ILONA ANDREWS

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

Also:

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

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

Something was stalking us through the tunnels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear ripped into her slab of meat.

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

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

I chewed and waited.

Nothing.

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

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

The shepherd glanced at me.

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

 Bear grinned at me.

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

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

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

I was Sadrin.  I am Sadrin.

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

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

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

What did that woman put into my head?

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

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

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

Maybe I would get some answers there.

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

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

“Rest.”

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

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

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

I went cold.

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

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

Malcolm. This was the original assault team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could we get down there? Was it physically possible?

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

Nowhere near long enough.

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

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

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

So fucking close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light on the helmet sputtered and died.

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

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

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

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

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

Bear wagged her tail.

“Come on, Bearkins.”

I started forward and Bear chased after me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elias nodded to him. “Good news?”

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

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

“No, Peter is two years younger.”

“Is he a Talent?”

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

“What is he doing there?”

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

Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.

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

Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.

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

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

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

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

Gambled. The man was dead.

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

“How deep is the hole?”

“Twenty-three million.”

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

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

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

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

“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.

“Of course he is.”

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

“The auditor…”

“Already got her, sir.”

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

“It is.”

“Are they having an affair?”

Leo blinked. “They are! How…”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is legal aware?” he asked.

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

“Jackson?”

“No news yet.”

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

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

“Speak of the devil.”

He took the call.

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

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

“Good to see you as well.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is my brother?” Yasuo asked.

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

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

“I’ll mention it.”

“Good-bye and good luck.”

“You as well.”

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

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

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

Everything would fall into place once they entered the gate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who can keep up?! Not moi.

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

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

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

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

That is all.

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

A late start this morning, sorry.

Many of you mentioned wanting an art book. From Candice Slater:

I am humbled by the BDH’s support. Their ongoing encouragement brings me great joy.  I fully intend to research future print options, but can make no specific promises as yet due to my lack of knowledge in this area.

If Candice decides to do a calendar or an art book, you will be the first to know, because we will announce it right here.

“What the hell was that?”

Bear panted at me.

“I said stay. I know you know what stay means. I didn’t say run into the fight and bite the giant wasp.”

Bear looked completely unrepentant.

“You’re a butthole. That’s your name from now on. Bear Butthole Moore.”

Butthole padded over to me and sat with a big canine grin on her face.

“What are you so happy about? I’m mad at you. At least have the decency to look embarrassed.”

Bear twitched her ears. Bear and decency clearly had nothing to do with each other.

I looked up. And forgot to breathe. Above me, the chamber climbed to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, expanding into a wider space. Long spiral ledges of something that looked like paper wrapped around the perimeter of the cavern, and between them huge luminous crystals glowed with pale yellow light. Far above, at the very top, a cluster of paper tubes hung together, some sealed with pale paper caps, others empty, their edges ragged. It was like standing inside a gargantuan conch shell, and it felt otherworldly, like a cathedral.

Regret pinched me. I destroyed this.

Yes, it was beautiful, but the spider herders deserved to harvest their eggs in peace, and I needed to get home. I had to get the coral egg and get out.

“Come on, Butthole. Let’s find what we are looking for.”

The ledges were paper, but they were the sturdiest paper I had ever seen. It had no problem supporting my weight. First, I walked up the ledges to the top, severed the cluster of pupae and let it fall to the ground. I didn’t need any more worker wasps hatching while I rummaged around their house. Then I searched the nest top to bottom.

I found the stolen spider eggs glued to the walls still in their web cocoons. Each egg had a bunch of blue coconut-sized spheres by it – the wasp egg sacks containing larva. In some places, the sacks had hatched into fat three-foot-long grubs resembling maggots and were feeding on the spider eggs.

The lifecycle was clear. The wasps stole the spider eggs and left them for their young. Once the wasp larvae hatched, they would eat the spider eggs and grow until they formed a pupa and finally matured into adults. The spiders weren’t the nest’s only prey.  I found three stalker corpses and bodies of four goat-like animals the size of a small deer, all glued with that same rough paper near the egg sacs.

Most of the spider eggs were empty or dark. I destroyed any wasp sacks or larva I came across.

The coral egg had been hidden away near the top of the nest, in a curve of the chamber, with a single egg sack attached to the wall next to it. Perhaps food for the new queen. I killed the wasp egg and gently removed the spider egg from the wall. It was smaller than the others, more like a soccer ball than a beach ball, and it felt warm and surprisingly light. I focused on it, activating my talent. A tiny life slept within, safe in a shell of nurturing liquid.

Oh.

The cream eggs came from the spiders. This one didn’t. This was one of them, a baby spider herder. A creature of an alien civilization, not just a sentient or a sapient, but a sophont not born on Earth.

I sat down and looked at it. A child separated from its parents, stolen to become wasp food and be devoured by grubs before its first moment of awareness.

It was so much.

For millennia, humans were terrified of being eaten. It was the most primal of our fears.  It drove our progress and our relentless pursuit of technology. We conquered the planet to keep our children safe from the predators that roamed in the night. We thought we put this anachronistic horror behind us. And then the gates appeared, and the ancient fear came roaring back. Once again, we were scared that monsters would appear and devour our children, and all of our weapons and all of our progress would do nothing to stop it.

I hugged the egg gently and stayed like that until the inner storm passed inside me. I would get back to my children. And I would return this child back to its family.

In total I found five spider eggs that were still glowing, including the coral one. Now, I had to get them out and get down to the bottom of the cavern without getting killed. I needed a rope.

Well, there was a lot of spider silk around.

I cut a tendril of the spider thread from one of the hollowed-out cocoons on the wall and pulled on it. It came loose, dragging chunks of wasp paper with it. It was about the width of a thick thread and feather-light.

I flexed. 1.8 mm in diameter, slightly thinner than cooking twine. Wow. The tensile strength was off the charts. 

I weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds before the breach. I checked my weight regularly. The DDC gym had an abundance of scales. The DDC monitored all government-employed gate divers for any unusual changes. They checked weight and height every three months, bloodwork every six.

I focused on myself. One hundred and fifty-one pounds. A six-pound weight loss. As I suspected, all that healing and fighting came with a price. This tiny strand of spider silk would hold ten times my weight. The eggs weren’t heavy, only large. That just left Bear.

I glanced at the dog and froze.

Ninety-four pounds.

That couldn’t possibly be right. I had checked her before and she was at eighty-two pounds. She had gained 12 lbs. It wasn’t possible. Even if my sense of time was completely off and we’d been in the breach for a week, a dog couldn’t just gain twelve pounds in seven days.

“Bear, come here, girl.”

The shepherd trotted over. I ran my hand over her body, feeling her flanks and back under the fur. There wasn’t much fat there, quite the opposite. She was on the leaner side. Judging by feel alone, she could use a few more meals.

I tried to recall her general dimensions, and they popped into my head from memory.

Bear was two inches taller and three inches longer.

I struggled to process it. She was taller and longer, which meant her bones elongated. Growing that fast should have put a huge strain on her body. 

It had to be stalker regeneration. She’d been eating every chance she got, and her new accelerated healing must’ve been putting these calories into her growth.

I flexed again, focusing in on her, looking for any abnormalities. Perfectly healthy. Nothing strange. Just a very large dog. Also, her harness was on too tight.

I loosened the belts as much as I could. I would need the harness to get her down to the floor of the cavern, but once we cleared that hurdle – assuming we survived – I would have to take it off. It was already pinching her body. If she got any bigger, it would hurt her.

There was nothing I could do about Bear’s explosive growth. It was what it was. One thing for certain, I needed to feed her better. If she was growing, she would need more calories. The next time we downed a stalker or maybe one of those goat things, I would let her eat all she wanted.

