the shallow calcite ridges to the wall, pulled a can of fluorescent paint from the pocket of my coveralls, and set about tracing the contours of the deposit in bright Safety Yellow. A hell of a find. Not that I would get anything out of it other than bragging rights. Government employees didn’t get gate loot bonuses, and that wasn’t why I’d taken this job.

The steady roar of the drills filled the cavern. 

I was thirty-three years old when I saw my first glow. One of the larger US guilds somehow obtained permission to sell sebrian knives to the public. Sebrian was found only in breaches, and the knife prices started at $1,000 for a tiny pocket blade. Our advertising agency had taken the contract and promptly sent it to me with the key phrase of “rugged luxury.”

I was sitting in my office staring at the knife and trying to figure out the right approach, when the blade turned pale pink. The glow refused to fade, and when I focused on it, something in my brain clicked. The weight, the density, the structure of the metal somehow popped into my mind and combined into a specific … profile was the best word.

I drove to the ER. I thought I was dying. Twenty-four hours later the DDC came calling with a contract and a patriotic sales pitch. Assessors like me were rare, and the government hoarded us, to the point of making it illegal for guilds to hire their own private assessors. The guilds had poured an obscene amount of money into lobbying against that law but got nowhere.

The invasion wrecked my life. I’d looked at that contract and realized I could do something about it. Every time I went into the breach, I found something to make us safer. Today it was adamantite. A drop in the bucket, but it was my drop.

I finished tracing the wall and set the can on a rock.

Elena crossed the stream and lingered on my left, looking toward the tunnels. She peered at the dark passageways, turned, her face sour, and called, “Stella!”

Stella, who was on the other shore watching the miners, didn’t move.

“STELLA!” Elena roared.

The dog handler spun around.

The scout waved her over. “Bring the dog!”

Stella splashed through the stream, Bear on a leash, and trekked over the ridges to us.

“I need you to check the tunnels!” Elena yelled over the drilling noise.

“Which tunnel?”

“Start with the left!”

Bear yanked at her leash, jerking Stella backward, toward the stream. Stella said some command I didn’t catch.

Bear yanked on the leash and erupted into barks.

Elena waved her arms. “Control your dog –”

Something burst out of the middle tunnel. It swept past Aaron, a vaguely humanoid shape in pale blue garments, so fast it was a blur. Four other blurs chased it, wrapped in dark gray. They tore past the tank in a flash.

Aaron’s top half – shield, armor, and body – slid to the side and fell to the ground.

For a horrifying moment, I stared straight at the stump of his torso, still standing upright. It was standing upright.

The blurs wrapped around us. I froze. They spun about me like a whirlwind, the four gray beings striking and slicing, while the creature in blue parried with impossible speed. I caught a glimpse of arms in dark armor gripping silver blades and inhuman faces with fangs bared. A second, and they tore across the cavern toward the wall and the mining crew. 

Untouched. I was somehow uninjured.

I turned to Stella on my right.

Her head was missing. There was her torso in indigo magnaprene, her neck, but no head.

The headless body crumpled to the ground.

A gasp came from the side. I turned on autopilot, still trying to process Stella’s missing head. Elena’s guts spilled out of her stomach. The scout clutched at herself. Dark blood poured out of her mouth. She made a horrible gurgling noise and fell.

This couldn’t be happening. It was a weird, horrible nightmare. I was dreaming that I found the magic motherlode of adamantite and then monsters came and killed everyone.

The air smelled like blood and bile. To the left four inhuman creatures tore at their prey in the blue robe, running on the walls and leaping in for the kill only to be knocked aside. Three miners floated in the stream, face down and the water was red, so red…

Oh God. It’s real. It’s all real.

Panic smashed into me like an icy hammer. I had to get out of here. Now.

The only safe exit was on the other side of the stream. I sprinted across the ridges to the water.

To the left, the fight swung back and forth along the lake’s shore.

I slid over the first rimstone damn, tore through the pool, climbed over the other side, and landed into the stream. Water came up to my thighs and I waded through it, squeezing every drop of speed out of my body.

Half of the mining crew was still drilling.

“Run!” I screamed, waving my arms. “Run!”

Sanders turned, plucking the headphones off his left ear, saw my face, whipped around, saw the creatures, hurled the drill aside, howled, and ran for the entrance. The line of miners broke as people charged to the exit.

Time stretched like molasses. There was only me and the water trying to stop me. I just had to make it across the stream.

At the cave entrance, Melissa was scrambling up the slope, toward London. The blade warden stared straight at me. Our gazes met.

Help me…

A door slammed shut in London’s eyes.

No. No!

Melissa shoved Anja Presa out of her way. The slender woman slid on the rocks and fell, rolling down to the stream.

I can’t die here. I have to get home to my kids!

I was running so fast. Faster than I’d ever run in my life, and I wasted precious breath on a scream. “Wait! Wait for me!”

London’s face was cold like ice. He yanked something off his belt. A grenade. He carried aetherium concussive grenades to be used as a last resort.

“Throw it!” Melissa howled and ran past him.

London looked straight at me.

Alex! No!

He dropped the grenade. It rolled toward the stream, bouncing over the limestone. The blue forcefield of his warden talent flared into life, wrapping around London. He turned and fled into the tunnel.

The world exploded.

The blast slammed into Sanders ten yards ahead of me. Water punched me off my feet. I flew like a rag doll and smashed against solid rock. My right leg snapped like a toothpick. My spine crunched. Agony splashed across my side and bit into my ribs. My ears rang, my head swam, and the air in my lungs turned to fire.

I tried to breathe and couldn’t. There was water on my face. I was in the stream face down. I had to get upright, or I would drown.

I wrenched myself up.

Bright white aetherium smoke filled the cave. I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t hear anything, I couldn’t breathe. I could only hold still as the pain drowned me.

“Mom! Don’t die!”

I won’t. I promise.

I forced myself to take a tiny breath. It felt like jagged glass cutting its way through my throat. I coughed through it and willed myself to take another. And another, swimming through the pain, one tiny sip of air at a time.

The smoke drifted up. My vision cleared. I was sitting in one of the pools by the shore, with the water up to my armpits, with my back pressed against the rimstone wall. Next to me a severed human head rested on the pool’s bottom. The dark curly hair swirled with the current. Stella.

It should’ve hit me like a semi, but instead I simply noted it, the same way I noted the blood spreading from my right leg and the broken glass that ground in my lungs with every breath.

I pulled the leg of my coveralls up, out of the boot. A jagged bone cut through the skin of my calf. A compound fracture. Okay. I tugged my pant leg over it.

I had to get the hell out of here. Out of this cavern. Out of the breach.

The exit was no more, blocked by a wall of rubble. London’s grenade collapsed the ceiling of the tunnel. He and Melissa left me to die.

The clump of alien creatures passed along the opposite wall, all but floating over the debris that had sealed the exit. I didn’t hear any gunfire. Our escorts were dead.

The aliens darted to the right, absorbed in their fight. They weren’t targeting the humans. Aaron, Stella, Elena, they were simply in the way, cut down in passing as the four creatures in gray tried to kill the being in blue. And if their fight swung this way, I would be in the way, too. 

I had to get out of the line of fire.

The wall in front of me, where the exit used to be, was at least forty yards away and sheer. 

I looked over my shoulder. There was a niche in the wall behind me, next to my yellow paint marks, natural depression in the rock. A place to hide.

I turned around. My right leg screamed. Standing was a no go. I would have to crawl on all fours.

I clenched my teeth and crawled out of the pool.

My right leg burned, sending stabs of hot pain through my knee. I could do it. Stay low, move slowly, don’t present a threat. It was only pain. I could endure pain.

Twenty yards to the wall.

Fifteen.

I hit my knee against a sharp rock, and my weight landed on my injured leg. The world went white for a second. I sucked in a small breath and kept moving.

Ten yards. Almost there.

Almost.

My fingers touched the stone. I turned around and tucked myself into the niche, pressing my back against the wall. There was a trail of my blood across the cave floor.

The creature in blue was still moving, but only two gray blurs remained. The third lay on the rocks, a smudge of dark fabric that shifted whenever the fight drew closer, stretching toward it like a living thing. I couldn’t see the fourth.

To the right something moved by the rock.

I sat very still.

A furry head with big ears poked out from behind an outcropping. 

Bear.

I licked my lips, trying to get my mouth to work. “Bear.” I could only manage a whisper. “Come.”

The German Shepherd crawled toward me, pressed against my thigh, and let out a soft whine.

“They left you, too.” 

I hugged the dog to me. We sat by the wall and watched the fight tear across the cave. The blurs were so fast. How could anyone move that quickly? It should’ve been biologically impossible.

One of the remaining gray blurs collapsed.

The last gray attacker shot toward us. It took me half a second to realize it wasn’t a coincidence. It was aiming for me.

There was no time to run, no time to do anything. I threw my arm in front of Bear shielding her on pure instinct. The gray blur loomed above us… and stopped.

I finally saw it clearly, a tall creature with four arms, wrapped in a tattered gray cloak. Its hands had too many fingers, long and clawed, and each hand clenched a sword. It stared at me with terrifying eyes, its irises missing, its sclera a solid mass of solid black, and its mouth, on the face of white pearlescent skin, was a wide, dark slash filled with nightmarish teeth. A blue blade protruded from its chest.

This is also real.

The gray cloak stretched toward my face, like some strange amoeba, its strands long and viscous.

The blue blade turned, twisting.

The creature spat purple blood and went limp.

The sword slid back into its body. The cloaked being fell to the side and slid a few feet down the slope.

A tall figure stood behind it, clad in a shimmering, ice-blue robe. The silhouette looked chillingly human, too tall, with limbs that were too long, but unmistakably familiar. The head was a solid chunk of metal, twisted into a sleek horned shape. The same metal, blue with gold filigree, sheathed their body under the robe. No visible skin. Even the fingers of their right hand, gripping the blue sword, were coated in metal. Their left arm was missing, cut off just below the biceps, and bright red blood spurted from the cut.

None of my briefings had ever mentioned a being that appeared this human. Animals, monsters, inhuman sentients with strange anatomy, vaguely humanoid beings, yes. But never this.

The figure touched their helmet. It split apart and retracted into itself. An older woman looked at me. Her skin was a muted pastel pink in the center of the face, darkening to a vivid turquoise near the hairline. A straight nose with a blunt tip, a narrow-lipped mouth with the same pink lips, and upturned eyes with blue-green irises, slightly too large for an Earth native, but not enough to alarm anyone.

Aside from the skin color, she looked so human, it was terrifying. There were crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines by her mouth. Either the DDC did not know, or they’d lied.

The woman stared at me. Her eyes were sad and mournful.

I stared back.

She swayed and fell.

What do I do now?

The sound of hoarse breathing echoed through the cavern.

She saved me. If she hadn’t stabbed the gray attacker, I would be dead.

Another hoarse breath. Another.

Fuck it.

I shifted on all fours and crawled the few feet to the woman.

The arm was sheared as if by a razor blade, the cut so precise, it was like an anatomy slide. I could see the bones among the bloody muscle. Blood shot out with every breath.

“We’ll need a tourniquet. Hold on.”

I dug in the pocket of my coveralls, extracted the paracord I always carried, and pulled it loose. Paracord was a shitty way to make a tourniquet, but she was bleeding out and I had nothing else. I folded the paracord length wise until I had about three-foot stretch of cord, wrapped it around what was left of her arm, and pulled it into a knot. The blood was still spurting.

I patted myself. I needed… Here. I pulled a slim flashlight out of my pocket. I always brought one as a backup to the light in my hard hat. I pressed the flashlight into the knot and tied another knot over it.

“This will hurt, and you’ll lose what’s left of the arm. I’m sorry. We have to stop the bleeding.”

I twisted the flashlight, tightening the knot. Once, twice, three times.

The woman reached out with her right arm and touched my hand. Her fingers were cool, their touch feather-light.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

The blood stopped spurting. Now I just had to secure this…

The woman touched her own forehead. Her fingers dipped into the skin, sinking into a seemingly solid skull. 

It had to be a hallucination. I was losing it from blood loss and pain.

The woman pulled something out of her head. It was round and glowing, like a brilliant jewel lit from within. It was so beautiful. The colors swirled and danced, a stunning, mesmerizing gemfire.

I had to look away, move, run, do something, but I had no will to move. The gemstone was too beautiful to resist. It was coming toward me, held in the woman’s long fingers. Closer. Closer.

The gem touched my forehead.

The Universe unfurled with light and color. A distant voice whispered inside my head.

“Treasure your inheritance, my kind daughter.”

Everything went dark.

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

Da fuck?

I was born for this moment. Come at me, poultry demons!

Cluck, cluck, cluck, *******Fucker!

I’ll be under the blankets, thankyouverymuch.

Same but breathable. Some of us need oxygen for our brains.

Are you calling me stupid?!

The fact that you have to ask…

Send the chickens to me. I need blood and souls for Bast.

Warning: R rated for fantasy violence and adult themes.

We are at war.

This war is not about wealth, resources, or territory. It’s a war of biological extermination. The very existence of humanity is at stake.

The moment the first gate burst, sending a monster horde to rage through our world, it brought us unimaginable suffering, but it also awoke something slumbering deep within some of us, a means to repel and destroy our enemy. Powers beyond comprehension. Abilities that are legendary.

The war is ongoing. If you are a Talent, your country needs you. The world needs you. Be the hero you always wanted to be.

Take my hand and answer the call.

Elias McFeron

Guildmaster of Cold Chaos

Chapter 1

Health insurance with $1,000 maximum family deductible.

Prescription drug coverage with 80% discount off list prices.

The first time I heard about gates, I imagined them to be these portals glowing with a magical blue light. Too many video games, I guess. They were nothing like it.  This one was a hole. A deep, black, vertical hole that punched through reality, swirling with pale mist. 

It appeared in front of the Elmwood Park Rec center.  To the left was Elmwood Public library, all red brick and tinted windows. To the right was a funeral home followed by perfectly ordinary, three-story boxes of apartment buildings covered in tan stucco. And straight ahead was an interdimensional tear. Just another Monday.

If someone told me ten years ago that I would be standing in front of a hole leading into a dimensional breach and preparing to go inside, I would’ve politely nodded, walked away, and later told Roger I’d met an unhinged person. Of course, ten years ago I was thirty, happily married, with a daughter in elementary school, a son just out of diapers, and a low-risk private sector job I loved. A different life that belonged to a different Adaline.

The future looked bright back then. Until the invasion shattered it.

Free emergency medical care when injured in the line of duty.

I took this job for the benefits, and when it got to me, like now, I recited them in my head like a prayer.

Dental, $150 deductible, 50% off braces.  

Things that came with age and children: appreciation of the dental plan with orthodontics. Braces were hellishly expensive.

Vision plan, 15% discount off glasses and contacts.

The gate gaped like a dark maw.

At least thirty-five yards tall. Maybe taller. The threat scale ran from blue to red, and the prep packet put this gate at the low orange risk level. On a dying scale of 1 to 10, it was about 7.

This was my seventy-eighth gate. I’d gone into orange gates many times before. I didn’t want to go into this one. It made my hair stand on end.  And the presence of the funeral home wasn’t helping.

“Ominous sonovabitch, isn’t he?”  Melissa murmured next to me.

 “Mhm.”

The mining foreman crossed her arms on her chest.  She was a tall woman, two years older than me, with auburn hair she religiously dyed every four weeks and the kind of face that said she had everything under control. We met years ago, on one of my earlier gate dives, bonded over kids, and stayed friendly ever since.

Melissa ran her mining crew like a well-oiled machine. She didn’t get rattled, but she was staring at this gate like it was about to reach out and bite her. Something about this hole set both of us on edge.

Melissa narrowed her eyes. “Anja, tie your damn shoelaces.”

One of the younger miners rolled her eyes and crouched.  “Always on my case…”

“Exactly. I am always on your case. I’m on everyone’s case. If we have to run for our life out of that gate, I don’t need any of you tripping over your feet, because I’ll have to double back and get you. You have two toddlers to come back to.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Melissa heaved a sigh. “Everybody is full of sass today.”

Around us the mining crew checked their gear, twelve people in indigo magnaprene coveralls and matching hard hats. Nobody seemed unusually worried. Toolbelts were adjusted, rock drills and shears tested, the generator and floodlights on three industrial carts inspected.  The usual.

The escort, five combat grade Talents in dark blue tactical armor, had done their precheck ages ago and were now waiting.  Aaron, a tank class, sat on a crate, leaning against another crate, his eyes closed.  His massive adamant-reinforced shield rested on the ground next to him.  Three strikers mulled about, armed with SIG Spear rifles and a variety of sebrian blades for when the ammo ran out.  

London, the escort unit leader, surveyed the mining crew. He was a blade warden, which meant he could both dish out lethal damage and summon a protective forcefield which made him invulnerable for several minutes. He carried a brutal-looking tactical axe, and on the few occasions I saw him use it, he cut through transdimensional monsters like he was chopping salad.

Both the mining crew and the escort wore blue, marked with the lightning blade emblem of the Cold Chaos Guild. I wore a white hard hat and grey coveralls with a patch of Dimensional Defense Command on my sleeve. The mining crew and the escorts were private contractors, while I was a representative of the US Government. My official title was Dimension Breach Resource Assessor. The guilds called us DeBRAs, and they were supposed to keep us alive at all costs.

If things went to shit, the tank would put himself between the mining crew and the threat, the strikers would cut down whatever got past him, and London would grab me, wrap us both in his defensive force field, and drag me out of the gate so I could report the disaster to the DDC. Of everyone here, I was the least expendable, as far as the government was concerned.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

The mist swirled, sending tendrils of dread toward me. I resisted the urge to hug myself.

20 days of recuperation leave.

Which was long overdue. Maybe that was part of the problem.

Basic Housing Allowance.

That was a big one.  BHA was the only reason I was able to keep the house after Roger left.

Child Tuition Assistance.

CTA was another big one. It helped me cover tuition for Hino’s Academy. Things were tight but I hadn’t missed a payment yet. The school had stellar academics, but I picked it for their underground shelter. If a gate ruptured and a flood of invading monsters washed over the city, Tia and Noah would be safe until the military and the guilds repelled it. Competition for the school was fierce, but since I was DDC, the kids were given special treatment along with the children of guild members. Advertising that Hino was the school of choice for the children of Talents was good for the academy’s prestige.

