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Tenesha McGuire invites her great-grandmother to join an excursion to London’s Imperial War Museum. Tenesha, a chaperone for some high school students on their senior trip, wants her great-grandmother to tell them the fascinating stories of the London Blitz.

But her great-grandmother won’t accompany her—too many bad memories. Memories that surprise Tenesha. Memories that will help her create a few of her own.

“The Blitz Experience” is free on this website for one week only. The story is also available in the Fantasy Bundle of Bundles Storybundle, in the volume Faerie Justice Bundle: A Storybundle Special Edition, which combines all of the Faerie Justice stories and short novels so far. You will also get with other bundle of bundles from fourteen different authors. Lots and lots of reading there. You’ll get 47 ebooks for about $2 per book. Or, if you’re feeling minimalist, you can get your own standalone copy of the story at any retailer or pick up a copy here. Enjoy!

The Blitz ExperienceKristine Kathryn RuschTenesha McGuire towers over her great-grandmother Littleton. Tenesha’s great-grandmother, whom she has called Grand since childhood, used to be the tall one. In fact, Tenesha can’t quite believe that the short but sturdy woman before her is Grand. They haven’t seen each other since Tenesha graduated from high school—and that is six years now—but still, no one should change quite that much.

They stand awkwardly in the living room of Grand’s house. The living room, at least, hasn’t changed. It’s narrow, with a small fireplace and furniture littered with handmade quilts and pillows. The end tables are the same—square spindly things that her great-grandfather had made as a young man—covered with a sheet of glass so that no one can ruin the surface.

This living room was always a place of excitement for Tenesha. Here, she first imagined World War II—practically seeing how suffering Londoners survived. She heard tales of kings from Henry the Eighth to the Edward the Eighth, who married an American divorcee and stepped down. History came alive here, and Tenesha still loves this living room—small as it now seems—for giving her that gift.

The living room smells of tea, old socks, and some kind of ointment, just like it always has. The only difference now is a flat-screen television in place of the old console model that once stood in front of the picture window.

“Come along,” Grand says. Her voice is the same. Strong and veddy veddy British—not quite the posh, clipped tones of the Queen, but reflecting a strong upper-class education. “Let’s have some tea.”

She meant the mid-afternoon meal that the British insist upon. Tenesha has never understood how the British have managed to keep their figures while eating four meals per day, one of them mostly made up of baked goods and sweets. Americans have gone to fat, all except a diligent few like her, and they don’t have as many scheduled mealtimes.

Even though she lived in London from the ages of six to eight, England seems foreign to her. She isn’t sure why. She also spent summers here until she graduated from high school. But each June when she arrived, she had to reacclimatize herself to all the little differences.

At least this time, she doesn’t have to deal with Grand’s neighbors. They always tut-tut when they see her, as if they can’t believe she and Grand are related. Tenesha looks like a lighter version of her father. She has his brown eyes and curly brown hair, but her skin isn’t conventionally white or black. Grand’s neighbors would often ask Tenesha if she was Greek or Italian. She would answer that she was American, which irritated Grand.

You must never forget who your people are, Grand would say. You come from good British stock.

And good American stock. Her father was born in Chicago, and still lived there, loving its blunt sameness. He rarely came to England with the family, preferring to stay in Chicago.

Grand has papery white skin, so pale that her veins show bluely through it. Her eyes are, even now, a vivid blue, and she has the Kewpie doll lips so in vogue when she was a girl.

Tenesha and Grand look nothing alike, but Grand has always insisted that the only person in the family who takes after her is Tenesha.

No one—not even Tenesha—can see the connection. But it still pleases her whenever Grand says it.

Grand hasn’t said it this visit. Not that they have had much time. Tenesha is on a strict schedule. For the first time, she’s acting as a chaperon. She agreed to help her best friend, Kara Edwards, with a class of high school students on their senior class trip.

Tenesha hadn’t thought it would be so much work. This is the first afternoon Tenesha has to herself. Grand knew she was coming and also knew they wouldn’t have a lot of time together, and Grand says she’s all right with that.

Tenesha isn’t. Money is tight. She expected that. She majored in history, and as her advisor said, no one majors in history and expects to be suitably employed upon graduation—even if they graduated magna cum laude, like she did.

Tenesha did manage to find work as a researcher for a well-known historian, on the very campus that she had just graduated from. But the job barely covers her bills—which includes the minimum payments on the $100,000 in student loans. That kind of money would make Grand gasp.

“Life is all the education I ever needed,” Grand used to say. Then her eyes would twinkle. “But the world was different back then.”

Tenesha slips into the kitchen, with its dowdy cabinets and dull white appliances. Grand is pouring hot water from a kettle that she has used all of Tenesha’s life. The teapot Grand is pouring the water into, however, looks new.

Grand’s hands, gnarled with age and arthritis, don’t shake. Her back is straight—something rare in a ninety-year-old woman. She sets the pot in the middle of the table, then sets biscuits and teacakes on plates nearby. She places a matching plate in front of Tenesha’s seat, the one that’s been hers all her life, and sits across from her, in front of the window overlooking Grand’s backyard.

This is what Tenesha wishes she could show the students. Not the changing of the guard or the Tate Modern. This small house, with its two gardens—the welcoming flower garden out front and the nourishing vegetable garden in the back. The heirloom tea set that Grand hauls out every afternoon, whether she has guests or not, a tea set that, Grand says, miraculously survived the Blitz.

Tenesha has heard the Blitz stories—hiding in shelters, the blackouts, and the god-awful rationing. When Tenesha was young and a plane flew over, Grand always grabbed her arm and looked up, as if she were prepared to drag them both to safety.

“It can’t be fun,” Grand is saying, “shepherding children over hill and dale.”

“High school students, Grand,” Tenesha says. “Teenagers.”

“Oh, dear,” Grand says as she pours. She goes through the entire ritual, offering milk and sugars, then shoves the plate of biscuits forward. Tenesha takes two of her favorites, with a chocolate layer in the center. “You must be having some fun on this trip.”

“I am,” Tenesha says. “I’m seeing things I probably should have seen when I was a kid.”

Grand’s lips purse and Tenesha realizes that Grand took that last comment as a criticism.

“I’m doing all the touristy things,” Tenesha says to cover over the awkwardness. “You know, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, and all that.”

Grand’s smile returns. She clearly remembers Tenesha asking to go to the Tower of London every year, and Grand’s response: No family member of mine is going to the Tower ever again.

“You know,” she says to Grand now, “Maybe you should come with us tomorrow. We’re heading to that war museum in Lambeth. The kids have studied World War II from the British point of view, and they’re actually looking forward to it. They would love to hear from someone who lived through it.”

Grand takes a cookie and sets it on her plate. The movement seems deliberate, polite, as if she’s using it as cover to give her time to think.

“There are volunteers who do that,” she says finally.

“Yes, but they’re not my Grand,” Tenesha says. “The kids’ll see them as some kind of lecturer. You’ll be the real thing, someone who can remember it all.”

Grand taps a biscuit against the plate, a habit that Tenesha has forgotten, but now, as she sees it, seems old as time. Grand is knocking the crumbs aside.

“No one remembers it all,” Grand says.

“You know what I mean, Grand,” Tenesha says. “You’ll tell them things they can’t get from a textbook.”

“I haven’t ever visited the Museum,” Grand says.

Tenesha is about to say, Well then, maybe you should, when Grand continues.

“I lived through that. Musty relics simply can’t tell the tale, not well enough for me, anyway.”

“But the museum isn’t for you,” Tenesha says. “It’s for me and those kids, so we understand what you went through.”

Grand raises her head. Her eyes seem brighter than usual. “You can’t know. Not unless you go through something like that yourself. And I fervently wish each and every day that no one I love will ever experience anything approaching those years. Although one can’t control history, now can one?”

“No,” Tenesha says. Her face heats. “I’m sorry, Grand. I didn’t realize—”

“How could you, child?” Grand says. “It’s my past, not yours. You’re building a new past, all your own. Speaking of which, I have something for you.”

She puts both hands on the table and levers herself upward. That movement is new, and is the only sign besides the loss of height and the wispy hair that Grand has begun her tenth decade on this Earth.

Tenesha stands up, but Grand waves a hand at her.

“Sit, sit. I won’t be but a moment.”

So Tenesha sits back down. She takes a bite of her own biscuit. Biscuits here are sweet—cookies, in American terminology, although no one in the States makes cookies like this. Even the chocolate tastes different. Richer, sweeter, darker. She’s missed these, just like she’s missed Grand.

Grand comes back, her right hand clenched into a fist. She opens it and shakes it ever so slightly, and a tiny gold cross on a matching gold chain hangs between her index and middle fingers.

“I’ve been saving it for you,” Grand says.

Tenesha isn’t sure how to respond. She’s never been religious. No one in the family is. Not even Grand. In fact, Grand only goes to church once a year, on Battle of Britain Sunday.

The cross shines with its own internal light. It has cuts along the center that look like small leaves. They glow redly in the sunlight filtering in from the window.

“It’s lovely,” Tenesha says, cupping the cross in her own hand. And it is. It’s also heavier than she expected, as if it’s made of real gold.

“We chose it when you were very little. Do you remember?”

Tenesha felt a glimmer of a memory. Adults everywhere, peering down at her. Crosses hanging from necklace trees. She pointed to one, but Grand grabbed her hand before she could touch it.

“I think so,” Tenesha says.

“I’m sure you do,” Grand says. “I remember getting mine.”

She pulls a larger, ornate cross from inside her blouse. This cross looks ancient. It’s slightly warped, and reminds Tenesha of nothing more than the Crown Jewels she saw the day before.

“I’ve never seen you wear that,” Tenesha says.

“I never take it off. But I don’t display it either, unless I need to.”

“Why would you need to?” Tenesha asks.

“I hope you never find out, child.” Grand goes behind Tenesha and attaches the thin chain of the small cross around Tenesha’s neck.

Tenesha clasps the cross in her right hand. The metal is warm against her skin. “If we picked this out so long ago, why are you giving it to me now?”

“Because you’ll need it,” Grand says.

“For what?” Tenesha asks.

“Those awkward little life lessons,” Grand says with her puckish grin. “The kind from which the most powerful memories are made.”

Rupert Lowe has always been ambivalent about his job at the museum. He has never seen himself as a museum sort of bloke. And he’s not that fond of the museum itself. Not the displays, but the actual building.

It’s old and large, made of stone, and once served as a hospital for the insane. While it looks very different than it had in its hospital days, it still makes Rupert think of an institution.

He tries not to think of this as he goes to work every day, but he has more difficulty controlling his thoughts on Sundays.

That’s partly due to his Sunday assignments. Rupert was hired as an all-around employee, filling in the gaps, helping where needed. Usually that means taking coats or carrying displays, moving tables, or helping young children find the loo.

That’s his job.

Except on Sundays. On Sundays, he begins the day at the Reception and Enquiries Desk and must respond with professional courtesy as people ask him all manner of silly and repetitive questions. Public interaction is not a personal strength, as his bosses well know, and so they try to use him in other capacities, but in these days of uncertainty, a man simply can’t say that he isn’t suited to the task at hand.

Rupert got his job because his uncle Clyde believed that Rupert needed some toughening up. Uncle Clyde had served in the many military actions that followed the Second World War, including the Iraq mistake that bloody bastard Blair had blundered into.

Uncle Clyde believed in King and Country. He never voted for Blair or the mealy-mouthed Gordon Brown, but he didn’t like Rupert’s opinion on them either. They’re our leaders, lad, Clyde would say. Best you listen up and follow orders.

Rupert was never very good at following orders, but he does attempt it here, even on the Reception and Enquiries desk. He doesn’t smile at the families coming in but he doesn’t tell them they’re daft, either, when they bring their five-year-olds and ask if it’s all right to take them into the Holocaust Exhibition on the second floor.

Instead, he politely informs the families that neither the Holocaust Exhibition nor the Crimes Against Humanity Exhibition are designed for children, and he simply can’t allow anyone under the ages of sixteen to view those exhibits.

By afternoon, he’s exhausted by his stint at Reception and Enquiries (truthfully, by the politeness required of him), and he still has six hours of work to go. No standing allowed on Sundays. He actually patrols, making certain that the children are touching only the things they’re allowed to touch.

At least, that’s how his boss described Sunday afternoon duty. Rupert has found that children generally aren’t the problem. It’s their parents who want a piece of this and a bit of that. The museum is quite friendly—most of the exhibits allow touching or sitting or leaning, but a few are clearly marked with a Do Not Touch sign, and those are always in trouble from a handful of people who believe signs do not apply to them.

Those people seem to come on Sunday. Sunday’s crowd is truly what does him in. Parents with children looking for an educational way to keep the little buggers entertained; ancient blokes who did their time in the service, come to complain that the exhibits don’t accurately represent what happened; and the usual gaggle of tourists, all trying to squeeze the maximum viewing in the minimum amount of time.

This afternoon, a flock of American students have joined the usual suspects. Generally, he likes Americans. They’re open and forthright and blunt in ways he could never be.

But he likes them on weekdays, when the museum isn’t so crowded. On Sundays, the Americans just add to the noise. And their lack of education shows. At Reception and Enquiries, they ask ridiculous questions such as why the Revolutionary War doesn’t have a display.

Our subject, Rupert always says primly, quoting the museum’s mission, is conflicts involving Britain or the Commonwealth since 1914—and some wag always asks what the Commonwealth is. It took him nearly a year to realize that more than half of the Americans actually don’t know.

Now, he sees to his disgust that the Americans are queued up at the Blitz Experience. The Blitz Experience is his favorite place in the entire museum, partly because it was a revelation to him when he went through it.

It’s a reconstruction of an air raid shelter and a bombed-out neighborhood in 1940, complete with sound effects and smells. The little room even shakes as the “bombs” fall from above.

His family has talked of the Blitz for years—Uncle Clyde claims that suffering through it as a tot inspired him to become the man that he is—and Rupert has always tried to imagine the difficulties and the heroism. So when he, as part of his training, was allowed in the Experience, he had the shock of his young life. Not the discomfort of the scratchy walls or the faint whistle as bombs fell outside. The room’s shaking disturbed him and so did the faint smell of smoke, but it was designed to disturb him.

He planned for that, and sat at attention as he imagined his grandparents—his grandmother, pregnant with his mother, and his Uncle Clyde in short pants, his hands clasping his chubby knees, all enduring.

But they probably hadn’t endured. That’s what so surprised Rupert. The Experience showed it all—the good and the bad—the way that the stress made the people in the shelter snap at each other and snipe, bitterly complaining about their lot.

He hadn’t ever imagined that, and later, when the lights came up, and recorded voices spoke of helping the injured and fighting blazes, it wasn’t enough to overcome his shock.

For some reason he had thought it hadn’t been that divisive, that everyone had come together, and clearly they hadn’t—not willingly at least, and not every single night.

He’d stepped out of that experience a changed man. He thought of that every Sunday afternoon, when he spent the last ninety minutes of his day guiding patrons into and out of the Blitz Experience.

This afternoon’s influx of Americans doesn’t really please him. Two groups of Americans went through the Experience earlier, when he wasn’t monitoring the rope, and he was glad of it. Since he started monitoring the Experience this afternoon, he’d watched the remaining Americans filter their way here. Now they stand at the end of the queue. Four boys and three girls, along with three adults, two men and a younger woman.

These people will be the last he can put through before closing time.

He grabs another metal sign and carries it to the end of the queue. As he walks, he counts aloud. He wants them to realize he has a quota. He also wants to remind the Americans to read the plaques on the wall before they enter the Experience. That way, at least, he will have fewer questions when they emerge.

Only as he walks around the rope, with its Do Not Pass, sign, he realizes he doesn’t need to remind the Americans to read the plaques.

Some are already doing so. The rest are listening attentively to an attractive young woman with dark hair and snappy black eyes. She wears a gold cross around her neck that catches the light.

“The London Blitz,” she’s saying, “began in the Docklands on September seventh, nineteen forty, and continued, unabated, well into nineteen forty-one…”

He likes the word “unabated.” It suggests an excellent education. He can’t stop to listen. He’s counting his way down, and no one is even paying attention. Not even the pair of gentlemen standing just behind the young woman.

Rupert made a mistake earlier. The two men aren’t Americans. He recognizes the older of the two. He’s brought family and friends telling them about the war with an air of authority only experience can give.

Even he is listening to the young woman, remarking to his friend as Rupert passes, “She’s quite the thing, for an American.”

Isn’t she though? Rupert thinks.

His mood lifts. He’s nearly done, and the day no longer seems as dismal as it had in the morning. He’s made it through and seen a pretty girl as well. A pretty, educated girl. A pretty, educated American girl, something he finds unusual and attractive at the same time.

Maybe he’ll speak with her when she emerges from the Blitz Experience. Maybe he’ll get Alfie to cover the door so that Rupert can escort her to another part of the museum, get to know her a bit, see if she’s staying in London longer than the usual two weeks.

Then he stumbles slightly, feeling silly. Even if she is, what interest would she have in him? He’s just a day worker with big dreams, none of which he’s pursued yet.

By the time he makes his way back to the rope, he’s decided not to seek out Alfie. If the girl wants to chat, she will. But most likely, she’ll be like the other visitors to the museum, who see him only as a roadblock in their haste to see every part of the building before they’re asked to leave a few minutes before six.

“Blitz,” Tenesha says, “is short for blitzkrieg, a German word meaning lightning war.”

Denver, Hitch, Fox and Gianni are watching the girls while they listen to Tenesha. She has a hunch they’ve come just to be near the girls. Neither Bailey nor Ali or Jada have boyfriends at the moment. They’re not looking at the boys at all.

“The Germans,” Tenesha says, “used the blitzkrieg style of attack to great effect in World War Two. When it came time to turn their attention to England, the Germans decided to send aircraft in great numbers and have them bomb selected targets.”

“Britain,” says the man behind her. “They turned their attention to Britain.”

Tenesha turns toward him. He’s as old as Grand, with a weathered face and tired eyes. He stands with a much younger man, who has the look of someone who is being dragged through an experience he’d rather not have.

“I beg your pardon,” the older man says with delightful courtliness. “I’m a stickler for accuracy about this war.”

She doesn’t mind. The students should know about the Blitz before they go into the so-called Experience. She has no idea what they have and haven’t studied. They seem more informed than most kids their age, but they have big gaps. She doesn’t want this to be one of them.

“They listen to me all the time,” she says with only a slight bit of exaggeration. “If you would like to tell them about the Blitz, go ahead.”

His eyes light up. He glances at his companion who shrugs. Then the older man steps forward as if he’s been asked to give a speech. “I suspect, since your young lady here is so knowledgeable, that you’ve been to the area we call Docklands. But let me tell you what it was like on that September night….”

She listens long enough to realize the man is an excellent storyteller. He takes them from the bombing raids and the British response known here as the Battle of Britain, and into the night raids that followed. His hands move as he talks. Even his companion leans forward, suddenly interested.

Then she looks at the exhibit hall beyond. The museum is much more than she can see in one day. She wishes she had come here earlier. On this trip, she’s discovering a new London, tourist London, and she’s beginning to understand why her American friends like coming here. It’s not gas fireplaces and narrow living rooms, cold shops and mediocre food.

There’s life here that goes back so far she can barely imagine it. The Ancient Romans built walls and roads here. People have lived and died in this place the Romans called Londinium for centuries.

“…they call it the Second Great Fire of London,” the man is saying.

She turns.

“There was a first?” Denver asks before she can stop him. He’s a big kid who’s very smart but also very awkward. She doesn’t want her students asking stupid, ignorant questions. Even though they aren’t her students, and she can’t expect them to know everything.

“In 1666,” the man says with good humor at the question, as if he doesn’t mind at all, “most of London burned. That’s why we have laws now that require buildings within the city limits to be made of stone…”

He handles the questions well. Her students have gathered around him. They’re lost in the story, like she used to be as a child, when Grand told her about London’s past.

The young man who divided them into groups has returned to his place in front of the ropes. His gaze meets hers, as if asking if she’s ready to go inside.

She smiles at him and shrugs, inclining her head at the old man, who has now riveted the group with his story of the destruction of the Square Mile shortly after Christmas 1940. The Square Mile is where London actually began. In 1940, buildings that survived the great Fire of 1666 still stood, as did several famous churches, untouched by flame of three centuries before.

Of course, in the center—then as now—is St. Paul’s Cathedral, beautifully redesigned after 1666 by one of the world’s greatest architects, Christopher Wren. Wren’s Cathedral, considered one of the most beautiful in the world, was the tallest building in London in 1940.

The old man’s story holds the kids in awe as he teases them with the idea that the St. Paul’s they saw only days before might be another rebuild after the fires of December 1940.

Of course, it isn’t. There’s a famous newspaper photograph that Grand has framed in her home of St. Paul’s poking out of wisps of billowing smoke, under the headline: War’s greatest Picture: St. Paul’s Stands Unharmed in the Midst of the Burning City.

Her hand creeps to the cross Grand gave her. It still feels warmer than it should. When she sees Grand again—and with luck, that will be before she leaves London on Friday—she’ll ask what the cross is made of, why it always feels warm.

The old man has moved onto the attacks after the new year, and how Hitler missed his opportunity to destroy Britain by focusing instead on Operation Barbarossa, his disastrous invasion of Russia.

“He was an excellent tactician,” the old man says, “but an impatient one. If he had followed his strategy all the way to the end, we probably wouldn’t be standing here today.”

“Or we’d be speaking German,” says his companion.

“And heil Hitlering each other,” says Denver, clearly trying to curry favor.

“Some of us would never have done that, lad,” the old man says. “No matter who won the war.”

The pretty American looked at him as if she could see through him, and then he blushed. Rupert hates blushing, but he can’t control it. He feels like one of those ridiculous blokes whose every emotion shows on his face.

Rupert wants to close his eyes in shame, but he doesn’t. He can hear the last echo of the voices from inside the Experience, and he knows this round is about to end. He moves to the exit door, waiting to guide the newly educated to the next part of the museum.

They emerge like they always do, heads down, silent. This group has no American school students. It’s a normal Sunday mix of Londoners bringing family and European tourists, who clutch their belongings as if someone is going to steal them. An elderly couple holds each other up.

He waits until the last of this bunch leave, then he closes the exit door. He turns.

The Americans are watching him with expressions of eager expectation on their young faces. Normally Americans are shifting from foot to foot. Generally, by the time they discover the Blitz Experience on the lower ground level, they’ve seen the rest of the museum. They’re here to be entertained or because some completist feels they must experience this too.

Rupert moves the rope aside, then opens the door. A bit of light falls on the faux stone benches. By this time of day, the Experience smells faintly of nervous sweat. Some people—even those who never lived through the Blitz—do find this intense. More than one bloke of his own age clapped him on the back on the way out and said, This is bloody scary, Mate. Not at all what I expected.

Rupert likes the look of disappointment on the faces of the Americans as they file in. The Experience looks so innocuous.

The pretty American waits until her students are inside and then she follows. She nods at Rupert as she passes him, and his skin heats again. It’s as if the Great Fire of London has started inside of him. He pretends it isn’t happening and nods back, feeling like an utter fool.

The elderly gent’s companion steps inside, but the elderly gent stops at the door.

“There’s room,” Rupert says.

The elderly gent shakes his head. No one inside seems to notice that he hasn’t gone in. His companion is shuffling after the Americans, looking for a spot on the bench.

“Are you sure, sir?” Rupert asks.

“Quite sure,” the elderly gent says. He reaches for the door, but Rupert grabs it first. As it swings shut, the elderly gent’s companion looks up, startled, as the door closes in his face.

For a moment, the room is in complete darkness. The utter blackness is breathtaking. Someone on Tenesha’s right takes her hand. She doesn’t pull away. She finds comfort in the warmth. She gropes a moment in the darkness with her left hand, finding the bench, and then someone else’s hand. She touches it tentatively. That person grabs tightly.

She has no idea who she’s sitting beside. At the moment, she doesn’t care.

In the distance, she hears church bells—and she remembers what the old man said: London used church bells to signal the start or end of an invasion. That entire fall, winter, and spring, the bells didn’t call the faithful to services. The bells warned of grave danger.

She supposes the bells now are to indicate an invasion. She expects a siren to follow, but wonders at the accuracy of it all. Could the people in the shelters actually hear a bell?

Then there’s a scratchy sound, like a voice over a public address system. She thinks she hears someone take a breath, and then it stops. Lights come up ever so slightly, and she gasps.

How did they do this?

She’s in a basement with twenty people she doesn’t recognize. Her students sit around her, as does the companion of the old man. But the old man himself isn’t here. The companion looks shocked. He’s glancing about as if unable to believe he’s alone.

The kids are simply going along with the ride, but the hair has risen on the back of her neck. Something has changed. It takes her a moment to realize what that something is.

This basement smells of cigarettes and sweet pipe smoke. Overlaying that is the smell of mold and damp. The bench she’s sitting on isn’t stone after all, but some kind of rusted metal.

Rusted metal slats. When she groped with her left hand, she could swear she felt a solid bench beneath her.

When she stepped inside the Blitz Experience, she got the sense of a narrow space with a low ceiling, not something this big and wide. The museum building is huge, but could it accommodate something of this size?

She isn’t certain.

The people—actors?—inside the basement are staring at her.

“This is not a public shelter,” says a man near the door. The door is a gray metal with a handmade sign on the interior which reads Shelter.

He’s speaking to the elderly man’s companion. She looks at the man. He looks as baffled as she does.

She hasn’t given him much notice until now. He’s slender, with black eyes and an angular face. He has a dimple in the middle of his chin. He’s wearing a shirt over a T-shirt advertising the name of some British sports team. He wears tennis shoes—what the British call trainers—on his feet.

The other man, the one who spoke, is staring at the companion in distaste. The man who spoke is wearing an old-fashioned suit with pleated trousers, a vest, and a matching coat. His white shirt has a starched collar that looks so stiff Tenesha wonders if it’s hurting the skin on his neck.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the man continues, “but this shelter is for no more than fifty persons.”

“There’s only thirty-five of us down here,” Denver says. “We could squeeze in fifteen more if we had to.”

Everyone looks at the boy in shock, including Tenesha. He’s been outspoken throughout this trip, but she didn’t expect him to willingly participate in any role-playing.

“You’re American?” a middle-aged woman asks. She sits on the room’s only chair, her sturdy legs crossed at the ankles. Tenesha can see a black line running up the back of her calves and thinks it odd, until she remembers Grand saying that women painted the black line on their legs to make it look like they were wearing stockings.

“Yeah,” Denver says. “We’re American high school students. We’re here to learn something.”

“Denver,” Tenesha says. “Don’t.”

He looks at her, frowning. Then he looks back at the others in the basement—the ones who were here first. Can’t he feel it? The strange tension, the almost palpable sense of fear?

The entire building shakes. Dust falls from the ceiling on the head of a bald man sitting across from Ali and Jada. The girls giggle as he brushes off his skull.

“Stop,” Tenesha says to them.

“You’re in charge, Miss?” the man who first spoke asks.

“Of this group, yes,” she says. She almost adds, all except for the man at the end, but she doesn’t.

“You cannot stay here. We simply cannot allow it. Should something happen—”

He stops himself, then looks down.

“It’s all right, Mr. Pintner,” another woman says. She’s younger, prettier, than the woman on the chair. She’s wearing a brown dress with sensible shoes, but the arms of a bright red sweater are tied around her neck, giving her a jaunty air. “We all know what might happen.”

“No, we don’t,” Denver says, then he looks at Tenesha.

“Denver,” she says. “That’s enough.”

He flops backwards, but the gesture lacks conviction. He does feel the oddness. Maybe that’s why he’s speaking up.

She glances at the rest of her little troop, all wide-eyed and a bit scared now. If this is a re-enactment, designed to make everyone uncomfortable, it’s working.

Mr. Pintner, the man who seems to be in charge, says, “If something happens to the shelter, and they need to identify…us…somehow, they won’t know how to go about it. They’ll think you work here.”

“They’ll sort it out,” the companion says. He sounds calm enough, but his entire body is rigid. He’s clearly frightened.

“There are public shelters right next door,” Mr. Pintner says. “Perhaps no one explained this to you at your hotel, but just follow the signs. The warehouses—”

The building shakes again, silencing him. More dust falls. The bald man wipes off his head, then moves aside. No one glances at the ceiling except the companion.

“Is that safe?” the companion asks.

Now they all look up. There’s a jagged crack, running from one wall to the other.

“That wasn’t there before,” the middle-aged woman says. She sounds a bit breathless. “Do you think we’ve been hit?”

“If we have, the Watch will come and find us,” Mr. Pintner says.

“Not if it’s an incendiary,” the bald man says.

“What’s an incendiary?” Denver asks, then bites his lower lip.

Everyone looks at him. Then the middle-aged woman turns to Tenesha.

“It’s terribly inappropriate for you to be sightseeing in London. I don’t know who brought you to the city or why, but when this is over, you should return to America post-haste. And to bring children with you….”

She shakes her head.

One of the men pats her hand. “Now, now, Felicia. They’re here. The decision’s been made, hasn’t it. There’s no sense in recrimination.”

“Someone will come if we’re in trouble,” the younger woman says. “That’s what the Watch is for.”

“Besides,” the bald man says, “if it is an incendiary, we’ll know within five minutes.”

Everyone looks up again, as if that crack in the ceiling has changed somehow.

“What’s an incendiary?” Denver whispers.

“A bomb that starts fires, I think,” Fox whispers back. He’s slender and dark, and usually tries to fade in a crowd. It’s a sign of his own discomfort that he’s speaking up.

“Christ, and we’re trapped in a hole?” Gianni asks, a little too loudly. He’s square-shouldered and tall, the only athlete in the group.

“Young man,” the middle-aged woman—Felicia—says. “It may be customary in your country to use foul language in times of crisis, but it’s not here.”

Tenesha hadn’t even noticed Gianni’s slip, not until Felicia spoke up, but now she needs to do something about it. She’s about to ask him to stay silent, when he bows his head.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m just surprised we’re here, is all.”

“As are we all,” she says. “I’m not even sure how you got in. Isn’t Mr. Ludgate monitoring the door?”

She asks this last of Mr. Pintner.

“He’s on fire watch,” Mr. Pintner says. “If he had to deal with an emergency, he would have stepped away.”

“Letting these Americans in,” Felicia says.

“I’m not an American,” the companion says. “My name is Edmund Hennel. My people have been in London since William the Conqueror. I most certainly do belong, and I resent the implication that I do not.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hennel,” Felicia says. “But you don’t work here. This is a private shelter.”

“You’d send us out there?” he asks. “With bombs falling everywhere? Simply because we don’t work in your facility?”

“I’ve explained it to you,” Mr. Pintner says.

“Yes, you have,” Hennel says. “And it doesn’t suffice, now does it? You’d send us out to die just because we might die in here and muck up the record-keeping?”

The bald man clears his throat. “When you put it that way, it does sound a trifle unreasonable.”

“Yes, considering your man let us in,” Hennel says.

Tenesha leans forward in surprise. Hennel seems completely sure of himself. Does he really think that awkward museum employee works with these people?

Then she realizes that Hennel must be bluffing. Someone is bluffing, since this can’t be real.

Her eyes hurt from the dim light. She feels the beginnings of a headache. Bailey, the girl on her right looks pale.

“Ms. McGuire,” she says softly, “I smell smoke.”

Tenesha sniffs, realizes that smoke is what’s bothering her eyes, not the light. But all the smoke, from the cigarettes to the pipe that an older man, barely visible in the far corner of the basement, holds in his right hand.

“People are smoking,” Tenesha says.

“You’d think a place like this would be designated nonsmoking,” Ali says.

“No, no,” says Bailey. “Wood smoke. Like something’s burning.”

“I smell it too,” says Felicia with a touch of panic in her voice.

“It’s your imagination,” Mr. Pintner says. “We’ve been talking of incendiaries, after all.”

“No,” says a thin young man sitting near a pile of boxes. “I smell it as well.”

“We have to get out,” Felicia says, the panic no longer a touch. “We’ll die in here.”

“If there’s smoke, we’ll die out there,” Mr. Pintner says. “Trust the Watch. They’ll get us if there’s danger.”

“And if they can’t get to us?” Hennel asks.

“Then we’ll burn alive,” Denver says, with just enough tremor in his voice for Tenesha to realize he’s not play-acting. He’s frightened.

“Do something,” Hennel says, and it takes Tenesha a minute to realize he’s talking to her.

“Me?” Tenesha asks. “What can I do?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “You’re the one with the cross.”

Everyone looks at her. She puts her hand on the tiny gold cross. It’s hot, but then everything is hot, including her.

“My Grand gave that to me yesterday,” she says, feeling confused. “It’s hers, not mine.”

“Should we be praying?” Ali asks. “Is that what you mean?”

“No,” Hennel says. He’s still staring at Tenesha. “You know what I mean.”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t know and she’s about to say so when someone pounds on the door.

Bailey emits a tiny shriek. Felicia crosses her arms. “We can’t take anyone else in here. We can’t fit anyone. We already have too many, and most don’t belong.”

Mr. Pintner ignores her. He pulls the door open. An older man—Tenesha can’t even begin to guess his age—stands outside. He’s wearing some kind of uniform with a big black belt and boots, and he has the most ridiculous tin hat on his head that she’s ever seen.

The smell of smoke has grown stronger now, as if it wafted in through the open door.

“Quite so,” the newcomer says. “I thought perhaps someone might be down here. We need to get you out. The buildings are burning on both sides.”

“I told you!” Felicia says, but Tenesha can’t tell who she’s saying it too.

Tenesha’s heart is pounding, hard, and it’s hard to catch her breath, but whether that’s from nervousness or the smoke, she can’t tell.

“Where’re we going?” Mr. Pintner asks.

“We’ll find somewhere,” the newcomer says, but he doesn’t sound reassuring.

Mr. Pintner moves beside the door. “You know how it works. Women and children first.”

“That’s sexist,” Bailey says.

“It’s nineteen forty,” Denver says.

“Still,” Bailey says.

Tenesha shushes them. She guides them out, struggling to get the boys to move.

“We’re not children,” Fox says.

“Just go,” she says.

As she steps out into another basement room, this one white with smoke, Denver grabs her arm.

“Ms. McGuire,” he says. “Something’s wrong.”

Yes. This scenario is too realistic. She doesn’t like it at all. But she doesn’t say that to him. Instead, she says, “What do you mean?”

“There’s only one door in that room,” he says. “And it’s in the right place. We came in that door.”

She turns.

It looks nothing like the door to the Experience. The museum personnel must have designed the room to spin around in the dark. Still, that odd sensation, the one she felt as the darkness lifted, has returned.

“I’m sure they just moved us,” she says with conviction she doesn’t feel.

“I don’t like this.” Denver’s voice trembles again.

She puts her arm around his shoulders. They’re surprisingly thin.

“I don’t either,” she says. “We’ll complain when it’s all over.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But to who?”

The first closing announcement ends on the museum’s public address system. Rupert silently curses himself. He hates it when his timing is off. The poor people inside the Blitz Experience have just had the magic of the moment interrupted with a bit of reality. Go to the gift shop, collect your coats, it’s time to leave.

He glances at his watch. The Experience will complete its run in less than a minute. The elderly gent is still hovering near the door. He looks nervous, although Rupert has no idea why he should.

“So you were there, eh?” Rupert says to him.

The elderly gent nods.

“Seems to me it would have been awful,” Rupert says, “never knowing what’s about to happen next.”

The elderly gent looks directly at him. There’s power in the elderly gent’s gaze and just a hint of contempt.

“We never do know what’s about to happen next, now do we?” the elderly gent says.

Rupert’s poor face heats again. “You know what I mean. That you could die at any moment.” Then he realizes that the elderly gent could say with the same contempt that all of them could die at any moment, so Rupert adds, “At the hands of Jerry, I mean.”

The elderly gent nods. That powerful look has left his face. “It wasn’t pleasant,” he says. “But we survived.”

“Against all odds, they say,” Rupert says.

“Yes,” the elderly gent says. “That’s what they say.”

He stares at the exit door. Rupert glances at his watch. They’re done. He waits a half second—he likes giving the Americans an extra moment of darkness—then pulls the door open.

And feels his breath catch in his throat.

The room is empty.

The smoke is thicker near the stairs. Tenesha’s eyes are watering.

“Come along,” the man in uniform says. Somewhere along the way she has figured out he’s the Watch they mentioned. The comments from earlier finally made sense. Grand had spoken of Watch commanders. They were part of the Home Guard—at least, that’s what Tenesha remembers. She doesn’t ask for clarification, though. She just follows along.

“How do we know we have everyone?” Denver asks.

“Mr. Pintner will make sure everyone’s out of the room,” the Watch says. “Come along. We don’t have much time.”

It’s warmer as they rise, but it’s an odd warmth, like the warmth from a fireplace. Tenesha can feel the pockets of coldness around it, and she sees bit of ash. Her heart is pounding so hard that it might come out of her chest.

This is not a play. No one has created this. Somehow, she has stepped into the London Blitz, and she doesn’t know how she got here.

She reaches the top of the stairs. In front of her is a large room, filled with metal desks and gooseneck lamps, none of which are on. Another man wearing a tin hat—apparently another member of the Watch—stands near one of the desks, holding a lantern that’s tinted red.

Tenesha can barely see the lantern. After a moment, she realizes that’s not because of the smoke. It’s deliberate.

She wonders why they’re all so worried about the light when through the windows, she can see fire burning across the way, lighting the night sky.

Her realization—confirmation, really—that this is actually happening focuses her. She stops at the top of the stairs, even though the man in the tin hat wants her to go forward.

“I’m a teacher,” she says because it’s easier than explaining she’s a chaperone. “I want to make sure my students get out.”

Oddly, he accepts that, rather than asking her why she’s brought students down here.

The smoke is making her dizzy. She rips off the bottom of her shirt and ties it over her mouth and nose. As the students come up the stairs, she instructs them to find something to cover their faces as well.

And she counts: Bailey, Ali, Denver, Fox, Hitch, Gianni, Jada. Her charges. Then the companion, Hennel, who glares at her.

“Do something,” he says.

“Like what?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but you’re the one who brought us here.”

The man in the tin hat grabs Hennel’s arm and yanks him away from her.

“Talk later,” the man says. “We have to get out and we don’t have much time.”

Tenesha corrals her students, arms around them, moving them forward. But she stops in the middle of the room. Flames rise around the windows, and it’s warmer the closer she gets.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

The man points to her right. She turns. There’s a darker corridor there, barely illuminated by firelight. She pushes the students forward, but they don’t need much encouragement.

She keeps her eye on all of them, always counting, getting so she can recognize them by their hair or their height. She follows them to two massive steel doors, one of which stands open. Through it, she sees more smoke and ash raining on a cobblestone street. Little fires burn, but they’re caused by flaming bits of wood that have somehow found their way to the cobblestone and are now burning themselves out.

“I don’t want to go out there,” Bailey says.

“We stay in here, we die,” Hitch says, and while Tenesha doesn’t appreciate the harsh assessment, she knows it’s true.

She moves to the front of her students, then she turns and looks behind her. The man in the tin hat is hurrying toward her. She’s suddenly worried he’s going to tell her that she can’t leave that way, that they’re trapped inside.

Her breath catches, and she coughs. Her chest hurts. She’s not getting enough air. The ripped part of her shirt covering her nose and mouth is wet from the dampness of her breath.

“Follow me,” says the man in the tin hat and then he scurries through the door. The thick air doesn’t seem to bother him.

“Let’s go,” she says to the students. They don’t have to be told twice. They follow the man into the streets.

The air is alive with smoke and bits of burning paper raining down on them. The sky—what she can see of it—is a brilliant pink and red, both beautiful and terrible at the same time. The smoke doesn’t smell horrible, like she would expect. It smells like incense, sort of, or some kind of weird tobacco in a pipe. Only the entire street smells of it.

Then she realizes where she is. She’s in the Square Mile.

The firestorm of late December 1940.

“We need to find shelter,” she says.

The Watch turns along another cobblestone street. Fire hoses litter the ground, pumping water from a truck that doesn’t fit on the narrow street. Tenesha squints. The firefighters are one more block over, working a blaze that is so close, it terrifies her.

Above, planes scream by. She can’t tell who they belong to—the Germans or the British. But no one around her ducks. To her left, a building crumbles as if a giant has pushed it.

One of the kids squeals and leaps toward her. The air is nearly too hot to breathe.

They have to get inside, but there seems to be no inside. And Tenesha knows enough about firestorms to know that soon the fires will create their own wind, and then everything in their path will become fuel. No one’s lungs will be able to stand the incredible heat.

She can barely make out the shape of buildings. Nothing looks familiar, but if she’s in the Square Mile, it wouldn’t look familiar. Most of it burned decades before she was born.

Her skin itches from the dry hot air. Her eyes ache. She stumbles forward. The students are still moving as well.

Ahead, barely visible in the smoke and ash, one of the Watchmen—recognizable only from his tin hat, waves at them. He grabs the arm of the man in the lead and pulls him out of her sight. The students follow, disappearing into the miasma.

Her stomach twists. What if there’s nothing beyond? What if this illusion ends there, and they step off the face of the Earth like the old sailors used to believe they could?

They’re all going to die, and somehow, that companion—Hennel—thinks it will be her fault.

“They’re not here,” Rupert says, his voice echoing in the narrow space. “How can they not be here?”

Rupert has gone inside just to make sure the Americans haven’t hid somewhere—not that there’s any place to hide. The Experience is pretty small. People sit on benches, and then as the lights come up, they see a replica of a London street—before the Blitz, during the Blitz, and then afterwards. They ease out through the second door.

Had they gotten out when he wasn’t looking? Why would they do that?

Then again, why do Americans do anything?

“They should be here,” he says stupidly. And they’re not here. They’re not here at all.

He feels a mixture of anger and panic. People don’t just vanish, now do they?

He makes himself take a deep breath.

“Or mayhap they do,” the elderly gent says.

Rupert looks up. The elderly gent is blocking the exit.

“What?” Rupert asks.

“You said, ‘People don’t just vanish, now do they?’ and I said, ‘Mayhap they do.’” The elderly gent clasps his hands behind his back.

Rupert swallows hard. He could have sworn he hadn’t spoken aloud. But he does tend to mumble to himself when things get difficult. Maybe he had been talking.

“After all,” the elderly gent says, “I didn’t see them come out. Did you?”

“No,” Rupert says. “But I wasn’t looking the whole time.”

The elderly gent gives him a disbelieving look. “You think nine people can simply slip by you and you wouldn’t notice?”

Rupert shrugs. “There’s the corridor and then the exhibits….”

His voice trails off. He isn’t even convincing himself.

They haven’t slipped past him and they aren’t in the Experience. Where are they?

“You tell me, lad,” the elderly gent says.

This time, Rupert knows he hasn’t spoken aloud. He supposes his expressions are speaking for him.

“I don’t know. They can’t have gone this way.” He looks at the back of the Experience, the fake storefront, and the broken cobblestone street. There are lighting effects behind it, and maybe a maintenance tunnel or something. He doesn’t rightly know. He’s never been behind the Experience. Only inside of it.

And it would take someone very determined to break through the illusion. Besides, what would be the point?

“Why aren’t you worried?” Rupert snaps. “Your friend was inside.”

“He came to learn.” The elderly gent rocks backwards slightly. “And I’m quite sure that he is.”

There’s a rumbling behind them. Tenesha turns. Stones have fallen across the road, blocking the way that the group has just come.

“Is everyone through?” she asks.

Then she sees Mr. Pintner. “We have an accurate count, Miss,” he says. “Keep moving.”

She has no choice. She scurries forward. She can feel something in the heat—a stirring—as if the breeze is about to start.

Hennel grabs her arm, his grip so tight that it’s painful. “Your students are inside,” he says. “Let’s go.”

They step into some kind of yard. It looks bizarrely normal in the reddish light. A garden, some statues, and a mausoleum, the stone shining redly at them.

The students are ducking inside. She follows, and hurries forward, wiping at her suddenly tearing eyes. Hennel and Mr. Pintner follow.

It’s cooler in here, and that makes all the remaining moisture in her body emerge. There are electric lights, thin, but real. For a moment, she thinks the blackout is over. Then she thinks maybe they’ve all realized it’s pointless. And then she realizes that no, this building has no windows, so no light can escape.

She stops, leans on a pillar, and looks ahead.

Arches. A series of stone arches around a granite casket.

She’s been here before.

Just a few days ago, as a matter of fact. A few days before seventy plus years from now.

“We’re in St. Paul’s,” she says.

“Don’t you Americans know anything?” Hennel says. “This is the Crypt.”

The Crypt is a separate building from the great church, but it’s on the church’s grounds. And she was here, a few days before.

She turns, and grabs Hennel’s arms, shaking him. “We’re in St. Paul’s!”

“No,” he says stubbornly. “We’re—”

“St. Paul’s,” she repeats. “It’s the only thing around here that survives.”

He stares at her for a moment. His mouth opens slightly. “But we’re in the Crypt,” he says.

“And that’s the Duke of Wellington,” she says, pointing to the granite casket. “Hasn’t he been here since 1805? You’ve seen him before, haven’t you? I certainly have.”

Hennel looks like someone has awakened him from a nightmare. “My Lord. So it is. We’re in the Crypt and the Duke has been here since 1805 and St. Paul’s—St. Paul’s was built for eternity.”

It takes her a minute to remember the quote. Their guide had spoken it on the tour of St. Paul’s. Sir Christopher Wren’s boast, “I build for eternity,” turned out to be true. And it doesn’t feel like a boast now, because for the first time since the world turned on its head, Tenesha can catch her breath.

“Let’s not stand here,” says Mr. Pintner. He puts his hand on Tenesha’s back and moves her forward. “I’m told they often have a cuppa and I don’t know about you, but I could do with one.”

Then he walks forward, so staunchly British that Tenesha can’t help herself. She grins.

Hennel smiles with her. “We’re in St. Paul’s,” he says.

“We’re in the Crypt,” she says with an involuntary, relieved giggle. “And somehow it all survives.”

The second closing announcement echoes through the public address system. Rupert runs a hand through his hair. How can he tell his superiors that he lost nine visitors, eight of them American? He can just see the story on CNN International now. Americans raise a fuss whenever anything happens to one of them. Imagine what will happen when they find out that eight of them have disappeared, seven of them school age.

His stomach is twisting.

“I don’t know what to do,” Rupert says. “I’m not even sure if we have procedures for this.”

The elderly gent smiles at him. He’s still leaning inside the Experience door, as if he’s expecting to find all nine on the benches. “Give it a moment, lad. It’ll all work out.”

“What do you know?” Rupert asks. “Has something like this happened to you before?”

“Not to me, lad,” the elderly gent says reprovingly. “And it really hasn’t happened to you either. Haven’t you wondered where they’ve gone?”

“I expect they’ve left somehow,” he says. “They snuck out when I wasn’t looking. Or they broke part of the Experience and went exploring.”

“You don’t really believe that,” the elderly gent says.

Rupert flushes. The truth is, he doesn’t believe it. He’s much more willing to believe they’ve disappeared.

It’s that imagination, boy. He can hear his Uncle Giles’s voice in his head. It’ll get you in trouble every time.

“It makes more sense than them vanishing in thin air,” Rupert says.

“Does it really?” the elderly gent says. “A group of Americans, with their teacher no less, and one very conservative British citizen, decide en masse to ruin a display in a museum. They unite and assault the display within five minutes of meeting each other. Does that make sense as well?”

“Maybe one of the Americans has a gun,” Rupert says. “He forced them.”

“How did he get in then?” the elderly gent says. “In fact, how did he get into England? I presume they flew from the States. Can you imagine a firearm making it through Heathrow?”

Rupert hasn’t flown out of Heathrow. He hasn’t been to the airport since 7/7/07, not that he went often before that either. The train stations are difficult enough for him and ever since those July bombings, he hasn’t been comfortable on a city bus or in the Underground. Every time he travels through King’s Cross he thinks, not of Harry Potter, but the way the entire place shut down that terrifying morning.

“This isn’t terrorists, is it?” he asks the elderly gent.

The elderly gent chuckles. “No. It’s not terrorists or anything else that’s easily explained. Just be patient.”

“Be patient?” Rupert says. “We’re closing.”

“In five minutes,” the elderly gent says. “They’ll solve it before then, I’m sure.”

“Who’ll solve what?” Rupert asks.

“Mr. Hennel and the pretty young American lady. They’ll bring everyone back safely. You’ll see.”

“What exactly’s going on?” Rupert asks.

“A tiny demonstration of power,” the elderly gent says, “and nothing more.”

Someone had put the kettle on. But no one had made tea. Instead, one of the Wardens hands out chipped mugs filled with cocoa to anyone who wants it.

Cocoa, if Tenesha remembers correctly, is hard to get with rationing coupons. It’s a treat. She whispers to the students to be grateful, but she doesn’t have to remind them.

“This is the best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted,” Ali says after taking a sip. She slips onto a wooden folding chair.

Some people Tenesha hasn’t seen before are playing cards off in the corner. Others have blankets spread out on the floor.

Tenesha shudders a little. The floor isn’t solid at all. Each stone is marked with names and dates. This is a crypt, as she and that strange man Hennel kept saying back and forth to each other, and the names and dates mark where someone’s body rests—usually someone famous to the British, because she hasn’t heard of them.

She takes a cup of cocoa, says polite things, trying to sound as grateful as she feels. Mr. Pintner gets his cup last, and doesn’t complain at all that he has cocoa instead of tea. Someone has brought biscuits, and a few of the students take more than their share.

She doesn’t reprimand them. She’s not having any and neither are many of the adults.

Instead, she carries her cup to the side where Hennel stands. He’s leaning against the wall, watching the group.

“You said I know how to get us out of here,” Tenesha says. “Why would you say that?”

He looks at her in surprise. “Because you brought us here.”

“I did not,” she says. “I’m not even sure where here is.”

“You do know,” he says. “We’ve come to St. Paul’s on December twenty-nine, nineteen forty, in the height of the London Blitz.”

“All the way from Lambeth?” she says. “In science fiction stories, time travel doesn’t work that way. Either you move in time or space. Not both.”

He tilts his head slightly, as if she’s said something cute. “This isn’t science fiction. This is real life.”

She lets out a little laugh. “This isn’t real,” she says. “The smoke smelled like incense. Smoke doesn’t smell like that.”

“Oh, but it did that night, luv,” he says. “Mr. Maplethorpe told me many times that—”

“Mr. Maplethorpe?” Tenesha asks.

“The man I came with. The one who lectured your students.”

She nods. The old man Hennel had arrived with. The old man whom, she just now realizes, never entered the Experience.

“Mr. Maplethorpe told me that on the night the Square Mile burned, the smoke smelled of seasoned oak. Some compared it to perfume or pipe tobacco. And some thought it smelled of incense.”

“Seasoned oak?” she asks.

Hennel says gently, “We walked past buildings that were more than three hundred years old. Burning buildings, some made from trees even older than that. We were smelling the great forests of England as they vanished forever.”

That brings tears to her aching eyes. She’s tired, she decides. Or maybe she’s overwhelmed.

What makes you think I brought us here?” she asks.

He reaches forward and she nearly backs away. But she decides not to. He takes the cross that Grand gave her in his hand.

“This,” he says. “It’s not a regular cross, you know.”

“Is that why it’s hot?”

It’s his turn to look surprised. “I thought it was hot from the fires.”

She shakes her head. “It’s always like that.”

Or at least, it has been as long as she’s owned it, all of twenty-four hours.

“Hmm,” he says, as if that’s a revelation. “I didn’t know these things had a power of their own, but it makes sense.”

“These things?” Tenesha asks. “I thought it was just a cross.”

He shakes his head. “Mr. Maplethorpe explained it to me. Take it off and I’ll show you.”

She reaches behind her head and unclasps the cross, then hands it to him. He stares at it for a moment, as if it’s unfamiliar, then points to the ridges in the middle of the cross itself.

“See how they reflect the light?” he asks. “It’s always in this pattern and the reflection is always red, never yellow or white. But red.”

She takes the cross from him and moves it around. The gold doesn’t reflect at all, and the little cuttings do reflect red no matter where she moves the cross.

“What does it mean?” she asks.

“That the bearer is magical,” he says with the utmost seriousness.

“A cross?” She raises her voice in disbelief. People look at her. The students frown, and Denver makes a gesture which means You okay? She nods and continues the conversation, this time in a lower tone. “Crosses are the opposite of witches. The Church hates magic.”

“That’s why this cross is different,” he says. “To the untrained eye, it looks normal. It was designed as the Church went after pagans. Mr. Maplethorpe says that’s why the poor souls burned at the stake and persecuted during the Inquisition had no magic. They weren’t protected.”

“With a cross?” Tenesha asks.

“Think through, luv,” he says. “If you have magic and you lived around the ancient church, wouldn’t you do what you could to blend in? It’s silly to think that the magical would get captured. They’ve survived for centuries, or so Mr. Maplethorpe says. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t have a few brains.”

She laughs. “This is a present from my great-grandmother. She must not have known what it was, because I have no magic.”

“You must,” he says. “This has to have happened to you before.”

“Coming to the Blitz? Not highly likely.”

“Going to some past event,” he says. “You’ve done it before. Everyone’s power manifests young. Yours has to be to travel in time.”

She stares at him. Even as she starts to shake her head, she remembers Grand’s living room, how Grand’s stories always came alive in that room, so alive that Tenesha could actually see them.

“You have, haven’t you?” he says and he sounds excited. “You have done this before.”

Grandmother. The words came out of a very long ago past, her mother talking to her grandmother on the phone. She sent an entire sandbox of children to the bar where I met her father. I’m not even sure how they came back. But I can’t have a four-year-old running about unsupervised through all of human history.

That first trip to Grand—the first that Tenesha can remember—came right after that. But before it, Tenesha had to wear—what? Some kind of hated necklace. Not a cross, but something that made her heavy, that weighed her down.

And then Grand: She’ll only be able to practice here, Liv. In my home. Under my supervision. Send her summers. She won’t even know she’s preparing.

“You remember something,” he says.

“If you know this,” Tenesha snaps, “then you’re magical too.”

He shrugs. “That’s what Mr. Maplethorpe says, but I don’t know what my abilities are. He says I have to believe that magic exists before I can tap my own powers.”

She closes her fingers around the cross. “You believe. You’re trying to convince me.”

“Oh, luv,” he says, “you’re the one who’s convinced me. Now we have to get back home.”

“What do I do? Tap my ruby slippers together three times and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’”

His mouth opens slightly. “That’s it!” he says.

“C’mon,” Tenesha says. “The Wizard of Oz isn’t true. Now I know you’re teasing me.”

“Mr. Maplethorpe hated that movie. He says it revealed too many things. He said they had to add the ruby slippers to the film or everyone would know how to do a location spell.”

“What?” Tenesha is growing more and more confused.

“Just try it, luv,” he says. “What can it hurt?”

She thinks for a moment. What could it hurt? Nothing if it doesn’t work. But if she tries it and it does, she might leave the students behind and she would have no idea how to retrieve them.

“Get the students,” she says to Hennel. “I guess we’re going to give this the good old college try.”

“Tell you what,” the elderly gent says to Rupert. “Let’s pretend this hasn’t happened at all. Come out of there and close the exit door.”

“Why?” Rupert asks.

“Let’s just try it,” the elderly gent says.

The third and penultimate announcement echoes off the public address system.

“What can it hurt?” the elderly gent asks when the announcement is over.

Probably nothing, Rupert thinks. He scrambles out and pushes the door closed, adding a fervent little prayer of his own.

“When do I open the door again?” he asks the elderly gent.

The elderly gent shrugs as if the answer’s obvious. “Why, the moment they return, of course.”

They’ve moved deeper into the Crypt, away from the others. Hennel retrieved the students on the pretext of showing them some famous person’s tomb. Only Bailey protested. She didn’t want to see anything ghostly on an already scary evening.

No one holds hands. They won’t give up their precious cocoa. So Tenesha has them huddle around her, touching shoulders. She makes sure she’s brushing against Hennel, who is brushing against the students.

She taps her heels together, eyes closed. She can’t quite bring herself to speak aloud, and she’s afraid if she is magical and she thinks about home, the entire gang will end up in her parents’ house in Chicago.

So she thinks, I want to go back to the museum. Please send us all back to the museum. We want to return to our time and the museum.

She opens her eyes to complete darkness.

“Damn,” Denver says. “The lights are out again.”

“Do you think the fires burned through the lines?” Bailey asks.

“Fires can’t burn down a stone building, can they?” Ali asks.

Then the lights return. All nine of them—students, Hennel, her—are crammed together on a street corner.

Rubble has fallen in front of a shop. On the shop’s unbroken windows, someone has written Dried Eggs Today. Fresh Cheddar, followed by a price per pound. Through the open door, she can see the empty shelves inside, but nothing lies broken on the floor, even though something should be there. After all, there’s rubble to the left of the shop, the remains of some building not quite as fortunate.

Tenesha’s breath catches. She did it wrong. They’ve arrived somewhere else, somewhere that might be just as bad.

Then she realizes that the faint odor of smoke is coming from her clothing, not from the building. There’s no dust or ash in the air. In fact, someone has glued the rubble together.

The street corner isn’t real. It’s been done up to look real. She lets out a small sigh.

A voice overhead says in a firm brook-no-quarrels British accent that they must leave immediately.

“Now where are we?” Bailey asks.

A door opens and the poor redheaded museum employee looks inside.

“They’re back,” he says with some relief. “They’ve come back.”

Rupert knows that he sounds like an idiot but he doesn’t care. As the first Americans step out, heads bowed, he sighs. He did hallucinate all of this. They’re just fine, leaving the Experience like everyone else does, just a bit subdued.

Then one of the girls looks over at him. Her face is smudged with black and her hair is falling out of its barrette. Her eyes are irritated and red.

He glances at the other Americans. They’re covered in dirt as well, and a few of them have ripped clothing.

A young man grins at him. “That’s the best ride I’ve ever been on, man. I don’t know how you guys did it, but that was cool.”

He lifts a mug to Rupert. The mug is battered and old, and smells faintly of cocoa.

Rupert doesn’t say anything. The American students file out and then their teacher, who doesn’t meet his gaze at all.

The elderly gent’s companion has his hand on her back, leading her away from Rupert to the elderly gent.

“This is Mr. Maplethorpe,” the companion says. “I figured you should meet him.”

The elderly gent bows to the young woman. “I’ve known your great-grandmother for a very long time,” he says. “And you’re just as lovely as she said.”

Rupert frowns. They set something up, to play him for a fool. They all knew each other.

He glances at his watch. The museum is nearly closed.

“I beg your pardon,” he says, struggling to keep his anger at bay. “But the museum will close in less than two minutes….”

“There’s an exit down here into the gardens,” the elderly gent says. “I suggest we go out that way.”

And then he leads them away from the Experience without a fare-thee-well to Rupert. Rupert stands for a moment, feeling hurt, and then he realizes he’d better follow lest they try something again.

He totters after them, staring at those mismatched cocoa mugs, wondering where those came from. The students are laughing and talking, looking happy and unconcerned as they go through the door.

He watches them wander into the garden, then he closes and locks the door after them, leaning on it.

He isn’t sure what to make of his last half hour. He wants to chalk it up to his evil, vivid imagination, just like Uncle Giles would.

But not even his Uncle Giles would have an explanation for those mugs. There were no mugs in the Experience, and the mugs in the cafeteria look nothing like that. He knows the Americans didn’t bring the mugs with them because backpacks and anything larger than a small purse has to be left at the coat check. No one carried anything large enough for the mugs, and no one had a way to make cocoa.

He shakes his head as the final announcement airs on the public address system.

He just wasn’t paying attention, that was all. He had been struck by the beauty of the American teacher, and he hadn’t looked at the students closely enough.

Now he has to go inside the Experience with the lights on full to make certain that no one spilled anything in there.

He’s going to have to report the elderly gent. The elderly gent was part of this whole thing. He probably shouldn’t be allowed near the Experience again.

The gardens are lovely, the air fresh and so very welcome. Tenesha is still holding her mug of cocoa, made seventy years before in another part of London. She’s still holding it, and it’s still warm. That’s got to be some kind of miracle.

Although she’s not feeling very miraculous. She’s sweaty and covered in soot. Her clothes reek, and she feels oddly betrayed.

The students seem happy enough. They think they went on the best ride ever, better than Disney World, better than Universal Studios, something so real they’ll talk about it for the rest of their lives.

Hennel and Mr. Maplethorpe know better. Mr. Maplethorpe walks alongside her. He seems to sense her mood, since he says nothing.

“You and my great-grandmother planned this, didn’t you?” Tenesha asks as they pass beautifully manicured rose bushes.

Mr. Maplethorpe looks straight ahead. “She’s been waiting for you to return to London. It’s put a strain on our magic.”

“Our magic?” Tenesha asks.

He nods. He puts a hand on her arm and stops her. Then he looks around to see if the students are following. They’ve huddled together, comparing notes. Hennel stands a few yards off, looking awkward, as if he wants to join Tenesha and Mr. Maplethorpe, but isn’t sure he’s welcome.

Tenesha’s not sure he’s welcome either. She wants to have this discussion alone.

“We have a group, you see,” Mr. Maplethorpe says. “It’s best if you have a group.”

“Great,” Tenesha says with sarcasm. “You have a group. I just discover that I have the power to travel through time and space, but you have a group, and my abilities strain your magic. I’m sorry.”

“We didn’t want you randomly traveling without understanding what happened,” Mr. Maplethorpe says. “We put a protect spell on you, placed you in your own little bubble so that you’d be safe. But we expected you to come back to England before you entered university. Instead, you did not return for six years. We’ve barely been able to control your magic.”

She almost sips the cocoa, then wonders if she should. Not because she suspects it will poison her, but because it’s oddly precious now, a relic of the past, of the experience that she has just had and doesn’t entirely understand.

“Maybe if you’d been honest with me. Or flown me out yourselves,” she says.

“We’re mostly pensioners—”

“Pensioners,” she says. “With no funds I suppose.”

He nods.

“I thought you were supposed to be magic. Why don’t you conjure up some diamonds or something?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he says. “Our gifts don’t give us a choice. We’re not like you Americans portray in the movies. Our magicks are usually small, and often inconsequential. Yours, it turns out, is neither. The ability to travel through time is rare and valued. And your ability clearly spans longer than your life, which is the normal limitation on these things. You’ll be quite valuable, should you allow us to press you into service.”

“Service,” she says. “What kind of service? Something that’ll turn me into a pensioner when I’m old?”

He winces. “No, my dear,” he says. “Our guild has existed long before there were guilds. We split into several factions. There are the mercenary types—they run several corporations, including magical ones—and then there are those of us dedicated to service. We also split. We have those who do good works, and those who make certain we remain untouched. We haven’t had a time traveler in our guild in nearly three hundred years. And we could use one.”

He stares at her.

“I have a job,” she says.

He takes the mug from her and sets it on a nearby wooden bench. Then he takes her hands in his own. From a distance it probably looked like he was proposing.

“Whether you return to America or not,” he says, “you’ll need training. We no longer have the resources to keep your abilities under wraps.”

“I’m sure someone there can train me,” Tenesha says.

He sighs. “We have very few members of our guild in America. The corporate groups are much stronger, and they will charge you for lessons. We will not.”

She shrugs. “It’ll be expensive either way. I’d have to move to England.”

“It’s not the expense so much,” he says. “It’s the time it will take for you to find the proper instructors. You’d probably have to move there as well. Time travel is the most difficult to control. That’s part of our problem. It takes only a willingness to slip into someone else’s memories, and then you’re there. So if someone’s telling you an emotional story about the day their first child was born, you might conceivably find yourself at that birthing chamber.”

She doesn’t move, but her heart has started to pound. This sounds familiar. Lately, it has felt as if she’s stepped a little too close to her friends.

“Why do you think you’re a history major, my dear?” he says. “Because you have the ability to imagine history thoroughly? Bosh. You would hear a lecture and partially slide away, because our magic can’t quite hold you any longer. That slippage will get worse.”

“Why didn’t Grand tell me this?” Tenesha asks.

“She planned to when you visited. Then you gave this gift of the museum visit, and even asked her along. She would have come if I hadn’t needed someone to prove to Mr. Hennel that magic exists as well. His talents are smaller than yours, but no less valuable. He can convince people that he’s right when he speaks with conviction.”

Like he had with her when they discussed the Wizard of Oz.

“His powers can be dangerous if left alone. We’re hoping to train him to use them for good.”

Tenesha pulls her hands from Mr. Maplethorpe’s. Then she takes her mug back. It doesn’t even feel like a modern mug. It’s too thin. Nowadays, mugs have substance.

“You talk a good game,” she says. “You use all the right words—service, working for the good, making the right choices. But how do I know that you’re not some kind of opportunist or….”

She let her voice trail off. She almost said a scam artist, but she knows he’s not that. Because she really was in the past. So that much is true: she wouldn’t have believed anything if she hadn’t traveled back to the Blitz.

“Do you believe your great-grandmother would ever work on what you Americans would call the wrong side? She’s no opportunist, is she?”

Tenesha looks at him. Grand is a good woman. If Tenesha believes anything, she believes that.

“I’ll need to talk to her,” Tenesha says.

“Of course you will,” Mr. Maplethorpe says.

“You people are asking me to change my life.”

“Actually no. The moment you realized you have abilities your life changed. You now have the choice of direction. Of course you must proceed with caution. We would expect no less.”

He bows to her, a curious little movement that seems both courtly and dismissive. Then he walks back to Hennel, presumably to deal with that man’s reluctance with whatever scheme Mr. Maplethorpe has proposed to him.

“Hey, Ms. McGuire!” Denver walks toward her with the rest of the group with him. “We were wondering if we can go through the Blitz thing again tomorrow.”

You could, she thinks but doesn’t say, but you wouldn’t like it.

“I’m afraid we won’t be anywhere near the museum tomorrow,” she says, unable to remember their exact itinerary. Not that it matters. She now has an itinerary of her own.

She must see Grand again, and she has to talk about her future. She has to now learn and understand her own abilities. She has to decide who she is going to become.

Although that part isn’t as hard as she made it sound to Mr. Maplethorpe. She decided long ago that she’s not interested in money—no one who majors in history is—and she realized with her first summer job that she’s not suited to the corporate life.

Besides, Grand won’t live much longer, and Tenesha has always wanted to spend more time with her. Tenesha will learn about this guild and the abilities of everyone in it.

They can teach her how to prevent time-traveling to places like the Blitz. She doesn’t want to go through anything like that again—at least, not unexpectedly.

Then, if she doesn’t like what this guild stands for, she can strike out on her own. She is an American after all. A believer in the rights and powers of the individual.

She’ll make her own choices.

But they’ll be informed choices.

She smiles to herself, feeling better than she has in months. She feels like she has a direction now. She’s still not sure where she’s going, but she has time to figure that out.

A lot of time.

All the time in the world.

The Blitz Experience

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © depositedhar/DepositPhotos

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

Any use of this publication to train generative arti!cial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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At the Keep, women serve one purpose: pawns for greater power. Power belonging to Micheline’s father. He uses magic to achieve that goal, but that magic serves another purpose, as well. It tests a woman’s purity. And what Micheline learns about this test will change her forever.

“Purity Test” is free on this website for one week only. The story is also available in Fantasies Collide Vol. 4 as a standalone anthology or in the Fantasy Bundle of Bundles Storybundle, in the volume Fantasies: A Colliding Storybundle Special Edition, which pairs the Fantasies Collide volume with volume four of Series Collides. The Fantasies edition will give you an additional 39 stories, along with other bundle of bundles from fourteen different authors. Lots and lots of reading there. You’ll get 47 ebooks for about $2 per book. Or, if you’re feeling minimalist, you can get your own standalone copy of the story at any retailer or pick up a copy here. Enjoy!

Purity TestKristine Kathryn RuschMy feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close, and sell them in whatever town I find myself in.

Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave these woods.

I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and the dogs.

I was but a child when Sutton came to the Keep. He seemed like an old man even then, with a beard that trailed to his knees and white hair that fell about his shoulders. His fingers were long and fine, but his back was broad, like a laborer’s, and his skin was rough to the touch.

His eyes frightened me. They were a pale blue, so pale that, in a certain light, they seemed clear. When I mentioned them to my mother—she was alive then: alive, vibrant, and beautiful—she laughed.

“Of course, Micheline,” she said in her lilting accent, using—as she always did—her people’s version of my name. “He is magic. It is fitting he has devil’s eyes.”

My father said my mother was a witch, but she had no true magic powers. She knew the gentle arts—herbs for healing, mostly—and she had an enchanting laugh. Men were drawn to her, and women too. She had a personality that overshadowed all others, and dwarfed my father’s.

Apparently my father had once loved her. Perhaps he loved her still in the days surrounding Sutton’s arrival, but he did not trust her. If my brother and I had not had my father’s auburn hair and freckled skin, his green eyes and his hooked nose, he would have disavowed us as another man’s children, as he had done with my younger sister. She had the misfortune to look like our mother: nut brown eyes, features delicate and small, and black hair so thick it hung in waves down her back.

She was just a babe when Sutton arrived, and my father hadn’t yet denied her, but in hindsight, it is clear the poisoned thoughts were already in him, twisting him, marking him, making him a man incapable of warmth.

My mother’s death the following year—giving birth to yet another dark-haired babe, a boy who would not live till dawn—completed my father’s transformation. From that night forward, I never saw him smile nor speak a kind word.

The Keep was my father’s. It had been his father’s, and his father’s father before him. A large, rectangular building with four small towers, it looked more like a castle or a fortress. But we called it the Keep because it had once been part of a larger complex, filled with granaries and great houses and stables.

They had all crumbled before my father was born, but the ghosts of them remained, leaving their stone footprints on the property. A guard tower, which had once been part of an acres-long wall, still stood, empty and dust-covered. My brother and I used to explore it before my father hired a nurse after my mother’s death—a nurse who taught me how to stitch and sit quietly and never ever reveal my innermost thoughts.

The guard tower had four levels, and a winding staircase that made its way around the interior like braids on a maiden’s nape. The top level had an arching ceiling, and a view that extended for miles on all sides. My brother and I often hid up there from our mother, and she would pretend she could not find us, although our footprints littered the dust, and our giggles echoed through the levels below.

My father gave Sutton the guard tower as a home. Suddenly my brother and I were forbidden to go within sight distance of the place. We would sneak to the edge of the woods and watch as laborers brought all manner of strange things inside—tables made of shiny material we had never before seen, boxes of foul-smelling roots, and cloth so thin it seemed as if it weren’t woven at all.

Later, the horses would arrive—and cats and dogs—never to be seen again. Other animals as well, things I didn’t recognize, with horns and snouts and short stubby legs. They would vanish into the first floor of that tower, and sometimes we would hear cries and wails as if the very depths of hell had opened.

But that was after Mother had died. Before, there were no animals, and Sutton would join us at feasts. My mother would tease him—“What miracle have we performed today, Mr. Sutton?”—and he would answer her, telling her of sparkling air or reading stray thoughts. One evening, she made the mistake of laughing at him, and from then on, he would disavow miracles, claiming he did simple magic and nothing more.

My father believed Sutton’s magic was not simple. My father believed Sutton could return our family to its former glory—castles and land and serfs. My father would no longer be a small lord, but a great leader, a warrior-chieftain who might one day unite the other lords, and take on the name of King.

My father never saw that goal—we still have warring lords, arguing tribes, and no unity at all—but he came close.

He came desperately close.

And then I ran away.

But I get ahead of myself.

There were years between my rebellion and my mother’s death, years in which my father grew harsher and colder and more ambitious; years in which the strangeness of Sutton’s Tower grew; years in which entire buildings appeared behind it, all of them emitting horrible yowlings and fetid odors, and sometimes, a river of blood.

My father gave my sister to a convent when she was three. Years later, I asked him about her, and he claimed that while she was my sister, she was not his daughter, and he had no obligation to her. I visited to the convent once, and no one had heard of her.

She is lost. I do not know why or how.

I asked my brother, but he no longer cared. He became a soldier after my mother’s death. At the age of ten, he wielded a sword twice his size. From then on, I saw my brother only at meals.

He was not allowed to speak to me, and soon he refused to meet my eyes. The closeness we had felt vanished. He became a stranger who drank too much, laughed too hard, and fought recklessly.

When my father started thinking of my brother’s marriage, using my brother’s life to establish alliances, I thought little of it. It is the way among lords—the firstborn must make a good match, whatever the cost.

The women paraded before my brother were often not women at all. Some were mere children. The two years that separated my brother and me seemed like a gulf then. While I still spent time with my nurse learning demure ways to defer to my future husband, my brother had already seen our entire corner of the world.

My father would hold feasts to honor the families who brought their daughters to the Keep, seeking an alliance. I attended, but was not allowed to speak unless spoken to, and certainly could not discuss anything with the newcomers.

I did not understand enough of life to fathom my father’s concern with purity. I believed him obsessed with pureness of heart. He did not care about anyone’s heart, having lost his own. He cared only that the woman who married his son was a virgin, and he did not trust doctors and midwives to determine it was so.

So when the young women and their fathers left the feasting hall with my father and Sutton, I thought it a common enough custom. I did not understand the protestations of some lords, the unwillingness of many to even come to our small Keep.

Once I overheard some soldiers speculating about my father’s determination. The soldiers believed that my father investigated the girl’s private parts the way a midwife would, while the girl’s own father looked on.

But the soldiers were as naïve as I was, only in a different way. They did not understand what a midwife later told me—that a girl’s virginity could not always be determined with a look or a touch, that sometimes, a virgin had no proof of it, condemning the innocent girl to charges of promiscuity when, in truth, she had never lain with a man.

The midwife who told me this also confided that she believed this happened to my mother. The wedding night, the midwife said, was a disaster. No blood had spilled on the white sheets, so everyone thought my mother’s maidenhood had not been intact at the time of the wedding.

Yet for her entire marriage, my mother claimed she had never touched a man other than my father.

I am exhausted. This forest seems to run forever. The wind echoes in here, whispering through the branches of the mighty oaks that hid the sun. The ground is rugged. I move slower now; my feet so sore that I limp even though I try not to.

I can no longer run.

I look at the tall trees, at the welcoming thick branches with their wide forks, and remember what it was like to be a child, hiding among the leaves.

I think of hiding now. It would be so easy. I would tie what’s left of my shoes to the shreds of my dress, then wedge my bare feet against the rough bark. I would wrap my hands around an easy-to-reach branch, and climb, pulling myself upward until the leaves hide me from the ground below.

My father wouldn’t find me. Neither would Roland or the others.

But the dogs would. I’d seen them tree a cat many times at the edge of the forest, surrounding the trunk, their paws scraping against the bark, baying and howling and barking until someone came.

I used to laugh at the dogs, but I do not now. I think of my father’s cleverness, his intense determination to get whatever he wants, and I shiver.

I continue to stumble forward. I cannot hear the dogs.

I am gaining a fragile hope. Perhaps they have returned to their pen. Perhaps my father has returned to his Keep.

Perhaps this final humiliation will break him.

But most likely, it makes him stronger. My father thrives in adversity.

He made his greatest mistakes when he believed the world was his for the taking.

She was tall, like my mother, a woman full grown. A few years older than my brother, she was still unwed. Her fiancé—a man of honor, her father said—had died on the battlefield, and she had mourned him which was unusual in an alliance that had been arranged from birth.

Her name was Opal, and I thought her the most beautiful creature I had seen. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, and it accented her chiseled cheekbones and sky blue eyes.

She did not smile. She made it clear she had no desire to come to our little Keep and see our pretend kingdom. She did not want to be the lady of this land.

She would, she told my father, eyes blazing in defiance, mourn her lost love for eternity.

“Fine,” my father said to her, “I do not care how you feel, only that, should the alliance be made, you do your part and produce sons.”

She spat at his feet.

Her own father apologized for her. He believed the union advantageous to both families. We had adjoining property, and weaker lords on either side. We could mount an army, he said, and take even more land. He was too old to lead. He would leave that to my father, so long as both families shared in the spoils.

The bargain was made before my brother ever saw his intended.

Not that it mattered. He was smitten from the moment he first looked at that stunning face. She slapped him when he got too close, and after he recovered from his shock, he slapped her in return.

My father laughed.

“Passion,” he said. “It guarantees sons.”

But there were no sons. There was no marriage. Opal would not submit to my father’s ministrations. Her own father pleaded, saying there could be no alliance without a guarantee, but she refused.

My father came to me for the first and last time in my life.

“Do you know your mother’s potions?” he asked.

“Some,” I said. “I was too young to learn most of them.”

“A sleeping potion is all I need,” he said.

I could do that.

I felt so pleased to help my father. Finally he had turned to me. Finally he had noticed me.

I would do anything he wanted.

I completed the potion in the space of a morning, and tested it on the nurse. She slept deeply, but continued to breathe—always a risk with a sleeping potion. Then I took it to my father.

He thanked me, and said no more.