For now, I had to concentrate on making a rope. The twine-sized spider silk would hold my weight, but it would also cut my hands. I had to make it thicker and figure out some way to shield my fingers.

I pulled on the silk, and it came loose. If my luck held, it would be one long rope, and I had a lot of cocoons to work with.

#

The rope took a lot longer than expected. I must’ve been at it for about three hours, but in the end, I didn’t just have a rope. I had two, braided together from several lengths of the spider twine. I also made a net sack into which I loaded the spider eggs, all but the coral one. That one would come down with me. I pried a paper cap off the cluster of tubes I had dropped to the ground. It was thick like canvas, but flexible, and I managed to work it into a crude sack. I put the coral egg into it and secured it with Bear’s leash.

Bear trotted out of the cave and came back in. She started doing it a few minutes after I began working on the rope. I read somewhere that German Shepherds liked to patrol. Nothing could get onto the ledge from below and if something came in from the tunnel, we could hold it off here in the nest, so if patrolling made her feel better, there was no reason to keep her from it.

I coiled my ropes and walked onto the ledge. Below us, about one hundred yards away, the spider herders blocked the floor of the cavern. There were seven of them and behind them massive white spiders splattered with black loomed at least twenty feet high.

Okay then. This altered things.

Bear stared at the spider army and let out a quiet woof.

“Yes. I see.”

I went back inside the cave, grabbed the queen’s head, and dragged it toward the gap.  It barely fit, but finally I managed to push it through. I grabbed it and strained. The head was surprisingly light. I jerked it up above my head.

Look, I killed your enemy.

The spider herders watched, impassive.

I hurled the queen’s head off the cliff. It smashed onto the rocks below.

No reaction. Not exactly promising. I’d hoped for a cheer.

I picked up my ropes and walked along the ledge away from the flowers. Bear trotted after me.

We cleared the blossoms. I picked a large boulder, tied one rope around it, secured the other rope around a different chunk of stone and went back to the wasp nest to get the eggs. When I came back, the spider herders had moved directly below my ropes, arranged in a perfect crescent, with the monstrous spiders behind them.

I flexed. Some pollen had gotten on the eggs in the net sack. I waved my hands over it, trying to clean them. The pollen was featherlight, and after a couple of minutes most of it was off. I tied the rope to the net sack containing the four regular eggs, tied the other end of it around a rock, and held the sack above the drop.

Still no reaction.

I gently lowered the sack down. The rope was long enough. The trick was to keep from bumping the eggs against the cliff wall.

Nice and slow.

A spider herder stepped forward. I lowered the sack into their arms. The herder sliced at the rope with their hand, cutting the net sack free. There was no tug, no pull. One moment the weight of the eggs was on the rope and the next it vanished. The spider herder moved to the back with their prize, and I pulled the rope back up.

I still had the coral egg, Bear, and myself.

Bear would have to be next. I looped the rope around the rock three more times, then wrapped it around her, threading it through her harness. 

“You will be okay, girl. I’ll be right down.”

I took a deep breath and gently lowered Bear off a cliff, supporting her weight with my arms. When she was about three feet down, I backed up, strung the rope over my shoulders, and began to let it out, little by little, foot by foot, going as slowly as I could. If I was the old me, there was no way I could’ve done it. She would’ve been too heavy.

I ran out of rope and looked down. I’d calculated correctly. Bear was hanging about six feet off the ground. Letting her down all the way would’ve been a dangerous gamble.  Bear was smart but she was a dog. There was no telling what she would do when facing giant spiders and weird looking beings. She could wait for me like a good girl, or she could decide it was biting time and get herself killed. Leaving her hanging was the safest choice. The spider herders made no move toward her and if the rope snapped and she fell, she wouldn’t get injured.

It was my turn. I hung the sack with the last egg around my neck, threading one arm through so Bear’s leash crossed my chest. The egg was now on my back in the sack. I grabbed the second rope. I had never rappelled off anything in my life. Hell of a way to start learning.

It was easier than I thought. The first time I had pushed off a little too hard, but by the fourth bump I got the hang of it.

Push.

Push.

Push.

My feet met the solid ground. I let go of the rope and turned around. The spider herders stood motionless. They were almost eight feet tall, and they towered over me, menacing and silent, their faces hidden behind veils. Only the eyes were visible, two of them per face, large, narrow, with a strange-looking white iris on a solid black sclera that didn’t seem the least bit insectoid.

I lifted my paper sack off my back, pulled the paper open, and held the coral egg out.

“Bekh-razz.” My voice sounded ragged.

The spider herder in the center stepped forward. I’d flexed. My talent slid over the spider herder, and I knew he was male and the staff in his hand, with the symbols etched into its shaft, meant he was in charge of this cluster.

The herder’s robe stirred softly, as he moved and I realized that the humanoid shape was an illusion. The top half of him, the upright half, seemed human. His arms, unnaturally white, were long and thin, and his hands had six segmented fingers, each tipped with a black claw. He seemed to float forward rather than walk, and as he moved, I glimpsed the outline of four segmented legs underneath the pale silk.

Soft voice issued forth from the spider herder. “Horsun, gehr tirr did sembadzer.”

Something inside me recognized this language. The steady cadence sounded so familiar. I knew the words but their meaning kept avoiding me, as if I was trying to hold on to slippery, wet mud.

“Dzerhen tam dzal lukr tuhta gef.”

I used to speak this. Long time ago.  I just forgot how… No, wait, it wasn’t me.

“…Dzer lohr dzal, Sadrin.”

Me. I was Sadrin. That was more than a name. It was an occupation… no, a purpose. This was my goal in life. It was why I existed. The core of my… The understanding slipped away from me, and I almost growled out of sheer frustration. So close.

Something tore in my mind like a piece of paper and suddenly some of the clicks and odd syllables made sense.

“…  hyrt argadi…”

Daughter. Argadi meant daughter. I saved a female child.

“…Argadi dzal to na yen sah-dejjit…”

Sah-dejjit. Friend. They considered me a friend.

“Dzer meq dzal bekh-razz danur. Bekh-razz danir.”

Safe passage for now and forever. Oh.

The spider herder pointed at my left arm. I stepped forward and held it out. The light on his staff flared into a needle-thin orange beam and hit my arm. Pain lashed me. I grit my teeth.

The light died. A narrow scar marked my arm, twisting into a flowing symbol. My talent focused on it.

The vision burst in my mind. Groups of spider herders, one after another, different landscapes, different times, all nodding and parting to let me pass. I had been given a great, rare honor.

The words formed on my lips on their own.

“Adaren kullnemeq, Sindra-ron. Sadrin issun tanil danir.”

Thank you for the priceless gift, children of Sindra. I shall be forever grateful.

The spider herders moved aside, and the sea of spiders behind them parted before me.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 8, Part 1 and 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I crouched on a narrow stone ledge protruding above a vast cavern. Bear lay next to me gnawing on a stalker femur.

Long veins of luminescent crystal split the ceiling here and there and slid up the walls, glowing like overpowered lamps, diluting the darkness to a gentle twilight. My talent told me it was Fos stone, a breach mineral that shone like a flashlight. The biggest Fos stone I had seen until now was about the size of my fist.

 Two hundred and sixty-two feet below us, at the bottom of the cavern, enormous lianas climbed the stone wall, bearing giant flowers. Each blossom, shaped like a twisted cornucopia, sported a funnel at least ten feet across and fifteen feet deep, fringed by thick, persimmon-colored petals that glowed weakly with coral and yellow. It was as if a garden-variety trumpet vine had been thrown into the chasm and mutated out of control into a monstrous version of itself.

Strange beings moved along the cavern floor, clad in diaphanous pale robes. Their torsos seemed almost humanoid, but there was something oddly insectoid about their movements. They strode between the flowers, carrying long staves and pushing carts.