“Ada, London is checking you out again,” Melissa said.

Next to me, Stella, Melissa’s baby-faced protégé, snickered quietly. She was twenty, and flirting was still exciting.

 A large German Shepherd sitting at Stella’s feet panted as if laughing. Bear came from an illustrious line of police dogs with heroic careers. She had the typical GS coloring, big brown eyes, and huge ears, and petting her was off-limits. I’d asked before and was told no. Bear was working like the rest of us. Petting would be distracting.

“Brace yourself, he’s coming this way,” Melissa murmured.

I turned.  London was heading straight for us.  His real name was Alex Wright, and he was from Liverpool, but everyone called him London anyway. People with combat talents were resistant to wear and tear, and at forty-five, London was still in his prime, tall, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and an easy smile. His job was to keep the miners and me safe, and since he was my designated babysitter, he and I spent a lot of time in close proximity.  Even so, he’d been paying me too much attention lately.

London stopped by us. “Everything okay here?”

“Everything was fine until you showed up,” Melissa said.

He grinned at her.  “Just doing my due diligence.”

They usually had a fun back-and-forth going. It put people at ease. I worked with guilds all over the Eastern US. In some mining crews, tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife and make a sandwich. Cold Chaos was light and bright.

“Are you worried about us, Escort Captain?” Stella tilted her head, and her mane of dark curly hair drooped to one side.

“It’s my job to worry, Miles. Have you been doing your sprints?” London asked.

“I have,” Stella told him. “Fifteen seconds for the dash.”

A hundred meters in fifteen seconds was damn impressive. It was good to be young. God, I was almost twice her age. How the hell did it even happen?  I was twenty only a few years ago, right?

“Not bad,” London said.

“I can beat both of them,” Stella reported, nodding at me and Melissa.

“Talk to me after you pushed three human beings through your hips and put on forty pounds from the stress of keeping them alive,” Melissa told her.

London turned to me. “Where do you dash, Ada?”

Why are you doing this? You know nothing will come of it. “Gate Park.”

All government gate divers ran – not for distance or endurance – but to survive. A 100-meter sprint, a walking lap around the track, rinse and repeat for an hour, then go home, and take ibuprofen for the aching knees. Three times a week. Five would be better, but three was what I usually managed. DDC had mandatory PT tests every six months to keep us in shape. When a noncombatant faced a threat in the breach, running to the gate was the best and often the only way to stay alive.

“Maybe I’ll join you sometime,” London said.

Again, why?  “You’re out of my league. It would be a waste of your time.”

“Never,” he told me.

“How fast do you dash?” Stella asked London.

“Let me put it to you this way: I could pick Ada up and give you a three-second head start, and you still wouldn’t beat my time.”

London smiled at us and moved on.

“Is he lying?” Stella asked Melissa.

“No,” the mining foreman told her.  “Combat Talents are on another level. We can’t keep up.”

London was sending out all sorts of interested signals. He was nice to look at, charming, and he’d clearly been around the block enough to know what he was doing.  By now, he’d had enough experience not to fumble and enough patience to pay attention when it mattered. If I agreed to go on a date, it would go smoothly and end well.

However, the DDC forbade fraternization with guild members. I was supposed to stay neutral and refrain from forming any personal attachments. Even the work-hours friendships like the one with Mellissa were frowned upon. Getting involved with a guild Talent would get me fired, and I had two kids and a mortgage. As fun as London would be in bed – and he would be very fun – he wasn’t worth losing my job.

My phone vibrated. Hino Academy. Please don’t be a problem, please don’t be a problem…

“Yes?”

“Ms. Moore?”

Gina Murray, the assistant principal. That wasn’t good.

“We have a problem.”

Of course, we do.

A woman emerged from the gate and waved. A scout the assault team had left behind. An hour had passed without incident, and it was time to go in.

“Alright people!” London called out.  “You know the drill. Last gear check.  Move out in two minutes.”

“What happened?”

I needed to fix this fast. Phones didn’t work inside the gate, and London had to stick to schedule and account for any delay.  If we went inside five minutes late and a disaster struck, even if it was completely unrelated, the Guild would drag him over hot coals for it.

“Tia left campus without permission.”

Melissa rolled her eyes.

“Okay.” What was that kid doing…

“Before she left, several students and a member of the faculty heard her make a self-harm threat.”

“What?”

“We are required to contact the police…”

“Please don’t do anything. Let me speak to her first. I’ll call you right back!”

I ended the call and stabbed Tia’s number in contacts.

Beep.

She wouldn’t. Tia wouldn’t.  Not in a million years.

Beep.

Beep.

I knew my daughter. She would not.

“Yes, mom?”

“Are you going to hurt yourself?”

“What?”

The mining crew formed up in front of the gate. London gave me a pointed stare.

“Oh look, Stella’s dog is malfunctioning,” Melissa said too loud.

Stella pretended to shake Bear’s leash.  “Won’t turn on. Something broke.”

London headed for us.

“The Academy called.  You told them you were going to hurt yourself and left campus.”

“Well, you know what, maybe I should kill myself because they just assigned us a fifth essay due next week…”

“Tia!” I couldn’t keep the pressure from vibrating in my voice. “This is really serious. I need you to be honest with me.  Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”

London cleared the distance between us. “What’s the hold up?” he asked quietly.

“Give her a minute,” Melissa told him. “It’s her kid.”

“No. I was in the cafeteria, I failed Latin again, and then there was the fifth essay due…”

London met my gaze. “Three minutes.”

Thank you, I mouthed. Three minutes was a gift.

“…Mr. Walton made a snide comment about not applying myself and I said, ‘Just kill me, it will solve all my problems…’”

And…?

“…And then I went to get Starbucks! I always sneak out to get Starbucks.  Everybody does it.  Nobody cares!”

It wasn’t a real threat. Someone overreacted. The relief washed over me like an icy flood. Not a real threat.

“Mr. Walton hates me!”

“Tia, I’m about to go into the gate. The school wants to call the cops.”

“What? Why?!” 

“If this happens, things will get very complicated, and I can’t help, because I’ll be inside the breach. I need you to return to school and fix this.”

“I was already on my way! I’m almost there.”

I started toward the gate.

“I’m walking into the school building right now.”

“Kiss their ass, do whatever you need to, but make sure you fix it. I love you.”

“I love you too.  Mom…”

The gate loomed.

“Here we go,” Melissa muttered.

“I have to go, Tia.”

“Mom!”

“Yes?”

“Don’t die!”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“Remember,” London called out. “We go in together as one, we come out together as one. Nobody gets left behind.”

The mist swirled around my legs.  I hung up, took a deep breath, and stepped into the dark.

#

Stepping through the gate felt like trying to push your way through dense, rubber-thick Jello.

I blinked, trying to adjust to the low light.

A stone passage stretched in front of me, illuminated by patches of bioluminescent lichens, moss, and fungi.  They climbed up the walls, glowing with turquoise, green, and lavender, some curling like fern sprouts, other spreading in a net like bridal veil stinkhorn mushrooms.

The otherness slapped you in the face. It didn’t look familiar, it didn’t smell right, and it didn’t feel like home. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Fear dashed down my arms like hot electric needles. I wanted out of this gate. The urge to turn around and run back to the familiar blue sky was overwhelming.

This burst of panic used to happen every time I entered a breach. I’d tried everything in the beginning: counselling, breathing, counting, cataloging random things I saw… My primary prescribed some Xanax, which I couldn’t take because it was strictly off limits for gate divers.  Slowed the reaction time down too much.  

Medication wouldn’t have worked anyway.  Nothing had worked until one week we got a cluster breach.  Four gates opened simultaneously in close proximity, and I was the only DeBRA in range. I went through four breaches in forty-eight hours, and by the middle of the third my panic switch got permanently broken. This anxiety was an unwelcome blast from the past, and it needed to go away right now.

It was probably the residual stress from the school call.

“Alright,” Melissa called out. “We have a limestone cave biome. The assault team found a large chamber with promising mineral deposits, so we’ve got a bit of a hike. Watch your step. Do you remember how Sanders fell into a crevice and got stuck, and we spent ten minutes pulling him while he was farting up a storm and giggling? Don’t be Sanders.”

Sanders, a tall bear of a man in his mid-thirties, chuckled into his reddish beard. “I didn’t have chili this time, I swear!”

A light laughter rippled through the crew. Melissa was going right down her playbook: item one, put everyone at ease the moment the crew stepped into the breach; item two, reach the mining site; item three, profit.

“We have Adaline Moore with us this morning. She is the strongest DeBRA in the state, which means if there is good pay in this hellhole, she will find it for us,” Melissa announced. “Another day, another dollar. Isn’t that right, Assessor?”

“That’s right.” I matched her tone. “Living the dream.”

Another ripple of laughter.

“Once more…” one of the miners called out.

“Don’t you say it!” Melissa growled. “You know better!”

“…into the breach!”

“Damn it, Hotckins!”

The guild superstition held that if you said the line, you would come out alive, but you would kiss the chance of a big score goodbye. It didn’t matter.  Someone always said the line.

 “I swear if you jinxed us, I will fire you myself…”

Aaron looked at London. The blade warden nodded, and the massive tank started down the passageway, moving fast.  Time was money. The mining crew followed, keeping the three equipment carts in the middle, the strikers guarding the flanks like border collies obsessed with their herd.

I joined the flow of people. Melissa walked on my left and London on my right. Elena, the assault team’s scout who’d come back to escort the miners, fell in step next to London. Lean, with a harsh face and blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail, Elena didn’t walk, she glided.

In theory, being on the mining crew was the safest part of the gate dive. Safe was a relative term.  Walking across a narrow beam over molten lava was also safe, as long as you didn’t fall.

“Doing okay?” London murmured.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Is Tia alright?”

“Yes.  She’s a smart kid. She will handle it. Thank you for the three minutes.”

“You’re welcome.” He glanced at me, his eyes concerned. “Not feeling this one?”

“No.”

Gate divers were like ancient sailors. We ventured into the unknown that could kill us at any moment. In the breach, survival depended on luck and intuition, and our rituals were an acknowledgment of that. We knocked on wood, we muttered lucky sayings under our breath, and we trusted our instincts.  My instincts were pumping out all of the dread they could muster.

“Anything specific?” London asked.

“It makes my skin crawl.”

“Don’t worry,” he promised quietly.  “I’ll get you out of here in one piece.”

I glanced at him.

“I mean it, Ada. The only way you go down is if I’m down, and I’m really good at surviving. We get in, get out, and you can go home and sort the kid issues out.  Tomorrow will be like this never happened.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded.

Ten years had passed since Roger had abandoned us. I’d been on my own for a decade, taking care of the kids, paying the bills, surviving.  Every decision in my life was up to me, and I made them without support or any help from anyone else. I’d become used to it, but London just reminded me how it felt to share all of that with someone. Someone who cared if you lived or died.

This was the worst time to wonder about things. I promised my daughter I would come back. I had to concentrate on that.

The passageway forked.  We turned right. Hotchkins, a short, dark-haired man, spraypainted a backward orange arrow on the wall.  He would do this every time we made a turn.  It was a proven fact that people running for their lives had trouble orienting themselves.

Ahead a glowing stick shone among the rocks.  Beyond it eight furry bodies sprawled on the ground in a puddle of blood. My foot slid on something. A spent shell casing.  The cave floor was littered with them. The assault team had made a stand here.

We passed the bodies, skirting them to the sides. The dead things were large, about the size of a Great Dane, with long lupine jaws and massive feet armed with hook-like claws. Their pelts, chewed up by bullets, were shaggy with blue-grey fur. They didn’t look like anything our planet could’ve spawned.

“A variant of Moody’s stalkers,” London said. His voice was perfectly calm.

“Yeah. There were a lot of them, and they are spongy. They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming,” Elena said. “And they spit acidic bile.”

“Good to know,” London said.

“We did our best to clean up, but the place is a maze.” Elena kept her voice low. “Passages going everywhere, so we may run into some. We didn’t see anything more advanced until we went much deeper, so there is that.”

“No worries,” Stella offered from behind them. “Bear will let us know if anything is coming.”

Elena gave her a cold smile.  “I will let us know if anything is coming.”

“Don’t pay her any attention, Bear,” Melissa murmured. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

Bear twitched her right ear. One day I would pet that dog.

Elena kept gliding forward, her face portraying all of the warmth of an iceberg.  Her talent was heightened hearing and vision, which put her into scout class. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear a person murmuring behind a closed door two floors above. But as awesome as Elena was, I would trust Bear over her any day. There was a reason every guild brought canines into the breaches. The transdimensional monstrosities wigged them out, and they let us know when something came near. Dogs were the best early warning system we had.

Elena was a young scout.  Her talent had manifested two years ago, and she was still in the edgy, prove-yourself stage. More experienced scouts made friends with canine handlers and carried dog biscuits.

At least she was conscientious and took her job seriously. Some combat Talents looked down on miners.  As I heard one hotshot put it, “We’re going to kill monsters and save humanity.  Have fun digging up magic rocks.” He was very surprised when he didn’t get his bonus at the end.

Magic rocks assured everyone’s paychecks and produced resources for weapons and armor.  Mining crews had to be protected at all costs, and both mining foremen like Melissa and escort captains like London held a lot of sway in the guilds. Without mining, guilds would not exist.

Ten years ago, when the first set of gates appeared out of nowhere near the major population centers, they’d taken humanity by surprise. We’d cordoned them off so we could carefully study them and before anyone had a chance to adjust, the gates burst, spilling a horde of monsters into the world.

We knew a lot more about the gates now. Beyond every gate lay the breach, a miniature dimension stuffed to the brim with monsters. That dimension connected Earth and the hostile world like a gangplank linking two ships. The breaches were how the enemy got from their world to ours.

Every breach had an anchor, a core that stabilized it. Once the breach appeared, the anchor began to accumulate energy.  When it got enough, the gate would burn through the fabric of our reality and rip open, releasing the invaders into our world to rampage and murder everything they came across. The more dangerous the breach was, the longer it took to burst.

There was a brief period, anywhere from a few days to a few months from the moment the gate appeared, when the monsters couldn’t escape yet but we could enter the gate from our side. It gave us a chance to extinguish the anchor and collapse the breach. The moment a gate manifested, the clock started ticking.

At first, destroying the anchors was the sole responsibility of the military, but it quickly got prohibitively expensive. Casualties were high.  And it was discovered that the breaches contained a wealth of materials: strange ores, medicinal plants, and monster bones with incredible properties. Resources that could aid our fight and make us stronger. It wasn’t just about destroying the anchors anymore. We had to strip the breach of anything valuable before it collapsed.

Pretty soon it became apparent that the very first gate rupture altered the world. Some said the gates released a virus, others speculated that it was some undetectable trace element that entered the atmosphere. Nobody knew for sure, but in some people it awakened the kind of abilities that previously only existed in myth and fiction. The Talents. Faster, stronger, almost magical.

The Talents banded into guilds, and governments around the world began to outsource the gates to them, taking a percentage of the profits. Economic and security crisis solved at the cost of volunteer lives.

The cave passage kept branching. Left, left, right, another right, each glowing with swirls of colorful lichens and fungi. Elena was right.  This place was a maze.

By now, the process of gate diving was almost routine. As soon as a gate appeared, it was graded, its threat level measured, a government assessor like me assigned, and the appropriate guild was contacted. The attack began with the assault team, heavy hitters with combat talents, who entered the gate and cut and burned through the miniature pocket dimension until they found the anchor and destroyed it.

While the assault team worked their way to the anchor, the mining crew came in and stripped the breach bare, extracting anything that could be of use and would help humanity keep fighting. Each breach’s resources were unique and precious. That was where I came in. My job was to assess the space, guide the mining team, and make sure that the government got their 30% cut.

Once the anchor was destroyed, the breach began to degrade and then collapsed, usually within twenty-four hours. Hopefully everybody got out alive, and when the next gate appeared, we would do it all over again.

Ahead Aaron stopped.  Finally.  It was time to earn my paycheck.  The sooner I found something of value, the sooner we all got out of here.

Dread curled around me like a cold snake. I could just turn around and run back to the gate, quit, and never go into any breaches again. I could absolutely do that. But then whatever this breach held would stay in it instead of becoming weapons, armor, and medicine.

I took a deep breath and followed the miners to do my job.

To be continued on Monday.

We are looking for an artist to help us with images. Somebody who is good at quick digital sketches of environments, mostly caves. Contact Mod R with your portfolio at modr@ilona-andrews.com

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

Thanks for the update and glad to hear that Book#4 is well under way, even if progress isn’t as fast as you’d like.

Looking forward to Essentia Capacity and if age or training can increase it for Stephen, even if only by a little…

Will the November release date for Book#3 be better for sales as you might be inside the Christmas timeframe as people struggle of gift ideas, or are sales fairly even during the year?

Hello there fantasy author blog enthusiasts! This is Sam, Will’s favorite and only younger brother coming in hot with a very unfun post while Will is somewhere in the middle of the ocean writing something not ocean related.  

2025 has been off to a rough start here at Hidden Gnome Publishing. As some of you may know from the last blog post, our cousin Ellie was diagnosed with stage four Ovarian cancer in January. She fought for four months but ultimately didn’t make it. She passed away 19 days before her 25th birthday.

Ellie was one of the cousins we grew up close to, relationally speaking. We took many cross-country RV trips as a family. I saw snow for the first time on one of those trips to Yellowstone and we brought Ellie on her first visit to Disney World. After she graduated from college, we even discussed with her the possibility of interning for Hidden Gnome to get some real world experience. 

Her older brother Stuart is one of my best friends and a Cradle fan himself. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last couple months in Georgia trying to be there for him and his family. In the end, there was nothing we could do, which is probably the part that stings the most.

A little over a week ago, another member of our team, Lily, had her mom pass away unexpectedly. She and her husband Patrick, our art designer, are currently with their family trying to navigate that loss. 

Life is hard and it’s difficult not to feel anger when you lose a young cousin to cancer and your mother before you’re ready to say goodbye. The only bright side is the 24 years Ellie got to impact other people’s lives and the effect a good mother can have on raising an awesome daughter. 
​
7 of the 12 members of Hidden Gnome are grieving in different ways right now. It’s times like these where being a family company is difficult, so apologies in advance for delays in some of our deadlines we’ve communicated. We’re all trying to get back in the proverbial saddle as quickly as we can.