But I knew he had plans, and I knew they concerned Opal. He had a servant pour the potion in Opal’s wine at that night’s feast. She yawned within minutes, excused herself, and was nearly asleep before she reached the guest quarters.

I excused myself as well, snuck into the guest quarters, and hid across the hall from her room. I wanted to know what my father was up to.

Around midnight, when the feast had dissolved into a drunken party, my father and Sutton came up the servants’ stairs. My father unlocked Opal’s door and went inside. Sutton remained in the hall.

He did not see me, but then Sutton never saw me. His gaze always skimmed past me as if I were a servant, beneath his notice, someone who did not exist.

Still, I did not move. I scarcely breathed.

After a moment, my father exited the room, the sleeping Opal cradled in his arms. He was a strong man, but he had trouble with her weight. Her arms and legs dangled, her hair trailing to the floor. Her feet were bare, her nightdress barely covering her torso.

She slept as soundly as Nurse.

The men tiptoed down the stairs, and I followed as closely as I dared. They wound through the back corridors, past the still hot ovens, toward the yards.

I hated the yards. The stench was abominable—pigs, and cows, and chickens running free. This late, the animals slept, all except one sow who lifted her head from the putrid muck and watched as the men hurried by.

I gave the pigs a wide berth. But the sow put her head down before I passed, and did not watch me at all.

The men went beyond the yards to Sutton’s Tower. My father set Opal on an old stone garden seat and remained with her, while Sutton opened the doors to one of the tower’s new sections. Then Sutton stood aside.

I circled along my old secret path, moving closer so that I could see. I ended up on the edge of the woods, and hid behind an old stump covered with weeds. I made no sound at all. My father did not see me, and Sutton never would.

The fresh scent of evergreen and crushed grass cleared the stench of the yards from my nose. The ground was damp with late-night dew, soaking my slippers within moments. But I didn’t mind; I liked the night and the darkness. I would have enjoyed it more, if it weren’t for the strangeness of my father and Sutton.

They both stared at those open doors. My father leaned against the back of that bench, hands clenched, Opal forgotten behind him. Sutton shifted nervously.

“Perhaps you should move, milord,” he said.

My father nodded, then stepped aside, heading away from me.

At that moment, a light flared inside the new room. The yellow edges of it caught Sutton as if he were a thief. The light came closer and closer, almost blinding in its intensity.

I squinted, and crouched even lower beside the trunk. The light illuminated the dried leaves, the drops of water on the broken blades of grass, the rich brown of the earth near my feet. I wasn’t sure if the light illuminated me as well.

Fortunately, my father did not see me at all. Neither did Sutton. They were staring at a white horse that had emerged from the doors, a white horse with a long horn. From the tip of that horn came the bright light. The horse had blue eyes and a mane the pale colors of the rainbow. The colors shifted with each of the horse’s movements.

Sutton moved to the side, out of the way of the horse. My father placed a hand above his eyes, shielding them.

The horse pranced forward. It paused for a moment. It did not look at the bench.

It looked at me.

I crouched even lower, but I felt the brightness of that light upon me. I raised my head ever so slightly. The horse had not moved, but one of the bright blue eyes held mine.

I shook my head, thinking, No, please, stay away, don’t let them see me.

The horse whinnied, nodded, then turned as if it were guided by unseen hands. It returned to the building, sliding through the doors, and disappeared.

The light slowly faded, but left reflections across my eyes.

“They lied,” my father said. “The unicorn did not go to her. She is not a virgin.”

“It is understandable, given her advanced age—”

“It is not understandable,” my father said. “She has been misrepresented.”

He walked to the doors and pushed them closed. Sutton hadn’t moved.

“Either the virgins are too young,” Sutton said, “or you cannot come to terms with their fathers. Perhaps you should take this one, demand a greater bride price since she is damaged—”

“I will not condemn my son to relive my life!” my father snapped. “I have told you this.”

“Then betroth the boy to a young one. Have him marry her the moment she comes of age.”

“We’ll have to retest her.”

“But the difference is that these fathers know what you’re doing. They won’t allow their daughters to be tainted.”

My father sighed. Then he shook his head, and started back toward the Keep.

“What of the girl?” Sutton asked.

“Leave her,” my father said. “She no longer matters to me.”

I waited until Sutton disappeared into his tower, and the lights went out. Then I roused Opal as best I could. She was much bigger than I was, so I could not carry her even if I had the strength.

Instead, I let her lean on me as if she had had too much ale, and helped her back to her room. With luck, she would remember nothing of the trip when she finally awoke.

But I did. The magical horse with its ability to find pure women, my father’s unwillingness to treat Opal with the least civility, and the vehemence in his voice when he spoke of his own life made me leery.

Soon my brother found himself engaged to a child of ten. The wedding, planned three years hence, predated my own by only a few months. He is wed now, though not happily. His young wife is a shrew, and he sees her only to perform his duties or so he says.

I vowed I would not have such a marriage. I vowed I would have warmth in my life, and laughter, like we had when my mother lived.

Although I made these vows, I was not sure I could keep them.

Then my father introduced me to Roland.

Roland was a tall man with broad shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist. His eyes crinkled in the corners, and his smile softened his face. He too carried the blood of my mother’s people—the black hair and the dark, dark eyes—but he did not have their ways.

His land lay between my father’s and the sea, most of it forest, all of it valuable. If he allied with my father, he would become part of a clan that extended from the shore to the hills—the most land in all the south.

My father wasn’t yet a king, but he was becoming the largest landowner in the entire country, almost large enough to raise an army equal to that of those who called themselves his betters.

With Roland’s help, my father would finally be in position.

The nuptial negotiations went on before I met Roland, but I did not care. I had always known I would marry to serve my father’s dynastic needs. I had no control over that. I merely hoped I could stomach the union my father chose.

When I met Roland, I was pleased to find him handsome and overjoyed at his tenderness when he took my hand, the softness in his voice when he spoke my name.

There would be affection in this marriage, affection and warmth and laughter. I could build a home as my mother had, and stop thinking about the darkness that was growing around the Keep.

By the time I met Roland, I had stopped walking all over my father’s land. I particularly avoided Sutton’s Tower—not because of the strange horse they called a unicorn, but because of the corpses I sometimes found near the wood.

The cat was strange enough. I had discovered it, with its small head and tiny horn, the twisted back and the stunted tail, shortly after my mother’s death. But the dogs, protrusions around their mouths, half formed wings on their backs, disturbed me most. I imagined I saw suffering still in their dead eyes.

The screams and squeals that came from Sutton’s Tower took on a sinister cast for me after that night with Opal, and despite the beauty of the unicorn beast, I realized Sutton was dabbling in something that threatened us all.

For I had no doubt he created these beasts with a particular goal in mind, just as he developed this unicorn to serve my father’s fancy.

I did not think of the virginity then. I thought of it as part of a parcel of a woman’s purity of heart rather than the goal of Sutton’s experiment.

At that point, I also did not think of the quick way in which the unicorn had found me.

I thought, once I met Roland, my life was set.

The morning of my wedding—yesterday morning—I stood in my dressing room as the seamstress stitched me into my gown. The wedding dress had a thousand seed pearls for a thousand years of happiness, and a necklace of full-sized pearls sewn into the collar. They matched the pearls along the veil, as did the pearls on the cuffs of my sleeve.

The hairdresser coiled my thick hair around my face, pinched my cheeks, and showed me my reflection in the looking glass. A woman full grown—a beautiful woman, whose skin was as luminous as the pearls, whose softly glowing cheeks reflected the color of her rich auburn hair, whose eyes shown with the light of a thousand-year future—stared at me from the glass.

I did not know that my drunken father had revealed a secret to my bridegroom the night before.

“When you are my son-in-law,” my father whispered, “I will show you how to become rich. I have a beast that approaches only virginal women and shuns those who are not. I used it to ensure the purity of my son’s bride, and I shall lease it out to other fathers who want to do the same.”

That morning—yesterday morning—I was not thinking of the unicorn or my hungover father. I fantasized about life away from the Keep, about the life I would build with my husband-to-be, about the children we would have—dark-haired girls who looked like my mother, and auburn-haired boys who would remind me of my brother before my father took him away.

I was preparing for happiness, as if it were my due.

As I went down the back stairs to the Great Hall where the guests and the priest waited, my brother found me. His left eye was swollen shut, his cheek speckled with blood, his knuckles raw.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and swept me into his arms.

I was too surprised to struggle. “What’s going on?”

“Roland,” he said with a touch of bitterness, “insists.”

That was enough for me. I would do what Roland said because he was going to be my husband, because I was beginning to believe I loved him, and because I thought he could do no wrong.

Together my brother and I tucked my veil into my bodice, and twined my train around his hand. Then he carried me through the kitchens and into the yards, careful to keep the foul muck from touching me or my dress.

The pigs were awake. They grunted as we passed. The chickens fled, making a half-hearted attempt to fly, and the cows simply looked over their shoulders, surprised that anyone would try to disturb them.

My heart pounded. My mother’s people had a separate wedding ceremony, one that came first, one that guaranteed the union would not be sullied by its brush with the church.

I hoped Roland wanted that, because the other thing—the unicorn—meant he did not trust me, he did not believe me, he needed proof before our first night together.

I had kept myself pure. I had not touched another man. My father would not allow me to be alone with Roland—“You must watch her,” my father had said. “She is tainted by her mother’s blood.”—so in no way could I be impure.

But my word did not count. Women like Opal had twisted my father further, made him believe even less. But I wouldn’t have expected it of Roland.

The moment my brother carried me out of the yards, however, I saw how wrong I was. Roland’s lovely face had a bruised cheek, and the corner of his mouth carried dried blood.

My brother had defended me, and lost. As his price, he had to fetch me to this hideous place so that a creature not created by God could attest to my virginity.

Sutton stood beside the doors, as he had that awful night with Opal. My father stood beside Roland near the fence.

“What caused this?” I asked my brother.

He told me about the drunken conversation, the creature my father had Sutton create to do his bidding, and the allure it held for Roland.

“Roland merely wants to see it work,” my brother said. “This is his best chance.”

Those words should have soothed me.

They did not.

My brother carried me to the stone bench. “It’s just a formality,” he said in an apologetic tone. “You’ll be all right.”

Perhaps I would have been. Perhaps the moment would have passed swiftly, and I would have forgotten Roland’s betrayal, my father’s willingness to show off his toy, and Sutton’s desire to humiliate all women.

But I remembered my first view of the unicorn. It had been an impressive beast from a distance, and I feared it up close. What did it do to determine virginity?

I knew the woman lived after the test—my brother’s wife was proof of this—but was she changed? Had my brother’s wife been a charming child, only to become a shrew after the touch of that ethereal light?

Had she been burned by a spawn of Satan, created by a man who was in league with the devil?

Had the experience so warped her mind that she never trusted again?

I turned on that stone bench, my dress catching on the rough edges, holding me in place.

Sutton opened the doors, and the light flared, as it had before. Only this time, I could see inside the building, see the stable filled with hay, the white horse—the unicorn—and the perfection of its equine face. The blue eyes seemed natural in the light of day, and the pale rainbow hues of the mane seemed a product of the torch that burned atop that strange horn.

The unicorn pranced toward me, its head lifted, its tail up, as if it were coming toward someone it knew and loved.

And, God help me, I raised my hands to my mouth, as terrified—more terrified—than I had been that night in the woods. I could scarcely breathe.

Please, no, I thought. Don’t come near me. Don’t hurt me. Please.

The unicorn stopped in confusion. It looked over its shoulder at Sutton, then at my father, and finally at me.

A tear traced its way down my cheek. Please …

The unicorn nodded, tilted its head, and I felt a warmth, an understanding. Perhaps—

The word was not mine. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and cowered, preparing for the touch of that magic light. Instead, I heard a whinny and my father’s cursing, and then Roland—Roland!—screaming, “You liar. You barbaric liar! You promised me a virgin bride, a good girl, and what do we have? A whore. A whore in virgin white.”

I opened my eyes.

My father was staring at me as if he had never seen me before. My brother started walking toward the yards, his back to me, as if I no longer mattered.

Roland grabbed my veil and yanked it off my head. His hand held my hair, pulling it so hard my scalp ached.

He raised his hand to cuff me, and I came alive. I punched him in the stomach, then kicked him in the knee, making his leg crumble. I shoved him away, tugged my hair from his grasp, and ran toward the forest.

“Stop her!” Roland shouted.

“Why would you want to do that?” Sutton asked. “She’s not what you want.”

“I never said I wouldn’t marry her,” Roland snapped. “She just has to be punished for her betrayal, so that it would never happen again.”

My betrayal. Mine? What about his? Who had that loving man been, that hero of my dreams, the husband who would take me from all of this?

A figment of my imagination?

A lie?

I had done nothing, and he had accused me of betrayal.

I kept running, hoping my father would defend me. It was a false test, he would say, created to ferret other men’s lies.

But he said nothing. Finally, Sutton shouted, “Milord, we need her. She must not get away!”

“She is her mother,” my father said, his voice half-hidden beneath my ragged breathing, my panic. “I should have known.”

And then I was in the trees, my dress catching on bark. I ripped the bottom half away and kept running, tears flowing down my cheeks.

“We’ll never catch her now,” Roland shouted. “Get the dogs!”

I hit a clearing and slipped on a patch of dirt. My feet went out from under me, and I landed on my back. The dirt moved. I was sliding downward. I hit a rock at the bottom, tumbled forward, and struggled to catch my breath.

Behind me I heard nothing.

I had a few moments. If they were going to get the dogs, I had only a few moments. But I had to outthink them. If I could stay away from the dogs, I could run through the woods and maybe make it to the shore, and my mother’s people.

Or if I came out near a village, I could sell the pearls, and get enough gold to buy food, new clothing, maybe even a horse. I could live on my own somewhere else, where there was no magic, no family, and no betrayals.

For the first time, I thanked my father for all his fox-hunting conversations at the various feasts. I knew how foxes somehow escaped the dogs. I had tricks that I could at least try.

I ripped my dress, strung some of the shredded pieces down a side path, then backtracked my steps. I held the dress up so that it wouldn’t catch any more and headed forward, crossing a small stream so that the dogs would lose my scent.

Then I hurried deep into the forest, always moving, never stopping, forever listening, for barking, baying, and the sounds of the hunt.

I am near collapse. A few berries, little water, no rest. I doubt I can keep going much longer.

Yet the forest continues forever. Perhaps there is no end to it. Perhaps I’ll die in here, alone, unmourned, spoken of as the humiliation of my family if I’m ever spoken of again.

I keep thinking I hear dogs, but they’re not barking. They crash through the woods, occasionally huff as if something pricks them. I never think of dogs as silent creatures, hunting with determination.

Maybe my father didn’t take Roland’s suggestion. Maybe I’m fleeing for no reason.

Maybe no one is searching for me at all.

That thought makes me stop. I bend over, trying to catch my breath. Little spots dance in front of my eyes. I stand, brace a hand against a tree trunk, and blink, hoping I don’t pass out.

The crashing, ever so faint. I have heard it since yesterday.

The dogs bay when they tree a fox. They bark when they get close, letting their masters know that the fox is within sight.

This part of the forest is too dense for horseback riding. My father, Roland, my brother, they would have to come on foot.

I cannot hear them, either.

The idea that they would not come hurts more than the idea that they’re chasing me. It merely confirms that I have no value. That I am nothing to my father, my brother, and a man I once thought my beloved.

I am nothing.

The huffing gets even closer, and I see something white through the trees. White, yet filled with the colors of the rainbow.

My breath catches. I blink, wondering if I am so exhausted that I’m seeing visions.

Then the unicorn steps into the patch of trees. Its flank is scratched, its mane filled with leaves and burrs. It stares at me, the blue eyes filled with knowledge.

Stop running. Please.

The voice in my head is not my own. I lean against the tree, using it to hold me up.

I am so sorry. I didn’t know turning away would make them abandon you.

“How can you speak?” I whisper.

I don’t speak. I have thoughts. I can share them with women like you. It’s part of the magic.

The unicorn bows its head. The horn—which is not flaring with light—nearly hits a tree branch.

I didn’t want them to hurt you. I thought if they let you go, you would be safe. I didn’t realize until too late you belonged to them.

“Not any more.” My voice is weak, even though I’m no longer trying to whisper.

It’s better this way. You have no idea how cruel they are.

Because I closed my eyes. I did not want to see. They were part of my home.

But I wanted to get away. I wanted a perfect, happy life with Roland.

“How did you escape?”

They didn’t close the door. I followed you. They didn’t even realize I had left.

But they would. My father guards his possessions, at least the ones he values. The ones he doesn’t value get lost.

Like my sister.

“They’ll come for you.”

Yes.

Unlike me. They won’t come for me.

But they won’t catch me if I don’t want them to. We can stay together.

“Why would I stay with you?” I ask, then wince at the cruelty in my speech. Cruelty that hides some truth. Why would I stay with this thing? I don’t even know what it is.

I don’t know what I am either. Except that I do not fit there. Neither do you. We are of a kind, and we are alone. Let us stay together. I will help you travel, and you will help me learn. And somehow, we will stay away from them.

A shiver runs through me. “You read my thoughts.”

When they’re powerful enough.

“Only mine?”

Yes.

The unicorn raises its head. Our gazes meet. Its blue eyes are gentle.

It has never ever been cruel to me. In fact, it is the only one in my life who has ever heard me or done as I asked.

I step forward, hand extended. “May I touch you?”

Yes.

I do. The hair on its nose is rough beneath my fingers, like horsehair. The horn does not flare with light, but looks very solid.

The unicorn watches me, its body trembling.

Except for our breathing, the woods are silent. Not even a bird chirps. And no dogs bark, no humans crash through the bushes.

No one knows where we are.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” I ask.

I do not even know what a sea is. It continues to watch me, its mane shifting from red to pink to white to blue.

“It’s where my mother’s people live.” Where everyone laughs with joy, and doesn’t judge, where they marry not in front of a priest, but by clasping hands and vowing eternal love.

I believe in love, it says.

“So do I.” I smile. That’s enough, at least for a beginning.

I put my hand on its flank.

Together, the unicorn and I walk through the forest, away from my father’s land, across Roland’s, all the way to the sea.

Purity Test

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Tjapa2007/Dreamstime

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

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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I just curated a Storybundle called The Fantasy Bundle of Bundles. You see, Storybundle is a bundle of ebooks by different writers on a theme. The concept behind this Storybundle is that each writer contribute a bundle of books. My main contribution is the entire Faerie Justice series in a compilation that you will never find anywhere else. My secondary contribution is in collaboration with Dean Wesley Smith. We’ve put together two books from our Collides collection—one is a book of fantasy short stories from our various series, and the other is a collection of otherworldly fantasy tales.

Those are only two of the bundles in this bundle of bundles. You’ll get stories from 12 other writers…or maybe 50 other writers, if you think of all of the contributors to the anthology series you will find here. All of the ebooks are exclusive to this bundle of bundles. You won’t find them anywhere else.

So much reading! Go take a look! Click here to get yours.

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All spring we’ve been counseling writers who have come to realize that going wide with ebooks is not bringing in the kind of income that the writers had hoped for. The days off to all the retailers and making a small fortune are gone. Now, writers need to expand their horizons even more, doing other things that aren’t as intuitive as putting books in bookstores.

Finally, Dean Wesley Smith and I asked writers on my social media accounts and Dean’s website if they’d like to see a seminar on expanding income opportunities. Everyone said yes.

Honestly, we need this too. Every few years, indie writers need a refresher course in what’s available. They also need to figure out what they want to do with their limited non-writing time. So, we’re excited to do this seminar. Here’s the information, mostly cribbed from Dean’s website. (The “I” in the piece from here on out is Dean.) Btw, since we compiled this list, we’ve come up with a lot more. As I said, very exciting!

What is this all about? Basically showing writers and indie publishers how to make at least $40,000 per year and even more if you are already making that much. The more we talked about doing this and talked with others, the more we knew it would be fun for us to lay all this out. And help our own business in the process.

So many writers are getting discouraged by not making much money, and yet they don’t even realize how the cash streams are built. In essence, this will be an awareness seminar on all the fifty or seventy or more major and minor ways of helping yourself make a living beyond just putting your work in the major stores around the world. Being wide around the world we will consider a basic starting point.

And don’t worry, we will explain completely what “being wide” entails. Got a hunch most are missing places for cash streams that would be very simple to add in.

This course will be for writers of all levels. From a number of short stories published to fifty or more major books. For early stage writers, much of this will be down the road, but it will be good to learn about and plan for. For more advanced writers, this will be a way to explore things you might not have thought of, or have thought of and are not sure if it would be worth your time to add in.

SPECIAL FEATURE!! And for everyone, since indie publishing is changing so fast, we are adding in one special feature. In one year we will update everything and add new information and videos into the class and do an extra webinar or two. And then we will do it again in two years. And in three years. If you are in the class this first time, there will be no extra charge. You automatically will get all the updates every summer.

We plan to divide up the many, many, many ways to make money with your writing into various levels. And trust me, a lot of these ways will not suit you, but the key is to find ways that fit with your business and your writing.

There is no right way to make a living. But there are hundreds and hundreds of ways to make a living your way.

Here are some samples of what we will discuss and learn how to do on each level…

LEVEL ONE (The major and obvious cash streams…) + — Kickstarter (and Kickstarter imitators) + — Patreon (how to use it for a cash stream) + — Substack (and how to use it for a cash stream) + — Shopify (direct sale… when to set up and so much on how to use it) + — Direct Sales (book fairs, and the like, the problems, the good things, the costs) + — Audio (huge area on costs, how to do it, how to use it, when to bring in AI and how to judge… so much stuff) + — Nonfiction Writing (how to have it help your fiction writing and make money.) + — Translation (changing all the time… markets are growing and AI translations will be discussed as well.) + — Short Fiction (a ton of ways to help make money here, more than you can imagine, actually.)*

And about a dozen others at this major level… As I said, we are way into over seventy possible cash streams and increasing the count all the time as things pop up. These lists are just basic core sample lists.

LEVEL TWO (Not so obvious cash streams.) + — Bundles + — Bookbub (and other smaller ones… how to make money on them) + — YouTube (a ton of things here… wow) + — Social Media platforms (beyond Facebook, a long ways beyond… and not ads) + — Merch (not licensing, just selling your own and how and where… this combines really well with book fairs) + — Newsletters, blogs, and readers clubs (huge area and a lot of ways to do them to build readers)*

And a ton more beyond these as well. So, so much information and so many cash streams that are possible.

It will be a lot of information to talk about in four weeks and that is why we say the minimum of videos will be 5 per day or 100 over the four weeks. (Again, you can do them at your own pace and no assignments.)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE SEMINAR…Five days per week, five or more videos per day. Four weeks long. Questions will be answered either privately or in videos for all to see as extras, depending on the question. Four webinars, one per week to focus on each week’s topics and what has gone before. Webinars will also be recorded.

Webinars will be starting in the second week on Wednesday at 4PM West Coast Time.

In the second, third, and fourth years, (every summer, late July) more videos will be added and more webinars scheduled to talk about the new and changing details. The key in this new industry is to stay informed as things change and this will be a great way of doing that, plus for new writers building a career, every year will be a great check-in point for yourself on progress.

No assignments, no requirements. You can go over the videos at your own pace, but keeping up will help you in the webinars. And, of course, they will be there to go back to at any point.

First day’s videos appear Monday, August 17th and the last videos for the first year will be posted on Friday September 11th, with the last webinar being the following week.

Cost is $500 but we have an early bird discount of $400 until August 1st.

Still room to get into the class so no need to write ahead at this point.

Send the $400 early-bird fee to PayPal to the email address* dean@wmgpublishingstore.com* (dead email only used for PayPal.) I will let you know I got it and put you on the list.

Questions, write me directly.

Hope you can join us in this really fun seminar. This will be amazing in so many ways.

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This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to to pick up a copy. You can buy copies in ebook. Here’s a link to the ebook on the WMG Books site, but you can get the ebook anywhere. The paper will be available soon.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up.

This post is from September of 2025, and is in the first section of the book.

SHORT STORY CRAFTFrom 2025

I’ve been working with a handful of wonderful writers on their craft. I offered a few mentorships last year to keep myself focused on craft while our personal business world was so fraught. I work with scenes and short stories, because I don’t read other people’s novels.

Occasionally, one of the writers I’m working with will comment that they forced the story they were writing into some arbitrary length (3500 words or 7500 words) because they’d been told that short fiction had to be short.

At first, I thought this was a problem that just one writer had, but no. I saw it more than once from writers who should know better.

The story you tell should be the length it takes to tell the story. Period.

If you have to turn in a short story for an anthology deadline or you are doing something crafty (like working with me), and the story you started runs long, either finish that story or set it aside. Then write a new story. Rinse, repeat, until you find a story that hits the proper length.

Do not ever shorten a story because you think someone won’t read it if it is too long. No. Not ever. Just don’t do it.

Especially now with indie publishing. A story is the length it needs to be to tell the tale. And nothing more.

That experience, plus heading back to the University of Las Vegas, Nevada this fall has storytelling in my front brain.

The class I’m taking is Theatre History, from the dawn of the theatre through the Reformation. (Next semester takes us past that.) It’s a survey class, focused on the developments and changes in the theatre from the ancient Greeks (more or less) onward. (Yes, we’re dealing with non-Western traditions as well. But mostly Western stuff, which begins with the Greeks.)

A history of theatre is a history of storytelling. The tools that we’re studying are tools to improve storytelling and make sure it holds the audience’s attention.

After class on Monday, I went to the Union for a late lunch and pulled out a paper edition of The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2024, edited by Anthony Horowitz. I don’t want to study at lunch and I don’t want to scroll through my phone. So I bring short stories which usually gets me through a half an hour or so.

I read the Jeffrey Deaver short story, “The Lady in My Life.” I’m a fan of his work, buying the latest novel new each time one appears. I like his short fiction as well, with a caveat that I will get to below.

The structure that this particular volume of the Best Mystery Stories uses is this: A bio of the author, the story, followed about an “about the story,” written by the author.

In Deaver’s case, he wrote that “The Lady in My Life” was based on a song, so that he could contribute to an anthology edited by Don Bruns. Deaver said that was all he could tell us about the story because, like the previous 100 stories he wrote, this one has a “big twist” at the end.

Then he went on to say this:

A short story…exists for one reason only.

A breathtaking shock.

They’re like an illusionist’s tricks. Setup, shocking reveal, and the thought: How the hell did the author do that?

No character studies, no important messages.

Just an unexpected blow to the gut.

Anyway, that’s what I strive for.

I sat at the table in the Union, conversations flowing around me, sunlight pouring in the big windows, and thought about that for a few minutes.

I had two simultaneous reactions:

1. 1. 1. 1. Um…no. That’s not the only reason that a short story exists.

And

1. 1. 1. 1. Well, that explains my reactions to his short stories then.

Let’s deal with #2 first.

When I read “The Lady in My Life,” I actually stopped in the middle and went back to the opening scene. I knew I was missing something, because that first scene seemed tacked on—too character-focused for a Deaver story. I knew the twist was somewhere in those opening pages.

In other words, I wasn’t lost in that piece of fiction: I was looking for the surprise.

The first time I ever read that way was in my twelfth year. I binge-read Agatha Christie. I was sprawled on my very 1970s brown and orange bedspread in my bedroom in our 1920s farmhouse on a Sunday afternoon. Tattered paperback library books were scattered around me. I was staring at them as if they held a message because I realized in that moment the Christie books had a pattern.

The person whodunnit was the person you least expected.

A few weeks later, I was in the same position on the same ugly bedspread, frowning at Murder on the Orient Express. I thought I had figured out Christie’s pattern, but…

SPOILER ALERT FOR A 91-YEAR-OLD NOVEL

…everyone had a motive. No one was the person you could least expect. Not a single character.

Because, you see, it turns out they all did it. Every last one of the passengers on that train. (Except the mighty Hercule Poirot, detective extraordinaire, of course.)

I actually felt cheated, and a little stupid. These days, when I miss something, I’m excited by it. I got fooled and it’s hard to fool me, at least in fiction. Then I want to know how the author did it.

But my discovery about Christie was so new, so profound (to me), that I couldn’t believe she had played that trick on me. Personally. Because, you know, writers only write for one person. The single reader on her ugly orange-and-brown bedspread in the quiet of her room.

(Cue peals of laughter here.)

Deaver’s short stories feel like Christie’s novels to me. That’s probably half of a compliment. I like them enough to read them, but I don’t get lost in them, and my goal, as a reader and a writer, is to get lost in fiction.

Instead, Deaver’s stories are an intellectual exercise for me. Can I see through them on one reading with no reread?

This surprise I got half of, but that’s all that was available to me. He actually withheld information, which irritates the piss out of me as a reader. Give me the information in such a way that I won’t see it. Don’t hide it from me.

Grump.

I’m not here to tear apart Deaver’s short stories. He’s a master writer. He’s created iconic characters in his novels (Lincoln Rhyme, Kathryn Dance, Colter Shaw), and he’s written some short stories that I think are among the best I’ve ever read.

But the only reason a short story exists is to shock the reader?

No. And God, no.

My reaction to that is profoundly visceral and not just because I can predict what he’s going to do with 90% of his short stories.

It’s the way he denies things that I adore about short fiction.

I love a good character sketch, one that puts me in someone else’s brain for a while, one that reveals rather than tells.

I love a good political rant, even if I disagree with it.

I love a good romance, although I know that the ending will probably be a happily-for-now. (It’s almost impossible to do a happily ever after in a short story, although I have seen it done successfully.)

I love a good historical exploration of a time I will never see.

I love a good adventure—be it in space or in the near future, in a made-up fantasy world, or a world slightly askew from ours. Or heck, in our world in places I will never get to.

His little note dismisses almost everything I love about short stories and boils them down to one thing. One predictable thing.

Because if you always write big twist endings, the readers stop reading for enjoyment. They want to beat you at your game. Sure, it’s fun, but I’d rather not know how the story is going to end going in. Unless, of course, it’s a romance, and even then, I like to be surprised by the journey to get to that happily for now.

That heck-no feeling I had when I read Deaver’s author note was not just from me the reader. It was also from me the author.

I don’t want to be limited to one way and one way only of writing anything, let alone short fiction. I can’t think of anything duller than writing the same story over and over and over again.

To be fair to Deaver, he doesn’t do that in his long-form fiction. He writes something different most of the time, although he does rely on the big reveal or the surprise twist a lot. In this too, he reminds me of Christie. He’s writing in the same genre most of the time (all of the time?), but he researches or experiences new places or new tech to explore in his fiction.

Christie traveled, and wrote about “exotic” locales, at least from the British reading public’s point of view. So many readers read her books to experience vistas they would never normally see, particularly in the Poirot books.

I have too much of a hummingbird brain to focus on just one thing. I like dipping in and out of different genres. I like writing standalone books and short stories. I like exploring different topics.

Yes, that has a downside too. It means I’m slower than most writers in getting to the next book in a series, but it also means that I bring fresh perspective to that series when I return.

I can’t tell you how many writer friends have complained to me about writing in the same series over and over again, and feeling like they can’t write anything else “because their readers don’t want it.”

That last quote is a quote that someone in traditional publishing (an editor, the head of the sales force) told the poor writer. Because traditional publishers and editors told me that about my work too, and I ignored them. I ended up with a lot of pen names instead, knowing that I couldn’t limit myself to one series, one topic, one genre…or one big twist.

I don’t believe in closing the door to any kind of storytelling. The story is what it wants to be. It might not end up as science fiction by the end. It might not be a crime story, even though it started that way. It might not be a romance after all.

There might be a big reveal or a breathtakingly small moment. And yes, there might be a big twist—if that’s what the story dictates.

But stories exist for many reasons.

And always have.

So, writers, write what you want to write, at the length the story itself dictates, and don’t worry about what some cranky writer tells you.

Even if that cranky writer is me.

“Short Story Craft” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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This rather short list makes it look like I didn’t read much in June, but I did. I had some misfires (as you can see), and I read quite a few things that I didn’t think were worth recommending. And then there’s Kelley Armstrong…

I binged the Kelley Armstrong Rockton/Haven’s Rock series until I caught up. The next (final?) book will be released in February and is already on preorder. You’ll find a lot of recommendations here, even though she forced me to read a pet-in-jeopardy novel, a child-in-jeopardy novel, and something that I did not expect at all and it upset me and I couldn’t stop reading… I guess Kelley Armstrong has moved into Stephen King territory for me, which means I’ll forgive her almost anything. It also means she is never, ever, ever going to be bedtime reading.

I did pick up the latest novel by an author I’ve read since the beginning of her career. Over time, my reading of her work dropped away from reading everything to reading some things. Her actual series didn’t really work for me—I used it as airplane reading in the 1990s and left the finished paperbacks on the plane for someone else—and then some of her other books stopped being to my taste, mostly when she added fantasy. (The fantasy was usually plebeian and my years at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ruined my tolerance for mediocre fantasy.) I’d been struggling with her romantic suspense novels—some worked and some didn’t—and the last four or five were just dull, which I consider to be a sin in a suspense novel. I preordered the newest suspense book, as was my bent, and discovered a protagonist too stupid to live. Seriously. She made very bad choices for unconvincing reasons. I gave up after 44 pages and realized that I’m done with this author. I’d given her more than my usual number of bad (to me) books, and I am (sadly) moving on. Some of her early works really influenced me and I’ll be forever grateful, but I’m done reading her work. It doesn’t speak to me anymore.

I also gave up on a novel by another long-time favorite author of mine, but I was much more forgiving here. He occasionally commits saga, covering decades in a relatively dry (and wry) voice. Sometimes it works for me; sometimes it bores me. I’ve tried to read this book twice and faded out both times—one when the book first appeared four years ago now.

And I finished Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series. The final book wrapped up loose ends, but I’m not recommending it, since it was a bit of a slog for me. I only mention it because I’ve recommended every other book in the series and you might see the lack. The series is absolutely worth reading and many of you might think the last book is the best. It might be a matter of personal taste as to whether or not it works for you.

However, you’ll find a few fun things in this particular recommended reading list. And, as I said, a lot of Kelley Armstrong.

June 2026Armstrong, Kelley, The Boy Who Cried Bear, Minotaur Books, 2024. This is the second book in the Haven’s Rock series. I recommend you read the Rockton series and the first book in the new series before picking this one up. I went into it fully committed to the series and knowing that this book was about a missing child. However, the kid was ten and there were sections from his point of view. Of course, me being me, I checked a few things before launching into the book. You may not need to. The other piece of information that you might want is this: I read this book overnight. Sigh. Breaking all my rules… Yes, I loved it.

Armstrong, Kelley, Cold as Hell, Minotaur Books, 2025. This book pissed me off for all the right reasons. It violates one of my biggest reading rules. It involves something that I never read for enjoyment. Yet, there I was in mid-June, turning pages so fast that I could hardly see the words. The scene in question is utterly stupid and completely gripping and I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I absolutely positively had to know what happened next. That is the mark of an amazing writer. And I’m still pissed that I read the scene. And bought the next book. And will continue to buy her books. Just to annoy myself. (This is book three. Do not start here.)

Armstrong, Kelley, The First Sign of Danger, Minotaur Books, 2026. I’m a little peeved. This is the penultimate Haven’s Rock novel, and the only one that’s currently available. (I have the final book on preorder.) There’ve been villains lurking throughout this series, and Armstrong finally deals with them here. I gobbled this book up in less than 24 hours.

Armstrong, Kelley, Murder at Haven’s Rock, Minotaur Books, 2023. This is book one of the “new” series, which is really just a continuation of the old series. But, I suspect, after writing into the dark, Armstrong let someone name the previous series after the town. Or maybe she did. Anyway, that town is gone, for reasons left out to avoid spoilers, and now we have Haven’s Rock, which is being built as this story starts. Because the Yukon is always filled with scary things and scary people and (maybe) serial killers which is (apparently) a joke I was unaware of, there is a murder before the town even gets its first permanent residents. The mystery is good, the book is unputdownable, and I like these characters. So I binged. I suspect you will too.

Feinberg, Scott,“Paul Williams Has Something To Say,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 8, 2026. I thought I knew a lot about Paul Williams, the composer, and it turns out I knew nearly nothing. I had no idea that he had quit music for a number of years, and was lured back into it. And there are a lot of other interesting tidbits in this short interview. Many of you know that I like articles about longevity in the arts, and this is a good example of that.

Rose, Lacey, “The ~~Late~~ Great Stephen Colbert,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 6, 2026. This is Stephen Colbert’s “exit” interview, and it’s fascinating. It looks at his longevity, his willingness to experiment, the political fallout, and a lot more. Really worth the read.

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I know many of you don’t go to Dean’s website, which means many of you miss some wonderful online writing tidbits as well as some excellent deals. I mention the tidbits, but today’s email is about the deals.

We’re running a workshop sale in the doldrums of summer. We figure many of you don’t have time to write but you can watch videos on airplanes or in long car trips or at the beach. So here’s the info on the summer sale. It comes from Dean’s website, so the first person here is Dean.

Everything on Teachable Half Off… PLUS!!That’s right, this sale is different. We have never done any sale like this before. We do about two sales per year these days, although that number is going down as well.

So with the code SUMMERSALE, you can get anything on WMG Teachable at half price.

And if you buy anything at half price, you also get a POP-UP of your choice. There are about 70 or 80 Pop-Up classes to pick from on just about any topic or genre, and they are priced at $150.

So get a classic workshop at half price ($75 half price amount) and get a free choice of a Pop-Up worth $150.

And you can get more than one class or workshop at half price and for each one get a free Pop-Up of your choice. Or buy one Pop-Up at half price, get a second one free.

Anything works and as many times as you would like. No limits.

Here is how it works…Find any class or workshop on WMG Teachable and hit purchase.

Then put in the code

SUMMERSALE

And you will have the workshop or class for half price.

Then pick a Pop-Up class you would like and write me with your choice. Or I will write you asking for your choice. Then I will send you a code to get into the Pop-Up of your choice for free.

Again, you can get as many as you like. Teachable does not yet have a shopping cart, so you will need to buy the half price class one at a time. And get a Pop-Up class for each one.

Yes, the challenges do count as a class.

And any of the bundles and such.

And if you get a class with four quarters in it, such as the Bite-Sized Copyright full year, I will give you a free Pop-Up for each quarter. Now that would be a great deal.

ONE MORE SPECIAL THING WITH THIS SALE…If you have been thinking about the Lifetime Everything Subscription (600 plus classes and growing) but it is just too expensive, we are discounting it in this sale a little more. Instead of the half price at $5,000, we are discounting it to $4,000. And if you have already taken a bunch of classes or have another lifetime subscription, write me and I might be able to do even better.

This sale isn’t going to last long, so don’t delay. No telling when we will do another sale and I doubt we will ever do one like this again.

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I curated a Storybundle to help us all escape the nightmares of 2026. As I explained in an interview with Jamie Ferguson, one of the other participants in the bundle, sometimes an escape means going to another scary place. But sometimes it means going to a wonderful alternate timeline where things are much better.

This bundle has everything from noir to romance. Great time travel tales and marvelous alternate history. There’s monsters and trains and adventure. There are crimes. There’s happily ever after. And almost everything is exclusive, including the writing workshop if you’d like to learn how to write your own time travel story.

My contribution to the bundle is an exclusive mini-bundle of two of my novels. The exclusive is called What If…Volume 1. (Yes, there will be more.) This particular volume combines two of my novels—Snipers, which is an alternate history and a time travel story filled with romance and adventure, and the first attempt at the same kind of story. The first attempt, Consecrated Ground, isn’t time travel at all. It’s a crime novel, and it’s not available anywhere else at the moment (although it is on preorder). Consecrated Ground is dark; Snipers is not (ultimately). Both are well reviewed and were popular when they were first published.

The cover on the top of this post is the brand-new cover for Snipers. And belowis an image of most of the books in the bundle. You can get all 15 books and the workshop for $30 (and give to World Central Kitchen at the same time).

Now here’s the bad news: The bundle will cease to exist late on Thursday (PDT). So if you want great ebook reading at a discount, go forth quickly and buy your copies. You can get your copies here.

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This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to to pick up a copy. You can preorder copies from all online retailers. Here’s a link to the ebook.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up.

This post is from February of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Sticking The LandingOh, wow. Endings. They’re so very important. They make or break an entire novel. Sometimes they make or break a reader’s entire experience with the author.

I’m very aware of this, and sometimes, as a writer, I don’t care. I’m not trying to please my readers. I always write to please myself.

Last week, as I was planning the future of my own writing, I ended up marinating in memories of my traditional publishing days, which brought back all those compromises I had to make. I never compromised on the work. I would walk instead of changing my vision for a story or a novel. And that made me unusual.

However, I would compromise as I was developing the idea, because I needed to sell on proposal. Often, I just ignored the proposal later, but occasionally I didn’t.

There were often dozens of fingers in my work on the proposal stage. People would say: Make it more like this current trend. No one wants to read about that topic. And my favorite, which still reverberates in my head sometimes: Wow, you’re trying to insult everyone all at once.

It’s hard to write when you have a crowd in your office. It’s hard to do a good job. I’m aware of that, and it makes me so happy to be indie these days.

I still read traditionally published writers, though. I have several whose work I love. And I sample books from writers I’ve never read before.

In January, I read a lot of short story anthologies, and in one of them, I read a story by a New York Times bestseller of long-standing. (And no, I will not tell you who she is.) I remember when her career started in the early part of this century. I thought she was a good mystery writer.

But somewhere along the way, she pivoted to the trendy. She became a writer of domestic thrillers—you know, the kind that happen in upper class suburban neighborhoods and gosh, by golly, gee whiz, there’s crime there and domestic violence and OMG, untrustworthy people.

Yeah, as you can tell, not really my genre, although I did sample a number of writers, realized it was me not them, and returned to my mean streets of cities fiction and other things.

I think I sampled this writer’s work then and didn’t like it— remembering that it’s me, not you—so I was a lot surprised by how much I liked that short story. I figured maybe she had moved off the domestic thriller train. It’d been a decade or more, after all.

I ordered her latest, which is set in New York (yay!), and then picked up one more book that sounded interesting as well. I settled into the latest book, and sure enough, the first part was pretty darn good. It kept me reading, anyway, even if there were parts that reminded me of Ira Levin novels from sixty years ago.

That’s okay. I don’t mind homage.

About two-thirds of the way through, though, there was a lot happening and it was getting more and more unbelievable. There were ghosts, but she wanted it both ways—maybe they’re an hallucination, and maybe they’re not—and the ghosts may or may not have an impact on the plot.

Then there was the bombshell about the husband that our protagonist knew but never mentioned, and then a lot of people died off-stage, all of them, and then…

Well, I kept reading, and sure enough, the twist was that it wasn’t the husband, like it usually is in domestic thriller. Okay, fine. The main plot ends, the ghosts are laid to rest, more people die, and we get to “six months later.”

And again, off-stage, we learn that some of the bodies were indeed dropped by the husband. The only person who ever believed in him was the wife, who at this point is (as the romance readers say) To Stupid To Live. She’s the only person in the book who isn’t a bad person, but that’s only because she’s dumber than a box of rocks. Everyone else is venal or a criminal or both. Most of them have murdered someone or accidentally caused a death, and all of them are unlikeable.

I finished that book, took it and the one I hadn’t read, and tossed them into the trade-in pile. I’m never reading her work again. Because really, honestly, that last third of the book was a truly terrible read.

She had a five-page long afterward in which she thanks her first readers, her second readers, her editors (both New York and London), her writer’s workshop, her agent (whom I happen to know and who is all about what she can sell, not about good storytelling),and all of her friends.

In other words, she lists the crowd in her office, and I’m sure, given that six-months-later section, they had a lot of influence on that.

Plus, the math was wrong. That might have irritated me the most. The main killers are eighty years old. It’s 2025. They had an eight-year-old child in 1963. Which meant that the kid was born in 1955. Which meant that the parents were both 10 years old when the kid was born.

Seriously, there were 1,000 early readers on this book and no copy editors? No one caught this but me? I actually went back to see if I had misread, but no, I hadn’t. Everyone listed in that afterward was math-challenged. Or they figured 1963 was so long ago no one would notice.

No one except this 65 year-old-reader who has a sister who turned 80 last year and who was sixteen when I was born in 1960. And no, she didn’t give birth to a kid in 1955 either.

Awful, horrible, irritating.

Because I’ve been looking for another good thriller writer. I don’t mind suspending disbelief and putting up with a high body count. I like to race through a book when it makes sense.

I thought, midway through, that I was really going to like this book. I almost ordered more books from this woman, but I’d learned long ago to see if the writer could stick the landing.

And, as you can tell, she didn’t. For me.

Sometimes sticking the landing is personal. Sometimes I don’t like the reveal that the narrator is the killer, even though I often love unreliable narrator stories. I hate books where the cute kid or puppy dies at the end—so much so that I now look ahead to see if the cute kid or puppy introduced on page five ends up dead at the end. (In paper books, I scan for kid/puppy’s name in the last chapter. It’s a pretty reliable method. I also have a few friends who know that I hate this with a profound passion, and they will let me know if a favorite author veers into dead kid territory.)

Oh, and a disclaimer—sometimes I kill the kid and the puppy in my fiction. As I told one of my students in January, I’m a complete hypocrite. (Or maybe just a true Gemini.) I hate that in my reading, but if the story I’m telling requires it, I will go that far in my writing.

Often, though, mostly, in fact, I will jump through major hoops to prevent the death of cute kid/puppy because I don’t like writing it. It’s devastating.

Anyway, that’s a me thing. And I will break the rule for some writers (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). I trust Stephen King to make sure that the death of the cute kid/puppy is never there solely to tug on my heartstrings. Usually the death is well foreshadowed (thank you) and it’s never there just to get more readers. It’s there because the story demands it.

I’ll abandon any writer who introduces the kid character, and then kills him off for no other reason besides giving the protagonist motivation. And again, that’s a me thing.

But the book I read this past week—which is not going on the monthly Recommended Reading List on my website—reminded me why so many traditional publishing books fail to stick the landing, particularly for authors who can’t stand up for their own vision.

I don’t know this particular author personally, but I will wager that she has made it such a habit to outsource her final draft that after two decades, she can’t conceive of any other way to write. And as a result, the end of the book was a mishmash of icky dumb stuff. (Everyone suspects the husband so make someone else the bad guy! If it’s the neighbors, there will be echoes of Ira Levin! We can use the Ira Levin thing as a pitch to the movies!)

The short story, on the other hand, would not have gone through the hands of the agent or both editors or anyone else associated with them. There’s not enough money in short fiction for those folks to waste their time.

So the short story was written by the unvarnished writer, who doesn’t write out of fear, the one who trusts her own vision.

As we all should.

I know, I know. I’m making a bunch of you very worried about your endings now. You wonder: How do I make sure I stick the landing?

Well, you write clean first drafts, don’t rewrite, and don’t let anyone else in your work. Then, you trust the process. Believe me, your creative voice will set up the proper ending. It won’t do fakey twists. If there’s a twist, it will be a legitimate one.

And then you let the project go. You move to the next.

There will be silly and stubborn readers like me who have ridiculous rules about what they read. (I will not read anything with corn on the cob in it! You can’t make me.) You’ll never get those readers. They will hate your work because you violated some personal rule you (and probably everyone else) had no idea existed.

But if you let an entire committee into what you do, then the writing you do will not be your best. You will stick the landing once in a while. Enough so that some readers will like what you do. But you won’t do it most of the time.

In fact, your books/stories well be good enough. As in mediocre. As in readable and little more. As mostly forgettable.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my fiction to be forgettable. I want it to be memorable.

The only way you will get people to read your next book is to have a satisfying ending on the current book…whatever that current book is for your readers. (I just finished a novel that I’ve had on my TBR shelf since 2009. That is the next book for me from that writer.)

So write your vision, and keep your friends, family, first readers, agent (if you’re dumb enough to have one), and editors out of it. You’re the writer. They’re not. How will they know if the storyworks? The story lives in your head.

The manuscript might fail, but that’s just a communication tool.

The story is all yours…and should remain all yours.

If your work is consistent—as in the ending should flow from details that exist in the beginning—then readers will return to you, even if they didn’t particularly like the ending of a book. They will see the authenticity.

The book I just finished reading had no authenticity. It was filled with kitchen-sink items, and that 1963 problem was a tell. The date had to be left over from an earlier draft.

I feel for the author. She’s clearly got it into her head that she needs the assistance of an entire village to make her books work.

And her work is good enough. It will help readers pass the time. But her work certainly won’t make them remember her for a long period of time.

That’s a shame, because the short story shows a writer with great power. Her novels do not.

Ah, well.

I’m sure I won’t remember this book much after this week. Maybe the Ira Levin stuff, and the 1963 things because it’s so egregious. But I will remember that I have not had a good experience with this author in the long form.

And I will not buy another novel from her. Ever.

“Sticking The Landing” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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With school over (as of the first week of May), I have more time to read. I occasionally binged a novel. I’ve had some down days as the chronic health issues flared and on one lovely day, I read two entire novels, something I hadn’t done since the damn dental surgeries of 2023. It was fun to read like that again. One of the novels I read that day would not have lent itself to a longer read. It would have been confusing.

Around Memorial Day, I read a novel that had been released the Tuesday before from a favorite Big Name Writer of mine. The novel was good enough to hold my interest, although I found myself scanning. I took an evening off to finish it…and wow, did I get mad. He skipped the validation entirely. Just ended it with Our Hero talking to a reporter, a scenario that would have worked in the 1990s, but in 2026, in the Dumpster Fire Era? No. Fake news abounds, and what would have been a career-ending scandal would be just a day in the office now. So I turned the page…and there was no more book. Extremely irritating, so badly irritating that it took me almost a day to recover. Yeah, sometimes I take the reading personally, especially when I don’t have as much time for it as I used to.

(Note: I wrote a post on the importance of endings on my Patreon page. That post became a chapter in my upcoming book, The Write Attitude.)

But, he’s an Old Reliable, for me anyway, and I’ll pick up the next book. It would take maybe half a dozen misses for me to let him go as a go-to author. This was unusually cursory and incomplete for him, which was weird. Probably something happening in his life that took focus away from the novel. Sigh.

I also binged the Best American Mystery and Suspense stories, but I wrote it up a month later. So I’m only letting you know which stories stuck with me. Let me say this: Titles are important, folks. If the title didn’t remind me, I had to look at the opening—and sometimes that didn’t remind me either. So, writers, make sure your titles fit your stories. I can’t say too much about the stories I liked because that will ruin them—which is actually a compliment.

As for my reading during the rest of the month, I’ve enjoyed what I’m seeing. I’ve shared what I like below.

May 2026Aptaker, Ann, “Neon Women,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. Originally written for an anthology of crime stories set in the 1970s, this story captures a lost Times Square and a lost kind of personality. Vivid, startling, and well done.

Armstrong, Kelley, The Deepest of Secrets, Minotaur, 2022. This is the final book in the Rockton series, but not the final book in Kelley Armstrong Casey Duncan Series. Yes, it can be confusing. I wrote a post on my Patreon Page about excellent series, and discussed the courageous stuff that Kelley Armstrong is pulling off even though these books are traditionally published. I’m not going to tell you much about this book because it will spoil the series if I do. Just suffice to say I’m impressed as hell.

Armstrong, Kelley, A Stranger in Town, Minotaur, 2021. I’ve spent May plowing through Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series. She’s pulling off an amazing reader trick, at least for me. She makes me read books in a setting I would never travel to and I can suspend my disbelief at some of the circumstances so quickly that I’m deep in the story before I even know what’s happening next. This particular tale focuses on the title–a stranger in a place that strangers can’t even find. And of course, there’s a murder and the overall plot is quite dicey and oh, my…if I say more I ruin it. Read this series, and start with City of the Lost.

Balogh, Mary, Remember That Day, Berkeley, 2026. Normally, I would put Mary Balogh’s cover here, but no. Nope. No. Not doing it. We actually made fun of the cover at Writer’s Lunch in February. The cover is so awful that it looks like it was designed by a beginning cover artist. And the “hero”‘s eyes are looking down her low-cut (for Regency) dress. Not kidding. So no cover picture. You can look it up yourself.

The book itself is wonderful and a masterful feat of storytelling. She brings two of her series together here, and her series always have dozens of characters. The romance is good and the story feels original. I wrote a longer piece about this on my Patreon Page. I started a series about writing series, and cited this book as a master work (with some analysis). So check it out!

Carter, Ally, Out of Sight, Out of Time, Little, Brown, 2016 edition of a 2012 book. This is book five of the Gallagher Girls series. It was unputdownable for me, but if you’re new to the series, start with book one. All of the tension here, at least at the beginning, comes from previous books. Then the book itself adds even more tension. Cammie, our heroine, has lost her memory over the summer, and since she is in the middle of a terrible crisis, the memory loss is a bigger deal than usual. Plus, someone important is in a coma, and the school has other problems and maybe we’re going to learn something about Dad and…Yeah. Just start the series and catch up. You’ll be happy you did.

Coates, Craig Francis, “Grendel,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. “Grendel” is probably the best story in the volume. You don’t even have to have read Beowulf to understand it, but it helps if you did. The ending made me gasp. The skill level here is high. The story is one I wish I’d thought of myself. Enough said.

Leder, Stephanie, “Not A Dinner Party Person,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. Great characterization here, great voice, and a wonderful ending that makes the story.

McElwain, Julie, Echoes in Time, Seshat Books, 2025. I know that Julie McElwain is self-publishing this series now, and I’m really glad she is. The books are hard to put down, the situation totally unbelievable and, as a reader, I don’t care. I’m loving the reading experience.

However, I worry about her (vaguely, since I don’t know her). She’s paying for covers and for someone to design the interior. That someone did not proof their work, and they’re just pouring the book into an online program without knowing how book interiors (for print) should look. I worry that McElwain is being horribly overcharged and that will make recouping her money difficult and at some point, she will stop writing the books for economic reasons. So…read this series. (It starts as a traditionally published series, then moved indie.) Encourage your friends. Let’s keep her sales up so that she can continue writing Kendra Donovan books, because they’re fun.

Pochoda, Ivy, “Jackrabbit Skin,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. This novella is set in a part of Nevada/California that scares the ever-loving’-crap out of me. So remote that it makes the Yukon seem populated, this part of the desert is empty and terrifying and filled with people who don’t want to be found. So, what does our LA protagonist do? She moves into one of those places where people go to get away from people. I know this, and I was tense from the first sentence. Pochoda’s writing is strong, the sense of place real, and the crimes believable. Even the ending, which I honestly did not see coming, is believable. One of the best novellas I’ve read in years.

Winslow, Don, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025,Mariner, 2025. When I started reading this volume, I worried about recommending it. Heck, I worried about finishing it. Don Winslow likes gritty noir, and much of what’s here is just that. But the great things about gritty noir are the characters, the voice, and the setting. So most of the stories held me, even when I didn’t want them to. It was the most even reading experience I’ve had with a good anthology in years. (Bad ones are even in their mediocrity.) I found myself riveted by almost every story. I’m not sure this is bedtime reading, but it’s good reading nonetheless, and you should pick it up.

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Annie Reed and Dave Hendrickson invited me to participate in their summertime romance anthology, Sunkissed Summer. I love writing for anthologies, and as my life is getting less hectic, I have more time to do so. (I had hoped to be in their previous volumes, but time and attention allow that to be possible.)

Sunkissed Summer features stories by wonderful writers from Annie and Dave themselves to Christy FiField, Dayle A. Dermatis, Thea Hutchinson, and so many others. I’m honored to be in such company.

My story happens in summer school, which, in the desert, isn’t as lovely an idea as you would think. And the characters aren’t your average college students…

Get your copy here—and enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the only damning detail.

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

Which, by the way, was not a crime.

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

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

He only questioned it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The entire courtroom seemed to be holding its breath.

We stayed that way for ten minutes.

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

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

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

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

“She said she’s here,” he said.

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

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

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

“And…?” the judge asked.

“And she insisted she needed to be here.”

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

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

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

“Yes, Your Honor,” Lucinda said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bride didn’t seem to hear him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucinda stared at me, her bottom lip trembling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped talking and looked at me expectantly.

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

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

“But it was,” she said. “I—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes filled with tears.

“You don’t hate me?” she asked.

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

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

And sure enough, I was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t like feeling like an idiot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even so, he startled me with his first question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What made this different?” Abrimowitz asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Raylin was doing was not one of those ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which was probably true.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

“Did you want to be?” Abrimowitz asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raylin lifted her head. “Um, objection?”

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

“Um…his answer?”

Laughter rippled through the courtroom, including the jury box.

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

“Um…all of it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was a strange set-up,” I said.

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

Raylin should have objected.

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrimowitz did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Mrs. Monroe stood up.

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

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

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

I shrugged at him, and he glared at me.

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

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

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

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

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

“That doesn’t look good,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Justice is blind,” I said.

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

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

“I’m the one who was shot,” I said.

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

“It did,” I said. “It does.”

His eyes narrowed. “But…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Law’s not a job for me,” I said.

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

“All right,” I said. “I won’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing.

Most of what we do means nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

I would absolutely do so again.

___________________________________________

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

The Bride Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know him?” Amelia asked.

“Should I?” Gram said.

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

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

Very seriously.

Too seriously.

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

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

“You’ll see,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” Gram said. “With Willard.”

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

Gram never remarried.

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

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

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

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

“Ralph,” Amelia said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I knew what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I loved him.”

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

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

Not good enough for you, Gram had said.

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

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

So?

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

Gram!

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

Gram!

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

I don’t want to know, Gram.

You should listen, honey.

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

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

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

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

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

A mutual friend.

Not Gram.

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

A serious failing.

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

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

You wanted to know about Ralph.

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

Well, Scott should be obvious too.

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

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

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

And Amelia had given up.

Gram pulled into a driveway and stopped.

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

Gram shut off the car.

“This can’t be it,” Amelia said.

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

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

She was enjoying that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie Danner had to be Amelia’s age.

Or younger.

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

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

Amelia sat too.

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

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

“What do you think?” Gram asked.

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Amelia mumbled.

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

“I was young,” Amelia said.

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

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

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

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

Not without Gram correcting her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was.

No one could ignore Gram for long.

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

“Damn close,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

“How is that relevant?” Amelia asked.

“She just told you,” Gram said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course not,” Amelia snapped.

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

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

“Peer pressure?” Gram said.

Amelia ignored her.

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

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

“Amelia—” Gram said in her sternest voice.

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

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

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

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

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

“Long grain, brown, or instant?”

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

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

“Have what?”

“Why you don’t have children.”

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

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

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

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

Gram shut up.

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

“All of those were results,” Sophie said.

“Of instant rice?” Amelia asked.

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

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

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

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

“Amelia,” Gram said.

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

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

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

“Yes,” Sophie said.

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

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

“Oh, for godsake,” Amelia said.

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

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

“What do I think?” Amelia asked.

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

“So why didn’t you marry again?”

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

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

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

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

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

Amelia sighed. The reasons for that could be a hundred fold. It might simply be that Sophie’s group of clients were self-selecting for the desire to make their marriages work. It might be that they were a statistical anomaly.

It might even be that the superstitions and her wardings worked.

Amelia didn’t care. She wasn’t going to follow dumb superstitions, and she wasn’t going to listen to a woman who hadn’t made a good marriage herself.

“I’d like to leave, Gram,” she said, and headed for the door. When she reached it, she turned and saw Gram give Sophie an envelope. Gram was apologizing for Amelia’s rudeness as Amelia left.

Amelia went down the cracked stoop to the gravel drive. Birds flying overhead, going to the Horicon Marsh, cawed. A slight breeze blew over her, and it blew away the stale air from the interior of the house. She had never acted like that around Gram before. In fact, she rarely lost her temper at all. But she didn’t like the pap this woman had been serving, and she couldn’t remain silent about it.

Somehow, the silence made her feel as if she were perpetuating the beliefs.

And she couldn’t. She couldn’t change her plans no matter how much Gram wanted it. This was Amelia’s wedding, the one she was planning with Scott. And it was her marriage, with Scott. And it was up to them to make it work. If they failed, she didn’t want to hire Sophie to scan their wedding pictures. Amelia wanted a real human accounting, a way of knowing where she and Scott had gone wrong.

The door closed behind her. She cringed, then turned. Gram was walking alone down the short sidewalk. She was clutching her purse to her chest. “I’d like you to drive,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Gram,” Amelia said as she started across the gravel.

“Don’t be,” Gram said. “This had the desired effect.”

Amelia stopped. “What do you mean?”

“You won’t talk to me,” Gram said. “You let me blather, and you smile and say, ‘Yes Gram’ as if I’ve already gone senile. Well, I haven’t. And you made a terrible marriage the last time, even though you’re not willing to admit it, and I didn’t want you to make a terrible marriage this time.”

“Sophie’s ideas are not what I need,” Amelia said.

“I know, and thank God for that,” Gram said.

The breeze blew Amelia’s hair in her face. She brushed it back with her left hand. “I thought you believed Sophie.”

“Oh, I think she has a valuable talent. I think she has the ability to make people see their future marriages clearly. I think if I had brought you here when you were going to marry Ralph, you would have decided to call off the wedding.”

“So you don’t buy this blue thing, this bird seed stuff.”

“No,” Gram said. “I wore black when I married Willard, or don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” Amelia said. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“It means,” Gram said, “that you’re sad about the wedding, maybe even that you’re doing it against your will.”

“But you loved Willard.”

“Of course I loved Willard.”

“And you were the happiest I ever saw you that day.”

“Of course I was,” Gram said.

“Then that just proves that Sophie’s wrong.”

“No,” Gram said.

“No?” Amelia asked.

“No,” Gram repeated. “It means that when I came to see Sophie and we discussed the wedding, I realized how much I wanted my marriage to be successful, and how hard I was willing to work to make it go that way. Which, if you’ll recall that little speech you gave us in there, is exactly what you said about Scott.”

Amelia turned slightly so that her hair wouldn’t keep blowing in her face. “You could have just asked me.”

“I did,” Gram said. “You always told me that he was a nice man and I shouldn’t worry, which is exactly what you said about whatshisname.”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph,” Gram said and shook her head. “How you could marry a name like that, I’ll never know.”

“Don’t start, Gram.”

Gram shrugged and walked to the car. Amelia hurried behind her. Gram climbed into the passenger seat and stuck the keys in the ignition. Amelia slid into the driver’s side.

“You mean you went through this whole charade just to learn if I loved Scott and would work on our marriage?”

“Yes,” Gram said.

“Why?”

“You mean besides the fact that I love you and want only the best for you?”

“That goes without saying, Gram,” Amelia said. She pushed the seat back so that her knees weren’t crammed into the steering wheel.

“Well,” Gram said, “it’s because you’re nearly forty. If I had married Willard when I was forty—and I knew him then—we would have had thirty wonderful years together instead of five. Five simply wasn’t enough. Thirty wouldn’t have been either, but it would have been better—”

Her voice broke. Amelia put her arm around Gram’s shoulder and pulled her close. “All I wanted,” Gram said against Amelia’s collarbone, “is to make sure you have a Willard in your life. Every girl deserves at least one.”

“I do, Gram,” Amelia said softly.

“I know that now,” Gram said. She pushed away and dabbed at her eyes with her thumb. “Will you drive? I have bridge club at seven.”

“Sure, Gram,” Amelia said.

She turned the key and the car started, its motor humming. She took a deep breath.

“Gram,” she said. “Thanks. No one has ever given me a gift like this.”

“What gift?” Gram asked.

Amelia turned slightly in her seat. “I thought you said this was a present.”

“The visit was and you didn’t want it.”

“But you gave it to me anyway.”

“You shouldn’t thank me for something you didn’t want.”

Amelia frowned. “But it turned out all right.”

“Well, it did, but that’s no reason to thank me.” Gram pushed a button on the door, and her window came down, letting in that errant breeze.

“Why not?”

“It worked because of you, my girl,” Gram said. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Amelia stared at her for a moment, still uncertain about what to make of her Grandmother, even though they’d been close her entire life.

“I suppose you and Scott will want to visit me,” Gram said, eyes still closed.

“Of course,” Amelia said.

“Regularly,” Gram said.

“Yes,” Amelia said.

Gram sighed. “Then I’ll have to move.”

“Why?”

“Or raise my chandelier. Which will be cheaper, do you think?”

Amelia put the car into reverse. “Raising your chandelier.”

“Good,” Gram said. “I rather like the house.” She opened her eyes. “I think you should let me drive.”

“No, Gram,” Amelia said.

“Then get us out on the highway, my girl,” Gram said. “Time’s wasting. You young people never understand how important these small moments are.”

Amelia grinned. “I think we do, Gram,” she said. “I think we do.”

___________________________________________

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

Something Blue

Copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW, June, 1998Published by WMG PublishingCover and layout copyright © 2018 by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © inarik | Depositphotos

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

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I’m having a blast working on book trailers when WMG does Kickstarters. I just completed this book trailer for Dean’s Kickstarter, which launched today. I hope you enjoy the video and I hope it inspires you to look at the Kickstarter! Lots of cool stuff there. (Click here for the Kickstarter)

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Mary-Jo-Assassin-Book-Trailer-Low-Res.mp4

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I mentioned in January’s list that I had fewer books to recommend in February and March. I read a lot but didn’t finish some of the books, and the ones I did finish, I didn’t really like well enough to recommend. As I tell my writing students, you have to stick the landing. And some of those landings really missed. A few of the others just bored me. I faded out as I went along and realized I didn’t want to read the book anymore. (I do that by grabbing other books, starting those, and realizing that I’d rather be reading them.)

I have stories here from 2 different Best American Mystery & Suspense, but I’m not recommending either volume, since I didn’t read a lot of them. The stories seemed child-cruelty heavy or animal abuse heavy, and I’m not really into either of those things. And there’s some I’m not fond of the kind of noir in either of them. So it’s up to you if you get these two volumes.

So here’s what I liked back in February…

February 2025Bernier, Ashley-Ruth M., “Ripen,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. When editors are lazy with the Best Americans and do not put the stories in any kind of reading order, the opening story is a real crapshoot. I’m always braced for something that does not give me any ideas as to the way the volume will go. As a result, I approach the first story with trepidation, and usually that trepidation is justified.

In this volume, though, the first story, “Ripen,” is well written, powerful, and memorable. I was happily surprised by the entire thing. The setting is rich, the characters vivid, and the story itself strong. Read this one.

Cho, Winston, “AI: The Ghost in Hollywood’s Machine,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. (This story online has a different title.) Fascinating piece that could have been written about any emerging technology, really. AI will change how business gets done all over the planet (is changing?), and Hollywood is no different. It will make some things easier to “film” such as massive crowd scenes (already is, in fact) but it might cost a lot of jobs. As in a lot of jobs. And the kind that normally don’t get taken by technological change…as in the jobs of creatives. I think we’ll see a lot of these articles in the future as we try to figure out how to live with this newest thing in our lives.

Cobo, Leila, “Guarding Celia Cruz’s Legacy,” Billboard January 11, 2025. Fascinating interview with Omer Pardillo, who manages the Celia Cruz estate. It’s about how he got the job, how he goes about maintaining the estate, and the heart of the estate. He lists where the revenue comes from. He says it’s mostly from recording royalties and brand partnerships. It’s really fun to see his joy at all of the success the estate’s been having. At one point, he states that it’s not bad for an artist who’s been dead for 21 years.

Cole, Alyssa, “Just a Girl,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby, Mariner Books, 2024. This story, written as a series of online TikTok posts, DMs, texts, emails, and online articles, is devastating and heartbreaking and extremely powerful. Tiana, her first year in college during Covid, starts posting updates on TikTok, and gaining a following. She tries a dating app, encounters a gross guy, and calls his yuckiness out on her TikTok…and then he and his friends start going after her. Everything spirals after that. What’s amazing about this story is that you can see the joy leaching from this young woman as she realizes how terrible the world can be—and how dangerous it is for young beautiful women. Highly recommended.

Freimor, Jacqueline, “Forward,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. Normally, I wouldn’t read a story that looked dense and difficult, but the format (and the footnotes) are the point of the story. It’s an amazing work of fiction, with a great reveal. Yes, it takes concentration to read it, but it’s really worthwhile.

McClintock, Pamela, “Ryan Reynolds Multitasks Like a Mofo,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. There’s a lot of fascinating quotes in this interview with Ryan Reynolds, whom The Hollywood Reporter dubbed their Producer of the Year. He does a variety of things besides act, and seems to enjoy all of them. The quote I like the most is at the end:

…it’s all an emotional investment. If you can create emotional investment in anything, any brand, it creates a moat around that brand that really, I think, facilitates the resilience and allows it to weather the storms in the bad times. And yes, that’s the part I love.

I think I love it too, although not as much as actual writing and making things up. Still, lots of good stuff to think about in this interview.

Zeitchik, Steven,“The Other Rebuild,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2025. 2025 has been such a shitshow already it’s hard to remember that the LA Fires happened only a few months ago. We seem to be moving from tragedy to tragedy, heartbreak to heartbreak, every single day, and we lose track of what others have gone through. A number of my friends went through the fires and fortunately, in this round of the climate change blues, very few of them lost their homes. (I can’t say that about previous California fires.) But everyone’s mental health took a nosedive. Many moved to different digs in the same town while others are leaving their LA homes. It’s an ongoing tragedy, and this is a piece from the early days. Important.

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I tend to write a lot of mystery novellas. They’re too long for traditional publishers, which makes them perfect for WMG. We can put the novellas in book form.

Over the last year, a number of you have asked how to get my Derringer-award winning novella, “Catherine The Great,” and while you can get it in last year’s Holiday Spectacular compilation, that’s only available in ebook. Many of you want paper…and I get it. I do too.

So, we decided to put it into paper. And by the time we got to that project, I had also written three other mystery/crime novellas. One is a thriller (Kizzie) and two are more straightforward mysteries. We put all four in a Kickstarter that launches today.

Here’s the video for the Kickstarter. Over the next week, I’ll also share the book trailers with you for the novellas. However, if you’d like to see them now, head to the Kickstarter. They’re all on it, along with a lot of other goodies.

As you can tell, this is one of my favorite things to write. I hope you end up getting the books.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/4-Mystery-Novellas-Low-Res.mp4

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You’ve probably noticed that we really upped our design game at WMG Publishing in the past year. Some of that is due to the new designers we’ve brought on board, but some of it is because Stephanie Writt has a lot of design experience using modern tools like Canva.

In combination with Dean, whose done more book covers than anyone I know, they’re working together to come up with really pretty books.

Every Friday, they do a seminar together called Writer Direct, which helps writers go directly to the readers, through indie publishing and marketing. (It’s open to anyone for a monthly fee.) For the past six months, the writers who attend have asked Dean and Steph to do a workshop on covers.

Once they started brainstorming, they realized they could do workshops on covers and interiors and Kickstarter.

These courses are designed to take a writer who has never designed anything and have them making gorgeous books by the end of the class. I’m their guinea pig. (Dyslexic girl. If they can get me to do it, anyone can do it.)

The nice thing about these, though, is that there are design tricks in the new programs that long-time designers don’t know. So there’s an entire section for people who have been making covers and designing books for years.

The classes won’t start for a few weeks, but we’re offering an early bird sale on these, which is buy two and get the third free. (In other words, save $500.) Or just buy one and save $100 off the price. Find out more information here.

When you follow that link, you’ll see another class from me. I’m doing short classes on techniques that I can teach quickly. After finishing the difficult senses—smell and taste (which I taught together)—those who came to the webinar asked for similar classes on the remaining three senses.

So, I’m going from hardest to easiest. The next one is on touch. It starts right after I finish the in-person Gothic workshop next week.

Finally, Dean and I are finishing up the next installment in The Kris & Dean Show Goes To the Movies. We’re doing Ocean’s 11 (the 2001 version). I’m the one who picked that because I’ve been meaning to examine that film very closely.

Turns out it’s even more useful than I thought it would be. This class will teach you all about how to feed information to a reader so that they don’t notice the important stuff until you want them to. It’ll also show you how to establish characters quickly, and how to handle an extremely complicated storyline with verve and clarity.

We’re having a great time doing this one, and it’ll go live next week.

So take a look and see if there’s a class for you.

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Like to read? Like to knit? Like socks? Like fantasy?

Then this is the Kickstarter project for you.

Here, in a nutshell, is what it is:

Socks & Sorcery will have four themed collector’s boxes, each delivered three times over the course of a year. Every box contains:

• A Surprise fantasy novel in the format of your choice (ebook, paperback or audiobook)
• 100g skein of exclusively dyed fingering weight yarn inspired by something from the book
• A 20g contrasting mini skein perfect for crafting heels and toes
• Delightful surprises to enhance your reading and crafting journey.

Mix and match any of the four themes—Dragons, Familiars, Witches and Vampires, or Faeries—or get them all for a box delivered each month for a year!

There are lots of great writers contributing books to this project including T. Thorn Coyle, Anthea Sharp, Leslie Claire Walker, and Thomas K. Carpenter. The first book in my Fey series, Sacrifice, is also a part of the project.

This project is a lot of fun, and I’m pleased to take part in it. I hope you join us!

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I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on March 30, 2025. If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Putting Yourself Out ThereI’m gearing back up to return to the university in the fall. After a heck of a couple of years, I’m resuming my very slow attempt to get a few extra college degrees. Mostly, it’s an excuse to listen to people much younger than myself learn cool stuff, and an excuse to listen to people somewhat younger than myself share their expertise.

I get inspired by all of that.

I’m searching class schedules and realizing that my Spanish has gotten rusty again, so there is probably a summertime online refresher in the complicated tenses on the horizon. Even though, really, using the proper tense is not my problem so much as finding the correct vocabulary word. As in any word that might suit in that circumstance. The vocabulary was the first thing to flee my brain in the hiatus.

The thing that fascinates me the most, though, is watching the theater kids, particularly those who are (at 18, 19, or 20) convinced they’re going to be Actors! (and yes, the exclamation point is there for a reason). Most won’t be, not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t listen well and they already think they’re God’s gift to the profession.

Mostly, I watch the ones who are insecurely secure in their dreams. These kids know exactly what they want in their lives, but they’re not sure they’re good enough to get there, so they work extra hard to figure out where they should be.

Sometimes it is not where they expect to be. In the theater department in particular, they have to take courses in all aspects of theater, and they sometimes learn that they love a part of theater that they hadn’t expected to like at all.

Surprisingly enough to my younger self, the one who didn’t have the courage to follow her musical abilities into a music degree or to even walk into the theater department at the University of Wisconsin, there are a lot of introverts in theater. Some of those introverts are writers, yes, but many go onstage and perform. Most, in fact, because they like being someone else in front of a group. It’s safer for them.

I get safe. It makes sense. I also get the fear of doing something revealing in front of a crowd. Mostly, that fear is gone for me now. Years of public speaking and talking on panels at sf conventions eased my mind.

Still, I was pretty shocked when I learned that a lot of actors and musicians suffer severe stage fright—people you’ve all heard of. If they have to go onstage, they sit in the dressing room and shake, or, in some cases, puke, because they’re so scared.

Had I known that…well, I doubt I would have done it, because puking is not something I voluntarily do, even for art…but it certainly would have eased my mind about what for me is relatively minor stage fright (in comparison to what these folks have).

Really, though, it’s what they are willing to do for their dreams and their art. They put themselves out there. More importantly, they figure out how to put themselves out there.

Every year, I have a conversation with at least one of my writing students who is terrified for some reason I never probe of putting their work in front of an audience. It always boils down to the fact that they’re afraid of being seen.

Sidebar from a nearly 65-year-old person who has worked in the arts her entire life: You are never seen. Not in your entirety. You may reveal all of your secrets and no one will care. Or they’ll comment on the portrayal of something minor, like the cat, and kvetch about that. It’s disappointing…and freeing.

However, the fear of being seen is a real and crippling fear, stopping a lot of prose writers and poets from following their dreams. Writers, unlike actors and musicians, can hide from the world. You can use a pen name, set up a legal entity that doesn’t use your real name (in an obvious manner), and never let your picture out into the world.

You can hide and publish your work. That’s the great thing about being a writer.

Usually when a writer figures out their own personal workaround, they put their work on the market, whatever it means for them.

I had one of those discussions this past week with a couple of different writers, some in person, one online, and when I photo-bombed the Writers’ Block webinar on Wednesday.

After that moment on the webinar, I spent a few hours thinking about how universal that fear is among writers. I’ve been in this business almost fifty years now, and I’ve seen it every year.

Then Dean and I watched a little bit of The Voice. We often watch something to rest our poor brains, usually at dinner. We’ve moved away from news (since there’s no way that will relax anyone), and gone to documentaries and The Voice.

We usually watch a segment or two and then go back to whatever we were doing. It will take us days to watch an entire 2-hour episode.

So that Wednesday night, we watched two members of Michael Bublé’s team duet on a song he wrote, called “Home.” Most of you know it as a super hit for Blake Shelton, but Bublé wrote the song and released it first.

Before the battle, Bublé talked a bit about writing the song. I can’t find the clip for that (mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s not that relevant), but I did find the one that caught my attention.