As I watched, one of them stopped at the opposite wall far below and tugged on the long green tendrils dripping from a large blossom. A spider the size of a small car slid from the flower. It was white and translucent, as if made of frosted glass.

The being checked it over, prodding it with a staff topped with a large chunk of colored glass or maybe a huge jewel. My talent couldn’t identify it from this distance. The spider waited like a docile pet. 

The being dipped a slender appendage into their cart, pulled out a glowing fuzzy sphere that looked like a giant dandelion, and tossed it to the spider. The monster arachnid caught it and slipped back into its flower.

The spider herder moved on to the next blossom.

It was surreal. I’d been watching them for about two hours and my mind still refused to come to terms with it. There were hundreds of flowers down there, and most of them held spiders. The herders had been clearly doing this for a long time – their movements were measured and routine, and they had made paths in the faintly glowing lichens sheathing the bottom of the cavern.

I was watching an alien civilization tend to its livestock.

“Do you know what this is, Bear? This is animal husbandry.”

Bear didn’t seem impressed.

If I had to herd spiders, this would certainly be a good place. From this angle, the cavern looked almost like a canyon, relatively narrow with steep, mostly sheer walls. They had a water source – the narrow ribbon of a shallow stream twisted along the cavern’s floor. I couldn’t see any other entrances, although there had to be some, probably far to the left, behind the cavern’s bend. If stalkers or other predators somehow invaded, they would be easy to bottleneck. It was an ideal, sheltered location except for one thing.

Another spider herder emerged from behind the bend on the left. My ledge ended only a few feet away on that side so I couldn’t quite see where they came from. This one was pushing a larger cart.

“Here we go,” I murmured to the Bear.

She flicked her ear.

The spider herder paused. Above them, about forty feet off the ground, a large blossom glowed with gold instead of red. The being raised their staff and leaped at the wall, clearing ten feet in a single jump. The spider herder climbed up the vine, shockingly fast, reached the flower, and thrust the staff into the blossom.

I glanced to the right. Across the cavern, a fissure split the wall near the ceiling, a crack in the solid stone about eight feet tall and five feet across at its widest.

Nothing moved. The fissure remained dark.

The spider herder swirled the staff as if scraping the pancake batter out of a bowl.

The fissure stayed still.

The spider herder pulled his staff out. Three dense clumps of spider silk hung suspended from the staff, glowing softly with cream-colored light. They were about the size of a beach ball.

A segmented body squeezed out of the fissure and dove, three pairs of translucent wings snapping open in flight. A wasp-like insect the size of a kayak zipped through the air, glinting with blue and yellow like a blue sapphire wrapped in gold filigree.

Bear jumped up and growled.

The spider herder saw the wasp and scrambled down, but not quickly enough. The giant insect divebombed across the cavern, hooked one of the spider eggs with its segmented legs, tearing it from the bundle, and shot up, buzzing along the wall into a U-turn. A moment and it squeezed back into the fissure, taking its prize with it.

The spider herder stared after it for a long moment, climbed down, and deposited the two remaining egg sacks into their cart.

I had seen a similar scenario play out hours ago, when I first found the cavern. I had backtracked since then, exploring as many of the tunnels around it as I could. All of them either dead-ended or led to a narrow, bottomless chasm that ran parallel to this cave. I returned to the ledge a while ago and have been sitting here since, observing and deciding how to proceed.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. The anchor was still straight ahead and to the left of me, radiating discomfort. I opened my eyes. I was looking right at the bend of the cavern.

If we wanted to get to the anchor, we would have to pass through this underground canyon. There was no way around it. Backtracking wasn’t an option. We were truly lost at this point.

Unfortunately, I had a feeling that the spider herders wouldn’t welcome our intrusion into their territory. 

Another wasp squeezed out of the gap and dove down, aiming for the cart. The spider herder let out a loud clicking sound. A green spider the size of a donkey raced around the bend of the cavern and leaped into the air, knocking the wasp into the wall. The insect and the arachnid tumbled down through the vines and rolled onto the floor. The wasp jabbed at the spider with a stinger the size of a sword, but the spider clung to it and sank its fangs into the wasp’s neck. The insect’s head fell to the ground.

The spider herder made another clicking noise. The green spider abandoned the wasp and scuttled over to the cart. The herder pulled out a glowing yellow globe and tossed it to the spider. The arachnid caught it and ran back around the bend.

“Look, Bear, your cousin from another dimension got a treat.”

Bear tilted her head.

The spider herder leveled their stave at the wasp’s body. A moment passed. A bolt of orange lightning tore out of the gem and struck the carcass. The insect sizzled and broke into dust.

The activation time was a bit long. The wasps would have no trouble evading, considering the delay it took to fire, but once the beam hit, the results were devastating.

If Bear and I strolled down there, assuming we somehow got down off the ledge, trying to make our way past the herders would be impossible. Between the green spiders and that orange lightning, we wouldn’t get through, not without some serious injuries.

I glanced at the fissure. There was a wasp nest behind it. Spiders were excellent wall climbers. Theoretically, the spider herders could mount a full assault against it, but there were three problems with that.

First, the fissure wasn’t wide enough. The wasps were long and narrow, and they folded their wings to get through. The white spiders would never fit. The green ones could try to squeeze in there, but they would have to enter one at a time, and the wasps would swarm them. 

Second, the wasps could take flight if they detected the assault and simply wait it out. The spiders couldn’t sit by that wasp nest indefinitely, and waiting by it exposed them to the aerial assault.

And third, the entirety of the wall around the nest was sheathed in mauve flowers. Toward the top, where my ledge met the fissure, the wall wasn’t strictly sheer. It broke down into a series of outcroppings, and the mauve flowers clung to the rocks like some deadly African violets. There was no way to approach the nest without going through them.

When one of the white spiders popped out of the highest flower, I had a chance to scan it. They were not immune to the pollen. It would short-circuit their nervous system. The spider herders and the wasps were at a standoff.

When I first stumbled onto the cavern, I got another vision. A group of three spider herders, their veils shifting in the wind of an alien world with a mass of giant spiders behind them; someone with human arms offering a carved wooden box to them; the leading spider herder accepting it; the spiders parting; and a single word spoken: Bekh-razz. A gift for the safe passage.

I would have to offer a gift to cross.

The spiders couldn’t get to the nest, but I could. The ledge I was on curved along the wall all the way to the nest. It was barely seven feet wide near the entrance to the hive. I wouldn’t have a lot of room to work with.

I got up and walked along the ledge toward the fissure.  

Bear dropped her bone and trotted after me. I halted by the first clump of mauve blossoms and flexed.

They glowed with pale lilac. I split the glow into individual layers of light blue and pink. The blue told me they were still mildly toxic to both me and Bear, but nothing our regeneration wouldn’t take care of, and the faint pink let me know that if properly processed, the plant could be used as contact analgesic. Made sense. That’s why we didn’t notice the effect pollen had on us until it was too late.

The wasps displayed hive behavior. I didn’t need a vision to clear that up for me.  It was obvious from their patterns. That meant that the moment I attacked the nest, every wasp would fight to the death to kill me. I had no idea how large that nest was. Or how many giant wasps waited inside. I had to be very sure, because once I started, there was no stopping. Earth wasps were vindictive, and it was safer to assume these would be, too. Even if I ran away, they would chase me through the caves and there was no passage narrow enough to lose them anywhere around this cave.

The nest rumbled.

I dropped to the ground. “Down.”

Bear hugged the ledge with me.

“Good girl,” I whispered.

A large wasp squeezed through the gap and took off, vanishing around the bend. 