The great part about being a family company is that we can be there for each other. Because of this job and the fans who support Will’s career, we have the ability to take time away and support our relatives when they need it the most. Sincerely…gratitude to all of you.

Cancer sucks and I have a whole new level of empathy for anyone who has or is currently walking through this. We’re all rooting for you! And remember, “A dragon is not ashamed of tears.”

-Sam

Tuna and Oliver had their annual visit to the vet for vaccines and physicals. Here is Tuna being the king of everything at the vet office.

He has no shame. Or dignity.

Tuna, predictably, was lovely to the vet, let his blood be taken, sat like a rock for vaccines, and has normal bloodwork.

I would take a pic of Oliver for you but I have no clue where he is. He is hiding. Oliver is allergic to life. He is allergic to cedar, he is allergic to Texas, he is allergic to food additives commonly found in cat food. He has constant nasal discharge, which means he sneezes a lot, he rips his hair out, which I clean daily, and he can only eat Royal Canin Sensitive Stomach food, because everything else he throws up.

Oliver was here at some point. This is 24 hours of me not cleaning that chair. I will get to it after that post.

Oliver will not eat special cat treats, tuna out of the can, or vet cat bribe treats. Only Royal Canin. That’s it. Also, he loves Meow Mix kibble, which he cannot have, because he regurgitates it right back out.

Oliver is also the reason why I have furniture covers on everything. Not only that, I have doubles, so I can swap them when company is coming. I cannot stand pet hair on furniture. It drives me up the wall so I religiously clean it with a special tool.

In case you are wondering, this works. Skip the small one, just get the bigger one.

Oliver hid in the carrier at the vet, had to be forcibly removed, and they could not draw blood even after putting him into the kitty bag. We had to leave him at the vet so they could sedate him with gabapentin. Finally, blood was drawn and the results have come back. He has IBD, Inflammatory Bowel Disorder, which we already suspected. He also has a UTI. We picked up an antibiotic for him, which we have to squirt into his mouth twice a day.

Oliver fights for his life every time we wrap him in a blanket to give him medicine. Every time that happens, he truly believes that we will murder him. Given a chance, he will claw you bloody and bite, and I just wish there was some way to make it less alarming for him, but there is not. So now, when he sees either of us, he runs and hides.

::exhales:: Oliver is a lot. He is now classified as elderly and he doesn’t react well to change. He is a sweet, clingy kitty, and I was the one who took him out of a cage in PetSmart, so he will have a home with us for the rest of his days.

Also a lizard got inside two days ago. Charlie killed it – we know this because he brought us the still twitching tail – which we confiscated. We looked for it at the time but couldn’t find it.

We found it this morning, safely tucked under a large dog pillow. It had begun to rot and it stank. I’m washing the pillow cover and contemplating if I should give up and throw the whole pillow out.

I’m supposed to be writing today, and I’m not feeling it. But I really want to get this novella done before the end of the month.

::pretends to gird loins::

Don’t write, don’t eat. Onward! To cleaning cat hair, putting pillow cover in the dryer, and then writing like the wind.

The post The Struggle Is Real first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

In reply to Benedict.

Ah that makes sense. Obvious we haven’t seen the Ashfords aside from Calhoun use sigls due to lack of screen time but from what little we have seen, it doesn’t seem like they are that skilled with Drucraft. If they married into House Meusel and only one of them is a prodigy that would indicate they are better at selling sigls than using them.

Magnus seems to be a Drucraft cripple which he passed on to Tobias and Isadora, and Lucella isn’t even a shaper which I think would mean she is only a tyro. That leaves Helen who I believe leans more on the Drucraft business side of things than actually ability and Stephen got his skills for his Father.

So would Stephen in pure Drucraft be behind Calhoun in for lack of a better term rankings for the Ashfords? Or would Charles and his mother have an edge or be equal to him?

People often misquote Benjamin Franklin on the only certainties in life—death and taxes. But Patrick wonders about the truth in that.

Once, young and foundering, he embarked on a quest to challenge life’s inevitabilities.

Now, older and jaded, he comes face to face with his past, forcing him to question everything he believes.

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

 

Death And Taxes By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sixteen years and a half continent away from the great American Midwest, Patrick saw Keri. She was running out of the market across the street from his favorite coastal café, a bottle of wine in her hand.

At first he thought it couldn’t be her. Her long brown hair caught the sun, reflecting it in golden highlights. She was slender, and the blue sundress she wore hung off her as if she hadn’t grown into it yet.

Perpetually twenty. That was what he thought as he sipped his mocha and returned to the Wall Street Journal. Keri would always be twenty and coltish, not quite grown into her body.

He smiled at himself, at his romantic nature. Proof, perhaps, that he had loved her because he saw her in every gangly twenty-year-old with the promise of great beauty.

Then a car horn made him look up. The woman was standing in the middle of the street, staring at him, cars stopped all around her. The bottle of wine had shattered at her feet.

His gaze met hers.

She hadn’t changed.

And there was a look of abject horror on her face.

***

Sixteen years and half a continent away, he’d been twenty-five, callous and certain of his own future. The son of a prominent lawyer, he’d become a lawyer too—not with the thought of practicing law, but with the thought of creating it. He studied politics like it was a religion, and decided that he had to be in the seat of government. So, with his newly minted certificate from the bar, he headed downstate thinking the capitol would welcome him.

Instead, he learned that any state capitol had its share of locally grown lawyers. With his pedigree, the partners at the large local firms said, he could get a job anywhere. The following question—why here?—had an underlying meaning: what’s wrong with you? How come you haven’t gone to your father’s firm?

He couldn’t very well say he had come because he thought getting into politics would be easier here. It wasn’t. He didn’t know anyone, and the art of politics was the managing of connections.

Eventually, he got a job as a junior staff lawyer at the Fair Housing Coalition, a job he saw as beneath him both financially and politically. Yes, yes, he believed everyone should have a home and everyone should be treated fairly, but most of the people he saw were too dumb to realize that a lease agreement was a legal document and that their behavior had put them in trouble with their landlord and the local laws.

He could have, he later supposed, joined the interoffice coalition that was working to change some of the more egregious landlord-tenant laws, but his heart wasn’t in it. Instead, he gravitated to the local university, spending his time in the student union, drinking with people who reminded him of his friends back home, talking philosophy and planning to change the world, one little decision at a time.

That was how he learned about the Professors Simmons and their interdisciplinary study—financed by any number of government agencies and private corporations—and extended, theoretically, over decades.

The study only made it through the first five months of its existence.

It caused two deaths, and derailed any hopes he had of politics—at least out front. Only fast-talking and the excellent attorneys of his father’s firm had saved Patrick from being disbarred.

By then, he didn’t care. He’d already met and lost Keri.

And had his belief in everything shattered.

***

He grabbed his mocha as he headed out of the café. Interesting, he would later think, that he’d left his PDA and his newspaper, but took his beverage.

It was a clear sign that he wasn’t thinking, just reacting, running through the closely set tables to the double-doors, pushing them open and hurrying into the street.

A VW Bug swerved past him, and the driver shouted an obscenity. A sedan, following, leaned on its horn.

But he didn’t move. He stared at the broken bottle, the red wine running like blood down the empty sidewalk.

Keri was gone—as if she had never been.

***

The Professors Simmons were not related. There were four of them, all in different disciplines. They met at a large university faculty gathering where everyone had been asked to clump alphabetically. Their common last names, their common ages, and their uncommon interests held them together a lot longer than the meeting had.

Professor Abigail Simmons taught philosophy. She had two seminars in which she tortured undergraduates, forcing them to challenge the realities in the world around them. She also taught three graduate seminars to the same twenty grad students, the courageous few who thought majoring in philosophy was a good idea, no matter how badly it ruined them for the job market. She had grown frightened for her own job, discovering that publishing occasional articles in philosophical and religious journals wasn’t enough to impress her dean. Apparently, she had to do some sort of breakthrough research to justify her salary. But, she would argue, breakthrough research and philosophy were by definition incompatible, something her dean believed she—of all people—could overcome.

Professor Roderick Simmons taught political science. He was the rightwing guru of the poli-sci department, the man that local media always called to give a reliable—and seemingly balanced—view of local elections. Roderick Simmons specialized in political systems and, in addition to his well-received books, he spent a lot of time away from campus, consulting with various groups, many of them tied to the Republican Party. He was tenured and secure, which made him perfect for this joint project.

Professor Marilyn Simmons was a biologist. Her teaching work involved occasional lectures to overcrowded 101 classes (with the day-to-day work done by teaching assistants) and supervising the research of sleep-deprived graduate students. Her seat at the university had funding from outside grants; she was a star professor who felt her own area of expertise had grown a bit stale. She was looking for a new challenge, one that would improve her prestige even more, and this, she felt, was it.

Professor Nash Simmons was the youngest and the most professionally insecure of the group. Even his specialty reflected his insecurities: His professorial bio said that he focused on Cognitive Analysis and Behavioral Theories—a lot of words, he liked to joke, that meant he had no idea what he was doing. He did whatever it was that he did from the Behavioral Science Department, where he taught upper-level psychology classes and graduate seminars in the brain. He supervised almost no graduate students and his thesis, a trailblazing work on cognitive theory that had been published to great acclaim, was now several years old. He had to produce something new, and in the way of all who were acclaimed when they were too young, he felt that something new had to be trailblazing as well.

Patrick had no idea how the multidisciplinary study went from cocktail party talk to grant-writing to grant-winning, but by the time he had encountered Simmons-N, as Nash Simmons had been designated by those involved in the work, the study was looking for willing bodies. That Patrick wasn’t a student and had an understanding of the body politic made him an unusual choice.

That he was willing to step into the real world in the name of science made him even more unusual.

But it was his willingness to apply experimental techniques to that real world that made him the most desirable candidate the Professors Simmons had found.

***

Patrick walked into the market. It smelled of garlic and fish overlaid with the faint scent of roses from a display near the door. The place was dark compared to the street and cramped, which instantly made him uncomfortable. He preferred the large chain grocery store at the end of town, where the lights were bright and the products were displayed according to dictates of some corporate official in another state.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw six different aisles heading toward the seafood department along the back wall. The seventh aisle, which started behind the cashier, carried wines, beer, and hard liquor. Cigarettes were stacked high, where no one could get them without help from the staff.

He waited in line, noting that everyone ahead of him had fresh produce and canned products with the words “healthy” or “organic” or “natural” on the label. He shuddered, hating the pretension, remembering when he used to do the same thing just to fit in with his university friends.

When he made it to the front of the line, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his badge. Most people in this small town knew their sheriff, but he was cautious for the handful that didn’t.

“The woman who just left,” he said. “The one with the wine. Can I see the copy you made of her license?”

The clerk flushed and for a moment, he thought the gambit wouldn’t work. Keri still looked twenty; she should have been carded. Oregon law stated that anyone who looked thirty-five or younger had to show identification to buy liquor.

But the clerk nodded and called for a manager, who took Patrick to the back office where he could look at the fuzzy identification that had been scanned into the computer system.

Kerissa Simon, the ID said, the last name dangerously close to Simmons—so close that it made his head hurt.

“Any idea where she’s staying?” he asked, knowing the store didn’t need a record of that, but often took it to avoid problems later on.

He got the name of a roadside motel, cheap but comfortable, and somehow it didn’t surprise him, just like her appearance in his refuge hadn’t surprised him.

Although it should have.

***

The meeting room was an old lecture hall in one of the campus’s earliest buildings. The building was now used primarily for offices, but this room had clearly been too big to give to just any professor.

Radiators ran along the walls beneath the single-paned windows, and despite the constant heat blowing into the room, there was still a draft. Patrick sat near the door in a wooden desk chair that was at least eighty years older than he was. Some of the names carved into the desk’s surface had been there so long that their edges had worn smooth.

He traced them, feeling out of place among the students, knowing he looked out of place in the suit his father had purchased for him before his first moot court appearance. Patrick had taken off the tie and stuffed it into his briefcase, but the fact that he had a briefcase instead of a backpack and a suit coat instead of a sweater already showed that he wasn’t One of Them.

A few stared, and a couple kept glancing at him like they expected him to get up front and talk about the various studies.

He’d had some preliminary meetings with the Professors Simmons and the assisting graduate students; he assumed these other participants had as well. Now, though, they were getting together for their first official meeting. They would have four such meetings before splitting into various subsets, four meetings in which the Professors Simmons would lay out the purpose of the studies as best they could, without tainting the results.

The professors stood in the hallway, heads bent, conferring, while a graduate student with a clipboard checked off the names of each attendee. Finally, a young woman, snowflakes melting on her hair and collar, stopped near the graduate student, gesturing an apology as she gave her name. Then she slipped inside the room, and took the only remaining chair, right next to Patrick.

“The snowstorm they predicted came, huh?” he asked.

She leaned away from him and finger-combed the moisture from her brown hair. Then she peeled off her coat, meticulously hanging it on the back of her seat.

“The roads are a mess,” she said. “I had to park six blocks away.”

He was in one of the private lots, courtesy of the Fair Housing Council. He hadn’t really noticed the snow until he started climbing hill. Then he worried about the swiftness of the storm, knowing that the sidewalks could get buried during the few short hours of the meeting.

“I’m Patrick,” he said as she sat down across from him.

“Keri.” She stuck her mohair scarf inside her coat sleeve, then smiled at him. “You need the money too?”

No, he wanted to say but didn’t, I just need the company. He knew this study paid the highest of any conducted on campus, and he thought he knew why. The interdisciplinary approach allowed for even more grant money than usual, and the professors decided to use that money to pay the subjects extra, so that they’d stick around for the duration rather than leave when the semester ended.

“Money’s always nice,” he said, which was as much of a dodge as he wanted to give her. He wasn’t sure why he felt this odd need for honesty. She was a bit thin for his tastes—all elbows and knees and sharp angles. She was also at least five years younger than he was, an undergraduate when he’d been out of school for a year now.

She smiled at him, then pulled an older laptop from her backpack. The laptop barely fit on the desk. Several other participants had laptops or AlphaSmarts or PDAs with keyboards.

He hadn’t even thought of taking notes, which suddenly showed him how far he had come from the student mentality. He leaned to the right, opened his briefcase, and pulled out both a legal pad and his BlackBerry, not sure which would work best in this situation.

Then the door opened one more time, and the Professors Simmons came in. Their appearance was as varied as their disciplines. Simmons-A was short and dumpy, her curly hair a mixture of gray and grayer. Simmons-R wore a suit as expensive as Patrick’s. His black hair had a precision cut, and his hands looked manicured. Simmons-M was slender and wore her long red hair in some sort of upswept do that looked like it took time and three other people to create. Simmons-N had the prerequisite professorial ponytail and wispy goatee. His glasses fell to the edge of his nose, making him seem even more absent-minded than he probably was.

Patrick’s stomach turned. Studies, waivers, payment by the hour, altering his behavior because he had agreed to do so, not because he wanted to do so.

Was he that lonely? Was he that lost?

He glanced around the room, at the stressed, pimply faces around him, and realized he probably was.

***

The motel had been built in the late 1950s, when this coastal community had been known as the Disneyland of the Pacific Northwest. Once there’d been a theme park (although in those days, they’d called it something else) on the outskirts of town. Only a few remnants remained—a red-and-white store downtown that made its own candy; a go-cart park across from a restaurant once known as (and still referred to by locals as) the Pixie Kitchen; and a five-story resort hotel built in the Cape Cod-style where presidents had stayed but which had become, in the intervening years, an old-folks home.

This motel, unoriginally called the Beach-Goer, still advertised that it had television and clean, comfortable rooms. It stood on a bluff overlooking the ocean, prime real estate that the elderly owners refused to sell to all sorts of development firms.

The main entrance was off a narrow drive that barely fit today’s SUVs; he had no idea how the large automobiles of forty years ago had negotiated the same road.

He drove a truck/van combination with an engine modified for high speeds. The county owned the vehicle, and if he ever lost a local election, he would have to give the thing back. Sometimes he thought he might miss it—in the back was all sorts of life-saving equipment mixed with weaponry—but mostly he saw it as a burden of his job, one of many he hadn’t understood when he learned that his checkered past mattered less to the people here than it probably should have.

He parked just outside the entrance, making sure that the official decals were facing away from the street, so as not to interfere with any walk-in business. Then he went inside.

The desk clerk was a local gal who played bingo at the casino every Wednesday night. He didn’t know her name, but they’d seen each other around. It was hard to miss the other locals in a town of 7,000.

She smiled at him with recognition. He didn’t have to flash his badge. He just asked for Keri Simons’ room, and the clerk gave him a room key.

He weighed it in his hand as he walked along the concrete sidewalk. The key was a kind of power: if she wasn’t there, he could wait inside her room, surprise her, let her know who was really in charge.

That he even had the thought surprised and appalled him at the same time. He had never thought of control in connection to Keri before.

But the study itself, the reason they met, was all about control.

And hubris.

And the belief that somehow, humankind had the power to alter its own destiny.

***

“For thousands of years, mankind has felt it has a destiny.” Simmons-A stood in front of the long wooden desk beneath the chalkboard. She had taken a piece of chalk before beginning her welcoming remarks, almost as if the chalk provided a kind of comfort. All during her talk, she kept the piece in her palm, alternately rolling it and clenching her fingers around it.

Patrick found himself watching the chalk instead of her face, partly because she reminded him of every professor he’d ever disliked, and he wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Not just a species destiny,” Simmons-A was saying, “but individual destinies as well. We can turn to almost any early document based on the oral tradition and find evidence. Genesis tells us that God created Man in His own image, and just that sentence alone implies that God had a purpose for Man, a purpose that Woman screwed up, of course.”

The group laughed, but it sounded dutiful. Patrick made himself smile, even though he hadn’t felt like it, but Keri crossed her arms.

“Mythology gives us story after story of people confronting their destinies, from the Christ story to the Greek story of Oedipus.”

Patrick shifted in his chair. He didn’t need the history lesson if that was what it could be called. He just wanted to get on with the actual business of the study, whatever it would be.

“Fighting destiny is one of the greatest themes mankind has.” Simmons-A tossed the chalk into the air and caught it. “Look at Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. Look at our own fiction from popular tales of Harry Potter to Star Wars. Even romance fiction flirts with destiny. Romance hints that every person on earth has a soulmate—someone they’re destined to be with. If we take the time to find that person—or if we recognize that person (apparently some of us do not)—then, the theory goes, we shall live happily ever after.”