It got me thinking, and I went up to my office and made a list.

Most people who work in the arts realize that their work has to be put out into the world.

• People who write music must perform that music to sell that song/sonata/whatever. They may be terrible singers. They might be shy as hell. But they need to make, at minimum, a demo tape.

Often they perform their own work, in some kind of concert, and it is that work that ends up catapulting them into whatever level of fame they will reach.

And then, partly because of the vagaries of the (exceedingly complex) music copyright laws, they may hear someone else cover their song. They might be like John Legend, who has said on The Voice that he cannot listen to a cover of one of his songs fairly. Or they might be like Bublé who not only assigned the song, but was honored by the way the singers performed it.

• People who write plays write them with production in mind. What is the point of writing a play if it’s just going to languish on your desk? The problem, though, with writing a play is that when it is performed, there will be an area that the performers cannot do or cannot say.

In early drafts of a play, the playwright will have to be nearby to do some kind of work to smooth out that section. Sometimes it’s because the star is a doofus and can’t say a word with more than two syllables, but mostly it’s because that section of the show, when performed in previews, did not work. Neil Simon deals with this a lot in his autobiography Rewrites.

• People who write screenplays know that they’re writing something that will be performed as well. I had a very famous writer friend who wrote the wordiest damn screenplays ever and had, in his contract, a clause that said not a word could be touched.

After his early years in Hollywood (when he didn’t have enough clout to have that stupid contract), he rarely sold a screenplay and when he did, it was a charity sale from a friend who would buy the screenplay so that the writer could retain his Writers Guild membership. (And then the charity friend would do a shooting script.)

• Artists know that their paintings or photographs will be displayed or used on covers or put on t-shirts and prints and everything else.

Even the lowest of the low, graffiti “artists,” the ones who deface buildings, understand that their art needs to be seen. (I’m grumpy about graffiti these days since Vegas has a lot of wall murals all over the city—and the freakin’ graffiti “artists” will deface them. Grrr. I hate people who deface other people’s art.)

• Even young poets these days understand that they might have to get up in front of a crowd at a poetry slam and declaim their poem.
• And let’s not talk about comedians, who are also writers, who get in front of a crowd, and risk bombing night after night after night. Dean and I saw one of George Carlin’s shows in his last years, and Carlin was testing material so new that he was holding paper torn from a notepad.

Some of it was funny. Much of it was not.

Fiction writers—people who write novels and short stories—are the only artists I know who expect someone else to publish their work. Fiction writers, particularly those who are traditionally published, believe that all they have to do is write it, and everyone will flock to their feet.

That’s an ingrained attitude, and a hard one to fight. Heck, a lot of these writers are worried when they decide to give a copy of their manuscript to an editor at a book publishing house or (worse) an agent.

Writers do not expect to have their work in the public view, and often fear it.

I’m not sure why this is. I think it’s just part of the culture.

There are movies that show writers at work, and someone else dragging that “brilliant” manuscript off the writer’s desk. Or the writer “gets discovered” in an English class (never happened when I was in school). Or someone else mailed off their manuscript.

That myth goes hand in hand with the idea that writing should be hard and writers should suffer while doing it. That myth also goes with the idea that anything written fast is terrible and anything labored over is brilliant. And that myth goes with the idea that being prolific is a sin. (Tell that to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.)

Indie writers have a similar problem, but it’s couched in other terms. I don’t want to learn how to publish. That’s going to be hard. It’ll take too much money or I can’t do covers or…or…

Okay, I want to reply, whatever roadblocks you want to set up for your work, go ahead.

But real artists—be they musicians or painters or (yes) writers—need to have their work seen. They need to figure out how to get on that stage despite their stage fright and put their art in front of an audience.

Otherwise the art will be destroyed when they die, tossed out with the trash or deleted off their computers.

Oh…and let’s talk “covers” for a minute. Blake Shelton’s version of “Home” is very different from Bublé’s version, which is different from the duet that aired on The Voice this past week.

If you’re lucky as a writer, and if you put yourself out there, at some point, someone will want to do make another piece of art using yours as inspiration. Maybe a movie, maybe a TV show, maybe a dramatic reading or an audio book.

That’s a “cover” for lack of a better term. (It really is a derivative work, and it does fall in a different place in the copyright law, but go with me on this for a minute.) Instead of being all protective and saying that you must control all things, say yes…if the contract terms are good.

That’s all.

A singer doesn’t have to get permission to cover a song. I can sing “Home” badly in front of an audience if I want to, but if I get paid for it, I need to let the songwriter know that I’m going to be covering the song. The songwriter cannot say no.

It gets complicated after that. (Okay, it’s already complicated.) But implied in all of this is that the music needs to get in front of an audience. The play will be performed. The screenplay will become the basis for a movie. The painting will hang on a gallery wall.

What makes writer-artists any different? Why should we fight so hard to create something and then be afraid to put it in front of an audience. Particularly since we’ll never see that audience. We don’t have to hear from them either, if we keep our email private and don’t go on social media and don’t read reviews.

What makes fiction writers so dang delicate? Every artist has fears. All of us do. If we want to make a living at our art, we learn to overcome the fear.

It may take a dozen workarounds. It might mean the writing equivalent of puking in the bathroom before stepping on the stage. But if you value your own work and your own dreams, you learn how to get past whatever is stopping you.

Just like other performers do.

“Putting Yourself Out There,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Picture of Gavin is there because, despite appearances, he’s terrified of putting himself out there.

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I read a lot in January and liked a lot of it as well. Some truly marvelous books (which is not what I could say for February & March. More on that in those lists). I also finished my reading for the in-person space opera workshop I was conducting in the middle of the month. Honestly, I didn’t like much of what I read in the brand-new anthologies I found. The stories had no depth or no ending or both. So I don’t have a lot to recommend from those books. Usually I can at least recommend the introductions, but one stunningly left out all the great female space opera writers of the 1990s and barely mentioned the ones in the 2000s. I realize that bias happens, but that one stung on a bunch of levels. (I guess I expect it from old timers, most of whom are not with us anymore, but not folks who were active in those time periods.)

I haven’t yet finished reading The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, because I needed to take a break. The book has a slant that is very white-male oriented. It’s also filled with some challenging pieces that aren’t holding up to the 26 years since the book was printed. (I swear, New Journalism is soooo self-involved.) But some of it is good and interesting and I’ll come back to it when the mood suits me. I doubt I’ll ever recommend the book, but watch: there will be a time when I recommend more essays from it.

I read one of the best novels I’ve seen in years and some great articles. So January was quite a success…which is why this list is so late. It took a while to chronicle my reading.

January 2025Anders, Charlie Jane, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Space Time,” New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Tachyon, 2024. I absolutely love this story. It’s everything a certain kind of space opera should be—fun, preposterous, believable, tense, and adventurous. All wrapped into a neat and well-written package. A wonderful gem of a story.

Crais, Robert, The Big Empty, Putnam, 2024. The best book I’ve read all year, maybe in the past few years. I love Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Pike doesn’t show up until halfway through this book because Bob is so dang good at point of view and the way a story should flow. I don’t have a lot of time for leisure reading, and right now, my lack of time is significantly worse. So I did the readerly thing. I stayed up past my bedtime, and Dean literally had to pull the book from my hands. I still read it in two days. Fantastic. And no, I’m not going to tell you much more than “fantastic” because, as with all of Bob’s books, to say more is to ruin a surprise. (I might have already said too much, in fact.)

Deaver, Jeffery, and Maldonado, Isabella, Fatal Intrusion, Thomas & Mercer, 2024. Yep, I have an Amazon link only for this book, because I just discovered something very unpleasant. This book (and a bunch of Deaver novellas) are only available in ebook on Amazon. Sorry about that! I read the book in paper, which is how I prefer to read, so I had no idea that this had happened until the moment I was putting the book on the list. Sigh. It makes me, as a reader, more than mildly pissed off.

The book is good enough. It’s not as good as most Deaver books, but it’s better than a lot of thrillers. I’ll read the next book in the series, and if I like it, I’ll pick up one of Maldonado’s books. Collaborations are a difficult animal. They can be something better than both writers, especially if the book is something they wouldn’t have written without the collaborator. I suppose Deaver could argue that he wouldn’t have had a character like Carmen Sanchez, but except for a few chapters that I suspect were all Maldonado, she felt very generic. So I don’t think this collaboration enhanced the two writers’ work (I’m saying this without having read hers). But this is a good way to while away a few hours.

Fekadu, Mesfin, “The Loophole That Landed Muni Long a Grammy Nom,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. The online version of this article has the title “Muni Long Explains How She Made It,” and I think that is a better title for the content here. Muni Long has been around for awhile, and she has followed her own path. There are some great quotes in here, but the best was her response to how she got paid for her streaming content:

Sometimes you look at your quarterly statement and you’re like, “Oh wow, $1,000 for 500 million streams. Great. That’s awesome.” The sheer volume that I have to write in order to make an income that makes sense [is insane]. What saved me is that I have quality and quantity, whereas some of these people, all they have is one or two records.

Quantity and quality. She’s right. We’re doing the same. Take a look at this one, even if you’re new to Muni Long.

Harris, Robert,, Vintage Books, 2016. I really like Robert Harris’s writing, although his topics don’t always interest me. I picked up Conclave after seeing a review of the film. A lot of my favorite actors are in it, and since I like Harris, I thought I should give the book an eyeball before watching the film. Glad I did. There’s a nice moment toward the end of the book, something completely unexpected and yet set up. It worked for me, and might not have worked in the film (which I have not yet seen). Of course, that had me looking through more Robert Harris for the books I’ve missed. I mostly didn’t order the ones on the topics that I don’t care about, but I did preorder the next. I love his courage as a writer. He’s always doing something interesting. This is a novella, filled with his great characters and marvelous writing. Oh, and for the interested: I am not Catholic, although I was in and out of Catholic churches as a kid because so many of my friends were Catholic. So I have a passing familiarity with some of the rituals, but no great interest in the church or its habits. I still found this fascinating.

Heinz, W.C., “Brownsville Bum,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. I had never heard of W.C. Heinz before reading this book. Yet many of the other writers in the front half of the book (at least) mentioned him as the best of the best. Well, this is my favorite piece in the book so far. It’s a 1951 piece about someone named Bummy Davis who was a fighter back in the day when fighters could kill each other in the ring. This one reads like a short story—the life and death of kinda thing. The writing itself is sharp and crisp, the events breathtaking. The murder, at the end, shocking because it happened in a bar, not in the ring. If you find the book, read this one first.

Rose, Lacey, “Selena Gomez is Waiting For Your Call,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. Last fall and early this year, there were a lot of interviews with Selena Gomez as the Oscar and Grammy hype heated up. She has a good team. But she’s also a great interview because, as young as she is, she’s had an amazing career. She knows who she is, and she’s blunt about it. I can’t encapsulate this long piece in any coherent way, except to say all writers (and Selena fans) should read it.

Royko, Mike, “‘A Very Solid Book,'” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. A lot of the work in this book is dated. So dated, in fact, that I had to look up some of the rivalries just to see what was going on. But this piece by Mike Royko from 1987 is familiar. I was 27 at the time, and aware of the Mets/Cubs rivalry.

Some idiot at some NY publishing house asked Royko to review a book about the Mets. And oh, did he. This piece is not dated, once you knew about the rivalry, and it is one one of my favorites. I just read it again, out loud this time to Dean. It’s a very short piece that is, ostensibly, a review of a book by Mets first baseman (at the time) Keith Hernandez. And Smith was a Cubbies fan through and through. The book is solid, you see, because it can survive being thrown against a wall…

Really worth reading

Score, Lucy, Things We Never Got Over, Bloom Books, 2022. Okay, this is annoying. As I set up this post, I discovered that Lucy Score’s ebooks are exclusive to Amazon. Same thing as the Deaver/Maldonado above. Grrrr. You can get the paperbooks anywhere you want, but to get the ebook, you have to go to Amazon. You can’t even go to her own website/store to get the book. Sorry about that. Get the paper. She has some lovely deluxe editions.

However, I did find the book on Amazon. I had just finished something else (what I can’t remember) and the algorithm suggested this book. I did what I often do and read the first chapter. And wowza is it good. Seriously, this first chapter is worth reading even if you don’t pick up the book. The chapter is a masterclass of information flow. The chapter title is Worst. Day. Ever. The first paragraph is a perfect hook:

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into Café Rev, but it sure as hell wasn’t a picture of myself behind the register under the cheery headline “Do Not Serve.” A yellow frowny face magnet held the photo in place.

Each paragraph builds on that. With each page, the situation gets worse and worse and worse. You—well, I—had to go to the next chapter immediately. The book ends up being a tiny bit long, and for a moment verges on “if you two only talk to each other, this would end” but by then I didn’t care. The book is fun, the writing is great, and the characters are a hoot. So pick this one up…or at the very least (writers) read that first paragaph.

Smith, Red, “Next To Godliness,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. My father, who was born in 1914, used to talk about the great sports writers and announcers from his life. He also talked about great players, so many of their names are familiar to me. Others, not quite as much. But Red Smith was quite familiar. His name was in the air all the time in our family, and also in the various writing classes I had. Red Smith was one of those writers even non-sports fans enjoyed.

Back when my father imprinted on baseball, there was radio, but it was local only. So games played outside of the area weren’t aired. The readers had to rely on the print media.

“Next To Godliness” describes an entire game in maybe 1,000 words. It also describes the reaction to that game from Smith himself. It’s lovely and well done. There’s a reason this man’s work was remembered—at least for another 50 years.

Smith, Thomas, “Dua Lipa Talks 2024,” Billboard, December 14. 2024. I love Dua Lipa’s stuff. I run to it. I also enjoy how she’s running her career, in the same way that I admire the way Taylor Swift is. These women are taking charge in a way that most musicians do not. So read this. She’s interesting and what she’s doing with her business is also great.

Verhoeven, Beatrice, “John M. Chu,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 13, 2024. Fascinating interview with John M. Chu, released just before Wicked came out. (If you haven’t seen Wicked, oh, you must! It’s marvelous.) Lots of great material here, mostly about being courageous. Lots of behind the scenes on his various movies as well. In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians, and more. Read this one.

Weir, Keziah, “Give And Let Give,” Vanity Fair, October, 2024. I’ve been thinking about this interview ever since I read it, particularly as one particularly nutty billionaire chainsaws his way through American government, another sends his fiance into space, and the rest don’t seem to give a rat’s banana about actual human beings.

Melinda French Gates, former wife of Bill Gates, is also worth billions, and she’s giving it away, systematically, to charity after charity. She says it’s not easy, because she had to have the right organization in place to help funnel the money, and then she has to figure out where she can do the most good. Note the difference: Do The Most Good. Yeah, she’s not the only ex-wife of a billionaire doing this.

It’s fascinating to me that the wealthy women understand their social responsibility and the bulk of the men…do not.

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I know, I know. It’s April Fool’s Day. And Dean Wesley Smith decided to launch a Kickstarter anyway. It’s for his Poker Boy series, which is one of my favorites. If you back it, you’ll get four Poker Boy ebooks and whatever stretch goals we hit. And writers, there’s some really great rewards here. So take a look.

And if you’re uncertain, at least watch the video I did. Enjoy! (Oh, and head to the Kickstarter here.)

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This is the first time in months that I was able to do a lot of reading for pleasure. Yes, I had other things to read and work on, but my time is starting to ease up. Yay! And more yays…I’m keeping this one up in real time. I will be publishing the lists I missed over the next few months, but I’m going to try to keep up with the current months as I go. I managed in October, which was a real victory. I enjoyed a lot of what I read, as you can see below, but also had to complain about a few books (without author names attached).

I guess I’ll start with the complaints. I read a standalone novel by a writer whose work I usually love. The novel was predictable and deeply unpleasant. I kept waiting for a twist, but none came. And the ending had no validation at all. The story just ended. It was almost offensively awful. I kept reading, thinking that something would pay off. This is what happens when you love an author’s work. You trust them to tell a story you’ll like. However, when they don’t, you usually don’t punish them. I will certainly buy his next. However, if the books continue to offend or displease me, I’ll stop. Fortunately, this one was from 2018, and he’s written a lot of books I like since. So this was a one-off. I also know that there are some topics he writes about that just don’t interest me. I think the problem on this one was marketing. It was marketing like the books I like, even thought it’s nothing like them. Whoops, traditional publisher. You didn’t give me enough information to make an informed choice. That same publisher did something similar on a book that came out last year. I wouldn’t have bought it, if not for a reader review that mentioned something in the book that made it a must-be (and a favorite read) for me. So marketing really does matter. Communicating the right thing to readers really matters.

Then I read a book in a series that I like a great deal, but this one was so mediocre that I was scanning by the end. And then I looked at Amazon to see when the next book was coming out…and it wasn’t. (She’s traditionally published.) That broke my heart a little. If she were indie, she’d have a next book which I would read, thinking this one a blip. (Sigh.)

And a third book that I’m not going to recommend, from yet another favorite writer. I read it…slowly…as my before-bed reading because it wasn’t challenging. Until it was. It became a challenging read because (I realized) there was no story if the heroine wasn’t TSTL (romance terminology for Too Stupid To Live). And if she and the hero had just talked, there would be no book either. Not that the secondary characters were any smarter. I finished it because…because…I didn’t quit. I think if I had been reading it at a different time of day, it would have gone into the trade-in pile much sooner.

Ironically, I’m rereading a book by the first author as I type this, and I’m reading another book by the third writer I mentioned. These duds didn’t scare me away. I couldn’t read another book by the second writer because there were none available. (Waaaaaah)

And now, below, on time! the books and articles that I can recommend from October.

October, 2024Burt, Stephanie, “Swift 101,” Vanity Fair, July/August 2024. Stephanie Burt taught a class in Taylor Swift and her many influences at Harvard. The class isn’t just about music. In fact, it’s in the English Department. The things she learned and taught are fascinating. Makes me wish I could take the class next year…and I’m not a Swiftie (although I like many of her songs).

Colapinto, John, “Jon Bon Jovi’s Long Journey Back,” AARP The Magazine, June/July 2024. As many of you who read these lists a lot know, I’m fascinated by how people manage to have very long careers. Jon Bon Jovi’s career has lasted more than 40 years. And then, despite great self-care, he lost his voice. This is about the ways that “life happens,” as he says. The interview is about survival and art, and is really worth reading.

Connelly, Michael, Desert Star, Little, Brown, 2024. It’s been a long time since I blew through a book as fast I blew through this one. Connelly’s books are uneven for me, but they’re always readable. This one had actual tension that kept me turning pages. Renée Ballard goes for her usual morning surf, and while she’s in the water, someone steals her wallet and badge (hidden on her car). Because she faces discrimination in the office, she doesn’t want to tell her boss that her badge is missing. So much of the early part of the book is about the recovery of her badge, and of course, things get worse. She involves not only Harry Bosch, but his daughter Maddie, and then there’s a twist—and well, I went through this in just a few hours. If you like this series, you will as well.

Dailey, Hannah, “K-Pop Is Everything,” Billboard, August 24, 2o24. Universal Music Publishing Group runs an international songwriting camp. The teaser on this article is that the camp is designed to produce “the next real batch of surefire hits for [K-Pop’s] young stars.” The pressure, the work, the procedures described in the article remind me of the music factory at the Brill Building in New York in the early 1960s, a place that truly was a hit factory. The difference, though, is the writers know that the lyrics will get translated. (Translators get a royalty split.) Fascinating read.

Fell, Nicole, “Finding The Right Palette for Red, White & Royal Blue,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 15, 2024. I loved the book Red, White & Royal Blue, and I’ll be honest: I haven’t seen the Amazon film yet. It’s a romance, and neither male lead looks like the men I’d had in mind while I read. So I’ve been putting off watching it. (Yes, I’m that superficial.) But Casey McQuiston, the author, was interviewed (along with one of the actors) for The Hollywood Reporter, and I did read that avidly. There’s a quote in the middle of this piece about the differences between a novel and a film, from McQuiston’s point of view, and it’s absolutely worth reading. (The book is too.)

Friend, Tom, “Peter Gammons: Diamond Vision,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. Form follows function. In the middle of this essay, about Peter Gammons and the day he nearly died, Friend mentions that Gammons told his writing instructor back at the beginning of his career that he didn’t want to write bland prose. He wanted to be part of the story. There is nothing bland about this essay. Its structure is unique and appropriate, and allows for the kicker of an ending. It’s very well done.

Havens, Lyndsey, “Spinning Another Year,” Billboard, August 24, 2024. Most of the trick to staying in business is about learning how to survive massive ups and downs. For United Record Pressing—a company that makes vinyl records, the actual product—the secret to their success has been perseverance, and giving up, even when vinyl was at its lowest sales figures (two decades ago). If you want to survive in business, then this is one of those must-read articles.

Herron, Mick, Dophin Junction, Soho Press, 2021. I got sick at the beginning of the month, and I’ve learned that when I’m down, I need to read spectacular wordsmiths who can also tell a story. I’ve read all of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, and I’m not that fond of his detective series, so I grabbed this short story collection off my shelf. It does feature stories from his various series, which are good enough, but the standalone stories are the best. I’ve pointed out a few here. Several of the stories contain surprises, but if I point that out in my mini-review of them, that will spoil them. So I’m just going to comment briefly on the ones I like.

I should note that the volume contains one of my very favorite short stories, “The Usual Santas.” I recommend it to writers often so that they can see how a masterful writer handles names and naming. Every character (and there’s a lot of them) is named Santa. Yet you can keep them straight. I usually post about this story in the Holiday Recommended Reading List, which you’ll see the day after Thanksgiving.

Herron, Mick, “Lost Luggage,” Dophin Junction, Soho Press, 2021. “Lost Luggage” focuses on a game that couples often play—looking at a stranger and seeing if they can figure out (without asking) who or what the stranger is. The game is familiar, since Dean and I do it as a writing exercise…and occasionally argue about our opinions. Of course, we never ask. Does anyone?

Herron, Mick, “Remote Control,” Dophin Junction, Soho Press, 2021. Lovely, twisty little story that has the benefit of being beautifully written as well.

Herron, Mick, “What We Do,” Dophin Junction, Soho Press, 2021. Even though above, I mentioned that I don’t like Herron’s regular detective series much, that might be a function of viewpoint. Usually he writes from the point of view of Joe Silvermann who is just incompetent. I don’t find him interesting at all. Zoe, his (sometimes?) wife, on the other hand, is exceedingly competent, as is exemplified in this story. The book ends with it, which is usually the slot for a strong story, and it fits the bill.

Jenkins, Sally, “Bitter Rivals. Beloved Friends. Survivors,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. I already bought my sister a copy of this book, based on this essay alone. My sister adores tennis, always has, and I knew she would love this essay. It first appeared in The Washington Post in 2023. The essay discusses the relationship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova over the decades. They met as teenagers, had a sports rivalry, but came to a deep friendship and understanding. Then they both got cancer a few years back. This essay, about friendships and living long full lives, is worth the price of admission into this volume. Extremely well done.

Land, Barbara, and Land, Myrick, A Short History of Las Vegas, University of Nevada Press, Reno, 1999. Dean had this book in his office and put it in the should we keep this pile for me. We cull our books every now and then, and most of the ones he had in that pile I was happy to let go. I read this one. It’s fascinating. The front part is clearly about the history of the city, and didn’t really date. The latter part was like reading a novel in that I knew what was going to happen to all of the players later on. There was so much rah-rah stuff in the second part, and I knew it would go south for almost everyone mentioned. Still, I found myself quoting some of this stuff at one of our writer meetings. And I also learned why the streets downtown have the names they do. So I liked it. I’ve put up the cover for the second edition. I have no idea if there were many changes, since I read the first edition, and found it fascinating in so many ways.

Lewinsky, Monica, “In Praise of Alternate Endings,” Vanity Fair, July/August 2024. I admire the crap out of Monica Lewinsky. She could have put a metaphorical blanket over her head since the 1990s. Instead, she has taken care of herself, and gotten healthy after the awfulness that was put upon her by so-called friends and the former President of the United States. She writes a lot about how to survive, and wowza, you know she’s survived a lot more than many of us. So I always pay attention to what she writes. This time, she’s talking about never losing hope. It was important in July/August. It’s more important now. Read this.

Marchese, David, “Al Pacino Is Still Going Big,” The New York Times, October 5, 2024. Fascinating interview on a long-time career. I’ve always found Pacino interesting, and that was confirmed in the interview. His attitude toward work, toward being an artist, toward managing money (which really struck me, considering my summer), and on just plain old survival really struck home. It’s worth getting the free subscription at the NYT.

Paiella, Gabriella, “Casual Luke Rides The Big Wave,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. This essay is about the winner of the original Big Wave competition, in Hawaii. I know a lot about big wave competitions. I used to be able to watch one from my house on the Oregon Coast. When the waves get so large that no one in their right mind would go near them, surfers travel from all over the world to compete and see who can survive them. This particular competition was won by a local, a guy who was working as a lifeguard on the beach at the same time as the competition went on. It’s an amazing story about doing something for the love of it, which I think is at the center of sports.

Rys, Dan, “A Man’s World,” Billboard, August 24, 2024. A creepy and somewhat surreal article about James Brown’s actual estate. Not just the money and the management, but his actual home, frozen in time from the day he was rushed to the emergency room before he died. That part is…strange. But the things the estate must deal with, including Brown’s rather tarnished reputation, is quite fascinating and worth the read.

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I’m so thrilled to announce our latest theme anthologies which have arrived just in time for the holiday season. These three anthologies contain stories from last year’s Holiday Spectacular, only these stories are arranged by theme.

So, if you want to read only romance, because you want to have a bit of joy in your life, pick up Winter Sparkles. If you would want some dark crime stories to reinforce the end-of-the-year darkness, buy Hardboiled Holidays. If you like stories about secrets as much as I do, get a copy of Holiday Secrets.

We’ve revamped the designs. The books are as wonderful as the stories. I think you’ll love them!

Of course, you can get the books as part of this year’s Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter. In addition to the reward featuring the books, you’ll get the annual Calendar of Stories (starting on Thanksgiving and running to New Year’s Day). And, because we’ve hit four stretch goals so far, you’ll also get three more stories of mine, a holiday issue of Pulphouse Magazine, and two (yes, two!) online workshops about copyright, worth $500 each.

Yeah, if I were you, I’d head over to the Kickstarter right now. Because it ends on Thursday at 7 p.m. Pacific Time.

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Trapped in time on the empty streets of Las Vegas, Christmas Day during the pandemic – a research adventure into the past turns into a nightmare of waiting amongst a empty city full of fear-stricken people.

But a strange poster sticks out among many on a boarded-up window in the Arts District. An invitation that shines a ray of hope on the future. If only the right “Last Thursday” can be located —in time…

“Last Thursday” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Last ThursdayKristine Kathryn RuschPandemic Christmas—his first, his only, everyone’s only, really, because the crisis would be over, at least in the States, by the end of 2021. Rupert stood in front of the closed-up bar; hands jammed in his pockets. No one had told him that the Nevada desert could be cold in the winter, just like no one had told him why he needed to avoid 2020, only that he had to do so.

Like waving a red flag in front of a bull, as they said back in this time. Meaning the obscure warning had been a lure for him, and ultimately, a trap.

Of course, he wouldn’t get sick—his immunity was innate, something sciency, something no one had really explained. The way that vaccination had evolved from shots in the arm to some kind of pill to something that babies got in the womb. Where he came from, everyone was immune to the virus they called COVID-19 and to HIV and to tuberculosis and every other disease the 2020 folks were afraid of.

He hadn’t thought much about his immunity, which meant that even though he had known about COVID-19 for reasons equally obscure to him, he had known he wouldn’t get it, so he had thought that 2020 was worth traveling to.

Boy, was he wrong.

Lonely, surrounded by scared people heading into and out of businesses with masks on, heads down, bodies tense. No one wanted to converse, no one wanted to look at him, and at first everyone thought him weird or some kind of conservative (what kind he didn’t fully understand in the beginning) because he wasn’t wearing a mask.

He eventually masked up. He eventually got used to the reticence. He wasn’t sure he would ever get used to the feeling of being trapped.

And he was trapped. His exit date was January 13, the week after the Capitol breach he had ostensibly wanted to study. That was what his application said, only because that was the one historical event he had known well enough to list.

Everyone knew about January 6. It was a major pivot point, like July 20, 1969, with the moon landing, and August 6, 1945, with the first nuclear bomb.

His theory? There were lots of pivot points, and everyone wanted to study them, so why not jot one down? He’d picked 2021 because it wasn’t that far back. He wouldn’t have to do a lot of life study or figure out how to survive in a world without, say, private bathrooms. Less inconvenience, and more time to explore the past.

Because, really, all he’d wanted to do was to travel in time. He wanted to leave his present and see what the world had been like before he was born. He wanted something new and different, and he had gotten different, and new, too, if truth be told.

But he hated it. He hated all of it, and more than anything, he wanted out.

Which was what made the sign so tantalizing.

He had been walking in the early morning because that was what he had taken to doing. Las Vegas was a surprisingly sleepy city in 2020. Not a lot of nightlife, and what was there had been prescribed. The casinos were mostly empty—those that were open anyway. And tourists were belligerent—those who showed up, that is.

Walking, it seemed, was something people could do without masks, provided no one did more than nod once as they crossed the street to avoid anyone coming at them. Masks seemed primitive to him, but logical. Since vaccines were just starting their roll-out this month, masks were all most people had.

When he did get close to people, he saw a tremendous amount of fear in their eyes. He intellectually understood the fear, even if he did want to tell them all not to worry, since he couldn’t infect anyone.

He didn’t say that, of course. He didn’t say much.

He explored his neighborhood and when that ceased to interest him, he went a few neighborhoods over, to what the locals were calling the Arts District and what his manual had called the Revitalized Downtown.

(So much about his manual was wrong that he had stopped using it. He’d shut off access to it, even though he could reinstate it in the corner of his right eye with a few commands. Whoever had written the thing had done their best to be vague (no spoilers!) while still trying to be accurate. Vagueness had been achieved. Accuracy…hadn’t.)

That morning—Christmas Day—he was walking early on a street he had only just discovered a few days earlier, even though it wasn’t too far from his apartment.

The first day, he had seen the bar, but hadn’t paid a lot of attention. It was recessed into a row of shops in the middle of the block. Called Weston’s Sea Shanty, the bar wasn’t near the sea nor was it owned by anyone named Weston. There were no shanties, which, Rupert learned through a hasty word search, were either some kind of shack that lumberjacks used (no real trees here for lumberjacks to cut) or some kind of song that sailors sang when they were working (no place for sailors to work that was sailor specific, anyway).

The entire bar confused him, just like so many other things. He’d stood in front, next to some tables chained together so that the homeless who had infiltrated this area couldn’t use the chairs for their own purposes, and looked at the barricaded windows next to a clearly locked door.

Plywood covered almost every window in this neighborhood, but this being the Arts District, real artists had covered the plywood with designs—most of them messages of hope or curses against the virus, and all of them interesting.

Except this one. The plywood had been whitewashed and, except for the bar’s name across the top, had been covered with signs. Some of them were useful—the state regulations regarding bars and COVID behaviors, including the fines levied against any business that failed to follow the directive—but some appeared to be someone’s attempt at humor.

Or maybe not.

Rupert was beginning to think he was humor-challenged in 2020 as well.

Because the signs that had vaguely threatening rules for customers, promising that those who did not follow said rules would be tossed out on their asses, didn’t strike him as amusing. Each rule had its own sign, from the order to mask up, another order to remain six feet apart, and a third that mandated no shaking of hands—a custom he had yet to see and clearly did not understand.

The only rules sign that caught his eye, though, was one that made him slightly sad. No hugging, it said. We used to like hugging and maybe we can do it again. But not right now!

In the middle of all those signs there was one more. It was slightly faded and the only one without any color on its surface, just a simple black-and-white note, almost as if it had been printed on a glitchy 2020 printer.

Interested in Time Travel? Meet Here Last Thursday, 7 P.M.

His heart jumped the moment he saw that sign, and once he saw it, he couldn’t stop staring at it. He had walked this way for two days straight and he didn’t remember seeing it before, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been on the wall.

The sign looked like it had been on the wall for years. But he knew that wasn’t possible because the plywood went up when everything shut down in mid-March of 2020. So the sign hadn’t even been there a full year.

And no matter what they said about the weather in Las Vegas, the weather here was mild. It wouldn’t destroy a sign like that, making it fade and look glitchy. If the sign had been on the wall for months, it would look the same…or, if it had been in full daylight for at least part of the day, it would have turned yellow.

The paper was crisp and white and new-looking. Or maybe that was because he wanted it to be new-looking. He had no idea if it actually was.

And given the other attempts at humor on the plywood, the sign itself was probably a joke.

But what if it wasn’t? What if he could actually meet up with other time travelers and relax, if only for an evening?

Maybe even find an early escape.

Rupert leaned against the chairs, feeling his heart pound. He was so lonely that he was willing to break a few rules.

If he jumped back to his time early, he would be fined and banned from time travel forever. He was also told that he couldn’t jump backward without permission.

He had the ability to do so, though. Every time traveler did. It was only the fines and threats of sanctions and, in a few cases, actual arrest that kept everyone following those regulations.

Besides, last Thursday was just yesterday. It wouldn’t be a big jump at all, not big enough to be noticed, not big enough to matter.

He would travel correctly. He wouldn’t worry about the spatial part of the jump. There was an alley not far from here, an alley that had enough crevices that he could stand in one and activate his handheld time portal. No one would see it.

One day—less, really, because last Thursday at 7 p.m. was only 14 hours ago.

He just needed to go back to the apartment and grab the time portal out of its shielded safe.

He smiled for probably the first time in days. Maybe even weeks.

Time travelers. In a bar. Somehow, that seemed appropriate to him—in a heartwarming way. In a thank God I found my people way. In a maybe a few hours of commiseration will make the next three weeks bearable way.

The walk to the apartment went faster than expected. And by the time he got there, his mood was much better than it had been when he left.

The apartment was something called a short-term rental that the Time Board had found for him. They had paid for it in full, too, which was important, since they hadn’t given him a lot of discretionary 2020 income. He’d had to be frugal which had irritated him almost more than the mask rules.

Located on the first floor of a ten-story building, the apartment was a corner unit without a lot to recommend it. Farther up, the apartments had a view. His was of the bail bonds office across the street and the Justice Center a few blocks down.

The neighborhood had a lot of homeless, a problem he hadn’t even known existed outside of the 1930s. He’d made the mistake of calling them all hobos when he first got here.

Now, he was a little annoyed at them, because they peered into his place if he left the blinds up or they peed on the wall which made the sidewalk smell like fresh urine half the time. He had to step around them and had learned the hard way not to throw money at them, because they usually drank it up. Instead, he’d handed out bags of food until the building superintendent stopped him.

They’ll stay by the building if you do that, the super had said. We don’t want them to. And if you want to stay in the building, you’ll quit now.

This time period was so heartless in so many ways. The casual cruelty took Rupert’s breath away. He couldn’t understand why there was no safety net for people who clearly needed mental health intervention or why no one had started a home for people whose income levels had dipped below the poverty line.

He didn’t ask about it, though, because he had no idea which questions were allowed and which ones weren’t. He had learned to keep his mouth closed so that people didn’t think him weird. He had started listening more, something that was (he was surprised to figure out) relatively new to him.

The apartment had a single bedroom with a very small bed, a tiny closet that barely fit the clothes he’d had to purchase, and a minuscule (and slightly insulting) bathroom with a stand-up shower so narrow he hit his elbows whenever he soaped up.

The living area included what was termed a “galley” kitchen (these sea metaphors bothered him), a dining area, and a couch with a TV plunked against the wall. The TV had taken forever to learn how to operate, but he’d managed. The Time Board had sent him with a “smart” phone which had “internet” technology, a search system so primitive that he felt it was better to ask people rude questions than try to use the blasted thing.

He managed to learn to cook, so he got to know the kitchen and its cabinets, and he found one that had a deeper back than the others. He stored the security safe there. He had to climb on a chair to find it, and then he’d had to switch on the chip in right thumbnail so that he could feel the edges of the safe.

He pulled it out. For a moment, he was terrified he had forgotten the combination, but he hadn’t. He had to twist it right, left, and turn it upside down before sticking his activated thumbnail against the bottom.

The safe opened, and the portal fell out. It was the size of a marble. He barely caught it, and he clung to it like the lifeline it was. It would be so easy to lose. Before he left, he’d actually splurged for the around-the-neck storage unit that looked like a bulky (and badly designed) necklace.

He got that now, put the portal in it, and stuffed it under his shirt.

His heart was pounding hard. He wasn’t supposed to do any of this. He didn’t need the portal for another few weeks. He hoped it didn’t have some kind of monitoring tech he didn’t know about so that the Time Board would know he was messing with it.

But if they knew, they’d stop him immediately—that was one of the benefits of time travel.

So after a few minutes—when nothing happened—he felt better. He managed to use some breathing techniques to slow his heart rate down. He slipped his coat back on, grabbed his 2020 wallet and his stupid, idiotic phone, and left the apartment, barely remembering to lock it.

He wanted to run back to the bar, but he didn’t. He walked with purpose, passing only a handful of people, most of them in cars, all of them looking sad.

When he got to the bar, he was surprised to see it was still closed. The entire neighborhood looked shut down. Even the restaurants where he had gotten take-out in the last few months were shuttered.

Apparently, Christmas was one of those holidays, although no one had told him. Which was the litany of his life at the moment. No one had told him anything.

He made his way to the alley behind the bar. The middle of the alley curved downward as if the ground had cleaved in two and someone had poured concrete over the divide. There was no water in it because there hadn’t been rain in forever (which the locals were complaining about).

The alley stank of rancid beer mixed with urine. He looked around, expecting to see a homeless person or two tucked against the building, but there was no one. Sometimes the authorities did a sweep through the neighborhood rousting the unlucky souls who weren’t supposed to be there.

Maybe that had happened recently—even though the urine stench suggested otherwise.

Rupert was alone, though, as far as he could tell. He had the presence of mind to look up, to see if any windows overlooked the alley and if they did, if someone was standing in them.

No windows, and no one on the flat roof above.

So he slid his weird necklace forward, grabbed the portal and called up the interface, using his left thumbnail. The coordinates for his return were there, but listed as Trip #2. If he deleted the history when he got back from this little adventure, the trip home would be listed as Trip #1. He wondered if that would be a red flag, then decided he didn’t care.

He wanted to see like-minded people. He needed to see like-minded people.

He programmed in Trip #3, which was so much easier than Trips #1 and #2. All he had to do this time was change the date and time, not the location.

Then he hit activate, and felt the weird whirring, with that ever-so-faint (and to him inexplicable) touch of hot air, and suddenly, it was dark.

A single streetlight shone at the end of the alley, and near him was a light above the door that led into the back of the bar. It was also about 20 degrees colder than it had been a few seconds ago and 15 hours from now.

At least, he hoped it was 15 hours. He hoped it all worked right.

He stepped out of the alley to see the street a tad more alive than it had been before he left. Cars drove by with their lights on. The Mexican restaurant across the street had its door open despite the cold.

A man stood on the street corner beside a closed theater, a guitar case open in front of him. He had the guitar strap around his neck, but he wasn’t playing. He was staring at Rupert as if he’d never seen a person before.

Rupert grinned at him, and the man touched the mask across his face. Rupert felt his cheeks heat. That’s why the man was staring at him.

The one thing Rupert had forgotten this time was his goddamn mask.

Fortunately, he carried a spare in his back pocket. He pulled the mask out and put it on, then pivoted and walked toward the bar—

Which looked no different than it had in the morning. The tables were pulled to one side, the chairs chained to them. The door was closed and locked, and the lights were off.

“Really?” he whispered in frustration. “Really?”

Apparently the sign didn’t mean the-night-before Thursday. It meant the Thursday of the previous week.

He hoped.

He decided he wasn’t even going back to his cruddy apartment, and he really didn’t care much about the guitar guy, although he probably should.

That thought alone made Rupert feel a tad guilty. He walked back to the alley and set Trip #4. One week previous. The official “last Thursday.”

And then he activated the portal.

Finally, he arrived somewhere lively—ish. People had spilled out of the bar into the street. They were holding drinks and laughing, but the laughs weren’t real. They were forced, as if everyone was trying to convince themselves that they were having a really good time when they weren’t.

The air was as cold as it had been when he left the…what should he call it? The 2020 present? Because it wasn’t his present. This was all his past.

He wended his way around the people, all of whom had masks, mostly worn around their chins, and started to let himself into the bar. A bouncer stopped him, told him to wait a minute until someone left. They were truly enforcing the state-imposed occupancy limits.

Finally, a woman stumbled out, barely keeping her feet in her heels. She waved at the bouncer, wished him a good night, and staggered off. The bouncer trailed after her, asking her if she wanted an Uber.

And that was when Rupert let himself inside.

The air smelled of beer and fresh chicken wings. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. There was a bar on his right, with only a handful of bar stools, spaced so far apart that conversation would be impossible. Some people sat there, masks around their chins, drinking alone.

A group had formed in the back, and they looked somber. Rupert checked the clock behind the bar. It was 7:10.

His heart lifted. That had to be his time travel group.

There were only three tables on the main floor, and all three tables were full. No one laughed in here, not like outside, and he found he preferred the semi-silence to the desperate trills of people trying to force themselves into a good time.

Some kind of rock music played overhead, just loud enough, which—in his experience—was rare in a 2020 bar.

He walked past the three tables to that group in the back. Ten people had spaced themselves maybe three feet apart, not the required six. Two were standing close to each other, both men. One was bent over, and Rupert thought maybe that man was sick.

The closer Rupert got, though, the more he realized that the man wasn’t sick. He was sobbing. The man next to him had a hand near his back, as if wanting to touch him in comfort, but was unable to.

On a counter, he saw a large photograph of a woman caught in the middle of a joyous laugh, with lights from this very bar blurred behind her. Candles were lit beside the photo.

Heat filled Rupert’s cheeks again. This wasn’t a time traveler’s meeting. This was some kind of memorial.

He stopped at the edge of the group anyway. A person looked at him—gender impossible to determine—brown hair medium length, a silver ring in their right eyebrow, a tattoo along the right side of their neck. Their mask was a shiny black, and looked expensive.

“This is…?” he asked, keeping his tone respectful.

“Analise’s memorial,” the person said, choking on the word “memorial,” sounding like they expected Rupert had come for that. “How did you know her?”

He could have said he didn’t, but he thought the better of it. Instead, he said, “I got to know her through the bar.”

The person smiled, which he could only tell because their eyes crinkled the way eyes do with a full smile.

“We all met her here. They didn’t have a funeral, because—you know—fuckin’ COVID. She went to that Thanksgiving thing, and then—fuck. She died alone in the hospital, you know? No one should have to die alone.”

Rupert nodded. His heart twisted, just a little. He’d been reading and hearing about the deaths, but he hadn’t known anyone. And technically, he didn’t know this Analise person, but he knew of her now, and it made him sad.

“The toast is going to be in a few minutes,” the person said. “You need to get your drink.”

Rupert walked to the bar and ordered a Heineken, which got him a glare from the bartender. But within seconds, an open bottle slid toward him. He left some money next to a soggy napkin, and walked back to the memorial, checking the rest of the bar as he went.

There were no other groups. Just this one, after 7 P.M. on a Thursday.

The wrong Thursday, apparently.

But that didn’t stop him from sharing a beer with them, listening to stories about Analise and her most spectacular memorable laugh.

Then he thanked everyone for including him and went outside into the cold. He paused for a moment to check the plywood, to see what signs were there.

The time travel sign was in the same place it had been on Christmas morning.

So clearly, he had the wrong “last” Thursday.

He sighed, belched up warm beer, and wandered into the alley, intent on going back.

Once he arrived in his 2020 present, though, only a few seconds had passed. It was still Christmas morning in an empty alley, and he had the entire lonely day ahead of him.

The beer had given him indigestion and a slight headache. Or maybe the time travel had given him the headache.

Or the memorial.

He didn’t want to go back to his hideous little apartment, not after that. And besides, he had just one more “last” Thursday to check out.

He adjusted the dates on his time portal, looked around like he had done before, and saw no one. Then he initiated the travel.

The wind felt a little warmer. The air a little colder. He didn’t remember that Thursday two weeks before being so cold, but he really hadn’t paid attention to the weather much.

He pulled his coat tighter, made sure the portal went back into its little storage necklace, and wandered out of the alley.

Some of the same people were sitting outside the bar, talking loudly. A few were laughing desperately. The same bouncer was near the door, but he didn’t recognize Rupert—of course, since the bouncer hadn’t met Rupert yet.

This time, the bouncer didn’t try to hold him outside. Rupert went in, checked the clock behind the bar, saw that it was 7:03.

But no one else was at the back where the memorial had been. Tables were piled high and chairs were leaning against the counter.

At the bar, two people sat next to each other. One of them was a man from the memorial service. He had his phone to his ear and he gasped.

“Jesus,” he said to the person next to him. “Analise just died.”

“No,” the person said. “Not possible.”

Rupert moved away, wandering around to see if there was some room he had missed.

But there wasn’t.

He wandered around the bar until 7:30, too restless to sit. He bought another beer, but didn’t drink it.

He left it on the bar as he went back outside, and peered at the plywood.

The sign was still there.

He sighed and walked to the alley, feeling discouraged but not discouraged enough to quit.

The previous Thursday was warmer but windier. The indigestion from that very first beer made his entire chest ache.

He hit his rib cage with a fist, belched, and stepped out of the alley. The wind was even stronger here, messing his hair.

This time, he didn’t even go in the bar, not right away. He looked at the plywood, and sure enough, there was the sign.

He wanted to curse at it, but that just seemed silly, even though it seemed to be taunting him.

The bouncer wasn’t there. No one sat outside either, not in this wind. He almost went back to the alley, but he couldn’t quite do that. Instead, he went inside.

Of course, there was no group. Only one person—a woman he had never seen before—inside, flirting with the bartender, who was having none of it.

Rupert smiled at them, waved just a little, and went back out to the alley, wondering how many Thursdays he would have to experience before he found the people he was searching for.

The next Thursday—the previous Thursday, really—was Thanksgiving. He’d suffered through that day once already, alone in his apartment, eating a make-your-own turkey platter from one of the grocery stores.

That experience had been more palatable than this one. A woman sat outside the bar, nursing some kind of amber drink. She looked sad.

She wasn’t sitting very far from the damned sign.

“Hey,” Rupert said to her.

She looked up.

“You ever notice that sign before?” he asked, pointing at the time travel sign.

She glanced at it, rolled her eyes, and shook her head.

“What passes for humor in this town,” she said and took a sip of her drink, dismissing him.

He took that as a no.

He went inside—no bouncer again—saw one full table with people who were obviously related to each other.

This time, he went to the bar. “Who put that sign up about time travel?” he asked the bartender.

The bartender looked at him like he was crazy. “What sign?”

“On the plywood,” he said. “There’s a sign about a time travel meeting…?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” the bartender said. “The owner prints fun crap he gets off the internet, and I stopped keeping track months ago.”

Then he frowned at Rupert.

“You want something?”

Rupert looked at the clock. 7:20.

“Naw,” he said. “I was just wondering about the sign.”

“I’m sure it’s just a dumb joke,” the bartender said. “I can ask him where he found it.”

“It’s okay,” Rupert said. “Thanks.”

And he let himself out.

The woman was gone. There was no one on the street. It was as desolate as it would be on Christmas morning.

Rupert decided at that moment that he hated it here, here being Las Vegas, the most overhyped city in the history of the United States. The vaunted nightlife was non-existent. He would have thought it would continue to exist during the pandemic, and it kinda did, but it wasn’t really any kind of “life.” More like a pretense, which made him more uncomfortable than the emptiness.

It also made him want to go back to his own time period sooner rather than later.

He’d keep collecting Thursdays until he found the right one. There had to be a day before the sign went up.

He just had to keep going back until he found it.

Five Thursdays, with the weather varying. Drippy rain one evening. A lot of tension right after the election but before the result. People huddled kinda together, staring at the overhead TVs, worrying.

By the last Thursday in October, the weather was almost warm, and he remembered how much he had enjoyed that not-too-hot desert air. There hadn’t been much to enjoy in this city, not in 2020, and it had seemed worse rather than better.

The indigestion had faded by then, and he was thirsty. He promised himself a bottle of water, and some wings because he was starting to get hungry.

He crawled onto a bar stool (no bouncer—when was that dude hired?) and ordered. The bartender didn’t like the bottle of water even though he delivered it, but seemed cool with the wings.

Some sporting event was playing on one overhead TV. On another, commentators were talking earnestly, probably about the upcoming election. Rupert wanted to tell them to settle down—they would get through it. The days would pass, the result would become known, the world would eventually move on.

But he didn’t get to say that, not any of it. He had to keep his mouth shut.

A peeling laugh—one of the prettiest things he’d ever heard—came from the front door. He turned in time to see a statuesque woman, long red hair curled around her face, laughing as she entered.

The first person, in all his travels on this strange day to actually possess a real laugh.

He could only see her eyes, but that, the red hair, and the laugh might’ve been enough to identify her, although he didn’t need to because the bartender called, “The usual, Analise?”

“Two,” she said, holding up two fingers for emphasis as she headed toward the back.

Rupert glanced at the clock. 7:45. Not part of the time travel group, then. If the stupid group even existed, which he doubted.

His wings arrived. They were a weird orange color, but they smelled good. He took a tentative bite, found them to be spicier than he had expected, but that didn’t bother him. He practically inhaled them, which meant he had been a lot hungrier than he thought.

Throughout it all, Analise talked and laughed, and actually spread some joy in that sad bar. He could hear her, telling stories, asking for another drink.

Her laugh was infectious and full-throated. People crowded as close to her as they dared in these socially distant times.

“Ah,” she said to a friend as Rupert was finishing his wings, “just live a little.”

“It’s not possible to live a little right now,” the friend said.

“Oh, yes, it is,” Analise said. “Your attitude is a choice. Yeah, it’s sad right now, but we don’t have to be sad every single moment of every single day.”

Rupert couldn’t hear the friend’s response. Instead, he pushed his basket of wings away.

Rupert felt as if Analise had been talking to him. He hadn’t really thought about his attitude.

It was a privilege to time travel. The Time Board, they tested everyone, and only let a rare few go back to work on whatever they chose to work on. Most everyone else got disqualified or told they weren’t time-travel material right from the start.

He hadn’t been told that, and despite his tendency to skate through requirements, he hadn’t been disqualified either.

He was lucky, even if 2020 was challenging. Especially since 2020 was challenging.

He let out a sigh, put some money on the bar, hoping it was enough for a tip. That was a custom he hadn’t figured out entirely yet either. Why didn’t they pay their staff enough? Why was it his duty to add to the salary?

Of course, he hadn’t asked anyone that question, because he didn’t know if it was a question the natives asked or if it would mark him as a true outsider.

He slid off the bar stool. He had a decision to make. He had forgotten to check the sign in his haste to get something to drink. He needed to check to see if the sign was there—or not. Maybe he should abandon this silly quest for other travelers and return to that bleak Christmas, where he could continue to serve out his privileged term.

Analise laughed again, and it made him smile. Such a joyous sound, a sound that had been missing almost his entire time here.

And by his 2020 present, that sound would be silenced.

He clung to the cool leather of the bar stool with his left hand. He had to do something—even though he hadn’t researched it.

That’s what the Time Board pounded into the travelers. Research, research, research. Some lives meant absolutely nothing in the scheme of things. A traveler could mess with them all he wanted and nothing in the future would change.

Other lives—hell, other moments—well, they were drivers of major change.

But, as one of his mentors told him, only around major events. A guy bending over to pick up a dime on the sidewalk might survive a mass shooting because he’d moved out of harm’s way, changing the trajectory of hundreds of lives.

A guy bending over to pick up a dime on the sidewalk on an average day with nothing strange occurring would be a dime richer.

The student travelers had laughed, but that had stuck in Rupert’s head.

And it was stuck there now.

This was a Thursday in a series of Thursdays, in a bar that didn’t seem known for anything except good company and reasonably good wings.

He hadn’t researched, but he didn’t need to.

This was 2020. The major events happened in other cities, not Las Vegas. Here, people tried to go on with their lives, and other people—like Analise—made it easier.

Decision made, Rupert stepped away from the stool and walked over to her. She looked up as he did, and that was when he realized he hadn’t tugged up his mask.

He pulled it off his chin and up, over his mouth and nose. Then he bowed just a bit formally because he couldn’t smile.

“Forgive me for intruding,” he said, “but do you have plans for Thanksgiving?”

The light left her eyes. She frowned at him, as if he was some kind of stalker, which he probably sounded like.

“What do you care?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

You’re the most upbeat person I’ve discovered in 2020. You’re full of light and laughter and affection, and I hate to see that snuffed out needlessly.

“It’ll kill you,” he said. “Going to that Thanksgiving thing. You’ll catch COVID, and you’ll get so sick that you’ll have to go to the hospital, and then you’ll die, alone just before Christmas.”

She laughed, but this time the laugh was brutal. “Good lord, aren’t you the world’s most cheery soul? Are you telling everyone you see to stay away from Thanksgiving celebrations or am I the lucky one?”

“Trust me,” he said, feeling panic. She didn’t believe him. Why didn’t she believed him? “If you go that Thanksgiving gathering—”

“I’ll get COVID and die. I got that. I’ll be careful. I always am.”

But she hadn’t been, not here, and not this evening. Her mask had been around her chin too.

He didn’t know how to say any more, because he knew how it sounded. It sounded like all those warnings on TV. He didn’t know how to make it specific to her, because he’d never heard where she went or how she contracted it or how, even, the person at the memorial had known.

Analise raised her eyebrows at him. She extended her right hand, palm down, and waggled her fingers.

“Begone, weird paranoid little man. Take your death fantasies elsewhere.”

His stomach turned with a sense of desperation he hadn’t felt since he got to this time.

“Please,” he said. “Please, just—”

A hand grabbed his arm, and yanked him back. He looked up, expecting to see the bouncer.

Instead, his advisor’s face was inches from his. The man’s green eyes glittered with fury.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he half-whispered.

“I figured—”

“You figured wrong.”

His advisor almost dragged him out of the bar. They got outside into the growing darkness. A few people pushed past them to get into the bar, but the street was mostly empty.

“How’d you get here?” his advisor asked.

Rupert touched his necklace, and his advisor’s eyes narrowed. The man looked different with one of those blue masks across his mouth and nose. Older, because of the wrinkles around the eyes.

“Location, idiot,” his advisor said, not even trying to hide his contempt.

“Alley,” Rupert said, nodding in the correct direction.

His advisor pulled him that way, but not before Rupert could check the plywood.

There was no sign. No sign at all.

Rupert ended up in time travel hell. Really, it was just a small room at the Time Board, toward the back, where he waited for nearly two hours before someone came to talk to him.

And then, they didn’t debrief him. Instead, they took his portal and his identification and told him he wasn’t welcome at the Time Board ever again.

“You know what you did, right?” the assistant who took his identification asked him.

She was thin with dark hair and even darker eyes. Her narrow chin put him in mind of Analise.

“Yeah,” Rupert said. “I shouldn’t have told her. How badly did I screw up the timeline?”

The assistant snorted. “You didn’t. That’s why we send everyone to 2020 for their final test.”

He felt cold. “No one told me it was a test.”

“That’s right,” the assistant said, “or you would’ve been on your best behavior. We wanted to see you in the field.”

“Why?” he asked. “Surely, after the warnings, most people don’t—”

“Most people do,” she said. “You go to a place, meet people, and they’re not names or statistics anymore. They’re friends, acquaintances, lovers—”

“Laughers,” he said quietly.

She frowned at him, then shook her head, maybe assuming she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“Everyone wants to help. Half forget the training.” She shrugged. “That’s how you flunk out. No redemption. But no other punishments.”

“For changing the timeline?” he asked.

“You didn’t change the timeline,” she said. “You can’t change the timeline in 2020 by warning someone that the virus will kill them. They know that. They think you’re just one of those people, the kind that takes it on themselves to tell strangers how to live their lives.”

Which he had. So he apparently was one of those people.

“There were a lot of 2020 natives doing exactly what you did. That was why she didn’t think you were anything but weird. By the time she got home, she probably forgot about you.”

Rupert sighed. He hadn’t thought about that. But that had been the problem, hadn’t it? He hadn’t thought at all.

And now he knew. The next time, he would do better.

“No redemption?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t heard that right.

“You forfeited your right to travel in time,” she said. “You can’t be trusted. What if you tell JFK not to go to Dallas?”

“Who?” Rupert asked.

She glared at him. “I have no idea how you qualified anyway,” she said and shoved him out the door.

The sun was bright and golden, the air so much fresher than it had been in 2020. The campus was green and lush, the buildings a bit too sharp-edged and metallic for his tastes.

Students walked to class, laughing and talking as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Just like they would have done in 2019.

He felt a surge of disappointment so great that it shocked him. He finally realized why he had joined up.

He didn’t want to move forward in time. He wanted time to be predictable. Time travel—he had thought—would have given him a measure of security, of comfort, of knowing what was going to come next.

But even in his 2020 present, he had been moving forward, not backward. And the framework he had thought he understood hadn’t been one he had understood at all.

He walked away from the building and found a bench near a flowering plum tree. It must have been spring. He didn’t even ask what date they had brought him back to.

He had no real idea when he was. He supposed he could ask. Questions like that weren’t unusual on a Time Board sponsored campus.

But he didn’t want to ask right now. He didn’t even want to know what day of the week it was.

He hoped it wasn’t Thursday.

He had enough of Thursday to last a lifetime.

Because he’d lived through what was, for him, a lifetime of Thursdays. And had learned a lesson he couldn’t apply to a job he could no longer do.

Yeah, he was changed. But in ways he hadn’t figured out yet, ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to figure out.

He just wanted to sit on that bench and let the world flow around him for a few minutes.

Or maybe forever.

He wasn’t sure which.

____________________________________________

“Last Thursday” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Last ThursdayCopyright © 2024 by Kristine Kathryn RuschPublished by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2024 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Canva

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

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Tuesday’s election results in the United States have left a lot of people feeling shocked, dismayed, upset, and angry. Others are pretty happy with that result. And even more people have moved on, thinking, Well, that’s over.

It’s not over, really. Whenever a new administration comes in the White House, changes occur. I suspect that the changes under Donald Trump this time will be even more significant.

However, this is not a political blog. There are thousands of bloggers and podcasters and commentators who are going to analyze and rehash and predict and try to figure out what happened in the past week.

If you want that, toddle on over to your favorite pundit and listen in.

This post is about the future.

Let’s establish something about the present first.

This outcome was one of four that could have occurred. The four outcomes (in November anyway) were:

1. Trump won
2. Harris won
3. The vote was tied (yes, that can happen)
4. The election was close and it was being litigated

I even read an article the day before the election listing all of those outcomes and talking about which one was likely. (The writer ended up being wrong on their predictions.)

The polls and trend lines have shown the strong possibility of a Trump victory for almost a year now. The reason that President Biden stepped down wasn’t altruistic. It was because the polling was so bad for him that he either got out of the race or lost big in November. (If you think Harris’s loss was big, Biden’s would have been much bigger. She at least made it into a race.)

People have known and discussed the possibility of a Trump victory for a long time now. It was an emotional shock to the system—maybe for everyone (in good and bad ways)—but it wasn’t a surprise.

And now, here we are, facing a future that is uncertain. We don’t know exactly what Trump’s policies will be, nor do we know how they will be implemented. We don’t know if they will have an uneven impact across the country or if the impact will be the same everywhere.

This has been a U.S. election on steroids. The difference between this one and the last two is pretty simple, though.

Trump won outright. It’s hard to argue with a victory like that.

So the post-election period will not include litigation and rioting in the streets. That’s a good thing.

It means that the next few months will be less chaotic than most thought they would be.

Less chaos leaves room for a lot of planning on the part of smart businesses and government officials.

We writers need to plan as well.

But that begs the question. How do you plan when you have no idea what will happen next?

Well…I hate to say this, but that’s called living, folks. We never know what’s going to happen next. Usually that feeling of not-knowing is just background noise. Every now and then, though, it’s front and center, like it is right now.

I wrote versions of this post in the past. I’m going to reiterate what I said in those.

Here’s how you live and run a business in uncertain times.

1. You figure out what the possible futures could be.
2. You figure out the impact those scenarios will have on your business.
3. Plan for the worst but prepare for the best.
4. Plan for struggle and
5. Make sure your plans are concrete.
6. Be prepared to make modifications.
7. Review your plans every week or every month throughout the period of uncertainty.
8. Be sure to include your personal time and finances in those plans.
9. Uncertain times—whether they’re good or bad for your business—can be extremely difficult emotionally.
10. Remember that the world will go on.

Most of these points are self-explanatory. Let me explain a couple, though.

The first one is quite important: figuring out what the possible futures will be. That pre-election article I mentioned above had done that. The analyst looked at what he saw as the various outcomes of the election, outlined them, and considered them.

Once you know the possible outcomes, you plan for each one of them. Yes, some will favor your business. Others will not. It’s up to you to figure out what will happen in each of those scenarios.

Let me remind you that hope is an emotion and not a plan. You might hope things are going to go a particular way, but if they don’t, you need to be prepared.

Right now, we have three months to plan. Three months to implement whatever your business needs. You plan for the worst. You also plan for the best. I’ve written a lot of blogs about the fact that success can hurt a business too. (Too much cash outlay too quickly, for example, or hiring too many people to keep up with demand.)

By the end of those three months, the few months after that might have come into focus. You plan for that focus. You also plan for uncertainty.

There is going to be a lot of uncertainty for the next six months or so. Brace yourselves for that.

I don’t use the word “plan” lightly. You need to consider what’s ahead, and your plans need to be concrete.

If you have posited four scenarios, then you need four concrete plans for those scenarios. If you can, you go with step one and step two and step three.

You will end up modifying those plans a lot as the future shakes out and we get more than an inkling of what’s ahead. You won’t be able to do some things you can do now. You might have other opportunities that you didn’t expect.

That’s how uncertainty plays out.

You need to make the same kind of plans for your family and yourself. Good outcomes, bad outcomes—they’re all in play at the moment. Do the hard work of planning ahead, and you’ll thank yourselves later. You might be surprised by a sudden change in your business, but you’ll be prepared.

What do I mean by “surprised” in that context? I mean that maybe the outcome you had strategized as the least likely is the one that happened. But you had planned for it, so you’re ready.

That’s how all of this works.

I hate to tell you this also, but there is good news for writers in uncertainty and difficult times.

People consume more entertainment. They watch more movies, fight over sports instead of politics, and they take up hobbies as ways to keep themselves distracted.

But most of all, they read. Book sales always go up in uncertain times. Books are cheap entertainment, comparatively speaking. A person can get four or more books for the price of a movie ticket.

People also use libraries more. Once they feel their finances have settled, they will return to buying books by their favorite authors. So even if someone “just” get your books from the library, eventually, they will pick up an actual copy on their own. Or they’ll tell others about it and those people will help you make a sale.

Writing helps you escape as well. Indulge yourself. Write something you don’t think will sell.

The world is changing, and you never know what might hit with people. You certainly can’t base it on what was.

That’s the other thing. As I said above, the world will go on. It always does. Sometimes there’s fundamental change, and sometimes it seems pretty stable.

We’re in a period of change.

And that’s pretty much the only thing we know for certain.

Note: I will be doing quite a few posts in the next few months, as I deal with all kinds of changes. Most of those posts will go on Patreon. If you’re interested, you can find my Patreon page by clicking here.

Also, Dean and I have revived what used to be called the Kris & Dean show, to help writers plan for 2025. We did a video. Take a look before Tuesday, which is when this program starts. Here’s the link.

“Facing The Future in Uncertain Times ,” copyright © 2024 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © 2024 by Kristine K. Rusch

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No-nonsense private eye Belinda Sweet, the only person in Los Angeles who wants no part in fame, avoids cases that bring her attention. Until she stumbles on one in a bar, when a barfly asks her to act as his alibi for killing his wife.

When the cops arrest him but then let him go, Sweet needs to know why. She’s lived in LA long enough to recognize an actor when she sees one. And she refuses to stop until she uncovers the real story—even if fame inevitably follows.

“Mr. Alibi” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Mr. AlibiKristine Kathryn Rusch“Will you be my alibi?” asked the man at the end of the bar.

He wasn’t an attractive man and this wasn’t the kind of seedy bar where you’d expect to find someone trolling for an alibi. In the eighties, we would’ve called this a fern bar, by which we meant a yuppie bar, something all woodsy brown and forest green with fake Tiffany lamps over each booth and actual windows which let in actual sunlight.

The guy was exactly the kind of guy you expected to find in a fern bar, a no-neck former high school jock with too much fat around the middle and a face that had settled in on itself. He looked like the guy central casting would’ve have put into the fern bar as wallpaper, and honestly, until he spoke to me, the wallpaper thing worked. I had seen him, but only as the stock character at the end of the bar.

He moved a seat closer to me, leaned across the bar—which was polished so heavily that its surface could act as a mirror—and said, “Miss?” in that tone which meant excuse me, but I asked you a question and I really really really need an answer.

Still, I glanced over my shoulder to see which miss he was referring to. I’m not the kind of woman people would call miss, not even when I was young. Back then, I had one of those faces that I had to “grow into,” and then, everyone promised me, I’d be considered “handsome.”

Like a girl wants to be told that she’s going to be “handsome,” which is a boy word and code for Jesus, she’s ugly now, but maybe she’ll gain a little character as time goes on.

Time went on, and I gained character, but not enough to keep my face from resembling decades-old shoe leather. Don’t suppose I helped it any by living in Southern California and going without sunscreen for my entire life.

“Yes, miss, I meant you,” the guy said, interrupting my train of thought. He smiled to take the edge off his words, because the edge had taken him from excuse me, but I asked a question to Hey, stupid, I’m talkin’ to you.

“What do you want?” I asked, and instantly regretted it. I had a rule: don’t engage in bars. Generally, the rule only applied near last call, when the guys got so drunk, they’d sleep with anything that walked.

The anything-that-walked category included me. It was damn near the only sexual category that included me. I was the woman all your hard-drinking friends referred to as the road kill they had to chew their arm off to escape from on the morning after.

“I was wondering if you would be my alibi,” the guy said. He probably thought it was a cute pick-up line, and he probably thought he’d try it on the ugly broad first. That way, if she poured her drink all over him, then he wouldn’t be out anything and he was free to try another lame-ass question with a slightly prettier woman.

“What the hell do you need an alibi for?” I asked, expecting him to answer Tonight, with a bit of a twinkle in those too-sharp brown eyes.

Instead, he said, “Yesterday afternoon,” and moved one seat closer.

Yesterday afternoon I was on a dirty side street in a dilapidated neighborhood, trying to take down a tweaker who’d accidentally kidnapped the wrong little girl. That little girl was in my car, crouched against the floor mats, covered in a blanket despite the heat.

I told her she could sit on the seat and wait for me, but she was too scared to sit, and frankly I didn’t blame her. I was a little scared myself.

The tweaker was one of those scrawny pus-faced bastards with rotating pinwheels for eyes. His brain had become as mushy as five-week-old bananas, and his hands shook as he trained a gun on me.

The gun looked rusted. It looked old. But there was no way I was going to let him pull the trigger. I had no idea if the damn thing was loaded. I also had no idea if the damn thing would explode if he rattled it too much.

He was shouting at me to back off, bitch, back off and I was backing. I wanted to get the kid the hell out of there, but I also didn’t want to attract this dude’s zombie tweaker buddies.

They had all cocked up this scheme together, the scheme to kidnap the mayor’s daughter, after they had sold all the scrap metal they could find including (but not limited to) the manhole covers from nearby streets, statues from one of the nearby parks, and copper wire from every air-conditioning unit in the county.

Only they hadn’t kidnapped the mayor’s daughter, they kidnapped the mayor’s daughter’s best friend, a little girl with the unlikely name of Karma Maggerty. Once I got her home to the idiots who named her, I was going to tell them to start calling her Kammie before I used my own gun on someone’s kneecap.

But that was all in my future—if I had one.

And you always had to doubt that you had a future when a pie-eyed tweaker shook a gun at you from less than fifty feet.

“I’m just going to leave,” I said, backing up. I had already called 911, begging them to come and arrest these assholes. Of course, the minute I gave the address, the 911 dispatch hung up on me.

She didn’t really hang up, of course. She just went to another line—“oops,” she said in that fake-competent voice they require from 911 operators, “looks like we have another emergency.”

They were going to have another emergency when I got through with them. If I got out of here. If the mayor’s daughter’s best friend survived.

I had to hang up and call again, becoming that other emergency myself, and this time, I told them that I knew where Karma Maggerty was, and they better get their asses over here before she got killed.

This time, the dispatch stayed on the line with me. She was nattering at me from my back pocket, where I had stashed the phone after the tweaker demanded that I put the damn thing down.

I wasn’t about to get rid of my only lifeline so I pretended to set it down as I tucked it into my back pocket. The tweaker pretended to be satisfied, or maybe he didn’t notice.

If he were by himself, I would trust that he didn’t notice a thing, but from inside the house, three other pus-faced tweakers with pinwheels for eyes watched me like I was Triple-X pay-per-view. I didn’t know if any of them had shotguns or semi-automatic weapons or even a simple old-fashioned pistol of the rusted variety now facing me.

“You can’t leave!” the original pus-faced tweaker shouted at me.

“And why not?” I asked in my most reasonable voice (prompting all kinds of alarmed noises from the phone in my pocket).

“Why not?” the pus-faced tweaker asked. “Why not?”

Any reasonable person would then have added the very adult line, because I said you couldn’t, that’s why. But he didn’t. He actually tried to think about it, with that banana-mush brain of his.

As I knew he would.

I backed away, one step at a time.

“I said you can’t leave!” he screamed at me.

I stopped backing.

“Why not?” I asked. Note I did not tell him I’d already asked that question. I’d dealt with enough tweakers to know that their memory was as porous as their skin.

“Why not?” he asked. “Why not?”

Only this time, he turned toward the house, as if he were going to consult with the other pus-faced tweakers, and I chose that moment to get the hell out of there.

I sprinted to the car, pulled open the driver’s door, said, “You there?” to the poorly named kid in the backseat, and as she managed a shaky, “Yes,” I turned the keys in the ignition, thanked Almighty God that the engine roared to life, and floored the damn accelerator, pulling out like Starsky and Hutch in the only stupid scene anyone ever aired of that television show any more.

The car’s tires squealed as we zoomed down the block, and behind me, I heard an explosion. Either the rusted gun had gone off, or the barrel had blown out, or the united brainpower from the pus-faced tweakers ignited their at-home meth lab.

I wasn’t going to turn around to find out.

Besides, I had to swerve some more to avoid the phalanx of cop cars streaming onto the street.

I went up on the grass of a nearby house, the cop cars all stopped around me, and their occupants got out, keeping the doors open and aiming their goddamn not-rusted guns at me.

I had to get out, hands over my head, saying, “I’m the one who called! I’m the one who called!”

It took a while to convince them, but convince them I did. I never did find out what happened to the tweakers—I had to go to the nearest precinct, give my statement, endure the heart-felt gratitude of my clients a.k.a. Karma’s idiot parents (whom I forgot to advise on changing their child’s name)—and then I went back to my lovely apartment in beautiful downtown Burbank, and passed out from exhaustion.

Just a day in the life of Belinda Sweet, down-on-her-luck private eye (whose parents were not at fault for her name, Belinda being a perfectly acceptable moniker in the early 1960s, and Sweet being the name of the idiot she had the misfortune to marry and the good sense to divorce).

A day in the life—and, oh yeah, also yesterday afternoon.

“Yesterday afternoon,” I said to the guy at the bar, “I was entertaining ten cops, four tweakers, and a little girl. So sorry, I can’t alibi you.”

“Damn,” he said, and moved back to his original seat at the end of the bar.

He didn’t seem fazed by my oh-so-eloquent rejection, but the bartender raised his eyebrows at me. Dunno if that was a reaction to my description of my yesterday or if it was just a silent query about the state of my beverage, which was, by the way, one appletini. Not because I happen to like appletinis—I don’t. I don’t like any kind of tini except a martini, and even that’s stretching things a bit—but because the appletini with the three green apple slices decorating the slightly apple green martini glass was my signal to the potential client who suggested this place that yes indeed, the ugly broad at the bar was the person he was supposed to meet.

I’d been here exactly one hour, had exactly one sip to see if the damn drink was as disgusting as it sounded (nope, more disgusting), and no client had shown up. Unless the client was Mr. Alibi.

I wasn’t about to ask him, though. If he wanted my services for yesterday afternoon, he should have hired me yesterday morning.

As if he knew I was thinking about him, he looked over at me. “Do you know anyone who can give me an alibi for yesterday afternoon?”

He was sounding desperate.

“No.” I said.

And then, because I couldn’t resist, I asked, “What do you need an alibi for, anyway?”

“Oh,” he said, with a shrug of his left shoulder. “Nothing really. Except that I kinda sorta killed my wife.”

This was what they called in the trade a confession. I kinda sorta shoulda called the cops right then and there, but I was in a bar, and I had an appletini, and the guy didn’t look exactly sober, and he was asking me for an alibi, and he probably still wasn’t all that serious.

Or maybe he was. The bartender thought he was. The bartender said, “How do you kinda sorta kill your wife?”

“With a shotgun,” the man said, and this time it wasn’t me who called 911, it was the bartender, who wasn’t even really discreet about it.

The cops showed up and hauled the guy away, even though we had no real proof he shot his wife or that the woman was even dead. All we did have proof of—or at least all I had proof of—was that this bar was in a better neighborhood than the tweaker house because the police response time to a hint of an emergency in this part of town was twenty times shorter than their response time to an actual emergency in the tweaker neighborhood.

Me, I waited another half an hour for my client, who never showed, stiffing me for my time and the stupid appletini. And as I sat there, watching the apple slices dissolve into whitish goo, I had the horrible, awful feeling that Mr. Alibi really had been my client, and I had handled the encounter poorly. Maybe the poor bastard hadn’t shot his wife. Or maybe he hadn’t killed her. Or maybe he blamed himself for leaving her alone that afternoon when the boogeyman broke into their upscale apartment and shot her while she was waiting in her negligee for Mr. Alibi.

Yeah. And I was going to win the Miss California pageant next year.

Still, I couldn’t get him off my mind, which was why I was Belinda Sweet, down-on-her-luck private eye, instead of Belinda Sweet, rich-and-famous private eye.

I got obsessed with the strangest, most non-lucrative things. Like Mr. Alibi and his mysteriously shotgunned, possibly dead wife.

First, I tried to fight the obsession. I’d had these things before, and they’re not just bad for me, they’re bad for business, especially after all the great press coverage I was getting from the Karma Maggerty case.

If I really wanted to, I could’ve stayed in my office for the next week and answered the phone. Fifteen reporters called to each possible client, but that meant there were possible clients, which didn’t always happen to me.

Of course, the fifteen reporters weren’t real reporters. They were either tabloid reporters or some junior hack from the local affiliates. A few were from those goofy celeb shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight, which had to have been hurting for real celebrity news. But this story did have, as one “reporter” explained to me, a connection to the mayor of the nation’s most important city, a kidnapped child, and gravelly voiced PI right out of central casting.

Nancy Grace, he’d informed me, had gotten famous on a lot less than that.

In a valiant attempt to shake off the obsession, I called back every single potential client, realized that a large percentage of them were loons with decades-old cases that other people had tried to solve, and half of the remaining group had the deadly dull I-think-my-spouse-is-cheating-on-me cases that made my work so darn fun.

I sent most of those cases to my better-equipped colleagues (one of whom is a multimillionaire because [hello!] this is Los Angeles and everyone is cheating on everyone else) and kept the three new insurance companies who wanted another fraud investigator as well as one of the Missing Child organizations that wanted me on permanent retainer.

The company clients all wanted an actual meeting along with a rates card, which I did draw up. The meetings were all scheduled for the following week, which left this week with nothing for me to do except preen in front of every single camera in Hollywood—which I certainly would not do.

So I obsessed. And when I couldn’t take it any more, I trudged back to the fern bar.

Well, actually, I drove. It only felt like trudging because driving in LA traffic always feels like trudging.

The same bartender was on duty. At least, I hoped it was the same bartender. He too looked like a guy out of central casting, and the uniform didn’t help. It wasn’t a uniform, per se, just a white shirt with the bar’s name in green over his right breast, but he wore the shirt with the pair of black pants that the owner of the fern bar had clearly mandated.

“You remember me?” I asked the bartender.

“Appletini, right?”

I grimaced. “Not normally.”

“Duh,” he said and grinned. “Whiskey, right?”

“Not today,” I said, a little startled he’d guessed accurately. “Gimme whatever you got that’s on tap.”

He poured me a nice piss-colored name-brand American beer which both of us knew I wasn’t going to drink as I climbed into my place at the bar.