I wonder how they know when the eggs are harvested? Do the eggs emit a pulse or something…

A hoarse shriek echoed through the cavern. That was new.

The wasp zipped back toward the nest, carrying another silk-wrapped spider egg in its claws. The egg glowed with coral pink. I flexed, focusing on it, but the wasp was too fast. Half a blink, and it squeezed into the nest.

I’d seen them steal three eggs besides this one, and nobody screamed the first three times. Also, the rest of the eggs glowed with cream, not pink. There was something special about this egg.

This was my best chance. I had to act now or find a different way.

I flicked my wrist, elongating the cuff into a sharp, two-foot blade shaped like a machete. Bear let out a soft, excited whine.

“Shhh.”

I padded through the flowers, my dog trailing me.

This was a foolish plan.

Ten yards to the nest.

Five.

Three.

Something rumbled within the fissure.

I cleared the distance between me and the gap in a single jump.

A wasp thrust out of the gap. I swung the blade and lopped its head off. The blue and yellow body crashed down, and I grabbed it with my left hand, yanked it out of the fissure, and sent it flying to the ground far below.

Bear broke into barks. There goes our element of surprise.

The entire nest buzzed like a tornado spinning into life. Another wasp shot through the fissure, and I cleaved it in half, my sword cutting through the segmented thorax like it was butter.

#

“Sir?”

Elias’ eyes snapped open. Leo hovered in his view.  Elias sat up.

“We found Jackson,” the XO said.

#

Two wasps tried to squeeze through the gap at the same time and got stuck one on top of the other. I twisted the sword into a spike, skewered the top one, because it was closer and let its dead weight push the second wasp down. It struggled, pinned to the ground, and I hacked at it. 

The buzzing was deafening now.  The walls of the fissure vibrated as the enraged hive mobilized for an all-out assault. Next to me Bear barked her head off, flinging spit into the air. She wasn’t just a dog, she was a guild K9, trained to alert when the breach monsters came near. The monsters were here, and she was alerting everyone.

I grabbed the body of the top wasp, pulled it out of the fissure, and hurled it over the edge.

#

“He’s been detained by the authorities in Japan.”

It took Elias a moment to process that tidbit. “On what pretext?”

“They claim he entered a luxury restaurant, ordered a high-quality cut of Wagyu beef, washed it down with Yamazaki Single Malt 55-Year-Old Whisky, which retails for 400K a bottle, and walked out without paying.”

“They’re saying he dined and dashed?”

Leo smiled. Technically, it was a smile, but it looked more like a predator baring his teeth.

#

Bodies clogged the fissure, drenched in hemolymph. I stabbed and hacked into the pile up, yanking chunks of the insects out.

Seven wasps.

Eight.

Twelve.

#

“Jackson? The vegetarian who drinks one beer a year and only under duress?”

“Yes, sir. Our Jackson.”

Elias hid a growl. It was a retaliation for Yosuke.

Two years ago, a star Void Ronin, a top tier Talent, had a falling out with the largest guild in Japan and quit. They blacklisted him. No other guild in the country would hire him. The idea was that the pressure of unemployment would force him to crawl back home. Yosuke called their bluff. Cold Chaos welcomed him into the fold eighteen months ago. He was enroute to Elmwood now from another gate and was due to arrive tomorrow.

Publicly, Hikari no Ryu said nothing. Privately, the guild wielded a lot of power in Japan, and they were pissed. Elias thought that they reached an understanding regarding this matter. Apparently, he was mistaken. It didn’t matter. Elias had never regretted the decision, and he wasn’t about to start now.

“Have they made any demands?” he asked.

“No. Most likely they will hold him and wait for us to come to them.”

Guild politics were convoluted and cutthroat. It didn’t matter which continent. Elias had dealt with worse nonsense stateside plenty of times. But there was an unspoken rule all guilds followed – healers were exempt from all of the political bullshit. They were off limits. You didn’t poach them, you didn’t threaten them, and you didn’t retaliate against them. They chose who they worked for, and if you got a good one, you did everything you could to keep them.

Someone in Japan had just crossed a very dangerous line.

“How would you like to proceed?” Leo asked.

“I’ll make some calls.”

#

The nest lay silent.

Bear was still barking.

“Quiet.”

The shepherd clamped her mouth shut. I listened for the buzzing.

Nothing.

“Stay, Bear. Stay. Stay!”

Bear sat down.

I’d killed twelve smaller wasps, probably workers, and five larger wasps, probably guards. Back home wasp colonies had a queen. She was usually larger than the workers and the guards, and if that held true here, she was trapped within the nest.

I slipped into the fissure, moving slowly and quietly. It was about ten feet deep. Beyond that, the passage widened into another cave chamber steeped in gloom and dappled with pools of pale light coming from above. I flexed. One hundred and twelve yards to the other wall. A lot of open space, and the floor was unnaturally clear. The wasps must’ve removed all of the debris that originally littered the chamber. Once I exited the fissure, I would be exposed.

A step.

Another.

A whisper of something large shifting its weight on the right, just outside the passageway.  I had expected the wasp to strike from above, but it sounded like it was on the ground instead.

I stopped, poised on my toes. My fingers trembled. Fear filled me. I was overflowing with it.

Another faint whisper. The wasp was waiting just feet away, ready to ambush me the moment I entered. I had to rely on speed.

I darted into the nest, angling to the left. A shadow fell over me and I dove forward, rolled, and came back to my feet.

A massive wasp bore down on me. It was as big as a bus, riding on six huge, segmented legs, each armed with two chitin claws the size of sickles.

Crap.

The wasp charged me. It wasn’t flying. It ran across the floor, straight at me, swiping at me with its terrible claws. I darted back and forth like a terrified rabbit.

Right, left, left, too many fucking legs, right…

The wasp swiped at me like a hockey player armed with deadly scythes. It was trying to skewer me and drag me to its terrible mouth where two sets of sharp mandibles would shred the flesh off my bones and rip me apart.

The world shrank to the stone floor of the cavern, the pools of light, and the horrible creature behind me. All my instincts screamed in panic. I had to run away. I had to run from this thing back through the fissure, but I couldn’t find it. The walls were a dizzying whirlwind.

 I was out of breath. I was disoriented. I couldn’t even think long enough to come up with a plan. All I could do was run for my life. Running wouldn’t work for too much longer. I would die here, in this nest.  

Something dark and shaggy shot out of the wall. Before my brain processed what it was, Bear charged at the wasp.

“No! Bear, no!”

The German Shepherd clamped her jaws on one of the wasp’s middle legs. The insect shook it and flung Bear off.

“No!”

One of the wasp’s legs sliced like a scythe. I saw it coming. I had stopped running because of Bear and now it was too late. I jerked back, but not fast enough. The blow swept me off my feet. I rolled across the floor, pain smashing into my side. The wasp reared above me. Its front leg came down like a hammer. One of the two claws pierced my right thigh, scraping the bone.

Bear leaped out from the side and bit the leg impaling me. The wasp queen didn’t even notice. The other claw clamped on my other leg. The ragged chitin sank into my flesh. I felt myself being lifted, up to where the horrible mandibles clicked.

No.

I sliced at the wasp leg pinning me. My sword cut through chitin like it was a twig. The wasp recoiled. I yanked the severed stump out of my thigh and rolled to my feet.

Fuck this shit. Why the hell was I running?

Bear snarled next to me.

The wasp swiped at me with its uninjured front leg. It was huge and fast, but I was faster. I leaned out of the way. The leg carved through the spot where I had been. The wasp swiped again, and I stepped back again, just out of reach.

Strike, dodge. Strike, dodge. It couldn’t touch me.