Keri bit her lower lip. Patrick didn’t know when he started looking at her instead of Simmons-A.

“From time immemorial,” Simmons-A said, “mankind has tried to fight its destiny, whatever that destiny might be. Few are with that proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Even fewer accept that spoon with grace. If you do not believe me, look at the remaining royal families of the world. Such tales we hear of debauchery and rebellion.”

A few people smiled, but most stirred, just like Patrick had.

“What has this to do with us?” Simmons-A asked. “Simple.”

She then gave a capsule summary of the faculty meeting, the conversation the Professors Simmons had in lieu of listening to faculty debate.

“The only thing that the four of us could agree on that evening,” she said with a smile that transformed her face from sour and discouraged to slightly pretty, “was that Benjamin Franklin was right: in this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

“And being born,” someone said from the front row.

She looked at him in surprise. He had broken her rhythm. Simmons-M, the biologist, came forward at that moment, rescuing her colleague.

“We can’t change that,” she said. “We’ve all been born and we’ve survived. So once we’re here, all we can be certain of are death and taxes.”

She had a powerful voice with a touch of music to it. She also had a great deal of charisma, and Patrick found himself wishing that she had been in charge of the opening speech instead of Simmons-A.

But Simmons-M knew her place, at least in this beginning. She made a little bow to Simmons-A and returned to the cluster of Simmonses near the blackboard.

“Precisely,” Simmons-A said, attempting to recover. “Death and taxes. We argued about that flip remark for weeks. And somehow, we went from a philosophical discussion of certainties and uncertainties in this world to what we’re calling a multidisciplinary study. According to our grants, we’re attempting to see if humankind can change its known destiny. But between us—”

And she grinned again, looking over her shoulder at her colleagues like a schoolgirl. Only Simmons-N smiled back.

“—we decided to have a race. We have four things to prove: That we do indeed have destinies. That we can change them. That human-made systems—in this case, taxes—can be changed. That biological systems—in this case, death—can be changed.”

Then she stepped back with a little nod, and Simmons-R came forward. Patrick slouched. He’d never realized until this moment how much Simmons-R reminded him of his father.

“You’d think,” Simmons-R boomed and half the room sat up as if they’d dozed and been rudely awakened, “that human systems would be the easiest to change. But I have my doubts. In a cursory search of governmental systems throughout human history, I cannot readily find an example of a society without taxation. Once again, let me turn to the Bible. The Egyptians…”

And as he discussed the levies that the Egyptians placed on their subjects, the taxes that built the Roman roads, the demands the medieval Japanese put on families, he made an eloquent, if familiar, point.

Patrick assumed the point probably wasn’t as familiar to the undergraduates—few people in the room besides the Professors Simmons were as overeducated as he was. He glanced at Keri. This time her gaze caught his, and she smiled.

He felt twelve again, and actually had to resist the urge to write a note on his legal pad and pass it to her. So far, she hadn’t typed anything into her laptop, and he’d only written down “Death and Taxes” as if it were the topic sentence of an essay exam.

In fact, he never wrote anything else down that night. The remainder of the evening was a jumble of lecture—Simmons-M discussing the necessity of death, not just on an individual scale, but on a worldwide one (species death; death of ecosystems; the eventual death of the planet itself), and the arrogance of humankind to think it can alter death, even on a small scale; and Simmons-N referring to behavioral studies that suggest humankind’s perceptions of the world have led humans to misunderstand it—and an increasingly shared but silent intimacy with Keri, who seemed to find the whole thing as pretentious and amusing as Patrick did.

“One of the things that we’re going to examine,” Simmons-N said in his nasal voice, “is whether time actually exists or is just a matter of perception. Because if it is a matter of perception, then nothing around us is real—or everything is real, from the primordial soup that the Earth was once to this moment to the heat death of the universe, all happening at once.”

Simmons-A smiled through that entire speech, as if she agreed. Indeed, it seemed to Patrick that she would have been better off saying it than the cognitive and behavioral scientist.

Patrick said that later to Keri, at an all-night coffee shop just off the main drag. They’d ducked inside on their way back to their cars—or, more accurately, on the way back to hers; he’d passed his blocks before, but hadn’t told her, enjoying her company enough to hazard the ice pellets and heavy wind that the storm had become.

They found a booth in a warm corner away from the door, where they spent the next few hours laughing about the pretension, about the silly race between the disciplines (which implied, Patrick said, that they would all succeed in areas of study where no one had succeeded before), about the ironic coincidence that led the Professors Simmons to each other in the first place.

Sometime during the evening, Keri postulated that the winner of the entire thing might end up being the philosopher, who had somehow gotten a group of diverse people together to re-examine their beliefs in a way that seemed as irrational as the most screwball religious cult.

Patrick had laughed at that remark. And it was his own laughter that he thought of most often when he thought of Keri. Not of those nights at his apartment, not of the horrible last day. Just the laughter.

And the professors’ fight against a complacency that he didn’t then understand.

He understood it now, even felt it on days when the sunlight hit the ocean, and his small town was bathed in a clear, almost unworldly light. He would tell himself, as he looked at that beauty, that he had done the best with what he had.

But there was always an itchy restlessness underneath—a what-if chorus that continued to sing: What if he had gone to his father’s law firm first? What if he hadn’t been interested in politics? What if he had never met Keri?

What if, what if, what if.

He played the scenarios in his mind as if he were screenwriter finishing a script for a time-travel movie.

What if…

He didn’t know. He would never know.

He only knew that if the ancient Greeks had written his life story, the what-ifs didn’t matter. Destiny was destiny. The Greeks always showed that no matter what changes mere mortals tried to make, destiny would win out.

Somehow, the Greek version seemed to tell him, he would meet Keri anyway, she would die, and everyone would be sued. Careers would end. Lives would be ruined. Simmons-N would commit suicide all over again.

And Patrick would end up here, carrying a little sheriff’s badge in an unimportant town on the Oregon Coast, living alone, and wishing none of it had ever happened.

***

He paused before knocking on the door to her room. Only now, with a key in hand, and the memories fresh, did he realize how silly he was being.

Keri Andreeson was dead. He’d seen her corpse. They all had. They had clustered around it in the biology lab, her mouth slack, her tongue protruding ever so slightly, her eyes bulging, and her skin an unnatural clay color, and they had stared.

No one had said a word. He wasn’t sure, even then, if anyone completely understood how much her death would change everything.

He wasn’t sure he understood even now.

He swallowed against a dry throat. Was standing here a sign of a growing insanity? The fact that he was willing to believe that some girl—coincidentally named Keri (spelling the same)—whose driver’s license claimed she was twenty-two and from Illinois (Keri had been from North Dakota, complete with a melodic Fargo accent)—the fact that he was willing to believe she was the same person as the girl whose body he’d seen, the fact that he was willing to believe she was alive, and looked the same, and was terrified of him—showed just how far he had fallen intellectually, how little he believed in realities any more, how much he hoped for miracles.

Which made him no better than the people who had placed their faith into those studies.

Or put their faith in anything, for that matter. For what was faith, but a belief in the impossible? An irrational belief in something unbelievable.

He clutched the key in his fist, tempted to open the door and scare the girl, whoever she was. Who would she report her fear to? The sheriff?

He felt a bitter smile cross his lips. Then he turned away.

Better to leave the past in the past. Better to leave destiny or fate or the lack thereof to the philosophers and the professors and the dreamers.

Better to return to the realities of traffic accidents and one murder a year and a lonely house on a cliff-face overlooking the ocean, a house with a television as large as his bookshelves, a place where he went when he couldn’t stand reality any more.

He had just stepped into the parking lot when he heard a lock turn and a door open behind him.

And before he had time to think—or maybe he lied about that: maybe he did have time to think and he chose this—he turned, and stared Keri Simons—Keri Andreeson—in the face.

***

They’d become lovers even though the Professors Simmons had cautioned against fraternizing. That alone might have skewed the study—or one of the studies—had any of them been completed. But the thing had barely gotten off the ground when it all ended. Patrick had just received his working orders from Simmons-R the week before, working orders that included an overall personal plan which extended for five years.

The breadth of the study surprised him, even then.

Patrick was to ally himself with a local political group—any political group would do, so long as it worked on the grassroots level—and slowly ease them to a new vision: that taxation was a scourge, that government needed fiscal responsibility, and that required budget-tightening, reduced spending, and no new taxes. Over time, the no-new-taxes pledge would become a no-tax pledge, depending on how high up the political ladder he could climb, how much power he could attain, and how many followers he could convert to his—actually, Simmons-R’s—way of thinking.

Patrick, in his naïveté, had thought it possible. Much as he believed politics was the art of compromise, he also knew it lived in the realm of argument. A charismatic man with the right argument could change the playing field—make compromise happen on the one-yard line instead of the fifty-yard line, and yet convince everyone that they had attained a middle ground.

He’d actually see in happen, years later. The political center moved farther and farther right as he moved farther and farther west. When he finally stopped long enough to look at what America had become while he’d tried to outrun his past, he found himself wondering if some of Simmons-R’s other subjects hadn’t continued with the experiment, working their way up the political ranks until they reached the national level, influencing everyone from senators to the president himself.

Then Patrick would shake that feeling off—surely he would recognize someone from the bad old days, right?—and he would remind himself that taxes still existed, that the United States went through cycles of heavy taxation followed by cycles of light taxation, but never, in its two-hundred-plus year history had the United States ever gone without taxing someone for something.

He found that vaguely reassuring, just like he found the obituary columns reassuring. People continued dying. Humankind kept fulfilling their destinies, one grave at a time.

***

She was twenty. That was the first thought which reached his brain as he stared at her, framed in that cheap wooden doorway, sunlight peaking over the building’s eaves and the shush-shush of the ocean beyond.

In no way could this woman be in her mid-thirties, stretched by time and loss and years on the run.

She put both hands on the doorframe as if bracing herself or blocking his entrance or simply holding herself up. She was as thin as ever, coltish, all angles and lines, a girl who had not yet fulfilled her physical potential, whatever that might be.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a voice he wasn’t sure he remembered.

He flushed. She had seen him pause in front of her door, maybe even seen his hand raise slightly, his fist clench the key. She’d certainly seen his indecision, and, ultimately, his retreat.

“You bought a bottle of wine today,” he said, finally choosing an official approach.

“Is that illegal?” She tilted her head slightly as if she were interested in the answer. The movement was familiar. Keri used to do it when she was flirting.

His heart literally contracted. He’d only felt that squeezed sensation once before, when he saw her on the cot in the lab, her arm dangling to one side, the IV still taped into it but listing, as if it had died with her.

It took a physical effort to bring himself to the present.

“No,” he said. “Buying wine isn’t illegal. Neither is dropping it. But you could have picked up the glass.”

“Is this town so poor that it sends someone out to get its littering fees?” Then he heard it: the Scandinavian music behind the Fargo accent. The accent existed in the up-and-down cadence of the words as much as the long-vowel pronunciation.

She had cured the long vowels, but not the melodious intent behind them.

“I’m not here to collect any fees,” he said, “even though I am the county sheriff.”

“I would have thought that a man who read the Wall Street Journal had higher ambitions.”

She had seen him then, drinking his mocha and reading his paper, taking his afternoon break and pretending he was someone else.

If she had seen him, then that look of horror had been real.

And if that look of horror had been real, did that mean she had recognized him?

And if she had recognized him, did that mean she was Keri Andreeson masquerading as Keri Simons?

“I did have higher ambitions once.” He felt odd discussing them with a woman he thought dead in the parking lot of a cheap motel. “I left the café to talk with you, but you’d already vanished.”

“Vanished.” She smiled. That smile belonged to a woman, not a girl. It was learned. It held a wisp of sadness as well as a touch of irony. And through it all, her eyes hadn’t changed. “Leaving broken glass behind.”

He should have brought a bottle of wine. He saw that now. It would have eased the moment, given it some symmetry. But he wasn’t that kind of thinker.

Or maybe he was—a man who knew better than to tempt fate.

“We got it cleaned up,” he said as if he had something to do with it.

She nodded. She didn’t ask who he was. She just studied him in the odd light filtering over the building.

Finally, he had to become the supplicant, even though he didn’t want to. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

She shrugged a single shoulder, her hands remaining in place. “This is fine.”

It wasn’t fine. Even though the motel was sheltered by the trees, there were other doors, other windows, other rooms where people might be. They might listen. The desk clerk might be listening, and later she’d mention the odd conversation to her friend in the bingo hall, telling them how strange the sheriff seemed on that sun-dappled afternoon.

“It’s not very private,” he said.

“I don’t see other cars,” she said, as if she’d expected his objection.

He sighed, and walked back toward her. She locked her arms, and he had the sense she had done that instead of flinching. Why would she be afraid of him? If they hadn’t met, then it was something about her. If they had, then she was afraid he’d recognize her. He’d know that she hadn’t died, that people had gone to jail for no reason.

But she had died. He had touched her waxy skin. He had cried for her.

He’d loved her.

He hadn’t thought of any way to approach this conversation, and now he felt tongue-tied. Did he ask her if she’d known a Keri Andreeson? Wouldn’t someone who had changed her name deny it? Or should he ask if she had gone to the university? Or simply ask what brought her here, to the literal end of the earth?

Finally, he settled on: “Have we met before?”

Her mouth opened as if she planned to answer him, then closed as if she thought better of it. “You mean besides now.”

He nodded, not willing to play any more word games.

“Outside the market, you looked at me like I frightened you,” he said, then wished he hadn’t.

“That’s why you ran outside?” she asked, her voice rising. “That’s why you tracked me down?”

“I was already thinking you looked familiar,” he said, letting the implication hang that yes, he had sought her out because he wanted to find out what terrified her.

“A lot of people say that.” She gave another one-shoulder shrug. “I have one of those faces.”

But not one of those bodies. Not in combination. But he didn’t dare say anything like that lest she think it improper. Not that she would have any recourse here, in this small town, where he normally was the recourse.

“Still,” he said. “Something you saw frightened you.”

She studied him for a moment. “I don’t think we have met,” she said, answering the earlier question. “You seem like a man a woman would remember.”

He felt his breath catch. The other Keri had described him that way. When he had asked her why she had gone with him that first night, she had said she would have regretted not going. He had asked why. She had smiled. Because, she said, you’re the kind of man a woman would remember.

The echo bothered him. Everything about this meeting bothered him.

“You came to see me because you thought I was frightened,” she said.

“I came because I wanted to find out if you’re the woman I remembered,” he said, noting the echo in his own language.

“Am I?” she asked.

He swallowed, his throat still dry. The movement was painful.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think you are.”

***

She died testing the equipment. That was the official story. She was lying on the cot, taking a bit of fluid in the IV, seeing if the heart monitors worked, when somehow, she went into cardiac arrest.

Experiments on human beings, whether in government funded labs or university trials, were forbidden in the United States. Tests could be performed—trial runs of pharmaceuticals, for example, or psychological batteries—all with waivers, properly signed, and the risks carefully laid out.

For the death study, administered by Simmons-M with help from Simmons-N, the risks hadn’t been properly laid out. The implication—never proven—was that the participants would be brought to the brink of death and brought back. At the brink, they would attempt to prolong life, through perception changes or medications or some other procedure.

But unlike the tax part of the study, none of this was written down. It didn’t dare be.

Although the grant for this part of the study had been explicit enough to bring the two Professors Simmons to criminal court, and drag the university into a system-wide scandal. Simmons-R got brought in when it became clear he had lobbied the institution that issued the grant money, but Simmons-A remained untouched.

Simmons-A had only her grant proposal to delineate her involvement, and her participants were going to examine the philosophical underpinnings of both death and taxes, with a touch of psychological attribution.

She claimed betrayal by the other Simmonses, and that was how she parlayed her involvement into bestselling nonfiction books, while the other professors spent years in court.

Arguing over Keri’s death. Accident? Possibly. The administering nurse was really a nursing grad student, not through her pharmacological classes. Perhaps she had put a sedative into the IV in error—or grabbed the wrong IV in error. But there was too much verbal testimony otherwise.

Too many indicators that the Simmons Three, as the press had started to call them, had become arrogant enough to believe they could conquer death. Simmons-N’s suicide, shortly after he had been let out of jail on bond, led to jokes in the local media—that the Simmonses were again trying to prove they could conquer the state, if not death itself.

There was no sympathy.

Not even from Patrick.

He had stayed for the trials, even though his father told him not to. He had stayed, even though he (and the other tax participants) were classified as non-involved.

No one discovered his relationship with Keri, and he didn’t confess it.

He watched as Simmons-M’s brilliant career dissolved, as Simmons-R went from being an authority to being a blowhard, as the two of them sat across from a jury and waited for judgment.

What’s your destiny now? The reporters would ask as the two of them and their lawyers hurried out of the courtroom every night.

Their destiny, it turned out, was a plea bargain. Negligent Homicide for Simmons-M. Conspiracy for Simmons-R. A few years time in a minimum-security prison, followed by community service.

None of this brought Keri back.

Simmons-A didn’t even attend the trials. When Patrick went to see her, after the trial, she grew rude and frightened when he said he wanted to discuss the study. But he didn’t leave.

Did you really want to change destinies? He asked.

I told them it couldn’t be done, she said. It’s the one thing philosophers agree on. That in life, some things cannot be changed.

He almost fell for it. Then he realized that she was wrong. The Hindu system was based on knowledge—reincarnation as learning, improving, changing, growing—and, by implication, changing destiny. Not accepting it as the Christians taught. Not bowing to its inevitability, like the Greeks.

But he didn’t challenge her. He no longer had the energy.

He couldn’t change his destiny. But he could change his life.

So he headed west.

***

Where, he thought as he got into his truck, he had become a man who drowned in taxes. They created his job, provided his ride, paid his salary. In an odd, and completely unplanned way, taxes were his destiny.

Just as death would be someday.

He started to pull away, and then he stopped.

None of that explained Keri, her look of fright, her resemblance to the other Keri, the one he thought he had loved.

He couldn’t leave. Not yet.

He rested his head on the steering wheel and sighed. Then he got out of the truck one final time.

He rehearsed what he was going to say as he crossed the parking lot.

Do you believe in destiny? He’d ask. Do you believe in soulmates? In love that doesn’t die?

He didn’t know what he’d do if she said yes.

But he was willing to find out.