It worried me that I had a place at the bar. At this bar, anyway. In my neighborhood bar, which was properly dim and scarred up, with no windows at all and certainly no plants, I had a regular seat and a standing order, not to mention a running tab.

But not at this bar. With luck, I wouldn’t come into this bar again.

“That alibi guy we called the cops on yesterday,” I said, “you ever see him before?”

“No,” the bartender said.

“Did he, by chance, pay for his drinks before the cops came?”

“Handed me a credit card when he ordered the first drink,” the bartender said. “I closed out his tab as the cop car was pulling away.”

The bartender grinned at me. I looked at the bar’s name on his shirt and realized he didn’t have the standard fern bar metal name badge. Maybe this place had a bit more (less?) class than I expected.

“Ted,” the bartender said.

“Hmm?” I asked.

“You were looking for my name. It’s Ted.”

I grinned. “Belinda.”

He held out one of those sun-wrinkled hands. I took it. It was cold-damp, like he’d just had it in a bucket of ice, which was entirely possible.

“So why are you asking about the tab for a guy who wanted to use you as an alibi, and why were you drinking an appletini yesterday when you so clearly find them disgusting?”

I was thinking that he would be a better private investigator than I was. Which made me flush just a bit.

I took a deep breath and said, “I work as—”

“A private investigator, I know.” He inclined his head toward one of the three televisions angled over the bar. “Your face has been all over the news.”

My flush grew deeper. I wasn’t used to being recognized, and I didn’t much like it. Which decided me then and there. No interviews, not for the Karma case, not for any case. Once some other big thing happened in LA—and it would only be a matter of days (or hours)—my mug would be off the big screen, and people would eventually forget.

“Yesterday, I was waiting for a client who never showed,” I said. “Then I got to thinking that maybe Mr. Alibi was my client, only he didn’t approach me in quite the right way.”

“You want to work for a guy who killed his wife?”

“No,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly true. I didn’t want to work for him, but I did want to find out about him. “I mean, I’m not going to give him an alibi, but I do want to know what he really needed.”

“Someone to take the shotgun away before he turned it on his wife,” the bartender said.

“What he needed yesterday,” I clarified.

“I think we gave him what he needed,” the bartender said, picking up a bar rag and wiping the already highly polished bar with it.

“I do too,” I said, “but still…”

“You’re feeling guilty?”

“No.”

“Angry?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?” he asked.

“I just want to know what the hell he really did.”

There. I’d said it. I wanted to know how nutty Mr. Alibi really was and if he’d shot his wife in a jealous rage or if he’d just cold-bloodedly hauled out the 12-gauge and pointed it after she served him a tough steak.

Because even if he had shot her at point-blank range, it wouldn’t have made the news. Or it wouldn’t have on the kind of news day that yesterday was (and the day before), with Karma’s dramatic interview (that lady, she saved me) and the mayor promising to rid the city of tweakers so no family would ever have to suffer like that again and the dramatic audio of my second 911 call. (Gee, y’think they lost the first one?)

“You want to know what he really did?” the bartender asked, as if I were nuts. “You’re one of those chicks who gets off on blood and brains all over the wall?”

“Nooo,” I said, losing a bit of patience. “I’m one of those ‘chicks’ who sometimes discovers a question that needs an answer before she moves on to something else.”

The corners of his mouth twitched. He was holding back a smile.

Damn if Ted the bartender hadn’t been toying with me.

“You’re asking about credit card receipts,” he said. “That means you want me to either give you his name or his phone number or both.”

“You took his phone number?”

“No,” Ted said, “although I’m supposed to. Especially now when people’s credit cards are being denied left and right.”

“But you don’t,” I said.

“Because most people think I’m hitting on them when I ask.” He shrugged one broad shoulder. “It’s too much of a hassle. I just put a fifty-dollar hold on the card, and that does the trick ever so much better.”

I frowned. The hands told me he’d been bartending forever. The brains told me he should be doing something else.

“This your bar?” I asked.

“You think I’d be wearing this stupid shirt if it was?” he countered.

I acknowledged that logic with a simple move of my head.

“That was your not-so-subtle way of asking what a smart boy like me is doing in a place like this?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Pissing off my mother,” he said, and walked away from me.

For a minute, I thought he wasn’t coming back, but he did. He just went to the back and came out with a slip of paper that had obviously come from a credit card machine.

“Stanley Donen,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Stanley Donen.” Then he spelled the name just so I’d get it right.

I must’ve had an odd look on my face, because when he looked up at me, he said, “What?”

“You might be smart, bartender boy,” I said, “but you don’t know your Hollywood history. Stanley Donen is a director from the 1950s. He directed Singing in the Rain.”

“I thought that was Gene Kelly.”

“Him too,” I said.

“You don’t think this guy is Donen’s son or something,” Ted said.

“Could be,” I said. “Donen’s last film was in 1984. But Mr. Alibi doesn’t seem like Hollywood royalty, does he?”

Ted looked at me oddly. “You think you can spot Hollywood royalty?”

“There’s generally an air of entitlement.”

“I dunno,” Ted said. “Asking to be alibied seems rather entitling.”

I shrugged. It didn’t seem that way to me, but I wasn’t going to argue it.

“It can’t be a fake name, you know,” Ted said. “He had identification.”

“You asked to see his ID?” I asked, knowing how old Mr. Alibi looked. No one in his right mind thought that man was under 21.

Ted made a face at me. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I mean you need ID to get a credit card.”

“You do,” I said. “You just don’t need your own.”

Mr. Alibi had given the same fake name at the police station along with a home address where, the arresting office told me with some irritation, a lovely middle-aged woman (emphasis on lovely) had flashed a rock the size of Rhode Island with a matching wedding band on her left hand and claimed to be his wife.

His living wife.

She also claimed her husband had a flair for the dramatic and liked to spend his afternoons shocking people.

So the police had investigated no further, warned him that he was out of line and to never do anything like that again, mentally added the phrase in our jurisdiction because they had a hunch he would do something like that again if he had enough drinks in him, and sent him on his merry little way.

So off I went on my merry little way, trudging to the address the cops gave me, which happened to be a not-so-small house in Beverly Hills, which was probably another reason why the cop hadn’t investigated much further, since whoever bought the house could’ve paid for a dozen cops just like him (and probably had).

The house was on one of those quiet cul-de-sacs that had been all the rage back when Beverly Hills starred as the wealthiest neighborhood in Los Angeles, back when the idea of hillbillies with money was funny and outré and kinda ironic, instead of the unintended result of a reality TV show.

I had a moment of doubt as I pulled up in front of the long curving driveway. The house was a remodeled 1960s mansion that wanted to be a suburban ranch house, but looked like it had swelled out of control. It was painted forest green and white, and because it was in Beverly Hills, the forest green looked appropriate and lovely when compared to the green of the plants and the spectacular green of the lush lawn.

No water crisis in this part of the city, or maybe someone was ignoring the limit on water usage that had been in effect—gosh, since I moved here as a toddler, way back in the dark ages.

Maybe, I said to myself (well, not “said,” exactly, “doubted” is more like it), maybe he actually is Stanley Donen’s kid, and he inherited the house, and he’s the kind of crazy that 99.9% of all Hollywood offspring are, and his lovely middle-aged wife (emphasis on lovely) tolerated it because it included the money to support her in the style that only a failed actress/model could aspire to in middle age.

Then I came to my senses, remembered that even though I was a down-on-my-luck private eye, I was still a private eye, with all kinds of modern tools at my disposal, which meant that I had an iPhone that I didn’t entirely understand, and I leaned back in the driver’s seat, logged onto the Internet Movie Database, and looked up Stanley Donen.

He was still alive, although imdb didn’t tell me where he lived. He had three kids, all boys, two in the Biz, as folks say around here. Not a one of them was named Stanley, although all were about the same age as my fake Stanley. So if he had been Stanley Donen’s kid, he would’ve been listed in imdb. They had plenty of time to scope him out. He was too old to be a grandkid, so he was a fake.

My heart leapt, which is an actual feeling that some down-on-their-luck private eyes have when things go their way. (The first time it happened, I thought it might be a cardiac arrhythmia that was heading toward a heart attack—which tells you just how rare that leapy feeling is.)

Then I went to the LA County website and looked for the deed registration page only to discover that some bastard had taken it down in a fit of civic pride (more likely fear of a lawsuit because of all the personal information stashed on that site). I’d used that registry more times than I wanted to think about, and I felt momentarily irritated that the information wasn’t available to me and then I realized that if I were a true hacker, I could find the information anyway, but I wasn’t a true hacker, not that kind anyway, and besides, it would be easier to drive the county offices and just ask to see the deed because it was, after all, public information.

But first, I had to act like the good, old-fashioned private eye that I was.

I had to boldly go where no private eye had gone before.

I parked the car and walked up the driveway, determined to knock on the house’s beautiful oak door.

The woman who answered the front door was indeed lovely and just barely middle aged (damn that cop) and not at all willing to admit that one Stanley Donen lived in the house—at least, not until I mentioned the cop, and the fact that I would be happy to call him to the house right now to verify that this was the address on Stanley D’s arrest record and that he had, in fact, talked to her.

She didn’t look dumb. She knew that lying to the cop in the middle of an investigation was a very bad thing.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “I know him. But his name isn’t Stanley and this isn’t his house.”

I could’ve guessed the “his name isn’t Stanley part,” but I hadn’t been so sure about the house. I had a dozen follow-up questions, but she still had her manicured hand on the door ready to slam it, so I decided to ease into the toughest question.

“Whose house is it?” I asked.

“Mine,” she said.

“Just yours?” I asked.

She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise.

“Yes,” she said with some irritation.

I nodded, not wanting to upset her too much. “And you are?”

“Not willing to suffer an interrogation,” she said and tried to slam the door.

But I’d been prepared for that move, and I caught the door with my hand. I was stronger than she was. She had gym muscles, which looked good. I had real muscles, which didn’t improve my appearance at all.

“I can find out at the county,” I said. “Then I’ll just come back with my trusty cop friend, and we’ll both find out what you know.”

She narrowed her eyes, shook her head slightly, and sighed. “Roxanne Winterbury.”

That name rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure which bell it rang. Could’ve been any bell, really. I wasn’t willing to ask her. Not yet.

“And how, Roxanne, do you know our friend Not-Stanley?”

“We go to the same gym,” she said.

Okay. That surprised me. I’d expected to hear that she’d met him in a bar.

“What gym is that?”

She named an upscale place in one of the upscale strip malls not too far from here. The kind of place that cost you $50 just to walk through the door and ask a question.

“And what’s Not-Stanley’s real name?”

Her lips thinned. She clearly wasn’t supposed to tell me this. “Doug Sirk.”

“Doug…Sirk?” Then I spelled the last name.

“Yes,” she said.

“As in Douglas Sirk?”

“I suppose. Why? Do you know him?”

I knew of him. Douglas Sirk was another director, not as well known as Stanley Donen. Sirk’s career, in movies anyway, only lasted through the 1950s. I didn’t know of anything he’d done after 1959—and I wasn’t sure why. Death, moved to television, retired—I had no idea. I was a movie buff, not a movie obsessive.

“No, I don’t know him,” I said. “Not personally anyway. But I do need to talk to him about what happened yesterday.”

“Oh,” she said. “It was just one of his pranks. It backfired because some bartender called the police.”

I blinked at her, a little too stunned to say much more. Actually, confessing to a crime when you actually hadn’t committed a crime was a misdemeanor, which was only enforced when you actually cost the city some money, which he had.

Only he hadn’t really cost it enough to make things terrible for him—not yet, anyway.

“Prank?” I asked.

She laughed a little nervously, then bit her upper lip and shrugged. “He likes to say outrageous things to upset people. Usually he gets a good story out of it.”

“But yesterday, he got arrested.”

“Well, who would believe that a man like that shot his wife?”

I would, I almost said, but didn’t. Clearly Miss Roxanne Winterbury wouldn’t. Proving, of course, which one of us was gullible and which one was cynical beyond belief.

(And making me wonder why the gullible one had the manicure, the rock the size of Rhode Island, and the mansion in Beverly Hills.)

“The bartender clearly believed him,” I said.

She sighed. “I know. I’ll have to talk to Doug about it the next time I see him.”

So he hadn’t talked to her since she lied for him. I found that fact fascinating all by itself.

“What made you lie for him?”

“It was part of the prank.” She waved that manicured hand, letting go of the door as she did, and nearly knocking me off balance.

“He set it up ahead of time?”

“He does that,” she said. “He goes around asking pretty women to be his alibi, and when they accept, he figures out something for them to alibi him for. It’s his way of picking up girls.”

Then she giggled in a wholly inappropriate way for a woman of recent middle age.

I could dispute the pretty part and I felt slightly vindicated about the pick-up line part, but I still didn’t understand exactly what was going on here. “When did he ask you to alibi him?”

“Oh,” she said and frowned. “Maybe a week ago? At the gym’s juice bar. You know.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I almost added that no respectable place calling itself a gym had a juice bar. But again, much as I wanted to alienate this woman, I didn’t dare.

She must have sensed my judgment, because she didn’t say anything. So I did.

“Did he give you his phone number?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We see each other every day. We’re both there from nine until ten. By then the early morning crowd has cleared out and the staff has had time to clean off the machines.”

I shuddered a little. “Did you see him this morning?”

“No,” she said.

“Was that unusual?”

“I was running late. Sometimes he finishes early.” She said that with a bit of a blush, which made me wonder if that last sentence was a double entendre.

So she kept track of him, but he didn’t wait for her.

“How do you know it was a week ago that he asked about the alibi?”

Her blush grew just a bit more. “We decided to share a post-workout smoothie. We hadn’t done that before. I nearly missed a standing lunch date.”

“What exactly did he ask?”

“He asked me if I would be his alibi.” She smiled at the memory. She really was a pretty woman. Damn her. “And of course, I said yes.”

Of course. Because that was what any sane woman would do.

“So he told me that if anyone showed up asking for Stanley Donen, I should tell them I’m Stanley’s wife and that he wasn’t home at the moment, but that he had been home for the hours they were asking about.”

“Even if they were cops?” I asked.

“He said he knew people on the force. He said it would be harmless fun.”

I nodded, as if I understood. I guess I did understand. This Stanley Donen/Doug Sirk was a nutball.

And so was this woman.

“You didn’t ask why he needed an alibi?” I said.

She laughed. “Of course I did. He told me he was playing pranks on friends. He’d tell them something outrageous and if they were silly enough to check, my response would confuse them more.”

“Did it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said and giggled again. That giggle would really be annoying from a two-year-old. On a woman in her late thirties, it was obnoxious as hell. “Those police officers frowned at me, looked a little angry, and then apologized. I think it was worthwhile just to have a member of the LAPD apologize, don’t you?”

I had a good relationship with the LAPD, despite its press.

“They may not see it that way, ma’am,” I said, sounding a bit like an LAPD officer myself.

The smile fled her face, and she suddenly looked frightened. Maybe she wasn’t as smart as I had originally given her credit for.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“You lied to the police in an ongoing investigation, ma’am,” I said. “They might consider that terribly wrong.”

Then I turned on one foot and marched back to my car, feeling a little less confused and a lot more satisfied. I didn’t hear the door close behind me until I’d reached the street.

So Roxanne Winterbury had watched me leave. Which meant she was thinking.

Wonder if that meant she had lied about her friend Douglas Sirk’s phone number. Wonder if she was reassessing the relationship or wondering how to warn him.

Then I decided it didn’t matter.

Warn him about what? That an ugly private eye was looking for him? That would frighten him how?

I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I found him. Except tell him to stop besmirching the names of beloved directors (even if that was stretching it in the case of Douglas Sirk).

Still, this whole case was getting curiouser and curiouser, to quote Alice in Wonderland. And I really did want to find out what was down that rabbit hole.

The gym felt like it was its own personal rabbit hole.

First of all, it wasn’t a “gym,” but a personal health and fitness club. And it nearly did cost me fifty dollars to get in the door.

No one got inside without paying some kind of deposit, preferably with a valid Black American Express card.

I got in because I had a valid private eye license, not one of those fakey things they sold on late night TV. To the bouncer’s credit (and yes, the place had a bouncer—although they probably called him a security guard), he actually knew the difference between a fake private detective license and the real thing.

He not only let me in with great reluctance, but he shadowed me with even greater distaste. If I hadn’t showered that morning and if I wasn’t wearing the cleanest of clean clothes, I would have thought that my body odor quotient was high—even for a personal health and fitness club.

The front desk put the reception desks at most five-star hotels to shame. It covered half a wall, had more computers than a bank, and a staff that looked so buff the soft lighting reflected off their perfect muscles. Unlike the folks who usually man the desk at a personal health and fitness center, these folks looked like they actually had an IQ as well.

I introduced myself while I held my wallet open, showing the license. Then one of the buffettes looked at me, then looked at another buffette who apparently was nonverbally dispatched to find the head buffette.

Who came out of the back wearing the gym rat equivalent of a suit—khaki pants, a designer golf shirt, and a watch that cost five times the price of my iPhone. He smiled, and I half expected to see that little starlike glimmer on his perfectly even, frighteningly white teeth.

“Ah, Miss Sweet,” he said in that unctuous tone used only by maitre d’s at upscale restaurants, “let me help you with your quest.”

I so badly wanted to correct him. I was Ms. Sweet, not Miss Sweet, and private investigators did not have quests. We had clients.

Only I really didn’t have a client here, now did I? I had a hunch. A hunch that was slowly turning sour.

We went around the lovely desk, past the banks of computers, and off in the distance, I could see high-end treadmills and ellipticals, filled with high-end (and somewhat desperate) people, all of whom looked extremely serious about their treadmilling and ellipticalling.

We slipped into an office twice the size of mine. The head buffette gestured toward one of the chairs in front of his expensive desk, and I sat down, discovering that the damn thing was as comfortable as my couch. I tried not to relax in it.

“Mrs. Wimberly Winterbury called,” he said, and I was so startled that I missed the rest of his sentence.

That’s why Roxanne’s name was familiar. Wimberly Winterbury had died less than a month ago, leaving her his 1.2 billion dollar estate, but his children (all twelve of them, with his six previous wives) were contesting the will. She was living on her generous allowance in the home he had bought for her before they married.

I knew all of this because, in LA, you can’t avoid the high-end gossip, particularly if it involves gold diggers, more than a billion dollars, and angry relatives.

“Miss Sweet?” the head buffette was saying in that unctuous tone. Apparently I had missed something after all, probably some crap about confidentiality, blah, blah, blah.

So I went on the offensive.

“I’m a bit disturbed here, Mr….?”

“Nevins,” he said.

“Mr. Nevins,” I said in my friendliest tone. “I’m investigating some disturbing reports concerning Mr. Sirk. It turns out he’s been using a fake name. Douglas Sirk isn’t his real name at all.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “His identification checked out perfectly.”

Meaning his credit card worked.

“What identification do you require?” I asked.

Nevins pulled up a file on the flatscreen computer next to his desk, discretely turning it away from me so that I couldn’t see the information as it showed up.

Wimberly Winterbury died, and his widow was involved with a con man who needed an alibi shortly thereafter. I was on the news and the next day, the same con man was talking to me.

Was that the link between us? Our trashy TV news coverage? Because it certainly wasn’t the fact that we were both middle-aged, pretty and rich. I was middle-aged, but pretty and rich seemed to have passed me by.

“He showed us his driver’s license, of course, and his credit card,” Nevins said.

Both of which were easy to get, even if they weren’t yours. “How long has he been a member?”

“Six months,” Nevins said.

“And have you been deducting the fees every month?” I asked.

“Heavens, no,” Nevins said, and he made that phrase actually sound convincing. “We charge annually.”

“One big lump payment,” I said.

“Along with an initiation fee in the first year,” he said. Then he looked at me blandly. “It does separate the wheat from the chaff.”

And I was clearly chaff.

“Would you do me a favor?” I asked. “Would you run a small charge on the credit card?”

“We can’t do that, Miss Sweet,” he said in his most disapproving tone. “We don’t give other people money from someone’s credit card.”

“It’s not for me,” I said, and resisted the urge to add, you dumbass. “I want to see if the card is still working. If it is, then you can reverse the charge and apologize if he sees his bill. If it isn’t, then I’d like it if you talked to me about Douglas Sirk and let me know what’s in his file.”

“I’m sure it’s legitimate.”

“You do know that he was arrested yesterday, right?”

Nevins looked at me with alarm.

“For shooting his wife,” I said.

Nevins’ alarm grew. I’d never seen a man’s eyes get that big.

“Roxanne Winterbury alibied him without even knowing why,” I said. “And he didn’t use the name Sirk. He used the name Stanley Donen.”

“The director?” Score one for Nevins.

“And if you go to the Internet Movie Database, you’ll realize that Douglas Sirk is the name of a movie director as well.”

That seemed to convince Nevins more than the credit card idea. Still, he punched several numbers into the computer, paused and said to me, “Do you think $20 will suffice?”

“I think it’ll tell us what we need to know,” I said.

He finished punching in the numbers, then stopped and stared at the screen. Then he punched in more numbers, and more numbers, seeming more frantic with each punch.

“Good Lord,” he said as that unctuous mask dropped away. “I’ll tell you what I can, Ms. Sweet, but I really don’t have much here.”

Damn if he didn’t suddenly become a human being. One who might have helped in a very large theft. But I didn’t tell him that. I figured he was smart enough to figure that one out on his own.

“I’ll take what you have,” I said, unable to resist sounding just a little unctuous myself.

What he had were two bogus credit card numbers, one stolen driver’s license number, an address and a cell phone number. Nevins wanted to call the cell, but I persuaded him not to. I also persuaded him to wait until I was done with my investigation before he called the police.

“We don’t want to tip off Mr. Sirk, now do we?” I asked.

Nevins agreed. Besides, he probably needed some time with his lords and masters to figure out how they handled account fees paid with a credit card issued to a man with fake identification.

That the ID was fake was pretty easy to prove. The California Department of Motor Vehicles couldn’t tell you who a license belonged to, but they could tell you who it didn’t belong to. And a call to the DMV with the license number came back with the information that that particular number and that particular name did not go together.

Which was more than enough for Mr. Nevins, but not quite enough for me.

As I left, I called a buddy at the LAPD to see if he could (quietly) let me know who the number did belong to.

It belonged to one Fred Zinnemann, yet another director, whose last film came out in 1982. But the heyday of his career was—you guessed it—in the 1950s (if you ignore my two favorites, Day of the Jackal and Julia). He was the guy who directed High Noon and I was tempted to whistle the theme song as I trudged through the streets of LA because I was beginning to feel like Gary Cooper, all alone in my quest for justice.

Donen/Sirk/Zinnemann had to have used more fake information to get that driver’s license. The fact that he existed in the DMV’s database meant that he had actually gone through them to get the Zinnemann license. Which meant that the birth certificate he presented had to look real to them. What I couldn’t get my LAPD friend to find out was how long Zinnemann had the license. Cops weren’t supposed to dig in DMV records either (weird California laws) and so he didn’t want to go back to his source.

So I had three fake names, two bogus credit cards, a real driver’s license number, a cell phone number, and two addresses.

And then, I realized, if the driver’s license was real, then the address on that license had to be real too.

And that’s how I found myself driving to Encino at sunset, when I really should have been driving home.

Encino, California, where Michael Jackson died. Encino, California, home of some really bad movie jokes (including a movie-long joke called Encino Man). Encino, California, which had waaaaaay too many houses for my tastes.

Encino has these lovely, big, expensive houses where the stars and their support systems live (although why they’d live in this part of the Valley, I’ll never know). It also has some smaller houses, the kind where real people live—or people as real as people can get living in Los Angeles.

Zinnemann’s house was in one of the real neighborhoods. Each house was maybe 3,000 square feet max, and some were much smaller, maybe 1,500 square feet. Not every house had a second story, but all had lovely landscaping, much of it turning brown.

This was a neighborhood where the people followed the water rationing rules, where they did their best, even though it was never enough to compare to the fancy houses just a few blocks away.

This house had actual trees in front, although what kind I had no idea. I’m a people detective, not a tree detective. A deliberately crooked brick walk led to a nice front door with its own little roof—a 1920s style that belonged in the Midwest, not in Encino.

The house was old enough that it might have been considered upscale in its day. Now it was a bit dowdy, in need of paint, a good pressure washing, and some de-cobwebbing.

Oh, yeah, and someone needed to remove the police tape from the front door.

The tape looked relatively new. It was still bright yellow and it didn’t have the dirt that coated the rest of the house. The yard bore lots of evidence of a police presence: tire tracks on the brown dirt where flowers had died long ago, crushed brown grass that still showed the marks of footprints, and one plastic folded number, the kind that crime scene techs use. They must have been irritated that they forgot it—and wondering just where they left it.

The number reassured me. It meant they had already photographed the scene. If I didn’t disturb the police tape, then I wasn’t truly messing with a crime scene.

I stepped off the brick walk and stepped over the tire tracks, heading to the picture window on the east side of the front door. I looked behind me to check if anyone could see me from the street. They couldn’t; those willowy trees were in the way. I stood on my tiptoes and peered inside the house, cupping my hands around my face.

The living room was a shambles. The couch had been moved, a coffee table was overturned, and something large and glass had shattered on the floor.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the floor and the built-in bookshelf. The floor was hardwood. It had once been covered with a rug.

I knew that because there was a stain around the floor in a rug-shape. In the center of the non-stain area (where the rug had been) was a brown stain, this one thick and oblong. Ish. Oblong-ish. Something had gone through the rug all the way to the floor.

Judging by the spatter at the edges of the rugless area, that something was blood.

The crap on the bookshelf wasn’t just blood. It was blood and brain matter and bone fragments.

Someone had been shot and that stuff was blowback.

I tried to remember if I had heard about a shooting in Encino recently, but nothing came to mind. That didn’t mean anything. Millions of people lived in the LA Basin, and some of those people belonged to gangs, while others were thieves and murderers—probably at the same proportion that any other community had thieves and murderers.

What I wanted to know was who this house belonged to, who was investigating the shooting, and who the hell died.

I figured that wouldn’t be too hard to find, and I was right.

Once I returned to my car, I pulled out my trusty iPhone with its wonderful Internet connectivity. I used to do my job without an Internet connection at my fingertips, but damn if I remember how I did it.

I plugged in the street name, the word “murder,” (figuring the cops wouldn’t do this much work for a simple shooting; not that anyone could have survived that much bone, brain, and blood loss), and came up with some relatively minor news reports.

Interestingly, most of the reports were on the various evening news shows—the ones that had sent their junior hack reporters to interview me. Those shows loved blood-and-guts news stories, especially those with video footage, just like they loved car chases, because those also had lovely video footage.

This crime was basic evening news fodder. A single woman, murdered in her home in a quiet Encino neighborhood. The news ate this thing up, particularly when it had aerial footage of a coroner’s van parked outside the house, and the crime techs at work in the yard.

And it was one of those scary headline crimes—single woman murdered, no apparent motive. She lived alone and had died alone. The only reason anyone even knew she was shot was that a neighbor peeked through the window and saw the body.

The neighbor was a short-term suspect, particularly when it turned out he had an arrest record a mile long. He was the neighborhood peeping tom—with a conscience, apparently. He didn’t have to call the police, but he did.

The woman, Katalin Voight, had moved to Los Angeles two years before. She was forty, not interested in any Hollywood work at all, and self-employed. She was a freelance bookkeeper who found work on Craigslist.

The Craigslist connection kept LAPD detectives busy for a long time, particularly since the 2009 Craigslist Killer case back east made everyone think of murder in connection to the site. But her records showed no murderous connection to Craigslist, nor did they show any murderous connection to anyone. Her family lived in the Midwest, and all they would say (sadly, of course) was that she wanted a new life.

Her neighbors knew nothing about her, her clients knew very little, and she hadn’t made many friends here, although she had a wide and varying social network on the Internet.

A quiet woman in a quiet house in a quiet neighborhood, loudly shotgunned to death even though no one heard, found by her peeping tom neighbor days after the event.

The news played it up for nearly a week before the coverage faded. That was almost two months ago. The fact that the tire tracks and footprints remained showed just how dry it had been in LA lately. I hadn’t realized how long it had been since we last got rain.

I set the iPhone down and looked at the house. A woman had died here. She had become more famous in death than she had in life—a curiously LA phenomenon. Even that fame was fleeting.

Roxanne Winterbury had become famous for marrying and being widowed by a very wealthy man. Her fame rose a few weeks ago as the court cases involving her inheritance began.

I became famous a few days ago for rescuing a child. My fame would pass within the week, but it did exist.

And while it was happening, I met a man who claimed to be a director. He almost voluntarily went off to jail, but not before orchestrating his own alibi. Which he tipped off when he was talking to me.

I frowned. A man who claimed to be three different directors. He didn’t orchestrate that alibi. He directed it.

I needed to get to a computer with a bigger screen and a lot more firepower.

I went to my crummy apartment which had my incredible high-speed Internet access, my up-to-the-minute computer and my extremely empty refrigerator.

I stopped for pizza on the way there.

Amazing how much of the world is at your fingertips nowadays. Amazing how little the police knew about taking advantage of that.

It took me less than an hour to call up Katalin Voight’s records from Rapid City, South Dakota. She had been a full-fledged CPA there, with actual big-time clients—or as big-time as clients got in Rapid City.

She was Katalin Voight to her clients, but in her personal life, she was Katalin Johnson, wife of Kenneth Johnson, who owned one of those movie palaces that had once been a vaudeville theatre.

The arrival of multiplexes, easy DVD rentals, and affordable big-screen TVs closed the movie palace. The papers soon carried a divorce notice for Katalin and Kenneth Johnson. Then the papers carried a one-paragraph mention of a restraining order. Then they carried an announcement that Katalin Voight’s business was closing its doors after fifteen profitable years while Ms. Voight was going into retirement.

It didn’t say she was retiring in Los Angeles, but she did.

And Kenneth tracked her there.

How do I know that?

Because those same papers ran a photograph of Kenneth when they announced the closing of the movie palace that he had owned and loved forever. The movie palace that closed despite his best efforts. The movie palace that had lost money for nearly a decade, despite his efforts. The movie palace that may have lost money because—he said—of the mismanagement of his CPA, one Katalin Johnson.

That photograph looked just like Stanley Donen/Douglas Sirk/Fred Zinnemann. The man who had briefly enjoyed the limelight as a movie palace owner. Who limelighted again (although somewhat privately) as the LA press discussed his wife’s mysterious murder. Who sought others in the limelight so that they’d help him regain that limelight.

He directed Roxanne Winterbury to give him a bad alibi that any cop should have been able to see through, and he directed me to search for the same bad alibi.

Which I did.

And that led me to his ex-wife’s house, and the detective on his ex-wife’s murder, who was somewhat annoyed at me for finding the ex-husband, whom he had no idea existed.

Kenneth Johnson was staying at one of those anonymous by-the-month business hotels that dotted all of LA County. He’d been there for a month before his ex-wife’s murder, and he stayed there throughout the publicity.

It wasn’t hard to find him, if you only knew where to look.

Kenneth Johnson got his fifteen minutes of fame. In tried-and-true LA tradition, he gave interviews to the press against his attorney’s advice, appeared on all the talk shows, and proclaimed his innocence. That went on too long for my tastes, but how long I have no idea, since I stopped watching after the first two days.

The problem was he extended my fifteen minutes of fame to nearly six months. I became the most famous detective in Los Angeles. Someone even ran a special about me on Court TV, although they didn’t interview me or my friends or most of my clients, and used only stock footage.

I tried to see this as a good thing. New clients, a better office, and enough money to afford a really good secretary who could screen my calls, turn away unwanted visitors, and tell the press to go to hell.

But I gotta say, I resented Kenneth Johnson. I felt like some flat-faced extra who had somehow become an unlikely star of a blockbuster film. I didn’t want the fame he’d directed me into, and I couldn’t seem to get out of it.

But it’s my new reality. Well-known detective Belinda Sweet, the go-to girl for the biggest of the big cases. Those cases do pay well, and I’m smart enough to solve them.

But getting used to this new persona is a bit rough.

I keep reminding myself: New personas and new realities are an LA thing. They’re exactly what Katalin Voight wanted when she moved to the city. A chance to start over. A chance to remake herself.

A chance to be someone else.

I am someone else, and I’d rather be me.

But that’s the LA curse and the LA blessing. At least no one will ask me to alibi them any more—at least, not after the fact.

Although some director’s been chasing me for weeks now, wanting me to host a cable show on alibis.

Which, of course, I will never ever do.

____________________________________________

“Mr. Alibi” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Mr. AlibiCopyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October, 2010Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Loke Yek Mang | Dreamstime

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

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Right now, every single person I speak to in the United States mentions how stressed they are. We have a lot going on here. It’s a week from the election, two days from Halloween, and it’s been a weird summer (at least here in Las Vegas). At WMG, we’ve been dealing with all sorts of changes, 99% of them really fun.

We moved our main offices to Las Vegas…10 days ago. We’re designing our books, making them more accessible on every platform and in every format. We’re finishing projects previously left undone…

And we are tired.

So when it came time to do the video for the Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter, which launched today, I let my mood inform my work. (I also had assistance from the adorable Angel.)

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Holiday-Spectacular-2024-Kickstarter.mp4We do the Holiday Spectacular every year. It’s a calendar of stories that you can receive from American Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. Most folks opt to get theirs via email, but we’re looking at other ways to deliver, which we’ll have in place by the time the Kickstarter is over.

The Holiday Spectacular stories, written by some of the best writers in the business, follow three general genres this year: Thriller, Romance, or Fantasy (with a sense of wonder).

If you back the Kickstarter, you can get the calendar (with every reward) as well as anthologies and all kinds of cool merchandise.

So head on over…and spoil yourself (or your loved ones). After the year we’ve all had, you deserve it.

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1912—In a world where President Andrew Johnson’s conviction at his impeachment trial guaranteed that Reconstruction not only had teeth but also continued into the 20th century, South Carolina stands out as a leader in change, a pioneer of laws that change the balance of power. This new United States, this new South, sees Blacks and women rise to their rightful places of power alongside Whites.

But that doesn’t stop Lost Causers from trying to return the country to its old ways.

So, when someone tries to stop presidential hopeful Kate Wells from speaking at an event organized by the influential Abigail Lockwood, Abigail knows the Lost Causers want to send her a message.

But her response might prove one they never expected.

“Politicians, Lost Causers, and Abigail Lockwood” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Politicians, Lost Causers, and Abigail LockwoodKristine Kathryn RuschOneFlames spat and snapped beside her, but Abigail’s gaze rose to the sparks, floating lazily toward the moss-covered live oak trees. If one of those caught on fire, the woods would go up. May had been inordinately dry, but April had been wet, and she had to hope that a loving God would cancel those two things out and keep the home she’d been born in—the land she’d been raised on—intact.

She stood barefoot on the dirt path leading to the pavilion. The fire ate the canvas like someone had treated it with alcohol. The ribbons went first, but the ropes and stakes remained, and inside she could still see the shadows of the chairs and tables set up for the rousing evening of speechifying and glad-handing that she’d been working so hard to organize.

She couldn’t think about what they’d do tomorrow, when they had to get through this moment first. Rufus was on her left, passing her buckets, which she passed to Titus, who handed them to the gardeners, running around the pavilion, splashing water on the flames.

The sizzle and pop and steam made it seem like the water was doing something, but the one thing it wasn’t doing was dousing the flames. They were growing worse by the instant.

The pavilion was sandwiched next to the great house, in the wide patch of lawn that she had created not five years before. The gardeners had complained that she was pulling down plants that had been in the earth since Lockwood Hall had been the River’s Bend Plantation.

The gardens weren’t burning yet and neither was the forest of trees planted on three sides of the great house, which led her to believe that the fire had been deliberately started. She hadn’t had that thought, though, when she sent Jeremiah on his horse to roust the firemen. It would take them at least forty-five minutes to get here, and she had to stall that fire somehow.

It was only standing here, half of her so hot that she could feel her skin prickling and the other half slightly chilled from her wet nightdress, that she realized the fire hadn’t been spontaneous.

Someone had snuck onto her property, either through the trees or under the canopy marking the main road, just to set the pavilion on fire. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened if they had come into the house.

Too late to think about that now. Now she had to grab, pass, grab, pass, grab, pass, and hope that the buckets would be enough to stem the tide of the fire until the firemen got here.

At least the pond was still full from the spring rains. And, if they needed it, the river that had once given the old plantation its name was close enough that they could extend the bucket brigade if they had to.

In that split second between buckets, as she swiveled from handing off a bucket to grabbing the next, she wiped the back of her hand over her face. The air tasted of soot and burning fabric.

The night sky glowed orange. They had to see it in town by now, even if Jeremiah hadn’t arrived at the fire station yet.

That was the problem living this far out. The pavilion might be a complete loss by the time the firemen got here. But they would be able to stop the fire from spreading and, God forbid, keep it from the house.

TwoKate Wells stepped onto the observation platform, the door to the train car banging behind her. Despite the gaslights around the terminal, she could only see a few yards of track disappearing into the darkness.

The air smelled faintly of smoke, which surprised her, given the warmth of the June night. But what she considered warm might be cold to someone raised in this hothouse clime.

Muffled conversation rose as the regular passengers made their way off the train. Arriving at three in the morning did make everyone seem a bit muted. Kate didn’t feel muted. Or tired. Just frustrated.

This trip was not working out the way she wanted it to.

Perhaps that was why she was hiding on the observation platform, waiting for everyone to leave before she disembarked. Not that she expected anyone to stop her or to recognize her. The biggest problem she had so far in her campaign for president was getting enough press coverage to become well known.

She placed a fist on the steel railing around the back of the car. Maybe she should have tried a whistle-stop campaign. But she had been afraid that no one would show up at campaign stops.

This election had an inordinate number of candidates, and this was before the conventions. As she told Martin Halston, whom she’d hired to run the campaign, she would do her whistle-stop after she had received the Republican nomination.

The last thing she wanted right now was a reason for the party power brokers, from John Roy Lynch to William Taft, to have an excuse to dismiss her candidacy. They might anyway, if she presented the wrong platform.

Martin wanted her to run on the standard old tropes—it was past time for a woman to become President. After all, women had gotten the vote at the same time as blacks. Women had become governors, senators, and federal judges (although none yet had been appointed to the Supreme Court). Martin felt that reminding her constituents and, in particular, the power brokers, that a woman deserved a chance at the highest office in the land would get Kate through the door.

But everyone from Carrie Chapman Catt to Jane Addams to Alice Paul had made that argument. The argument had gotten them nowhere.

Instead, Kate felt they (she) should address how difficult 1912 was already proving to be. The economy lacked the stability that it needed, particularly after the panic of 1910. Just as things had started to look up, the RMS Titanic had gone down, taking some of the world’s power brokers with it. And, in the two months since, confidence in humanity’s ability to make the world better seemed threatened, too.

Kate was going to try that argument here in South Carolina. She had always liked coming here. She felt at home, had since her first visit at a retreat for the Congressional Women’s Caucus. The land looked very different from her native Illinois, but the gentle outspokenness of the women here appealed to her blunt Midwestern self on a level she had yet to completely understand.

But it was more than that. Ever since the war ended, South Carolina had been a leader in change. It pioneered laws that changed the balance of power, redistributing the land once owned by the treasonous Confederate landowners, allowing blacks—who were in the majority here, even then—to take over the government.

She had been looking forward to coming to South Carolina, but as the train stopped, she felt unsettled, as if she had made a mistake in coming here.

She tapped her fist on that rail. She couldn’t hear voices any longer, which meant that the other passengers were inside the terminal. She went back into the observation car, and picked up her personal bag. Her assistants already had her luggage.

She would head to her hotel and see if she could get some sleep, before the meetings began in the afternoon.

She took her bag to the exit, opened the door, and sneezed. The smell of smoke had grown stronger, blowing in on the wind. Maybe not a hearth fire at all. Perhaps something more serious.

But no one seemed alarmed, and the exhaustion she had been holding at bay threatened to overwhelm her. Her mood would improve after sleep.

It always did.

ThreeAbigail sat on the steps leading to the veranda and watched the sunrise cast red light all over wisping clouds. Usually she loved this view of the lawn and the gardens beyond. She’d stand, a cup of coffee in her left hand, and survey her entire domain.

Maybe God was punishing her for that arrogance. Lord knows, He punished the previous owners of this land something awful.

Someone placed a heavy shirt around her shoulders. She looked up. Titus stood behind her. His skin looked mottled and patched, dark where soot covered it, and light brown around his lips, where he’d clearly wiped off his mouth. Tracks ran through the soot, tears most like, although he would deny it.

Her son was nothing if not stoic.

He sat beside her. The top of the steps creaked under his weight. Her youngest boy now outweighed her by a hundred pounds, all muscle.

“The horse came back,” he said quietly.

It took her a moment to understand him. Her brain was working slowly, which she blamed on the lack of sleep, but was probably the trauma of the night. Her hands ached, her eyes burned, and she stank of smoke. He had probably dropped the shirt over her because her nightgown, thin and soot-covered, revealed more than it covered.

“Jeremiah’s?” she asked, just for confirmation.

Titus nodded.

She had wondered what happened to Jeremiah. The firemen had arrived late, claiming they had seen the red against the sky, and smelled the smoke. She had set that information aside, thinking they had simply passed him on the road.

The fire department had a new mechanized truck, and it went fast. Jeremiah, she had thought, would have moved the horse off the road so that the truck itself wouldn’t spook him.

The pumper automobile still stood at the edge of the lawn, its tanks empty, and the boilers off. The firemen were rolling up the hoses and getting ready to go. She had focused on the fire and the land and the drama of the night, and hadn’t given a second thought to Jeremiah.

“When?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know.” Titus ran a hand over his mouth, a nervous tick since babyhood whenever he didn’t want to say what he was thinking. “They found it grazing near the main road.”

She nodded. The horse wouldn’t have come closer, not with the fire and the upset.

Jeremiah was a good man. He ran the household for her. She liked to joke that he was the family butler, but in truth, he was the manager, making sure the dozen or so employees she engaged did their jobs.

She hadn’t even questioned his decision to alert the firemen. That kind of thing was what Jeremiah did.

“Do we know where Jeremiah is?” she asked.

“No, Mama,” Titus said.

But they both had an idea.

FourThe body lay crumpled beneath an ancient live oak just off the road leading to Lockwood Hall. Sheriff Dunnet Brewster removed the hat from his bald pate and clutched it to his chest.

Jeremiah Harding had been a good man, and he hadn’t deserved to die.

Dunnet was partly relieved two of his men had found Jeremiah, thinking maybe whoever had started the fire had taken him into the woods near here, and tortured him. There were still enough Lost Causers who felt that ku-kluxing was an exhibit of power, not a pathetic attempt to recover what they had lost.

Dunnet crouched beside the body. It was huddled in a fetal position, originally making him think that Jeremiah had been beaten, and had died protecting his face and torso.

But as Dunnet got close, he saw a bloody mass across Jeremiah’s front. Dunnet grabbed Jeremiah’s shoulder and pulled him slightly forward. The remains of Jeremiah’s shirt gaped, revealing a neat little round hole between his shoulder blades.

He’d been shot in the back by something powerful, or at a close enough range that the bullet (bullets?) did maximum damage, exiting out the front.

The shot would have thrown him from his horse, and he would have sprawled along the road. Whoever killed him had dragged him here, and posed the body.

Which bothered Dunnet. That made no sense. Lost Causers usually liked to show their handiwork, not hide it. It made terror easier.

Dunnet rose slowly, his knees creaking. He had seen a lot of things, but this was new.

Still, it was his job to investigate.

“There should be a blood trail,” he said to his men. “Let’s find it.”

FiveThe knock on her door came at ten a.m. sharp. Kate blinked. She’d been dozing, but that didn’t substitute for good sleep.

“Coming,” she said, as she gathered her robe and slipped her feet into the slippers she carried everywhere.

She pulled open the door to find Martin outside. He wore the same suit he’d worn the night before, only he had his coat over his shoulder, and he had found a different shirt that looked only slightly wrinkled.

He clutched a tray in both hands, with a silver coffee pot, two bone china cups, and a pile of pastries in the middle.

“I had another hour,” she said, letting her irritation through.

“Yep.” He pushed his way into the room, and she closed the door behind him. He set the tray on the table near the window.

She trailed behind him. The coffee smelled good. The pastries smelled better. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

“Possible change of plans,” he said, and her heart sank. The speakers were lined up, the event had been advertised for nearly three weeks. She’d had assurances—

“There’s been a fire at Lockwood Hall,” he said.

She blinked, not expecting that. She had expected to hear that some of the local bigwigs had decided not to speak on her behalf after all. Since W.E.B. DuBois entered the race, she had been hearing a lot of discouraging talk about her candidacy. DuBois was brilliant, famous, outspoken, and a heck of an organizer. He knew everyone.

The only hope she had was that he wasn’t always politic. He could antagonize as easily as he could charm.

“A fire?” she asked.

Martin pulled out a chair for her, then crossed to his and sat down. He looked as tired as she felt.

“I don’t know how bad it is, but it was bad enough that the entire fire department worked half the night on it,” he said.

“The smoke,” she said, more to herself than to him. “That’s what I smelled.”

“Most probably,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of information, but we might have to forgo our work here. If you’re going to keep to your schedule, that is. If not, then we can try to reschedule the actual event.”

She looked down at the pastries. They glistened with butter and sugar, decadence that she hadn’t seen much of on this trip.

She’d done the best she could on a limited budget, but she had seen South Carolina as the centerpiece of her travels. Where South Carolina went, so went Mississippi and Georgia and Louisiana and almost every other state of the former Confederacy. She didn’t think she could get the male black vote here, not with DuBois in the ring, but he wasn’t that popular with women of either race.

She had seen an opening, and these meetings here in the next two days were the centerpieces of them. But she was relying on Abigail Lockwood to help introduce her to the local women who ran everything from the mayor’s office to the congressional campaigns. A lot of the funding came because of the recommendation of black women, and Abigail had assured her that she could help.

And now the fire.

Kate wasn’t sure what she should do—for herself, her campaign, or for Abigail.

If Abigail was even all right.

Kate felt her cheeks warm. She hadn’t even asked how Abigail was doing.

“Was anyone hurt?” she asked.

Martin shrugged. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was pouring coffee. “I’ve told you what I know.”

Kate nodded, thought, then decided. If she ever became president, she would have to deal with the good and the bad, the disaster as well as the triumph.

Might as well start now.

“Let’s go to Lockwood Hall,” she said, “and see if Abigail needs help.”

SixThe news Sheriff Dunnet Brewster shared hurt. Abigail stood in her front parlor—the parlor that Jeremiah would have insisted they use—and clasped her hands over her heart. She had known since the horse came back that something had happened to Jeremiah, but her own innate optimism had let her hope that he had been bucked off or knocked unconscious.

Not shot as he rode into town.

Dunnet stood near the door, twisting his hat in his hands. Titus and Rufus stood beside Abigail, while her oldest son, Robert, remained outside, talking to the fire chief. No one sat on the horsehair sofa or tried to squeeze their bulk into the upholstered armchairs, and for once, Abigail didn’t offer it.

“I know you’ve had threats from the Lost Causers,” Dunnet was saying. “Any recently?”

Abigail glanced at her sons. Sometimes they—and Jeremiah, God rest his soul—protected her from the worst of it. Thinking, apparently, that she couldn’t handle tough times. Not remembering that she had taken over this acreage when their daddy died, more than twenty years before. Just as Reconstruction was ending, when the terrors were at their worst.

“A few years ago,” Rufus said, “right after that Supreme Court case, we had constant threats.”

Dunnet frowned slightly. No one had told him, because Abigail and her sons decided to handle it all themselves.

“That case wasn’t even about you,” Dunnet said.

“It was, though,” Titus said. “It would’ve had an impact on any family that got its property after the war. Just because the case was based in Mississippi didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt us if it went the wrong way.”

Abigail had watched that case with unease. Even though the Congress had mandated that the traitors who fought against the Republic lose their property, there had been talk throughout the last sixty years that the property laws were unconstitutional—that the federal government didn’t have the right to break up plantations of active Confederates and sell them to whomever had the funds or was willing to work off the purchase price.

The property laws had benefited blacks and poor whites alike, shifting the balance of power so dramatically that most of the former landowners had fled West rather than live in poverty in the land they had once ruled.

But that case, like so many others in the past few decades, had tested the strength of the federal government over the states and she had been lucky—they all had been lucky—that the federal government won.

“You never reported anything,” Dunnet said.

Titus ran a hand over his mouth, which gave Rufus time to answer. Rufus was the polite one among her sons.

“You weren’t sheriff yet,” Rufus said.

So much in such a small sentence. The previous sheriff—Joe Davis, a white man whose family could trace its roots back to the Revolutionary War—never prosecuted Lost Causers. Somehow, there was never enough evidence, even when the victims (if they survived) could identify the assailants.

Dunnet nodded. His gaze met Abigail’s. She had worked on his election, reminding everyone in the county that they were best off with people whose families had either come out of slavery or remembered what it was like to be poor, white, and barefoot, people who believe that no one cared about them.

She worked tirelessly to keep her people in office, and sometimes she failed, as evidenced by the election of Sheriff Joe Davis.

“You could’ve told me,” Dunnet said.

“We did just fine,” Rufus said.

Just fine was a matter of opinion. They had survived the anger, the demands, the burning cross at the edge of the road.

“We hired guards,” Abigail said. Dunnet needed to know the measures they had taken. “And in December, when it was so cold, we decided we didn’t need them anymore.”

“Who knew the damned Lost Causers would come slinking back out when the weather warmed up,” Titus said.

She glanced sideways at her son. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his cheeks moved as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. Another nervous habit, one he had learned from his father. One of the few things.

She had no idea how her husband would have handled this all. He used to take a lot of measures into his own hands, something that she urged her sons not to do.

The law helps us, she had said over and over again. And it had until a few Lost Causers managed to win local office. She was now devoting a goodly portion of her annual income to make sure no Lost Causers won any elections.

Dunnet’s frown had grown. “You think Lost Causers did this?” he asked.

“Don’t you?” Titus asked.

Dunnet’s gaze met Abigail’s. That frown bothered her, just like that fire bothered her. And all of it was mixed up in the loss of Jeremiah. She had relied on him since her husband died, and she was having trouble thinking straight.

“You have problems with any particular Lost Causers?” Dunnet asked her.

“We have trouble with all of them,” Titus said.

Abigail placed her hand gently on his arm. “The Adairs,” she said. “They still think this property belongs to them.”

“You don’t think it was them, though,” Dunnet said. “Why not?”

“Of course it was them,” Titus snapped. “Why else kill Jeremiah? He kept kicking them off the property. They’d tried to take him once before—”

Abigail tightened her grip on her son’s arm, stopping him. She hated it when he talked over her.

“The Adairs have threatened all of us,” she said to Dunnet. “But they would never set a fire that could burn the great house. Or the gardens.”

She glanced at Titus whose mouth had become a thin line.

“In fact,” she said, “they threatened to kill everyone who removed plants along the lawn when we redid the gardens ten years ago now. They said we were ruining ‘River Bend’s heritage.’”

She gave a sarcastic emphasis to Lockwood Hall’s old name and history.

“It was them, Mama,” Titus said. “Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know,” she said, feeling more than a little off-balance. “But I don’t think it’s our job to find out.”

SevenSomehow Martin had commandeered an actual automobile. Kate had tied a hat around her head to keep her hair from flying everywhere. The Abbott-Detroit, as the driver called it, had a roof, but there was no glass in the side windows, so the breeze flowing through the carriage was formidable. She had to keep a hand on top of her hat, just to keep it from peeling off the top of her head.

Martin’s hair wisped around his skull, making him look like he had just awakened. She could only see it from the back, since he had opted to sit up front with the driver. She hadn’t caught the driver’s name, which was unusual for her. One of her great skills as a politician was hearing names once and remembering them.

But she had been greatly distracted today, trying to figure out what her next move would be.

She had finally decided to let compassion guide her first, and then she would decide, after she had spoken to Abigail Lockwood.

They had met nearly fifteen years before, after Reconstruction formally ended. The Democrats had started to regain footholds in the South, with some former Confederates heading home from the West, hoping to rebuild. Abigail had started a grassroots organization that funded Republican candidates, those who supported the tenets of Reconstruction—free public education for all, ease of land ownership, and continued punishment for anyone who espoused the treasonous ideas of the former Confederate States.

Kate had come in as a young politician, still on the rise in the Illinois legislature. Even though Abigail hadn’t mandated it, her organization benefitted women the most, primarily because women had been slow at building national coalitions.

Kate had helped her build a branch in Illinois. They had worked on other projects once Kate got into Congress, but Kate had never directly gone to Abigail for help before.

And now, Abigail was the one who needed help.

The trip to Abigail’s home—one of the biggest holdings in the entire state of South Carolina—had taken less than fifteen minutes, even though the former plantation was a good ten or more miles outside of town.

The automobile turned onto a wide lane, sunlight barely filtering through the canopy formed by gigantic limbs of old trees covered in moss. The road was stately and beautiful, but the air here smelled so strongly of smoke that Kate’s eyes watered.

She half feared what she would see as they bumped across ruts to get to the main entrance, even though she had been assured that the great house had not burned down.

The great house was too small a phrase for what greeted her. The columned mansion, with a front portico that looked like it belonged on one of the stately palaces of Europe rather than a home in the middle of the Carolina countryside. Kate had read about such homes, but had never seen one. Built before the war, of course, by white Southern planters with delusions of grandeur, most of these old buildings had been torn down or carved into apartment-style dwellings for multiple owners who had sub-divided the land.

Very few had remained intact, although more in the Carolinas than almost anywhere else. Here, the reclamation laws had started early, and the prices were low enough that former slaves could buy their old masters’ dwellings for a pittance. Most knew how to work the land, make it profitable, and keep the houses running—and apparently, Abigail’s family had counted itself in that number.

The automobile stopped near the stone steps that led to the double doorway made of wood painted white just like the house itself. Only sides of the house were covered in soot, probably from the morning’s fire.

Kate got out of the automobile, and sneezed once at the strong smoke smell. Other vehicles were parked along the side of the road, and a few horses were tied to a rail several yards away. She wasn’t the only visitor.

Martin got out, and accompanied her up the stairs. He grabbed the door knocker, a gigantic L carved out of brass, and tapped it twice.

No one answered. He did so again, the sound echoing in the odd stillness of the morning. Not even birds chirped. She had expected more noise after all of the events that had occurred here, but she had been wrong.

Kate was about to give up and see if she could roust someone from the back of the property when the door opened. A tall broad-shouldered man stood before them. He wore denims and a work shirt covered with soot. He looked exhausted.

He was one of Abigail’s sons, but for the life of her, Kate could not remember which one.

“Miss Wells,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you.”

Sons of the South, always formal.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” she said. “I was hoping to speak to your mother.”

He nodded, and swept her and Martin into the large front parlor with its heavy furniture, and oppressive stench of smoke. Only after he left them alone, did Kate realize she should have commiserated with him about the losses. But she hadn’t. She was out of her depth on something like this.

He returned not five minutes later.

“Come with me,” he said.

As she followed him, Kate saw no opportunity to commiserate. He was all business, leading her and Martin quickly through the hall that went past the public rooms of the house. Kate had a sense of expensive and old furniture, a variety of antiques and heirlooms.

He led them into a stunning wide room with high ceilings and wicker furniture covered with orange and white cushions, matching the white rugs and the sheer white curtains that were pulled away from the eight-foot-tall windows overlooking the back of the house. Through them, Kate could see Abigail talking with a burly man whose bald head glistened in the sun. He was wearing some kind of uniform.

Abigail’s son opened double doors that Kate had initially thought were windows, then stood back.

“She’s out there,” he said.

Kate thanked him as she walked by, Martin trailing her. She expected Abigail’s son to follow, but he didn’t. He pulled the doors closed and remained inside.

That thought made Kate realize she hadn’t seen any staff at all. One of the selling points of holding the rally here, Abigail had said, was because her staff was used to putting on large functions.

Was the staff gone? Had they not shown up this morning?

But the questions fled as Abigail turned toward Kate. Abigail, usually the most beautifully dressed woman Kate had ever seen, wore a muslin gown that was faded and loose. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she had a black smudge along her neck and arms. Her hair, still in its night braid, was pulled loose along the back and sides.

She looked heartbroken and exhausted.

Kate extended her hands, and Abigail took them, clutched them, really. Then, without thinking about it, Kate pulled her into a hug.

Abigail clung to her, and Kate held her tightly. Over Abigail’s shoulder, Kate could see Martin’s reflection in the window glass. He looked stunned. Kate was not a person who hugged easily. She rarely shook hands with anyone, a habit he wanted her to change.

Then her gaze moved from his reflection to the lawn. The grounds were blackened by fire, and coated with mud. Broken poles stood at odd angles. The remains of chairs tilted sideways, and the stage where she would have spoken that night was charred gray, as if it were a ghost of itself.

Licks of black went down the lawn, and some of the trees in the garden beyond were half-blackened. The air stank of smoke here, but also had a thick wetness, as if the water used to curtail the flames still coated everything.

Finally, Abigail stepped out of the hug, and gave her a half-apologetic smile. “We clearly can’t hold the rally.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Kate said. “I’m here to provide whatever you need.”

She meant it too, although she wasn’t sure exactly what she could do.

“I was supposed to say that to you.” Abigail grimaced, and Kate realized she was holding back tears. The man she had been talking to looked surprised. Apparently, everyone was used to the Abigail who took care of others, who seemed impervious to anything thrown her way.

“Well, things change,” Kate said, surveying the lawn. They were lucky the fire had not spread.

Then, since no one had bothered to introduce the bald man, she leaned forward and extended a hand.

“Kate Wells,” she said.

“Dunnet Brewster,” he said. “I’m the sheriff here.”

He was watching her as if she were something strange and new. Maybe she was—a Northern white woman who had barged her way into what was clearly a family scene.

“Do you have any idea who could have done this?” she asked, partly because she didn’t like the way he was looking at her.

“Not yet,” he said. Then he looked at Abigail. “I thought you had the pavilion up for a family event.”

“No,” Abigail said. “Kate is on a speaking tour.”

The sheriff frowned, clearly confused. “A lyceum tour?”

Kate bit back a sharp retort. So many had wanted her to go on a lyceum tour instead of a political one. But she didn’t want to see the masses, not yet. She wanted to talk to Republicans and power brokers. A new kind of tour, really, and Abigail had agreed with it, before all of this.

“No,” Abigail said. “She was to speak to local officials and members of the party.”

“The Republican party?” he clarified.

Abigail nodded. “You should have gotten an invitation.”

He shrugged. “I don’t go to political gatherings if I don’t have to.”

And that, Kate would have said had they been having a normal discussion, was why so many local political office holders never rose in the ranks.

But he had turned slightly, his back half toward her, so that he could see the mess on the lawn.

“Speaking tour,” he repeated. “What are you speaking about, Mrs. Wells?”

The assumption of marriage. She had long since stopped correcting anyone who made it, although it still annoyed her. Why did the language designate whether or not a woman was married, but not do so with a man?

Martin spoke before Kate could answer. “Miss Wells has started a presidential bid. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. She is the first female who actually has a good shot at becoming the Republican party nominee.”

The sheriff raised his eyebrows. “You believe the power brokers at the convention will choose you?”

Something in his tone made it clear that he thought she had no hope whatsoever. But Kate was used to doubters.

“That’s why I’m on the tour,” she said.

“And she has a good shot?” He directed this question at Abigail, not at Martin or Kate.

“She does.” Abigail sounded tired. “The field is wide open right now, and it will take someone organized, with political savvy and financial resources, to win over the brokers.”

“A good shot,” the sheriff repeated. “How very unusual.”

Kate felt a thread of irritation. She had come here to talk to Abigail, not argue her political prospects with a local sheriff.

Then Kate looked at Abigail. She seemed alive for the first time since Kate had arrived.

“You think this is about Kate,” Abigail said to the sheriff, surprising Kate.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

EightKate looked confused, but Abigail wasn’t. She felt strong for the first time that day.

The idea that the fire was set to stop Kate was the first thing that made any sense. Not the Lost Causers, who truly did not care (at this point) who the presidential nominees were, but others—and Abigail had run into dozens of them—who believed that women did not belong in public office.

Kate was the first with a chance at the brass ring. She probably wouldn’t win the nomination, but if this tour was successful, she would have enough support to become the vice presidential nominee. And she would bring Illinois with her, along with all of its money and influence.

“I’ll have Rufus give you a list of names who have disparaged this meeting,” Abigail said to Dunnet. “And I will find a site for the rally tonight.”

“No,” Kate said. “You have more than enough to do. We will call off the rally—”

“That is what they want,” Abigail said.

“Forgive me, Mrs. Lockwood,” Dunnet said, “but you don’t know that.”

Her gaze narrowed. “Oh, but I do. It explains everything.”

“Even Jeremiah’s death?”

She paused, thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes, especially that.”

Kate took a step forward. “I hadn’t realized that someone had died. Abigail—”

“It means,” Abigail said, deliberately interrupting Kate, “that whoever did this knew the fire wouldn’t be enough to stop me. So they tried to make certain the fire would harm the property, maybe even the house, and if it didn’t, they figured I would be incapacitated by the loss of Jeremiah.”

And to think she had nearly played into their hands.

“I don’t think finding a new venue is wise,” Dunnet said.

“It’s not your decision,” Abigail said.

He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand, stopping him.

“I can tell you this, however,” she said. “We were wrong. Lost Causers set the fire, and shot Jeremiah. It just wasn’t the Adairs, or anyone close to them. You’ll be looking for someone close to the local Democrats. Not someone who hates me.”

Dunnet glanced at Kate, as if he expected her to step up and stop Abigail from making this decision. Kate just watched politely, as her assistant shifted behind her.

“And,” Abigail added, “one last thing. The person you’re looking for knows me well. They would know that losing the pavilion wouldn’t stop this rally, but losing Jeremiah would.”

“You have someone in mind,” Dunnet said.

“I have several someones,” Abigail said. “I’ll give their names to you tomorrow. That way, we’ll see if your investigation takes you to them naturally.”

Dunnet’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you trusted me, Abigail.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “I also trust that I can be wrong. So this will be a kind of insurance.”

“If I may,” Kate said, and Abigail braced herself for Kate to back out of the rally after all. “In my experience, people who make these kinds of threats—people who actually act upon them—are not happy with failure. They will try again.”

“Ma’am,” Dunnet said. “My experience—”

“Miss Wells is a lawyer who prosecuted all sorts of criminals in Illinois before embarking on her political career,” her assistant said somewhat primly.

“Not to mention she has a point,” Abigail snapped. “Haven’t you read how many times John Wilkes Booth tried to get close to President Lincoln before succeeding?”

“No, ma’am,” Dunnet said stiffly. “That case is a bit before my time.”

So Abigail had hurt his feelings by questioning his abilities. Too bad. She needed him to do her bidding, not the other way around.

“I will let you know where we will hold the rally,” she said. “I suggest you have some operatives there, in disguise, looking for Lost Causers lurking outside.”

Dunnet stared at her for a moment. He appeared to be wrestling with himself, then he turned to Kate.

“You do realize, ma’am, that if you are correct, your life could be in danger.”

She smiled at him, but her eyes were sad. “Unfortunately, Sheriff, we live in a volatile nation. These days, my life is in danger whenever I step on a stage. And I am not alone. I’m sure Mr. DuBois and Mr. Roosevelt have similar thoughts when they step on a stage as well.”

“You should hire guards, ma’am,” Dunnet said.

Her smile widened. “What makes you think I haven’t?” she asked.

NineThe city’s Lyceum Theater was a larger venue than Kate had planned on. The stage was a proscenium arch that overlooked the patrons, rather than one that would allow her to see their faces. But she couldn’t very well say no to the venue. Abigail had gone to great personal trouble to secure it, on this very difficult day, and Kate would make the best of it.

She had handled the rest—or rather, Milton had. He had notified the other speakers of the change of venue, and had sent a dozen different people to inform ticket holders that the rally would be held downtown rather than at Lockwood Hall.

It had taken some time to make the change—everyone wanted to gossip about the fire—but it looked like the evening might happen after all. Kate needed to change into her speaker’s clothing—she had a trim blue dress light enough to handle a place that would become hot and stuffy despite its size.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep her speech short, or if she wanted to give the speech she had initially intended.

Abigail had done much to guarantee that this would happen, so Kate needed to guarantee that this effort would not be in vain.

That meant she would have to garner press coverage somehow.

She just wasn’t sure how.

TenThe intersection of Democrats, Lost Causers, and Abigail Lockwood was a small one indeed. Even with the lists that Rufus Lockwood had written for him, Dunnet did not have a wealth of suspects. Most were too stupid to execute such a plan or had no interest in politics at all.

If he ruled out the Lost Causers who were related to the Adairs of River’s Bend Plantation, then he had an even smaller list.

It all came down to one name: Joe Davis, the former sheriff.

And somehow, Abigail had known that. And she had known Dunnet wouldn’t have believed her if he hadn’t done some of the legwork himself.

But now, he didn’t know what to do. Because approaching his predecessor was difficult enough without this large an accusation attached.

Dunnet had decided to wait until the speechifying was over before he made any move. Part of him hoped that nothing would happen this night, and he would be able to take his time investigating the fire and the murder.

But part of him knew that it would end here, no matter what.

The Lyceum Theater took up one entire city block. It had a lot of smaller rooms, but somehow Abigail had commandeered the theater itself. It probably helped that she was on the Lyceum committee, and had donated a lot of money for theater renovation.

The ticket holders barely filled the front section of the auditorium. What would have looked like a large gathering on the lawn at Lockwood Hall looked like a tiny meeting here.

Everyone was dressed well, and most seemed unconcerned about the change of location. The Lockwoods had come, but did not stay. Abigail Lockwood had simply thanked everyone for being so flexible. The applause greeting her words had been raucous, proving once again how loved she was in this community, but she hadn’t wanted to hear it. She had smiled (through tears, he thought) and waved at the crowd, before vanishing into the back.

The other speakers sat on stage. Everyone from the current governor to several former governors, all Republican, and the most respected man in respectable South Carolina politics, Robert Smalls.

Smalls, who had held every conceivable office here, was still a United States Senator (and probably would be until he died). Some say his theft of the CSS Planter changed the tide of the war in South Carolina. In one night, he had stolen a Confederate vessel and taken his knowledge of where the mines were planted in Charleston Harbor to the Union, saving thousands of lives.

Yet once Dunnet had heard Davis derisively call Smalls “The Boat Thief,” as if the great man were nothing more than a common criminal.

Smalls had grown round with time and good food, but Dunnet would not want to tangle with him. Smalls sat next to Kate Wells, patting her hand once or twice as they were immersed in deep conversation.

Smalls had once said he would never endorse political candidates, so his appearance here was some kind of coup.

Dunnet used all of the speechifying to pace around the auditorium. He had officers outside, some in disguise, but so far he had heard nothing.

Then, just as Smalls rose to speak, a door opened on the second tier of seats. Joe Davis waited there for just a moment before slipping inside the auditorium.

He was a big man, with the kind of white skin that turned red in the sun. He wore a black suit that looked too heavy for the weather. He didn’t sit down, but instead tugged his coat nervously.

Dunnet felt his heart sink. He hadn’t wanted the conclusions to be right. He hadn’t liked Davis, but Dunnet didn’t want to think that someone who wore the same badge he now wore could go so easily to the wrong side of the law.

Not that men like Davis saw what he was about to do as “the wrong side of the law.” Dunnet had arrested enough Lost Causers to know that the mixture of people on that stage was an affront to all the Lost Causers believed in.

The white men, talking with the black men as the colleagues they were, had to grate as well. Not to mention the entire event being arranged by a black woman to benefit a white woman who easily sat side by side with a man like Robert Smalls.

Dunnet slipped behind the seats, going around the back, keeping his gaze on Davis. Dunnet took his Tower cuffs off his tool belt and held them in his left hand. He didn’t want to pull a gun. Someone might notice. But they wouldn’t notice the handcuffs.

Davis didn’t even look at him. Davis was working his way toward the front, tugging on his coat in a way that Dunnet didn’t like.

Dunnet moved quietly, approaching Davis from the back.

Smalls finished his introduction, and as the applause rose to greet Kate Wells, Dunnet stepped beside Davis.

Dunnet grabbed Davis’s right arm.

“Come with me,” Dunnet said, loudly enough that Davis could hear him. No one else seemed to as the applause continued.

“You need my help, Sheriff?” Davis asked. He clearly didn’t know why Dunnet had grabbed him.

“Outside,” Dunnet said, not quite willing to lie, although it might’ve been easier.

“I’d like to hear the little lady, if you don’t mind,” Davis said.

“I do mind,” Dunnet said.

Davis’s gaze was flat. He looked at the stage, where Kate Wells stood, in front of the podium, not behind it, comfortable in her early thank-yous to all of the dignitaries who had come out to support her.

“Don’t get in the way, Dunnet,” Davis said.

“I’m not going to,” Dunnet said, using a maneuver he had practiced a hundred times. He yanked Davis’s right hand back, grabbing the elbow of the left, pulling it downward. It took a single quick movement to attach the Tower cuffs to Davis’s wrists.

Davis’s eyes narrowed. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Not here you haven’t,” Dunnet said. “Not yet.”

But he had seen Davis’s coat swing open, seen the pistols riding on his hips. Many men carried guns in this town, but most did not carry two at the same time.

“I’d like to know what you’re accusing me of,” Davis said.

Looking backwards, Dunnet wanted to say, but did not. Instead, he said, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

Then he pulled Davis by the arms, leading him to the very door he’d entered from, and out of the building, glad to be free of the speechifying, but sorry too, on one level, because he wanted to hear what a woman like Kate Wells thought she could offer that the men could not.

ElevenKate watched the sheriff arrest a man she had never seen before in the very back of the auditorium. The lights had remained up at her request, not because she was paranoid, but because she had wanted to see how her words would affect the audience before her.

She had been speaking about the murder and fire at Lockwood Hall, about the fund she was establishing for the family of the man who died, as the sheriff led someone out of the auditorium.

She waited until they were gone, before pivoting to her speech. But as she did, she mentally tossed her prepared notes. She was going to speak from the heart, for better or worse.

She said, “In this generation, we all talk about what we are owed. My female colleagues believe women are owed a right to stand legitimately for higher office. My black colleagues believe they are owed a president from their ranks, as do so many of my white Republican colleagues.”

The men behind her shifted on the stage. A few people in the audience looked down.

“But there is a dark side to this feeling of being owed. The families of former Confederates believe they are owed either land or reparations for the loss of their fortunes. They have never recovered from the war.”

The members of the press in the front row sat up, perhaps thinking that she was going to side with the Democrats. That would be true pandering, if she even implied that those who believed in the Lost Cause had a point.

Now that she had everyone’s attention, she leaned against the podium.

“The war ended before I was born,” she said. “Before many of you were born. We lost a president, then tried, impeached, and found the next guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. We survived decades of turmoil.”

No one moved, except her. She stood upright, raising her voice even more.

“Through courage and strong leadership,” she said, “we have built a new world, one in which all people are not only created equal but have the same equal opportunities under the law. Strangely we do not celebrate this. Nor do we look at each other as equals. We see black and brown and white, male and female, Democrats and Republicans, rather than those with the best vision for the future, the best vision for our multicolored nation.”

Normally, she would have launched into her vision here, but she did not. Not yet.

“The events of last night, against one of the city’s most prominent families, come out of that sense of entitlement the Lost Causers have. Over the years, we have repeatedly suffered at the hands of those Lost Causers. But the Lost Causers do not rule us. Thank heavens.”

A few heads nodded.

She spoke to them.

“Because,” she said, “imagine if they were still in power. Imagine what would have happened if the Lost Causers rose ascendant after the war, as it looked like they would for a moment. Imagine a world in which they continued to rule the South. Imagine where we would be now.”

People looked at each other. A few frowned.

“The Lost Causers have only the power we give them. And we have given them little. We should give them even less. What we should do is celebrate who we are as we move forward in this new century…”

TwelveAbigail Lockwood leaned against a pillar backstage, letting herself feel the exhaustion for the first time that day.

She had no idea if Kate Wells would impress the power brokers here in South Carolina. The speech was decidedly unusual, but so were the events of the day. And they were not Abigail’s concern, not for the next few weeks.

She needed to work with Jeremiah’s family, to plan his funeral and honor his life. She needed to soothe her sons and her staff and rehire those guards.

But she also needed to heed Kate Wells. No one could simply tolerate the presence of the Lost Causers among them anymore. When she was done with the grief and the healing, Abigail needed to work on changing the laws, perhaps reviving some of the Reconstruction-era laws that had caused so much consternation.

The ones that held that reverence for the Confederate cause was, in itself, treason. That meetings in which the Confederate flag was flown were not legal gatherings, but acts of terror.

It wasn’t enough to elect people like Dunnet or to financially support candidates like Kate Wells.

It was time to put the war in the past once and for all. Not to forget it, but to bury it, and all of its harmful aims.

Abigail ran a hand over her face. She was sad and a little terrified, but mostly, she was angry.

And, she had learned throughout her long life, that anger didn’t help anyone any more than feeling entitled did. What she needed to do was channel that anger into action.

The right kind of action.

The kind that built a better future, rather than tried to patch the problems of the past.

Mentally, she tipped her hat toward Kate Wells.

“Thank you, Kate,” Abigail said quietly, as she pushed herself upright.

She was going home, to the land that her family had worked for more than two hundred years, the land her family had owned for forty-three years.

The land had a lot of scars. The fire was just a new one. But the land was the source of her power. And she would use it.

She would use it all.

____________________________________________

“Politicians, Lost Causers, and Abigail Lockwood” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Politicians, Lost Causers, and Abigail LockwoodCopyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Alternate Peace, edited by Steven H. Silver and Joshua Palmieri, Zombies Need Brains Publishing, 2019
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © sepavone | Depositphotos

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

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As many of you know, we lost our wonderful cat Cheeps in March. He was a heck of a personality, and the condo feels smaller without him. But his health had been uneven for years, and we finally had to let him move on.

He’s the first cat I’ve ever had who actually had fans. He had a Facebook following. During the pandemic, I decided to let him and Gavin help me with promotion. I started something I called Promotion Central, and said that the staff was the cats. I’d post pictures and then write something wry, and people liked it.

Mostly, though, they liked Cheeps. He was pretty. He also had kitty charisma. And somehow, his personality got through.

He was loud, he was demanding, and he was impossible to ignore. He also had an impish side and a sense of humor.

My two remaining cats, Gavin and Angel, do not have a sense of humor. Gavin is working very hard at filling Cheepy’s shoes (okay, he didn’t wear shoes, but you know what I mean). Angel is constantly worried about everything. She wants to do things right.

Cheeps couldn’t give a rat’s flying patootie about doing things right. He expected others to do for him. He was in charge. We all danced to his (rather loud) tune.

Shortly after he died, I wrote a short story inspired by the (extremely sad) trip to the crematorium to pick up his cremains. I dedicated the story to Cheeps. And…Dean bought the story for Pulphouse. The story’s in the current issue, which you can get if you click here.

But I also did something else, and it was a bit more subconscious.

I had to curate a Storybundle this summer. We had chosen the names of the bundles back in the spring. This one was a repeat of one we’d done before, only with new writers. It’s called Cattitude.

The title is so very Cheepy. But I swear I wasn’t thinking of Cheeps as I put it together—consciously anyway. I was thinking of him subconsciously.

You see, every Storybundle gives the buyer the opportunity to donate part of the fee to charity. I wanted a cat-related charity for this bundle, so I researched a bunch of them. I kept coming back to Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends “is dedicated to ending the killing of dogs and cats in America’s shelters. To help Save Them All, Best Friends works with shelters, rescue groups and our members nationwide.”

Cheepy was not a shelter cat. (Gavin and Angel were.) But Cheeps was a rescue. We got him out of a severe hoarding situation. He was clearly abused. He was afraid of feet for years, especially if they were encased in black shoes. It took him forever to warm to us, although he was very affectionate with Gavin. In his last few years, Cheeps allowed cuddling…on his terms. He finally decided to spend time hovering near us, usually on the back of the couch or a chair when one of us sat in it.

When Dean got seriously injured a year ago, Cheeps became his best friend, doing a Cheepy cuddle of staying close. It took a lot of time and a lot of love, but he had gone from being scared of everything and everyone (human, that is) to running the household.

I think every cat should have that chance. (Every dog too.) That’s what was hovering in the back of my mind as I chose the charity.

I ended up writing about the charity in the promotional material for the Storybundle, rather than heavily promoting the authors—which might not have been the best sales tactic, because the writers are wonderful. The bundle includes ebooks from T. Thorn Coyle, Lisa Silverthorne, Christine Pope, and Anne Renwick. Ron Collins and Jeff Collins, Bonnie Elizabeth, Kari Kilgore, and Annie Reed contributed ebooks you can only find in this bundle. My contributions are one of my very favorite Kristine Grayson novels (featuring a kitten superhero—that is, a superhero who saves kittens) and a Year of the Cat volume, featuring stories from across several decades.