I flexed, stretching time like a rubber band, forcing my senses into overdrive. The uninjured front leg struck at me, slow like molasses. I cut it, dashed under the wasp, severing the other legs with quick strikes as I sprinted past, and emerged behind the monster insect. A second and it was over. The world restarted, and the queen crashed to the floor, the stumps of her legs jerking in wild spasms.

Bear howled.

I took a running start and jumped. My leap carried me through the air, and I landed on the queen’s fat abdomen and dashed toward her head.

The queen’s huge wings stirred. It was trying to fly.

I slipped on the narrow waist connecting the abdomen and thorax, caught myself, leaped onto the thorax, and scrambled onto her neck.

The wings hummed and blurred like the blades of a helicopter. A gust of wind buffeted me.

I drove my sword into the queen’s neck. It sank through, and I ripped it to the side, carving through the exoskeleton. The queen’s head drooped, and I chopped at the thin filament connecting it to the body.

The head crashed down.

The wings kept going. The headless body rose in the air, carrying me with it. I clung to it. The wasp corpse climbed twenty feet up…

The wings slowed.

The body fell slowly, careened, and landed in a heap. I jumped, rolled to break my fall, and came up in a crouch.

The queen was dead.

#

Elias put away his phone.

“Nice.” Leo grinned.

“They wanted a fight. We gave them a fight.”

All they had to do now was wait.

The post The Inheritance: The Rest of Chapter 7 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I received a surprising number of questions regarding my hair. I’ve addressed it on Facebook, but a lot of people don’t use it. I color my hair because I’m going grey. A lot of people look lovely with grey hair. I’m not one of them. I’ve tried to grow it out and it is terrible on me. My mother was blond, so you would think it would work, but I guess I lean more into my dad’s side of the family.

Anyway, I usually go to a salon and this time I asked for a slightly different color. Everything seemed fine for a few of weeks. I was distracted by work and other things and the hair was the last thing on my mind.

Then we needed a new author picture because ours was too old. And we needed it it kind of quickly because of the UK press release, so I decided that I should probably recolor the hair. As I was examining my lackluster hair in the mirror, I realized that I have a lock of hair that is two inches longer than the rest of what I could see. That was not normal.

I made an appointment at a different salon. They were able to fit me in quickly, so I was really happy about it. I came in, sat down int he chair, the stylist looked at my head and said, “There is extensive damage.”

My hair broke off. We are not sure what went wrong. She thought a wrong developer might have been used by mistake. Anyway, four inches of hair had to go.

Here I am with preliminary cut, looking kind of alarmed. As you can see, I am in my hedge witch era here.

I texted Gordon and told him my hair will be short. He asked if I was getting a “Can I talk to the manager?” haircut. I asked my stylist and she said, “Of course, not.”

I think the hair really turned out. I love the color. I miss the length, but it is healthy, light, and I can still ponytail it.

Here it is in the author pics:

The last time I had my hair this short, I was 12. I was worried about what would happen if it naturally dried, but it’s not too bad. I will just have to style it a bit more for the formal meetings.

And that is the hair saga.

PS. If you are looking for a good salon in San Marcos, Salon MINK is awesome. Ask for Jessica.

The post The Hair Calamity first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

We are delighted to officially announce that THIS KINGDOM WILL NOT KILL ME – Maggie the Undying volume 1 has found a home with Tor UK.

Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is delighted to announce the acquisition of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, an extraordinary epic fantasy by bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews. Publisher Bella Pagan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Chris Scheina at Tor US for this and two further novels in this trilogy.

The official press release is here.

We are super excited to work with Tor UK. This means more buying options for the UK Horde, like Waterstones, a wider distribution, and a greater availability of the book in ebook and in print. No more waiting for weeks for the books to arrive from the US. No more cancelled orders due to “lack of availability.” Massive win there.

Furthermore, this edition will be specifically geared toward UK readers, and Tor UK is known for releasing beautiful books. They are also known for publishing unusual, out-of-the-box fiction, which means This Kingdom will be in excellent hands. While portal fantasy/isekai trope dominates in anime and comic format, there haven’t been that many attempts to bring it into the literally world, so we are very grateful Tor UK took a chance on it.

Also, we’ve interacted by email, and they are so nice to work with.

On a personal note, neither Gordon nor I believe ourselves to be legendary. We are just very happy that we finally have a UK publisher committed to supporting our books in such a big way.

This brings me to the slightly more bothersome news.

This Kingdom Begs Forgiveness From the UK Horde

This part of the post is for READERS WHO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK.

If you reside in US and/or order from Amazon.com, none of the stuff below applies to you. Your preorders are NOT affected.

If you have preordered This Kingdom on Amazon UK, you probably noticed that your preorder has been cancelled and funds have been refunded. This means that any Amazon UK customers who preordered This Kingdom will need to re-preorder the book.

Before any further explanations, here is the correct Amazon UK link and well as the Waterstones one:

Amazon UK Waterstones

The price is exactly the same. Tor UK was most gracious about making sure that everything matched and the Horde would not lose out.

Why did this happen?

This is one of those cases where the problem is unavoidable, and it’s nobody’s fault. The foreign rights sale process for US titles usually goes like so:

• US publisher acquires the book
• The book is edited
• US publisher formally accepts the manuscript after edits
• The book is presented to foreign (from US point of view) publishers
• Foreign publishers read the book and, hopefully, make an offer to purchase it for their territory

Sometimes a book is really hot, and everybody bids on it sight unseen, but most of the time this is how the foreign sales happen. On the US side, there is a delay between initial signing of the contract and the actual acceptance of the book, which can be months or sometimes years.

Tor US bought This Kingdom 1 year and 4 months ago, in February 2024. Tor UK didn’t have a chance to read the manuscript until this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s US listing went on sale and naturally flowed to Amazon UK. This is standard procedure, because if the foreign rights are not sold in the UK, at least the readers who order from Amazon UK would have a chance to purchase the book from the US.

We are so sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. There was no way to prevent it, but we deeply apologize all the same.

On a personal note, we are so excited for this partnership. If the book does well, maybe we will finally make it over to the UK to meet all of you. Fingers crossed.

The post This Kingdom Finds Home in the UK first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Flex.

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

Chomp, chomp…

“Will you please quit doing that?”

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

“I mean it.”

She licked her lips.

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

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

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

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

 Fuck it.

I nodded at the stream. “Go get it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mmm, raw alien meat.

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

“Stalker. It’s what’s for dinner.”

Bear panted.

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

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

This meat was raw. Not rare. Just raw.

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

Bear chewed on the stalker ham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d become aware of the anchor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good to go?”

The dog waved her tail.

Maybe we could take a breather…

The cave wall by Bear’s poop moved.

“Come!” I barked.

Bear ran over to me.

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

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

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

I backed away.

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden Legacy in Dutch.

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

Verschijningsdatum: 17-07-2025

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

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

Click to Preorder

The Inheritance Release Date

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

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

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

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

This Kingdom Needs an Astronomer

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

The post Housekeeping Saturday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London went pale.

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

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

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

The words hung between them.

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

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

“I would have tried.”

“And you would have died.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened next?” Elias pressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London unlocked his teeth. “No.”

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

“I would have collapsed the north access tunnels.”

“Why didn’t you?”

London grimaced. “It wasn’t my call.”

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

Elias glanced at Leo. Now.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“I did.”

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

It was all pouring out.  They broke him.  

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

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

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

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

Nobody said anything.

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

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

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

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

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

“It wasn’t the gold,” Leo muttered.

“It wasn’t.”

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

No, this problem ran deeper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Agreed,” Leo said.

“Did you find Jackson?” Elias asked.

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will, sir.”

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

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

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

Me: Who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look how cute he is at his picnic table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regeneration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear licked the hat clean and looked at me.

“More?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danger.

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

The vision faded.