 

___________________________________________

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

Death and Taxes

Copyright © 2017 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fate Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Daniel M. Hoyt, Daw Books, 2007
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Jun He/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.

In reply to Kevin.

Charles is a manifester, yes. Most senior members of important Houses would be.

Calhoun isn’t unusual for being a manifester, he’s unusual for being a manifester at such a young age.

The dramatized adaptation of Burn for Me, first novel in the Hidden Legacy series, will be released next week by Graphic Audio.

GA expect a similar release schedule for Hidden Legacy as for Kate, with a new installment every couple of months or so. They will be adapting all seven books in the series: Nevada’s trilogy, the Diamond Fire transition novella, and Catalina’s trilogy. They will also include the bonus unpublished Arabella POV blog exclusives: A Misunderstanding and The Cool Aunt.

Without further ado, the first samples from Burn for Me, fresh of the sound design table.

Mad Rogan abandons his hermit orchid and joins the Baylors for a meal:

Neva and Rogan meet Bug – the voice transformation is aweeeesome!

It’s an all-new director and cast, which I know you want to check out – GA have updated the list on the Burn for Me page I linked above.

The new team have had the same level of collaboration and insight from Ilona and Gordon as Nora and her team for the Kate adaptations. Pronunciations clips with HA’s preferences, advice on voice casting, insight on characters, what our favorite scenes are etc. But a reminder here as always that Graphic Audio are their on business, who approach the authors and buy adaptation rights to these works, so all creative and commercial decisions are ultimately theirs.

House Andrews do not commission them for these audio books. The GA dramatized full-cast adaptations will never replace the traditional, one-narrator audio books released by the authors and their publishers.

I have covered in more detail how to buy and the accessibility of the GA app in this post, which you can also supplement with the Graphic Audio Help FAQ on their website.

Audiobooks.com are also running a promotion for 70% the dramatized GA adaptation of Magic Slays until the 1st of May. A chance to complete your collection if you don’t own it already!

Happy listening!

The post Exclusive Samples of Burn for Me from Graphic Audio first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Publishing updates from Susan Illene, including paperback availability, Galadon news, and details for her upcoming new romantasy series.

We…wish…you…a…stop. We wish you would stop.

No, this is cool. Really.

OMG! Is Santa really Captain America?

No. Just. No.

I wish you a merry…

Ha! Die stupid hat! Die!

I have you now, and your ruby slippers too!

The precious is mine!

I hate each and every one of you.

And, no I am not participating willingly. Please call my assassin. I have a job…

Open Road Media has updated the cover art for their ebook edition of Swan Song.

Thank you for this post, it was exactly the knowledge I was thinking Stephen was missing and should be thinking about. I mean, obviously he has seen people drain wells, and should be wondering about doing it himself and what one can do with the drained magic. Sounds like he desperately needs to educate himself on how to convert wells into pure arum (rather than sigils) so he can start building a supply. And then secondarily can practice with all the old failed sigils he already has. Considering the extreme competition for powerful wells and his extreme skill at finding lower ranking wells, it seems the most likely chance of him manufacturing higher level sigils would be by combining the magic from multiple small wells…

In reply to Celia.

Thanks for the insight Celia; it’s nice how these drucraft articles get the mind speculating!

I wonder if the drucraft skill a traditional/bloodline thing (like the Hapsburgs) demonstrating the house’s ‘pedigree’?

Although Charles and Calhoun haven’t been seen making Sigls (But is just may be that Benedict hasn’t recorded it for us) they could be spending time making specialist items that can’t be bought in the exchange.

Another possibility is that they are working on enhancing the house wells with the aim of getting them to ‘A’ Class and hence a seat on the ruling council?

BTW: I hope that work is proceeding well on Book #4 and that the personal issues are now sorted…

This is long, so table of contents:

• The Origin of LitRPG
• The Inheritance and how is it different
• What is happening with other series
• A recommendation for a cute comic.

The Origin of LitRPG

As everyone knows by now, I’m a massive Solo Leveling fan. I’ve read the manhwa before the anime was ever announced and then reread it several times. Right now, with the anime release on Crunchyroll (we are up to 2 seasons), it is enjoying unprecedented popularity and some people credit it with starting the Hunter subgenre of LitRPG.

The premise of LitRPG is that somehow the protagonist enters a game world, usually loosely based on an MMO structure. In Massively Multiplayer Online games, players usually must choose a class that defines how they play the game. For example, tanks have heavy shields and armor. They are hard to kill so they taunt the enemy and bear the brunt of the attack while DPS (Damage per second) classes deal damage, and healers cast restorative spells. Players organize into guilds with strict hierarchy.

In the Hunter subgenre of LitRPG our world becomes a video game. Portals open in random locations, leading to dungeons, which, unless conquered in time, will unleash monsters upon the world. Some people mysteriously awaken to magic powers. They are usually called Hunters and they are ranked according to their ability. Hunters band into guilds, and guilds assault the dungeons. It’s World of Warcraft in real life, complete with a system window that announces when you go up a level and shows you your numeric stats like Strength and Agility.

As much as I love Solo Leveling, it didn’t originate the term “hunters.” The first mention of this system in comics actually comes to us from 2012 manhwa called I Am A Noble.

Sorry, Sung Jin-woo, you are not the first. Just the most handsome.

Unfortunately, there are no legitimate translations of I Am A Noble – please do not link pirate sites with machine translations – but there are plenty of other manhwa titles that fall into this genre. Here are some of them in no particular order. I have read all of these, and some are good, some I liked less. You can find them at your usual manhwa places like Webtoon, Tapas, Tappytoon, etc.

• Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint
• Kill the Hero
• The Druid of Seoul Station
• The World After the Fall
• The Worn and Torn Newbie
• The Player Who Can’t Level Up
• Hoarding in Hell

I’m going to link a list here: Hunter/Dungeon/Gates, but there are others, more comprehensive ones.

But the question is, where did this set up originate? What inspired it? Well, World of Warcraft is obviously one of the ingredients. The game came out in 2004, and at its peak, in 2010, had over 12 million subscribers. It also spawned an entire generation of successors. But what else happened near that 2012 mark?

On August 16, 2011 Ready Player One came out. This book was everywhere. NPR, USA Today, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, translated into 37 languages, available in 58 countries… It was a global phenomenon. If you somehow missed it, it’s about an 18 year old kid whose life is awful, so he chooses to live a completely different life in an online game. This book hit like a meteorite. Although, it is not a strict LitRPG in a sense of classes and quests, it was, without a doubt, the driving force behind the development of the genre.

When Ready Player One came out, LitRPG did not exist as a sub-category. So when did LitRPG became a thing? Who originated this term?

The term LitRPG was coined by… a bunch of Russians. I present to you Magic Dome Books. LitRPG is their bread and butter.

From their website:

LitRPG is a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy which describes the hero’s adventures within an online computer game. LitRPG books merge traditional book-style narration with elements of a gaming experience, describing various quests, achievements and other events typical of a video game.

The defining feature that sets LitRPG fiction apart from traditional portal fantasy is its use of interactive gaming language, such as the inclusion of various system messages, players’ stats, items’ characteristics and other elements appreciated by gamers. The narration in a LitRPG novel has to abide by the rules of a game while filling it with conflict and drama as the hero tries to survive in this new environment.This “book meets game” experience proved to be exactly what many gamers-turned-readers were looking for in a novel. 

LitRPG books are not the same as traditional game novelizations. As a rule, LitRPG books are set in fictional game worlds which are entirely their authors’ invention, such as D. Rus’ AlterWorld or V. Mahanenko’s Barliona. Also, their use of gaming elements and attributes sets them apart from traditionally penned game novelizations.

Initially unrecognized by traditional publishing, the genre kept growing, gaining a truly insatiable readership that devoured such cult series as Sword Art Online, Ready Player One and The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. In 2012, Russia became the first country in the world where the genre was officially recognized, receiving its current name – LitRPG – and its own place in libraries and book shops. Since then, dozens of new game-set novels have been published in Russia, some of them national bestsellers such as Play to Live by D. Rus and the Way of the Shaman by V. Mahanenko.

So they tell us right here what these writers were inspired by. Sword Art Online is a series of Japanese light novels that began as a webnovel in 2001, which was picked up for publication in Japan in 2009. This is one of those “overnight successes” a decade in the making. SAO didn’t get an English translation until 2014, but really gained in popularity when the anime adaptation came out. The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor began as a South Korean webnovel from Kakao, which began in 2007 and ran until 2019. It is a massively popular series, which spawned a comic adaptation and its own mobile game.

Both series featured virtual reality. In SAO people were playing a multiplayer game and found that they were unable to log off and in LMS a poor Korean student plays a popular new game to earn some money for his grandmother and ends creating a lot of beautiful art and eventually becomes a central figure in a power struggle over the game.

The third title mentioned is again Ready Player One, which was inspired by arcade games of 1980s. If we were to dig deeper into 1980s, we find…

Well, yes, technically, it is similar. But we are looking for something else. Something where people went through a portal and ended up in a game with specific classes and quests… Something with the portals…

And there you go. The first true expression of LitRPG on screen in 1983. Why Cavalier? Why not a Paladin? Never understood that.

Okay, fine, that was a screen adaptation. But what about the literary equivalent?

This is a tougher call, because again, we are looking for very specific things: classes, portal, game setting, quests, and so on.

I’m going to say Quag Keep by Andre Norton.

In early 1970s Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were working on a new game called Dungeons and Dragons and they couldn’t find anyone to publish it. So in 1974 Gary Gygax partnered with Don Kaye and formed TSR, which published Dungeons and Dragons in that same year.

Two years later, Gary Gygax invited Andre Norton for a session in the new setting he was developing called Greyhawk. Quag Keep was the result of that session. It came out in 1978.

I had to grab the description from Wikipedia, because the one on Amazon is terrible.

Martin, a player in a game of D&D, touches a figurine of a warrior, and is unwillingly transported into the body of Milo Jagon, a warrior in the city of Greyhawk. Milo/Martin gradually meets others likewise transported to this world. Bound together by forces they do not understand, the players struggle to trust each other. Under the compulsion of a geas, everyone is forced to go on a quest. They eventually confront the one controlling them, the Gamemaster, and battle with him to regain control of their lives. Although they win, they find that they cannot return to “reality”, and must remain in Greyhawk. Rather than splitting up, they realize they make a good team and decide to continue their adventures together.

We do not have the literal system windows of the online game. Other than that, this hits all the points: players are portaled, they have classes, they must accomplish quests, and they band into a party.

But what about Dragonlance Chronicles? Nope, that doesn’t fit. First, it was commissioned by TSR in 1983 to promote the new campaign setting, so Quag Keep predates it, and second, it’s a novel set in Dragonlance with characters original to that world. There are no players.

Sadly, Quag Keep bombed. The critics disliked it, so it is one of the lesser known Andre Norton’s works.

But what about the portal fantasy? When did that start?

I love you, please don’t make me pull Lewis Caroll out. That is another post.

Here is a list from Goodreads. It’s pretty comprehensive, but it doesn’t include pseudo portals like H.G. Wells’ Time Machine or Edward Bellamy’s 1887 Looking Backward 2000-1887. Fun fact: Bellamy was the first to introduce the concept of credit cards in fiction.

When we market books, we have to hit the here and now references. While we might phrase things like “this work will appeal to fans of isekai” or “this work will appeal to fans of hunter LitRPG,” we are doing this to appeal to a new generation of readers because saying things like “This is like Chronicles of Narnia and Princess Bride made a baby with Game of Thrones and then gave it to Locke Lamora to raise” is confusing.

So what about the Inheritance? How is it different?

There are things that bug me about the Hunter subgenre specifically in its current LitRPG iteration. If we really dissect it, a lot of the genre deals with existing within a static system. Your class is set. Your abilities are set. You can get new abilities but only within the system parameters.

Sometimes you gain levels, but only in your class. Sometimes you can game the system and unlock something unexpected due to prior knowledge or chance. Sometimes you cannot improve at all. In Solo Leveling, Sung Jin-woo is the only person able to level up. In that world, if you “awakened” to your powers as Rank B, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, you will stay Rank B. He is the only exception.

LitRPGs generally fall into two categories: either succeed within the system and be the best at playing the class you’ve chosen or disrupt the system and become the best badass there is who answers to no one, while the rest of the people remain in their assigned roles. There is a simplicity in it: you can earn experience, have tangible progress in levels, and be assigned a course of action by the system.

If you were coming from an environment where generations of people have given up on upward mobility without inherited wealth, or a country where the government exerts pressure to keep you in your lane and your designated role, this type of system might be familiar and appealing, in part because sometimes it carries a subversive message.

Setting the social implications aside, if you look at the list of the manhwa I linked above or at Magic Dome Books, you can note something interesting. In the word of Cordelia Cupp, “What’s with all the dudes?”

This genre usually features a male protagonist, typically between 17 and 25. There are occasional older protagonists, but again mostly male. There are occasional exceptions, as always, and there are more women in books than in manhwa, but in general they are harder to find. Recently I stumbled on a LitRPG manhwa, which had a female protagonist. She had the housekeeping talent. I’m sure it was meant to be just part of the current trend exploring the cozier side of LitRPG, but the hero is kicking butt left and right because he is the best hunter who ever lived and our girl is making his bed so he can nap.

A couple of months ago, I saw a tutorial video, where two women were having an awesome time trying to nuke the Matron of Glennwood in the Enshrouded. (If you are interested, here is the link to the video.) I very much enjoyed watching them try to kill her. It kind of confirmed my theory that most of the time inspiration is accidental.

For these reasons, The Inheritance is not a true Hunter LitRPG in the strictest sense of the word.

A Little Housekeeping

Unfortunately, not every story is suitable for the online serialization. Serialized stories need to be fast paced and tightly focused so people don’t get lost. This is why serializing Hugh 2 was very difficult. It was complex and required revisions as it was being written due to the layered motivations of the protagonists. None of the projects we have currently sketched out for our existing worlds would work for serialization.

The Inheritance was conceived and structured specifically for online reading. It was meant to be a serial from the start. We are about 2/3 of the way through, so it’s mostly written. It’s our gift to you this spring because there will be very little content on the blog as we dig into our massive workload.

The Inheritance will be posted probably twice a week and in its entirety. It connects to nothing, it requires no prior reading, and it will likely be a one-off, so there probably won’t be a sequel.

There are no Easter eggs. We would never troll the BDH. Trust us.

After its run, The Inheritance will be available for sale for you to keep, probably as part of Small Magics 2, which will be collecting various free fiction from the website.

We understand that some of you are upset because you would like the free stories to be available in ebook format faster. It takes effort and time to put it all together into a cohesive anthology, and we have to have enough content to justify the price and especially the audio edition. We do not want to short-change those of you who are visually impaired or who prefer your fiction as an audio adaptation. It is difficult to book an audio narrator just for a novella-length work. There has to be significant word count for it to be worth their while. We would want to have the narrator at least booked before the ebook comes out, so we can give you an ETA.

PS. ModR suggested adding recipes our characters cook at the end of Small Magics 2. Is it weird to have recipes from our books in an anthology? It feels kind of weird.

The Top Dungeon Farmer

In conclusion, thank you for sitting through my TED talk. To make up for it, I thought I would show you my current manhwa Hunter favorite. Behold the unbearable cuteness.

The Top Dungeon Farmer. Yes, it is that adorable. Look at those bunnies! He gets a killer monster bear later and it is also adorable. I must say, I don’t care for the cat. Anyway, there are 80+ episodes, most of them free on Webtoons. If you need a distraction where nothing super horrible happens, this might do the trick.

PS. It should really go above where we talked about our world turning into a video game. There is, apparently, a real life condition called Game Transfer Phenomenon. BBC explains more. So who knows, perhaps we will start assigning classes to ourselves some time in the future.

The post Lit RPG: The Origins, The Inheritance, and Other Things first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

April 18, 2025

We are at war.

This war is not about wealth, resources, or a difference of ideology. It’s a war of survival. The very existence of humanity is at stake.

The moment the first gate burst, sending a monster horde to rage through our world, it brought us unimaginable suffering, but it also awoke something slumbering deep within some of us, a means to repel and destroy our enemy. Powers beyond comprehension. Abilities that are legendary.

The war is ongoing. If you are a Talent, your country needs you. The world needs you. Be the hero you always wanted to be.

Take my hand and answer the call.

Elias McFeron

Guildmaster of Cold Chaos

The post The Inheritance Begins first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Madison, Wisconsin, 1972—When Detective Hank Kaplan calls Valentina Wilson to a crime scene, she wonders why. She soon finds more questions than answers in a secret room belonging to a wealthy female philanthropist, whose brutal murder the police hastily cover up. Val’s search for the truth will take her from the rape hotline she runs to the shocking realization that the woman’s murder anchors a long line of horrific events stretching back decades.

Chosen as one of the best mystery short stories of the year by the readers of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, “Sob Sisters” continues the powerful story of Valentina Wilson, a character who first appeared in Nelscott’s award-winning Smokey Dalton series.

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

 

Sob Sisters By Kris Nelscott

TECHNICALLY, I WASN’T supposed to be at the crime scene. I wasn’t supposed to be at any crime scene. I’m not a cop; I’m not even a private detective. I’m just a woman who runs a rape hotline in a town that doesn’t think it needs one, even though it is 1972.

Still, what woman says no when she gets a phone call from the Madison Police Department, asking for her presence at the site of a murder?

A sensible one, that’s what my volunteers would have said. But I have never been sensible.

Besides, the call came from Detective Hank Kaplan who, a few months ago, had learned the hard way to take me seriously. Unlike a lot of cops who would’ve gotten angry when a woman out-thought him, Kaplan responded with respect. He’s one of the new breed of men who doesn’t mind strong women, even if he still has a derogatory tone when he uses the phrase “women’s libbers.”

The house was an old Victorian on a large parcel of land overlooking Lake Mendota. Someone had neatly shoveled the walk down to the bare concrete, and had closed the shutters on the sides of the wrap-around porch, leaving only the area up front to take the brunt of the winter storms.

And of the police.

Squads and a panel van with the official MPD logo on the side parked along the curb. I counted at least four officers milling about the open door while I could see a couple more moving near the large picture window.

I parked my ten-year-old Ford Falcon on the opposite side of the street and steeled myself. I was an anomaly no matter how you looked at it: I was tiny, female and black in lily-white Madison, Wisconsin. Most locals would’ve thought I was trying to rob the place rather than show up at the invitation of the lead detective.