All about cats, of course. Great cats. Wonderful cats. Magic cats. Opinionated cats. Cats with moxy. Rescue cats. Shelter cats. Bookstore cats. Lots and lots of cats.

The bundle is time-limited, so it’ll disappear forever this week. You have to head over there now to get all this wonderful reading, which you can get as little as $25. So head on over, and get these wonderful books. I guarantee that you’ll enjoy each and every one of them.

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May was when some crap hit the fan at WMG, and I found myself working 18 hours per day and getting very little sleep. Consequently, I didn’t read much in May. What I did read was in bits and pieces, spread out over the entire month. So I don’t have a lot to recommend here…but wait until you see June!

May, 2024Huston, Caitlin, “Fiction Forward,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 6, 2024. When someone tells you something is not possible or that it won’t sell or that no one is interested, think on this story. I can’t tell you how many people have told me over the years that fiction audio, especially podcasts, doesn’t get an audience. Yet the most-nominated podcast in this year’s Ambies was a fiction piece. If I say more, I’ll rival the word count of the piece I’m sending you to. So go take a look.

Macintyre, Ben, Rogue Heroes, Broadway Books, 2016. After reading The Mosquito Bowl, which I recommended in February, I found myself scanning my World War II books to find another interesting volume. I ended up reading Rogue Heroes, which was fascinating and cringeworthy at the same time. Macintyre does not flinch at some of the brutal depictions of his protagonists or of the war itself. I found the entire thing fascinating and deeply uncomfortable.

McQuiston, Casey, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, Wednesday Books, 2022. I think I owe an apology to Casey McQuiston for letting this book sit on my shelf for two years. I had an early edition of the book with a cover that screamed romance. I thought I knew what the book would be about, but wowza was I wrong. That’s how I’ve reacted to all of McQuiston’s books. I literally judge them by their covers and find them wanting. Then I read the books and I fall in love.

Shara Wheeler kisses our protagonist Chloe, her rival for valedictorian at Willowgrove Christian Academy, and then disappears. Just walks out of school and goes somewhere else. The mystery of Shara Wheeler’s disappearance, her behavior before she vanishes, and a few other fascinating pieces that I can’t tell you because Spoilers! is what made me read this book in a month in which I had no time.

Get this one. Share it with your friends.

Tringali, Anthony, and Cox, Stephen, “‘Over the Rainbow’ Under Suspicion,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 6, 2024. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my years of studying copyright, it’s that figuring out of music copyright has been stolen isn’t as easy as it looks. But it does look like Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg might have lifted most of the melody for “Over The Rainbow” from a Scandinavian composer named Signe Lunde. Whether or not the lifting was intentional is up for debate. Whether or not it matters depends on how the information is presented. Signe Lunde was a woman who was well known. She also became an active Nazi sympathizer. Those are just some of the fascinating twists in this article. I suggest you read it, and see what you think.

Weprin, Alex, “The AI Perils Buried in the Fine Print,” The Hollywood Reporter,* March 27, 2024. Fascinating analysis of all the conundrums buried in what we’re all calling AI. People are interested in using it, but aren’t sure how or why. Corporations are having similar dilemmas. Really worth the read. It’ll give you something to think about.

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Dean and I just finished outlining the entire Mystery Novella class that we’re co-teaching. It’s based on the writers workshops that I have always wanted to do in person, but I think it would take at least two weeks, several hours per day, to teach one novella class.

Right now, that’s cost prohibitive here in Las Vegas. We’re working on making it affordable, and maybe within two years, we can do that.

But right now, we’re doing the novella classes online.

Novellas are my favorite form, and for me, novellas just happen. Twenty years ago, I used to cringe when my crime stories veered into novella territory. Back then, no publication took mystery novellas and the novels had to be at least 90,000 words. I managed to place a few of the shorter novellas in the digest magazines, but it was always tricky. Thank heavens for anthologies, because that was my only shot at the time.

Now, though, with indie publishing, there are many many many uses for novellas, mystery and otherwise.

I had a mystery novella in this past year’s Holiday Spectacular. “Catherine The Great,” which is about a very gifted defense attorney, won the Derringer Award for Novelette (in a tie with David Dean). You’ll be able to get a copy of that when we release the Holiday Spectacular Omnibus in a week or two. (We redid it, with a new cover and a properly edited interior.) I’ll let you know the moment the new version of the omnibus is available.)

I usually don’t sing my own praises, but I’m good at novellas.

The mystery novella class begins tomorrow, and you still have time to sign up. We’re taking signups through the week.

One other workshop starts tomorrow, and it is the one that I had to convince Dean to do. You see, Dean hates the phrase “writer’s block” because he believes it’s an excuse.

If you actually look at the term, though, it’s one of those umbrella phrases. Writer’s block means something different to each writer at different phases of their lives.

• Early-phase writers have trouble getting words on the page. They haven’t learned how to write yet, so they feel “blocked.”
• Long-time professional writers claim they’re never blocked, but they will acknowledge project-block, something I’ve been dealing with on an sf novella. I realized (while Dean’s channel-surfing led him to the end of Oceans Twelve) that I had one character who needed a team around her. And suddenly everything snapped into place. I’ve been struggling with that story for two years. But, unlike early-stage writers, I wrote something (many somethings) else in between.
• All writers go through phases in which life intervenes. People who have taken part in my most recent writing challenge are seeing that. I had a blockbuster August (despite the workshop) and then I hit September, and found myself dealing with all kinds of things that had to take precedence. The day I was going to start back up at full speed was the day that a cold/whatever hit.
• Exhaustion, by the way, feels like writer’s block. It feels like your brain can’t muster up the story or the words. And, really, it can’t. Nike has a great series of ads called “Winning Isn’t Comfortable,” showing the struggle it takes to achieve physically at a high level.Look at this one. Like it or not, writers, you’re using a muscle when you work. Your brain. And it can be pushed for a long time, but in the end, you’re like the runners at the end of the commercial. You think those folks could get up and run a few more miles? Heck, no. Accept it. Rest. And then move forward. (She writes, talking to herself.)

After I convinced Dean we needed to do this class, he asked me if there were enough forms of “writer’s block” to make a week-long workshop. So I had him ask folks on his blog, and the writers we know here in Vegas, and others as well. Within about two hours, we came up with fifty different things that writers had termed “writer’s block.” Each thing has a different solution. Some of those solutions are like the exhaustion one, above: Give it time. Others have easier solutions, like project block: assign it to your subconscious, then go work on something else.

We have the list, and we have the solutions, and wow, are we looking forward to this class. We’re calling it Writers Block Freedom because it provides solutions to the wide variety of symptoms for the problem we all call Writers Block.

And let me be clear here. Some of these so-called symptoms are more challenging than others. The solution isn’t go work on something else. It might be a restructuring of your viewpoint or a way of taking care of your health.

This class also starts tomorrow, and there’s a weekly webinar with the class, one we hope will bring writers together for solutions and pep talks.

Do long-term writers need this? Of course, I was glad we were planning this class, because I felt blocked this month, even though I’m not. I just had real-life priorities that got in the way of the writing, some things that would have forced me to take family leave from my day job if I had one. We all struggle with starting and stopping. That’s part of who we writers are.

Anyway, the link to this class is here. And again, you can sign up all week. In fact, you can sign up at any point, but you will miss several in-person webinars if you do that. So take a look.

By the way, the links I posted above take you directly to the classes, but you might want to poke around the WMG Writer Store all by itself. We’re adding things all the time. And if you went to the Anthology Workshop, you might recognize some of the t-shirt sayings.

I hope to keep you all posted on the various goings on these days, as the fall progresses. Not that it feels like fall here in Vegas. It feels like July. I hope that changes soon…

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Laurel helps many people who return from the desert shaken by what they’ve seen—or think they’ve seen. But Mark seems different. He listens to her, and he makes her obsession with finding the strange silver objects—and discovering their secrets—his own.

But that obsession comes with a cost: one neither might want to pay.

“Spaceships In The Desert” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Spaceships In The DesertKristine Kathryn RuschLaurel ran down the steps of the post office, clutching two manila envelopes and half a dozen letters. Darkness had fallen even though it was only a few minutes past five. A light, chill drizzle coated the air. She felt rushed, although she had no reason. No one waited for her to come home except the cat, and the cat usually didn’t care when she got in as long as he was fed on time.

She hurried to the twelve-minute parking zone, unlocked the passenger door on her white Datsun, and put the mail inside. Then she crossed around the front of the car and stopped.

On top of Skinner Butte, a cross blazed against the darkness. She had never seen the cross before. Its blue-white light lit up the trees and cast shadows on the hillside below. Mark would have loved it.

But Mark was dead. She cross-watched alone.

She unlocked the driver’s door, got in, and drove off, never once looking back at the cross that stabbed the hillside with unearthly light.

The afternoon seemed like any afternoon, even later, when she tried to find the differences. Gus, Big Harry and three others sat in a corner booth and pounded on the table when they ran out of coffee. She marveled at the men, the way they could drink steaming liquid and not seem to get hotter. She drank ice water and sweat still tickled her back.

The sound of the jeep pulling into the gravel driveway stopped all conversation. And when the tall young man walked in the door, Laurel could tell he had seen something strange. He was slender, almost reedy. His thighs below his rumpled shorts were badly sunburned, although he hadn’t realized it yet, and so were his arms and face. His angle-cut brown hair was a week’s growth away from losing its style, and his sweat-stained shirt looked new. But it was his eyes that caught her. They had a faraway frightened and entranced expression that she was beginning to recognize.

She set a glass of lukewarm water down on the counter. “Drink it slow,” she said.

He swayed as he picked up the glass. His fingers were long and thin, without calluses. “Needs ice.”

Laurel shook her head. “Just drink it. You can have one with ice in a minute.”

He finished the water in two gulps, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hands. His fingers were already shaking. He had gotten far too much sun. He would be staying there longer than he realized. He put the glass down. “Ice this time.”

She put a small scoop of ice in his glass, then added warm water. The last thing he needed was stomach cramps. “You saw them, didn’t you?”

His eyes got wide and, for a minute, she thought he was going to be sick already.

“Jesus, Laurel,” Gus said. “You gotta ask ’em that every time?”

The young man frowned. His water glass was already empty. “What are they?” he asked.

“Them tall cool silver things sitting in the sage brush?”

The young man nodded, then clutched the counter for support.

“Spaceships,” Gus said reasonably. “Spaceships in the desert.”

Gus said that every time, and the reaction was always the same. The stranger would always turn away, always refuse to talk to her, as if she had been making fun too.

But this young man ignored Gus and turned back to Laurel. “Why did you ask if I saw them?”

“Because,” she said. “You had the look.”

He held out his glass, and his warm arm was shaking badly. She took the glass out of his hand, then scurried around the counter. He tried to stand up, but lost his balance and would have fallen if Big Harry hadn’t grabbed his arms. Harry picked up the young man and carried him into the back room.

“Want me to call the doctor, Ma’am?” he asked.

“No,” she said, opening her medical kit. “I think I know what to do by now.”

She lived at the base of Skinner Butte in a big, rambling house that someone had placed on the register of historic places, but had then neglected to record the history. Her apartment on the second floor had a spectacular view of the city and, off in the distance, the Cascades and the Three Sisters. She had no real use for Oregon’s tree- and snow-covered mountains, although she found them pretty. She was a flatlander, born and bred in the Midwest, who had fallen in love with the deserts of the Southwest. But she had come to accept her life here, with its solitude and quiet, uneventful days.

The cat dozed on the windowsill, occasionally opening an eye to gaze at the mountains. To him, they represented a wild place, a place where, if he had been born five sizes larger, he would live and hunt and be free. She ran her fingers through his black fur and he gave a soft purr.

Then she set the envelopes down, pulled off her coat, and hurried to the bedroom. There, through the window, she could see the cold light of the cross creeping down the hillside, looking for something, looking for her.

Water, salt, lotion and shade. When Laurel treated those people, her back room smelled like calamine. She would hear their secrets, people talking because they were lonely, because, for the first time in years, someone was taking care of them. And then they would heal, and they would realize what they had said. Their smiles would become rigid and they would leave, quickly, as if she had embarrassed them.

This young man was different. His sunburn wasn’t as bad as she had originally thought and he wasn’t as dehydrated. He took the salt tablets she gave him wordlessly, as if he knew what they were, and he put the lotion on himself. Then he slept for nearly forty-eight hours, waking only for meals and to go to the bathroom.

“Finally found yourself one, eh, Laurel?” Gus asked on the middle of the second day.

“He’s still sick, Gus.” She wiped the counter with an old towel. Its sour smell rose up and twisted the inside of her nose.

Big Harry and Gus glanced at each other. “Sure, honey,” Big Harry said. “But if I was you, I’d move that big fancy jeep of his before someone takes it for parts.”

She glanced out the window. His jeep sat there, gathering dust from the driveway and the underused highway. If she walked out there now and tried the door, she would burn her fingers. “I think it’ll be safe enough,” she said.

On the third day, he woke up near dusk, his eyes clear and his expression bright. “I had the strangest dream,” he said. “Tall, cool, silver things in the desert, calling to me.”

“It wasn’t a dream.” Laurel handed him his dinner—a thick cheeseburger on an equally thick bun, homemade fries and milk. He looked at it as if he hadn’t seen food for days.

“You telling me it’s real?” he asked.

Laurel set the tray down and stole a fry for herself. “I don’t know if it’s real or not,” she said. “I just know that it’s there.”

She sat at the dining room table and opened her mail. Pictures fell out, sliding across the polished wood surface, and glaring at her with reproduced accusing eyes. She knew what the letters would say: Find him; Heal me; Please, in the name of Jesus, save her. Wadded bills and checks were taped to the hand-scrawled letters. She set them all aside to return later and opened the final envelope.

Another check, this one from Sylvie, the next installment on the café. No note, no letter. Just the agreed-upon sum. Laurel pocketed that check and sighed.

His name was Mark and he was on his way home to Oregon. He had lived in Southern California for three years “drinking too much,” he said, “to shut off his brain.” She guessed, from his deep tan and muscular body, that he had been some kind of athlete, but he never told and she never asked. He was young, maybe twenty-five, but she could ignore that if she didn’t concentrate on his wrinkle-free skin.

She too said very little about herself. She told him she was forty, a truth she usually told no one. She told him about buying the café, but didn’t tell him why she had chosen a site fifty miles from nowhere, her only customers scared tourists unused to long stretches of barren highway and the regulars who drove truck or lived on tiny, unprofitable ranches on the little dirt roads leading off into the sagebrush.

They had had their conversations in the whipping wind, talking rapidly lest the dust thicken their tongues as they bounced along those same dirt roads in Mark’s jeep. He was determined to find the tall, cool, silver things—Gus’s spaceships—even though she had tried to talk him out of it.

“They don’t appear to people who look for them,” she said that first day. The sun was going down, but the heat still shimmered along the desert.

Mark covered both seats with towels, then got into the jeep. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m going to find them.”

Laurel threw one last look at the café. She had left Sylvie in charge. Not much had happened at twilight. The regulars went home to their wives and the tourists found a roadside motel to protect them from the eeriness of the desert at night. Sylvie could handle the occasional customer—and the quiet.

Laurel got into the jeep. She could feel the heat radiating from the plastic, through the terry cloth, through the denim of her jeans. “They never appear at night,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find them.”

And he drove. Every night for two weeks, they drove. Laurel saw parts of the desert she had never seen before; hill after hill, scrabbled cactus, and the drifting, inevitable sagebrush. Once they found a skull. Laurel thought it belonged to a coyote, but Mark was certain it had belonged to something different.

Then, one night, he stopped the jeep. The desert stretched for miles around them, offering nothing but sand and scrub dusted by moonlight. It was cold. Mark reached in back and brought out a woven Indian blanket. He wrapped it around them, as if they were sharing a bench at a football game, then reached beside the driver’s seat and pulled out a thermos and two thermal cups. He poured steaming coffee, thick with cream, just as she liked it, and handed her a cup. He poured another cup for himself. She waited, knowing that this was something important.

“Why do you come with me?” He stared straight ahead as he asked the question, almost as if he were speaking to the desert itself.

The stars were deep, bright pinpoints of light against the black sky. Laurel took a sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue. She had been driving all those years ago, just driving to—how could she put it?—escape. Then she decided she couldn’t say anything about that, and simply said, “I saw them. Twice. The first time, it was mid-afternoon and I was driving down from Idaho. And there they were, tall and silver and cool.”

Like a mirage that wasn’t a mirage. She knew that if she walked over to them and touched their sides, her hands would freeze to the metal like they used to when she licked them and touched her slide in the middle of winter. The spaceships sang to her, and the singing lulled her, rocked her gently, until the conscious part of her mind reminded her that she was in a desert, in the sun, in the heat, and somehow the convertible had found its way to the café and coolness.

“The second time, I was looking for them, only I pretended I wasn’t. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, standing like sentinels guarding the entrance to a secret fortress. This time I decided I would touch them. I got out of the car and they disappeared. Shimmered once and then completely disappeared.”

She smiled at the memory, as real as if it had happened that morning. “I would have thought they were a dream-vision if it weren’t for all the other people who have seen them too. Even Gus has seen them, although he won’t admit it.”

Mark nodded, finished his coffee, and capped the thermos. He put his hand on hers as if to thank her. They sat like that for over an hour, listening to an occasional howl from a distant coyote and letting the mystery of the desert envelope them like a hidden lover.

She listened to the news as she cooked dinner. The latest hijacking, the newest scandal, meant no more to her than she meant to the cat. He rubbed on her legs for attention sometimes, but that was only because he wanted food. She rubbed against newsprint, thumbed the radio dial, but that was only because she wanted entertainment, because she wanted company.

She took her meal—Spanish rice, tortilla chips, and refried beans—and sat at the dining room table. The envelopes bearing their hopeful letters reproached her. If she were a different woman she would take the money, touch the pictures, see if she could find the missing, comfort the bereaved. But she was not a different woman. She enjoyed her privacy as she had once enjoyed her powerlessness—only now, she recognized that she had privacy. She never realized that she was powerless until powerlessness was gone.

They had been working their way around in a circle and finally, they had reached the beginning again. Mark took her out that night anyway, on a road they had traveled before. There were no tire tracks, no tall, cool, silver things, nothing to prove they had been this way before, just their memories and the map they had been charting their route on. Twenty miles down the road, Mark stopped the jeep.

“Look,” he said, and pointed to the top of a hillside. A cross, illuminated by tiny floods at its base, beamed its message to an empty landscape. “You ever go cross-watching?”

She shook her head.

“I do,” he said and laughed in the way that people do when they reveal something potentially embarrassing. “Sometimes I think that those crosses are put there by aliens to signal each other. Hiding behind the tenets of a human religion. By placing the crosses a certain way, they send messages to each other and we look at the crosses and wonder who would place them so high and far away, always thinking that the ‘who’ is human.”

“But you don’t believe that,” she said not as a question, because his tone, so matter-of-fact, told her that, indeed, he did not. He was merely saying something preposterous to protect himself against her reaction to his real belief.

“And then I think maybe the people—the humans—who put up crosses and those ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’ signs are the real aliens. Human beings aren’t that fanatic. We’re complex beings with scattered interests, not obsessed with one thing to the exclusion of everything else.”

We’re obsessed, she thought, but said nothing because this time he was open to her, expressing something he truly thought.

“And then I think about the people those cross-bearers follow, the TV-preachers and the tabloid-psychics, people who take the money from their impoverished fellows and tell them to erect crosses on hillsides so that their prayers will be answered. And I wonder what is alien and what is normal.” He ran his hand through his hair, grown out now and almost ill-kempt.

“And that’s why you’re searching.”

“Maybe,” he said.

She took out her yellow legal pad and began answering the letters she had piled on her table. Perhaps, when she had the money, she would buy a computer so that the letter she wrote wouldn’t have to be copied from memory night after night. Dear so-and-so, I’m sorry that I cannot help you. While it is true I have certain powers, I choose not to use them for money . . .

She remembered the first time she had, the only time she had, shortly after the tabloids printed their first article on the Nevada Café Owner’s Amazing Powers, after she had learned how to use the gift she had received when Mark died. She had helped an old woman track her son, a vet lost, supposedly, to the Viet Cong. He was living in the United States, with a Vietnamese wife and two children. He hadn’t contacted his mother because he knew that she would never understand. To her, he believed, it was better that he appear lost or dead than married to an Asian woman. He had been right.

Ink smudges marred the side of her right hand and her fingers cramped. The cat lay in his perch at the window, but didn’t look at the mountains. He was watching the light of the cross creep slowly over the house and down the lawn.

Places had certain resonances, she thought when he stopped the jeep nights later at the same spot they had drank coffee and talked. They had said no more of crosses, but she had begun to notice them, sticking like white spikes in the hillsides, little messages from alien gods.

Mark grabbed the blanket from the back and got out of the jeep. “Come on,” he said. She wondered if he was trying to conjure up the spaceships with a more personal heat than the desert provided.

He spread the blanket on a bare patch of ground beneath a small knoll and extended his hand to her.

“Creatures live in the sand,” she said.

“I’ll make you forget them,” he said. And with his twenty-five-year-old body, he did.

He did.

Sometimes she wished she could go back to being the woman she had been before Mark. She remembered escaping the failed marriage, the failed career, finding the desert, the spaceships and the café like she remembered stories other people had told about their own lives. Somewhere she had lost her connection, her ability to believe. Everything was real. She could imagine nothing any more. Even the cat’s fantasies were more interesting than the workings of her own mind. Cat fantasies, which she could touch because they lived together, without even touching the cat.

The cross worried her.

She hadn’t seen crosses since Mark died. She used to tell herself that was because she wasn’t looking any more. But that was wrong. Maybe it was like searching for the spaceships. Maybe she was looking too hard.

She pushed aside the last letter, grabbed her coat and keys and stepped outside without saying goodbye to the cat. Down the hill, she could see the bustle of shoppers crossing the street, their arms laden with packages.

She wondered what they believed in and then decided that it didn’t matter.

The cross seemed to have grown. It loomed large against the hillside, its white light ending unnaturally, only a few inches from her feet.

Is she stepped from the sidewalk onto the illuminated grass, would she lose her power? Would the light speak to her? Change her? Or would she be the same? A middle-aged woman living out a young man’s half-articulated dream, a dream he had abandoned in her desert nearly five years ago.

She stared up at the cross and it seemed to be staring back, waiting.

It was dawn when they got off the blanket, tired, sand-covered, and tingly. Laurel brushed off her clothes as Mark shook the sand from the weave. He put the blanket in the back of the jeep, then grabbed her arm.

“Stare straight ahead,” he said.

She did. And there they were, off to the left, tall, cool and silver, like rocket ships from 1950s pulps, only blurring somehow, perhaps because she wasn’t looking at them directly, but through the corner of her eye.

“I want to touch them,” he said.

But you just touched me, she wanted to say, although she said nothing. He wasn’t hers to hold.

“Come with me.”

She watched them shimmer as the sun’s rays grew warmer. Whose dream were they? Hers or his? She had discovered them first, but he had searched, methodically, painstakingly, until he found them.

“Laurel?”

She didn’t move. He stood beside her for a moment, but only for a moment, then hurried in the direction of the spaceships, never looking at them, always studying the ground, but she knew he could see them at the edges of his vision. When he seemed halfway there, she turned and watched him, careful not to stare directly at the silver coolness.

Finally he reached them and disappeared between them with a cry not unlike the one he had made as he had entered her. That was when she began to run across the sand, feeling the heat already, seeping into her shoes, her body, and she wondered how long she had been standing in the sun before he disappeared.

She watched the sagebrush, the snakes and the scorpions, always searching for him in the shiny silver towers just ahead. When she was within a few yards, she called him and heard nothing but her own cry reflected in the dry air. Another cry began, a low moan, too deep to be Mark’s, and it so startled her, that she looked up. The spaceships seemed solid, and she realized that they weren’t spaceships at all, but buildings in some kind of city, whether past, present or future, she couldn’t tell. But as she looked at them, they began to waver like heat visions, and she ran harder, her breath coming ragged in her burning lungs, her hands extended before her, her mind screaming for Mark, although she couldn’t waste the air, the effort to use the lips. The buildings grew faint, then strong, then faint, but she managed to reach one, to touch it, before they faded completely, and it was as she had known it would be—frosty cold, so cold that it burned—and her palm stuck to the steel, and as the building faded into nothingness, she saw a tiny handprint—hers—fade with it.

Later, they told her, a helicopter spotted her, and someone picked her up. She stared at her burned hand for days and when she finally asked about Mark, they told her he had disappeared in the desert and was probably dead. But she didn’t cry because she knew different. Whenever she touched things with her injured hand, she could see him in that cold silver city, searching still, whether for something he hadn’t found or for her, she did not know.

She stared at the light inching toward her feet. Cross light. She hadn’t cared about crosses until Mark had mentioned them, just like he hadn’t cared about spaceships until she had asked him if he had seen them. Just as he had chased her obsession, she was chasing his.

She stepped into the blue-white light. It didn’t feel cold or alien as she had expected it to. She didn’t feel different at all. A sadness went through her as the last belief, the belief that Mark’s crosses would give her back her spaceships, ebbed away.

Then she turned and saw her shadow haloed in blue-white light, looking alien, looking different. When Mark had disappeared, she had donned his dreams, thinking she couldn’t follow him, thinking she had to do what he would have done had he stayed.

The cross dared her to the top of the hill.

She sighed, then started up the narrow, winding footpath that eased its way through the trees. The butte was quiet. No parkers, no evening visitors, no one except her, her breathing, and her feet scrabbling along the path. She wasn’t frightened, but the light made her feel as if she walked in a world with hard edges, where trees bit and shadows had sharp corners. Had Mark felt this way as he crossed the desert, as if he were alone and in a strange place? Or had his excitement driven him forward?

Finally, the butte leveled off and she could see the cross. It stood like a guardian at the edge of a precipice. A lone sentinel watching her pilgrimage with a detached cool interest.

She had stared straight on like this at the spaceships—the city—and they had shimmered. But the cross seemed to grow stronger. Her hand tingled and she remembered the feel of the silver burning her before it faded away.

Could the cross heal her? If she reached out and touched it, would it take away the power, the curse her shimmering desert city had given her?

She extended her hand and it shook. On the dirt below, her shadow looked as if the planes of her body were square instead of rounded. A box shadow, drawn by a child and a ruler.

The cross grew stronger, the blue light almost silver in its whiteness. Laurel stepped forward, wishing for the healing; and she walked, the light became a solid thing in her hand. A vision came to her of TV preachers, speaking against blue backdrops, the white light of their image crawling from the television set, flickering silver across the viewers’ faces.

And then she remembered Mark, wandering in that cool, silver city, still searching for something he would never find. He was conducting her search and she had never told him what she was looking for. Just as he had never really told her why he watched crosses. If she touched that cross, she would be trapped forever in a place like this, a place where she didn’t belong.

She put her hand down and the light from the cross seemed to dim. As she watched, the light retreated, sucked into the cross, until the structure itself grew dark and black. The cross winked out as quickly as a heat mirage.

The halo had slipped off her shadow like an overlarge suit. She stood in the darkness, enjoying it, then she reached into her back pocket. Sylvie’s check had been folded into small pieces. Laurel unfolded it, and slowly, methodically, ripped it apart. It was time to leave the trees and the snow-covered mountains. Time to forget the dreams of a man whose presence was only a memory.

She would go back to her world. Her desert. And start looking for spaceships.

Or cities.

Or tall, cool, silver things shimmering in the sand.

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“Spaceships In The Desert” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Spaceships in the Desert

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Starshore, Summer 1990Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Sarahluna | Dreamstime

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

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Here’s something fun. My award-nominated novella, “Maelstrom,” is in a Storybundle with eight other space opera ebooks. It may look like there’s only eight books here, but really, there are entire series bundled into some of these ebooks.

You can get them all with a simple click. But they go away in about 48 hours. So hurry on over.

And, in case you’re on the fence, here’s the blurb for “Maelstrom.”

Nedda Ferguson-Lithe lost her father on the Gabriella’s final mission. The ship’s disappearance remains one of the great mysteries of the sector.

But as Nedda interviews the crew’s survivors, she finds more questions than answers.

No one knows who or what causes the maelstroms that make exploring Nájar Crater on Madreperla so dangerous. But everyone knows that the rumors of the crater’s riches prove far too tempting despite the danger.

Every time a ship ventures into that crater, a maelstrom drives it out. Or destroys it. Nedda hopes to find out which fate met the Gabriella—and her father.

Nominated for the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award for best novella, Maelstrom proves a heart-wrenching standalone addition to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s award-winning Diving Series.

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Gift first saw the lights as a baby. The faerie lights promised him a different life from the one he would know in the castle.

But he couldn’t resist the pull of the mortal world. And that curiosity might change the course of not one, but two, kingdoms forever.

An unforgettable story about magic, choices and love, which inspired part of World Fantasy Award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s international bestselling Fey series. Investigate the series at World of the Fey.

“Changeling” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

ChangelingBy Kristine Kathryn RuschThe colored lights danced over his baptismal crib. He didn’t have words yet—he was only four days old—and the world still blurred before his half-opened eyes. He had been left alone for just a moment. His pagan mother, Queen in more than name, arguing with his Christian father over the necessity for the ceremony. The nurses huddled against the strong oak doors, listening through the cracks as the Queen vented her fears about the holy water about to be dripped on her son’s head.

The baby, whose father wanted to call him Sebastian and whose mother wanted to call him Elric, reached toward the lights, pudgy fingers grasping with the odd strength that only babies had. By accident, he touched a blue light and pulled his hand away with a startled cry. With the smell of sulfur and a bit of smoke, the blue light had become a tiny naked woman, with thin wings shimmering on her back.

“Got him,” she said.

The other lights stopped flickering and floated to her, each popping and becoming little naked people as well. The baby watched them, his fingers stinging with heat, and turning blue at the tips. He whimpered as the little people wove a gossamer net around him, but his nurses, intent on the argument that had just missed—by the width of a poorly aimed goblet—coming to blows, heard nothing. The net was soft and warm around him. As it lifted him in the air, his fingers stopped stinging, and he could almost smell his mother’s milk. The rocking and the milky scent soothed him. As the little people carried him to the window, he felt a calm he had never known before.

He turned his small head in its nest and looked down on his former bed. Another being had already taken his place, fingers curled over the baptismal blanket as if to hold it tight.

“Changeling,” the baby thought, marking not just his first word, but the arrival of his conscious being, born a full adult, thanks to the fairies’ magic touch.

Arianna opened the sash covering the window overlooking the garden. She climbed on the window seat, tucking her bare feet under her long dressing gown. Sunshine warmed her, and the scent of roses filled the room. She leaned back and closed her eyes, not wanting to see the tapestry-covered walls that she had seen every morning of her entire life. The thick featherbed leaning against the wall was rumpled—no one had come in yet to fix it or dress her—and the fire in the grate had burned to ash in the middle of the night.

But it didn’t matter. The morning was warm and beautiful, just as Mother had predicted it would be. Mother had been upset each time she spoke of the coronation: her bejeweled hands clasped as if in protest and her great green eyes filled with tears. She had never liked Elric, always claiming that he was not her child, something Father had laughed at, recalling the Great Baptism Debates and before that, the Awful Royal Birth Screams that had echoed from the chambers above.

Lord, how she missed her father. His calmness had been the perfect foil to their mother’s odd notions. Besides, he had always found time to spend with his children, even when their mother did not.

Mother had managed to stall the coronation for six weeks, but the Lords had finally overruled her. Mother had said nothing of it, but Arianna assumed that the Lords had threatened to overthrow her if she didn’t allow Elric to take the throne.

Not that Elric cared. Elric did whatever anyone told him, which should have pleased Mother, if she had wanted to retain power. All she had to do was order Elric to listen to no one but her.

Something rustled in the garden below. Arianna opened her eyes and leaned out, hoping to see a deer. She had seen one on the morning of her father’s death, and Mother had said that proved she had second sight, had seen the death warning, and failed to heed it. Arianna had said that it proved there was a deer in the garden and nothing else.

The rose bushes were in full flower. Red and white flowers stood out like drops of paint against the rich green leaves. Off to the side were the hedgerows, marking the delineation between the rose garden and the rest of the flowers. A bird burst out of a copse of trees to her left and Arianna started to turn away, thinking that was what she had heard, when she realized she had seen something else.

A shiny black head of hair half hidden among the cluster of white rose bushes in the center of the garden. She made herself turn back slowly, trying to ease the beating of her heart. When she was a child, her mother used to tell stories of tribes of evil woodsmen who beheaded children and used their hair for court wigs. Even though Nurse later explained that those were tales designed to keep the children on the palace grounds, part of Arianna still believed the stories to be true.

The hair moved, just a little, enough so that Arianna was convinced that it was attached to someone. She leaned out the window, careful to grip the cold stone sill. At that moment, the person stood, and she was startled to see Elric, surveying the garden as if he had never seen it before.

She pulled herself back enough to stay out of his view. Elric looked odd. His shoulders seemed wider, and his mouth had a curl to it, almost as if it would ease into a smile or snarl at any moment. His skin looked white in the morning sun and his black hair darker than it usually appeared.

But that wasn’t what surprised her. What surprised her were his eyes. They had a sharpness, an alertness, to them that she had never seen before.

“Elric!” she called. “You’re supposed to be in your rooms!”

He glanced up at her, eyes as wild as the deer she had seen, and then he shimmered and disappeared.

Caught. Seen by a switch of a girl no bigger than his aunt Fay. If they knew back at the Gates, they would laugh him from the Ring, and he would lose his chance to become king of them all at the Midsummer Frolic.

He crouched in the shadows of the trees. The girl still leaned from the window, searching the garden, trying to find him. She had a familiar look to her, a brightness to her eyes, that only those with a touch of Trueblood had. If she looked hard enough, she could probably see him, even now. Truebloods could not hide from each other.

She went back inside and he sighed with relief. He had been a fool coming here so close to the solstice, but he couldn’t stay away. After he became king, he would never return to the mortal world. He would stay in the Ring, protected by magic, until his powers waned and a new king rose to take his place.

A shiver ran down his back. In the shade, the ground was damp. He wasn’t used to being in the mortal world in the daylight. Birds flitted from tree to tree just as they did in the Ring, and the sun had a warmth he had never felt before.

Something about the castle drew him. Something that whispered at the edge of his memory.

Elric.

She had called him Elric.

(“Sebastian!”

(“Elric!”

(“Woman, I’ll have none of your heathen names for my son. He was born into a Christian household and Christian he’ll remain!”)

The People called him Gift. He remembered the naming ceremony around the fire. He had rested in a new cradle made of ferns and twigs and the remains of his net. They had called him Gift and thanked the forest gods that they had been able to save him.

He would receive a new name, should he be crowned in the darkness.

Elric, you’re supposed to be in your room.

He had been in this castle before. Flashes (another being in his place) had haunted him each time he stood in the garden. They would haunt him until he died.

Unless he settled it now.

She had thought him Elric. Elric he would become.

Arianna did not move as Lissa tugged on her hair. Mother had dictated the dress and the hairstyle: several long braids wrapped around her head and decorated in pearls. Arianna loved to have her hair fall free, but Mother said that was unbecoming to a woman without a husband. Mother’s husband had died, but she still wore her hair long and flowing down her back. Arianna wondered if she would ever be able to do the same.

Arianna’s reflection in the rippled glass showed a face white with strain. Lissa held her lower lip between her teeth as she combed. Mother had beat Lissa with a comb once when Arianna’s hair had tumbled down her shoulders during dinner. Lissa had vowed never to let that happen again.

Lissa pulled so hard that Arianna’s head wobbled. She would not cry out. She would say nothing. She wanted out of this room as quickly as possible. She wanted to see Elric.

If she closed her eyes, she could see him there, movements as wild as an animal’s. He had shimmered and disappeared, but as she had crouched down from the window, she had thought she saw him in the trees, staring at her.

Her brother had always been odd, but his oddness had never seemed purposeful before.

“Are you almost done?” she snapped at Lissa.

“I still have half the head, Highness,” Lissa said, “and it must be right for the Queen.”

“The Queen be hanged,” Arianna said, but not loudly enough for Lissa to hear. Arianna feared her mother’s wrath as much as the maid did.

The castle was cold. He thought it odd that mortals would choose to live in a place colder than the outdoors. The air smelled damp and musty, and strangely familiar.

He had never seen so much activity in one place. In the large kitchen, the only warm room he had found, women, wearing kerchiefs over their hair, tended fires in large stone boxes. The room smelled of cooked game and fresh bread. His mouth watered, but mortal food was not what he was after.

In the larger gathering rooms, servants added decorations to the walls. Up the flat stone steps, a woman with the shine of a Trueblood allowed another woman to help her dress. The girl he had seen sat before a mirror while another girl played with her hair. Men in other chambers helped each other dress. But only one chamber drew him, one he remembered being in when he was so tiny he could not speak.

The oak door was closed, but he spoke softly to the dying wood. It answered creakingly in great pain from the metal studs someone had poked in its frame. He brushed his hand along the scarred surface, easing some of the pain, and the door slid open for him, without a sound.

He slipped inside. The cold walls were covered with woven rugs, decorated with great care. Voices echoed from the inner chamber. He walked around the gilt edged chairs and made himself shimmer like light before stepping into the carved open doorway.

His shimmer nearly left him. He froze, cold as the surface of a pond on a winter day. Standing before him, wrapped in heavy woolen robes, was the being he had last seen as a baby. Only now it looked like a waxen image of himself.

Another man bobbed and danced around the image. “…bit warm, Highness,” the man was saying, “But lovely. Yes, impressive. The others will be pleased to see the wealth this kingdom has. You must walk firm, my Lord Elric, as if you own it all, since you do now. You do.”

Elric. You should be in your rooms.

Elric! ’Tis a royal name from my people! You shall not corrupt him by naming him for some misbegotten saint!

His fingers twitched and the sharp blue pain he had felt ever since he could remember returned. Lights. Lights. He had seen lights and touched them and then…

…he was beside the fire and they were calling him Gift. He was no gift. He was one of the many babies brought to faerie because the fey had grown old and corrupt and could no longer bear their own.

His shimmer disappeared and he had to catch the cold stone to keep himself from falling. No wonder Fay had to boost his magic when he confronted the adults. The little bit of Trueblood wouldn’t carry the magic required of a full Trueblood. He was mortal. He was mortal and they never told him.

A rustle behind him made him turn. The girl was there, looking older, the hair piled on top of her head and wrapped in pearls. Her dress clung to her chest, then widened at her hips until he could barely see her tiny slippers peaking out.

“Elric,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in a frown, “why aren’t you dressed?”

He grabbed the shimmer, pulled it back around him and pushed against the wall. Her frown grew. She reached out, and would have put her hand through him if he had not moved away.

“Milady Arianna?” the manservant spoke.

The girl shot a suspicious glance at his hiding spot, then walked into the other room. “Elric,” she said, looking at the waxen image. “Elric? Is that you?”

Because Mother had waited so long, the Lords had decided to hold the coronation in the church. Arianna arrived early, knowing she would catch her mother there.

The church was a miniature version of the castle. Made of stone and mortar, with towers on all four sides, it looked like a child’s play toy instead of a place of worship. Arianna had stepped inside only once—for her father’s funeral—and she had been very uncomfortable.

Inside, the church was colder than the castle’s closed east wing. The back pews were made of stone and were covered, just for today, with thin red cushions embroidered with the family’s crest. The front pews were wooden boxes, designed to hold and protect the gentry from the masses. The King’s box, rarely used, had a small platform leading up to it, so that the King would sit higher than anyone else in the room.

Arianna stood in the door for a moment, getting her bearings. Her mother’s voice echoed from one of the back rooms: high, strident, and forceful. Arianna didn’t know how the bishop could argue with her. No one argued with Mother.

Arianna walked down the stone floor. A rolled up red rug would be laid for her brother, but not until he appeared. The stone sent chills through her thin slippers, and she stifled the urge to sneeze.

Her father had lost the religion battle, just as he had lost most battles with his overbearing wife. Arianna sometimes thought he had died early, just to get away from Mother.

She followed the voices into a group of rooms of the King’s box. The rooms were done in gold and red, with plush chairs and big oak desks. Mother always said the church had money. Here was the proof of it.

The Bishop faced Arianna. He wore his white and gold robes, and clutched a staff so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. His round face held no expression at all except for two red spots on his cheeks. Arianna knew the feeling. Sometimes a club to the head might make Mother talk sense.

Mother towered over the Bishop. She had insisted on wearing her specially built shoes with the three-inch heel, making her taller than anyone in the Kingdom. Her dress, made with real gold thread, and heavier than the King’s coronation crown, shimmered in the candlelight.

“You will not touch him, nor will you douse him in holy water,” Mother said with such force that Arianna knew that she had repeated the sentence at least a dozen times.

“It is part of the ceremony, Highness, and as such, I cannot skip the ritual. The foreign nobles will know.”

“Foreign nobles be hanged!” Mother said. “He is not a Christian. He does not need Christian trappings at his coronation.”

“He will be a Christian king, Highness, ruling a Christian nation.”

Mother waved a hand and the Bishop winced. “If only his father were alive. He would come up with some kind of compromise.”

“If Father were alive,” Arianna said, “we wouldn’t be having the coronation.”

Mother whirled. “Arianna!” Her voice held relief. “Show him what holy water does to my children.”

Arianna swallowed. The burn marks ached. She had dipped her fingers in holy water after a ceremony held in the palace. Nurse had to put out Arianna’s burning skin with her skirt. Father had warned Arianna never to show the Bishop the scars. He said that would be grounds for a complete revolt against the monarchy.

“It makes us nervous, Bishop,” she said, ignoring her mother’s plea-filled gaze. “Perhaps you can wave—” she didn’t know the term for the equipment he used “—that thing over my brother’s head and pretend there is water in it. After all, we’re going to pretend that he’s a Christian king since none of us know the first thing about your religion.”

“Arianna!” Mother hissed.

“Quite right, Arianna, quite right,” the Bishop said. “A compromise worthy of your father. Then the other nations will think we have a Christian king, and I will not have shirked my duties.”

Odd that he didn’t worry about the reaction of his god. Arianna sighed. She didn’t have time to think about that. “Mother, I need to talk with you.”

Her mother glanced at the Bishop, then at Arianna, as if she couldn’t believe the argument had been so easily settled. “What is it?”

“Privately, Mother.”

“All right.” Mother shot another angry look at the Bishop, then left the room and followed Arianna out of the church. As they stepped across the threshold, Mother wiped her shoes to get the stench of holiness off them. “What’s so important?”

“I saw something strange in the garden,” Arianna said. She explained Elric’s odd behavior and the way the new image of him had disappeared twice, both times leaving a shimmer that she could barely touch.

“And you can see that shimmer?” Mother asked.

Arianna nodded. “It doesn’t go away, no matter what I do. If I squint, if I touch it, no matter what, it stays.”

Mother sighed and shook her head. “We need to take you home and get you tested,” she said. “I should have known when that holy water exploded on you—”

“Mother, please.” Arianna had been listening to that speech since the deer in the garden.

Mother smiled absently and patted Arianna’s arm. “If you see that shimmer during the coronation, I want you to point it out to me,” she said. “Then stand back.”

A small crowd of people had disembarked from a carriage near the gate. “What is going on?” Arianna asked.

Mother’s smile grew wider. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I think there’s magic in the air.”

He shimmered against the wall until the manservant left. The waxen image still stood in front of the mirror, unmoving. It appeared to be staring at itself, but he knew that it was waiting for someone to tell it what to do.

Mortals were such fools. They actually believed that lump was a real being? If he had not come back, the waxen image’s reflexes would have slowed to nothing. It needed power from its home source and he knew he was that source.

He was Elric.

The name suited him better than Gift. He wiped the shimmer off his skin and went into the dressing room. The waxen image turned at the sound. Elric approached and touched it, feeling the clammy skin, shivering at the lifeless eyes.

He let the image go. So he had been home here, once. Not long, though. They had taken him young, as they often did.

He had time. He hadn’t expected to find the answers so quickly. He would follow this image and see what its day was like.

Arianna sat on the altar beside her mother, staring at the Bishop as he repeated his admonitions to the new Christian King. Elric hadn’t moved from his spot in the back of the church. He looked normal now—a bit slow, and witless, the kind of man who would always do what he was told. Was that why the Lords wanted to speed up the coronation? So that they would have a malleable king? Did that mean that Mother would have to fight for her very existence?

Arianna sighed. She didn’t like thinking of the future.

The Bishop finished his lecture. One of the churchmen in the back signaled Elric to walk down the aisle. Two young boys walked before him, opening the red carpet. Elric walked as he was told: step, pause, step, pause; never taking his eyes off the front of the church. Mother stood and Arianna stood beside her, feeling a strange fear in the back of her throat.

Elric knelt on the steps leading to the altar. The Bishop walked down two steps to tower over his future king.

Something shimmered on the back of Elric’s coronation robe. Arianna tugged her mother’s overlong sleeve. “There,” she whispered, pointed to Elric’s feet. “There it is.”

Mother frowned.

The Bishop turned and dipped his staff in the holy water. Arianna turned white. He had promised. He had said she had come up with a good compromise. She started across the altar, her mother grabbing at her skirts.

“No, Arianna!”

“…e Spiritu Santu—”

She grabbed the Bishop just as her mother grabbed her, just as the holy water flew from the bulbous end of the staff. The water landed on Elric and splattered the back of his robe, the carpet and the people sitting in the front boxes. A drop landed on Arianna’s hand and a small fire flared, sending sharp pains through her skin.

She slapped it out. Another fire started on Elric’s robe. Elric himself looked up at the Bishop—and smiled, truly smiled for the first time in his life. Then he vanished, leaving only bits of clay and earth on the collapsing robe.

The nobles in front screamed. The church smelled of smoke. Mother had pushed the Bishop aside and was struggling down the steps in her too-tall shoes. The fire on the back of the robe had grown until it was the shape of a man.

Elric. It was Elric. Not the one who had disappeared, but the one she had seen that morning, with his lively blue eyes and strong quick-moving fingers.

The Bishop picked up the bowl of holy water and made to throw it on Elric, but Arianna grabbed his arm. “No,” she said, wincing as more water spilled on her. “It won’t put out the fire.”

Another flame sprouted on her arm, and she had to use the Bishop’s sleeve to put it out. He looked at her with such repulsion that she thought he was going to hit her.

Elric’s fire was out and he was cradled in his mother’s arms. She picked up the robe and wrapped it around him, murmuring, “My son! My son.”

One of the Lords stood. “I demand to know what has happened.”

“There is an enchantment—” The Bishop began.

“—which the Bishop broke,” Arianna replied. “That was why my brother was always so slow. The tears of Christ have made my brother himself again.”

A rustle of voices ran through the crowd. Elric staggered forward, held in place by Mother. She wasn’t going to let him go. He shot a glance at Arianna, a look filled with such panic that she felt her heart go to him. “What was that?” he whispered. His speech had an odd accent, a lilting, almost musical tone.

“Christian Holy Water,” she whispered.

“Christian?” He let out air, almost like a sigh, then began to struggle.

“Don’t move, you fool,” Mother hissed in her best command voice. “You can’t go back now. You can only stay with us. Best make what you can of it.”

“This is a Christian place?” His voice, mercifully, remained low. “I can’t stay here.”

“You have to,” Arianna said. “You’re being crowned King.”

“King?” He glanced at the door, then at the ceiling, then surveyed the burn marks on his skin. He looked at his fingers as if he expected something on them, but couldn’t find it. “I am mortal then.”

The Bishop yanked his sleeve from Arianna’s grasp. He looked at the crowd, then at Elric. Arianna could see the Bishop make a decision before he spoke. “Of course you’re not mortal, boy,” he said as quietly as his booming voice would allow. “You’re King—above man, above all except God.”

He waved the staff over Elric and spoke more Latin. The noble sat down, and Mother relaxed her grip. The coronation was done.

But Arianna watched that lively, intelligent male face. Her true brother. The coronation may have been over, but the fun was just beginning.

Elric had fallen asleep beside the fire, listening to the coo of his newborn son. He had been awake for nearly three days now, listening, waiting. The window open, the baptismal crib decorated just as he remembered it. He had banished the nurses and guarded the child himself.

Colored lights flew in the window. The baby’s coos grew louder as he saw the pretty colors. He reached for them, giggling as he did, accidentally touching one. A pop and the smell of sulfur filled the room, jarring Elric awake.

The fairy stopped her ministrations over the baby. She stood in midair and bowed to Elric.

“Human King,” she said in a mocking tone.

He reached for her, his fingers still heartbreakingly normal. The blue had been gone for years. “Take me back,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “You’ve been tainted,” she said. “I’ll take your son.”

He watched as the fairies wove a skein of light and wrapped it around his child. He wished he could speak to the boy, tell him that the world of magic was a better world than this, that there was hope there and—

The door burst open behind them. The fairies disappeared in a halo of light. Elric had to run forward and catch his son before the baby dropped back into the crib.

“They were here,” his mother said. “I smelled them.”

She reached into the air, touched a remaining light beam and winced as it popped. One fairy shook a fist at his mother and flew away. She turned on Elric. “You were going to let them take him.”

He stared up at her. She was Trueblood and powerful, but she had never scared him. She had chosen to give up her life for a life with humans. He clutched the baby to his chest.

“Yes,” he said. “I was going to let them take him.”

“Why? Don’t you remember? Don’t you know fairies can never love?”

He didn’t care about love. He was too fairy to know what it meant. But he remembered. He remembered the free flowing magic, the warm nights, the wonderful spectacle of lights. They hadn’t loved him, but they had given him laughter, which no one seemed to understand here.

He looked at her, and felt a sadness burn into his soul. “They’ll never come back now.”

“I know,” she said. “And now we are finally free.”

She took the baby from him and left the room. He went to the window and stared out, seeing lights flickering in the garden. He would call them back if he could, but he was mortal bound and ugly in their sight.

They would die off soon. Their line was too weak. He would never see them again.

“We’re not free,” he whispered to the uncaring wind. The lights around him winked out—one by one. “We’re all prisoners of our destiny.”

____________________________________________

Changeling

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in The Book of Kings, edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg, Roc, July 1995Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Steve51 | Dreamstime

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

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Still playing catch-up from our incredibly weird year. I’m not sure it was a bad year, because we got rid of a huge ugly problem in our lives, one we didn’t even know we had until January, and our business is thriving. Dean is healing, and we’ve made some good changes. So the year will end up being a positive one…even if I’m incredibly tired and behind on things like Recommended Reading because of it.

Well, I did the reading. You all know that. I just didn’t write up my likes. And to be completely honest, I put up the March list after leaving out one publication because I had so many recommendations from it. I wanted the March list up, so I moved everything from that magazine to April. That’s On Wisconsin for Winter of 2023. I needed to complete something, so I sacrificed accuracy for completion. Ultimately, I didn’t include everything, because some are UW specific and went into my library. But you’ll find a lot from that issue down below.

I’m slowly catching up on writing about the reading. For context, I did this reading in April, but wasn’t able to write much about it until July, August, and September. There’s a lot of great stuff here, though, and most of the articles are free. Take a look.

April 2024Benson, Harry, “Ticket To Ride,” Vanity Fair, February 2024. I seem to be collecting a ton of articles about the Beatles first visit to the U.S. in 1964. Because it was sixty years ago, everyone is writing and sharing pictures. Harry Benson, though, was traveling with them, and saw the change from famous band to pop icons. Of all the articles I’ve seen, this is the best.

Cartwright, Lachlan, “Take The Cash or Fight? Media Moguls Split on AI Deals,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 14, 2024. I’m pointing out this article to show you (especially you creatives) that the AI fight is complicated. So many people are trying to figure out what the generative AI future will be, and some people are hedging their bets. Some of it is because of the money, but some of it reflects the uses of AI. So read this and keep it in mind as we see more and more articles on generative AI.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, We Were Eight Years in Power, One World, 2018. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power is one of the most banned books in the United States. I’d been meaning to read it for years, and finally decided, heck, I’m going to do so. My copy is now dog-eared and underlined, with lots of yellow sticky notes. It’s an important book. It’s a meditation on writing, from a man who reread the essays he wrote while Barack Obama was in office after he knew that Trump had been elected. Some of the essays—particularly the first, about Bill Cosby—were dated even then. Some have become dated by now. But so much in here is still important, still worth reading. A lot of it is uncomfortable to read as well, in a challenging and good way. And much of it is filled with truths, including one that’s important in 2024, now that we have another cadidate of color.

Like this:

For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.

Or this:

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under the skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishment to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police.

I found lines and paragraphs and entire pages like this, all worth underlining, all still (sadly) true. This is an amazing book, one you might want to read and discuss with friends.

Gardner, Chris, “‘I’m Bloody Tired of Hiding,'” The Hollywood Reporter, February 28, 2024. Fascinating interview with Lynda Obst, the megaproducer, who has been in the business forever. Apparently, getting older and having a cancer diagnosis has made her a lot more forthcoming. A blunt and fascinating “no-whining” interview with a woman who has succeeded in the business longer than many of us have been alive. The attitude that gets her through everything when something goes wrong? They won. We lost. Next. You know, that’s kinda my attitude too. It works.

Glicksman, Josh, “A League of Their Own,” Billboard, February 10, 2024. A fascinating roundtable, timed before the Super Bowl featuring professionals who have, over the past few years, combined music and sport to create a whole new market. I’ve circled and underlined this to death. Pay attention to the discussion of rights here, and the possibilities presented by a whole new market. Then open your mind to changes in writing and marketing. You might not see what I’ve seen here, but you might get a picture of some of it.

McManus, Karen M., One of Us is Lying, Delacorte Press, 2017. I think, considering the spring I had, this book appealed to me just from the title. Only in the book, the liar is a mystery and unfortunately, in our lives this spring, the liar was not a mystery. Still, this is a fun, fascinating mystery novel which is pretty much the Breakfast Club as a locked room mystery. (Someone dies in detention.) Good characters, good writing. I enjoyed it enough to buy the sequel.

McManus, Karen M., One of Us is Next, Delacorte Press, 2020. I really didn’t think that McManus could pull off a sequel to One of Us is Lying, but she did. The ending was a bit abrupt, but that was okay. (It wasn’t okay when I finished the next book, which just…ended.) This was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Mitchell, Gail “Superstar: Usher,” Billboard, February 10, 2024. Fantastic article on what it means to be an artist with a long career. I circled and underlined a lot in here. Usher discusses creativity, staying relevant, whether it’s important to stay relevant, and remaining inspired. He also discusses how to keep all you’ve done before out of your head, as well as what the expectations of you are.

The article ends with this quote:

We’re as powerful as we choose to be. That’s what got me here. I just believed and didn’t pay attention to what anybody else had to say.

If you plan to have or already have a long career, read this.

Prince, Daisy, “Barbarians at the Glades,” Vanity Fair, February 2024. Fascinating and creepy article about Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, the changes that have occurred to both communities since the arrival of MAGA has upended the old order, and a bit about generational wealth. I’m sharing because this is a time to share the unease.

Provost, Megan, “What It Means To Succeed,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. The interview with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new provost is mostly about AI and his ideas about the way that AI will alter academia and the way that research gets done. I’m collecting all this AI information; I find it fascinating. I hope you do as well.

Schmitt, Preston, “Creating The Badger Brand,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. Wow. This is an amazing article. The UW was one of the last major universities to license its logo. It also had some issues figuring out what the logo was. (In fact, in a future issue, a man wrote in contesting some of the information in the article. After you read it, you’ll see why.) If you want to see the complexities of trademark and licensing, check this out.

Steinhoff, Jessica, “Surprising Stories From the UW Archives,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. This article made me want to travel home again, if only I could. I’m not surprised at some of the stories, like the material from the Sterling Hall bombing in 1970, but others did surprise me. I didn’t know, for example, that the 602 Club was an unofficial gay bar. And I certainly didn’t know about the mandolins from 1893. Take a look, just for the cool history.

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As many of you know, Dean and I had a heck of a year. I had more dental surgeries
than I want to think about. Dean fell during a 5K and shattered his shoulder, having
major surgery and PT. We had (and still have) a major business issue to deal with.

Of course all of those things had an impact on our writing. We slowed down or
stopped altogether. If we didn’t know better, we would have said we were blocked.
But we weren’t. Life got in the way. It does that sometimes. And sometimes, we as
writers get in our own way.

Dean and I made a list of over 50 things writers call “writer’s block.” The solution for
these things is not one-size-fits all.

We decided, based on our year and our hard-fought wisdom over decades, to help
writers through whatever they’re calling writer’s block.

We’ve designed two courses over 18 weeks, including 16 webinars and lots of
homework, to help writers overcome whatever is stopping them or slowing them
down.

We want to help writers return to the joy of writing.

These classes are new. They start on October 1. And until Monday, you can get
them at a discounted price.

Take a look at the website and the video Dean made explaining what we’re doing.
See if it’s for you.

Questions? See if Dean answered them on his website. Click here.

Join us in breaking free from writer’s block.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone for backing the Fey Kickstarter! I’m so thrilled that you like the books enough to support them early. Wait until you see how lovely they are. WMG has really started stepping up its game.

You should be getting surveys soon. Fill them out so that we can send everyone their books!

Thanks again!

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We have hit the last day of the Kickstarter for the newest Fey book, Incident at Serebro Academy. The book is a standalone adventure in the Fey saga—the perfect place to start. You can get the ebook with every reward, and that includes a discounted price on all of the Fey novels. We’ve hit stretch goals as well, so there’s lots of fantasy reading here, as well as some cool writing workshops.

Here’s the book’s blurb:

THE FEY ATTACK

A grisly ambush at Serebro Academy starts a race to uncover secrets that might save the Academy or destroy it entirely.

Magical maps, Fey spies, treachery and dangerous secrets. A stunning fantasy—impossible to put down.

This thrilling page-turner continues Rusch’s masterful melding of epic fantasy and steampunk while demonstrating once again her place as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

The book was fun to write, and it’s beautifully designed. Each chapter has art, which shows where on the map the action takes place.

So click on over to the Kickstarter and explore. You might find something just for you.

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Written as a prequel to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s popular Fey saga, “Destiny” follows the Shapeshifter Solanda on Nye. The Black King wants her to use her special abilities on a job that will change the Fey forever. But Solanda wants to change the life of one child. Can she do both? Or should she do nothing at all?

“Destiny” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here. If you want more Fey, visit our website, World of the Fey. And remember to go to the Fey Kickstarter that runs through Thursday, September 19.

DestinyKristine Kathryn RuschSOLANDA WALKED the cobblestone streets of Nir, the capitol city of Nye, her tail up. She had a meeting with Rugar, the son of the Black King. He had sent a Wisp to find her, and it had taken the little creature nearly a day to do so.

Solanda was in her cat form, as she had been since the Fey captured this repressed country—and thus very difficult to find. The Nyeians had many faults—they were prissy, overdressed, and pasty faced, not to mention abominably poor soldiers—but they did treat their animals well. She had found a family who fed her to excess, allowed her to roam outside, and pampered her as no cat should be pampered.

How appalled they would be if they ever discovered the golden cat their daughter had adopted was really a Fey Shapeshifter.

Solanda’s tail twitched once in amusement. Every day she imagined eating her lovely tuna dinner in the glass plate that the family gave her, and then Shifting into her Fey form just to say thank you.

She didn’t know what would appall the Nyeians the most: the fact that she was Fey, or the fact that she would be naked. She doubted any of them had seen a naked woman before: the wife managed to change her clothing one piece at a time, without ever taking it all off at once, and the husband didn’t seem to think this unusual. He would probably be more shocked than his wife at the appearance of a naked Fey woman in his house. He would probably fall over in a dead faint.

Only the daughter, a girl of five, was redeemable. Esmerelda was a good child. She had to be. She was raised Nyeian. Her mother trussed her in layers upon frothy layers of clothing, making movement nearly impossible, and then yelled at the poor child whenever she did something natural, like running.

Sometimes Solanda thought she went back to that household at night because she felt sorry for the child. But in truth, she stayed there because they gave her fish properly deboned and they brushed her, and they put a warm cedar bed in Esmerelda’s room. Esmerelda, good child that she was, never confessed to her parents that she often picked up the cat and carried her to bed, cuddling with her long into the night.

And Solanda would never tell anyone—Fey or Nyeian—that sometimes she purred when she slept, pressed against the little girl’s back.

Shifters were supposed to be the coldest of the Fey, the most fickle members of a warrior people, incapable of real emotion, flighty, restless and completely self-absorbed. They also were supposed to take on the characteristics of the animal they had chosen to Shift into, so Solanda’s fickleness—theoretically—was doubly compounded by the fact that she had chosen the cat as her alternate Shape.

Of course, it didn’t matter how many times she had proven herself trustworthy. In the war against Nye, such as it was, she had done intelligence for the Black King. She had worn her cat form and slinked into Nyeian villages, soldiers’ camps, and mess halls, keeping her ears open, and learning more than she should have.

Most countries that the Fey had fought had banned strange animals from military compounds. Solanda had heard that the Co had gone so far as to slaughter any strays, thinking they might be Fey reconnaissance. But the Nyeians had a fondness for cats, and while they kept stray dogs out of their camps, they fed cats on the side.

Solanda had spent most of the war the pampered resident of a Nyeian general’s tent. He used to feed her bits of meat off his own plate while telling his staff his battle plans for the next day.

And then when he fell into his snoring sleep, she would go to the nearest Shadowlands and inform the Fey general of all she had heard. Toward the end of the war, she reported directly to the Black King, who shook his head at the stupidity of the Nyeians.

Conquering Nye was the first step toward world dominion. The Black King didn’t say that, but Solanda knew that was his goal. The Fey were a great warrior people, but they only owned half the world right now. The Black King—and the Black Throne—wanted all of it.

Solanda entered the merchant sector of Nir, and silently cursed to herself. The merchants often shooed cats out of this area. Her presence here was suddenly noticeable, and she didn’t dare Shift. She’d shock an entire community of Nyeians—which would probably be good for them.

Scents from the nearby vendor stalls caught her nose. Fried beef, more fish, some sort of vegetable something which turned her feline stomach. The fish was enticing. It almost made her forget that she was here because she had been summoned by the Black King’s son.

Rugar had been her commander for part of the Nye campaign. He was an able warrior, frustrated under his father’s tight leash. The problem with Rugar was that he believed himself to be the equal of his father, and he was not.

Solanda would rather work with the Black King, ruthless as he was, than with his less-talented son.

The tall stone buildings prevented the sun from getting to the cobblestone. The stone was wet beneath her paws from the morning rain. The air was thick and muggy, making the six layers of clothes the Nyeians wore look even more uncomfortable.

The handful of Fey who were on the street wore their traditional uniform—a leather jerkin and pants. The Fey were so much taller than the Nyeians that even if they didn’t dress differently, they would be noticeable.

She ducked under some clothing stalls, past the buildings that housed the year-round indoor merchants, and turned on the street that led to the Bank of Nye. The Black King had taken over the building. It was four stories of gray stone, towering over the buildings around it—as close to a palace as there was in Nye.

She sighed heavily and crossed the street, climbing up the stone steps and staring at the large stone door. She’d have to Shift just to get into the place.

Then she saw a nearby window ledge. The window was open. She leaped onto the ledge and jumped to the stone floor inside. She thought this building unusually cold for a Nyeian structure. The house where she was pampered was made of wood, and had thick rugs on its floors. Every surface was soft, and the air perfumed.

Here the air smelled like chalk and the stone was chilly despite the heat. There were no guards in this room, although there should have been. It looked like it was someone’s office—a desk in the center, chairs on the side for supplicants.

The door was open and led into a cavernous hallway. She heard voices and followed them. Several Fey guards huddled in an alcove. They were Infantry and young, tall even though they hadn’t come into their magic yet. Their dark skin and black hair was a welcome sight. She’d gotten tired of looking at the pasty-faced Nyeians, and hadn’t realized how much she missed her own kind.

“…fool’s errand, don’t you think?” One of the young men said.

“If it’s so important, why doesn’t the Black King go?” another asked.

“Blue Isle is important,” said a young woman. “It’s the only stop between here and Leut.”

Leut was the continent on the other side of the Infrin Sea. The Black King wanted to go there more than anything. He wanted to conquer as much of the world as he could before he died.

“If we are going to conquer the world,” the girl was saying, “we have to go through Blue Isle first.”

“Then it doesn’t make sense,” the first man said. “Why send Rugar? He’s not as good a commander as his father.”

“Maybe,” Solanda said in her most authoritative voice, “the best commander in the world has a plan that’s too sophisticated for you to understand.”

They all turned. They had similar upswept features, narrow faces, and pointed ears. Solanda had often thought that her people looked like foxes—most of them, anyway. Shifters, like her, often took some of the characteristics of their animals. Her hair and skin were more golden than dark, and she had the Shifter’s mark on her chin—a birthmark that established who and what she was when she was in her Fey form.

But they couldn’t tell now. All they could do was tell that a cat had spoken to them.

“Well,” she said, sitting on her haunches and wrapping her tail around her paws. “Where do I start? Do I reprimand you for gossiping in the middle of the day? Do I tell you that I got into the building through a window that some careless fool left open and, if I had been some young Nyeian bent on assassination, I could have walked right past you and you wouldn’t have noticed? Or do I ask that one of you poor, magickless fools get me a robe so that I can have my meeting with Rugar?”

They didn’t answer her. She raised her chin slightly. Amazing how she could intimidate them, even though she was so very small.

“By the Powers,” she snapped. “Get me a robe. And put a guard on the window.”

She nodded over her head toward the room she had just come out of.

Two of the young men ran off toward the room. The third young man hurried off, presumably to get her a robe. That left the young woman.

“I really should report this,” Solanda said. “Technically, you put the Black King’s life in danger.”

“From the Nyeians?” the young woman snorted. “You snarl at them and they run. They couldn’t fight us in the war, and once they found out that they’d remain in charge of their businesses, they really didn’t care that we took them over. Why would one of them try to get in here?”

“Revenge?” Solanda said. “We did, after all, slaughter half their army. Those young men were related to someone.”

“Then that should take away half the threat, shouldn’t it?” the young woman said. “After all, the Nyeians believe that only men are capable of fighting.”

Solanda felt amused. “I have a hunch that belief has changed since they were defeated by us. What’s your name?”

“Licia,” the girl said.

“You haven’t come into your magic yet, have you?”

The girl straightened her shoulder. Magic was always a touchy subject with Infantry. They were tall enough to show that they would get magic, but chances were if they neared adulthood and still hadn’t come into their magic, their abilities would be slight.

“No,” she said.

“You showed a tactician’s mind. Why do you waste it gossiping with people who aren’t worthy of you?”

The girl straightened her shoulders. “I don’t normally guard. I am usually in the field.”

“But there’s no field at the moment, is there?” Solanda said. “What are you doing here?”

“Rugar asked me to come. He says his daughter needs more swordfighting training.”

Solanda narrowed her eyes. Jewel, Rugar’s middle child, was the most promising of all his raggedy offspring. She hadn’t come into her magic yet either, but her height and her heritage suggested when her magic came it would be powerful. She was a good swordswoman now—Solanda had seen her fight in the last of the Nye campaign.

“Why would she need more training?”

Licia shrugged. “I suspect it has something to do with the fight Rugar had with his father this morning.”

Solanda tilted her head to show her interest.

“They just left that room you came through. They were screaming at each other all morning long.”

“About what?” Solanda asked, realizing that she was now gossiping. But she didn’t want to go into a meeting with Rugar with less knowledge than he had.

“About going to Blue Isle. Rugar says he won’t go without his daughter.”

“Not his other children?”

“He didn’t mention them.” Then Licia smiled. “At least not at the top of his voice.”

Solanda suppressed a sigh. The Black King favored Jewel. He felt that her brothers were idiots—and he was right. Their magic was slight, like their mother’s had been. Rugar’s entire life had been about defying his father. Rugar should have married a woman who had great magic. Instead, he had chosen someone he could control.

The young man returned with a flowing golden robe that was clearly of Nyeian origin. Solanda didn’t ask where he had gotten it. She didn’t thank him. Instead, she said, “Place it over me.”

He did, blotting out the light. The robe smelled faintly of perfume and perspiration, but it clearly hadn’t been worn in some time. The fabric was heavy satin—too heavy for a humid day like this—but she wasn’t in the position to be choosy. If Rugar was planning something stupid, she wanted to meet him Fey to Fey. Psychologically, it gave her an advantage.

She Shifted, feeling her body slide into its familiar Fey form. Her body stretched and grew. Her tail and whiskers slid into her skin, her hair flowed down her back, her front paws became hands. She ended up in a sitting position, her knees drawn to her chest, the robe draped over her like a tent. Inwardly she sighed, and wished that there were a more dignified way of Shifting into clothes.

Then she slid her arms through the sleeves, and her head through the neck hole, letting the stiff fabric flow around her. It was a woman’s garment, although she had no idea why someone would store one in a bank—or perhaps she did, and didn’t want to think about illicit affairs among Nyeian bankers.

She lifted her long hair out of the garment’s neck, and let it fall down her back. Licia bit her lower lip, and the other Fey looked down. They hadn’t realized they were talking to the best Shifter in the Black King’s army—at least, not until now.

Fools. Shifters were rare. How many of them would come into the Black King’s dwelling and order Infantry around?

“Licia,” she said, “announce me to Rugar.”

The girl’s skin colored slightly, but she moved in front of Solanda and led her down the hall. It got stuffier the farther in they went. Solanda was grateful that her feet were bare. The cool stone was going to keep her from melting in this robe.

Licia led her up a flight of stairs into a rabbit’s warren of what had once been offices. Solanda smiled. Rugar was hidden here, in an obviously less desirable area of the building. The Black King had a thousand ways of showing his displeasure with everyone around him.

Licia knocked on a door at the end of the hall. Solanda stood far enough back that she wasn’t visible from inside. She heard Rugar’s gruff voice, and then Licia’s response, announcing Solanda.

The door opened, and Licia stepped aside.

“I guess that means you’re supposed to go in,” she said.

Solanda stopped and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. She spoke softly so that Rugar couldn’t hear. “If Rugar and his father are fighting,” she said, “side with the old man. Rugar is not the future of this race. You’re better off remaining in Nye with the Black King than going to Blue Isle with Rugar.”

Licia nodded, then glanced over her shoulder as if she were afraid of Rugar. Solanda walked past her and through the open door.

Rugar stood in the center of the small room. He was medium height for a Fey, and his features had a predatory, hawk-like look to them. His almond-shaped eyes were the deep black that Solanda associated with the Black Family. It was as if the Throne echoed in their very essence. He had thin cruel lips, and an expression of permanent unhappiness.

For man in his fifties with grown children, he looked startlingly like a petulant child.

“You sent for me,” she said, not disguising her lack of respect for him.

He clasped his hands behind his back, his father’s favorite stance. “I’m taking an army to Blue Isle. You will be part of it.”

She snorted. “I serve your father, not you.”

Rugar glared at her. “He gave me permission to choose whomever I wanted from the standing armies in Nye.”

“You have no need for a Shifter,” she said. “Blue Isle is a tiny place, filled with religious fanatics who have never seen war. You’ll sail in with your troops, wave a few swords, and be able to claim victory over an entire country in the space of a day. I’ll be useless to you.”

He shook his head. “I’m taking you, and a lot of Spies and Doppelgängers. I am to be military governor of Blue Isle. My father will launch an attack from there onto Leut.”

Solanda narrowed her eyes and was glad she wasn’t in cat form. She probably would have found an excuse to scratch Rugar, and that wouldn’t have been good for either of them.

“Spies, Doppelgängers, and a Shifter,” she said. “It sounds like an intelligence force. You won’t need it if you conquer the country as quickly as you believe you will.”

His gaze went flat. “I will need it.”

She stared at him for a moment. He knew something and he wasn’t going to share it with her. Spies made sense, even in an easily conquered country. They would find the pockets of resistance. But Doppelgängers had no place there. They killed their hosts and then took over the body, including the memories. Except for the gold flecks in the eyes, no one could tell them from their victims. Doppelgängers had a sophisticated magic—one that the best commanders used sparingly. And certainly didn’t waste them on an already conquered country.

“You have no need for me,” she repeated. “I stay with the Black King.”

“You’ll come with me.”

“Your father said so?”

“No, but he will.”

“Because he already acquiesced on Jewel?”

Rugar started. He hadn’t expected her to know that.

Solanda raised her eyebrows and allowed herself a small smile. “I am good at gathering intelligence.”

“And,” he said, “as you pointed out, there’s no need for intelligence gathering in a conquered country.”

She nodded. “I’ll go to Leut with your father, when he’s ready. Until then, I’ll relax here.”

“Solanda—“

“Rugar,” she said, holding up a hand. “You and I have no great liking for each other. I have a hunch your father is sending you to Blue Isle to get you out of his sight. I’d rather not be associated with you in any way. Right now, I hold your father’s respect. I’d rather not change that.”

Rugar took a step toward her. She could feel the violence shimmering in him.

She grabbed the doorknob. “Touch me,” she said, “and I’ll scratch out your eyes.”

“You can’t touch me. I’m a member of the Black Family.”

She smiled. “I’m a Shifter. Unpredictable, irresponsible, flighty—remember? I’m sure the Powers would let this slide.”

“But my father would not,” Rugar said.

“Oh,” Solanda said softly, “but I think he would.”

She tried to see the Black King before she left the building, but he was nowhere to be found. His personal guards were gone as well. She decided she would find him in the morning, and went back to her life as a pampered Nyeian cat.

The home that she had chosen was a large one on the outskirts of Nir. It had two stories filled with more clutter than any home she had ever seen. Books of poetry, musical instruments, incredibly ugly paintings, and furniture everywhere. The only saving grace was that the furniture was comfortable and the kitchen had a cat door that she could escape through when the wife decided it was time for music.

Solanda slipped through the cat door, past the kitchen hearth. One of the three Nyeian servants was cleaning the pots from the evening meal. The air smelled faintly of roast beef, and Solanda’s stomach rumbled.

Still, she didn’t beg from the servant. She knew better. The idiot had kicked her “accidentally” once, and had the scars to prove it. But Solanda knew if she attacked anyone in the house too many times, she would be thrown out, and she wasn’t willing to lose her rich dinners and soft bed just yet.

She blended into the hideous yellow wallpaper as she hurried up the stairs to Esmerelda’s room.

Esmerelda sat on the edge of the bed, fingering a rip in her dress. She had a forlorn expression on her small face. Her brown hair hung limply around her cheeks, and a streak of dirt covered the pantaloons beneath the skirt.

Solanda had never seen Esmerelda look dirty before, nor had she seen the girl’s hair loose at any time except bedtime.

“Oh, Goldie!” Esmerelda raised her voice in relief. She was speaking Nye, which was a language that Solanda hadn’t known well when she moved into this house. Here her Nye had improved greatly, but she wanted to be fluent in it by the time she left.

The little girl launched herself off the bed and grabbed Solanda before Solanda could jump out of the way. Esmerelda wrapped her arms around Solanda and held tightly. Esmerelda had never done that before. If she had been a grabby little girl, Solanda would have been gone a long time ago.

So this meant, quite simply, that something was wrong.

Solanda let herself be held for a moment, then she turned her head toward the door and flattened her ears. Esmerelda, smart child that she was, understood both signals. She pushed the door closed, and then let Solanda go.

Solanda jumped on the windowsill. Esmerelda followed her, but didn’t open the window like she usually did.

The room was hot and sticky. Solanda wouldn’t be able to stay here too long if that window wasn’t opened.

“I don’t dare,” Esmerelda said softly. “Mommy’s really mad at me. She didn’t even let me have dinner.”

Now Solanda was interested, but she didn’t want the story, not yet. She bumped her head against the window’s bubbled glass.

Esmerelda bit her lower lip and shook her head.

Solanda placed a paw on the glass and meowed softly.

“Okay,” Esmerelda whispered. “But if anyone comes, I’ll have to close it.”

Solanda almost nodded, then caught herself. When Esmerelda came close, Solanda bumped her affectionately with her head, and then watched as the little girl pulled the window open.

A cool breeze made its way inside. That was the other nice thing about this house. Esmerelda’s room opened onto a large undeveloped area, so the smells of the outdoors came in strong. Breezes were unencumbered. Esmerelda’s mother hated this, and often wished for close neighbors, but Solanda saw it for the blessing it was.

Esmerelda knelt down beside the window and put her elbows on the sill. She didn’t touch Solanda, but she was still a bit too close. Her body heat was ruining the breeze.

“I been so bad,” she said, “I won’t get to go outside ever again.”

Solanda watched her. The little girl had never been able to resist a cat’s gaze. Solanda had never seen a child who was so very lonely. Esmerelda wasn’t allowed to play—except with dolls whose clothing was frilly as the stuff she was trussed in—nor was she allowed to associate with the neighboring children who were, in her parents’ mind, beneath her. She had lessons in poetry and music, art and dancing, but she liked none of it. What she really wanted to do was run as far as she could, and climb trees and learn how to swim.