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

The shepherd wagged her tail.

“Yes, I don’t know either.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost there.

One step at a time. Almost made it.

Just a little further.

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

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

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

It burned like battery acid.

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

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

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

Tears wet my eyes. 

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

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

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

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

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

The shepherd looked at me.

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

I stroked her fur with trembling fingers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The relief had been indescribable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I reached out to take his hand.

He shifted away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“I felt relief. A burden lifted.”

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

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

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

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

“I think you’re still in shock.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Not this.”

“Ah.”

“Not anymore.”

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

“No.”

The word lashed me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What am I supposed to tell the kids?”

“Whatever you want.”

He got up and went inside.

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

I stroked Bear’s fur.   

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

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

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

Another shudder twisted me.

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

I gritted my teeth.

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

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

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

This post is all about audio.

Maggie Audio

This Kingdom is getting an audio release, and we are being asked about our input. We R Excite!

If you have a favorite narrator who is suitable to voice a 25 year old woman and does great male voices, lay your suggestions on us in the comment section. We are looking for a new to us narrator, so not someone who has voiced a lot of our work.

Inheritance Audio

The Inheritance Audio is in the works. We are right now looking at a split narration for Ada and Elias. This adds additional hoops for us. Because of the scheduling issues, the ebook and print copy of The Inheritance will likely come out a lot earlier than the audio. It’s hard to book narrators on shorty notice. But have no fear, the audio will be released.

AI Audio

On May 13th, The Guardian published an article regarding Audible use of Ai voices.

“We are bringing new audiobooks to life through our own fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology,” reads the announcement on Audible’s website. There are two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible’s AI technology.

Both options will allow publishers to choose from more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French and Italian to narrate their books. AI translation of audiobooks is expected to be available later in the year.

We will not be picking up that option. All of our narrators are human. This is why it takes so long for audio to come out sometimes.

Rogan POV audio

We are aware that Rogan POV didn’t make it into GA edition. No worries, we are working on it and hopefully you will be getting the extras with the next couple of releases.

The post Can Your Hear Me Now? first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Before anything else: MAGIC TRIUMPHS is out from Graphic Audio today. Yay!

Gordon’s surgery went well. We got home safe yesterday and today he is in the home gym, working the shoulder as the doctor instructed. The doctor was pleased and saw no additional need to do anything beyond the expected scope of the surgery. Gordon was very put out yesterday because they did a nerve block and he couldn’t move the arm.

The first thing my husband did when I pulled into the garage is squint at the trashcans on the curb, left there since Monday was the trash day. I told him that I would take care of the trashcans, so I got out and headed for the recycling bin. I pulled it back behind the wall and here is my husband dragging the other trashcan back.

I made him coffee and bought yummy Krispy Creme doughnuts and got him a strawberry shake because his throat hurt. He did things like pick up the dog and pick up packages. Apparently, “a man has to do things” instead of sitting on the couch resting his arm in a sling like he is supposed to.

I stressed out a lot about the surgery. We came in at 7:00 am, as instructed, at 9:45 am they took him away, and I went into the waiting room, where the patients were represented by numbers on the screen. Each number had a color code that informed you what stage of the surgery the patient was at. It was supposed to be a short surgery. When I got there, his name had a green code meaning that he was in surgery. 10, 11, 11:30… Then I get a text. Surgery is starting. By 1:00 pm I was kind of a basket case and I bought some yarn I shouldn’t have bought in a moment of stress. I need to block Wendy’s Wonders.

Anyway, we are home and it’s back to the writing. And admin. So much admin.

I have a fun challenge for you. This is a rough sketch of an actual intersection in a major US city courtesy of Candice Slater. Some creative liberties were taken with the height of the building, but other than that, it is right out of Google Maps. It’s an interesting intersection, because there is a pancake restaurant in that red building on the left and an IHOP over there under the blue roof.

There are some clues in The Inheritance as the the general location. More clues will be give in the upcoming installment. The first person to recognize this intersection and name the cross street will get a character named after them in The Inheritance. The character maybe a hero or a villain. Comments on the blog only, please. Have fun!

Edit Mod R: Winners have found the answer, in approximately 15 seconds! Congratulations, JoAnne and Anton, sharing the prize! The Horde is unmatched, Interpol should either hire us or watch us, not sure hehe.

The post Name That Street first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Bonus points for correctly identifying the popular culture reference.

Drishya Chandran blinked her big brown eyes. On paper, she was twenty-one. To Elias, she looked about fifteen at most. 

It’s not that the kids are getting younger; it’s that I’m getting older.

“I’m sorry,” Drishya said. “I honestly didn’t see anything.”

They had commandeered the Elmwood Public Library and through the glass window of the conference room Elias could see the gate looming like a dark hungry mouth, bathed in the glow of the floodlights. No matter how many lives they threw into it, it would never be enough. It was past one in the morning, and he was out of coffee.

“Walk me through it one more time,” he said.

“The drill head jammed,” Drishya said. “I showed it to Melissa. She said to go get the new one from the cart in the tunnel. I went to get it. The next thing I know Wagner is running out of the tunnel, and Melissa is behind him, and her face doesn’t look right. I’m like okay, I guess we are doing that now, so I turned around and ran to the gate. I heard an explosion behind us, so I didn’t look back. I didn’t even know London made it until I was out.”

“Why was the cart in the tunnel and not at the site?” Elias asked.

“It didn’t fit. The site slopes to the stream and there wasn’t a lot of flat ground, so we could only get three of the four carts in.” Drishya counted off on her fingers. “Cart One had the generator, lights, and first aid, so it had to come in. Carts Two and Three were for the ore. Adamantite is heavy, so we didn’t want to carry it too far. Cart Four with the spare parts had to live outside.”

“So there was adamantite at the site?” He’d read Leo’s notes of Melissa’s interview, but it seemed almost unbelievable that so much adamantite could exist in one place.

“Oh yes. That’s how my drill broke. Chipped off a chunk this big.” Drishya held her hands out as if lifting an invisible basketball.

“Was the adamantite in plain view?”

The miner shook her head. “No. Buried, and half of it underwater. It took the DeBRA about 10 minutes to find it. She had to mark it with paint for us.”

Was this why they were attacked? Was something protecting the ore?

Drishya sighed. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Everyone is dead.”

“It is, and they are,” Elias confirmed.

“I knew we would get a big bonus when we found the gold, and then the DeBRA came up with adamantite. I was so excited. I thought I could finally put a deposit on the house. My mom isn’t doing so well. I’ve got to get us out of the apartment, and I’m the only one working.”

Gold? What gold? “I’m sorry your mother is in bad health, and that you had to go through this trauma. You may want to see Dr. Park. He has a room set up downstairs.”

“I’m okay. I didn’t see any of it,” Drishya said. “I’ve only been working for 6 months. I didn’t even know people that well…”

He’d seen this before. Some people grieved when faced with death, others got angry, and some tried to disconnect themselves from what happened.

“I understand,” he said. “Still, it might be a good idea. You’ve lost colleagues in a sudden traumatic way. Things like that can fester.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“So how much gold was there?”

“A lot. It was everywhere in the water, like rocks. We weren’t even drilling; we were pulling it out by hand. Nuggets the size of an apple. We ended up dumping like fifty pounds of it to make room for the adamantite, and we’d been only gathering it for about five minutes.”

“I see. I appreciate your help, Ms. Chandran. The guild is grateful for your assistance. Please get some rest.”

She got up and paused. “You are a lot less scary than I thought you would be.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Just so you know, Wagner told me not to talk to you.”

Elias raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He said that miners don’t go into the breaches with guildmasters. They go with escort captains. He said it was something to keep in mind.”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

She nodded and walked out.