I grabbed the hotline’s new Polaroid camera. Then I got out of the car, locked it, and walked as calmly as I could across the street. I wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, so I stuck my hands in the pocket of my new winter coat. At least the coat looked respectable. My torn jeans, sneakers, and short-cropped Afro were too hippy for authorities in this town.

As I approached, a young officer on the porch turned toward me, then leaned toward an older officer, said something, and rolled his eyes. At that moment, Kaplan rounded the side of the house and caught my gaze.

He hurried down the sidewalk toward me. He was wearing a blue police coat over his black trousers and galoshes over his dress shoes. Unlike the street cops on the porch, he didn’t wear a cap, leaving his black hair to the vicissitudes of the wind. He was an uncommonly handsome man, with more than a passing resemblance to the Marlboro Man from the cigarette ads. I found his good looks annoying.

“Miss Wilson,” he said loud enough for the others to hear, “come with me.”

He sounded official. The cops outside started in surprise, then gave me a once-over.

A shiver ran down my back. I hated the scrutiny, even though I knew he had done it on purpose, so no one would second-guess my presence here.

“This way,” he said, and put a hand on my back to help me up the curb.

I couldn’t help it; I stiffened. He let his hand drop.

“Sorry,” he said. He knew I had been brutalized by a cop in Chicago. While that experience had made me stronger, I still had a rape survivor’s aversion to touch.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” Kaplan said. “But we’re going in the back. Did you bring your camera?”

I held up the case. I had wrapped the strap around my right hand.

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

He walked quickly on the narrow shoveled sidewalk leading around the building. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

“So,” I said, as soon as we were clear of the other cops, “you guys don’t have your own cameras?”

“We do,” he said. “You’ll just want a record of this.”

Now I was really intrigued. A record of something that he was willing to share; a record of something that they didn’t want to record themselves? Maybe he had finally decided that I should photograph a rape victim immediately after the crime had occurred.

Although Kaplan didn’t handle the rape cases. He was homicide.

The narrow sidewalk led to another small porch. Kaplan pulled on the screen door, and held it for me. Then he shoved the heavy interior door open.

A musty smell rose from there, tinged with the scent of fall apples. I had expected a crime-scene smell—blood and feces and other unpleasantness, not the somewhat homey smell.

To my right, half a dozen coats hung on the wall, with a variety of galoshes, boots, and old shoes on a plastic mat. This was clearly the entrance that the homeowner used the most.

“When should I start photographing?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when,” Kaplan said, and led me up the stairs.

We stepped into a kitchen that smelled faintly of baked bread. I frowned as Kaplan led me through swinging doors into the dining area. A picture window overlooked the lake. The view, so beautiful that it caught my attention, distracted me from the coroner’s staff, who clustered in the archway between the dining room and living room.

Kaplan touched my arm, looking wary as he did so. I glanced down, saw an elderly woman sprawled on the shag carpet, arms above her head, face turned away as if her own death embarrassed her. This area did smell of blood and death. The stench got stronger the closer I got.

I couldn’t see her face. One hand was clenched in a fist, the other open. Her legs were open too, and looked like they had been pried that way. A pair of glasses had been knocked next to the console television, and a pot filled with artificial fall flowers had tumbled near the door.

The coroner had pulled up the woman’s shirt slightly to get liver temperature. The frown on his face seemed at once appropriate and extreme for the work he was doing.

I moved a step closer. He looked up, eyes fierce. His mouth opened slightly, and I thought he was going to yell at me. Instead, he turned that look on Kaplan.

“Who the hell is that? Control your crime scene, man. Get the civilians out of here.”

“Sorry,” Kaplan said, sounding contrite. “I turned in the wrong direction.”

He touched my arm to move me away from the crowd. I realized that he had play-acted to convince the coroner and the other police officers that my appearance in that room had been an accident.

But it hadn’t been. Kaplan had wanted me to see the body.

“This way,” he said in that formal voice, as if he thought someone was still listening.

He led me back into the kitchen, then opened a door into a large pantry. Canned goods lined the walls. A single 40-watt bulb illuminated the entire space.

My stomach clenched. I had no idea what he was doing, and I wasn’t the most flexible person around cops.

He pulled the pantry door closed, then moved past me and pushed on the far wall. It opened into a book-lined room with no windows at all. Mahogany shelves lined the walls. The room was wide, with several chairs for reading and a heavy library table in the middle, stacked with volumes. Those volumes were half open, or marked with pieces of paper.

Beyond that was another open door. Kaplan led me through it.

We stepped into one of the prettiest—and most hidden—offices I had ever seen. The walls were covered with expensive wood paneling. A gigantic partners desk sat in the middle of the room. The flooring matched the paneling—no shag carpet here. Instead, the desk stood on an expensive Turkish carpet, of a type I had only seen in magazines. The room smelled of old paper, books, and Emerude. I couldn’t hear the officers in the other part of the house. In fact, the only sound in this room was my breathing, and Kaplan’s clothes rustling as he moved.

An IBM Selectric sat on the credenza beside the desk. Behind it stood a graveyard of old typewriters, from an ancient Royal to one of the very first electrics. Above them, files in neat rows, with dividers. The desk itself had several open files on top, and a full coffee cup to one side. I wanted to touch it, to see if it was still warm.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” I asked.

“I think you’ll find some interesting things here,” he said, nodding toward the floor. Against the built-in bookshelves in a back corner, someone had placed dozens, maybe hundreds of picture frames.

I crouched. Someone had framed newspaper and magazine articles, all of them from different eras and with different bylines.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Her life’s work,” he said.

“Her,” I repeated. “I’m not even sure whose house this is.”

He looked at me in surprise. “I thought you knew everything about this town.”

“Not even close,” I said.

He sighed softly. “This house belongs to Dolly Langham.”

“The philanthropist?” I asked.

He gave me a tight smile. “See? You do know her.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Some of my volunteers kept trying to contact her for help with fundraising for the hotline, but she never returned our calls or our letters.”

A frown creased his forehead. “That’s odd. She was always doing for women.”

I frowned too. “I take it she’s the woman in the living room?”

“That’s the back parlor,” he said, as if he knew this house intimately. Maybe he did.

“All right,” I said slowly, not sure of his non-response. “The back parlor then. That’s her?”

He closed his eyes slightly and nodded.

“You’ve caught this case?” I asked. “It’s yours entirely?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he didn’t sound happy about it. “This is a big deal. Miss Langham is one of the richest people in the city, if not the richest. Her family goes back to the city’s founding, and she’s related to mayors, governors, and heads of the university. She’s important, Miss Wilson.”

“I’m getting that,” I said. “Why am I here?”

“Because,” he said, “cases like this, they’re always about something.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know. There’s the official story. And then there’s the real story.”

I froze. Cops rarely spoke to civilians like this. I had learned that from my ex-husband, who had been a Chicago cop and who had died, in part, because of what had happened to me.

“You think the real story is going to get covered up,” I said.

“No,” Kaplan said. “I don’t think it. I know it.”

I glanced around the room. “The real story is here?”

He shrugged. “That I don’t know. I haven’t investigated yet.”

He was being deliberately elliptical, and I was no good with elliptical. I preferred blunt. Elliptical always got me in trouble.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“I need a fresh pair of eyes,” he said.

“But the investigation is just starting,” I said.

He nodded. “So is the pressure.”

I let out a small breath of air. So, he had a script already, and he didn’t like it. “You want me to photograph things in here?”

“As much as you can,” he said. “Keep those pictures safe for me.”

“I will,” I said.

“And Miss Wilson, you know since you were once a cop’s wife, how things occasionally go missing from a crime scene?”

“Oh, I do,” I said. “You want to prevent that here.”

He shook his head, and gave me a look he hadn’t shown me since the first time I met him. The look accused me of being naïve.

“You know, Miss Wilson, I find it strange that you don’t carry a purse. Most women carry bags so big they can fit entire reams of paper inside them.”

My breath caught as I finally understood.

“I prefer pockets,” I said, and stuck my hands inside the deep pockets of my coat.

“You are quite the character, Miss Wilson,” he said approvingly. “I think you might have a couple of uninterrupted hours in here, if I keep the doors closed. Is that all right with you?”

Inside a room with no windows, only one door, a phalanx of cops outside, and a dead body a few yards away. Sure, that was Just Fine.

“You’ll be back for me?” I asked.

“Most assuredly,” he said, and put his hand on the door.

“One last thing, Detective,” I said. “Who found this room?”

A shadow passed over his face, so quickly that I almost missed it. “I did. No one else.”

So no one else knew I was here.

“All right,” I said. “See you in two hours.”

He nodded once, then let himself out, pulling the door closed behind him.

I felt claustrophobic. This room felt still, tense, almost as if it were waiting for something. Maybe that was the effect of the murdered woman in the back parlor. Maybe I was more tense than I thought.

That would be odd, though. I had training to keep me calm. I went to medical school until I couldn’t find a place to intern (honey, we don’t want you to take a position away from a real doctor), and then I went to the University of Chicago Law School. I got used to cadavers in medical school, and extreme pressure in law school, and somewhere along the way, I had accepted death as a part of life.

I let out a small sigh, squared my shoulders, and pulled off my coat. I opened it, so that the inner pockets were easily accessible, and draped it on one of the straight-backed chairs near the door. Then I grabbed the Polaroid and put it around my neck.

I didn’t know where to start because I didn’t know what I was looking for. But Kaplan had asked me here for a reason. He wanted me to find things, and to remove some of them, which meant that I shouldn’t start with the books or even the framed articles.

I started with the files.

I walked behind the desk. The perfume smell was strong here. Dolly Langham had clearly spent a lot of time at this desk. The papers on top were notes in shorthand, which I had never bothered to learn. I was certain one of my volunteers at the hotline knew it, however. I stacked those papers together and put them in a “Possible” pile. I figured I’d see what I found, and then stash what I could just before Kaplan came back for me.

I opened the drawers next. The top held the usual assortment of pens and paperclips, and stray keys. The drawer to my right had a large leather-bound ledger in it.

The ledger’s entries started in 1970, and covered most of the past two years. The most recent entry was from last week. There were names on the side, followed by a number (usually large) and a running total along the edge. That much I could follow. It was the last set of numbers, one column done in red ink and the other in blue, that I couldn’t understand.

Kaplan had to know this was here. He had to have looked through the desk; any good investigator would have.

I took the ledger and placed it on my coat.

Then I went back and searched for more ledgers. I figured if she had one for the 1970s, she had to have some from before that. I didn’t find any in the drawer—although I found a leather-bound journal, also written in shorthand, with the year 1972 emblazoned on the front.

I set that on the desktop along with the notes, and continued my search.

The desk, organized as it was, didn’t yield much, so I turned to the files behind me. They were in date order. The tab that stuck out had that date and a last name. I opened the oldest file, and inside found more handwritten notes, and a yellowed newspaper clipping. The byline—Agnes Olden—matched the name on the outside of the file.

Someone had scrawled 1925 on the clipping, which came from a newspaper I’d never heard of called The Chicago Telegram. The headline was Accuser Speaks!

Dressed in an expensive skirt and a shirtwaist blouse with mullion sleeves, Dorthea Lute looks like a woman of impeccable reputation instead of the fallen woman all assume her to be. For our interview, she sat primly on the edge of her chair, feet crossed demurely at the ankles, hands clasped in her lap, head down. She spoke softly, and when she described the circumstances of her accusation, she did not scream or shout or cry, but told the tale with a calm tone that belied its horror.

I scanned as quickly as I could, trying to get the gist of the piece. Apparently this Dorthea Lute accused one of Chicago’s most prominent citizens of “taking her forcibly and against her will” in the “quiet of his own home.” Friends and family said that she was bruised, and “indeed, witnesses saw her wearing her arm in a sling. She had two black eyes, and a purplish bruise that ran from her temple to her chin.”

I closed my eyes for a brief moment. This was an account of a rape, and the interview was conducted with the “accuser,” who—of course—had been accused herself of using her body and her “wiles” to “improve her standing in the world.” When that didn’t work, she accused this prominent businessman of “the most vile of crimes.”

I thumbed through the file and found no more clippings, just more notes. Then I grabbed the next file. It had the same byline, and featured an interview with the family of a young girl who died brutally at the hands of her boyfriend. File after file, interview after interview, all written in that now-dated manner.

I replaced those files and grabbed another from the next row. This came from the Des Moines Voice, another paper I had never heard of, and came from 1933. The content of the file was similar to the others, with the shorthand notes, the scrawls, but the byline was different. This one belonged to Ada Cornell. Cornell had the same kind of interest in crimes against women.

Only these files also contained carbons of the original news piece.

I was intrigued.

The next shelf down had stories from the 1940s, and many of them came from different communities. The bylines all differed but the files remained the same.

So I took the last file off the last shelf. It came from nearly twenty years before—1955 to be exact. I had expected it to be a 1972 file, considering there were notes on the desk. So either the files from 1955 onward were missing, or she hadn’t done anything for years and got back into the work.

I couldn’t believe that she had given up until recently, not with the typewriter graveyard behind me. I looked around the room for another place that held files. Then I walked to the center of the room, put my hands behind my back, and frowned at everything.

This was a room within a room within a room, so secret that it was in the very center of the house, hidden behind what most people would consider the pantry. Dolly Langham wrote under false names, so she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was doing this work.

I frowned, then glanced at the panels. In the old mystery novels, paneling—especially from fifty years ago—hid secret passageways. This room itself was a secret, so I doubted I’d find a passageway. But I might find a hidden compartment.

I surveyed the area, looking for scuff marks, fingerprints, something that jutted out, but I saw nothing obvious. Then I looked at the paneling itself. It had a pattern along the right and left side, but the wall with the files and the typewriter graveyard was configured differently, as if that entire area was built especially for Langham. Wall panels weren’t mass produced forty years ago; they were crafted by someone, who—if the inside room had been built in the Depression—wouldn’t have questioned the design.

A decorative frame had been built around the shelves in the center. Then the waist-high shelf that housed the typewriter graveyard jutted out an extra foot, and so did the area below it.

I went behind the desk, crouched and felt along the edges. I found a small ridge that my fingertips just fit inside. They brushed against a tiny knob. I pressed it, and half of the lower cabinet swung open, silently. A tiny light clicked on, revealing more files.

The shelves ran across the length of the cabinet, and the files continued to the floor.

I left that open, then touched the frames on the right side of the entire unit, looking for a similar ridge. I found it, and that long door swung open, revealing a closet. Inside, wigs, make-up, clothing, and the faint scent of mothballs. I peered into the darkness beyond and realized I had been wrong: there was a hidden passageway behind the clothes.

I pushed the clothes aside, and coughed as dust rose. Cobwebs hung from the opening beyond. I stepped inside anyway and peered. It didn’t appear to be a passageway after all, but more of an extension of this room, like a gigantic walk-in closet.

But I couldn’t be certain unless I explored.

It was clear that Langham hadn’t used this closet in a long time. If I could assume that whatever happened to her in that living room happened because of something she had hidden, then I might be safe in assuming the “something” was a recent occurrence, not one housed in mothballs and cobwebs.

I knew I was making a hasty judgment, but that was all Kaplan had left me time for. Besides, I didn’t have a flashlight. I would have to haul whatever I found into the main room—or trust that there was an electrical switch somewhere back there that I could find easily.

I closed that panel door, and opened the one on the other side just in case it was something different. As I thought, it was the other end of this “closet,” with more wigs, and clothing, including a few very old furs. The musty smell made my eyes water.

I pulled out my Polaroid and took pictures of that back area. I also took pictures of the files. Then I took a few pictures of an open file on the desk.

And by then I was out of film. The Polaroids dried on the desktop as I closed the doors. Then I sat on the Turkish carpet, and looked through the files in the hidden case. The writing style that Langham cultivated had lost popularity, and so had the long yellow journalism stories. They vanished after the war. But she seemed to adapt. There were articles here from The Milwaukee Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and more. Many of the longer articles appeared in Saturday Review, Ladies Home Journal, and surprisingly, that new magazine for women, Ms.

The bottom shelf was empty except for two large manuscripts, in their entirety. As I was about to pull one out, I heard a sound from the outer room.

I cursed, then carefully closed the cupboard door. My heart was pounding. I had a hunch the person out there was Kaplan, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want the other investigators to know about this—and neither did he.

Then I grabbed my pile from the desktop, hurried it over to that chair, and covered the entire pile with my coat. If I left with everything I’d hidden, I’d look like I gained fifty pounds, but that couldn’t be helped.

The door opened just as my coat settled on top of everything.

Fortunately, the person at the door was Kaplan, and he was alone.

He closed the door, then leaned on it. “You find anything?”

“You know I did,” I said. “How come she kept all this secret?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just looked at it today.”

“But it’s clearly relevant to your case. You’re going to need it.”

He gave me a bitter half-smile. “In a perfect world.”

I felt chilled. “Meaning?”

“Apparently, she interrupted burglars,” he said with such sarcasm that I didn’t have to ask him if he believed it. He clearly did not.

“Who made this decision?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “It’s coming from the chief. We’re to wrap up the investigation in a hurry.”

“What about this?” I waved my hands at the files in the back. “Who gets this?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Dolly was the last of the Langhams. We haven’t even looked for a will or contacted her attorney. I have no idea who inherits. I suspect it’s a bunch of charities.”

“This is her life’s work,” I said.

That bitter smile creased his face again. “Apparently, she had a lot of different life’s work. Folks around here would say her life’s work was her philanthropy, spending Papa’s money.”

I thought of the ledgers. “I wasn’t able to go through anything. I just located things. I’d like to come back—”

“I doubt that’ll be possible.”

“But you have no idea how much is here, what she has. I certainly don’t. I can’t even decipher most of it. I don’t read shorthand.”

“Ah,” he said, “the benefits of a law school education.”

I understood what he meant. If I had been a typically educated woman, I would have known shorthand. But I never was typical.

“I have some volunteers who can read it. Give us a few days in here—”

“I can’t, Miss Wilson,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here now. In fact, I came to get you out. The mayor is on his way, and I’m sure the television cameras will follow. I don’t want anyone to know you were even on the premises.”

“Great,” I said. “There’s more than I can carry.”

He unzipped that heavy police department jacket of his. “Give me some of it,” he said. “Quickly.”