She’d probably never get to achieve those goals.

“I was running this afternoon,” Esmerelda said. Her face was wistful. She leaned her forehead against the glass. “Mommy was looking at fruit and I thought I could just go around the block, but she saw me. I guess she followed me.”

Esmerelda had done this before, and it hadn’t gotten her sent to bed with no supper. Solanda suspected the problem had something to do with the rip in the dress. Clothing was sacred, at least to this family. Solanda wanted to tear every piece so that this little girl could be free.

“She saw me fall.” Esmerelda said, fingering her skirt. “She saw me hit a Fey.”

Solanda stiffened. She almost asked who, and caught herself. Two near lapses in one conversation. She was getting much too relaxed with this child.

Esmerelda ran a soft hand over Solanda’s head. Her touch was gentle again, as it had always been before.

“She said she was the Black King’s granddaughter, and she yelled at Mommy for dressing me the way she did. And Mom yelled back. The lady said yelling at her was like yelling at all the Fey all at once.”

Only one Fey woman could make that claim. Jewel. No wonder Esmerelda’s mother was upset.

“And then Mommy told Daddy and he said that the Fey might hurt us. Because I ran.” A tear coursed down Esmerelda’s cheek.

And those fools were blaming the child for being a child. Solanda pushed against the girl’s hand, and Esmerelda sniffled.

“I didn’t mean to run. I just can’t stay still sometimes.”

Solanda understood that. She could never stay still. It was a curse of being a Shifter. It was the reason Fey wisdom said that Shifters were the most heartless of the Fey. Most Shifters did not have children, and most rarely stayed anywhere long enough to form a real relationship.

Esmerelda sighed. “I wish I was like you. I do what I want. Or like that Fey lady. She was nice to me. She didn’t like Mommy though.”

Neither did Solanda.

“She said children shouldn’t be dressed like me. She said I ran into her because my clothing didn’t let me run properly.”

Probably true, Solanda thought.

“And that made Mommy really mad.”

Esmerelda let her hand slide off Solanda’s neck. She bunched her hands into fists and rested her chin on them, looking fierce and strong. Solanda felt her whiskers twitch in amusement. One day, Esmerelda’s parents would no longer be able to control this child. If she was this strong, articulate, and intelligent at five, she would be impossible to control at fifteen.

Especially with all of the Fey influence around her.

“I wish I had magic,” the little girl said. “Just a little bit. Then I could run and no one would know. I’d make myself invisible and no one would see me.”

Solanda looked out the window, knowing her expression was too sympathetic for a cat. There was a ring of oaks at the edge of the lawn. They were blowing in the breeze. Maybe there would be another storm. Maybe this storm would finally cool the place off, although she doubted it. Nye’s hot season was the worst she had encountered in any country she had ever been in.

“Esmerelda!” her mother’s voice echoed from the hallway. “Why is your door closed?”

Esmerelda gasped and pulled down the window so quickly she almost caught Solanda’s tail in it. Then she leaped onto the bed, stretching out. Solanda jumped beside her and curled up at her feet just as Esmerelda’s mother opened the door.

The woman’s face was flushed. She looked like a tomato about to burst. She was so tightly corseted that her body looked flat, and Solanda wondered how the woman could even breathe. She wore an evening dress of white satin that accented the redness of her face. The sides were lined with sweat.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Then she frowned. “How did that mangy cat get in here?”

Solanda growled softly in the back of her throat. She was not mangy. And the woman had never called her that before.

“I told you that you were supposed to be in here by yourself to think about what you did today. Things could have been much worse. Fortunately, she was in good mood. You know what those people can do? Why it’s said they can cut the skin off a person with the flick of—”

Solanda yowled, and the woman stepped back, a hand over her heart. Esmerelda sat up, worry on her small face.

“Are you okay, Goldie?”

Solanda licked her right paw as if she had twisted it. She was not going to let that woman tell this little girl about Fey atrocities—even if they were true.

“Come on, Goldie,” Esmerelda’s mother said. “There’s some beef for you in the kitchen.”

Usually that would have gotten Solanda off the bed. But she could sneak down after everyone was asleep and take what she needed. Right now, she wanted to stay beside Esmerelda.

“Goldie,” the woman said.

Esmerelda, good child that she was, bit her lower lip and said nothing. She didn’t beg for the company that she obviously wanted.

“Goldie!” her mother sounded exasperated now. Then she shook her head. “Why do we put up with this animal?”

Neither Solanda nor Esmerelda answered.

Finally Esmerelda’s mother sighed. “All right, she can stay. But I do expect you to sleep in that dress tonight and to think about how you could have hurt us all. That rip should be a reminder of the danger your misbehavior put us in. Nye isn’t the place it used to be, child. Do something wrong, and those Fey will harm all of us.”

Then she pulled the door closed, and Solanda heard the boards creak as she made her way down the stairs.

Esmerelda’s fingers played with the rip. Solanda looked at it, then crossed the bed, took the skirt in her teeth and pulled. The rip grew. Esmerelda giggled, then covered her mouth. Solanda pulled harder. If the little girl had to sleep in these clothes, she might as well be comfortable.

Esmerelda ripped the pantaloons too, along the dirt line, giggling as she did so. “Mommy will think I did it when I was running,” she said. “You’re so smart, Goldie.”

Of course she was. Solanda preened and allowed herself to be petted one more time.

Then Esmerelda looked at the door, her smile fading. “Sometimes I think Mommy doesn’t want me. She wants somebody else. Somebody perfect.”

Too bad she didn’t realize that the child she had was better than perfect. Solanda sighed softly. Some people had more than they deserved.

The idea came to her in the middle of the night, in that hot and stuffy room. She could take Esmerelda away, and Esmerelda’s parents wouldn’t even know it had happened. But it would take the cooperation of the Fey Domestics.

Fey magic was divided into two parts: warrior and domestic. Warrior magic was designed for warfare. Some Fey magic turned its practitioner into a weapon, like the Foot Soldiers who had fingernails that could slice better than a blade. Domestic magic could not be used to fight any war. Domestics lost their magic if they killed. Their magics were healing magics or home-bound magics, such as spells that made chairs more inviting or fires warmer.

The next morning, after making certain that Esmerelda got breakfast, Solanda slipped out the cat door. She went to the Domicile that the Fey Domestics had set up just outside of town. The Domicile had been built especially for the Domestics, and covered with various protection and healing spells. It was a traditional U-shaped building—with hearth and home magics in one length of the U, the healing wards in the other, and the middle section as a meeting place in between.

Solanda usually didn’t seek out the Domestics. They always wanted to experiment with her—have her try on a new cloak covered with some sort of rain protection or have her taste a new food to see if it had an effect on her Shifting. The last time she had been in a Domicile had been when she had broken a paw jumping from a tree in one of the last Nye battles. The Domestics had mended the bone, and had given her a smelly ointment she had to apply in cat form. She had thought the stench alone would kill her.

As she mounted the steps to the center part of the building, she shook off her paws. Here she would not Shift to Fey form. The Domestics weren’t as obsessed with power as Rugar was, so she didn’t have to use her height as a reminder of the strength of her magic.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The air was cool and welcoming. It smelled of a sea breeze. Bits of magic floated in the air. Spinner’s magic. They were working on their looms. She could hear the hum just down the corridor.

A Baker entered, his fingers dusted with flour. They glowed. And she knew he had spelled the bread he’d been baking to remain fresh for as long as possible. It was a traveling spell, one most often used when troops were heading off to battle. She wondered if someone had requested it.

“I’m here to see Chadn.”

The Baker nodded, then slipped through a door that led to the Healing part of the Domicile. Solanda hopped onto a chair. Her mood rose and she cursed, jumping down. She didn’t need to be spelled, to wait, happy and contented, on a chair dusted with Domestic magic. Instead she paced the cool floor and wondered why she couldn’t smell the baking bread.

Finally Chadn entered the room. She was a young Shaman, although the toll of her power had already turned her hair white. Her face was wizened, her mouth a small oval amid wrinkles. Only her eyes were bright—sparkling black circles of light in a ruined face.

She had been assigned to stay with Rugar during the war and she was happy to be free of him. Shaman were the most independent Fey: their Vision as strong as those of the Leaders, but their magic Domestic so they could not rule a warrior people. They were the wise ones, the advisors, supposedly the strength behind the Black Throne. The Black King required a Shaman of his son, but did not use one himself. He had dismissed his own, years ago, for disobeying him. It was one of many areas where the Black King broke with tradition.

“Solanda,” Chadn said. “I had hoped to see you.”

Solanda jumped on an end table and was relieved that her mood did not change. She sat on her haunches and looked into Chadn’s face.

“I have a request,” she said. “It’s for a Nyeian child.”

“A child?” Chadn sounded surprised. “Not a Fey child?”

Solanda shook her head.

“I had Seen you with a Fey child.”

The Shaman’s Visions—and the Vision that leaders like the Black King had—allowed them glimpses into the future. Some said that the glimpses allowed the Visionary to change the future. Others believed that the glimpses led the Visionary to that future.

Solanda’s eyes narrowed. “I have not been with a Fey child.”

Chadn nodded. “It was on Blue Isle. The child was a Shifter, and you kept her from death.”

Solanda’s whiskers twitched. “I told Rugar I would not go to Blue Isle with him.”

“The future of our people lies with you, Solanda.”

“And a child?” Solanda raised her chin. “Are you sure it was a Fey child?”

“Not entirely,” Chadn said. “The child had blue eyes.”

Solanda gave a soft grunt of surprise. She had heard of blue-eyed people, but she had never seen one. “The child couldn’t be Nyeian?”

“She was Fey, and newborn. She had a birthmark on her chin. Only her eyes were strange, and perhaps that was because of the Shifting. I Saw you put your hands on her lips, and swear to protect her, raise her, and make her strong. Then I Saw her full grown, saying you had been the closest thing she had to a mother.”

Solanda laughed, although inside she felt cold. A Shifter only swore to protect a child who held the future of the Empire. A blue-eyed child that Shifted? The center of the Empire?

“Visions can be altered,” Solanda said. “I am not leaving Nye.”

“You may have no choice.”

“I’ll always have a choice,” Solanda said.

Chadn inclined her head toward Solanda as if giving in on that point. “What does the Nyeian child need?”

Solanda took a deep breath. “She is different from any other Nyeian I’ve seen. Strong, independent. She met Jewel yesterday and is being punished for it. I would like to remove the child from her family and bring her here, to be raised among us. She will be useful when she’s grown. She will be part of the second-generation, the Nyeians that rule Nye for the Fey.”

Chadn stared at her for a moment. “So take her. Shifters steal children.”

“This one’s mother will raise a fuss if she’s gone.”

“What mother wouldn’t?”

“She’ll come to us.”

“And you can’t prove to the Black King that we must keep the child.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Solanda said.

Chadn folded her hands over her stomach. “You want a Changeling.”

“Yes,” Solanda said.

“How old is the child?”

“Five.”

Chadn sighed. “Have you asked the child if she’s willing to leave?”

“Not yet. I wanted to know if I have help first.”

“You will keep the child at your side?”

Solanda frowned. That wasn’t a normal request. Shifters rarely kept children. They usually brought them to Domestics to raise. “Must I?”

“At five, it will be you she trusts.”

Solanda shrugged. “Then she shall stay with me.”

“And you will stay away from Blue Isle.” Chadn said that not as a question, but as a statement.

“Rugar will not let a Nyeian child in his war party.”

“So the child serves two purposes.” Chadn’s eyes narrowed. “Has she magic?”

“Of course not.” Solanda laughed. “There is not magic outside the Fey.”

Chadn frowned. “I am no longer certain of that.”

“Because you Saw a blue-eyed Shifter?”

“Because I Saw a great war, coming when we least expect it.”

“War is part of Fey life.” Solanda jumped off the table and headed for the door. “I’ll bring you news of the child tomorrow.”

“I’ll have Changeling stone ready,” Chadn said. “But realize before you act, that this is for life.”

“I already know that,” Solanda said. “I have chosen well.”

“I hope so,” Chadn said.

Solanda went to the docks and sat on a fence. She loved it here. The Infrin Sea formed the most natural harbor on Galinas, and there was always some sort of activity. Toward the north end of the harbor, the Nyeian builders made the great ships. Those ships traveled all over the known world, and now Fey Domestics helped unload cargo that would go all over the Empire.

Ships from Blue Isle had stopped coming to Nye when news reached them of the Fey takeover. She would never see an Islander, never learn more about them than she already had.

And that would be all right.

For there were some things she couldn’t discuss with Rugar’s Shaman. Like the prophecies that had been made by another Shaman at Solanda’s birth, prophecies that claimed her legacy would be in the children she saved.

Children—not child, like Chadn had seen. Solanda would influence the life of more than one.

The breeze was cooler here, carrying with it the smell of salt and a tinge of dead fish. That smell made her stomach rumble. She tried not to think of the things she ate in her cat form, things she would find disgusting when she was in Fey form. Right now, raw dead fish sounded extremely appetizing.

But she didn’t go in search of the source of the smell. She had some thinking to do. Prophecies and Visions made her nervous. She had no idea what to do with the information Chadn had given her. Because, at various points in her life, Solanda had been told by Visionaries that her future held contradictory things.

One Shaman had told her she had to avoid the Black Family for she would kill a Black Heir. Another Shaman had told her she would raise a Black Heir. And now Chadn had Seen her swear to protect a blue-eyed Shifter, a newborn who couldn’t survive on her own.

Solanda bowed her head. The prophecy she never mentioned, the one her parents had kept silent, had come the day of her birth and she had never forgotten it. The prophecy was a cold one: she would die before her time, far from home, for a crime she did not regret.

The Fey did not believe in crime. They were constantly at war, so the crimes that plagued other races—murder, theft—were absorbed into the wars themselves. The Fey only punished two crimes: treason and failure. Both of those crimes were considered crimes against the Empire. Failure was a large crime, encompassing the failure to follow an order, or the failure to defeat an enemy in a prolonged battle.

Treason was any crime against the Black Family and was such a heresy, that it wasn’t even discussed among rational Fey.

Both crimes bore the penalty of death.

It seemed to her that she would never commit crimes like that, that the prophecies had come because she was a Shifter, not because of her character. She wasn’t as flighty or as difficult as anyone said she was.

And besides, she had to take care of Esmerelda.

She wished she could be there the morning that Esmerelda’s parents discovered the Changeling. It would look like Esmerelda, even act like her—if stone could act like a living breathing creature. But it would only last a few days, and then it would cease to exist. They would think Esmerelda dead, when, in actuality, she was only gone.

Then, perhaps, that wretch of a mother would regret how she treated her daughter.

Esmerelda would live a life she couldn’t even imagine now. She wouldn’t have to wear six layers of clothes on the hottest day of the year, and she would learn how to live life to its fullest instead of remaining indoors and studying all the time.

Esmerelda would be the closest thing to Fey that a Nyeian could be—and for the first time in her young life, she would be happy. Solanda would see to that.

They would both be very happy.

Solanda returned to the house after dinner. Ultimately, she found she couldn’t resist the dead fish that were piled near one of the docks. She had eaten herself sick, and then had to clean every inch of her fur before she even attempted the walk home.

Not that the house was home. In some ways, Esmerelda was.

Solanda used the cat door. Esmerelda’s parents were talking softly in the parlor.

“Perhaps boarding school,” the mother was saying. “If she is this incorrigible now, imagine what she’ll be like when she gets older.”

“Give it time, darling,” the husband said. “She’s still a child. She will learn, as we all did.”

“It’s just I despair of ever teaching her manners. You didn’t see her with that Fey….”

Solanda had heard enough. She hurried up the stairs. She would talk to Esmerelda tonight. Tomorrow the Wisps would come, carrying a bit of stone in their tiny fingers. They’d fly in the open window, leave the stone on the bed and it would mold itself into a replica of Esmerelda while Solanda was leading the real Esmerelda out of the house.

Quick, neat, and completely perfect. The parents wouldn’t have to worry about manners or boarding school. Esmerelda would get her heart’s desire. And Solanda would have her reason for staying in Nye.

The door to Esmerelda’s room was open. Esmerelda sat beneath a lamp, a long skirt over her lap. The air was stuffier than usual, and Solanda saw that the window was closed.

It had probably been closed all day. Sunlight had poured in, and the poor child had had to sit in the heat, working on some task her mother assigned her.

When Solanda got close, she saw what it was. The child was attempting to mend her own ripped dress.

The stitches were uneven, and Esmerelda had stitched the bottom layer of fabric onto the top. That would make her mother even angrier. Esmerelda’s eyelashes were stuck together, her nose was red, and there were tearstains along her cheeks.

“Goldie!” she said, and let the dress topple to the floor. She was wearing another dress, equally inappropriate to the hot weather. She reached for Solanda, but Solanda jumped onto the windowsill.

She was not going to be hugged by a hot sweaty child—not, at least, until the window was open and the fresh air came inside.

Esmerelda glanced toward the door. She put a finger to her lips, as if she thought Solanda were going to give her away, and then called, “Mommy! Can I go to sleep now?”

Solanda froze in her spot. She didn’t want to be seen in here, not tonight. She wanted to have her conversation with Esmerelda in private.

“Are you done with your dress, darling?”

“Yes.”

Solanda looked at it. The dress was ruined. The poor girl would have an even more difficult day than usual tomorrow.

“Then blow out the lamp. Good night.”

“Good night.” Esmerelda pushed the door closed. Then she went over to the window and opened it.

A strong breeze came in, and on it, Solanda smelled rain. Maybe, after she spoke to Esmerelda, she would go outside. By then it would be raining, and she would be able to cool down.

Esmerelda put her hand over the lamp’s chimney and blew. The flame inside the glass went out. Solanda blinked in the darkness, letting her eyes adjust. It only took a moment. There were clouds over the moon this night, and it was very dark.

Esmerelda went back to her chair. “I wish you knew how to sew, Goldie.”

“I don’t,” Solanda said. “But I know someone who does.”

Esmerelda let out a small yelp, and put her hands over her mouth. She peered around the room as if looking for the source of the voice.

Solanda had to go slowly with this. The child wasn’t used to magic, not like Fey children were.

“I could take the dress to her tonight,” Solanda said, “and by morning, you wouldn’t even know there had been a rip in it.”

Esmerelda’s eyes were wide. She finally turned in Solanda’s direction. “You can talk, Goldie?”

“As well as I can listen.” Solanda jumped from the windowsill to the bed. The room had cooled down. The fresh air felt marvelous. “What would you think, Esmerelda, if I took you to a place where you could wear comfortable clothes, play with children your own age, run and jump and swim to your heart’s content? What if I told you that you would never have to sew another stitch, have another music lesson, or sit in a corner when you’ve done something that your mother didn’t like.”

Esmerelda looked for her, but clearly didn’t see her. Cat’s eyes were far superior in the dark. Solanda watched the child lick her lips, rub her hand over her knees, and then sigh.

“How long would I stay?” Esmerelda asked.

“Forever,” Solanda said.

“Would I have to be a cat?”

Solanda laughed. For all her verbal sophistication, Esmerelda was still a child at heart. “No,” Solanda said. “You’ll stay just as you are.”

“Would Mommy come?”

“No.”

“Daddy?”

“No.”

Esmerelda’s shoulders stiffened. Her little body looked rigid. “Who would love me then?”

Solanda started. She hadn’t expected that question. “I would be with you,” she said.

Esmerelda was silent, as if she were thinking this over. “Where would you take me?”

“To my people,” Solanda said.

“I’d live with cats?”

“No,” she said gently. “With the Fey.”

Esmerelda gasped. She held onto her chair as if she expected to be dragged from it.

Solanda wondered if she should have said that, but she had never taken a child before. Certainly she knew of no one who had ever taken a child of this age.

But Chadn had said she had had to speak with the child, and the choice to come had to be the child’s. There was sense in that. Esmerelda, at age five, would always have a memory of living with her parents. She needed a memory of her choice to leave them.

“Esmerelda,” Solanda said. “I—”

“No!” Esmerelda screamed. “No!”

She launched herself out of her chair as if her voice had given the ability to move again.

“Help! Mommy! Help!”

Solanda’s ears went back. She hadn’t expected this from Esmerelda, not her sane, different child.

“Esmerelda, I only want to give you a better life—”

“Mommy! Daddy! Help!”

Finally Esmerelda pulled the door open and blundered into the hallway. Solanda followed, tail between her legs, ears still back. The little girl’s screams echoed down the stairs. Her parents had reached her, and they both put their arms around her. Esmerelda was too terrified to be coherent.

Then the mother looked up the stairs. She saw Solanda, her gaze flat.

And Solanda realized she had no choice.

She Shifted, her body lengthening, her tail disappearing, her fur becoming skin.

Then she walked, naked, to the floor below.

Esmerelda’s mother gathered her child in her arms and backed away. The father placed himself in front of his small family, arms out.

“You came from the Black King, didn’t you?” the woman said. “To punish us by stealing our child.”

“It’s not about you,” Solanda said.

Esmerelda peeked around her father, eyes wide. Solanda had never, in her entire life, been so conscious of her nakedness.

“Wh-what do you want?” the father asked. He was trying to sound brave. Like most Nyeians, he was failing.

“I had hoped to take your daughter, but it seems that she prefers this place, even though you treat her as less than house pet. It seems, for reasons I cannot understand, that she loves you.”

“Of course she does,” the woman said. “We’re her parents.”

“As if that’s a divine right.” Solanda stopped on the middle stair.

The family cringed below her as if they expected her to strike them with a lightning bolt. She didn’t have that kind of magic. They had seen the extent of her powers, but apparently they didn’t know that.

“She is a child,” Solanda said. “She is to run and play. She is to have friends of her own age. She is to have comfortable clothing so that she can move without tripping. She is supposed to get dirty, to rip her skirts, and fall on her behind. She is to have some joy in her life. Do you understand?”

“I thought you Fey were supposed to leave us alone,” the mother said. “I thought—”

“Be quiet,” the father said.

Esmerelda clung to her father, her curiosity moving her closer.

“You will give her those things,” Solanda said, “or I will take her from you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the father said.

“You can’t do this,” the mother said. “You can’t change our customs. The Black King promised you wouldn’t.”

“A promise made to a conquered people is worth nothing,” Solanda snapped. “You will do what I say, or the child is mine.”

“Mommy.” Esmerelda reached for her mother. Solanda’s eyes narrowed. Couldn’t she see that her mother saw her only as a thing to be trained, to be forced into the right and proper life?

Probably not. It was too sophisticated a concept for her. The same innocence that allowed Esmerelda to accept a cat’s speech, allowed her to believe that she was loved.

“Do I take her now?” Solanda asked.

“No,” the father said. “We’ll do as you say.”

“But our friends—”

“Shut up,” the father snapped. “Do you want to lose her?”

For a moment, the mother’s gaze met Solanda’s and in it, Solanda saw something she recognized, a coolness perhaps, a calculation. How would that woman have answered if she had been asked who would love me then? Would she have dodged the answer like Solanda had? Or would she have heard it at all?

“She will stay with us,” the woman said. She sounded resigned.

Solanda felt a hope she hadn’t even known she had die inside her. “Then I’ll watch. You will treat that child as if she is more precious than gold. And if you fail, even once, she’s mine. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” the father said.

But Solanda did not take her gaze from the mother.

“Yes,” the woman said.

Esmerelda had stepped to her father’s side. She was still holding his leg. “Are you Goldie?” she asked.

Solanda gave her a small, private smile. “Only for you.”

The little girl slipped behind her father again. Her answer was clear, too. She would stay, no matter what. And Solanda had done all she could.

So she Shifted back to her cat form. For a moment, she watched them all, tail twitching, then she ran up the stairs and into Esmerelda’s room. She stopped for only a moment, knowing she would never return.

She leapt onto the windowsill, and sighed. She had just lost her excuse for staying on Nye. She was bound to the Black Family. She had to do as they wished.

Rugar wanted her to go to Blue Isle.

Where a Shifter awaited her care. A newborn child, with blue eyes. A child who would think her the closest thing she’d ever had to a mother.

Solanda looked over her shoulder. She heard Esmerelda’s voice, high, piping, excited; the soft answers of her parents. Solanda had lied to them. She would not be able to watch.

She hoped they would take good care of her little girl.

Then she jumped out the window, and climbed along a tree branch. Maybe her future had been preordained. Maybe she had no choice. She would raise a Black Heir, maybe kill one, and influence children.

How different would tonight have been if she had told the child that she would love her?

She would never know. Perhaps that was the moment in which everything could have changed. Maybe she had just missed her only chance to save herself.

____________________________________________

DestinyCopyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in French as “Destin” in Faeries: Toutes Les Fantasy, Hiver 2000-2001 First published in English in Creature Fantastic, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2001Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG PublishingCover and layout design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © 2012 by Dirk Berger

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

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We just launched a Kickstarter for The Incident at Serebro Academy. It is the next Fey novel after Barkson’s Journey. However, you don’t have to read Barkson’s Journey to enjoy this one.

You see, most of the books in the Qavnerian Protectorate series (which is a side series off the main Fey) happen at the same time. So, you can read these next three books in any order you want. (I prefer my order, but hey, I’m just the writer.)

Here’s the blurb for The Incident at Serebro Academy:

THE FEY ATTACK

A grisly ambush at Serebro Academy starts a race to uncover secrets that might save the Academy or destroy it entirely.

Magical maps, Fey spies, treachery and dangerous secrets. A stunning fantasy—impossible to put down.

This thrilling page-turner continues Rusch’s masterful melding of epic fantasy and steampunk while demonstrating once again her place as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

The Kickstarter contains all of these books and a lot more, like the map and mugs and even more books. So head on over and get a copy of The Incident at Serebro Academy before anyone else.

Don’t Like Kickstarter?

And for those of you who aren’t Kickstarter fans, but want to order the book, it’s up for preorder on your favorite stores. My favorite is World of the Fey, which also has a lot of the goodies that are in the Kickstarter. So here’s the link to the store. After you’ve ordered The Incident at Serebro Academy, poke around. You’ll find all kinds of fun stuff.

Lots to enjoy here! I hope you will.

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When a notorious local developer claims to own the home of the late Olivia, her neighbors band together to stop him. But as they each work to thwart the developer, secrets pile on secrets until everyone finds themselves with something to hide.

“Olivia’s House” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Olivia’s Houseby Kristine Kathryn RuschOlivia died on Thursday. By Monday, the vultures had swooped in.

To be fair, though, the vultures had already settled in this desirable little corner of Las Vegas real estate.

Arlie wiped a hand over her forehead and stood in front of her open garage door, watching the parade of Mercedes, BMW SUVs, and shiny new oversized trucks ostensibly used for construction. These men—and they all seemed to be men—never really did any construction, not like Arlie and her wife, Babette, did. Arlie and Babette worked alongside any contractor they hired, climbing on the roof, inspecting the attic, and frowning at the termite damage near the patio doors.

The pest services people had left days ago, their bill on the as-of-yet-un-remodeled kitchen counter, next to the gigantic bill for the asbestos remediation in the bedrooms, living room, and formal dining room.

The house, which had looked so perfect a year ago, had all kinds of secrets hidden in its walls, and not the kind that inspired Arlie to daydream about who might have visited here, who might have performed on that baby grand piano that the previous owners sold with the house, or who might have lounged around the (at the moment empty and in desperate need of remodeling) kidney-shaped pool.

She still loved the house, but she was in the middle of a major remodel, and the middle of a remodel always brought up a twinge of buyer’s remorse.

Sweat ran down her back. Her thin, long-sleeved shirt clung to her arms like the sawdust from 2x6s she was trimming on the back porch. She had come to the garage to grab a broom and the wet vac when she saw all the vehicles pull in across the street.

The houses in this ancient (by Vegas standards) subdivision sat back from the winding road that circled each little sub-neighborhood. Arlie’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, with Olivia’s house on one side and an even older ranch-style home on the other side.

All the original trees, expensive grass, and tall fences ensured that she hadn’t even heard the vehicles pull up. She used to joke with Babette that if Olivia wanted to hold one of those exclusive 1960s Vegas parties this little corner of the subdivision had been known for, Arlie and Babette wouldn’t have heard a thing.

But Olivia hadn’t held a party in decades. There probably hadn’t been that many vehicles in front of Olivia’s house since the 90s.

Arlie wiped her sawdust-covered hands on the back of her khaki work pants. She was standing in just enough shade to keep the vicious Vegas sun off her face. But it was still hot out here.

The huge black truck parked directly across from the opening in the beautiful (old) adobe fence started rocking. Then the driver’s door opened, and Leighton Taylor swung out.

Her heart sank.

Leighton owned the nightmare monstrosity at the curve leading into this particular cul-de-sac. Not only did Leighton’s contractors fail to water down their dirt when they dug or worked, getting grit all over this part of the neighborhood, but they also worked at all hours, making the monstrosity worse, not better. At the moment, it was probably at its best (which wasn’t saying much), a partially built 8,000-square-foot series of cubes the architect Leighton hired called a house.

And worst of all, its eastern end butted up against Olivia’s property. At least the construction was on the opposite side of the house from her beautiful bedroom, so she hadn’t heard most of the construction noise, although she had complained (softly) that the beep-beep-beep of vehicles in reverse awakened her most mornings.

Leighton’s building didn’t fit in the subdivision, but it wasn’t the only building that looked different. Sahara Circle, built in the 1950s, was one of the first subdivisions in the entire Vegas Valley.

In its heyday, Sahara Circle was the place for the rich and famous. It was not too far off the growing Strip and yet secluded, where the kids of the rich and famous could grow up in what they claimed to be an idyllic 1960s world.

Idyllic for straight white people, anyway. Arlie was painfully aware that she and Babette wouldn’t have been able to live here when the subdivision was built. She had seen their inclusion in this still-idyllic part of Old Vegas as a win for modernity—even though, Babette had pointed out, that they were both white and back in the day, they would have been considered eccentric spinsters who combined their resources to live “economically” in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

Leighton didn’t look like a mid-century mogul, either. He was long and rangy but lacked the sun-weathered skin that marked him as someone who actually did physical labor. Up close, his face was fleshy, and his eyes were generally puffy from either too little sleep or too much drink.

Arlie and Leighton had clashed from the moment they met because she had made the mistake of asking him what he thought of the “piece of crap” down the street. He had given her a dismissive smile that the wealthy seemed to learn at birth.

“That piece of crap is mine,” he replied.

She had flushed, but she hadn’t apologized. The neighborhood was historic, even if Vegas hadn’t yet designated it that way, and the houses were all built in a 1950s, 60s, or 70s style. Even the more architecturally daring homes had that mid-century vibe.

But Sahara Circle was built before subdivisions realized they needed HOAs that everyone had to sign onto, a limited range of designs, and even approved colors and landscaping.

Arlie and Babette hadn’t known about the lack of regulation when they bought their home, nor had they known that rich assholes like Leighton could buy in and then bulldoze the original homes. Initially, Arlie had thought Leighton was building on one of the few empty lots left in the city. It was only later, while talking to Olivia, Arlie learned that a sister home to hers had existed just a few houses away.

Olivia. When Arlie and Babette bought their house a year ago, Olivia had been a spry 85-year-old. Then she had a fall, which occasioned an MRI and some X-rays that showed something cancerous—Arlie never caught the details—and about the time the asbestos company had finished their remediation, Olivia was confined to her bed.

Arlie visited, of course. She learned all the good current gossip, all the even better ancient gossip, and all the scary gossip as well, learned who had affairs, and who drank too much, who turned a large fortune into a small fortune, and who had mob ties back in the day. Arlie learned who had passed through the neighborhood, which celebrities lived where once upon a time, and whose kids sold off too cheap.

Olivia never said anything about her own kids, and they never visited, not once, not after Olivia’s diagnosis, not during her treatments, and certainly not in her last weeks. Arlie had offered to call, and Olivia had shaken her head with a sad smile.

“What’s done is done,” she had said, “and no maudlin deathbed conversations will repair it.”

For all the gossip, Arlie had never learned what “it” was, although she had hoped to get a glimmer of it at the funeral. But no. The kids hadn’t shown up for that either, although the entire neighborhood had, as well as the members of half the charity and arts boards in the city.

Arlie let out a breath as another bead of sweat ran down her back. The early afternoon didn’t provide a lot of shade, and the Las Vegas summer sun had a bite to it, a literal bite. Still, she walked down her cracked driveway to see if she could figure out what Leighton and his minions were doing.

Although she had a hunch. She had an awful, horrible hunch.

Leighton’s gaze met hers as if he expected to see her there. Maybe he did. Maybe one of his minions had told him she was there, watching him.

“Don’t worry.” His tone had that edge it always had when he was talking to her. “We won’t block your view.”

She blinked and frowned. There really was no view to block. Her house was a one-story ranch behind a high fence with old palm trees and lots of planted vegetation. She couldn’t see Olivia’s house except when the gate was open, the way it was now.

Then the realization dawned, but she played ignorant because she knew that with people like Leighton, playing ignorant was often the best way to get information.

“Your place can’t block my view,” she said, “no matter how high you go up.”

His smile was cruel. “I meant here. Across the street. We own this now.”

“Oh, good,” she said, even though she didn’t feel it. “Someone with money who already has a finger in the neighborhood. The house just needs a little TLC to be brought back to its former glory.”

“There was no former glory,” Leighton said. “It’s a goddamn ranch house. Tacky and old. It’s goin’ down. Not sure what I’ll do with the lot yet, but I like having the room for expansion.”

Even though she had expected him to say that, her stomach twisted. She hoped the loathing she felt for him didn’t reach her face.

“You bought Olivia’s house,” Arlie said, confirming what she had just heard. She was doing her best to keep her tone neutral so that he wouldn’t see just how much the idea of it rocked her.

“Yeah. I bought the house,” he said in a low, confidential tone, “pretty much before the old lady died. The kids didn’t want the place, so I had an offer in months ago. Made it possible to finalize once the estate paperwork is done.”

Months ago. While Arlie and Babette were talking about what they would do if the house came up for sale. If their finances could handle another payment, another expensive remodel. They loved the neighborhood, and Arlie had loved the house. It was a treasure, with lots of little nooks and crannies and expensive one-of-a-kind details.

“The kids are so sure they’re going to inherit?” Arlie asked. Because she wasn’t.

“Yep.” Leighton smirked. “She has no other heirs.”

“But the will hasn’t gone through probate yet,” Arlie said. Not that she would know. It was a guess.

“Minor details,” Leighton said. His smirk grew. “But I promise. We won’t mess with the view.”

“Is that supposed to have some hidden meaning?” she asked.

His smirk turned into a half-smile of contempt. “It means that’s all I can promise. Except that the piece of crap house is coming down as soon as the legal work is finished.”

She didn’t nod. She could barely move. He had used the words “piece of crap” just to goad her.

“If the estate isn’t settled, how did you get a key?” she asked.

He shrugged a single shoulder. “Don’t have one. Just walking the outside.”

He winked at her, then pivoted and headed back to his abomination of a truck. She watched from the driveway, arms crossed, as the men gathered outside and talked, as they paced the ground, as they messed up the landscaping with their footsteps, as they forced a fence so they could get through, as they screwed everything up.

She watched until they were gone.

And then she went inside to talk to Babette.

Arlie was proud of herself: She didn’t burst into tears as she stepped into the cool darkness of the caterer’s kitchen, and she didn’t put her fist through a wall. In the past, she might have done either. Or both.

Babette was seated at a folding table they had set up in lieu of a kitchen table. She had peeled off her canvas work gloves and placed them in the pile of gloves that ran the gamut from yellow plastic cleaning gloves to leather ones so thick they could have been used as catcher’s mitts.

Babette was looking through bills and the original architectural rendering, which they had found in one of the built-in drawers in the super-sized laundry room.

Babette was tiny, with a buzz cut that usually showed off whatever flamboyant color she had dyed her hair. She had done rainbow hues for Pride Month but washed those out on the first of July. In past years, she had blended into the red, white, and blue, but she was mad at the direction of the country at the moment, so she let her hair return to its usual black.

“I told you it’s too hot to work out there,” she said without looking up.

Then she looked up and must have seen something on Arlie’s face because her next question was, “Now who died?”

Arlie took a moment before she answered the question because it poked at something. Who died? Olivia, but they knew that. Who else died? What else died was the better question. What else was the dream she had had of living in an idyllic 1960s suburb with her wife and her accepting neighbors, having barbeques in the summer and progressive dinners during the holidays, waving at each other over the fences, and knowing (and accepting) all the gossip as they retreated into their mid-century enclave at night, redesigning the entire place to a modern sensibility, not the one she and Babette had grown up in, the one that hadn’t accepted them at all.

This, Arlie realized, was a lot more personal than she had originally thought.

She poured herself a large glass of homemade lemonade before sitting down at the table. Then she told Babette what she had seen.

Babette’s pretty little mouth formed a moue in irritation, which grew into a raspberry and an expletive when Arlie told Babette what Leighton had actually said.

“There’s no way,” Babette said. “Legally, they can’t sell property they don’t own.”

The “they” in that sentence had to refer to the kids, who, it was becoming clear from the expressions on Babette’s face, were at fault for this entire mess.

If Olivia had been analyzing the mess, she would probably have blamed herself and that mysterious event or thing that had come between her and her children. But Arlie kept quiet about that. It was easier to blame the kids, and since they were still alive, it was logical as well.

A phone call wouldn’t stop them from selling the property to Leighton, and Arlie and Babette didn’t have enough money to compete with Leighton in some kind of bidding war. Arlie and Babette weren’t hurting; they had flipped enough houses all over Las Vegas to have a good reserve fund, and they got good money on the places they kept—good enough, anyway, to give them a healthy monthly income.

But a healthy monthly income couldn’t buy out an asshole like Leighton. That would take real money. And while Arlie and Babette knew a lot of Las Vegans with real money—folks who bought the ten million dollar homes in Summerlin and folks who made more money in a week than Leighton was spending on that monstrosity of a house—those folks wouldn’t help with this, partly because Arlie wasn’t going to ask.

No home inside Sahara Circle had been designated as historic. Vegas didn’t give out that distinction very often and had, thus far, avoided some of the early subdivisions. Besides, this place was technically in Clark County, not in Las Vegas proper. The differences between the two told a tale of annexations gone awry, lax laws in one area and tougher restrictions in another, and competing jurisdictions on everything from land management to wastewater restrictions, all of which drove Arlie quietly insane, particularly when she had to figure out which jurisdiction handled what issue.

But still, she had been looking forward to spending the rest of her life in this cul-de-sac, looking at the rehabilitated mid-century moderns around her, enjoying her fantasy subdivision, and dying, as Olivia had, in her own bedroom overlooking her lovely garden.

“I guess it’s time,” Babette said, setting the bills aside.

She spoke with such calm, such deliberation. Whenever Babette used that tone with Arlie, Arlie got nervous. But this wasn’t about Arlie. This was about the house—both houses, really. Theirs and Olivia’s.

After all, they weren’t trapped here. They could flip this house. They’d lose money because they were putting in finishes that didn’t belong in a flip, and they were paying a little too much attention to historical accuracy, but it was better to take a loss than be miserable forever.

However, losing the house—this house—might just break Arlie’s heart. And would that make her miserable forever? She wasn’t sure.

“Time for what?” she asked.

“Well,” Babette said, picking up the glass of lemonade that Arlie hadn’t yet touched, “we’ve been talking about the lack of a homeowners association since we got here. I guess it’s finally time to start one.”

Arlie half-smiled. “Sounds like a great solution except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Babette asked, then sipped the lemonade.

“Leighton would be part of the association,” Arlie said.

“Well,” Babette said, shoving the glass toward Arlie with a bit of a grimace. Apparently, the lemonade was too tart for Babette. “Not technically.”

Arlie frowned at her. Usually, Arlie knew what Babette was thinking, but she couldn’t follow the logic.

“He doesn’t have a home here, now, does he?” Babette said. “That thing he’s building, it’s not finished. And it certainly doesn’t look like a home to me.”

Arlie grinned. Sometimes, Babette’s deviousness bordered on brilliant.

Then Arlie’s grin faded. She had always opposed homeowners’ associations. They got in the way of flips half the time, particularly when they had silly regulations, like what types of vehicles could be parked on the street when, even in the middle of construction.

“How on Earth would we start one?” she asked.

“Well,” Babette said, “it seems that we should call a meeting first and figure out the procedure second.”

“We can’t do it here in our house,” Arlie said. “Nothing’s finished.”

“I don’t see why not,” Babette said. “We have folding chairs. And air-conditioning. What else do we need?”

Apparently, they needed couches, end tables, and armchairs, as well as air conditioning. The meeting ended up at Derrick Houghton’s place down the street, and even though he insisted his living room was fine, everyone migrated to the massive kitchen. Ten neighbors—barely a quorum, under Roberts Rules of Order—sat around the breakfast bar, nursed beers and iced tea, and noshed on a vegetable tray with two kinds of sauces or charcuteries which had more choice than an appetizer at a restaurant.

Derrick was the single father of three teenage kids who were with their mother for the summer and “escaping the Vegas heat,” he said.

He was a slightly pudgy man who wore black socks with his sandals. That wasn’t his only fashion faux pas: he also seemed to prefer lime green shorts paired with lemon-colored shirts that he seemed to buy in bulk.

Arlie had yet to learn what he did for a living, although she had an idea that he lived off family money. Babette refused to speculate about the neighbors, which, in Arlie’s opinion, took all the fun out of living in a neighborhood.

In addition to Arlie and Babette, the Garcias from three buildings down had come. They were new to the subdivision as well and looked a little uncomfortable at the gathering. Rosalinda Garcia leaned against the kitchen island as if she needed it to hold her up, and her husband, Hernán, stood near the refrigerator as if he wanted to bolt out the back door.

Their closest neighbors, the Nguyens, stood across the kitchen from the Garcias. The Nguyens had lived here since the devastating real estate crash of 2009, which had destroyed much of the value of Las Vegas real estate.

Even though the Nguyens lived on a two-acre parcel near the gate, they owned four different houses here. The Nguyens upgraded all of them and rented them to high-end clients, usually celebrities who had residencies at Strip casinos.

Thao Nguyen looked like he had just come from his office. He didn’t specialize in real estate—that was his wife—but he had some kind of high-end job that required thousand-dollar suits, even in the summer heat. He didn’t look hot, even though he still wore the jacket over a pale orange shirt that shouldn’t have worked but did.

His wife Cam wore a sundress of the same orange. Arlie wondered if they coordinated. She also wore pale orange sandals with wide high heels that looked like they were made in the 1970s. Her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place with a bamboo barrette that matched the bangles on her arms and a ring on the middle finger of her right hand.

She was drumming her long fake nails on the countertop until Madison DeRoot caught the fingers in her own. Cam gave her a startled look, and Madison smiled apologetically, moving her hand away.

“Long day,” Madison said. “My nerves are frayed.”

Madison ran one of the largest financial services corporations in Nevada. Arlie had no idea if Madison owned it and couldn’t think of a good way to ask. Madison had clearly changed clothes after she got home from work. She wore a caftan and flat sandals that didn’t match. Her hair, which she wore up when she went to work, fell past her shoulders in unnatural blond waves.

“This may not help your nerves, then,” Babette said. The others would hear Babette’s comment as a concern. Only Arlie knew that tone from Babette meant that Babette was verging on irritation.

“I gotta hear what you propose,” Madison said. “Don’t wanna change the neighborhood too much.”

“Too late for that,” muttered Nancy Givens. She looked every day of her fifty-some years, although Arlie could still see a trace of the little girl whose picture had been used in a profile of the neighborhood done by Life Magazine back in the day.

Nancy had inherited her house from her parents and saw herself as the unofficial historian of the subdivision. The Nguyens told Arlie that initially, Nancy had led a fight to keep the neighborhood covenants in place—the ones that didn’t allow coloreds in the subdivision at all except as maids and gardeners.

When Arlie asked her about it, Nancy shrugged it off.

All of the developments re-examined their covenants about that time, she said. Remember? The press made a big deal about President Reagan’s homes having protective covenants about that point.

Arlie wasn’t buying homes when Reagan was president, but she had seen a lot of “protective” covenants, which only protected whites and were still on the books even now. She wanted to argue that Nancy had fought to get rid of the covenants, but language always gave people away. When Nancy had referred to the covenants as “protective,” Arlie knew that the gossip she had heard was correct.

Nancy was one of those people she imagined frowning on Arlie’s perfect subdivision, the one filled with more people like her and Babette and the Nguyens and the Garcias, and not with people like Nancy and Derrick—and Old Man Buckles, who sat on one of the kitchen chairs near the door.

Old Man Buckles—Jerry, doll, he’d said when she had introduced herself almost a year ago—had the shoe-leather skin that Leighton never would. Old Man Buckles didn’t look old, at least not physically. He had broad shoulders and a barrel chest, strong legs, and hands that were wide enough to hold dinner plates.

But his clothes were looser than they should have been, and the hems on his pants brushed the floor, suggesting that he had lost inches, as people did when they got older.

His blue eyes were bright, though, and if it weren’t for his shock of white hair and his yellowing teeth, she would have thought him in his fifties.

Olivia had called him a contemporary, so he had to be in his eighties.

He owned what had been the largest house in the subdivision until Leighton started building that nightmare. Old Man Buckles’s place had two wings off a center structure; each wing could have been a ranch house by itself. The center structure, like so many midcentury moderns, was focused on the driveway, the circular turnaround, and the four-car garage.

As far as Arlie could tell, he lived there alone. There was no fifth Mrs. Buckles. According to Olivia, the previous four wives had gotten away with half his fortune. The kids visited regularly—always, Olivia had said, hoping they would cozy up to him enough to get the full inheritance. It wasn’t hard to identify his kids either since the sons and, unfortunately, the daughters looked like out-of-shape versions of their dad.

Babette was handing out one sheet of paper with the proposal’s bullet points highlighted. After she had given everyone the highlight page, she added the proposed HOA terms. She had talked to their real estate lawyer about what it would take to set up a retroactive homeowners association, and it sounded like a lot of work.

Arlie was hoping they could accomplish some of this without a formal legal agreement—which would, no matter how thinly they sliced it, have to go to Leighton as well.

Old Man Buckles was the first to finish reading. He rolled the papers into a club and slapped it against the open palm of his left hand.

“So, what’s this about, really?” he asked, looking directly at Arlie.

Something in his gaze made her want to squirm.

“Leighton,” she said. “He claims he bought Olivia’s house.”

“Oh, bull—” He cut the word off mid-swear, glanced around the group, and finished with “—pucky. I doubt Liv’s lawyers even reviewed the will, let alone figured out how to execute it.”

“He should have,” Thao said primly. “She’s been gone—what? —a week now?”

“Since Friday,” Arlie said.

“Any good lawyer worth his salt would already know what’s in the will,” Madison said.

“Her,” Old Man Buckles said. “We share a lawyer. It’s a her.”

“Worth her salt then.” Madison’s cheeks had flushed.

“She’s a good one, but she takes her time,” Old Man Buckles said. “I kinda like that. It allows for changes.”

“There can’t be changes now,” Nancy said loudly as if Old Man Buckles was both dumb and hard of hearing. “She’s dead.”

Already, the group had gone down some kind of rabbit hole. “Leighton says he negotiated with the kids ahead of time,” Arlie said. “He says they have an agreement in principle, and once the will’s complete, he’ll own the place.”

Old Man Buckles, half-smiled, leaned his chair back on two legs and rested the crown of his head against the wall between the two windows.

“Could work, I guess,” he said.

“Do we know the kids are going to inherit it?” Derrick asked.

“That’s usually how it works,” Nancy said, sounding defensive.

Old Man Buckles crossed his arms. Arlie watched him out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t quite tell what he was thinking, and she wanted to know.

“Jerry,” she said, “do you have anything to add?”

“Not at the moment,” he said, then rolled his eyes.

“Look,” she said. “If what Leighton says is true, he’s within his legal rights to build anything on Olivia’s patch of ground. He can tear down her lovely house and put up another monstrosity as long as it stays within the building codes.”

“Which are for shi…zzle here,” Hernán muttered.

“Yeah,” Nancy said. “They built this development outside the city for a reason.”

“The codes aren’t that different here,” Arlie said. She’d investigated them. “Maybe they had been back in the day, but they’re not now.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” Old Man Buckles said.

“Not really,” Arlie said. “Leighton knows the code, and he’s adhering to it.”

“So, I don’t see what we can do here,” Madison said. “He owns the land, he’ll build something ugly on it, and we’re stuck unless we move.”

“Worse,” Derrick said. “He’ll tear down Olivia’s house and change the tenor of the neighborhood.”

“Maybe…” Old Man Buckles said.

“No maybes,” Nancy snapped at him. “He’s already building the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, and it sounds like he hates Arlie here.”

Arlie’s cheeks heated. The fact that Leighton might build another ugly house wasn’t her fault. She started to say something, but Babette put a hand on her arm.

“No matter what we do,” Thao said, “we will not be able to put legal restrictions in place in time to stop whatever Leighton Taylor is planning.”

“We’re screwed then,” Rosalinda Garcia said, meeting her husband’s gaze. He raised his eyebrows.

Arlie recognized the look. It was married-couple for we leaving yet?

“Well,” Babette said, “we could file some kind of restraining order until we put the legal requirements in place.”

“Going to court isn’t going to stop Mr. Taylor,” Thao said as if he had experience with Leighton. “He has more attorneys than all of you do.”

Arlie noticed that he kept himself out of that list.

“Then maybe we buy him out,” Derrick said. “I’m sure if we pay a bit more than he will pay—”

“Men like Taylor, they don’t care about money.” Old Man Buckles rocked his chair.

Derrick frowned at him as if that movement was going to cause problems.

“Then we have no hope,” Nancy said. “Because Leighton’s way ahead of anything we want to do.”

“I did not say he couldn’t be coerced.” Old Man Buckles smiled. “Anyone can be convinced to do anything. You just have to find the right incentive.”

His smile set a little chill through Arlie.

“What does that mean?” Madison asked.

“I mean,” Old Man Buckles said, “we want something, he wants something. We want him to leave. We really want him to stop building that monstrosity, and we certainly don’t want him to expand into Olivia’s property.”

“We can’t do anything about that.” Nancy waved her hands at him the way people did when they were panicked.

“It’s pretty simple, really,” Old Man Buckles said. “We make it unpleasant for him to stay.”

Arlie swallowed hard. Both Nancy and Old Man Buckles were old Vegas. This development was old Vegas. There were aspects of old Vegas that should remain in the past.

But she wasn’t sure how to say that without saying her assumption out loud.

“I don’t think Leighton notices unpleasant,” she said, a little too loudly.

“Everyone notices the right kind of unpleasant,” Old Man Buckles said. He lowered his chair hard. The two legs banged on the tile floor.

“Well,” Thao said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

He took his wife’s hand, then looked at Arlie.

“I would support the start of a homeowners’ association, should it not be focused on one homeowner. I think we need restrictions so we don’t lose any more of the old designs to people like Mr. Taylor.” Thao gave her a pained smile. “But that is all I would support.”

Madison looked from him to Arlie to Old Man Buckles.

“I seem to be missing something here,” she said.

“You’re not missing anything,” Hernán said. “In fact, I’m not even sure we had this meeting.”

He said that last with a lot of emphasis, his gaze on Old Man Buckles.

“Yeah, well,” Derrick said, pushing off the edge of the counter so that he could stand upright. “I guess we talk to some lawyers then about drafting something. Should we pool resources for legal fees?”

“Draft a homeowners association?” Cam Nguyen asked. “If that’s what you’re suggesting, I’m for it.”

“I don’t want fees to get out of hand,” Nancy said.

“How about we get a quote,” Babette said, “and then we’ll talk again.”

“Sounds fair,” Derrick said.

“Lawyers get involved,” Old Man Buckles said, “lawyers make money. No one else does.”

“This isn’t a divorce, Jerry,” Nancy snapped at him. “Sometimes lawyers are helpful.”

“Yeah,” he said, slapping the rolled papers against his palm again. “I suppose. When you need them for cover.”

Arlie wished she hadn’t invited him.

“We do need them for cover,” she said, trying to turn the conversation around. “We need them to make sure we do this right.”

Old Man Buckles smiled and said nothing at all.

In the middle of the night, Arlie woke out of a dream. Olivia had been talking to her from the bedroom, something about Don’t ask Jerry about the history of this place, dear. It’s better if you don’t know.

Arlie couldn’t remember if the conversation had taken place or not. The dream seemed vivid and real, and somehow, that confused her more: Was it a memory? Or was it something her brain made up?

She eased quietly over the side of the bed, careful not to wake Babette. Arlie grabbed her robe and slipped her feet into the shoes she’d taken to wearing instead of slippers. The house was a construction site, after all, and they were living in the middle of it, which she believed stupid, but Babette had wanted to establish themselves in the neighborhood.

Arlie usually didn’t regret it, except in the middle of the night. She hated turning on lights more, but she was also afraid of stepping on a loose nail or a shredding bit of wood.

She tied her robe over her middle, shivering in the air-conditioned cold, and walked to the kitchen. There, she reached for the light switch and stopped herself. She had the odd feeling that the house was being watched.

Which was silly, because someone would have had to get through the adobe fence, not trigger the security lights, and be standing in their wide backyard to see into the kitchen.

Still, her skin crawled. She decided against opening the refrigerator door.

Instead, she went into the laundry room and opened the exit, which led to a corner in the patio that had seemed like wasted space to her when she first saw it. Now, she was grateful for it because it meant she could step onto the patio silently.

The air was slightly humid and smelled of rain and dust. A storm had come through so recently that the nearby grass was wet. Vegas had a monsoon season in the summer, resulting in thunderstorms that were powerful and dramatic and could cause flooding, but they rarely made the news because they were so localized.

The one that had just gone through was probably what had awakened her, and the electricity in the air probably had given her skin that crawly feeling.

The idea didn’t make her feel better, though, possibly because of the remnants of the dream.

One afternoon, about two months before the end, Arlie had arrived just as Olivia was watching the evening news. A before-the-weather segment showed a video of a house for sale near Paradise Park.

“Tony’s house,” Olivia had muttered. She’d already taken her nightly meds and was a tad more loose-lipped than usual.

Tony turned out to be Tony Spilotro, who was a known enforcer for the Chicago mob. He’d been in charge of the mob’s interests in Las Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s, at least according to the news story.

Olivia waved her hand and said, “They all seem so surprised he had a normal house. Everybody had a normal house. What do these people think? That—”

And then she focused on Arlie as if seeing her for the first time.

“You buy other houses here,” Olivia said, “you be careful when you open the walls. And when you dig. Tony lived near Paradise, but those Paradise Park people had nothing on Sahara Circle.”

And then she laughed. She patted Arlie’s hand, then stared outside for a while before falling asleep.

Arlie never got her to say anything after that.

But she did know what Olivia meant because one of Arlie’s first flips had been a Paradise Park ranch. Paradise Park was right near the Las Vegas National Golf Course, in the middle of what was then all there was to the Strip. And Arlie had found a series of secret rooms in that ranch, although not a one of them had any buried money or a body or anything else.

She wandered to the empty pool. Two of the lawn chairs had blown over—there had been a storm—and she set them upright, then sat in one, feeling the damp seep through her robe.

That next flip was the tough one—the escrow house, she called it, because she never really did end up owning it. Estate troubles from the beginning. The owner had died without a will, or so the family said, which meant everything went to them. But the owner’s live-in girlfriend found a document in his handwriting, witnessed by two old friends, that served as a holographic will, showing his intent.

Then his business partner found another will, a later one, both on the computer and printed up, with the owner’s signature and a note in his handwriting saying that will would supersede everything.

That was when the lawsuits started. Nevada was an intent state—that’s how Arlie’s regular lawyer put it. Whatever the deceased wanted, whatever he intended—that was what the state wanted to do.

And the question was, which of those wills showed his intent? Usually, it was the most recent will, but the unusual nature of it—for him—typed and only partially handwritten meant the heirs would spend months, maybe years in court over this. Because there was a lot of estate to dispose of.

“Run from this one,” her lawyer had said. “Run fast.”

She had taken the advice and, after twelve months, was grateful for it. The last time she had driven by the place, it was still shuttered, with overgrown weeds and a dead lawn, leading her to believe the court cases continued.

Court cases. Wills. Intent.

And a computer.

She didn’t like what she was thinking. She didn’t like it at all.

Arlie spent the evening digging in her old file boxes in the garage, looking, she told Babette, for a bill she thought she hadn’t paid. Babette didn’t care. Her attitude was always that Arlie did what Arlie did.

But Arlie was feeling guilty in advance, and she overexplained when she was feeling guilty, which was not good, considering she hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

It took her nearly an hour to find the old paper file she had kept for the house in Paradise Park. She’d kept the emails and documents on her computer as well, but she shared that with Babette, and she didn’t want anything to come up in the browser history.

Sure enough, in the middle of all the legal papers were photocopies of the various wills and a copy of the half-typed, half-handwritten will. Arlie scanned it. It really didn’t apply as well as she had hoped, so she scanned the handwritten will as well. That was closer to what she was looking for.

She made copies of both documents using one of the older printers in the garage, folded the new copies, and shoved them in her back pocket. She then replaced the files where she had found them, made sure to shut off the printer, and meandered her way into the bedroom.

Babette was in the kitchen, arguing with someone about water usage, which wasn’t an issue with this house, considering they were on a well. So, Babette was working on one of the other properties, handling the regulatory stuff that cropped up all the time.

Arlie was grateful for that because she often lost her temper when she had to deal with bureaucrats. Long ago, she and Babette agreed that Arlie got to use the hammers as often as she wanted, mostly to work out frustrations that would have been worked out with her fists in the past, and Babette got to talk someone to death, which was her preferred method of dealing with difficult people.

In the bedroom, Arlie went deep into the closet, where she kept her clothes in boxes, waiting for construction to get finished. She opened a box of jeans, pulled out her blackest pair, and stuck the papers in the back pocket. Then she found a black long-sleeve t-shirt and tossed it on top of the jeans. She placed one of her black baseball caps on the pile for good measure.

She pulled the door closed on her closet and went back through the house. Babette hadn’t even noticed that she had walked through.

Arlie stepped outside into the growing heat of the day. She hit the ancient button near the garage that opened the gate. The beautifully wrought metal doors swung open, groaning as they went.

Then she looked at Olivia’s house.

If no one had told Arlie any differently, she would have thought Olivia was still inside, gazing at her beautiful backyard. The hum of cicadas had started, signaling that the day would be hot, so Olivia wouldn’t turn on the backyard fountains until late evening. The fairy lights on the grounds would add to the magic. There was a lot of found art around trees, and near bushes, all of it sculpture and most of it made by very famous artists.

Arlie had no idea what would happen to all of that if Leighton got the place. She might have to beg him to let her remove the one-of-a-kind pieces. Or maybe she would have Babette do that. Or some other neighbor (Thao?) whom Leighton objected to less than he objected to her.

Arlie wanted to be specific, but she didn’t dare. What she was doing was bad enough; she didn’t want to make it completely obvious.

Because that would be worse.

It seemed to take forever for night to fall and even longer for Babette to fall asleep. The good thing was, though, that once Babette fell asleep, she slept so hard that Arlie usually had to shake her awake if she needed her.

Arlie was counting on that oblivion right now. She slipped out of bed half an hour after Babette started making her tiny little snoring sounds and climbed into the closet, closing the door tightly. Instead of the overhead light, while she dressed, she used the flashlight on her phone, grabbing black Nikes rather than her boots because the boots were probably a lot more distinctive. After dressing, she stuck her hair under the baseball cap, patted her back pocket to make sure the papers were in it and then eased the closet door open.

The house was treacherous in the dark, as all houses were in the middle of a remodel. Nothing stayed in the same place for longer than a few days, so Arlie had to pick her way carefully across the darkened living room and into the kitchen. She placed her phone in its cradle, and she wasn’t going to wear her smartwatch either. She didn’t want to be tracked, and she didn’t want to shut them off.

The only thing she was going to carry with her was a thin flashlight, some thin plastic gloves, and her lock-picking tools. She had learned how to pick locks nearly fifteen years ago, after yet again paying a locksmith to open relatively easy (he said) locks in houses she had bought. She was spending hundreds per year on locksmiths, and she realized if she knew how to pick a lock, she would save a good portion of that.

The toughest part was going to be getting from her house to Olivia’s. There was only one way to do so directly—through the gate and across the street.

Arlie wasn’t going to walk that way. Instead, she was going to take advantage of the darkness, scale her own fence, and walk along the neighbor’s paths. She had to approach Olivia’s house from the back, away from her own property and away from Leighton’s.

Arlie and Babette had security cameras everywhere, and Arlie had decided that shutting them off would seem too suspicious. She knew where the blank spots were on her property, so she would stick to those.

She had no idea if there were blank spots in Leighton’s. She wasn’t even sure Leighton had cameras or a security system. If she were building his monstrosity of a house, she would have insisted on some kind of security, even with all the security in the subdivision. The tools and materials his builder was using were expensive, and losing them to a thief would be costly.

Scaling the fence was easy from the inside of the property. There were stumps of old palm trees that she hadn’t yet removed. She stood on one of those, put her hands on top of the adobe, and pulled herself up, knowing she was protected by the fronds of the remaining palms from any other nearby cameras.

She jumped down and landed in some scratchy dead brush, which crinkled under her feet. She paused, waiting to see if anyone heard or if anything moved.

This half-acre of her neighbor’s property was undeveloped, and they were never here. The home was an inheritance that they planned to fix up and hadn’t gotten around to yet.

She walked along the fence line, between the ancient palm trees and around the dead brush, until she reached the side of the road. From there, she crossed the cul-de-sac on one of the vacant lots, headed behind Old Man Buckle’s property, across a cracked and ancient driveway, and through a hedge into Olivia’s backyard.

Olivia had a 1970s security system but had let the contract lapse because she didn’t want security from Sahara Circle to run to her house every time someone from home health care forgot the code and pushed the door open anyway.

Arlie expected the system to remain off. In fact, she was gambling on it.

She walked around to the front of the house, staying in the shadows. Olivia had let the security lighting go, and the fairy lights in the back that she had so loved were either burned out or turned off. Still, some security camera from a neighbor’s (heck, from Arlie’s own place) might catch her silhouette moving across the yard. Worse, some camera might actually catch her face.

She figured her face was shielded enough with that ball cap, so long as she kept her head down. But in contrast to her t-shirt and jeans, her skin was light enough to be noticeable on a camera.

So she kept her face turned toward the house as she made her way to the front door. She slipped on the gloves, crouched in front of the main door, and picked the lock so quickly and efficiently that she startled herself.

The door opened without making a sound. That was why she had picked this door. The patio doors grated on their metal tracks, the back door stuck, and the entrance into the garage squealed so loudly that Arlie had been able to hear it across the street whenever she was outside.

Arlie slipped inside and gently pushed the front door until the latch clicked shut. Then she pushed in the handle lock and turned the deadbolt that had been so easy to open.

Her heart was pounding hard. The scent of Olivia’s favorite vanilla candles mixed with the leftover smell of her Chanel perfume hit Arlie, followed by other smells. The musty scent of a closed-up house (already!), and the faint stench of urine and illness, coming from down the hall. She had half-expected the odor of rotting food, but the hospice people must have cleaned that up as they left. Their equipment was gone from the entry as well.

She turned the flashlight toward the floor, then flicked the light on, and scanned the living room. It looked the same as it always had: expensive couches and chairs, all bought at the height of the 1960s mod era. Small sculptures on the table, books lining the built-in book cases, no television to be seen.

The garden faced her through the wide windows across the living room, but she really couldn’t see much more than the overgrown hedges along the patio.

She flicked the flashlight off, then silently made her way to the long, narrow hallway. The first door on the left was a study/library with more books. It had been done in red velvet and dark wood.

This room was stunningly dark. She flicked on the flashlight again, hoping that the curtains were closed like she remembered.

They were. She turned on the overhead light.

It was dim—the old bulb barely up to the task of banishing the gloom. She reached across the desk to the desk lamp, letting its orange-yellow light warm up the place.

She stood for a moment, feeling the frustration of her conversation with Leighton. This room alone had thousands of dollars of custom-built paneling, probably imported from Africa in the 1960s before the exotic wood bans. The desk was hand-carved from the same wood, and the chair, which wasn’t as comfortable as it looked, had a pad that matched the red carpet and drapes.

The newest thing in the room was the computer, and it dated from the early 1990s. It was hooked up to a dot-matrix printer that was almost the size of Arlie’s bandsaw.

But Arlie knew the computer worked because Olivia used it to write letters. She would be printing and mailing them if Arlie arrived in the early afternoon.

Arlie made sure the computer was plugged in, and the printer was attached. The paper was threaded through the platen.

She turned both machines on, the computer beeping happily at her as if it had missed being active and the printer moaning as much as the doors did. Then, the printer’s gears flopped into place, and everything was ready.

Arlie dug into the computer files just to see if there was a letter here or any kind of will. She found a few letters to Olivia’s lawyer, Anita Reiff, mostly about small things. Nothing about a will or anything to do with Olivia’s children. And nothing to the children either.

Arlie opened the desk to see if there were letters from the children and found nothing. The computer was too old for email, and Olivia had resolutely refused to update her technology. So there had been no obvious contact with the kids in decades.

Arlie reached into her back pocket and pulled out the photocopies. She would have to use some of the language from here, then print out the will and somehow get it to Reiff.

Arlie opened a file marked Miscellaneous, and there she found a single file marked Musings.

She opened it and saw that it was a bullet-point list of things that needed to go in an updated will. These musings were from 2008 and did not mention the kids. Instead, the heirs were half the charities in town.

“Good,” Arlie whispered, and the sound of her own voice startled her. This was the perfect place to start.

She copied the file, then stopped, her heart pounding. The stupid file had the current date.

She had forgotten the most important thing. She had to change the computer’s clock.

Fortunately, she owned computers like this in the 1990s, and she knew how to use them. So, she did. She had the computer default to its original settings, and the date was left blank. Then she tossed the copied file into the trash, made sure the trash was empty and started again.

This time, the new file showed the date as –/–/–, which was what she wanted. She would go back in after she was done and change some of the more recent letters as well, just so that this wasn’t the only file touched.

She didn’t have to add much. Just one single bullet point recommending that Arlie either inherit the house or be hired to restore it. In either case, the house was not to be sold or altered in any way.

Arlie didn’t know the legal language for that, but she didn’t have to. She also didn’t have to steal any of the language from those old wills. She felt a twinge of unease, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.

Instead, she hit print.

The dot-matrix made eee-eee-eee noises as it printed, and she was convinced the entire neighborhood could hear them. She pulled the document out of the printer. It was barely legible. There wasn’t much ink in the printer. Did the document need a signature to be valid? It wasn’t really a will. It was just intent.

And for that, it would need a date.

Or would it? Because Arlie had only known Olivia for a year, that automatically dated the document.

She leaned her head against the bulky computer screen and sighed. Her stomach was twisting. She felt ill. Her heart was pounding.

She would have to somehow show this to Babette and explain it, even before taking it to the lawyer. And then, she’d have to tell the lawyer how she came into possession of it and—

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t come up with a plausible way of handling any of it.

But if she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t be able to stop Leighton. If she did, she would be committing some kind of felony. Theft, embezzlement, or something.

Yes, she loved this house. She loved this subdivision, and she loved the image she had of it, restoring it to its former glory, only with all people welcome.

But she couldn’t commit a crime to do it.

And maybe, just maybe, the document she had altered showed Olivia’s actual will. Now, Arlie wished she had talked with Olivia about her plans for the future.

But Arlie hadn’t.

Her mouth was dry. She was already breaking the law. She was trespassing. But it was the kind of trespassing she had done in the past to examine an empty house she wanted to flip. She was doing no harm—if she didn’t take anything. And if she didn’t use this altered document.

She stared at it for a moment. She could tear it up and throw it out, but if someone pieced it back together…

Better to take it home and light a match to it. Better that no one ever knew what she had done.

She folded the printout and stuck it in the left back pocket of her jeans. She stuffed the other documents back in the right back pocket where they had been when she arrived.

Then she closed the file she added, closed the folder, and shut down the program on the computer before shutting the computer itself off. Her hands were sweating inside those plastic gloves. She checked the desk and made sure she hadn’t left anything.

She shut off the desk lamp and saw, in the weird flat light of the overhead, that the printer’s orange light blinked. She shut the printer off, letting out a small breath as she did so. She almost forgot that.

She just wasn’t cut out for any of this.

Somehow, she would have to live with Leighton’s ugly house and his vindictive teardown of this place. And if she couldn’t live with it, well, then she knew how to sell a flip, and she also had the skills to rent it.

Still, her eyes teared up as she let herself out of the library for probably the last time. She turned, looked at it, absorbed what a lovely, comfortable room it was, and vowed to keep it in her memory. Then she shut off the overhead light, opened the door, and stopped in the hallway, tempted to do one last walk-through.

But she had taken enough risks.

She locked the front door from the inside. She was going to risk letting herself out through the garage and into the backyard.

The door stuck, just like she remembered, but it didn’t have a deadbolt. All she had to do was lock the handle and pull it closed. She managed to get the door open without it making too much noise.

She had to turn on her flashlight, keeping the beam low so that it wasn’t visible through the dust-covered garage door windows.

Then she walked past the Cadillac that Olivia had kept after her husband died, past the pile of equipment that seemed to date from the 1970s—everything from fertilizer to lawn spray that had probably been banned before Arlie was born.

The garage smelled faintly of dust and chemicals, mostly old gasoline. Leighton would have to clean this up first thing because it was probably a safety hazard.

Arlie shut off the flashlight before pushing on the other garage door, the one that led into the backyard, and it didn’t stick as much as she remembered. Maybe it swelled in the heat. Or maybe Leighton had let himself into the place since the door wasn’t closed as tightly as it should have been.

She tiptoed across the yard, stifling a sneeze as she did so. That chemical odor had gotten into her nose. She went through the opening in the trees, backtracking, pausing for only a moment when she thought she smelled cigarette smoke.

She waited, trying to see if the smell was coming from a nearby yard or someone walking down the road.

She took a tentative sniff, hoping it wouldn’t inspire the sneeze, and no longer smelled the cigarette smoke—if she ever had. She might have smelled something from that garage.

Almost as if on command, she sneezed. It was explosive and loud, and she froze, hoping she hadn’t awakened half the neighborhood.

But no one moved. She didn’t see anything in the faint light from the corner street light more than a block away. She didn’t hear footsteps either.

Her heart was pounding because she felt guilty. She needed to get home, get rid of the document, and go to bed. Maybe take a shower first, just in case some of that garage smell had gotten on her clothing.

The walk home was uneventful. She let herself into the house, half expecting Babette to confront her. But Arlie was alone.

Thank heavens.

She would never tell anyone what she had done.

As far as she was concerned, this night had never happened.

It had never happened at all.

Two nights after she broke into Olivia’s house, Arlie woke up to the loudest bang she had ever heard.

“Thunder,” Babette murmured and rolled over.

But Arlie frowned. She hadn’t ever heard thunder that loud, not even in monsoon season.

Then there was another bang, and another, and another. The sounds were too sharp to be thunder. Thunder rumbled. It didn’t sound concussive unless it was right overhead.

She had no idea what it was, but she grabbed Babette around the waist and rolled them both off the bed.

“What the—?” Babette asked, struggling.

“Get under the bed,” Arlie said, shoving her.

“What’s going on?” Babette asked, not moving.

If Babette had one flaw that Arlie wanted to change, it was the fact that she woke up so damn slowly.

Another bang, and this time the ground shook. Something hard—several somethings hard—hit the side of the house, and as the shaking eased, another bang, farther away this time, followed by breaking glass.

“Someone’s getting in,” Babette said.

“I don’t think so,” Arlie said and shoved Babette with all her strength. Babette finally got the message and crawled under the bed.

Another far-away bang and more breaking glass. Then, loud, scared voices and the smell of smoke—real, heavy, chemical smoke.

“Shit,” Arlie said, wishing she had grabbed her phone as she grabbed Babette.

Arlie had no idea what this was, but she worried that it was a gas main explosion. And if it was, then she and Babette would die in here.

Arlie groped for her slippers, found Babette’s, and thrust them at her. “Put these on,” she said.

“We can’t go out there,” Babette said. “Someone is shooting at us.”

“Explosions,” Arlie said. “Probably gas leaks.”

Babette cursed. She seemed awake now.

Arlie slapped her hands against the floor, found her own slippers, and pulled them on. She also found her robe and clung to it. Then she grabbed Babette’s hand.

“We’re going outside,” she said. “Head down, shoes on.”

“Robe?” Babette asked.

She slept in a skimpy little shift. Arlie wore a t-shirt and shorts, mostly because she woke up fast enough to answer a door or handle an emergency.

Like she was doing now.

She gave Babette the robe and dragged her into the bedroom. Arlie grabbed her phone off the nightstand and saw no alerts on it as she turned on the flashlight function.

The banging had stopped, but the voices had grown louder. Then, in the distance, sirens.

Arlie led Babette through the living room, noting broken glass from at least two windows. The stench of smoke had grown stronger, and her eyes were watering.

She pushed open the front door and stepped onto the path leading to the driveway.

She recognized a few of the outside voices now—Nancy, Madison, Derrick—mixed with others that sounded unfamiliar. Overhead, clouds of smoke plumed, and someone was yelling something about hoses.

The sirens were growing closer with each passing moment.

She pushed open the small gate door and stepped through it ahead of Babette in case there were problems on the street in front of them.

And good thing she did.

Because there were burning bits of something on the street, in Olivia’s yard, and in her yard.

Burning. In the summer. In Las Vegas.

“We have to get our hoses,” she said to Babette.

Babette didn’t say anything. Instead, she pointed. Reluctantly, Arlie followed Babette’s finger.

Flames rose out of the center of Leighton’s monstrosity. Except for the middle cube, which was burning, the rest of the cubes were in pieces. That was what was all over the yards, the properties.

Leighton’s monstrosity had exploded.

Arlie let out a sigh. It couldn’t be a gas explosion then since the building wasn’t done. The walls weren’t up, so the gas hadn’t been attached to the house.

The relief she felt lasted only a second because she needed to check her own yard, as well as the interior of the house. Flying pieces of shrapnel burned everywhere.

Babette—who simply could not handle an emergency ever— had not moved.

Arlie swore at her, something she almost never did. “Get the damned hose. Put out the fires.”

If she could, Arlie would have done that herself, but she had to check the house first, and if she sent Babette, Arlie had no idea if Babette would stomp out a fire she saw, come to get Arlie, or, worse, do nothing at all.

“The damn hoses!” Arlie repeated, then pushed Babette, which seemed to make her come alive.

That, and the fact that most of the neighbors were running toward their own homes, either to get hoses, make sure everything was all right, or get out of the way.

The sirens sounded really close, but Arlie couldn’t count on them. The entire subdivision could go up if this kind of fire got out of hand.

She would take care of her house first, then the yard, then Olivia’s.

Arlie went to the house after making sure Babette grabbed the nearest hose. As Arlie opened the door, she saw Babette turn on the water on the side of the building.

Screw that. Arlie went into the laundry area, where the sprinkler controls were, overrode them, and turned them on. Babette would still get enough water for the hose, but the sprinklers would take care of any embers that they couldn’t see yet.

Then she turned on the lights, and she went back to the living room. That was where she heard glass breaking on this side of the house. Bits of Leighton’s property had to hit with a lot of force to clear the fence and blast their way into the house.

She found a long piece of rebar on the carpet with a scorch mark, but no fire. She touched the rebar. It was still warm, but not hot. Still, she picked it up and tossed it onto the ancient tile in the un-remodeled kitchen.

Then she continued, walking around the street side of the house as the sirens pulled close and stopped mid-thrum. There were more voices, shouting, and the sound of water running all over the house.

More shrapnel had broken one of the patio doors near the garage and another window in the half bath. Nothing hot, nothing burning. However, she had to tell by touch (and she kept picking up the pieces of Leighton’s house) because the chemical stench of the smoke was making her eyes water and her throat hurt.

She went out back. The yard was soaked, which was good, and she didn’t see anything that had cleared the fence here.

But she took several steps back, getting her slippers and nightclothes wet as she looked at the roof.

Some shrapnel up there, bits of the house, but it didn’t seem like they were burning or had started anything. The damn roof was made of asbestos, and the asbestos remediation team told her to replace the roof all at once, especially if she was going to change any part of the house’s footprint.

She had planned to, but not right away. So, the asbestos had probably snuffed out any problem. However, she’d have to call the team back out as soon as possible because any damage to asbestos would cause it to flake, and she and Babette might inhale it.

Minor problem right now. Minor.

Arlie could hear the firefighters yelling, someone saying the police needed to be called, and someone else asking if there was anyone living in the structure.

She continued to walk around her home, making sure the wet ground didn’t contain burning shrapnel and that nothing burned on the roof.

Bits of Leighton’s house stuck in her siding, and one more piece of rebar looked like an axe thrown at a tree, but the damage was all from flying debris and not from fire.