Elias pulled up the interview notes on his tablet. Neither Melissa nor London said anything about the gold. Malcolm wouldn’t have seen the adamantite, but gold was an entirely different beast.

Was it just gold? Was that it? He’d been wracking his brain, trying to find the reason for the lapse in procedure, having this back and forth with Leo, wondering what he was missing, and all this time, the answer was depressingly simple. Well, no shit, Sherlock, here it is. Greed.

He had put so many regulations and checks in place, and somehow greed always won. He was so fucking tired. Things were much simpler in the breach. The enemy was in front, the support was behind, and he didn’t have to wade through the swamp of human failings. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room and into his armor. He had a powerful urge to slice something with his sword.

Leo appeared in the open doorway like a wraith manifesting, met his gaze, and stepped back.

“Come inside and shut the door,” Elias growled.

Leo came in and closed the door behind him.

“Sit.”

Leo sat.

“Why do baby miners think I’m scary?”

“Because you are, sir. Most people find a man who can cut a car in a half with a single strike and then throw the pieces at you frightening.”

“Hmm.”

“Also we offer the highest pay and the best benefits among the top tier guilds, and you are their boss who holds their livelihood in his gauntleted fingers…”

Elias raised his hand. “Did you know there was gold at the mining site?”

Leo’s eyes flashed with white. “I did not.”

“Apparently it was in the water. Nuggets the size of apples. Finally, I know something before you do.”

“Congratulations, sir.”

Elias let that go, pulled up the map of the site on his tablet, and pointed at the three tunnels, each carrying a current of water that merged into a single stream. “Gold washes downstream.”

“Malcolm left the tunnels open because he wanted to maximize the profit from the site.”  Leo’s face snapped into a hard flat mask. “He must’ve expected that once they cleared the site, they would gather more gold upstream.

“Remind me, how much did Malcolm make last year?”

“Seven million.”

“I want to know why gold got him so excited that he risked nineteen lives by leaving the tunnels unsecured.”

“Nineteen?” Leo frowned. “The mining crew, the escort, the DeBRA…”

“And the dog.”

“Oh.”

“Malcolm took a significant risk. That’s not just greed. That’s desperation. How are his finances?”

“Squeaky clean as of the last audit, which was two months ago. Credit score of 810, low debt to assets, less than 10K owed on credit cards. I’m following up on a couple of things. We should know more in a few hours. Do you want me to get Wagner in to talk to you?”

“He won’t tell me anything. Wagner is forty-nine years old. He was a coal miner before the gates appeared, and we are his third guild. He’s used to getting screwed over by his bosses.”

“So, he developed an adversarial relationship with us despite fair treatment,” Leo said.  “Seems counterintuitive.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of treatment he gets. He’s cooked. He doesn’t trust us, he will never trust us, and he will always resent us no matter how many benefits he gets.”

“That’s not even logical.”

“It isn’t. It’s an ingrained emotional response. Trust me, we won’t get anything out of him. I’d like you to reinterview Melissa instead. As you said, I’m scary, so she may do better with you. Don’t be confrontational. Be sympathetic and understanding. Make it us against the government: we need to tell the DDC something and we need her help to make them go away. Imply that her cooperation will be remembered and appreciated.”

Leo nodded. “Should I bring up the families?”

Elias shook his head. “Normally the foreman would be the last to get out, just before the escorts. She was at the head of the pack. Either she was incredibly lucky, or she abandoned her crew and ran for her life. Either way, there is guilt there. If you lean too hard on it, she might shut down. Go with ‘you were just doing your job, and we don’t blame you for surviving’ instead. Get her a coffee, get some cookies, interview her in a comfortable setting, and see if she thaws and starts talking. If she goes off on a tangent, let her. Don’t rush. You are her friend; you are there to listen.”

Leo nodded. “Will do.”

“Did Haze get the children?”

“Yes. They’ve just arrived at HQ. I still don’t think this is wise.”

Twenty-eight people died in the breach. Fourteen members of the assault crew, nine miners, four escorts, and Adaline Moore. Twelve of the deceased left behind minor children. Of all of them, only Adaline Moore’s kids had no immediate family to take care of them.

The media devoured any news related to the guilds and gates, and the death of a prominent DeBRA would set off fireworks. Once the news broke, Adaline’s children would become the center of a news cycle. They would be overwhelmed, used, wrung dry for the sake of the cheap emotional punch, and then abandoned to their grief. If they were lucky, the country would forget they existed. If they were unlucky, someone would take note of two vulnerable orphans with a million-dollar life insurance payout.

“I will not allow Adaline’s children to be fed to the media circus,” Elias said. “They are safer at the Guild HQ. DDC hasn’t made any notifications yet, but we both know it will get out. I don’t need some asshole showing up at their door, sticking a microphone into their faces, and asking how they feel about their mother dying. All Haze told them was that Adaline is missing in the breach. They will find out what happened from me, personally.”

He would take care of that in the morning.

“Adaline Moore would have made provisions,” Leo said.

“I’m sure she did. Until we know what they are, we will take care of it.”

“This will be seen as Cold Chaos controlling access to the children because we have something to hide. We are trying to minimize the media’s attention, but they love conspiracies. In an effort to keep the story small, we may end up making it bigger.”

“That’s fine. If they want to paint us as the villain of that story, let them. We will survive. We are the third largest guild in the country.”

Leo sighed quietly.

“I called Felicia,” Elias told him.

Felicia Terrell was a powerhouse attorney, and she specialized in guild-related litigation. He spoke to her two hours ago. She called him a marshmallow and promised to show up first thing in the morning. The children would be well protected from everyone, including Cold Chaos.

Elias leaned back. He was so over it. As soon as he hammered the assault team together, he would enter the gate. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room. There was no politics in the breach.

Leo was still sitting in the chair. Some other problem must’ve reared its ugly head.

“Lay it on me,” Elias said.

“We can’t find Jackson.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find him?”

“He was supposed to fly out of Tokyo twenty minutes ago. He didn’t make it to the plane, and he isn’t answering his phone. I’m on it.”

Jackson was arguably the best healer in the US. He didn’t drink, he didn’t do drugs, and his biggest vice was collecting expensive bonsai. The man did not go AWOL. Jackson was always where he was supposed to be. He was calm, competent, powerful, and respected wherever he went, because he did things like walk into other guilds’ gates and rescue their assault teams from disaster when asked. Nothing could happen to Jackson.

“Do whatever you have to do, but find him, Leo.”

The XO nodded. “I will.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

The rollercoaster note is still in effect: this will be a scary ride, but it will arrive safely. Ada is not a pushover.

Something was wrong with Bear.

We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels. Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all. I was so worn down, I could barely move. My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.

Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.

Bear whined and fell.

Oh god.

I dropped on my knees by her. “What is it?”

The shepherd looked up at me, her eyes puzzled and trusting.

I flexed, focusing on her body, concentrating all of my power on her. What was it? Blood loss, infection…

The faint outline of Bear’s body glowed with pale green, which told me nothing. I had to push deeper. I focused my power into a thin scalpel and used it to slice through the surface glow.

It resisted.

I sliced harder.

Harder!

It  broke, splintering vertically into layers, and I punched through it. It was almost like falling through the floor to a lower level.

Bear’s body lit up with pale blue, the glow tracing her nerves, her blood vessels, and her organs. I had never before been able to do that, but that didn’t matter now.

Toxin. She was filled with it. I saw it, tiny flecks glowing brighter as they coursed through her like some deadly glitter. I had to find the origin of it. Was it from a stalker bite? No, the concentration of poison wasn’t dense there. Then what was it? Where was it the highest?