I picked up my coat, and handed him the ledgers. I kept the two journals and all of the recent shorthand notes, shoving them inside my coat. We zipped up together, like co-conspirators.

Which, I guess, we were.

“Let’s go,” he said. He waited for me near the door, and as we stepped out, he turned off the lights. The room disappeared into a blackness so profound it made my skin crawl.

The library was empty. Still, I hurried through it, not wanting to stop this time. I waited at that door for Kaplan.

I clutched my hands around my middle like a pregnant woman. The edges of the journals dug into my stomach, and I wanted to adjust them, but I couldn’t.

We went through the same routine—I stepped into the pantry, he shut off the lights, then closed the door. Once it was shut, he moved a few boxes in front of it.

I could hear voices not too far away. Kaplan paused at the pantry door, peering through it. Then he beckoned me, and we scurried across the kitchen. The voices were coming from the dining room beyond.

Kaplan led the way down the stairs and out the side door. He looked along the sidewalk, nodded when he wanted me to follow, and walked faster than I liked on the ice-covered concrete.

My papers and journals were slipping. I shifted my hands slightly, praying that nothing fell as I hurried after Kaplan.

He reached my car before I did, tried the door, and cursed loud enough for me to hear. He didn’t like that I had locked it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to unlock it without dropping anything. I pulled the keys out of my pocket, adjusted my papers again, and leaned a little on the cold metal to unlock my door.

I pulled it open. Kaplan reached around and unlocked the back door. He looked both ways, bent over, and opened his jacket. The ledgers fell out along the seat. Then he slammed the door closed and shoved his hands in his pockets.

I just got in the driver’s side, figuring it was easier than getting rid of my stuff.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said before I could ask any more questions. Then he slammed the driver’s door closed.

He had returned to the other side of the street before I could get the keys in the ignition. My breath fogged up the window, but I just used my fist to make a hole.

I didn’t have to be told to get the hell out of there. I pulled out just as a group of large black cars came around the corner behind me.

I followed the narrow street out of the neighborhood, then pulled over until the windshield cleared. While the defrost was doing its job, I reached around to the back seat. I locked the door, and grabbed a blanket I kept on the floor for emergencies. I used it to cover the ledgers that Kaplan had spilled.

If we had dropped anything outside the car, I hoped Kaplan had found it.

Because I wasn’t going anywhere near that place again.

***

I got back to the hotline in record time. The hotline was a few miles away, deeper in the city itself. We weren’t far off State Street, which connected the University of Wisconsin with the Capitol. This neighborhood used to be a nice enclave for the medium rich, leaving the very rich to Langham’s neighborhood. Now, the old Victorians here had been torn down or divided into apartments, usually crammed with students.

The church where we housed the hotline had been abandoned two decades before. I lived in the rectory and used the church proper for the hotline, and sometimes to house women in need.

On this day, I pulled into the rectory side of the parking lot. I didn’t want the volunteers to see what I had.

It took me two trips to bring in all of the material. I piled the stuff on my coffee table, then closed and locked my door. I pulled the curtains too, something I rarely did in the middle of a Midwestern winter.

I took off my coat, put some innocuous papers over the things on my coffee table, and picked up one sheet of the paper covered in shorthand. Then I headed into the hotline proper.

The passageway between the rectory and the church had no heat, and was cold this time of year. I opened the unlocked door into the church, and inhaled the scent of sawed wood.

My volunteers, as inept as they were, loved doing the repair work.

I went down the stairs into the basement and found five women in t-shirts and ragged jeans, discussing the finer points of electricity.

“Val would never say she’d hire an electrician,” Louise said. She was a tall, middle-aged blond and one of my best volunteers.

“And yet I will,” I said as I went by. Several women looked up in surprise. Apparently they hadn’t heard me come in. “We’re not going to remodel this place just to burn it down. If we’re at the electricity stage, let me know and I’ll hire someone.”

“Consider yourself on notice,” Louise said.

I nodded. Something else to take care of.

I went all the way back to the main office, where we had our phones. We’d initially had only one line for the hotline and one private line. But our hotline had expanded after some recent publicity, and now, we had three separate desks with phones on them. The calls rolled over to a different line if one was in use. It was an expensive system, but well worth it.

The afternoon’s volunteers were an undergrad named Midge who had just started a few weeks ago, and one of my old hands—Susan Dunlap, who worked for the phone company.

“Don’t tell me you’re here on your day off,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

She was writing in the logbook. We kept a record of each call that came in, the time, date, and what was said. The volunteer signed in at the beginning of her shift, and then, if there were no calls, she read what had been written between her shifts. We sometimes got repeat callers, women who tested us before they confided in us, and the volunteers had to be prepared for that.

Susan was a middle-aged redhead who had never really lost her baby weight, even though her kids were in high school now. Like Louise, Susan was one of my most reliable volunteers, a main supporter, almost from the beginning.

Midge was studying at the other desk. She had the secondary phone, not that it mattered. Right now, the phones were silent.

I hovered until Susan finished writing. Then I asked, “Do you know shorthand?”

“Doesn’t every woman?” she asked so blandly that at first, I thought she was serious. Then I realized she was making a political statement.

I smiled. “If so, then I’m decidedly not female.”

“Me either,” Midge said.

Susan grinned. “I’m older. Back when I was a girl, they forced us to learn shorthand while they suffocated us in girdles.”

Midge looked alarmed. But I grinned back.

“Come with me,” I said to Susan. “Midge, can you watch the phones?”

“Sure,” she said, frowning at us.

Susan and I went into the kitchen. It was a marvel, built to serve dozens at church suppers. And unlike the rest of the church, this kitchen had been in good condition when I bought the place. Apparently it was one of the few places that the previous tenants had kept up.

Susan sat at the large table we had in the center of the room. I handed her the sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I don’t honestly know,” I said. “Tell me if you can read it.”

I poured us some coffee from the pot we kept on the stove.

“It’s an idiosyncratic form of shorthand, and it uses some symbols that are pretty old,” Susan said. “But I think I can read it. Something about a—this can’t be right.”

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Can you get me a legal pad?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went out to the front office, and grabbed a legal pad from the stack I kept in one of the desks. I brought it and a pad back to Susan. She translated the shorthand into English, pausing over a couple of words, shaking her head the entire time.

“This can’t be right,” she said again.

She didn’t say that as if something in the text bothered her, but as if something in her translation did.

“Show me,” I said as I sat beside her.

“Okay.” She tapped her pen against the legal sheet. “It starts in the middle of a sentence. Usually when someone takes shorthand, she skips the articles—‘a’ ‘the’—and that’s happening here.”

She slid the paper to me. Her handwriting was clear.

…tortured family relationships. Rumors he had fathered his stepdaughter’s bastard child. Z denies. Paternity test would prove nothing since Z & stepdaughter share blood type. Other accusations…

“What is this?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have reams of this stuff. Can you translate it for me?”

“I’m not sure I want to,” she said. “I’m not the only one who knows shorthand here.”

I nodded. “But I trust you.”

“You trust the others,” she said, still looking at that paper.

At that moment, Louise came into the kitchen. She was covered in grayish dust. When she wiped a hand over her forehead, she only managed to smear everything.

“You realize, Val, that there are no female electricians, right? Who the hell are we going to hire?”

“There’s got to be a female electrician somewhere,” I said.

She snorted. “Maybe on Mars.”

I sighed.

“You’re going to have to break the no-men rule,” she said.

“And here we have that trust thing again,” Susan said.

“Did I miss something?” Louise asked.

“Not really,” Susan said.

Louise went to the fridge and removed two Cokes and a Hires root beer. She set the bottles on the counter, then fumbled for the bottle opener.

“I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?” Louise asked.

“Just Val trying to rope me into a job I don’t want,” Susan said. “It’ll probably give me nightmares.”

I looked at her.

“You mean answering the phone doesn’t?” Louise asked.

Susan sighed. “Worse nightmares.”

“Ah hell,” Louise said. “Nothing can get worse than mine. I’ll do it.”

I glanced at her. She’d been around almost as long as Susan. Louise was my unofficial foreman on the remodeling.

“Do you read shorthand?” I asked.

“Is there a woman alive today who doesn’t?” she asked, and she was serious.

“You mean besides Val?” Susan asked.

“Oh, gee, sorry,” Louise said. “Yes, I read shorthand.”

“You’d have to keep all of this confidential,” I said.

“Not a problem,” Louise said, and I believed her. She had kept everything confidential so far.

“Good,” Susan said. “She can do it.”

I shook my head. “I have a lot of material. I need both of you to work on it.”

“Mysterious Val,” Louise said. “Let me take the drinks to my crew and I’ll be back.”

She slipped out of the kitchen, clutching the bottles between the fingers of her right hand.

“You’ll have to work in my place,” I said to Susan.

“Oh, God, Val, that’ll drive you nuts,” Susan said. “I’d offer to take this home, but I don’t want my kids near it.”

“I don’t blame you.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that there was a chance that what was on these papers had gotten Langham killed. “That’s why I want you here.”

Susan frowned, thinking. “Then what about the vestry? It has a desk and good lighting. And no windows, so no one would know we were there. Besides, none of the girls go upstairs.”

“If you’re comfortable working up there,” I said.

She smiled. “I love that room. It’s as close to a secret hideaway as we have in this place.”

She was right. And I thought it appropriate for them to examine materials from Langham’s secret room in our most secret room.

“If Louise agrees,” I said.

Susan smiled. “She will,” she said.

***

They worked throughout the afternoon. I didn’t interrupt them. Instead, I sent the workers home, and stepped in for Susan at the phones. The evening shift arrived with pizza. I was about to go upstairs with some pieces for Susan and Louise when Susan surprised me in the kitchen.

“We found something,” she said quietly.

I knew that Kaplan would be in touch, so I told the two volunteers that if someone came or called for me, I was in the vestry. They seemed surprised. I wasn’t even sure these two new girls knew where the vestry was.

Then I followed Susan upstairs.

The smell of sawed wood was strong here as well. I was in the process of remodeling the former offices and choir room into a women-only gym. At the moment, I still taught my self-defense classes at Union South and my friend Nick’s gym, but I wanted a room of my own, as Virginia Wolff said.

The vestry was to the left of the construction zone, past the still closed-off sanctuary. Paneling hid the door on this side, apparently to prevent parishioners from walking in on the minister as he prepared.

Right now, though, the door was half open revealing a well-lit little room. It wasn’t as big or as fancy as Langham’s hidden office, but it was beautiful, with lovely paneling that I planned to save, and a ceiling that went almost two stories up, ending in a point that mimicked the church’s closed-off spire.

Louise had lit some homemade scented candles, so the little room smelled like vanilla. The desk was covered with hand-written legal papers. The garbage cans were overflowing with wadded up sheets. The nearby table had all of the journals opened to various pages. A blank legal pad sat on one of the reading chairs I had placed toward the back.

“Where did you get this stuff?” Louise asked.

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

“You need to tell us,” Louise said.

My heart sank. After that step-, only-, half-daughter thing, I braced for the worst. “How bad is it?”

Susan went over to the table. She touched an open journal.

“This,” she said, then touched another, “this,” and another, “this,” and yet another, “and this, all tell the same story. Different days, different years.”

“And the handwriting is a little looser in all of them,” Louise said, as if that would mean something to me.

“What story?” I said, knowing they wanted me to ask.

“You’d recognize it if you could read it,” Louise said. “It’s the sob sister.”

***

We’d been calling her the sob sister from the beginning of the hotline. She had called every Saturday night like clockwork, rarely missing, usually around eleven.

She always told the same story—a brutal, violent rape that nearly killed her, left her ruined and heartbroken, and made it impossible for her to have children. She would sob her story out. The first few times I took the call, her words were almost incomprehensible.

I tried to get her to come in, to talk to someone, to report the incident. I told her I would go with her, and she would always quietly, gently, hang up.

Other volunteers had a similar experience, and finally we stopped telling her to report the incident. We just listened. Every Saturday night. Sometimes there were more details. Sometimes there were fewer. She always sobbed. If we tried to console her, she would hang up.

I’m not sure exactly when we figured out she was drunk—maybe about the point someone gave her the nickname, about the point when we realized we were helpless in the face of her never-ending grief.

The sob sister taught me that not all victims could be healed, and that for some, grief and loss and terror became an everlasting abyss, one they would never come back from.

I had assumed the sob sister was some broken-down drunk who lived in a trailer, or as a modern-day Miss Haversham in a ramshackle house at the edge of town.

I never thought the sob sister was someone as powerful and competent as Dolly Langham.

“You’re sure?” I asked, sounding a bit breathless.

“Positive,” Susan said. She picked up one of the journals. “This is from 1954.”

Then she read the account out loud. It wasn’t word-for-word what I had heard on the phone—after all, Langham had written this in shorthand, with missing articles and poor transitions—but it was close enough to make the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“And this one,” Susan said, “is the day after Pearl Harbor. She speculates on who might enlist, and then—suddenly, as if she can’t control it—that damn story again.”

I held up a hand. I had to think this through. It violated a lot of my assumptions about everything, about the sob sister, about the nature of victimhood, about Dolly Langham.

Who, come to think of it, was a single unmarried woman who lived alone in the family manse after her father died, who had no family, and who seemingly had only her charities to keep her warm.

But she had had a secret life.

As a sob sister. Not the sobbing woman who called my hotline, but as a front-page girl, one of those women writers of the press, the kind who specialized in an emotional sort of journalism nearly forgotten and completely discredited. Nellie Bly, who got herself tossed into an insane asylum so she could write passionately about the awful conditions; Ida Tarbell, whose work on Standard Oil nearly got discredited because of her gender; or even the great Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching campaign almost got her killed, all got dismissed as sob sisters.

Women who wrote tears.

Dolly Langham wrote tears. Accuser Speaks! It was a piece of sympathy, not a piece of hack journalism. So were other stories, all under the guise of a straight news story, told in a way that would appeal to the woman of the house, the emotional one, the one who actually might change the mind of her man.

“Do you guys remember who gave the sob sister her nickname?” I asked.

“It was before my time. You guys had already labeled her before I got here,” Louise said. “So, you know who she is now. You want to share?”

“I can’t yet.” I said, even though I wanted to.

Susan was tapping her thumbnail against her teeth.

“June seems like so long ago,” she said after a moment. She was frowning. “Maybe Helene nicknamed her. Or Mabel.”

Our oldest volunteers. I adored Mabel. She had campaigned for women’s rights in the teens, and had done her best to change the world then. That she was helping us now seemed a miracle to me.

Helene, on the other hand, drove me nuts. She was conservative, religious, yet determined to make this hotline work. I still struggled to get along with her, but as time progressed, I had learned to appreciate her.

“I think it was Helene,” Susan said. “I have this vivid memory of her passing the call to me one Saturday night just as the phone rang. She said she couldn’t help the sob sister any. Some others were there and the name stuck.”

She couldn’t help the sob sister. Because they knew each other?

“Are there names in any of these accounts?” I asked. “Does she give us a clue as to who this guy is who hurt her so badly?”

“It wasn’t one guy,” Louise said softly.

I glanced at her. Her eyes were red.

“It was a gang,” she said. “A few of the early accounts were really graphic.”

Susan nodded. “And there are no names, at least not that we’ve found.”

“What about in the other papers I gave you?” I asked. “Are there any names in those?”

“Initials,” Louise said. “And I have to tell you, this stuff is gruesome.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “What was this woman into?”

I shook my head again. “I’ll tell you when I can. The most recent papers, what are they about?”

Susan bowed her head. “You don’t want to know.”

But Louise squared her shoulders. “It’s another group.”

“A group of what?” I asked, feeling cold.

“A group of perverts,” Louise said.

Susan had put a hand over her mouth. Her head was still bowed.

“What kind of perverts?” I asked.

“The kind who like little boys,” Louise said. “They take them from the home, to work. And the boys work, all right.”

Her words were clipped, bitter, angry.

“The home?” I asked, my mind a bit frozen. I’d become so used to dealing with women that the phrase “little boys” threw me off. “Their homes?”

“The boys’ home near Janesville,” Susan said, sounding ill. “My church gives that place money.”

“Please tell me she uses names,” I said.

Louise shook her head. “Initials, though. That and the home might be enough information to figure it out.”

If we were cops. If someone was going to investigate this. I didn’t know if Kaplan could do it. Groups, gangs, rings of organized anything were often the hardest thing to defeat.

“Did they know she was investigating them?” I asked.

“Someone—a E.N.—thought she was asking a lot of questions. She was scared,” Susan said. Then she added, “I got that from the journal, not from her notes.”

“Can you give me what you translated?” I asked. “Not the journals, but the notes themselves?”

“I wish we had one of those expensive copiers,” Louise said. “I really don’t want to write this stuff out again.”

I empathized.

“Just set the papers in a pile right here.” I moved a metal outbox onto the table. “I’ll pick them up if I need them. Don’t copy right now. Keep translating, if you can. If you can’t, I understand. But I sure would like names.”

Susan picked up her pen. Then her gaze met mine. “How do people stay sane in the face of all this crap?”

I thought of the cops I’d known, good and bad, as well as the people I knew who were trying to make things right in the world.

“I’m not sure they stay sane,” I said. “Hell, I’m not even sure they were ever sane.”

I wasn’t sure I was either. But I didn’t say that. I figured both women knew that already.

***

I was halfway down the stairs when I met one of the volunteers coming up. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose was red.

“Call for you,” she said in a thick voice.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “Just taking a break.”

She was trying for jaunty, but she failed miserably. A lot of the volunteers took breaks after a particularly tough phone call. Often those breaks took place in the ladies room, and involved lots of Kleenex.

I hurried down the stairs to my desk. Kaplan was on the line.

“I’m coming over there,” he said. “But I figured, given the nature of your business, that you’d want me to let you know first.”

I did appreciate it, but knew better than to thank him. In the past when I noticed him being sensitive, he got offended.

“Do you know where the old rectory used to be?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Go to that door.”

I hung up and hurried back through the walkway into my tiny living room. I had just switched on the lights when I heard a car pull up. I didn’t look through the curtains. I waited, tense, listening to the car engine shut off, the door slam, and footsteps on the gravel. I anticipated the knock on the door, but it still made me jump.

“It’s me.” Kaplan’s voice. I appreciated that he didn’t identify himself. He probably had no idea that I was alone.

I checked the peephole, then unlocked all of the dead bolts. I pulled the door open.