She made her way around the house, saw the firefighters dealing with the fire in the middle of Leighton’s monstrosity, saw two other firefighters walking around Olivia’s place, and saw one more heading toward the other side of the street to make sure the houses over there were all right.

In the light of the flames, she could see the faces of Derrick and Nancy and Madison, frowning at the destruction. They were standing with their arms crossed, and then, as a group, they looked at her.

Arlie’s cheeks flushed. She didn’t have anything to do with this. How could they think that? And what had they already told the firefighters? That she hated Leighton and the thing he was building on his own property?

She was a builder, not a destroyer. She wouldn’t have blown up his house, even if she had thought of it (which she hadn’t).

Some other neighbors stood to the side, a few in long robes, some in t-shirts and shorts like she was, and a few others looking like they had thrown on whatever was nearby.

It took her a moment to recognize Thao. He wasn’t in one of his fancy suits, but instead, something that looked like a bright orange-brown jogging outfit from the 1970s. The security guards from the front gate were talking to the police. She hadn’t even realized that Metro was part of the group that had shown up, but there were their police cars and an ambulance, too.

The hose was curled along the driveway, water dribbling out its end. Babette walked toward Arlie, looking as sodden as she felt.

“I think I got everything out over at Olivia’s. I figured we were okay when you turned on the sprinklers.”

Babette should never think during an emergency, but Arlie didn’t say that. Instead, she put her arm around Babette and pulled her close, glad she was all right, glad everyone seemed to be all right, hoping that the stench wouldn’t cause other problems, hoping that this turned out to be a disgruntled employee and not a failure of the security up front or something more sinister, something that her neighbors suspected her of.

Babette rested her head against Arlie’s shoulder and snaked her arm around Arlie’s back.

Whatever caused this, they would deal with it. They would figure out what it meant for them.

The arson investigator showed up while the ashes were still cooling. It was barely dawn, and a few firefighters remained to monitor the embers. Arlie was leaning against her fence, the adobe digging into the back of her t-shirt. She hadn’t changed yet, and she probably looked a mess. But she had managed to make coffee.

Babette had taken a shower and then went back to bed, but not before asking Arlie how long the air would stink of smoke.

Arlie had no idea, so she made something up.

Now, she was studying Olivia’s house, which also took some damage from the explosions—more than her own house had. Fortunately, she’d been planning to replace the broken windows, so she really had no cost for this.

She would follow the lead of the others in the subdivision, though, when it came to collecting insurance money. If these explosions happened because Leighton had done something stupid, then she was all for suing the ever-living hell out of him.

The arson investigator was a short man with bow legs that she usually associated with a hardcore rancher. His brown face had some red, probably from the heat, and she would have described the tight gray curls on his head as ash if she somehow didn’t feel that inappropriate.

He carried a gas mask—or some kind of mask—in one hand and a fire helmet in the other. His blackish-gray uniform had a yellow band across the middle, identifying him as part of the fire investigative team. All kinds of equipment—some of which she recognized as heat monitors—danged from hooks around that middle belt.

His boots left dust marks on the road. He walked toward her, stopping only to set down the hat and mask. Then he pulled a clipboard from the large pocket on one side.

“You see this happen?” he asked her as he reached her.

“Heard it,” she said.

“You wanna tell me about it?” he asked.

What an easy way to get someone talking. Everyone liked to talk about their adventures with a fire and explosion.

He wasn’t writing on the clipboard, not yet, so she figured she could tell him a bit.

So, she did—the explosions, thinking it was something else, turning on the sprinklers— “Smart,” he said—and told him that Babette had put out small fires too.

“We had damage,” Arlie said. “I can show you.”

He nodded. “We’ll need to photograph it. My team’ll be here shortly. They’re working on the other properties right now.”

That caught her. “Other properties? Did something else get hit in the subdivision?”

He gave her a tired smile. “No, not here. Other properties owned by Mr. Taylor. Do you know him?”

“Kinda hard to miss him,” she said, thinking about the words “other properties.”

Something rustled behind her. Babette approached, looking cool and comfortable in gray shorts and a matching gray top. She carried her coffee, and anyone else would have thought she had just gotten up.

But Arlie recognized the brightness in those eyes. Babette had seen her talking and come out to save Arlie from herself.

“You don’t like him?” the investigator asked.

“I don’t really know him,” Arlie said. “But let’s just say he and I are oil and water.”

“Good morning!” Babette said, smiling at the investigator. Then she let her smile fade. “Or should I leave off the ‘good’?”

He shrugged and gave her his tired smile. “I’ve ceased judging mornings. I understand you had a rough night.”

“That is an understatement,” Babette said. “I’m sure my wife told you all about it.”

There was judgment in that sentence.

“She told me what she did. Smart stuff, keeping any ground fires from starting. There were a few down the block that we had to put out.” He watched Babette, but she didn’t relax as he clearly wanted her to.

“I take it you’re investigating,” she said. “Do you have a card?”

“I do.” He lifted the clip on his clipboard and handed her a card. “You’re an attorney?”

“No,” Babette said and didn’t say anything else. Babette was good at being silent when silence was necessary.

Arlie didn’t care about silence, not at the moment anyway. “You said there were other explosions at Mr. Taylor’s properties?”

“Three,” the investigator said. “All over the city. Same kind of explosive used.”

“You know it was an explosive device?” Arlie asked.

“I’m sure we’ll find out more soon enough,” Babette said hastily, trying to get Arlie to stop talking. Babette worried too much. This investigator did not have an “I’m being friendly because I’m investigating you” vibe. Arlie had been investigated enough as a kid with anger-management issues to know the difference.

The investigator ignored Babette. In fact, he turned slightly so that he could face Arlie directly.

“Yes,” he said, “we know that these were explosive devices. Old ones. Unstable as hell. It was lucky whoever planted them didn’t blow himself to smithereens just transporting them.”

“So, no one was killed, then,” Arlie said.

“Not that we’ve found so far. Mr. Taylor was in his condo when everything happened, so he’s all right. And this property was the only one in a subdivision. The others are office complexes.” The inspector tucked the clipboard under his arm. “You ever hear any rumors about Mr. Taylor? Did he have ties to this subdivision?”

“You mean besides owning property here?” Arlie asked.

The inspector nodded.

“We don’t know anything about him,” Babette said, tucking her arm in Arlie’s. She wanted Arlie to walk away.

But Arlie wasn’t ready to leave. She couldn’t quite understand the source of the inspector’s question.

“I—I don’t think Leighton has ties to the neighborhood. I know he bought that property he was building on. It was for sale for almost a year before he picked it up. Why do you ask?”

“Because the devices have a unique signature,” the inspector said. “One we haven’t seen for nearly forty years.”

Arlie felt a cool shock run through her, Old Man Buckles’ voice strong in her head: Everyone notices the right kind of unpleasant.

The inspector was staring at her. Had he seen that chill travel down her spine?

“So, you think there’s more in the neighborhood?” Babette asked. Arlie couldn’t tell if the fear in her voice was real or staged for the inspector.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll do a thorough search. As far as we can tell, Mr. Taylor only owns one property; is that correct?”

Arlie swallowed. Her throat was scratchy from the smoke. “He told me last week he was going to buy Olivia’s house once it went through probate.”

“Olivia…?” the inspector asked.

Arlie pointed. “Olivia’s house. The property butts up against his. He wanted to expand.”

“All right.” The inspector nodded. “You see anything suspicious, anything at all. You call 911. Don’t even call me. Get a team out here. Those devices are nothing to mess around with.”

“Will do,” Arlie said.

He nodded, then walked across the street to Olivia’s. He peered at it for a moment, then hauled a cell phone out of his gear and spoke quietly into it.

“I thought he was asking for statements,” Babette asked.

Arlie put her hand over Babette’s. Babette’s skin was cool.

“He’s already ruled us out,” Arlie said. “He recognized the devices.”

Babette looked up at her, understanding finally crossing her face. “You think Old—”

Arlie squeezed Babette’s hand, shutting her down. “I haven’t seen him, have you?”

Babette shook her head. “Should we go over there?”

Probably. It was probably a great idea to tell the inspector about Old Man Buckles. The other neighbors had told the firefighters about Arlie’s verbal wrangles with Leighton.

“No,” Arlie said. “It’s none of our business.”

Even though it probably was.

Gossip spread through the subdivision faster than the flames had the night before. Almost everyone, it seemed, stood outside and watched the inspectors, offered opinions, had ideas.

But, as far as Arlie could tell, no one mentioned Old Man Buckles. Maybe no one else had heard his comments the night of the homeowners meeting as threats. Except Nancy. Nancy had tried to shut him down.

And Nancy wasn’t gossiping at all. Like Arlie, she was just listening.

More inspectors arrived. They poked and prodded and collected. They photographed the outside of Olivia’s house, the damage to Arlie and Babette’s house, and all of the places where the shrapnel ended up.

They formally interviewed security but didn’t formally interview anyone else. A few of the neighbors were upset that the inspectors didn’t talk to them at all.

The night of the explosion, Arlie deliberately watched the evening news. She recorded all four local newscasts and watched them back to back. Only one managed to catch up with Leighton.

He looked haunted and terrified, and his “no comments” were bracketed with an “I have no idea what happened.”

The local reporters all spoke to different people who knew Leighton, including some from the neighborhoods where the other bombs had gone off.

“You don’t wish this on anyone,” said one woman, “but if it had to happen to someone, well, then…”

Another said, “Good luck to the cops. Everyone hated this guy. Everyone.”

There were overhead images of the damage in Sahara Circle, but the subdivision’s security refused to let reporters inside. That was why Sahara Circle had security in the first place; once someone developed the first star map in the 1970s, the subdivision owners didn’t want tour buses to come through there.

Apparently, the system still worked when it had to.

One newscast—the last one of the evening—had a tidbit.

“Sources say that the bombs used in these explosions had been used in several similar hits on businesses back in the 1970s. The bomber was never found, but police at the time believed the hits were retaliation for the business owner’s refusal to pay protection money to the mob.”

A chill ran through Arlie again. She kept her head down so that Babette didn’t see her face, not that Babette had to.

Arlie couldn’t take it anymore.

She stood.

“I gotta see if Old Man Buckles is okay,” she said.

Babette lifted her head. “You think that’s a good idea?”

Arlie shrugged. “Checking up on the neighbors is usually a positive. He’s the only one I haven’t seen all day.”

Babette’s face fell. “What if he’s…?”

“Either he’s there, or he’s not,” Arlie said and pretended that she would be fine either way. But she wouldn’t be fine until she knew he was all right. And if he wasn’t there…

She squelched that thought before it had time to become full-blown.

Then she let herself out of the house.

The sky was a burnt amber. Smoke still wafted from the explosion site. The smell clung to the air like the stench of burned rubber at a tire factory.

She took the long way toward Old Man Buckles’s house near the gate rather than walking past what was left of Leighton’s. Her heart was pounding, and she felt slightly ill, although she blamed that on the stench.

When she reached his house, she stared at the four-car garage in the center, which made it difficult to figure out where the front door was.

Finally, she went to the door that actually looked like someone used it and rang the bell. Static crackled as an intercom she hadn’t even noticed blinked on.

“It’s open, doll.” Old Man Buckles’ voice.

She felt relief and irritation at the same time. Part of her didn’t want to see him. She wanted to avoid this conversation. But she did want to know if he was all right.

The door pushed open outward, which wasn’t the way doors usually worked. But it was a safety feature if you expected threats to walk through that door as often as friends.

She stepped into the cool darkness, noting the smell of Vicks mixed with the fresh odor of cigarettes. Amazingly, she could smell anything, given the stink of the outdoors.

She pulled the door closed and faced three different corridors.

“Living room, doll.” The voice seemed to come from in front of her. She used her knowledge of these old ranch homes and followed the corridor that led toward the back rather than the ones going to her right and left.

The corridor wound past the ugliest fireplace she had ever seen—an open fireplace that looked like it was part of the corridor. Built of brown and tan stone, the fireplace struck her as a hazard rather than a desired feature of the home.

But the fireplace told her she was heading in the right direction. She rounded it and found herself in a great room the size of two living rooms. It had windows to a back garden that looked like it belonged in a wet, humid climate instead of Las Vegas—weeping willows, live oaks, roses of a dozen varieties, and more than she could identify from a distance. Mostly, what she saw was red and pink flowers and greenery. None of which belonged in a desert.

The living room was low to the ground and had uncomfortable, matching 1960s furniture, the kind of design she called Frank Lloyd Wright light.

Old Man Buckles sat near an indoor planter that ran the length of the garden windows. The indoor planter was made of the same stone as the fireplace but didn’t have any plants growing in it at all.

To her surprise, Old Man Buckles was sitting in a wheelchair. He had oxygen tubes running up his nose and a tank on the back of the chair.

“Forgive me if I don’t stand up,” he said. His voice sounded as strong as ever, and his face was a healthy pink color.

“What happened?” she asked, looking at the chair.

“Doll,” he said, “don’t ask me questions today.”

“Okay.” She didn’t sit down. “I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”

“Didn’t get any sleep for two nights, three if you count me following you.”

Her gaze met his. His eyes were blue and sharp, not the eyes of a sick old man at all.

She didn’t say anything. He shook his head.

“You know, you damn near ruined everything. What’d I tell you about lawyers?”

“They’re good for cover,” she said.

“Before that. You bring in lawyers, lawyers make money. No one else does.”

Her cheeks heated. He had seen the will.

“You didn’t delete the file properly,” he said. “I did. Don’t want anyone investigating that will to find it. Olivia wanted her money to go to charity.”

Arlie’s mouth was dry. Her heart had started beating hard.

“I woulda told them to sell you the house,” he said. “I’m still gonna tell them that if you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?” she asked, wondering why he was going to tell anyone what to do.

“You make sure you be careful when you touch anything. Particularly in the garage.” He coughed. Then the cough led to another and another, each deeper than the first.

“What’s in the garage?” she asked when he stopped.

“Five fewer things than there were yesterday,” he said. His voice was raspy now.

She frowned.

He rolled his eyes.

“Jesus, doll, use that brain of yours. Liv and I, we knew each other from work. I planted things, she made them. She was an artist, that Liv. Then, her kids found what she was building. They was in college then, thank God. She’d kept everything off-site when they were growing up. Still, one of them lost a finger.”

Arlie blinked, trying to follow. Maybe she was following.

“Olivia built bombs?”

“Oh, honey, they were more elegant than that. Designed for the space, you know. Like these chairs. That’s what artists do. Form follows function.”

“Olivia would never—”

“What?” he snapped. “Did you think she was some harmless old biddy? Olivia was a great lady. She just…”

He coughed again, then wiped the back of his mouth.

“The smell is getting to me, you know?” he said.

Arlie didn’t respond.

His shoulders went down. “She just never got over it, hurting her kid like that. The other people who got hurt on site, she always knew, you know, they deserved it on one level or another, but her kid? He didn’t.”

That’s why Arlie wasn’t supposed to call them, why Olivia knew her children would never come to see her.

And Olivia had understood.

“She thought she could atone, you know. That’s why the will.” He pressed the tubes deeper into his nose.

“The kids already sold the house to Leighton,” she said.

“The kids don’t inherit nothin’,” Old Man Buckles said. “I seen the will. I been talking to Anita—that’s the lawyer—and I’m executor. Lucky me. It’s straightforward, and all that money, it goes to the right places—kid’s charities, homeless shelters, all those places Olivia donated her time to. I couldn’t let you mess that up.”

“So, you blew up Leighton’s house?” Arlie finally found her voice.

“It became pretty clear to me you weren’t gonna quit. So, I had to do something. I figured, you know, incentive. It’s not like it hasn’t been done before. Guys like him, they threaten violence, but they can’t handle it.” Old Man Buckles smiled, his hand still covering half his mouth, holding the tubes in his nose. “You’ll see. He’ll sell everything and leave town in less than a year. You don’t gotta worry about him. He might even sell you that lot if you want it.”

“I’m not made of money,” Arlie said, sounding annoyed. She wasn’t annoyed. She was nauseous. She had caused this. Her hatred of Leighton. The homeowners association. The stupid will.

Old Man Buckles was watching her closely.

“I wasn’t going to do it,” she said. “I burned that document I printed. I wasn’t going to do anything.”

He sighed. “Lawyers. What’d I tell you about lawyers?”

She had no idea how that was relevant. She was about to ask when he waved his free hand.

“Leighton would’ve hired one, forced the kids to do the same. Then some stupid investigator would’ve gone through the computer and found the damn document you altered. Just like I did. And then everything would’ve been questioned. Everything.” He pointed a finger at her. “You damn near ruined it all.”

She understood that. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. About any of it. But especially about Olivia.

“They already tied the bombs to the 1970s bombings,” she said. “You’re not worried about that?”

“Why should I worry?” he asked. “I’m an old man. Nobody looks twice at old people.”

“And if I tell them you did it?” she asked.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’m not a contractor. I’m not a person who can carry boards on her shoulders and climb roofs. I’m not someone who can get in and out of houses without being picked up by security cameras.”

He was threatening her. But she wasn’t afraid of him.

He must have seen that, because he added, “You keep your trap shut, Liv gets what she wants. People benefit. You talk, lawyers make money. That what you want?”

Arlie felt dizzy. “I don’t know what I want,” she said.

“It’s up to you,” he said. “That’s what you gotta remember. It’s all up to you.”

She walked back in the growing twilight. By the time she reached her house, the porch light was on.

Arlie went inside. Babette was sitting at the kitchen table, going over the bills as if the last 24 hours hadn’t happened.

“I take it he’s all right, and his house was spared,” Babette said.

Arlie sank into one of the folding chairs. It creaked under her weight. This was her moment. She could say, He planted those bombs. And Olivia built them. Which would mean that Babette would call the police, and they would interview Arlie. Everyone would mention how she hated Leighton, that she was always in and out of Olivia’s house, and that she could not have known about Olivia’s kids.

Nancy would have known. Maybe that was why Nancy didn’t say anything. Nancy had been brought up not saying anything. Because that was the kind of neighborhood this was.

Not an all-white, all-straight perfect neighborhood with a few shady characters. But a veneer over a lot of ugly things. A veneer of ranch houses and roses and live oak and trees that didn’t belong in the desert.

Arlie had been working off a fantasy, trying to turn it into a modern fantasy.

And if she didn’t say anything, it would be the same kind of subdivision, filled with good people and bad, famous people and not-so-famous people. Criminals, and—

“Is he all right?” Babette had lifted her head from the bills. She looked concerned.

Arlie nodded. “He’s having trouble with the stench. Has to be on oxygen.”

“Yeah,” Babette said. “I wouldn’t mind some of that myself.”

Then she turned her attention back to the bills before her, to their life together—hers and Arlie’s. Here, in their dream home, if they ever remodeled it. The home that once had a sister home where the bomb went off. The home that stood directly across the street from the beautiful house once owned by a serial bomber.

“You okay?” Babette asked. She didn’t look up this time.

“Yeah,” Arlie said. She stood.

Maybe she wouldn’t buy Olivia’s house after all. Maybe she wouldn’t restore it. Maybe she’d even talk Leighton into keeping it.

But as that thought crossed her mind, she realized she still didn’t want Leighton on this block. And she had liked Olivia—at least the Olivia she had known. The one who worked on half the charity boards in the city and knew all the gossip in the neighborhood. The one who had died looking at her garden.

Right now, all Arlie had was Old Man Buckles’ word for what Olivia had done. That’s all anyone had. And he was a mean piece of work. Maybe he was lying.

She liked to think he was lying.

Really, it was easier to think he was lying.

Yeah. He was lying.

Because that was what people like him did.

She oughta know. She ran into them enough on the job here in Las Vegas. She could deal with them.

As long as she kept everything in perspective and went about her business.

As long as she lived her life without thinking about theirs at all.

____________________________________________

Olivia’s HouseCopyright © 2024 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout © copyright 2024 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art © copyright fergregory | Depositphotos

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

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September 1920, New York City: Phillipa D’Arco makes a living investigating the past for the United States Government. Bloodless, they call her, making her one of the best operatives. So, when Phillipa fails to return back to 2057 to report her findings, Assistant Attorney General Preston Lane needs to make a decision: send in yet another investigator or lose a valuable asset.

Whatever Lane decides, he knows he’ll face consequences. But the truth behind Phillipa’s disappearance will cause ripples in time Lane can’t begin to imagine.

“September At Wall And Broad” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

September At Wall And Broadby Kristine Kathryn RuschMANHATTAN

SEPTEMBER 16, 1920

SHE DIDN’T WANT to go to work this morning. Normally, Philippa couldn’t wait to leave the tiny two-room walkup she shared with five other women. The place smelled of grease and dirt so old that no amount of bleach would get it out. She had tried to clean the flat when she realized she would have to live like everyone else in this godforsaken century. She scrubbed the place until her hands were raw, and made no difference whatsoever.

Ambition was cold comfort when you shared a mattress with two other women—girls in 1920 parlance—neither of whom had bathed in the last week. The flat had two windows, both of which overlooked the brick building next door. No breezes, no sunlight.

Not that it mattered. She stayed out of the flat as much as she could, coming back to sleep and change clothes. She probably smelled no better than her companions. The bathroom was down the hall, the bathtub foul, and the toilet an atrocity.

She’d been counting the days to September 16, not because that was the day she’d been waiting for, but because she’d be able to go home, real home, bathe, sleep in a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, and turn on the air conditioning, even if she didn’t need it.

For the first time in her entire career, she missed the middle of the 21st century. She missed it with a mad passion, realizing that with all the rising sea levels, the incredible population growth, the poverty that no one could quite wipe out, the life she led there was one of privilege, even though she associated more with the upper class here than she ever had there.

Still, she stood at the door of her apartment building, and looked up at the azure sky. A perfect blue, the temperature in the low sixties, promising to be one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else. The city, about to enter its ascendancy in American life, glowed under the September sun.

People were walking outside and gazing upward, some even smiling, probably planning a series of errands that would get them out of the office. Folks who worked outside had smirks of superiority; they got paid to be outside.

A few people were probably thinking ahead to lunch, planning to splurge at one of the food carts, and maybe even sit on one of the benches lined up along the streets or head to one of the city’s parks, if only for a few minutes. A few snatched minutes that no one would ever get.

She shuddered. She’d been in Manhattan before on a perfect September day. On one of her first jobs, in fact. She’d stood not far from here and gazed upward at a building that wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye this morning, and watched, at 8:46 am, as American Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower.

The same sort of sunshine. Same kind of optimism in the air.

Only then that crisis had been more deadly, using weapons not yet dreamed of, hitting a building impossible to build in this time period, while an entire nation watched on a machine that Philo Farnsworth wouldn’t even imagine for another year.

That day had been hard, but she had been prepared. She had watched the footage, read the accounts, talked to others who had also visited September 11th. And that day had been the final test in her training: could she maintain her composure as people jumped to their deaths to escape flames, as buildings pancaked around her, as first responders who wouldn’t live out the day ran past her to save as many lives as possible?

She had been, in the words of her instructor, “positively bloodless.” He had meant that as a compliment, and she had taken it that way. “Positively bloodless,” meant she kept her composure, did her job, and got out with a minimum of notification and a minimum of fuss.

Yes, she had nightmares. Everyone did; it was part of the job. But they weren’t debilitating, and she was able to work through the worst of them with the therapist the department had assigned her.

She was, in other words, a stellar candidate, the best of her class. A woman who had since completed dozens of difficult assignments.

A woman who did not want to walk to the corner of Wall and Broad on this beautiful September morning. A woman who did not want to enter the House of Morgan to take her lowly secretary’s desk with its fancy expensive Underwood typewriter, something she had been instructed to be very, very careful with because it was delicate. It wasn’t delicate. The damn thing was a tank and it would take a sledgehammer to destroy it.

She would wager, if she had anyone to wager with, that the Underwood would survive today’s bombing with nary a scratch.

She sighed, and stepped into the sea of humanity. Only four hours left, and she needed to make the most of them.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MARCH 23, 2057 (SUPPOSEDLY)

ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL Preston Lane needed a moment to process the information the four people behind him had just presented.

He pivoted and faced the floor-to-ceiling window of his office in the Time Department’s building. The building was known as the Bubble for a variety of reasons. The first was obvious: its round glass shape looked like a bubble. But the second was because it was protected by time bubble after time bubble after time bubble. “Time bubbles” were the nickname for “time-guards.” In some ways, time bubble was more accurate, in that the bubble froze a time period into place.

He worked here instead of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building (which was a nice, but old building) because the Time Division of the Justice Department, like all time-related government departments, had offices here. The Bubble protected all who served.

The yard outside was in full spring bloom. Cherry trees lined the wall, their blossoms in full pink flower. The green grass, the emerging foliage, all spoke of a fantastic DC spring.

Which hadn’t quite arrived in DC yet.

The permanent staff blew smoke up his ass about the yard. It’s enclosed, so it follows its own schedule, the head gardener told him when he’d asked. Think of it like a greenhouse.

A greenhouse with a manipulated timer. He’d gone into the archives shortly after receiving his assignment and looked. This year’s cherry blossoms mimicked last year’s weather. Last year, the trees had reached full bloom by the end of March, just like they had for the past thirty years. This year, the trees outside the Bubble had returned to their April schedule, the one that had made this city and its cherry trees justly famous.

Plants didn’t cooperate inside a time bubble. If you wanted plants to bloom and grow, they actually needed care, just like they would in a greenhouse. If you wanted to pretend that they followed the same schedule as the outside world, you didn’t speed up the timeline or import different plants from different time periods. You set the yard’s chronometer to its own schedule, and prayed that it worked like the rest of the world.

Which it did not. The world was/is/will always be a messy place. For the plants inside the yard, the world had an unbreakable schedule, and theoretically, the entire staff enjoyed that.

It made his skin crawl. All of this did. The deeper he got into his assignment, the more unhappy he became.

Especially with the Wall Street case.

Before he got appointed to the Time Division, someone on staff had noticed that Manhattan’s financial district had been time-guarded from mid-August to mid-September 1920. Time-guards in the United States needed approval from the Time Department. The Secretary of Time had claimed she knew nothing of this, and indeed, there were no records of who or what had installed that bubble.

Plus, the bubble did not conform to government regulations.

Government-formed time bubbles existed throughout the United State’s history, and they also existed now. The White House had its own time bubble, as did Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Pentagon. All of the buildings housing the Cabinet had them as well. Not every place could be protected—if someone could easily get to a United States Representative, for example, because the country did not have enough money to protect district offices. The money instead went to time-guarding polling places on each and every election day in the country, no matter how small the election.

Lane did not have the ability to reset time. Officially, no one did. But he suspected someone held that power unofficially, and that someone or those someones existed in the very government he served.

But the answer to that question was above his pay grade.

What happened to Philippa D’Arco, however, was not.

Lane took a deep breath. He’d go out into the yard and walk among the cherry blossoms if he weren’t allergic to the damn things. Because he needed to move.

But he couldn’t, because he had to finish this meeting. He turned his back on the windows. Wilhelmina Rutger and her three assistants still stood behind him, ignoring the comfortable chairs and the hollow tables that allowed for some selected time viewing.

His wife would be furious. He was supposed to accompany her on some important dinner for her hedge-fund business. She had probably given up on him anyway. She didn’t understand the government’s mandate: anyone who worked in the Bubble had to take a second oath, vowing to never ever use time travel for personal gain. Even if that gain was keeping peace in a marriage already on the rocks.

He forced his attention back to the problem at hand—not his problem, but the division’s problem. They were related, after all.

“Okay, let me see if I get this straight.” He had started so many conversations like this in the six months since his appointment. Time travel’s complexities made his brain hurt. “D’Arco had ten windows for return and missed all of them, which is, apparently, unlike her. She’s also the first investigator we’ve sent to the September 16th bombing who failed to return.”

“Yes.” Wilhelmina was petite and blond, with a friendly face completely at odds with her take-no-prisoners personality. “Philippa’s body didn’t return either, which is our failsafe.”

Wilhelmina peered at him, as if she were testing whether or not he actually knew that. He wasn’t sure he did. He tried not to look even more creeped out. He hated the way that people just vanished when they stepped into the time chamber, even if the vanishing was only for a moment or two. He didn’t want to think about how he’d feel if they came back a few seconds later as a corpse.

“In other words this is extremely unusual.” Lane sighed again, and swept his hand at the chairs. “Let’s sit.”

They did. He frowned at the assistants, having no idea who they were. Wilhelmina always seemed to bring a different set of assistants to every meeting. Lane wasn’t sure if that was because she couldn’t keep assistants or if her assistants swapped out due to those time complexities.

“Philippa is the first woman we’ve sent to the Wall Street bombing,” Wilhelmina said. “Our previous investigators were all men. The first one arrived just after the time bubble burst, 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, one minute after the bomb went off. He couldn’t even get into the bomb site at Wall and Broad. We tried to have our second investigator arrive at 12:02 pm, and he couldn’t do that. He could travel outside the time bubble around the financial district, but he couldn’t time-travel inside it within hours of that explosion. We sent our third investigator to Manhattan one month before the explosion with the idea that he would get a job that would allow him to investigate the entire area, and see if the historical record is missing something that we should know.”

Lane remembered now. “That last guy is the reason we ended up sending Philippa.”

“Yes.” Wilhelmina smiled, even though the smile did not go to her eyes. The smile said, We’ve had this conversation and you should remember it. All of it. I hate repeating myself. Sir.

He did remember the conversation now. He had asked her, Why weren’t we aware of the rigid class structure in New York at that time?

It’s not class structure that we’re running into per se, sir, Wilhelmina had told him. It’s nepotism. To get hired in the House of Morgan, you need to have some kind of relationship with someone who does work there. And in 1920, we’re at the height of the corruption that became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. Everyone inside the New York Police Department who could hire our man won’t now, because he has no ties to Tammany Hall. We—

He’d cut her off. He had no idea what Teapot Dome was, and didn’t want to find out. The same with Tammany Hall. He had some historical expertise, but it wasn’t New York in the 1920s. When he accepted the President’s appointment as Head of the Time Division in the Attorney General’s Office, Lane had hoped to use this job to deal with interesting things, like people traveling back in time to murder someone else’s grandmother who just happened to be a federal judge or something.

Instead, he was dealing with protected time periods that hadn’t been protected by the proper authorities, and hints and allegations of alleged time abuse. Half his staff was somewhen else at the moment, investigating, prodding, poking, seeing there was a case. Or, as his boss, the Attorney General, liked to say when he brought potential cases to her, the staff was seeing if this was something that would “benefit us in the next election, or is it something that we can leave on the scrapheap of history for the next administration?”

Maybe he should quit, before the cynicism took him out of the game entirely.

“Sir?” Wilhelmina asked.

He’d checked out again. He wondered if he could pretend it was because he didn’t understand the time paradoxes.

“No one looked at young women in that period,” Wilhelmina said through gritted teeth. She was clearly repeating herself. “If they had jobs, they were clearly from the wrong class and being women, they were considered stupid.”

He had no idea how anyone could find women stupid. There had to have been women like Wilhelmina in that day and age. How had anyone believed they were inferior?

“Philippa is one of our best operatives,” Wilhelmina said. “She studied the bombing for three months before we sent her back. She’s spent a month In Time.”

Lane hated that phrase. It came from In Country, military slang for foreign territory, particularly a war zone. But its use here often confused him, because the rest of the world always wanted him to do things “in time” as well, and it meant something completely different. Like “just in the nick of time,” which was the only way he’d make that dinner date now.

“Philippa couldn’t have been killed in the bombing. She knew where she should stand, what she should do, where the most victims were, the greatest danger. She knew it all. She also knew she could return to us at 12:01, and give us her information. She would have come back, sir. I know it.”

Wilhelmina’s voice shook as she said that last, not with anger, but with sorrow. Or was it fear? Either way, he’d never heard those two emotions in her voice. Now she had his full attention.

“So what do you want to do?” he asked.

Wilhelmina was authorized to do a lot on her own. The fact that she had come here, with a request that she hadn’t yet articulated, meant something was very different.

“I want to send in an investigator, sir,” Wilhelmina said.

He frowned. “We already sent in three, not counting Philippa. At a certain point, we have to decide that we have done what we can on this investigation. We only have so many resources.”

“We don’t leave people in the field,” one of the men snapped. Everyone looked at him. He paled. “Sir. Sorry, sir. I mean, after all. She could be in trouble.”

Could have been in trouble, Lane mentally corrected. But he didn’t say it. He continued to address his questions to Wilhelmina. “Do we have information on her after September 16?”

“In a cursory search of the historical record, her alias, which is Philippa Darcy, does not show up. But it doesn’t mean anything. Thirty-eight people died that day, and 143 were seriously wounded. But that was according to the statistics released long after the fact. No one put up flyers or tracked everyone who had been on the street that day. Even if they had the resources, they didn’t have the will. The newspaper reports, for godssake, only listed names and address of the lower-class victims, and that was only if they got identified. The authorities didn’t even know for certain if the body parts they found matched up to the—”

“I’m aware of the vagaries of the pre-technological age of investigation,” Lane said. “I’m asking if Philippa Darcy married or showed up in the public records. Maybe she had done her best to leave a message…?”

The investigators were supposed to send their recall device back if, for some odd reason, they decided to stay in the past. Only a handful of people had ever stayed, and all of those had traveled back just a few years, not more than a century.

“No message, sir,” Wilhelmina said. “We checked. But Philippa is in the payroll roster in the House of Morgan for the week before. There is no payroll roster for the week of the 16th, and she isn’t on it the following week.”

Lane placed his hands on his knees and slid back. “Clearly there’s a problem with the time-guard around that time period. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, so I don’t think sending another investigator into that time-guarded period is the best answer. I think you’ll need to come up with a new plan to figure out how this bubble got placed, and who placed it.”

One of her assistants slumped, but Wilhelmina’s back straightened.

“I’m not asking for someone new to investigate the bombing or that time-guard, sir,” she said in a how-dumb-are-you voice. “I’m asking to send an investigator to locate Philippa. I have to believe that she knows something, that she discovered something, and that someone is preventing her return. None of our failsafes have worked, and at least one of them should have. We should have some knowledge of what happened to her, and we have none.”

“You automatically leap from this mission didn’t go right to someone has harmed her?” It was Lane’s turn to use the how-dumb-are-you voice. “For all we know, she could have been standing too close to the bomb when it went off, and she got vaporized. She, her device, the failsafes, everything. After all, as you just pointed out, our information from that time period isn’t exactly trustworthy. And I seem to recall that they never did figure out with any certainty what happened that day.”

The third assistant grimaced. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest—”

Wilhelmina held up a hand, silencing him. “We do an out-and-back,” she said. “A short mission, looking only on that day. We send in someone new. We give him the right credentials. After all, William J. Flynn took a train in from DC the moment he heard about the bombing. We can have our man take jurisdiction for just a few hours.”

Lane had no idea who this William J. Flynn was, although he supposed Wilhelmina had once briefed him on that as well. So many cases, so much to remember. Maybe he would resign at the end of the year. Clearly all of these time paradoxes were taking a toll.

“I thought we already did that,” Lane said. “Wasn’t that our second investigator?”

She glanced at her assistants. “We had the wrong credentials.”

“What?” Lane asked. He knew he hadn’t heard this.

“We had legitimate New York police department credentials, but we had given our man a position too high up in the department. They figured out fairly quickly that he was a fraud. Only they figured he worked for former Commissioner Arthur Woods, not that he had come from the future.”

Arthur Woods. Another name Lane probably should have remembered. He sighed. He would have to read up on this entire investigation just to refresh his memory. He could either do that, or trust the woman who sat before him.

“How much will this cost the department?” Lane asked.

“It depends,” she said flatly. “You can calculate the loss of a human life and the loss of the training we invested into the investigator, or you can figure the price of one more trip into time.”

“Possibly losing another investigator,” he said.

“Possibly,” she said.

“If we do, we both lose our jobs,” he said.

“That’s what’s worrying you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. What worries me is that we’re doing something we don’t entirely understand. We’re throwing more resources at it rather than investigating the best methods and then taking them. There is no hurry, Ms. Rutger, as you’ve often told me. If we send in someone today or next week, it won’t matter. They’ll still go back to the same time period.”

She raised her chin ever so slightly. He had gotten through.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “In my concern, I had forgotten that. We will conduct a more thorough investigation, and then I will consult with you again.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Wilhelmina and her assistants left, but he remained seated. Something about this disturbed him greatly. Not Wilhelmina’s hurry or even the assistants’ passion. In fact, he understood the assistants’ passion. They could have been the ones on the front lines. But for the luck of the draw, this conversation could have been about any one of them.

No, something else bothered Lane.

New York’s financial district. Three major attacks that he knew of: this one in 1920, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. Plus at least two thwarted attacks, one in 2012 against the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan, and another in 2025 against the New York Stock Exchange.

Were they all time-guarded events? If so, were they time-guarded by Homeland or Justice or the Time Department? Or by someone else? Something else? A multinational? A foreign government?

Lane stood up slowly. He had to make a choice here. He could remain the ignorant figurehead, disappointed in the job that they had given him, or he could step into his role as the chief investigator of time irregularities for the Federal Government.

He hated those dinners his wife planned. He used to love investigative work. He’d simply been overwhelmed by his learning curve and, if he were honest, by the fact that he walked through several time bubbles every morning when he came to work. He hated the Bubble, but everywhere he’d worked in DC had a time-guard of one type or another. The problem wasn’t the job; the problem was his attitude.

He’d allowed others to dictate policy during his first six months here. Time to change that, no pun intended. Or maybe he did intend to pun. Because it was past time. And he couldn’t use the amazing resources at his disposal to start again. So maybe he could use them to solve something huge.

Or, if this wasn’t huge, just to make the right decision in the Philippa D’Arcy case.

Whatever that decision might be.

MANHATTAN

SEPTEMBER 16, 1920

PHILIPPA GLANCED AT the clock hanging on the far wall. The incredible clack of typewriters had its own rhythm, a rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat bing! that had become familiar to her. At the desk next to her, the new hire sang “Over There” faintly under her breath, a reprieve from the Tin Pan Alley tunes she had started the morning with. The last few hours of Philippa’s last day. She looked at all the girls around her, intent on their typing or fixing their shorthand or stacking already-completed letters in manila folders, and wondered how they would fare.

They might be all right. The large room had no windows, the grillwork making it seem like a prison. All of the girls who worked there wore white shirtwaists and long skirts, their hair in a neat bun. They seemed interchangeable and probably were, to the men who ran the House of Morgan.

Philippa straightened her desk, rolled a sheet of House of Morgan letterhead in the platen of her Underwood, and stood up.

Mrs. Fontaine looked up from her desk. It faced the rows and rows of desks.

“You do not have permission to stand,” she said. She was twice the age of the girls and twice their weight. She ran a tight office, but a fair one. She pretended to be an ogre, but the girls loved her, because she understood what it was to be young and employed and a little bit terrified.

“I’m sorry,” Philippa said. “I’m afraid I need a personal moment.”

Technically, the girls weren’t to leave their desks until their thirty minute unpaid lunch break. But Mrs. Fontaine understood that women couldn’t always sit that long, particularly at certain times of the month. She claimed she got her girls to do five times the work the girls in other financial houses did, because she allowed them “personal moments.”

Mrs. Fontaine nodded. “Make it quick.”

Philippa wouldn’t make it quick. Not that it mattered. After noon today, she would no longer be employed at the House of Morgan.

She would make one more tour around the building, and try to see if there was something unusual. Then she would return to her desk and prevent some of the girls whom she’d befriended from taking their usual lunch. They would be safe inside their windowless room, but on that street, near the Curb Market, the Sub-Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange annex, and all of the other buildings, people would die, lose limbs, have their lives forever changed.

Technically, she wasn’t supposed to prevent that. Technically, she was supposed to go about her business. But there was no way of knowing what the girls would have done without her, so trying to play that game didn’t work. She had to live with herself, and even though, in her real life, in her real time, these women were long dead, they were alive now, she’d been their friend, and she owed them.

She slipped a steno pad into the pocket of her long skirt, and stepped away from her desk. She smiled a thank you to Mrs. Fontaine, then headed in the direction of the women’s necessary. The one great thing about the House of Morgan was that it had bathrooms and they were clean. Not that she needed to use one.

She waited until she was out of Mrs. Fontaine’s sight, then pulled the steno pad from the pocket of her skirt. She hugged the pad against her chest and then wandered, making certain she looked lost.

It had worked every time she had done this in the past. Some man would ask her where she needed to go, she would give an answer, and he would point her in the right direction. The younger men would ask her name, and give her a bright smile. The older men would sometimes put their arm around her and guide her to the correct floor.

She didn’t want either to happen today. She needed to do her last tour unescorted. Then, if she didn’t find anything, she would slip onto the street and run to the Sub-Treasury building.

She couldn’t get their mission off her mind either. Right now, as she patrolled the inside of the House of Morgan, workers at the Sub-Treasury building were transferring a billion dollars in gold coins and bullion to the federal assay office across the street.

She had no real idea how they were doing this; her reading told her that the workers were using a wooden chute, and after the bombing, a U.S. Army battalion would arrive to protect the gold.

Initially the Time Crimes Division believed someone was trying to steal the gold. After the first investigator discovered that no gold got stolen, someone suggested that the time-guard had been put into place to prevent the gold from getting stolen, and had been successful.

But that didn’t make sense either, because the gold would be a lot easier to steal after the bombing than before. Hell, she could figure out how to do it: she could time travel into the Sub-Treasury or next to the chute in the assay office at 12:01 in the chaos. With the right kind of manpower and weaponry, the gold would disappear.

But it didn’t; it wouldn’t; it never would. It would remain.

The fact that she was even thinking of heading to the Sub-Treasury building showed just how desperate she was to get some information, any information, before she left 1920 at 12:02 pm. She had already been to Sub-Treasury courtesy of a nice young guard, who had thought her harmless. A different nice young guard had shown her what he could in the assay office, and there, she found nothing out of the ordinary.

Not that she knew what she was looking for. Something. Something had to be here, besides this bombing.

Something had to be so important that changing it threatened The Way Things Were.

She walked up a marble staircase to the private meetings floor. She’d been called into a few of these conference rooms. She’d sat on a wooden chair in the back and taken notes.

Today, if someone asked where she was going, she had a half-plausible lie based on that previous experience. She knew that Junius Spencer Morgan the younger, the heir to the throne, was having a meeting in one of the rooms facing Wall Street. She’d seen photographs of the aftermath, although she wasn’t sure which room he was in. If someone stopped her, she would tell them she was going to relieve the secretary handling that meeting.

But no one stopped her. She went up staircase after staircase to floor after floor and she was about to give up, when she noticed one of the doors to the maintenance area stood open.

She’d tried that door in the past, and it had been locked. This time, she slipped inside.

Four men were leaning together, gesturing and whispering. They appeared to be arguing. They didn’t notice her.

They didn’t look like maintenance men. They were too clean for one thing. People who did physical labor in this decade had a layer of grime on their clothes and skin that just couldn’t come off in a weekly bath. Their clothes were off too. A little too shiny, a bit too new. And one man wore shoes that had a metal ridge she had never seen before. Or, rather, that she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Or, rather, that no one would see for many many years.

The men all looked at her at the same time. One man flushed red.

“Can we help you?” asked the man wearing the odd shoes. He had dark eyes and skin that wasn’t quite white. She wouldn’t have noticed that a month ago, but after living here, in a world where everything was defined by skin color, last name, education, and accent, she noticed.

Her heart started pounding. Her planned lie about Mr. Morgan seemed wrong, somehow.

“I saw the open door…” she said.

“Christ,” hissed the man who flushed. “She saw us. No one was supposed to see us.”

His teeth were white. Even. Perfect. So were the teeth of the first man who spoke. So were her teeth. People here remarked on that.

These men didn’t belong here any more than she did. And, she would wager, no one in the Time Division knew about them.

She backed out of the room, slammed the door closed, and ran for the stairs. With one hand, she lifted her skirt enough so that her own boots didn’t catch, and with the other, she put the steno pad in her pocket. Then she reached for the railing. The steps were slick, and she had to slow down some.

She heard footsteps behind her. She sped up just as someone grabbed her. He smelled of cologne. Not Bay Rum. Cologne. Nothing from this time period. It was too subtle, too complex. And the hand that covered her mouth had had a manicure.

She bit his palm. He cursed, but didn’t let her go. Instead, he dragged her up the stairs. She struggled, but couldn’t free herself. Her feet banged on every step, jarring her all the way up her spine.

Surely, someone on the lower levels heard that. Surely, someone would come investigate. Surely, someone would do something.

She elbowed the man, then tried to hit his face with her fists. When he pulled her onto the upper floor, she levered herself up on his arm and kicked him on his shins. He didn’t even flinch. He continued to drag her. One of the other men joined him, and they flung her into that room.

She slid along the floor on her skirt, and nearly slammed into the wall. The men peered down at her.

“What do we do with her?” asked the man who had flushed.

The man who had dragged her reached down, and pulled her lips back so that he could look at her teeth like she was a horse. She tried to bite him again.

“Feisty bit of business,” one of the other men said.

“Who are you, really?” the man who dragged her asked.

“Philippa Darcy,” she snapped, using the name she used in this period. “I’m expected in Mr. Morgan’s office.”

“It’s eleven-thirty,” one of the men said to the others.

The man who dragged her grinned. “Then I’ll wager that Mr. Morgan won’t mind if you don’t show up. He probably won’t even notice.”

“He will,” she said, keeping to the game. “He’ll notice. He’ll send someone searching for me.”

“Nice try, honey,” said the man who dragged her. “But you girls aren’t that important to anyone in the House of Morgan. No one except your boss even knows your name.”

“What do we do with her?” the man who flushed asked again.

“We can’t send her home for another 31 minutes,” said the man with the shoes.

Her heart rate increased. They knew. They knew about the bomb; they probably knew that she didn’t belong here.

“What’s really going on?” she asked.

“Ah, honey,” said the man who dragged her. “That’s above your pay grade. It’s strictly need-to-know.”

She struggled to her feet. Damn the skirt. Her legs caught in its folds.

“I think I need to know,” she said, with more bravado than she felt.

“And you will know,” the man who dragged her said. Then he grinned. “All in good time.”

And all of the men laughed, as if he had told a particularly witty joke.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MARCH 23, 2057 (SUPPOSEDLY)

LANE WAS DEEP in his research when his assistant peeked her head in the door. He nearly snapped at her, but thought the better of it. Her lips were in a thin line, her hair slightly out of place. She looked frazzled, and one reason he had hired her was because she was the most unflappable person he had ever met.

“The Attorney General just called a meeting downstairs,” she said. “He says it’s urgent.”

“I thought nothing was urgent in the Time Division,” Lane said.

“Apparently,” she said, “this is.”

MANHATTAN

SEPTEMBER 16, 1920

AT 11:55 AM, Charles Gage took his seat at the back of Fred Eberlin’s New Street restaurant. The place smelled of frying meat and spilled beer. The table was sticky, and even in the middle of the day, the electric lights were on. They weren’t very powerful, and they barely cut the gloom.

The waiter who had greeted him didn’t want him to sit so far back.

“Wouldn’t you rather have a seat up front by the window, sir?” he asked as Gage strode toward the back of the restaurant. “You can watch all of New York go by without moving a muscle.”

“Not today,” Gage said. Today, if he sat by that plate glass window, or any plate glass window within six blocks of Wall Street, he ran the risk of serious injury, maybe even death.

Even sitting this far back was a risk. But he wanted to be inside the time-guard. Within the hour, the police would block off sections of Wall Street, and he wouldn’t be able to get in unless his paperwork was perfect.

He didn’t want to rely on perfect paperwork. He wanted to rely on outsmarting whatever it was that had set up the time bubble in the first place.

The waiter sighed loudly. “The specials are on the board up front, sir, but I suppose I can recite them for you.”

“I’d rather have a sarsaparilla,” Gage said. He’d acquired a taste for the damn things on another job, ten years ago his time, but only a year before this one. He had a hunch that whatever the Coca-Cola company used to make the drink was bad for him, but he didn’t care. It was a taste he couldn’t get anywhen else. If, of course, he had time to drink it.

He pulled out his pocket watch. He’d set it to New York time the moment he arrived. He couldn’t get to Washington D.C. on September 16, so he’d had to settle for Philadelphia which, for some reason, wasn’t time-guarded at all. He took a train to Manhattan, and arrived at Penn Station at nine a.m. Then he’d walked down the island, and stopped near the Equitable Life Insurance Building, which, at 38 stories, was currently the tallest building in the city, if not the world.

He’d loitered outside for as long as he could, watching the cutthroat operatives of the outdoor Curb Market trade the junk stocks and bonds that the regular markets sneered at. Part of him was fascinated to see history in action. The Curb Market’s annex was nearly finished, and these traders would move inside within the year. But for the moment, they acted like street vendors, waving their tickets and shouting to be heard.

But he couldn’t simply observe them. He needed to keep an eye on the street. He was watching for a touring car with a New Jersey license plate. He was also looking for some sort of old wooden wagon being pulled by an elderly horse. The horse would end up in pieces all over Wall Street, as would the wagon. The touring car would end up on its side.

Smart money believed that the car rear-ended the wagon, which had probably come from the DuPont Powder Works with a load of dynamite. Manhattan had banned the transport of explosives on its streets during the daylight hours, but that didn’t mean that companies followed the rules.

He saw the touring car, recognizing its plate—NJ24246—and realized that the man who claimed to be the chauffer in the news reports looked nothing like the man driving. Then Gage saw a brand new wagon being pulled by an elderly horse. He wished he could take video, but he didn’t dare. He was already attracting enough attention by standing outside the Equitable Building.

He’d slipped through the crowds and made his way to the restaurant where he sat now, wondering if the things he had seen had any meaning whatsoever.

Not that he was here for the bombing. He wasn’t. He was here to find Philippa D’Arco, or Darcy as they called her. Her image was stamped—literally—inside his mind. One of those chips that the investigators for the Justice Department used on occasion. He knew what she looked like when she walked, talked, laughed, as if he had known her well. He wouldn’t be able to miss her any more than a lover or her own family would have.

If Gage saw her. If he found her.

He wasn’t entirely sure she was still here. He had telephoned the House of Morgan that morning, and asked if she was working. He’d been told that secretaries did not receive personal calls while at work, and then someone had asked his name.

“I’m her father,” he had lied. “Her mother’s gravely ill. I would like to speak to her.”

“You may do so during her regular luncheon,” the young man who had answered the phone told him. “All female secretaries take luncheon beginning at noon.”

“But she is in the office?” Gage pressed.

“She signed in at 7:45 am, sir. Good day.” And the young man had hung up.

So Gage had three pieces of information to take back with him. Philippa D’Arcy had shown up to work. The chauffer on the touring car did not look like his photograph in the papers from the hearings. And the wagon that might or might not have been carrying the dynamite was brand new.

The waiter set down a tall glass with the greenish brown liquid foaming inside. Gage picked it up, hoping for one sip before all hell broke loose—

And then the world went white. A sound, louder than anything he’d ever heard, shook the building. The air turned fire hot, then evaporated, and his lungs ached. He dove under the table. Too late. Already shards of glass had slid their way here.

Everything went deadly quiet. Nothing. Not a single sound. Almost as if all of New York held its breath at the same moment.

And then someone moaned.

The waiter was crouched against the back wall. The two customers who had been sitting near the window were sprawled on the floor. Another waiter leaned against the counter, still clutching a plate of food.

Gage stood, ran his hands over his suit, checking to see if he was uninjured. He was. He knocked some glass shards out of his hair, picked up his hat, and shook it off as well.

The screams were beginning, as were the cries for help.

He took a deep breath, tasting smoke, blood, and something acrid, but at least there was oxygen again. He steeled his shoulders, and stepped into what he knew would be the hardest few minutes of his life.

He had to step over the injured, pass the dumbstruck, avoid the helpless, and head for the door. It had been blown open by the force of the explosion. A young man sprawled on the steps, bleeding from a gash in the head. His trembling right hand reached for a spiked rail that had ripped through the shoulder of his suit.

That had to be George Lacina, who worked at Equitable Life Assurance, the man whose comment to The New York World had set off all sorts of alarms in 2057. Lacina said that he later noticed that all the buttons on his coat had come off, and his watch was ten minutes slow.

Almost as if time had stopped. Or gone backward. Or rippled.

All signs of a time-guard.

Gage glanced at his pocket watch. It appeared to have stopped. But as he looked at it, the second hand moved. He needed to do the same.

It was easier said than done. Hundreds of people poured out of buildings, hurried down stairs, and ran away from the financial district. Some of them bleeding, many of them covered in glass or plaster, all of them looking terrified.

He had to go upstream, pushing through them all, careful not to fall or he would be trampled to death. All the while his feet slipped on blood or severed limbs or body parts he couldn’t identify.

A woman on fire screamed as she ran past him. A man tackled her from the side, wrapping her in a coat.

Gage pretended he didn’t see, reminded himself it was history. When that didn’t work, he lied to himself that it was a virtual simulation—and he’d been through hundreds of those. Thousands. He couldn’t help these people. They were more than a century dead, and for most, this was the worst day of their lives. But he couldn’t reach out, couldn’t do anything.

He had to find Philippa.

He reached the House of Morgan, pushed his way up the narrow steps toward the open doors. People still poured out, but he didn’t see her among them. He caught some of the women who looked unhurt.

“Philippa,” he said. “Where’s Philippa?”

Mostly they shook their heads, then shook him off. One heavyset older woman frowned at him, said, “She went … necessary. But … an hour ago.”

Only she was gone before he could parse out what that meant. Or what he hoped it had meant. Philippa had gone to the ladies room an hour before and had never come back.

If she was a smart little time traveler, she would have vanished by now, safe back in 2057, inside the Bubble, making her report. But he was here because she hadn’t done that. Her body hadn’t shown up, her chip hadn’t activated, her failsafe device hadn’t returned.

He knew his chip would survive a blast—he’d been through half a dozen of them, not to mention the fact that everything was tested for all kinds of conditions—so he doubted her equipment had failed.

He kept grabbing people, asking, “Philippa?” and getting no response.

Except from a red-haired young man, wearing shirtsleeves, and ripped pants.

“Thought I saw her upstairs,” he said, voice trembling. “Lordy, I hope she’s all right.”

Gage nodded, kept moving, found the stairs, tried to ignore what he saw. Couldn’t ignore all of it. The young man held into place by something large—a bit of wall, maybe?—pinning his skull to his teller cage. The man with the broken leg trying to help another man bleeding from the face. The woman ripping pieces of her skirt and using them to tie off oozing wounds.

Above the trading floor, the glass dome that marked this part of the House of Morgan creaked. People screamed and dove for the walls. He didn’t. He knew it wouldn’t collapse.

Junius Morgan, carrying a wounded man toward the door. His face was scorched, his clothing blood-covered, but he seemed determined.

All of these people were heroes. Gage wasn’t. He couldn’t be. He had to keep searching for Philippa.

He explored several floors, saw more wounded, but no more dead, avoided some of the dazed victims, and kept searching. He didn’t see her and no one seemed to know where she was.

He spent nearly two hours inside the House of Morgan, exploring each room, seeing all the damage—which was much more considerable than the papers ever made it out to be—and he found no trace of her.

It was as if she had followed instructions and vanished. Only she hadn’t.

Finally, when he walked out of the bank, exhausted and covered in dirt and blood, he braced himself. Time to assume his identity as a Pinkerton, pretending he’d been hired by the Equitable Company, since the House of Morgan was unofficially using William J. Burns’s International Detective Agency.

He would find Philippa, or the parts of her, or what became of her, if he had to stay here for the next year to do so.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MARCH 23, 2057 (SUPPOSEDLY)

THE CONFERENCE ROOM, bunkered under the building, was an unassuming little space, modeled on the White House’s Situation Room. Bunkered, time-guarded with all the latest gadgetry, but so shielded that no one could travel in even from inside the Bubble itself.

Lane hated the little room. It looked like something out of time itself. Rectangular, with blond wood paneling, matching table, and the most uncomfortable blue chairs in the world, the room was always stuffy and tension-filled.

He was the last person to arrive, and as he pulled the door open, he had only seconds to prepare. No one had warned him that he faced not only the Attorney General, but Cabinet Secretaries from Treasury and Time as well. And, off in a corner, as if he were monitoring the meeting instead of participating in it, Brandon Carnelius, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Lane had barely gotten the door closed when the Attorney General said, “You need to recall Charles Gage from 1920.”

Kayla Huntingdon was not known for her diplomatic skills, something that had gotten her into trouble with Congress more than once. Sometimes Lane wondered how she ever made it through her confirmation.

“We lost an operative,” Lane said. “And we’ve found some anomalies.”

“We know,” said Noah Singh. He ran Treasury. He was known for his diplomacy, not that it showed at the moment. “Recall him anyway.”

Lane knew better than to remind Singh that he did not work for Treasury. Annabelle Tsu, the Time Secretary, nodded. “We have decided. We’re going to leave the time-guard in place.”

“We didn’t create it,” Lane said. “I’ve researched. It didn’t come from the government.”

“Not technically,” Singh said. “But you needn’t worry about it.”

Lane looked at Huntingdon. He realized from the set of her full mouth that she was furious. She had not been informed about something. Tsu’s long red fingernails tapped on the tabletop. Apparently she hadn’t been informed either.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Lane asked. He’d directed the question at his boss, Huntingdon, but he didn’t care who answered.

“Technically, you don’t have the security clearance,” Singh said. “We’ve decided to bring you into this, since you might run into an anomaly, as you call it, again, and we need you to be prepared.”

Huntingdon looked down, her blond hair covering her face. Lane had seen her do that before. It was a deliberate move so that no one could see her expression. Yep, she was pissed. And he had a hunch he was about to be.

“I’m not sure that you’re aware of the fact that the Federal Reserve System was founded in 1913,” Singh said.

“I know my history,” Lane said.

“Let him speak,” Tsu said quietly.

“And worked with other central bankers in other nations during the various wars. The Fed’s powers expanded after the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and of course, the recent Currency Crisis,” Singh said. He sounded like every bad professor Lane had ever had.

“Let me cut through the bullshit for you,” Huntingdon said. “Somewhere along the way, these so-called financial geniuses figured the only way to control monetary policy was to change it. By going backwards.”

“What?” Lane blinked. No one was supposed to alter major historical events just because they hadn’t worked properly. Or what this generation thought of as properly. “They can’t do that. It’s not legal.”

“We started our policy before it was illegal,” Carnelius intoned from his corner. As if that made it right. There were laws in place to cover such things. Otherwise someone could go back in time and do something that wasn’t a crime then, but was now, and be completely immune from prosecution.

Lane started to say that, but Tsu shook her head. Tsu, who looked as angry as Huntingdon.

“Forgive me, sir,” Lane said to the Fed Chair, knowing he was out of turn. “But we’re all forbidden from messing with Time.”

“Yes, we are” Singh said, taking the focus off Carnelius. “The Fed knows that now. But they started before the rest of us. Interestingly enough, they had time travel devices long before anyone else did. And they did things that they’ve been trying to clean up ever since. You’re probably most familiar with the Flash Crash of 2010? That was an error on the part of the time travelers from the International Monetary Fund, who are tied into this as well.”

“I don’t understand,” Lane said.

“Someone,” Huntingdon said, “and no one will say who…” and with that she looked at Carnelius, “tried to use a time device in 1920. And then tried to cover it up. Which is why all the original detectives from the Bureau of Investigation to the New York Police Department to the private detectives had no real idea what happened, because all of their theories were true.”

Lane got cold. A messy cover-up led to conflicting time stories, which led to bad investigations, which lead to chaos that often cost lives. Like it had in this instance.

“We cannot investigate the so-called bombing without making matters worse,” Huntingdon said. “So call off your people. And when you hit a similar time-guarded moment related to something financial, check before you send investigators into the past.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we knew what periods to avoid?” Lane asked Huntingdon.

Her lower jaw moved slightly before she responded. “It would. And yet, apparently, the Fed is not in the business of making our lives easier.”

Carnelius shook his head slightly, as if no one understood him.

Lane filtered several responses before he said the one thing he felt he had the right to say, “We’ve been working on the Wall Street Bombing for nearly a year of our time. We’ve used a lot of resources. Why has this just come up now?”

“Because,” Carnelius said, “one of your operatives stumbled on some of ours.”

“Who?” Lane asked. “And when?”

“In 1920. Miss Philippa—Darcy? D’Arco? She stumbled on my people. The moment they found out who she was, they sent word to us.”

Time didn’t work that way, but the language didn’t keep up. They’d found out in 1920, but when had they discovered it in 2057? Or had they? How had word gotten back? Lane didn’t know, and he had a hunch everyone would say he didn’t have the right to ask.

“When can we get her back?” he asked. That at least, would be a victory. He wouldn’t have lost an investigator to this ridiculous operation.

“They won’t give her back,” Huntingdon said, the frustration clear in her voice.

“See here, Kayla. It’s not quite like that,” Singh said.

“She can’t come back,” Tsu said. “She knows too much.”

“She’s ours now,” Carnelius said. “You don’t need to worry about her. We’ll take good care of her.”

“Like you took good care of Wall Street in 1920?” Lane snapped.

“Prescott,” Singh said. “Some respect.”

“Yes, respect would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” Lane said as he got up. “Thirty-eight dead, hundreds more injured, in what history considers the worst act of terrorism on American soil until a bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995? All caused by some idiots mishandling time travel for the Federal Reserve.”

“Technically, it wasn’t us,” Carnelius said. “We’re not the only Central Bank with time travel capabilities.”

“Oh, that makes it so much better.” Lane spread his hands on the tabletop and looked at Huntingdon. “I’m going to tender my resignation.”

“And I’ll have to refuse it,” she said. “With this kind of secret, you have just become a lifer in the Time Division.”

Lane’s breath caught. He felt a moment of terror that he then suppressed. “You can’t do that. I serve at the whim of the President.”

“And at whose whim does the President serve?” Tsu muttered.

“Enough,” Singh said. “This meeting is over. And it never happened.”

“Of course not.” Lane felt dizzy. “Just like I never lost an investigator.”

“You didn’t lose her,” Carnelius said. “You simply transferred her to a better paying job.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Lane said. “I want that on the record.”

“What record?” Huntingdon asked. “This meeting never happened.”

Lane tilted his head back. His brain hurt. And this wasn’t even a time paradox. It was a political one, with real repercussions on real people’s lives.

“When will you return her to us?” he asked.

“We won’t,” Carnelius said. “She’s ours now. Forever.”

That would have sounded ominous outside of the Bubble. Inside it, it was damn near terrifying.

“I suppose you won’t tell me what that means,” Lane said.

“It means she’s elsewhen.” Carnelius stood. “And that’s all I’m going to say.”

MANHATTAN

SEPTEMBER 1, 2088 (SUPPOSEDLY)

“YOU’VE GOT TO be kidding,” Philippa said. She sat on what looked like air, a clear chair that was more comfortable than anything she felt in weeks. “I have to stay here?”

“Not here, exactly,” said the man who had dragged her. His name was Roland Karinki, and he worked for the Time Unit in the Federal Reserve. At the moment, they were in the Manhattan Fed, in a room that literally vanished in the clouds. “You’re free to leave this job, to do whatever you want.”

“But I can’t go home,” she said.

“If by that you mean 2057, no, you cannot. It’s forbidden to you now. But we can use your services here or in the distant past. We have a lot to do.”

She tried not to look panicked. She tried not to be panicked. Her training had warned her that she might get stuck out of her time. It wasn’t supposed to bother her. She was positively bloodless, after all.

But she didn’t feel bloodless.

“I liked 2057,” she said. “No, I loved 2057.”

“I believe you,” Karinki said. “At least you’re not trying to lie to me by saying that you’re leaving behind friends and family. I know Time Division forbids both of those.”

“Not friends,” she said, although if she were being truthful, she had not been encouraged to have good friends.

Which made her wonder about all those girls she’d worked with in the House of Morgan. Had they made it out safely? Were they badly wounded? Would she ever know?

“You’ll like it better here,” Karinki said. “I promise.”

“Promises from a man who grabbed me and tossed me into a room, then took me out of my life. Great. How do I know I can trust you?”

“Because,” he said. “I have orders from your boss. Do you recall Prescott Lane? He left a file for you, which you can view at your leisure.”

She narrowed her gaze. “I know nothing about 2088. You could have faked it.”

“I could have,” Karinki said. “But I didn’t. We didn’t. And we will help you adjust.”

She leaned her head back, and thought for a moment. She was somewhen else. That was what she wanted when she woke up this morning in that wretched two-room flat, with two smelly girls beside her on a flea-ridden mattress. And she had a hunch the food would be better than it had been in 1920. The attitudes would be better as well. And then there was the matter of comfort.

Maybe she was positively bloodless. Because she could feel herself transitioning to the new when.

“I need a hot shower,” she said. “Some new clothes. And a bed in a place that has climate control.”

“That’s easy,” Karinki said. “How about dinner?”

“Sure,” she said. “Alone. In my new apartment. With all kinds of information at my fingertips about the last thirty-one years. I won’t make a decision until I know what my options are.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and then extended his hand. “Welcome to the future.”

She looked at his palm. It was clean, but it had bite marks on the fleshy part that he hadn’t yet cleaned up.

“It sure as hell better be nicer than the past,” she said.

“Time periods are never one thing,” he said. “You should know that.”

She did know it. Maybe better than he did.

Maybe better than anyone.

She looked out that window at Lower Manhattan. Sunlight reflected off the Equitable Building struggling to survive between skyscrapers she couldn’t identify. Through the buildings’ canyons, she saw the Upper Bay, Battery Park, and a clean Statue of Liberty. Saw New Jersey in the distance.

“What month is it?” she asked.

He grinned. “September.”

She looked outside again, but not down this time. Up, like people on the sidewalks in 1920. She saw a clear blue September sky. The kind that promised one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else.

“I’m staying in Manhattan,” she said. “I don’t care when. But I do care where.”

He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “We can arrange that.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I wouldn’t work for you any other way.”

____________________________________________

September at Wall and BroadCopyright © 2014 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Fiction River: Time Streams, edited by Dean Wesley Smith, WMG Publishing, August 2013Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Rolffimages | Dreamstime

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

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The kids at school call Wilhelmina “Cry-Baby Witch.” Kinda true. At least about the witch part. But they don’t know that, and Willi still struggles to control her magic.

So, when she gets caught using her magic to help one of the animals in Mrs. Anderson’s room, Willi fears the worst. Because creepy Craig Maddson now knows Willi’s secret. She knows he plans to tell on her. But she has no idea how to stop him.

“Chameleon” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Chameleonby Kristine Kathryn RuschWilhelmina crept inside Mrs. Anderson’s room, and sat there, with the lights off. Outside the windows, snow fell in big white flakes, faster and faster, so fast that Willi couldn’t see the teacher’s parking lot just across the sidewalk. The chameleon paced in its little cage. The mama gerbil had her back to the cold, and the papa gerbil, in his own glass world, watched the snow as Willi did. The snake cage was open — the boa constrictor was still missing — and the mice were crowding their own cage in its absence. The rabbit sat on a table up front, nibbling on a carrot and staring at Willi with beady eyes.

Willi didn’t mind. She felt safe here, in the humidity, with the smell of too many furry bodies. Even with the boa constrictor on the loose, popping out of the ductwork, and scaring the principal as it had done the day before.

Everyone else was waiting out the storm in the auditorium. Willi hated the auditorium. She would rather wait here, with the animals.

The snow had started that morning, after gym. The principal made an announcement, saying it was too dangerous to drive. The radios had already announced that the parents should not try to pick up their kids. Everyone would spend the night at school, if they had to, and Mrs. Bates, the cook, would make them something extra special. Lucky she did at lunch, because the electricity went out just before math. The clock behind Willi’s head still read 1:15.

Willi wasn’t scared. She knew her mom would come anyway. A storm would never stop her mother.

The animals didn’t seem frightened either. They liked the quiet, just like Willi did. She was glad to get away from stinky old Craig Maddson, and weird Dougy Spencer. The kids hadn’t stopped picking on her since she had come to school two months ago, just after Thanksgiving. They made fun of her clothes, and when she went into the bathroom and zapped herself into new ones, the kids stopped laughing and no longer even looked at her. Sometimes they called her a witch, and she couldn’t even tell them to stop because that was what she was.

She brought her knees up against her chest. When she had told her mom about it all, her mom had said that Willi shouldn’t want to be like the other kids. Willi didn’t agree until a week later, when the teacher took them to the natural history museum, in the history of science building attached to the grade school. (Her mom had enrolled her in a university lab school, thinking that smart kids would be kinder than the dumb ones Willi had studied with in Kentucky.) The kids laughed and pointed at all the dead animals, stuffed and frozen in their glass cages. The bobcat had moth holes in its fur, and just beneath the surface, Willi could hear a faint whisper of memory, begging to go free. She wasn’t powerful enough to free the bobcat, so she sat in front of the cage and cried.

And had been called Cry-Baby Witch ever since.

Outside the wind howled, and a bit of cold seeped in through the windowpanes. The rabbit’s fur ruffled. Willi whispered a protect spell and blew it at all the animals. They looked up at her, as if in gratitude, and she blew them a kiss.

She wished she knew where the boa constrictor was. It had always been her favorite. She liked its long slimy length, the power in its straight body, the alien coldness in its black eyes. Maybe, if she used dust magic, she could find it.

She whipped the dust into little particles, and sent them searching, but the snake wasn’t in Mrs. Anderson’s room. Willi slipped out into the hall. Maybe the snake did travel the ductwork like the principal said, and she would find it in someone else’s classroom.

The hallway was dark, darker than she had ever seen it. The lockers stood like soldiers at the Air Force base where she had lived with her daddy just before he died and her mother decided to stay for good. The window displays beside each classroom’s door had lights glowing on the contents. The hearts Willi had painstakingly cut with scissors because her mom told her not to show her powers glowed redly. Something moved in the fifth grade’s display case, and as she walked by, she saw the boa constrictor, its body flaking and dry, wrapped around a Peek-a-Boo doll.

It hadn’t been eating school mice as Mrs. Anderson had said. It had gotten itself trapped. And it was dying.

Willi glanced up and down the hall. She didn’t see anyone. In the distance, she could hear singing coming from the auditorium. They had been singing all afternoon in the fake generator lights, away from the storm. Willi thought that everyone would be hoarse by now. She saw someone cross the hall and disappear into the boys’ room. She was as alone as she could be.

She ran back into Mrs. Anderson’s room and got two mice, begging their forgiveness. She wasn’t too fond of mice — they ate their babies, just like the papa gerbil did — and that made her mad, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to kill them. But, as her mom would say, creatures ate each other. That was the way of the world.

Willi hurried back into the hall with the mice trapped in her pockets. She sat on the floor and raised her fingers, making a small turning motion. The thin silver lock guarding the display case clicked and the door swung open. The snake nearly fell out. Willi flattened her hands like a bed, and let the air carry the snake to her. She eased the snake down and put the mice in front of it. She made an invisible barrier so that the mice couldn’t run away. The snake looked up at her, its cold cold eyes actually seeing her for the first time, and then it snapped a mouse between its oversized jaws.

Willi stood. She couldn’t watch this.

Craig Maddson stood behind her, his face white as the bunny’s fur. “You are a witch,” he whispered. “And I’m going to tell everybody that you stole the snake and you’re killing mice.”

“I did not!” she said. “It was dying!”

But he had already taken off running down the hall, his Nikes slapping against the tile floor. She couldn’t let him tell. She couldn’t. The kids hated her bad enough. But if the teachers thought she messed with the snake, she would never go into Mrs. Anderson’s room again.

Never see the rabbit again, never hold the chameleon and watch its personal magic. Never be safe.

Without thinking, she raised her hand and bid the air to tie Craig’s feet. He tripped and skidded along the tile, finally landing outside the auditorium. He sat up and flopped his legs like a fish. Then he started screaming.

The principal burst out of the auditorium door, his short rotund frame crouching over Craig. Willi put a hand over her mouth. She had made it worse.

The snake had swallowed the second mouse and was slithering against the wall, trying to hide. Willi glanced around. The principal would see her. Anywhere she went, he would see her, and she had already used her magic quota for the day. She was trapped.

She turned and ran down the hall, past the doors to the gym, past the music room and into the narrow hallway where the grad students had their tiny offices. All the doors were shut and locked. They must have gone home before the snow hit.

The end of the hallway smelled of paint and formaldehyde. Willi burst through the double doors leading to the Natural Sciences building. She spun around the corner, and found herself face to face with a stuffed bear. She stifled a scream. The bear was so old, its fur had no whisperings at all. She ran past it and all the other dead animals, until she found the hall of the dinosaurs.

Her teacher, Mr. Hayes, hadn’t taken them in there. He had pointed at the dinosaurs and laughed. “Those models,” he had said, “were made in the 1950s, before I was born. They’re out of date and wrong.” But they had looked great to her, tall majestic beasts, with green skin and eyes as cold as the snake’s.

She didn’t hear anyone behind her. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her breathing was coming hard. She hurried into the dinosaur room, and snuck around the big green dinosaur in the middle. The dinosaur had a long neck and a tiny head that was staring at the door. She touched its flank. The dinosaur was made of plaster of Paris. It was cold and hard.

She sank on her knees and leaned against the dinosaur’s leg, waiting for the principal to find her.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, in the dust and the dry-smelling heat. No one had walked on this side of the dinosaur in a long time. Her tennis shoes had left patterned footprints on the floor. Her jeans were covered with a white and green powder. It took a moment before she realized that the dinosaur’s legs were peeling.

Willi touched it, and more dust dropped onto her hand. She couldn’t imagine being so old and out of date that no one even tended her. Poor dinosaur. She leaned her head on the plaster of Paris, and listened, but heard no whisperings, no hope, no feeling of being trapped like she had gotten from the bobcat.

The dinosaur wasn’t dead. It had never been alive.

Somehow that made her very sad. She brought her knees up to her chest and tucked her chin against them. Ice pelted the side of the building, sounding like rocks thrown against a concrete wall. No one had come after her yet. Maybe they hadn’t seen where she had gone. She was used to her mother, whom no one could ever hide from.

Willi got up and dusted off her jeans. She wandered to the back of the dinosaur room. Other dinosaurs stood against the wall. A rounded one, with a big head and an armor-plated back, had lost all its covering on one side, revealing a mesh frame. The pterodactyl (her favorite and the only kind she had heard of) was missing one wing. Maybe Mr. Hayes hadn’t brought them here because the dinosaurs were in such bad condition, not because they weren’t up to date.

Maybe she would stay here forever. The dinosaurs didn’t care who she was. They were different from all the dead animals, just like she was different from all the other children. Her mom said she had to blend in, learn how to get along with humans. But Willi didn’t want to blend in. She wanted to save a snake without Craig Maddson telling on her, and she wanted to talk to the rabbit without people thinking her crazy. She wanted to free what little life she had found in the bobcat, if she could only find a way.

Her mom made it look so easy. Everyone thought her mom was normal. They didn’t know that she made dinner by pulling out the groceries they had bought for appearance sake, snapping her fingers and setting out serving trays. They didn’t know that she changed her hair color without going to a beautician. They didn’t know that she didn’t work for a living because she had all the money she had earned on horse races since gambling became a craze in Atlantic City.

No one could put anything past her mom, but her mom could put stuff past them. That, her mother had said, was what Willi had to learn.

What Willi had failed this afternoon.

She sighed, and coughed as dust got into her lungs. No one would come for her. She would rot in this back room with all the non-dead dinosaurs. Half of her wanted to get found. Half of her wanted the principal to kick her out.

The other half wondered who would take care of the animals if he did.

She wandered back to her hiding spot and touched the side of the dinosaur. This time she did hear whisperings, but like nothing she had ever heard before. Voices. Voices were trapped inside the dinosaur.

…is too. They get really big and they stomp all over everything and eat people…

…I’m going to get on its back and it’ll take me away, like Danny and the Dinosaur…

…If only I was as big as you. Then they wouldn’t hit me any more.…

The voices were small, light. Children’s voices.

…It is too real. You just can’t see it. It comes out at night and watches us while we sleep.…

…and it was really hot, and all they got to do was eat and sleep, and hunt…

…I don’t know why I like ‘em. I just think dinosaurs are cool…

Willi moved her hand away. The dinosaur’s head had turned just a little. It seemed to be smiling at her. What lived inside it were fantasies, beliefs, fears, and it held them dear. She leaned her head against its side.

“I’m sorry that you’re flaking,” she whispered. “If they let me come back tomorrow, I’ll have enough magic to fix you.”

The dinosaur’s smile grew, and the voices swirled around her, almost too fast to catch. It took a few minutes for her to realize that some of the voices she was hearing were coming from the hall.

She let go of the dinosaur. The children’s voices disappeared. Only two adult voices remained.

“…saw her in the middle of the hallway, feeding the snake. We don’t tolerate theft in this school, Mrs. Ramsey.” The principal’s nasal voice echoed. Willi ducked against the dinosaur’s leg.