Her lungs. That fucking glitter saturated her lungs, slipping into her bloodstream with every breath. I had to go deeper. I pushed with my power. Before, it was like trying to slice through glass. Now it felt like punching through solid rock, and I hammered at it.

The top layer of the blue glow cracked, revealing a slightly different shade of blue underneath. I hit it again and again, locked onto the glitter with every drop of willpower I had.

The tiny specks expanded into spheres. What the hell was that?

I pounded on the glow, trying to enlarge it. The spheres came into greater focus. They weren’t uniformly round; they had four lobes clumped together and studded with spikes.

What are you? Where did you come from?

A flash of white cut my vision. I went blind. It lasted only a moment, but I knew I hit a wall. I wasn’t going any deeper. I would have to work at this level.

I blinked, trying to reacquire my vision.

My thighs were glowing with blue.

I jerked my hands up. Pale glitter swirling through my arms and fingers. This dust, this thing was inside me too, and I couldn’t identify it.

We were both infected, and it was killing us.

Panic drenched me in icy sweat. I wanted to rip a hole in my legs and just force the glitter out.

Bear whined softly like a puppy.

I was losing her. She trusted me, she followed me, and she fought with me, and now she was dying.

“You can’t die, Bear. Hold on. Please hold on for me.”

Bear licked my hand.

The urge to scream my head off gripped me. Wailing wouldn’t help. If only I could identify the poison.

Why couldn’t I identify it? Was it because it was inside us and it had become part of us? Or was I just not strong enough to differentiate it from our blood? It had started in the lungs, so we must have inhaled it.

I took a deep breath and exhaled on my hands.

There it was! A trace of the lethal glitter. I focused on it. The four-lobes spiked clumps, swirling, swirling… Something inside me connected, and I saw a faint image in my mind. The mauve flowers. We had been poisoned by their pollen.

I flexed harder, stabbing at the pollen with my talent. The tiny flecks opened up into a layered picture in my mind, and the top layer showed how toxic it was…

Oh god.

We were almost out of time. We needed an antidote. Now.

I strained, trying to access whatever power lay inside me, the same one that showed me the Grasping Hand and gave me the stalkers’ name. It didn’t answer.

Please. Please help me.

Nothing.

We would die right here, in this tunnel. I knew it, I could picture it, me wrapped around Bear, hugging her as we both grew cold…

No. There had to be an answer. We hadn’t come all this way to lay down and die. We did not kill and fight all these damn stalkers –

The stalkers. The stalkers went to the lake to drink. The flowers were all over the shore, but the stalkers had died because the lake dragon had torn them apart. The flowers didn’t poison them.

I jumped to my feet and ran to the nearest corpse. My talent reached out and grasped the body. There was pollen on the fur and on the muzzle and a faint smudge in the lungs, but none anywhere else. Not a trace in the blood. They were immune.

The poison had to be eliminated in the bloodstream. If it was purged in the liver or any other organ, there would’ve been traces of it in the blood vessels but there were none.

I flipped the stalker on its back, shaped my sword into a knife, and stabbed the corpse, slicing it from the neck to the groin. Bloody wet innards spilled out. I dug in the mush, pushing slippery tissue aside until I found the hard sack of the heart. I carved it out and pulled the bloody clump free.

Flex.

The heart glowed with blue. Toxic. It would poison us, too, but there was a slim chance we could make it. It was the difference of might-be-dead from the stalker heart or definitely-dead from the pollen. We didn’t have hours, we had minutes. The heart had to be the answer.

I put it on a flat rock and minced the tough muscle into near mush. I scooped a handful of the bloody mess and staggered over to Bear.

She was still breathing. There was still a chance.

I pried her jaws open and shoved a clump of the stalker mince into her throat. She gulped and gagged. I held her mouth closed.

“Swallow, please swallow…”

Bear gulped again. Yes. It went down.

“What a good girl. The best girl. One more time. Let’s get a little more in there.”

I forced two more handfuls into her and flexed. The concentration of pollen in her stomach dimmed. I had no idea if the immune agent in the stalker blood would spread or if it would be broken down by stomach acid. It didn’t matter. We were all out of choices.

Bear let out a soft, weak howl, almost a gasp. It must have hurt.

“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you if there was any other way.”

If I ate the heart now, there was no telling what it would do to me. I could pass out right here, and we would both become stalker dinner.

About twenty minutes ago we had walked by a narrow stone bridge that spanned a deep cavern. There had been a depression at the other end, a little cave within the cave. I’d thought it would be a good place to rest, because the stalkers could only come at us one by one, but I had wanted to get out of the tunnels. At the time, it seemed better to just keep moving. It seemed like forever ago, but it had just happened. We had to find a place to hide, and that was the closest safe spot I could think.

I should be able to find the bridge again. I just had to follow the trail of bodies and make it there before the poison got me.

I picked Bear up. She felt so heavy, impossibly heavy.

I spun around and trudged back the way we came.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 5 Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I have a weird feeling this week. It’s like I overlooked something or forgot some bill, and I keep checking to see what I missed and can’t find it. And it’s Thursday already. How? How?

Gordon’s surgery is next week. They will clean the scar tissue from his shoulder, and he will have to immediately go into physical therapy. If we miss an Inheritance installment, that’s probably why. Hopefully we will stay on track. I am going to try to get the next three posts lined up so Mod R can just click Publish and then do the hard work of moderating.

To people asking about craft projects: I haven’t been able to knit or crochet because the hands are not cooperating. Especially the wrist rotation with the hook is a no go. I haven’t been able to see a neurologist either. I can’t even get on the schedule. It is a bit frustrating. Okay, it’s very frustrating.

I need to get back to workouts. I chickened out this week because we are having a heat wave. It’s overcast today and it cooled off to 96, wooo! We were at 101F (38C) yesterday. It’s hot and humid. I think lifting weights was helping a little or maybe it’s my imagination.

Since I can’t knit or crochet, I’ve been trying to play a little bit of computer games, although I have to limit that, too. Both Planet Crafter and the Enshrouded are releasing updates: the Enshrouded one already came out, and the Planet Crafter is coming on 16 or 19th.

I have been playing the Humble expansion in Planet Crafter in preparation for the expansion. It’s a neat game where you are a convict dropped off on a barren rock of a planet, and the only way to escape is to terraform it into a garden planet.

Right now I’m breeding butterflies in different colors. The game is pretty, although Humble isn’t my favorite. I like a lot of water at my base locations, and the centrally located lake is more like a puddle.

My butterflies! My bees! Zeolite crystal mining site Cool Sinkhole. There is a cave behind the large waterfall.

The new update is supposed to let you terraform more moons in this alien solar system. I’m excite!

Finally, we have gotten a couple of puzzled comments – mostly from international readers – regarding the widespread use of dishwashers in US. About 75% of US households have them. They are convenient, and we are encouraged to purchase them because they use less water. A typical modern dishwasher will use 3-4 gallons for a load of dishes, while washing the same load by hand uses 15-27 gallons. It also saves energy, because most people wash their dishes in hot water and heating that water adds up. To that one commenter who wondered why an off-the-grid home in the Southwest would need one – their water is likely limited. They are trying to conserve their resources. A small dishwasher can ran off solar, and washing dishes is not optional.

To the person who is now vigorously typing how their handwashing never uses that much water: Having a dishwasher doesn’t make you lazy, not having one doesn’t make you a dirty planet polluter. It’s a convenient appliance. Some people have space for it, some don’t, and there is no reason to have a moral superiority battle over it.

I’m trying to figure out what to read next. LitRPG is my new military SF. I usually read outside of the genre I’m working on and I’m unlikely to ever write a strict LitRPG. I am sadly out of the Azarinth Healer. I have Bushido Online in my library for some reason. Maybe I will try that one next.

The post Life and Other Dishes first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.