Kaplan was still wearing his heavy police jacket, and his galoshes. His black pants were stained with snow and salt along the hems.

“C’mon in,” I said, standing back.

He nodded, stamped his feet, and entered. He stopped as I closed the door, a look of surprise on his face. “This is your place?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I expected—”

“The hotline, I know,” I said. “We don’t let strangers in there.”

“I remember,” he said grimly. He took off his jacket, put his gloves in the pocket, then ran a hand through his hair. He slipped out of the galoshes as well.

He was wearing a rumpled suit coat under the jacket. “You see the 10 o’clock news?”

“No.”

“Open and shut. Burglars surprised her, knowing what was in the house. Now we’re having an all-out manhunt which will, of course, fail.”

I opened my hand and gestured toward the sofa. His gaze passed over the materials that I had left on the table. “Coffee?” I asked. “Water? Soda?”

“Coffee,” he said. “Black. Thank you.”

I went into the kitchen and started the percolator. Then I hovered in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.

“How do you know it wasn’t burglars?” I asked.

“You mean besides the fact nothing was stolen? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. She surprised those burglars, so they viciously attacked her. The odd thing was there was more than one of them, and still they didn’t have time to take her purse or the diamond earrings she wore or the gold bracelet around her wrist.” He leaned his head back. “There’s so much not right here, and I can’t tell anyone.”

Except me. The tension had left me, and I actually felt flattered, although I knew better than to say so.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” I asked quietly.

He raised his head, and looked at me. “She called me her disappointment.”

I raised my eyebrows. At that moment, I heard the percolator and silently cursed it. “Coffee’s done.”

I filled two large mugs, grabbed the plate of five raisin cookies that I had stolen from the volunteers two days ago, and put it all on a tray that had come with the kitchen. I brought the tray into the living room and put it on the end table near him.

I sat across from him on the matching chair that faced the window. “You were a disappointment?”

“Yeah.” He grabbed two cookies, but he didn’t eat them. “Among the other things she did, Dolly Langham gave out two full-ride scholarships every year to the University of Wisconsin. She gave them to the best students from Madison area high schools, no matter the gender.”

“Wow,” I said. “You got one?”

He nodded. “Four years at our greatest state institution.”

“And then you became a cop,” I said.

He shrugged one shoulder. “Like father, like son.”

“And she got angry at you.”

“Said I was wasting my talents.”

“Are you?”

His gaze met mine. “Are you wasting yours?”

I smiled. “Touché.”

We both picked up our coffee mugs. He didn’t add anything, so I said, “You never lost touch with her.”

“I checked up on her,” he said. “She wasn’t young and she lived alone.”

“I’ll bet she appreciated that.” I blew on my coffee, wishing I hadn’t tinged that sentence with sarcasm.

“You got it. She hated it. Not that it made any difference. She still died horribly. Worse that I would have expected.” He sighed. His sadness and regret were palpable.

Yet the thought of him just discovering that hidden room today didn’t ring true. He had known all along that it was there.

“So she took you into her private office before,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’d seen her go in it once, but I’d never gone in myself. I just thought she had some paperwork stored in the back of the pantry, until today.”

“What made you get me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I guess I always figured you and her as kindred spirits.”

I started. Had he known what she was doing? “Why?”

“The stubborn independent streak, maybe,” he said. “The willingness to go against female norms. The way that you both believe men are unnecessary.”

“I never said that.” I sounded defensive. I liked men. Or, at least, I used to.

“She never said it either. It was just the attitude—don’t help me, don’t do for me, there’s nothing you can do that I can’t do.” He shook his head. “She was a cussed old broad.”

His voice broke on the last word.

He loved her. He really should not have been in charge of this investigation, and yet he was. I doubted he would have been able to relinquish it to anyone.

And yet, because he loved her, he couldn’t go along with the fake investigation. He had to know why, and it might cost him his career.

I almost said something to him, warned him, but it wasn’t my place. It angered me when he told me what to do; I was certain my warning him would make him just as angry as it would have made me.

So I decided to approach the entire idea sideways. “Do you know what she was working on?”

He took a deep breath, ran a hand over his face, and sighed, clearly gathering himself. “You mean besides the charities.”

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “But you do.”

I got up and took the Polaroids out of my pile. Then I held them before showing them to him. Showing them to anyone almost felt like a betrayal of her trust—this woman I hadn’t known, and hadn’t met, who was, as Kaplan had so astutely seen, a kindred spirit.

I even knew why she had avoided the hotline. She didn’t want—she couldn’t, really—draw attention to her secret life. Besides, she had called us before we approached her. She was afraid we would figure out who she was.

“Here’s the problem,” I said before I put the Polaroids in front of him. “She’d been doing a mountain of investigative work, and she’d done it for decades—longer than you and I have been alive. Any one thing from her past could have killed her.”

I carefully laid each Polaroid in front of him, explaining them all, the secret closet, the hidden shelves, the pen names, the meticulous notes that we hadn’t even really begun to explore.

“Jesus,” he said when I was finished, and the word was a half-prayer, half-reaction. “Jesus.”

I hadn’t even told him what she had been working on. I only touched the old cases, because I wasn’t familiar with most of them, not yet.

“Why would she do this?” He picked up one of the pictures, the one that showed the wig, the different clothing. “Her father was still alive through much of this. He never knew?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Kaplan said more to himself than to me. He looked up, his gaze open and vulnerable. “It doesn’t—”

Then his mouth dropped open. He closed it, and shook his head slowly.

“I should listen to myself,” he said. “I said she was like you. She was, wasn’t she? She had the same background and there was no way in hell she was ever going to be someone’s victim.”

“Not the same background,” I said softly. “It’s never the same.”

“You know what I mean,” he said with more heat than I expected. He thought I was belittling his realization. “You know what happened. Is it important? Did it get her killed?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure when it happened. In the teens, I think. I can’t tell you much more. She used to call here, so it falls in my confidentiality rules.”

“Which won’t hold up in court,” he said fiercely.

“I know,” I said. “I’d give you names and dates if I had them. She’s gone, after all, and I’d love to find out who killed her. But she never gave names, and she didn’t give a lot of details that would ever help us find who hurt her.”

Damaged her, damn near destroyed her. “Hurt” was such a minor word in the context of what happened to Dolly Langham and the power of her reaction to it.

“Names?”

I nodded.

His eyes narrowed. “So give me what you do have. The recent stuff. Logically, that would be what got her killed. If nothing else, it’ll give me a place to start.”

I was shaking my head before he even finished speaking. “You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t like any of this,” he said. “Just tell me.”

So I did.

Somewhere in the middle of the discussion, partly because I couldn’t stand his expression, and partly because I didn’t want to answer questions I knew nothing about, I went up to the vestry for the translated papers.

Louise was still there, looking ragged.

“A man called you earlier,” she said, as if I had done something wrong.

I nodded.

“Your cop friend?”

I picked up the papers from the out basket. “Thank you,” I said.

Then I went down the stairs again. My cop friend. Were we friends? I wasn’t sure.

I let myself back into the rectory. It smelled of toast, bacon, and coffee. Kaplan wasn’t sitting on my couch any longer. He was in my kitchen, scrambling eggs in my best cast iron pan.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I haven’t eaten anything except cookies all day.”

“I don’t mind when someone else cooks.” I looked at the clock on the stove—it was the middle of the night. I should have sent Louise home.

Kaplan divided the eggs between two plates, then added bacon and toast. He handed me a plate which I gladly took. I was hungry, and that surprised me.

I set the papers on the table as I sat down.

He sat across from me, but didn’t read. Not yet.

“She did this for almost fifty years,” he said, “and never got caught before.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“If she did, she got out of it.”

I nodded slightly, a small concession.

“How could she get caught this time?”

“Maybe the disguise didn’t work for an elderly woman,” I said. “Or maybe someone recognized her voice. We probably won’t know.”

He had already cleaned his plate. I had barely touched mine.

He picked up the papers, then went into the living room to read them. I finished eating and cleaned up the kitchen.

It felt both strange and natural to have a man in my house again. To have a cop in my house. A benevolent cop. I need to stop thinking of every cop like the man who hurt me and remember how much my husband Truman had cared about the people around him. Truman was like most of the cops I had known. I needed to keep that in mind.

When I finished the dishes, I went into the living room. Kaplan had rolled up the legal sheets and was holding them in his left hand. His right elbow was braced on the arm of the couch, and he was lost in thought.

“What am I going to do?” he asked as I sat down across from him. “I’m a detective in a small city. I have orders from the chief of police to close this quickly. I don’t think he’s involved, but I’ll wager whoever is has money and clout and the ability to close the cases that he believes need closing.”

“I know,” I said softly.

“Sometimes,” he said, not looking at me, “you learn to close your eyes. But this….”

He let the words trail off. Then he raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed.

“They killed her. They killed her to keep her quiet, and she worked her whole life to make sure the full story got told on cases like this. They silenced her, and she didn’t believe in silence. Hell, Miss Wilson, she’s going to haunt me if I let them get away with it. Even if she’s not a real ghost, she’ll haunt me. Just her memory will haunt me.”

“Val,” I said.

He blinked, and focused on me for the first time.

“Call me Val,” I said. I didn’t need to explain why.

“Val,” he said softly. Then he sighed. “I won’t have a career if I go after this. I might not live through the week.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. I’d seen worse over the years.

“But I can’t let it drop,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “You might not have to.”

His breath caught—just a moment of hope, a small one, and then I watched that hope dissipate. “It won’t work. Anything I do—”

“I’ve had a few hours longer to think about this than you have,” I said. “And there’s something pretty glaring in the evidence that Miss Langham gathered.”

“Glaring. Something that’ll convince the chief?” he asked. Then before I could get a word in edgewise, he added, “Even if the evidence is rock-solid, I can’t do anything. Hell, for all I know, there are judges involved and city officials and—”

“Hank,” I said quietly. “This gang, this ring, they operate across state lines.”

His mouth opened slightly. Then he rubbed a hand over his chin.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, you’re right. Hell, I won’t have to even tie this to Dolly’s murder. I just have to quietly hand it to the right person.” Then he smiled. “And I just happen to know some good men who work for the FBI.”

***

I wish I could say it was easy. I wish I could say it all got resolved in the next few days. But I can’t, because it didn’t. It took nearly a year on the orphanage case, and most of the time, Kaplan was out of the loop.

Which meant I was too.

And that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t trust the FBI on the best of days. But I had to continually remind myself that this wasn’t my case or really, my business. Although if they didn’t stop it, I promised myself I would find a way.

Eventually, the Feds arrested a lot of people and more quietly resigned, and the regional papers had a lot of articles that were vague and unsatisfying, because someone deemed the details too graphic for publication.

Langham’s case got closed quickly. Kaplan and I decided that it was better to assume her death was caused by the most recent case, and to get the ringleaders for that. However, I know that Kaplan is still quietly investigating. He’ll never be satisfied until he knows what really happened.

But for now, the official story stands: Langham’s death inside her own home was caused by burglars she interrupted. What got taken? No one knows exactly, but it turned out that the house had two secret rooms that probably dated from Prohibition—or so the papers speculated, without proof, of course. The rooms had books and desks, but there were empty cupboards, except for clothing that apparently belonged to Langham’s father’s various mistresses.

Whatever had been in the drawers of the desk and the cabinet behind one of the desks, well, the burglars had clearly made off with all of that.

In the middle of the night. With police escort.

If you could call Kaplan a police escort.

That part wasn’t in the papers, of course. And the neighbors never seemed to notice the two police officers—one tiny and dark, and the other who looked like he was from central casting. They arrived at one a.m. on two consecutive nights, parked in the driveway, and carried boxes of documents out to a squad car.

No one questioned it, no one remembered it, and no one even knew about those rooms for nearly two months after the investigation closed, when the heirs—the administrators of seven local charities—got their first tours of the place they now held in trust.

Then the story broke open again.

By then, no one even mentioned the cops dealing with that late-night crime scene. No one mentioned the boxes.

Boxes that moved from one secret room to another—although my room wasn’t exactly secret: just forgotten. It was the closet off what had been the choir room. There were even a few musty robes balled up in the corner. I didn’t move them. I just locked the closet door, then locked the choir room door, and wondered what I would do with my treasure, what I would do with another woman’s life work.

Kaplan asked me not to worry about it, not yet.

I didn’t worry about it, but I decided it was time to join the female half of the human race. I signed up for a shorthand course at Madison Area Technical College, starting in January.

And that would have been the end of it, except for one rather strange conversation, late on a Saturday night, two weeks after Langham’s death.

I found myself alone with Helene, our second-oldest volunteer, the one who irritated me, the one who had given Dolly Langham her nickname.

That night, Helene wore a blue dress over a girdle that had to hurt like hell, her perfect stockings attached at the thigh with clips that she would have been appalled to know I had seen as she sat down. She had played the organ at Langham’s funeral, and stood graveside like a supplicant.

I had pretended I hadn’t seen her.

But that night, in the silence of the phone room, about eleven p.m. when Langham’s drunken calls usually came in, I said, “You knew who it was from that first call, didn’t you?”

I watched Helene weigh her response. An old secret versus a new one, the sadness at the loss of a friend, the weight we both felt in the silence.

After a long moment, she nodded.

“You knew what she had been doing all these years too, didn’t you?” I asked.

“The charities? Of course,” Helene said.

“The writing,” I said.

Helene peered at me. Then sighed. “I thought she had quit decades ago. I would have told her to quit if I had known.”

So Helene suspected the truth: that Langham’s death was caused by her work, not by burglars.

“Who hurt her so badly?” I asked.

Helene shook her head. “Does it matter? They’re all dead now.”

The words were so flat, so cold. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “A couple of them committed suicide. After their disgrace.”

I frowned. She shrugged, then slid the log book of all the calls toward her, to do her night’s reading.

“Their disgrace?” I asked.

“Different for all of them, of course,” she said as if she were discussing the weather. “You know how it is. They come to Madison for graduate school or to work in government, and then they go home to Chicago or Des Moines. And then the press finds some story—true or not—and hounds them. Just hounds them.”

She smiled just a little, her hand toying with the edge of the log.

“Those tearful interviews with the female accusers. Readers used to love those.”

Then she stood up, nodded at me, and asked me if I wanted coffee. As if we were in the basement of a still functioning church. As if we weren’t discussing the unsolved murder of a woman who had been Helene’s friend for decades.

A shiver ran through me, and I looked at my half-finished room, that still smelled of sawed wood.

Sob sisters.

The things we did to live with our pasts. The things we did to cope with the violence.

The things some of us did for revenge.

 

___________________________________________

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

Sob Sisters

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November, 2013
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Curaphotography/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

 

Last weekend, we went into Albany, with my brother and sister-in-law, to have dinner with friends of theirs, and to attend an exhibit at the lovely Albany Institute of History and Art. The exhibit is called “Americans Who Tell The Truth,” and it features portraits by Robert Shetterly, along with quotes from his truth-telling subjects.

Shetterly’s art is unusual. His portraits are simple, even primitive in some respects. The bodies of his subjects, and the backgrounds of his paintings, are flat, lacking in detail, unremarkable. But the faces are nuanced, instantly recognizable, filled with life and spirit and personality. And the names of the subjects, as well as their quotations, are scratched into the paintings themselves (while the paint is still wet, as my brother, the painter, pointed out). Shetterly has painted more than two-hundred truth-tellers, including forty-two that have been selected for the Institute’s exhibit. Some of those included are obvious selections. Others are less well-known, and still others have somewhat checkered histories, which makes for an interesting blend of portraits.

On the one hand, featured subjects include Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, Pete Seeger and Ella Baker, Cecile Richards, the late president of Planned Parenthood, and Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death-penalty crusader portrayed in the movie Dead Man Walking. But among the other truth-tellers whose portraits are on display, are John Brown, the anti-slavery activist whose violent raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 resulted in several deaths and helped to spark the Civil War; Mother Jones, the late-Nineteenth/early-Twentieth century labor organizer and activist; Frank Serpico, the New York city cop who resisted and later exposed corruption within the police department, at risk of his own life, and whose harrowing story was brought to life in Serpico, a 1973 movie starring Al Pacino and directed by Sidney Lumet.

Yet, the figures who fascinated me most during our afternoon at the museum were those of whom I’d known nothing — not even their names — before seeing the exhibit. One of them was Leah Penniman, a food justice advocate and activist whose portrait exudes warmth and joy. Her quote is wonderful and worth repeating in full:

Our ancestral grandmothers braided seeds and promise into their hair before being forced into the bowels of transatlantic ships. As they plaited their okra, cowpea, millet and black rice into tight cornrows, they affirmed their hope in a future on soil. They whispered to us, their descendants:
“The road may be rough, but we will never give up on you.”

Another was Grace Lee Boggs, an author and community organizer, who gazes out from her portrait appearing tough, frank, unwilling to put up with any BS. Her quote:

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative… We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity requires a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.

Few moments in our nation’s history have demanded more of American truth-tellers than the one we find ourselves in right now. We are governed by liars, bombarded by falsehoods every time we go online or turn on certain news channels, confronted by people — some of them friends, some of them family, most of them well-meaning — who have armed themselves with misinformation in order to parrot talking points they have heard on TV or from someone else who might be equally well-meaning and equally misinformed. Just the other day, I encountered online a post from someone I like and respect, who was repeating the jumble of untruths and recklessly manipulated data used by this Administration to justify their disastrous tariffs. I didn’t bother to comment. I didn’t wish to alienate a friend, nor did I have the energy or inclination to engage in a flame war. Instead, I allowed the disinformation to go unchallenged. I’m not proud of this.

Fallacy, disingenuousness, quackery, distortion. They pummel us. They insinuate themselves into every discourse. They are disheartening, infuriating, exhausting.

Which makes Robert Shetterly’s bold honoring of those who have stood up for truth again and again, all the more admirable, all the more important. We as a people have been challenged before by those who traffic in lies, and ultimately honesty has prevailed. Truth broke Joseph McCarthy’s fear-driven hold on the U.S. Congress, just as it ended the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. I choose to believe that it will wash away the bullshit that currently coats our most sacred institutions. But I have to be willing to stand up for honestly when next I am presented the opportunity. All of us do. We need to be inspired by those who inspired this exhibition.

One of my favorite portraits was of a media hero of mine, PBS’s Bill Moyers. I will leave it to him to have the last word:

The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests – and to the ideology of market economics.

The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.