“Of course she fed it.” The voice was her mother’s. The tone was exasperation at a stupid human being. “The snake was dying. It must have been a hard choice for her. My daughter loves animals. She had to sacrifice mice to keep the snake alive.”

“We don’t know that the snake was dying, any more than we know that your daughter ran this far. This area is forbidden to children —”

“Mr. Caldwell, I have just about had enough of your prattle,” her mother said. “I know my daughter’s mind. If she’s going to hide, she’s going to hide well. And what I said about the snake is pure logic. You said it’s been loose for a long time — a fact I find appalling — and I assume there are no mice or rats in this building, except for the ones in cages. Now, I don’t know how long a boa constrictor can go without a meal, but it stands to reason that the thing would not be in good health.”

They stopped outside the door. Willi saw their feet swirl the dust. Her mother was wearing her black cowboy boots with their four-inch heels. The principal had on his good leather shoes, the ones without the scuffs.

“I must be frank with you, Mrs. Ramsey. Ever since Willi came here, she has not fit in. She spooks the other children and she does strange things like she did this afternoon. I don’t know what she said to Craig Maddson, but he was so frightened that he couldn’t move his legs for the longest time —”

“Mr. Caldwell, my daughter is brilliant and talented and unusual. I thought an experimental school like this one would be a haven for her, but you’re like the other teachers in this country. You only care about making her normal. Well, she’s not normal and she never will be. Perhaps you should concentrate on making the children better individuals instead of better clones.” Her mother took a step into the room. “Willi?”

The yell was for show. Willi’s mother knew where Willi was, and Willi knew better than to stay hidden. She snuck out around the side of the dinosaur, wishing it could protect her. But it could only listen and absorb her hopes and fears.

Her mother’s hair frizzed in all directions, and her leather coat hadn’t a speck of snow on it. The principal looked rumpled in his black suit.

Her mother said. “Willi, are you all right?”

Willi’s hands were clenched in small fists. “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. The snake was just trapped, and I was trying to help it, and Craig Maddson is so mean!”

“It’s all right, honey. You’re not coming back here.” Her mother held out a leather-gloved hand. “Let’s go.”

“I must protest,” the principal said. “There’s a blizzard out there. You may have made it here safely, Mrs. Ramsey, but you’ll never make it home, not with the child.”

“Try me,” Willi’s mother said. They started down the hall, Willi’s hand tightly wrapped in her mother’s. “By the way, you might want to catch that snake. It’s stalking Willi’s favorite rabbit.”

“How —?”

“No!” Willi shouted. She broke free. “Stop it, Mom. You’ve got to stop it.” She ran down the hall, around the corners, past the bear, past the offices, past the rooms, until she reached Mrs. Anderson’s. The snake had made its way under the desks to the table in the front. The rabbit was washing its face, all unaware. Willi scooped it up and hugged it to her chest, burying her face in its warm, musky fur.

“It won’t get you,” she whispered. “It won’t.”

She whirled and climbed on the table, leaning against the windows, against the swirl of depthless white. The rabbit trembled in her arms.

Her mother and the principal appeared at the door. The principal saw the snake, turned and hurried down the hall. “Willi,” her mother said. “You’re being silly.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “This rabbit’s just like me. Nobody likes it and nobody protects it.”

“You protect it,” her mother said as she came in the room, gingerly stepping over the snake. She stopped by the window and tapped the chameleon’s cage. “You would do a better job if you became like this little fellow. Blending into your environment, but never losing track of who you are.”

“That’s what you yelled at him about.”

“Mr. Caldwell?” Her mother smiled, making her entire face look no older than Willi’s. “No, honey. He wants all children to goose-step in place, to be the same creature. In the real world, snakes, rabbits and mice all share the same plot of ground, but they have to be careful of each other.” Her mother glanced around. “You’re right. This is a very safe room. No wonder you like it here.”

Willi leaned against the window. The glass was like ice against her back.

“Here, let’s put that snake back so your rabbit is safe.” Her mother clapped her fingers and the snake floated across the air. The lid on the snake cage came open, and the snake lowered into it, gently. Then the lid went back on.

Slowly Willi set the rabbit down. The rabbit scampered a few feet away, then huddled, as if it still wasn’t over its fright.

“Let’s go home, honey.”

“No,” Willi said. “They’ll wonder how we did it.”

“It’s all right. You’re not coming back.”

This would be the fourth school she left in the past year, and the only one with animals. Willi glanced at her rabbit, at the chameleon, at the snake. The dinosaur in the next room needed her help, and the animals needed her protection. She didn’t want to leave them, no matter how mean Craig Maddson was.

When the snake had run away, it had nearly died.

“No,” Willi said. “I want to stay.”

“I thought you didn’t like it here.”

“I like some things,” Willi said. She liked Mrs. Anderson and the animals. She even liked that back room, filled with dust and dinosaurs. She especially wanted to see the dinosaur again. “Maybe I been too much like the rabbit. Maybe it’s time to see what the chameleon can do.”

Her mother smiled and hugged her. “Fitting in isn’t what matters. Being true to yourself is. You’re not a rabbit, honey.”

She knew that. But she wasn’t a chameleon either. She was a big green dinosaur, the kind that didn’t exist by human standards, made of strange materials, and filled with fantasies, beliefs and fears.

She put her arm around her mother, and they headed to the auditorium. They would stay. They would suffer through the singing and the cold food, and maybe Willi wouldn’t fit in, maybe she wouldn’t be normal, but maybe for a short time, in the dark, in the storm, the other kids would think she was one of them.

____________________________________________

ChameleonCopyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Daw Books, 1993.Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Arnaud Weisser | Dreamstime

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

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I know you’re all looking for a great read to get you through the last two weeks of summer—unofficial summer, that is. In the States, summer ends with Labor Day, even though the official end is September 23. But life and work and all those supposedly non-summery things will start getting in the way of those beach reads. Or in the case of Las Vegas, the sitting-inside-and-basking-in-the-AC reads.

Well, I have the answer for you. It is the Big Time Bundle 2024, which I curated. It has great fiction from Lisa Silverthorne, Ron Collins with Jeff Collins, Kathryn Kaleigh, Robert Jeschonek, Douglas Smith, Dean Wesley Smith, Michael Stackpole, Kevin J. Anderson, with Doug Beason, and WMG Publishing, Inc.‘s Holiday Spectacular Time Travel anthology.

My own contribution is one of my most favorite. The Gallery of His Dreams was nominated (or won) every award that existed in sf at the time. I wrote the story during a rough time, and it was a great escape for me. I hope it will be for you.

The bundle will exist for two more weeks before fading away. So you’ll run out of…time! Yes, time! So get yours now.

Here’s the link. https://storybundle.com/time

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War correspondents and soldiers possess one thing in common: They only see pieces of the war—even a magical war.

Everything rests on a single magical weapon, dispatched by Pixie Air, which the soldiers believe will solve everything.

One war correspondent questions how. But for the first time, she finds herself on the battlefront, hoping that her people succeed in this last attempt at saving their corner of the world.

“Dispatches from the Front: Number Sixty-One” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Dispatches from the Front: Number Sixty-OneKristine Kathryn RuschWinter, Year FiveNear the Cascann Mountains

The shelter is little more than a snow-covered hut. The centaur who brought me up here cannot fit inside. We cover him with blankets to warm him up, give him hot mead and the last of some richly scented stew, and send him back to his troops.

All the way up, he complained about letting a human ride his back, even though he is the media liaison for this part of the war. He doesn’t like answering to a woman, particularly a woman once known as a unicorn tamer, a woman whose only real magical skill—besides her learned ability to put pen to paper—is to get equine creatures to do her bidding.

He made me swear I was not charming him. I swore. He did not believe me.

The journey up the foothills was treacherous, and one I was glad I did not have to make alone. He remained silent through most of the trip—afraid, he told me when it looked like we wouldn’t reach our destination—that I would report every word he said.

I reminded him that we had censors. Before any parchment gets tied to the feet of the carrier pigeons, it is copied by the monks attached to each unit, and dispatched to headquarters. The monks remove things, the officials remove more.

So I try to be vague while being descriptive. I’m told by my editor that the censors don’t mind harsh talk, just specific talk, talk that will give away positions to the enemy or allow him to divine battle plans.

I’ve heard that the Scralle have lost their diviners and are now relying on general wizardry, but like all rumors, there is no way to confirm.

What I told my centaur—what I tell all of the media liaisons—is that being a battlefield correspondent is like being a soldier. I only see pieces of the war, not the whole. I leave the analysis for the historians of whichever side survives.

Those historians will not know what to make of this—the entire magical world at war with itself.

The hut has only one room. Pixie Air has divided it into two using a gossamer blanket that is sturdier than it looks. The main area, with the large fireplace, is filled with pixies. Those back from the latest mission have the closest pallets to the heat. The rest must rely on blankets so small that they wouldn’t cover my feet.

The second room is for the lumbering non-magical humans—mostly young women or boys who have not reached their full growth. They wear furs and lined boots against the cold. While they wait, they play card games that I have never seen before or ask me and the unit scribe to write letters to their loved ones back home.

I was told, back at base, that I could go on the next mission, but the Pixies object. I am twice as tall as the tallest human here and three times as heavy. I am the only adult over the age of twenty-five.

It doesn’t matter that I have kept my so-called innocence so that I can retain my small magic. What matters out here are height and weight restrictions. If I get into one of the crafts they call pixie boats, there will be no room for the bomber and that will compromise the mission.

The centaur will not return for me for three days. During that time, I will eat the meager rations of food, probably taking something from someone who has an actual purpose in this raid, and try to be useful.

The pixies sit in the farthest corner of their section of the room. The leaders—none of them above a colonel (and I get the sense these ranks may be honorary or self-chosen)—do not know what to do with me. They want to comply with headquarters, but they are frightened and tired and not used to making decisions.

They’re also not used to the cold.

This pixie troop comes from the tropics. They volunteered as a unit—straight out of flight school, one of the older men told me—and fought their original missions in the jungles near their homes.

But after the destruction of the Pegasus Fleet, most of the winged fairies defected. Only a few remained, and those who did had greater uses as attack planners rather than raid commanders.

The pixies continued to move north, until someone discovered—quite by accident—that pixies flying against a gray sky over a snow-covered landscape were nearly invisible.

The air troops got sent here, along with the pixie boats—painted by artist mages to resemble clouds—and sent on their first raid.

Headquarters say Pixie Air has changed the course of the war. They believe that the pixies, with their delicate wings and quiet voices, are the ultimate in stealth weaponry. The Scralle do not know how to find them, let alone bring them down.

Rumors say that dragons have been sent against pixie fleets and have failed. Even if the dragons open their mouths and spew fire against what seems like—to them—an empty sky, they cannot defeat the pixies. They generally fire away from the fleet—dragons being the blindest of all flying creatures.

I mention this late my first night to the commander. She is a delicate woman, who has been in the war from the beginning. She volunteered before her country ever got involved, and she initially attached herself to the First Eighty-second Flight Unit, back when they took multiple ethnicities.

For a short time, she was paired with a pegasus—a good team, she said, because he could fly her into enemy territory and she could invade the headquarters, as unnoticed as an insect, operating as a short-range spy.

When I asked her about the destruction of the Pegasus Fleet, she turned away. Later, her second, a man who has known her since childhood, says she blames herself for the poison. She smelled the mash as the brownies heated it, and it nearly made her pass out.

I say, there is no way she could have known what it would do, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have been able to stop it. Four thousand pegasus on the western front died as vampire troops, posing as humans in the late-night hours, replaced the good mash with foul.

Her second nods. “I know,” he says, “but that does not alleviate her guilt. There are always some friends we cannot bear to lose.”

I say nothing. Each unit I embed with thinks I am new to the war. I am not. I too have lost my share of friends, and some of those deaths will haunt me forever.

But I spoke to her second after I spoke to the pixie commander. She listened to my talk of dragon fire and invisible pixie boats, and looked at me as if I were crazed. Then she held out her right hand.

The fingers are blackened and swollen. The tops of her wings are bandaged, the tip of her nose gone. Even though the pixies wear the warmest clothes they can find, even though the wool they receive from the weavers is spelled against the chill, it is not enough.

These small bodies are used to temperatures one hundred degrees warmer than the warmest days in these foothills. Add elevation, and the temperature drops even more.

The commander must send double, sometimes triple, the number of pixies it takes to keep the boats aloft in case part of her troops lose consciousness or worse.

She figures they have only five more raids up here before the enemy finds our hut. She implied, in our shortened conversation, that my presence might have threatened even those. The centaur and I were visible against the snow. Even though we wore white—also spelled to take away lines, and ease visibility—his hooves left prints, and our scents carried on the chill breeze to the orcs on the other side of the mountain.

She will not approve me for a raid over the next target. I cannot say I blame her. I am getting in the way. My understanding of the way the pixie boats worked may have been right for the first few years of the war, but it is not right now.

So I go to the far corner of the room—the half for the humans. Outside, the wind howls. It has gotten dark. Lanterns hang from the wall, but it is cold back here. The gossamer curtain blocks more than sound; it also blocks heat.

In the far back corner lie the wounded. They will get evacuated as soon as the raids are over. An oxen-drawn transport will leave tracks in the thick snow. Eagle runners can only carry a stretcher between them, and are also quite visible, particularly as they struggle with something that weighs as much as a young human.

Fortunately, most of these injuries are physical. Cursed or charmed injured must go to the barn, as far from the others as possible. We all know that anyone who is taken to the barn will die—it is not warm enough to live there for more than a few days—and while we have compassion for them, we cannot risk being contaminated by them.

Curses seep. They invade dreams, travel in body fluids, or shared utensils. Sometimes they are airborne, although the air here is too cold to keep most curses alive.

Only the house medical mage treats the injured who have been moved to the barn. Before she can re-enter the hut, she gets scrubbed with lye (her skin is so raw, I have no idea how she bears it) and rubbed with herbs that supposedly protect against a curse’s spread. The other mage—brought to create the weapons—says some kind of charm over her coming and going, and everyone hopes that is enough.

I have brought my quill, ink, and precious paper. I sit in the far corner with the gravest of the ill, and take dictation. After a few moments, we realize that I must clutch the inkwell between my legs so that the liquid remains warm enough to use. As the ill talk, I can see their breath.

Only it is not fair to call them “the ill.” They are so much more. There’s Tanre, a boy of thirteen years who has been fighting for the past three. He has just started to hit his growth spurt. The first sprouts of beard form on his chin.

They embarrass him. He wants to remain young forever, so that he can stay with the pixies. But his hands are gone—lost when the last alcana opened as he dropped it through the trap door. His flying partner managed to tie off his wrists and do a rudimentary spell to keep him from bleeding to death. The pixies had already turned around, and the mage who invented the alcana happened to be near the hut.

No one could save Tanre’s hands, but they were able to save his life. He believes the witches in his village will be able to make new hands for him, but no one has the heart to tell him that our side does not use that kind of magic. That kind of magic—which revives dead body parts and uses bits of the darkness in all of us—is what started this war in the first place.

Instead, we leave him with the hope that he will get well, he will live a useful life, and he will fight again.

He sends a letter to his mother, and it is an adult’s letter, filled with nothing but the beauty of the countryside, the courage of the various peoples he’s met, and the strangeness of a woman who can write.

People like Tanre, from countries so remote they are only sites on poorly drawn maps, have born the brunt of this fight. My people stay in the cities, plan the attacks, make changes as the forces grow or diminish. But Tanre and his kind are on the edges of the crisis, seeing the destruction first hand, and believing they make a difference.

His letter is lovely—he is articulate for a boy his age—and it says nothing. The next letter I write, for a young woman named Quay, is not articulate at all, but it is filled with anguish. She has lost fingers, and her face—once beautiful—is black with frost. There are poultices that can help her, healers from the cold communities who know how to treat such damage, but I do not tell her this. I don’t know if she will reach them in time.

Instead, I let her dictate a blunt letter to her fiancé, freeing him of his obligation to her, and letting him marry the woman he has always loved. Tears fall across her dead skin as she says this: she has been promised to him since they were infants. She is letting go of a dream.

I ask her why she does not wait, why she will not let him make the choice after he sees her. She turns away from me, and for a moment, I think she will not answer. Then she says, “It is not fair to hold him to a promise his parents made. The world differs from the one we were born into.”

The world differs.

She says this with simple understatement. The world she was born into, maybe fifteen years before, was in the last days of the Interim. I have lived twenty years longer than she. I was born in the last days of the last war, and saw the veterans return home. I was old enough to go to the flaring conflicts—the firestorms, the politicians called them—that could so easily be put out with arrogance and a bit of so-called diplomacy.

I thought war was that: simple conflagrations among peoples not meant to live together—elves moved from their small woods to houses in the city; sea nymphs forced to work in rivers; the were-creatures, brought to so-called zoos so that they could be studied and tamed.

Whenever a non-native population rebelled, it was seen as an isolated incident. We were raised to believe that all beings could get along. But the hatreds between the dwarves and the trolls; the natural enmity between vampires and humans; the unwillingness of ghosts to leave their traditional haunts, were more than flare-ups. They were the result of too much tampering. Politicians thought diplomacy could solve all—that we would learn to get along, that we could deny our natures—not realizing that this strange idealism created even stranger bedfellows. Believers in dark magic affiliated with practitioners of even blacker magics, and bribed the greedy, like the dragons who normally affiliated with no one.

When the actual war came, it caught us all by surprise and yet shocked no one. It was a logical extension of all that had come before.

But I say nothing of this to her. The world does differ for her. Because she had those early years of calm, when it seemed like all the bloodshed would remain in the past—or at least in distant places with names none of us could pronounce.

In those days, she would not have been able to envision herself here, on this cot, her beauty gone, her dreams shattered, her future the only gift she could give to the man she loved.

In the other room, the pixies plan the next raid, their voices rising in agitation. We cannot make the words out in here—they are lost to the gauze and to the high-pitched tones that the human ear can acknowledge but not truly hear.

I take the letters I have finished, unrolled and drying, to the company clerk. It is better for the letters to go through official channels. If they go back with me, they’re subject to all the censorship that my dispatches must face. The letters might not arrive home before the wounded do.

Then I push past the gauze curtain and step carefully into the pixie area. The pixies are so small that I could easily hurt one if I’m not careful. Their wounded lie on pallets nailed into the wall like shelves. I have not talked to them. I have not tried. Most are in comas induced by too much effort, a loss of magic, and the deep, destroying cold.

“Humans are not welcome,” the commander says to me. “and you cannot report on our conversations.”

I nod. But I know what they’re discussing. It has been the subject of everyone here—the high casualties, the impossibility of maintaining these raids much longer, the future missions. We all hope for five, but the medical mage in the back told me in confidence there are barely enough for one more.

“I have a suggestion,” I say. “Since you’re planning strategy, I thought you might want to consider it.”

The commander puts her hands on her hips. Her wings flutter in the heat waves from the fireplace.

“Speak,” she says. Even in her tiny voice, the word sounds like the command that it is.

“Let me release an alcana,” I say a bit too eagerly. “Then you won’t need anyone else in the boat with me.”

“You’re not to serve,” she says. “We have had strict instruction about that.”

From the centaur? Or from his unit commander? Or have the orders come from even farther up? I do not know and I do not ask. I’ve found that it’s better for me to take action on the front than it is to go through channels. Channels are starting to disintegrate anyway.

(It is amazing to me to write a sentence like that, knowing it will be cut. Why do I write it anyway? Because I have to? Because I’m daring them—you, poor censor, who must read these words? Or because I hope that these reports, all of them, of which this is the sixty-first, will be published some day, some day in an Interim, where a young girl can grow up and think a lack of conflict is normal, where she does not face the loss of her beauty at twenty or the loss of her hands at fourteen.)

“Nothing is strict any more,” I say to the pixie commander.

She studies me, damaged hands still on her hips. I wonder what else she has damaged, what I can’t see, what she can’t see yet. And I wonder if she will survive long enough to take stock, to know what faces her in the years ahead.

I wonder that about all of us, in my most despairing moments. I wonder if any of us will survive long enough to understand what we have seen.

“You have magic,” she says after a moment.

I nod.

“You might lose it. The alcana can destroy magic around it.”

Which is why the pixies cannot touch it, why the boats are reinforced with some kind of metal, made in the mountains a thousand miles from here and flown, at great risk, to these isolated places.

“My magic is small,” I say.

She shrugs. “It is magic. I cannot destroy that.”

“I have the power to charm equines,” I say. “It is supposed to vanish with my innocence. I haven’t tested it since the war began.”

She leaps onto a human-sized stool, left in here as a table. Her wings flutter as she leans toward me. I wonder if that flutter is a form of palsy, the beginnings of a pixie’s loss of control of her various limbs.

“You rode a centaur here,” she says.

“He is the media liaison. He is under orders.”

She sighs. “Innocence is an old-fashioned term for virginity. Have you lost yours?”

“In all the ways that matter,” I say.

She laughs. The sound tinkles, like water across rocks, gentle and beautiful and terribly out of place here. If she were my size, she’d clap me on the back. Instead, she reaches out her small hand and takes my littlest finger, shaking it as if we have just become comrades.

She thinks I am being coy. She thinks I have been with a man. But I am not being coy. I believe there are all forms of virginity, and they can all be lost. Does it matter whether I have made love when I have seen mermaids sliced from waist to tailfin? Or children, orphaned, homeless, and starving, destroyed by the breath of a single brown-eyed dragon? Or men, leaping to their deaths, because they believe their own lives are worth less than the world they are fighting for?

I did not charm the centaur to get him to come up here. I did not even try.

I believe my innocence to be lost long ago, the day I first trudged into the Rhines, volunteering for duty with my papers, my pens and my bottles of ink.

“We leave before dawn,” the pixie commander says, her smile fading as suddenly as it arrived. “Someone will make sure you’re awake.”

She floats off the stool on a current of hot air from the fire. That small movement seems like it takes a lot from her. When she lands on the floor, she puts a hand to her back, hunches for a moment, then, thinking she’s unwatched, winces. Finally she stands upright and walks among her troops, a proud woman ready to face another day.

I report to the weapons mage. He is not the inventor of this alcana, although the inventor once lived in this hut. The alcana is a newer weapon, one developed for the cold regions, designed to work at lower temperatures than most evil charms.

We have had a dilemma from the moment we started using magical weapons against our opponents. Too much darkness in the weapon itself, and we become like our enemies. Our violence, our bleakness, our lack of compassion will only be a matter of degree—and we will no longer be fighting for all that is good and true, but that which isn’t quite as bad and not quite as false.

There are rumors, unsubstantiated of course, that the weapons makers must return to the labs for a debriefing. One maker, on his way out of a camp south of here, told me he feared that he would be put to death upon his return.

“How else can they control us?” he whispered. “There’s no way to test for incipient darkness.”

The alcana inventor has trained his apprentice and left three days before I arrived. Weapons inventors are privy to a kind of invisibility so that they might pass from one region to the next; the centaur and I might have passed him on the trails and never have known.

The weapons mage has long black hair, tangled from the harsh winds, and a beard badly cropped below his chin. His eyes have a desperation to them. He seems more afraid of the weapon than I am, perhaps because he knows what it does.

We are inside what must have been a chicken coop before the winter storms came, before the war found its way up here. The air still smells of dung and chicken feathers. It has a dryness that makes me want to sneeze.

The mage does not let me touch my alcana. That is what he calls it: mine. While I stand there, he charms it to obey only me.

It is smaller than I expect, although twice the size of an adult pixie, and it is shaped like a giant robin’s egg, although it is not blue. It is an iridescent white, a color I have never seen in nature.

It will fall from my hands, silently against the gray sky, landing with a little poof in a pile of snow. Then it will burrow to the frozen ground, and the magic will leach from it, absorbing other magics, turning them and changing them ever so slightly—just enough so that their users can no longer summon them. Unsummoned, the magics will wither, and eventually die.

The only thing we do not know is the range of the alcana. We do not know if magics ten miles away will wither as well or if only the magics in the near vicinity will wither.

“We are protected in any case,” he tells me. “The alcana only steals the dark magics.”

“Then why warn me away? Why warn me that I might lose my magic?”

His smile is slight, bitter. He mutters, “I wish she had not told you that.”

I wait, in silence, and he finally adds, “Because we do not know how many of our magics have their origins in darkness. They have turned light. But light has various shades, and one of them is the gray of twilight. Which side does gray belong to? Both? Neither?”

He wears gloves while he handles the alcana, and hands me a pair just before I leave. He gives me specific instructions which I cannot repeat here—not because I know you’ll delete them, my friendly censor (you will, of course; I would), but because I do not want to trust them to the page even as far as headquarters. If I did, this would be the dispatch stolen, this would be the turning point of the war: the enemy would learn the basis of our weapons technology, and would, then, know how to spell against it.

I cannot give them this gift, even in theory.

Suffice to say my duty is easy enough. Little more than dropping the alcana from the pixie boat. Painfully little, but just enough to cost me my hands should I do it wrong.

And because I will be in the boat alone, no one will be able to tie my wrists. I will bleed to death, trapped in a boat painted like clouds, held up by a fleet of pixies, flying courageously toward their doom.

It is disingenuous to say I am awakened before dawn, just as it is disingenuous to write this in present tense when it is clear by the act of writing that I have survived enough to tell this story to someone. It is just there are few words to describe the moment when someone tapped my shoulder. I was not asleep, but I was not exactly awake either. I had been lying on a filthy cot, thinking of the day ahead, cold and trembling, and then I am awake, following a young man I have not met yet into the boat barn.

The pixie boats are misnamed. They are boxes large enough to hold a platoon of pixies but so small I wonder if I can actually fit inside. The outsides are painted like clouds, or were, but are now so scratched and damaged from use that they look like bits of unusable cotton.

My advisor—I don’t know what else to call him; he never gave me a name—shows me where to lie, how to hold the alcana until I need to release it. My breathing is shallow; I regret begging for this assignment now.

I will be trapped inside that box—alone—until a pixie crawls through one of knotholes in the side and shouts the heads-up at me. Then I release a lever, open the trapdoor beneath me—with nothing to hold me inside the box except my legs braced against the walls—and hold the alcana over the emptiness. Then I activate it, and let it go.

I’m not even supposed to watch it drop. I let it go, pray it hits silently in the snow, and then close the trapdoor. The sound of the closing door will notify the pixies that I’m done. Then they’ll turn around and head for home.

It almost works like that. I do fit inside the box—although how two humans fit inside at the same time, I’ll never know. I have to lay in a fetal position on my left side so that my right arm can reach the lever. The mage has given me a holder—like a little stand—for the alcana so that I do not have to hug it to me. He worries that I might get some permanent damage if I do that.

I’m worried I’ll get permanent damage no matter what. Within a few moments—or so it seems—my entire left side falls asleep. I wish I could follow it—the time in the box is excruciatingly long. Before we even take off, I’m chilled through. By the time we’re done, they’ll have to check me for frostbite, if I don’t fall asleep and die first.

I have no idea how the pixies fly in this—their wings so thin I could shove a fingernail through them. They hold gossamer strings attached to the box. The commander assured me before we left that the strings have the power of a spider’s web, which does not reassure me. I have broken through spiders’ webs many times.

It is surprisingly light inside. The wood is thin and the box poorly constructed; light comes through all sorts of cracks. That’s good; I’d been afraid I’d be flying in darkness.

Liftoff seems surprisingly easy; it’s the mid-air part of the flight that’s hard. The box rocks—partly with wind currents but partly, I later learn, as the pixies drop away, one by one, victims of the cold.

By the time we reach the drop zone, only half the squad remains.

I do not know this inside, blissfully. I am cramped in the small space, unable to do much more than raise my head. I want to move a little, but I’m afraid the pixies won’t be able to handle any great shifts in weight. So I move my fingers on my nerve-deadened arm, and pray that the sleep won’t kill it. I waggle my toes, and count, and, under my breath, recite every poem I learned as a child.

The interior of the box warms a little, due to my body heat and the air I breathe out. But I am still frozen through and through. I cannot believe that some of the human team have ridden on eight or more missions. I do not know how they endure this.

Finally, a pixie squeezes herself through the knothole near my head. Her features are strained, which I attribute to the difficulty she has getting inside, but which I later learn is due to the team attrition. At this point, she doubts we will ever make it back.

“It’s warm in here,” she says in her tiny voice.

“Only in comparison,” I say.

She smiles, but the smile is distracted. “It’s time.”

I nod, and she squeezes out—all going the way the instructors have told me it would. I pull the lever with my good arm and for a moment, I fear that the trap door is frozen shut. Then it squeals open, letting in air so cold that I think I will flash-freeze like a drop of water on a crisp mid-winter day.

With a shaking right hand, I reach for the alcana. I do not trust my left. I remember the boy with no hands, wonder if he had a malfunctioning limb, wonder if he tried to activate the alcana with only partial control of his dominant side.

I scooch against the wall, feeling the rough wood send splinters into my back. I use my knees to hold the alcana, having been warned not to activate it in the holder (in case I can’t remove it, I think).

Then I lean over the trapdoor. Beneath me, I see sundazzled snow, and tops of trees and chimneys belching smoke. All seems peaceful, like the valley I came up with the centaur.

Do they know what’s coming? Do they realize the threat?

Do they care or are they as sick of this war as we are?

I shove the activated alcana through the hole, and reach for the lever, promising myself I will not watch.

I almost make it. I see the puff of snow as the alcana slips beneath the surface, between several buildings and near a tramped down bit of land. The door closes slowly enough that I see someone—human-shaped, although I cannot be sure the person below is human—emerge from one of the buildings and walk the opposite direction from my little missive.

Then the trapdoor closes, shaking the entire box. For a moment, it slips toward the front, sending me sliding toward the lever. More splinters go into my cheek—and probably into the numb left side, although I cannot tell for sure.

I think I hear chatter—screaming, maybe?—although I might be making that up.

Finally the box rights itself. I feel the turn as we head back, and I believe I do doze, in the silence, in the frozen air that suddenly feels hot, in the strange interior light.

When I wake—and this time, I do wake from a real sleep—it is as the box thuds to the ground, back at the hut. The lid comes off, other humans bundle me out and carry me to the human room where the injured lay. Someone rubs my limbs, puts an ammonia-scented ointment on my skin, and whispers soothingly at me.

I go back to sleep, asking no questions, which is so unlike me.

It is not until the following day that I learn only twenty of the pixies made it back from that trip. The other eighty died, falling away like the alcana, too small to even make puffs in the snow.

When the centaur returns, I go to him carrying only my parchment for this dispatch. I have given my pens and ink to the scribe, my envelopes to the clerk. The papers are mostly gone, used to write letters home for the humans remaining in that hut.

There are barely enough pixies for one more raid. The commander tells the centaur that, and he nods gravely.

Then he gets on his knees, camel-like, to let me climb on his back. He does not grouse this time, nor does he mention my abilities.

“I hear you released a weapon,” he says.

“Yes.” I do not want to talk about it. Even now, my skin tingles with the cold and I have no feeling in my left foot.

“Did it go off?”

How should I know? I want to snap at him. He knows better. He is a soldier. We only see pieces of the war, never the entire part. Each action we make might be futile; each life lost, lost for nothing.

Then again, we might have made the decisive blow that changes everything.

Only the historians will know.

“Did the weapon work?” he asks with a little more emphasis, as if I had not heard him the first time.

“I hope so,” I say. For the sake of eighty tiny people I never really met, for everyone in that hut, for all the people scattered along our side of this mountain, I truly hope it worked.

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Dispatches from the Front: Number Sixty-One

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Army of the Fantastic, edited by John Marco and John Helfers, Daw Books, 2007Published by WMG PublishingCover and layout copyright © 2021 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Michele Cornelius | Dreamstime

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

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Funeral directors deal with many unexpected things at a funeral, but only a select few know how to handle an influx of flower fairies. Flower fairies often prove unpredictable…except when they get angry. And then they become terrifying.

So, when a flower fairy child shows up alone with a bouquet for someone who requested no ceremony, the funeral director knows to address her carefully. Because if the other flower fairies fear harm might come to one of their children, the humans around them could face the greatest threat of all.

“Flower Fairies” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Flower FairiesKristine Kathryn RuschShe stands behind the bouquet of flowers, her little face barely visible through the green fronds. Her skin is the color of loam, her eyes the faded green of underwater seaweed, and her lips the dusky rose of the tulips that hide her.

My heart pounds. I see her among all the bouquets set on the long white table, but my colleagues don’t. They’re moving flowers, checking tags, figuring out which bouquet goes into what memorial chapel.

We have four funerals this afternoon and two viewings tonight. The funeral home is large, modern, with several exits and entrances, so none of the groups will see each other. Their music shouldn’t even overlap.

On days like today—a Saturday, shortly after the winter holidays—I employ nearly a dozen people, some of whom just stand by the doors and make sure the right family goes to the right memorial chapel.

It’s all very delicate and very sad, and I try very hard to make sure that my employees seem sympathetic. After hundreds of funerals, however, many people lose sympathy. They recognize the patterns and realize some people are loved, some are hated, and some are simply forgotten.

And then there are the very old, whose friends and family have died long ago.

The very old touch me. I can easily see myself as part of their ranks, alone and forgotten. I want someone to honor me when I die, just as I’m sure they wanted someone to honor them.

So I do. For their funerals, I put on my best dress, and sit in the chapels myself. The ceremony is often elaborate, planned for friends and family who are now gone. When that happens, it’s clear the person never expected to live so long. Often she (and it usually is a she) planned her ceremony with my father or my grandfather.

We keep amazing records. My family has planned funerals for this town for more than a century. If a historian comes into our little parlor and asks to see the records from a burial sixty years before, I can find it. I can tell who presided and who attended.

I can also tell what kind of floral arrangements decorated the memorial chapel.

Flowers have always been my specialty.

Perhaps that’s why I notice the flower fairies long before anyone else does.

This little girl looks no more than three, but looks can be deceptive, particularly among flower fairies. Three is a problem. Three means I might have to return her to her family.

When she realizes that I see her, she smiles. Her eyes brighten to emerald and actually twinkle.

She touches the flowers in front of her. Ferns accent a mix of dusty rose and purplish blue tulips, with a single well placed lily in the center.

“I made this,” she says in a decidedly childlike voice.

Everyone in the room turns. The silence, which was already heavy, turns oppressive.

She doesn’t seem to notice. She’s smiling at me. She is as young as I feared.

“Isn’t it pretty?” she asks.

I turn to my assistant Diane. Diane’s skin is normally the color of chalk, but it’s gone even paler now.

“Call Roderick,” I say.

Roderick is the only one of the flower fairies who uses modern technology. He burns through cell phones like smokers burn through matches. Fortunately, he’s smart enough to keep the same number with each phone change.

Diane slips out of the room. Technology usually doesn’t work well in the presence of the magical.

I smile at the little girl. “Your flowers are lovely.”

“Thank you,” she says primly. Then she waits. She wants me to ask what it is she’s doing here or, worse, what she wants.

I never ask the flower fairies what they want. That’s the wrong question. It’s a question—particularly with a magical child—that could get the questioner in decades of trouble.

“Is this your first bouquet?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.

She nods. “Can I stay?”

I don’t dare say no to her. Saying no to an infant flower fairy is much more dangerous than saying no to an adult.

“You can stay,” I say and try not to cringe.

I was little more than a babe myself when I first met the flower fairies. My parents owned a summer cabin near one of the mountain lakes. It was the only place I’d lived that didn’t smell faintly of formaldehyde.

Instead, it smelled of the cool, clear lake water—and flowers.

Flowers. Flowers everywhere. My father believed that the cabin’s previous owners had planted thousands of perennials, not listening to my mother when she would remark that many of the flowers that covered our property every year were annuals. Not only that, but they often bloomed at the same time—peonies and geraniums, roses and lilacs, asters and snowdrops. Seasons seemed to mean nothing on our land, something I didn’t appreciate until much later.

I must have been six when I stumbled onto the clearing. In those days, children—even young children—were allowed to wander so long as they came back in time for supper. I wore a watch with large hands. I’d learned to tell time two years before, and I adhered to the schedule rigidly.

The schedule gave me freedom, which I desperately needed. When you grew up above a funeral home, you knew more about sadness, mourning, and death than you should have. The entire house had an oppressive air—one I accepted as normal until I grew old enough to visit my friends.

Sunlight filtered through the trees, burning off the last of the early morning fog. That fog made everything seem opaque—the trees, tall and strong with their green leaves; the shadows, deep and dark and somehow welcoming; and the flowers, which covered the meadow like grass.

The colors would have been overwhelming but for the fog: Blues and reds and pinks and so very much white that it looked less like an accent color and more like a deliberate shade.

I stepped from my path in the trees, expecting to walk on a carpet of flowers, because that was what they looked like, a carpet that led to another part of the woods.

But I sank into them. The ground where the flowers grew was lower than the ground in the forest. I walked in a sea of blooms, shoulder-high, and I felt like I had found heaven.

My watch stopped and I was late for lunch, forbidden to go off on my own again for a week. By the time I returned, the flowers were taller, and I didn’t like walking inside of their stalks. The darkness with its intermittent rays of sunlight frightened me—and even then, I knew there was something wrong here, something not completely normal.

But I visited the clearing every summer. I learned to remove my watch before I stepped inside, because it stopped every single time I went into the clearing.

But I was never late to lunch again—the fairies saw to that. For such capricious little creatures, they have oddly tender hearts.

We have six memorial chapels—two large, three medium, and one small, so that the family doesn’t notice that the deceased has few friends. This afternoon’s funerals will take place in both large chapels as well as two of the medium chapels.

We’ll have crowds.

But the little girl’s flowers aren’t going to any of those chapels. They’re going to the small chapel, on the far side of the building.

At six tonight, we’re holding a viewing.

I don’t expect anyone to come.

The deceased is Helena Spenser, one of the very old. The obituary that ran in the paper this morning said she was one hundred and five, but the age was just an estimate. Like so many of her generation, she was born at home and no one ever issued a birth certificate.

And like so many women before her, Helena Spenser often lied about her age.

I met Helena a decade ago, when she made her funeral plans. She was formidable, a woman who still had vestiges of unusual height. She carried herself like a dancer, back straight, moving with fluid grace.

I even remember the outfit she wore—a black dress trimmed with red, and decorated with a single rose in the dress’s lapel. Her hat, a cloche which matched the dress in design and trim, tilted rakishly on her thick silver hair.

My office was small then; I hadn’t yet built the new Memorial Center. We sat in what had once been the servant’s quarters in my family’s oversized Victorian and, heads bowed, decided how Helena Spenser’s friends and family would celebrate her long life upon this Earth.

Only this morning’s obituary warned me that Helena Spenser’s family had died sixty years before in a devastating fire. Her close friends—a group of widowed women who had raised hell and money for our little town—died nearly two decades ago.

She had acquaintances, but not the kind that most older folk had. She had never left the home she built after her husband and sons died, so she had no retirement center bridge partners, no orderlies who cajoled her to eat, no nursing home directors who felt it their duty to attend the funeral of one of the “members.” She never went to church, so no minister would feel obligated to say a few words about her passing.

While she’d been spectacular in life—an actress who became a playwright, a self-made woman who had somehow survived the loss of everyone who mattered to her when she was still in her forties, the center of society into her seventies, and a philanthropist until the day she died—she kept to herself.

There was to be no ceremony. I remembered that much without even checking her file.

Such nonsense, she’d said when I broached the topic all those years ago. Show the world I’m dead and then burn what’s left.

I hadn’t known about the fire then. I hadn’t known about it until this morning when I read about her.

I’d known the obituary was coming; I’d called the paper myself to make sure I didn’t have to fund a notice of the viewing from Helena Spenser’s account. But I hadn’t expected the obituary to be so detailed and rich, nor had I expected Helena Spenser’s life to be so fascinating.

Although I probably should have.

I had only met her the once, and she’d made quite an impression on me.

We have no other flowers for Helena Spenser’s viewing, and that angers me. This woman gave millions in charity, and no organization that benefited from her benevolence thought to send a single memorial.

Granted, most people send flowers to funerals and Helena is only having a viewing. And in the middle of this morning’s obituary, the paper had highlighted a box of memorials where money could be sent in lieu of flowers.

I understand charitable donations. I usually encourage them. But someone should remember this woman as she leaves this life to go to the next. Someone should decorate her chapel, just for a little while.

Looks like that someone will have to be me.

Each funeral has excess flowers. The family takes the cards and the bouquets that they want—if any—and then one of my employees discreetly asks if the family minds donating the remaining flowers to lonely nursing home and hospital patients.

Of course the family doesn’t mind. The family doesn’t want to think about the flowers because that’s just one more thing to worry about.

Besides, flowers die too—and that’s an often too visual reminder of the fact that their loved one has just left the world.

So I will take some leftover flowers and decorate Helena’s chapel.

It became Helena’s chapel this morning, when we moved her body from the embalming chamber to the casket and then moved the casket to the front of the room. The casket is polished lavender—not quite the model she picked out (that one has been discontinued) but close enough.

She looks lovely inside of it, nestled on satin that matches her hair. We didn’t have to put much make-up on her. She doesn’t look that much different from the woman who visited me in my office all those years ago.

She’s wearing a black suit with purple piping. The black sets off her hair, the purple accents the casket itself. It’s too bad no one will see this. Rarely has our staff made a corpse look so good.

I check on her before the first funeral. I put the guest book near the entrance, so people can sign in and leave if they want to. I place the placard announcing the visiting hours just outside the door.

Right now, Helena looks lonely in her small chapel, without flowers and without notes. The piped-in music, all 1920s jazz, sounds a little too jaunty for the occasion. But I didn’t pick it. She did.

She had planned everything down to the last detail.

Except, of course, the effects of age and time.

By late afternoon, Roderick still hasn’t arrived. I’ve had Diane page him three more times. I even sent one of the lowliest assistants to the edge of the clearing not far from the old Victorian. This assistant will stand near the old growth tree stumps that dot the back of my property, and call for Roderick.

Roderick never comes when he’s paged like that. Instead, he finds me, wherever I am, and reminds me he’s not a dog.

Of course, this time, the verbal page isn’t working either.

I can’t wait. I have to ready the chapel just in case someone shows up for Helena’s viewing.

Gingerly, I carry the little girl’s bouquet into the chapel. The vase is made of obsidian. I’ve never seen anything so beautifully carved.

The flower fairy sits on the edge of the vase, her feet dangling off the side. Her little fingers caress the ferns. Her emerald eyes twinkle.

“Will everyone like the flowers?” she asks.

I can’t answer that question. If I say yes and no one does, then I have lied to a flower fairy, which puts me at their mercy. If I hedge and say, I hope so, then I am insulting the little being who created this arrangement, because I’m telling her in a sideways fashion that the flowers aren’t good enough. If I say I don’t know, I lose standing with the flower fairies.

Instead, I stop outside the chapel doors. I look down the private hallway and make sure we’re alone.

“Are you sure you want to remain with the bouquet?” I ask.

She nods. She’s tiny and delicate and amazingly beautiful. She looks like a flower herself.

“These flowers are for grieving,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “That’s why there’s a lily.”

The funeral flower, apparently, for flower fairies as well as for humans.

“All right,” I say, and with one hand, pull open the heavy oak door leading into the chapel.

No matter how gently we perfume the air, the scents of death and formaldehyde linger. The body in the coffin never looks real. I am always amazed at how many people say that the deceased looks so happy or so alive or so beautiful.

Helena does look beautiful—for a wax doll—but the vibrant demanding woman I met the day we planned this event was much more beautiful. Animation, personality, that spark of life—it can’t be faked, not with make-up and reconstruction and excellent posing.

It can only be mimicked.

I expect the flower fairy to gasp or be shocked. But she rides on her vase like a soldier going to battle. She does look up front as we walk. A small frown crosses her little face.

“Pretty,” she says, and points.

At first, I think she’s pointing at Helena. Then I realize she’s pointing at the coffin.

“I want the flowers there,” she says, still pointing.

I follow the point as best I can. I swallow, trying to think of a tactful way to tell her the arrangement is too small for such a large empty space.

“Usually,” I say, “something as pretty as your arrangement goes on the shelf just behind the coffin.”

I indicate the shelf near the podium. Usually three of the loveliest arrangements go there. But a single arrangement, particularly one this beautiful, would look spectacular there as well.

“No,” she says and moves her finger up and down imperiously. “There.”

She means the closed half of the coffin. I suppress a sigh and silently wish for Roderick.

Of course, he doesn’t come.

“The viewing doesn’t start until six,” I say. “It’s four now.”

I’m not sure she understands. I’m trying to tell her, in a roundabout way, that she’ll be alone. I don’t dare say that bluntly because I’m afraid she’ll use her budding magic to force me to stay or to bring in my assistants.

Or worse, to bring in everyone from one of the nearby services.

“It’s all right,” she says.

And I hope it is.

“I have some errands,” I say. “I’ll be back before the viewing starts.”

“I know,” she says and settles behind the fronds.

For the next hour, I try not to think of her alone in there. She’s young and if young fairies are anything like young humans, then she must be bored.

If she’s bored, she’ll either sleep or she’ll cause trouble.

I’m hoping for sleep, but part of me expects the worst.

After I leave her, I text Roderick. A plume of smoke rises from my Blackberry, so I know the text has gone through. I set it on vibrate and put it in my pocket.

Then I go to the largest chapel, where the final funeral is just ending.

The funeral is for the mayor’s mother-in-law. She was a difficult woman, who never had a kind word to say about anyone, her son-in-law in particular.

The large crowd isn’t here for her. They’re here to see and be seen. It’s funeral as political event. The mayor will be running for governor next fall, and, unless something goes wrong, he’ll win. Everyone wants to be his friend, in whatever way they can accomplish that.

His wife is the only one crying. She’s not sobbing. Instead, her eyes are leaking. She keeps wiping the tears away as if they anger her.

They probably do. No one should cry for the woman in the casket. Even in death, she looks mean. Her mouth is pinched from smoking, her fleshy cheeks forming jowls that we couldn’t erase with make-up. She died of a massive heart attack while berating the head of the town council and the joke around town (spoken quietly and away from the mayor’s hearing) that she had done the impossible: having a heart attack without having a heart.

The mayor is saying a few words. They’re deft—he is truly a politician—and then he’ll invite everyone forward to pay their last respects.

He has promised me all of the flowers—his wife wants none of them. I slip away, leaving the remainder of the ceremony to my able assistants, who can better stomach hypocrisy than I can.

Instead, I head back to my office, checking my Blackberry as I go.

It’s not like the flower fairies to leave one of their children alone for so long. It’s not like Roderick to ignore my pleas for assistance.

We’ve known each other since my days in the woods, back when I was a child. Roderick took care of me and his price (fairies always have a price) was to learn how to use modern technology.

Roderick wanted to cross between his world and ours. Mostly he manages it. People do notice him, but they think it’s because they find him attractive. Somehow they miss the glamour that slides off him like glitter.

I’m about to text him again, when Diane catches my arm. I didn’t even see her approach.

“You need to come with me,” she says.

She was assigned to our other large funeral of the day, but that ended hours ago. I expect her to lead me to the big chapel. Instead, she takes me to the smallest chapel and carefully pulls open the door.

“Look,” she says.

I’m afraid to. A magical child left alone in a place of the dead. I thought I was making a mistake. Now I will see exactly what that mistake is.

I peer inside, carefully, so that the girl can’t see me.

My breath catches.

Flowers cascade off the closed casket. Lavender and bluebells mix with a carpet of greenery. The greenery outlines the aisle that flows all the way to the main door.

I remain in the hall and let the door close.

The child was bored, and she found a way to amuse herself. My heart catches.

“You didn’t hear from Roderick, did you?” I ask Diane.

Diane shakes her head.

“I didn’t notice,” I say. “The flowers aren’t covering Helena, are they?”

“I didn’t notice either,” Diane whispers.

We should check. One of us should go inside and make sure the girl didn’t cover our corpse with a carpet of roses.

But I can’t bring myself to send Diane in there, and I’m not going to go myself. I don’t know how to tell a magical child—a flower fairy—to stop doing something.

I’ve been chastised by the flower fairies before.

I brought my father to their clearing, hoping he would ask them to do the flowers for his funeral home. They humored him, then made him forget.

And they punished me for sharing our relationship.

They made me promise that I would display any flowers they gave me, even when I became director of the family funeral parlor.

I agreed. I thought I had outsmarted them because I never planned to work with my family.

I was twelve.

I didn’t understand the ways of the world.

I still honor that agreement, even though the contract has expired.

I have seen what happens when someone crosses them.

I adjust the placard on its board. Then I text Roderick again.

Urgent, I type. Please. Help.

The smoke rises, acrid and dark. He’s getting my messages.

He’s just not answering.

And I don’t know why.

At quarter to six, I slip into the private bath behind my office and change into my best dress. This dress is new; I bought it the day I heard of Helena’s death. The dress is black with red trim—not as glamorous as hers was, but I can never do glamorous.

I don’t wear a hat because hats indoors, particularly at a funeral, are often considered bad luck. But I pile my hair on top of my head and secure it. Then I slip one of the hothouse roses—also red—into the makeshift bun.

I can never be as dramatically beautiful as Helena, but I can at least honor her by looking my best.

I slip on a pair of black pumps and grab a glittery black clutch purse.

Then I head for the smallest chapel.

Diane stands outside the door to usher in anyone who shows up. It’s a little after six. So far she’s ushered in no one. We’ve received no calls, no condolences, and no questions about where to send cards.

Roderick hasn’t come either.

I twist my fingers together. The little flower fairy won’t know that anything is amiss at the viewing, but what do I do with her afterwards? I’m not sure she should stay with the bouquet.

Diane grimaces at me as I approach. I recognize the look; she hates these lonely viewings as much as I do. We’ve done too many of them over the years.

“Want me to go in with you?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Send Roderick in, though, if he ever shows up.”

She nods.

I grab the oak handle on the door and pull it open.

This time, my gasp is audible. Diane crowds beside me and gasps as well.

The chapel is covered in greenery. The pews are covered in a carpet of wildflowers, the floor itself looks like it’s made of moss, and trees grow in the corners. Flowers bloom on the shelves—more roses than I’ve ever seen, carnations, and lilies in stunning displays.

But the bouquet on the casket remains, and so does the open part of the casket itself. Helena Spenser looks like she’s resting on a bier made of flowers.

“My God,” Diane breathes. Then she touches my arm. “If anyone shows, should I send them in?”

“Yeah,” I say. I have no idea how I’ll explain this, although I’ve had a few fairy-sponsored magical moments before, and I’ve found that simple works best. “If they ask, just tell them she loved flowers.”

“Okay.” Diane seems reluctant to move.

I know I am. But I’ve come to pay my respects, and I’m going to do that. Then I’m going to sit as if I’m family and watch over her until viewing hours end.

I step inside. The aisle is so soft that my heels pierce it. I wobble. I’ll do damage as I walk, so I pull off the shoes and set them by the door. They’re instantly covered with grass and purple crocuses. I wonder if I’ll ever get them back.

I walk on the moss. It feels warm as sunlit ground. It’s comfortable and soothing, like going barefoot in the glade.

Still, I step carefully. I’m not sure where the child is. I don’t want to hurt her.

I walk up to the coffin. Helena’s eyes are closed, her lashes brushing her heavily made up cheeks. She looks content, even though I’m not sure how. Corpses don’t show emotion.

I glance at the bouquet, wondering how that infant fairy managed so much work in such a short period of time.

But I don’t see her.

I tell myself this isn’t unusual; to create this magical wonderland, she probably has to move around a lot.

But my heart is pounding.

What happens if I lost her?

What happens if she gets hurt?

I don’t even know what to call her. Fairies guard their names jealously and they don’t like pet names.

I decide to cajole her. “This room has never looked lovelier.”

“Good.” The voice behind me is male and it makes me jump.

I turn. The man behind me is taller than I am. He is so thin that my hand could probably encompass his waist. He wears leaves over his hips and down his legs, but his chest is bare.

His skin is green, his hair brown. Instead of looking strange, he looks gorgeous.

Such is the way of flower fairies.

“We have worked hard this afternoon,” he says.

As he speaks, more fairies come out of the greenery. They’re all heights, and thin. Some have green skin, some have loam-colored skin like the little fairy. Some have skin the color of ivory. Their hair often matches the flowers they carry. They are all barefoot. The men wear leaves like this man does, and the women wear skimpy dresses made of petals.

Since fairies wear nothing in the wild, they are covering themselves according to human custom.

“This is stunning,” I say. “And quite unexpected.”

The door in the back opens, and Roderick slips in. He’s wearing a suit and it looks stranger than anything the other fairies wear. Normally, Roderick wears tight black jeans, a t-shirt with some Goth band I don’t recognize, and heavy boots.

The suit looks like an Armani, perfectly tailored to his slender frame. The white shirt beneath accents the darkness of his skin. His normally spiky hair has been combed back, and his piercings are empty.

He looks like a teenage boy told to clean up for his grandmother’s funeral.

“There you are,” I say with so much relief it even surprises me.

He smiles. I thread my way through the throng of fairies and stop beside him.

“I tried to contact you,” I say. “I was worried.”

“It’s a small price to pay,” he says, then sweeps his hand toward the chapel.

As he does, I see the glamour fall from his arm. The scents of moss and sunlight and a hundred flowers follow that glamour

“If I had warned you,” he says, “this would not have happened.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because this is your domain.” He bows his head slightly. “We have invaded. We beg pardon.”

He thinks they’ve done something wrong.

“Pardon granted,” I say, because you never cross fairies, no matter how well you think you know them. “I appreciate the respect for my domain. But you do need to know that I would have allowed this.”

He looks at me in surprise. So do some of the others.

“This is a non-denominational chapel,” I say. “What that means is the family and friends can design the service they want for the deceased. Just as you have here.”

The little girl climbs into his arm. She puts her thumb in her mouth and rests her head on his shoulder. She’s watching me with those emerald eyes.

The fairies had sent her ahead because they knew I wouldn’t object to her. They had tried to outthink me.

He cradles her close. “You would have allowed this?”

I nod. “It’s lovely. I’m sure Helena would have appreciated it.”

He says, “We wanted to honor her.”

“She meant a lot to you,” I say, falling into my role as funeral director.

“To all of us.” He smoothes the little girl’s hair. “We honor her, because she honored us.”

I’m surprised. I thought my staff and I were the only ones who knew about the flower fairies.

“She saw you then,” I say.

“Not at first.” He rests his head on the little girl’s for just a brief instant. “But every day for the last sixty years, she stopped and admired our flowers.”

Sixty years. Since her family died.

“Then she would murmur how lovely they were. Gradually we revealed ourselves. She visited our flowers. She played with our children. She was a bright, warm spot in the middle of our day.”

I thought of that for a moment. A woman who had lost her husband and children. A woman who was looking for a way to go on. She had found it in flowers each and every day.

Then she learned the secret behind the flowers and instead of being afraid, she embraced it.

She embraced them.

As I have never dared to do.

“Do you mind if I sit?” I ask.

“Is that what you planned to do?” he asks.

I nod.

“Do you do that at all such occasions?”

“No,” I say. “Only the special ones.”

And this one is very, very special.

“Let’s all sit,” he says. He leads me to the front pew, then joins me. The little girl has fallen asleep in his arms. She has his look around the eyes and lips. I wonder if she’s his.

I know so little about him—about any of them—and I am afraid to ask.

One by one, they approach the open casket, and one by one, they drop a flower inside. The flower varies—sometimes it’s a daffodil, sometimes an orchid. But it’s always lovely and it always fits.

When they’re done, they sit in the pews. Vines cover them. Honeysuckle grows along the walls. Wisteria covers the doors.

We bow our heads in silence to this great woman. We mourn her passing and we celebrate her life.

Then, when the viewing hours are over, they all stand—and vanish.

Except for Roderick. He remains beside me.

“We’ll clean this up,” he says.

“Leave it,” I say. “We won’t use the chapel for another two days.”

He smiles and touches my face. “Come see us in the glade,” he says. “We miss you.”

Then he too vanishes.

I stare at the motes of glamour, still floating where he had been. Before, I would have heard a threat in his words.

I would have been frightened.

Fairies can be terrifying.

But it took Helena to remind me that they are also extremely special.

They honored me today by respecting my chapel while honoring her.

If I treat them kindly, perhaps one day, they will decorate my chapel and sit in silent vigil after I am gone.

I hope so. Because from now on, I will remember that while flower fairies are capricious, they have oddly tender hearts.

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Flower Fairies

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Realms of Fantasy, October, 2009Published by WMG PublishingCover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Mega11/Dreamstime

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

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I am finishing this up very late. I saved the articles and books in piles, meaning to finish my recommended reading list as I read. But the events of the spring and early summer prevented me from doing much more than my writing and the work I needed to do to keep my business alive. I managed to get bits of the Recommended Reading List done as I read, but only bits. One of those bits is in this introduction. The others are scattered throughout this particular piece.

I wrote the following paragraph right after I finished the essay I’m referring to. I was shaking as I did so, because I was so very angry—and not in a good way.

Wow. I don’t get angry at the essays I read very often, but I lost my temper at one of the essays in The Best American Essays 2023. Normally, I don’t reveal much about an author or an essay I don’t like, but I’m going to mention this one here: “Revelation at the Food Bank” by Merrill Joan Gerber. I’m outing her because she infuriated me with her ignorance and her narcissism. Get this: during Covid, her cleaning lady told her to stop shopping at the grocery store and go to the food bank instead because they didn’t make you get out of your car. So this Gerber woman did. I figured the revelation would be “gosh, look at how many people are struggling.” Instead, this idiot of a woman, a retired professor with a ton of accolades as a writer, a woman who can afford a cleaning lady, for godssake, continued to go to the food bank because she made a connection with “the food bank lady.” No thought to the fact that Gerber can actually afford to buy her own food. No thought to something like grocery delivery. No thought to how many people needed the food she was taking because they couldn’t afford it and had a family to feed. As you can tell, I’m so furious at this woman that I could just…I don’t know. And I’m angry at the editor who bought the piece in the first place and the editor of this volume, who decided that this essay was one of the year’s best. (It goes on and on and on revealing this woman’s total self-involvement. No thought to others here at all.) Man. I do everything I can to support our various food banks and the services for the struggling folks in this city, and then there are people like the two editors and this idiot woman who don’t understand their freakin’ privilege at all. Wow.

Yes, I wrote the above in the moment, and I’m glad I did, because I’m writing the rest of this now after our difficult spring. The above paragraph reminded me how thoroughly pissed off that essay made me (and still makes me) and how it made me wonder if I should even recommend the volume. After a few months, I thought…ah, heck, I can recommend individual essays from the volume. After all, it’s not the fault of the other writers that they’re lumped in with this awful woman. But…as I sat down with the book…I found that I just couldn’t. I can’t honor this editor, nor can I give Robert Atwan, the overall editor, even tacit approval for the terrible decision to include this essay.

You can call this cancel culture if you want. But this is my list, and my website, and I am not going to give any credit to something I find so deeply, deeply, deeply offensive.

Anyway…I did return to the Alexander Chee Best American Essays volume after abandoning it shortly after the pandemic because I couldn’t handle tough subjects at the time. I’m glad I did return to it. I read a lot more than I expected in March. Looking back on it all, I’m a bit astonished by that. Most of it is nonfiction, essays, and articles. Only one novel here, which makes sense considering all that I was doing. I think everyone will find something to enjoy here.

March, 2024Abramovitch, Seth, “Looks Like He Made It: Manilow At 80,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 4, 2024. Because of my age, I know too many Barry Manilow songs. Because of my age, I’m rather uninterested in the man. (It was exceedingly uncool to be a Manilow fan when I was a teenager.) So, as a result, I trained myself to be resistant to all things Manilow. And it took me a while to read this article. I’m so glad I did. It’s about perseverance in the arts at the highest level. If you’re working in the arts, you need to read this.

Biskind, Peter, “We Give Social Media Something to Fight About (That Isn’t Politics),” The Hollywood Reporter, January 26, 2024. A fun article about the things people love about Hollywood. You might agree with some, and might hate others, but this is fun.

Chae, Jung Hae, “The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’Etat, and the Small Dreamers,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. I love this essay. It combines the difficulties of dealing with a parent as their own person. It also reflects the way that different cultures impact our lives. And it looks, honestly, at our relationships to dreams and money. Read this one.

Chee, Alexander, The Best American Essays 2022, Mariner, 2022. Unlike the Best American Essays 2023, I can highly recommend this volume. Every essay caught me and made me think. The ones I list here are only there because they had something extra for me. This is an extra special volume. Pick it up.

Crosley, Sloane, “After Barbie, Greta Gerwig Has No Plans To Rest,” Vanity Fair, December/January 2024. Greta Gerwig has more courage than I do. She works in Hollywood and she’s willing to buck every single naysayer she meets. There’s so much quotable stuff here. One of my favorites? “At some point, the terror of never making anything becomes much bigger than the terror of making something bad.” Read this, and try to apply Greta-courage to your next work.

Galuppo, Mia, “From A Child’s ‘Insightful’ Eye,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 16, 2024. An interview with the director of The ABCs of Book Banning, a documentary on how banning books negatively impacts children. Read this, then watch the documentary.

Galuppo, Mia, “It Can Be A Very Lonely Profession,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 8, 2024. Producers are extremely important to making movies, to making certain that creative things happen in Hollywood. It’s really hard to organize a lot of money, the people needed to make the film work, and to keep your enthusiasm for the work. This is a very frank interview among a group of producers. Lots of great quotes, especially from Christine Vachon, who has been in the producing trenches for decades. I love this one from her, which came for me at the right time.

A crisis is only when someone gets hurt. Everything else is just a pain in the ass, a challenge, a problem. But “crisis”—there’s only one reason to ever use that word.

Gimpelevich, Calvin, “Among Men,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. The great hook on this essay caught me at the very start. Calvin was both transitioning and working construction. He ran into a lot of prejudice and had to deal with some problems that every slight male encounters. Only he hadn’t been in the world of men at that point as a man and saw parts of the culture he had never seen before. I’m not going to summarize any more because you need to read this to get the full insight and impact.

Keegan, Rebecca, “‘It Was One Big Train Wreck In My Head,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 18, 2024. This interview convinced me to watch the documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, which I highly recommend. The interview is with Lionel Richie who pulled off an amazing feat. He had very big and very crazy night. He was hosting The American Music Awards. He was winning awards that night…and he was coordinating the single-night only recording of superstars who got together to sing “We Are The World.” He and Quincy Jones pulled off an incredible balancing act. From writing the music, to getting super famous people (and great musicians) to agree to managing personalities for nearly 24 hours, he did what in hindsight looks impossible. Read this…and watch the documentary, particularly if you’re an artist yourself. It’s astounding.

McClintock, Pamela, “Will Packer Mints Money With Black Movies,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 4, 2024. Like Greta Gerwig (see below), Will Packer has spent decades in Hollywood proving the suits wrong. He has made films that no one believed in because they featured Black performers or were about Black topics. I love reading articles about people like this, because they keep going despite the headwinds. And that is what Packer seems to do best. Take a look.

Mounzer, Lina, “The Gamble,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. A fantastic essay on living with a gambler and about magical thinking. I think there’s a bit of optimistic magical thinking in all writers, so this resonated for me. Unexpectedly, though, in the middle of the essay is a wonderful (very long) paragraph about the way that people give condolences in the various dialects of Arabic (which is fascinating in and of itself). The paragraph ends like this:

Death is the greatest of obstacles, the strictest and most unchangeable of fates. It is the single certainty, written from the start. In its face, this truth must be acknowledged by all. When it comes to death, a surrender to fatalism is a great comfort. Otherwise the if onlys might themselves to your feet, tripping you back into the past every time you try to move forward.

Breathtaking. And quite wise. And well done. There are more gems in the essay. Go see for yourself.

Simpson, Erika J., “If You Ever Find Yourself,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. Boy, I saw a lot of myself in this essay. The rest of the title is “…piss poor and struggling to survive.” I was, after my divorce. Maybe a bit before as well. I had no money and no one to ask for it. (My folks, upon hearing I was getting a divorce, said, “What did you do?” and did not offer to help in any way.) I barely made my bills. I wrote a lot of nonfiction and some places did not pay me. Others did, but never when I needed it. Fortunately, I had that skill, though, so I could augment my income. Still, I did most of the things that Simpson outlines in this essay. I sure wish I had had it back then.

So, Anthony Veasna, “Baby Yeah,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. This is a beautiful essay, very poignant. It’s about hope and despair and suicide. So lost a close friend to suicide, and the essay is, in part, a tribute to the friend. While that’s poignant, it’s made even more so by the fact that So himself died the year after this essay was written. Worth reading, but sad that he will not be around to contribute more.

Spitznagel, Eric, “Take My Joke, Please!” The Hollywood Reporter, January 10, 2024. A really good article on jokes, theft, and copyright. Even though most of us who write aren’t writing for ourselves to perform onstage, we are going out into the world and doing things. So this is worth looking at.

St. James, Simone, Murder Road, Berkeley, 2024. Creepy and marvelous book about a very scary stretch of road and a couple who encounters dark things along it. St. James has written a number of Gothic-adjacent books that I like. This one isn’t Gothic. It’s more contemporary dark fantasy. (I don’t want to say horror, because it’s not quite there either.) I devoured this in two nights, which for me is like reading in a single sitting. It’s not my favorite of hers, but it’ll tide me over until the next book of hers arrives.

Stevens, Angelique, “Ghost Bread,” The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, Mariner, 2022. I’m sensing a theme in some of the essays I liked. They’re about the difficult relationships between parents and children. This one is about Stevens biological father and her own somewhat difficult life. Memorable and difficult.

Sun, Rebecca, “Blame The Gatekeepers, Not The Filmmakers,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 18, 2024. Very important essay about the reasons why movies about white people’s responses to horrible events in the native community, like “Killers of Flower Moon,” are the chosen narrative voice. Sun’s thesis is that the white gatekeepers can’t see past their own noses. Having seen that reaction to one of my projects which has been under option for nearly ten years now, and has had the “why don’t you focus on the white people” question or worse, the question that comes at me (why did you chose to write about these things? as if as a white person I shouldn’t have violated some code), I think her thesis has merit. If nothing else, it will start discussions.

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Andersonville. The name strikes horror in the memory even now. But before Lieutenant Nathaniel Garrison lost two years of his life to that place, he fell in love with a beautiful Confederate—and married her at the exact wrong moment.

Even fifty years later, he hears her voice.

Then, on the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, he sees something he shouldn’t, something that brings back everything: the war, the loss. The woman herself.

“The Dead Line” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

The Dead LineKristine Kathryn RuschJUNE 17, 1911NATHANIEL GARRISON GRIPPED the silver handle on his walking stick and cursed the unsteadiness of his legs. After three days, he should have had his sea legs. The Olympic was the largest ship ever built and, as a result, was steadier in the water than most. He had spent a fair number of years on ships—both before and after the war—and he had never had so much trouble walking on a deck.

Of course, in those days, he hadn’t been recovering from a bout of pleurisy that had nearly taken his life. He hadn’t been this thin since those horrible years in Andersonville, years he was still amazed he had survived.

The afternoon’s weather was balmy and he couldn’t stay confined to his stateroom. He was supposed to remain indoors—all that outdoor air was supposed to be bad for him, not that he cared. He had not made it seventy-four years by believing everything other people told him. His body craved light and air and exercise. By gum, he’d have both.

The Boat Deck was filled with people. Many were sitting in lounge chairs, blankets at their feet, staring across the railing at the surprisingly calm Atlantic. Others were gathered at tables, having animated conversations. Rich people, of which he was one. Captains of industry, their wives, children, and mistresses. People he did not socialize with unless necessity forced him into it.

He supposed he would find a great deal of entertainment among the luminaries on this ship. It was the Olympic’s maiden voyage and, as a result, he found himself in a floating party, complete with reporters hired by the White Star Line to capture the grandeur, and allowed access to all the first-class berths, so long as they did not bother the passengers.

Sometimes he wondered how difficult that was. In addition to him—a man who never gave interviews because he despised the influence of the scandal sheets—there were several other well-known men, including J. P. Morgan who was here, of course, to monitor his investment. Several members of the British peerage were on board as well, many on vacation and some, like Lord Reginald Seton, to do business in New York.

If Garrison had been a reporter, he would have interviewed them all. What would the crew have done, after all? Thrown him off for violating his agreement? He suspected a number of journalists were taking notes, and the very thought of it kept him away from the public areas most of the time.

He rested his arms on the deck’s wooden railing and stared at the gray Atlantic which stretched as far as the eye could see. The sky above it was bluer than the ocean but they still blurred at the horizon. Out in the middle of nowhere, going somewhere fast.

He looked down. Even though he’d been on the Olympic for three days, he still couldn’t believe the size of her. Here, on the Boat Deck—A Deck as the brochures called it—he was as high as he could get. Seemingly miles above the frothing water, as if he were watching from the balcony of one of London’s tall buildings overlooking the Thames instead of from the deck of a ship. A floating palace, the ads had called it, and that was probably true.

A floating palace filled with the usual sycophantic and self-absorbed courtiers, all of whom thought they were more important than they were.

Behind him, a woman laughed. The laugh was fluted, trilling up and down the vocal register like a diva’s playful attempt at a scale. The hair rose on the back of his neck.

He hadn’t heard that laugh in nearly fifty years.

Surely he was mistaken. He was short of breath and just getting over being ill. He had spent too much time alone, and whenever he did that, he thought of the war.

He thought too much of the war.

Then he heard the laugh again, closed his eyes, and saw her, just as he had that first night.

She had taken his breath away then.

Much as she was doing now.

JUNE 17, 1861LIEUTENANT NATHANIEL GARRISON placed his cap under his arm and nodded crisply to the Negro butler who opened the massive oak door. The man before him had to be at least eighty; his dark skin lined with wrinkles, his curly hair a pure white. The man took his hat and his card and ushered him inside.

Garrison had an odd feeling that he had suddenly stepped across the Mason-Dixon line. But he knew that wasn’t so. It wasn’t legal to own slaves up here. The butler had to be a free man.

But it still made Garrison uncomfortable. Despite Lincoln’s denials that this was a war fought over slavery, slavery was the issue that had caused the South to secede. Even the appearance of it here, in the nation’s capitol, made him more uncomfortable than he dared say.

The air was cool inside, despite the awful heat. The entry was large and mostly made of oak. A wide staircase led to the upper stories. On the banister, an iron gas lamp, carved in the shape of Cupid, rose.

Garrison had never been inside the Cunliffe house before, and had no real idea how to act. It was his first society party and he was here only because he was on General Scott’s staff, not because he was important in and of his own right.

His summer dress uniform was still too hot for the heat and humidity of official Washington. A trickle of sweat ran down his back despite the coolness of the entry.

The butler had hung his cap somewhere and was opening the pocket doors that led into the main part of the house. “This way, sir,” he said, bowing before Garrison.

Now Garrison could hear voices and the soft music of a string quartet, playing Mozart. The sound wafted in from the verandah, but there were people in the drawing room as well, holding glasses filled with champagne and plates covered with hors d’oeuvres.

He caught snatches of conversation as he moved into the room.

“…when Tennessee seceded…”

“…President Lincoln isn’t acting as if we’re in a war…”

“…General Scott isn’t just old. He’s senile. We’re—”

That last conversation stopped as the speaker, a young man who wore a cream summer suit, saw Garrison. Garrison took a flute of champagne from a tray offered him by a Negro waiter, and walked toward the verandah.

President Lincoln wasn’t the only one who wasn’t acting as if there were a war. Half of Washington’s military was here, eating finger foods and discussing secession as if it were a parlor game.

Garrison didn’t want to be here himself. He had a lot of work ahead of him drilling the 90-day militia units and trying to form the new three-year volunteer units into a coherent army. None of them had had any real training. Many were simply young men who wanted to fight. And even though Washington was now ringed by military camps, organized units and fancy uniforms did not make an effective fighting force.

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who was general in chief, had planned to spend the first year of the war preparing. Even if the plan hadn’t leaked, Garrison thought it wouldn’t have worked. The cries that started with the firing on Fort Sumter had risen in May when Richmond had been chosen as the capital of the Confederacy, and were now hitting a fever pitch.

Richmond wasn’t that far from Washington, after all, and most people thought the war would be over quickly if only the United States quashed the Rebels in their capital.

Garrison was worried that the Rebels might try to do the same to Washington—a fear he shared with General Scott.

Either way, the war would escalate from small skirmishes to a large battle soon enough. The only question was when.

The champagne flute was made of crystal and he had to hold it delicately as he made his way to the verandah. Here, even more people stood. The air smelled of the small smoke fires burning in bowls at the rim of the property to keep the mosquitoes away. Several more servants, holding large fans, waved them up and down so that the thick air moved.

It wasn’t yet twilight, though that hour wasn’t far away. The longest day of the year was fast approaching and sometimes it seemed to Garrison that the days would never be long enough.

Across the yard, he finally saw his hostess, Mrs. Evangeline Cunliffe. Mrs. Cunliffe was a widow whose husband had died of a fever several summers ago. She was known for holding the most important society functions in all of official Washington.

When General Scott heard Garrison complain about the invitation, Scott pushed him to go. Old Fuss and Feathers was never one to turn down an important social function. His political nature was too honed—perhaps from the days when he was the Whig candidate for President, days he rarely talked about since he had lost so badly to Franklin Pierce.

Garrison was not a social man. He would thank his hostess, mingle for a few moments after that, and then disappear into the house. Without making his apologies, he would be on the road back to camp within the hour.

Behind him, a woman laughed. The laugh was fluted, trilling up and down the vocal register like a dance hall girl’s playful attempt at a scale. In the days before his father forced him to go to West Point, Garrison had fancied himself a musician. His father had sent him away precisely to destroy that ambition and had succeeded, for the most part.

Except when something caught his ear, as this laugh did now. He turned, looking for the source of it. Women in wide hooped skirts stood on the lawn, their shoulders bared, revealing cleavage, and their hair in ringlets that seemed too girlish for most of them.

The laugh came again, and he turned again, finally catching the last note of it. The woman who made the sound was wearing pink, but on her the color seemed natural. She had black hair and eyes equally as dark, against skin the color of alabaster. The pink dress had no ornamentation—no lace, no frothy ruffles designed to enhance the bosom. Even though the woman was petite, her features small and foxlike, she filled out the dress nicely, naturally, as if the style had been created just for her.

She wore diamonds around her neck—or what appeared to be diamonds—small ones that caught the light. They added radiance to her face, but he was already captivated. He had never seen such delicate beauty before, delicate beauty that added to, and did not try to hide, strength.

The cloying scent of perfume overwhelmed him, and he suppressed the urge to sneeze. A hand slid through his bent arm and gripped it tightly.

“Lieutenant Garrison.”

He looked down at Mrs. Cunliffe. Her long black hair had been pulled to the back of her head and held in a snood. She still wore black, even though her husband had been dead for years, but the dress whispered as she moved. Silk, and from the look of it, expensive silk at that.

“Mrs. Cunliffe. I was just coming to pay my regards.” His voice sounded foreign to him, stiff, formal, and unnatural, in a way it usually never was.

Her smile brightened her face. She lacked the beauty of the woman he had been watching, but she made up for it in personality. Even he could understand why so many men in Washington discussed her with such open admiration—and he was at least fifteen years younger than she.

“Come now, Lieutenant.” Her voice had a soft Virginia accent that somehow made her seem even more feminine. “We both know you were not looking at me.”

To his surprise, he felt a flush rising in his neck. He was not a man who blushed—but then, he was not a man who usually got caught unawares.

“If I had been looking at you, Ma’am,” he said, “I would have been more welcoming as you approached.”

She laughed, deep-throated and rich, a woman who no longer had need of feminine games. “You are as charming as they say, Lieutenant.”

“Who says?” he asked.

She shrugged and gestured with her free hand. “All of Washington. You’re one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, you know. Rumor has it that you’re going to whip old Fuss and Feathers’ troops into shape long before he realizes there’s a war going on.”

To hear Scott’s nickname come from a civilian startled him almost more than her disrespect had. “General Scott is aware of the war,” Garrison said quietly. “He simply believes we must prepare for it.”

“Admirable,” she said, “if we were going to fight a prolonged war.”

He wasn’t going to get into a political discussion with his hostess. He’d been raised in the country, but even in the hinterlands, he’d learned enough about decorum to know that politics and parties did not mix.

She took his champagne flute and set it on the flat top of the wooden railing. Then she led him off the verandah and down the stairs to the lawn. “What, Lieutenant? No opinion? Or would you rather seem loyal to your commander by keeping your silence?”

He smiled. She was good. “I’m merely a lieutenant, ma’am,” he said. “My opinions do not matter.”

“I suspect that as a lieutenant who is out in the field every day—”

“If you call the perimeter of the city a field, ma’am.”

“—your opinions are probably more accurate than those of General Scott. I hear he’s not as sharp as he used to be. Is that true?”

He was sharp enough to order me to this damn thing, Garrison thought, but did not say. “General Scott has a long history of military leadership in our country. That he is old and that the press has ridiculed his preparations does not mean that he has diminished capacity.”

Even though Garrison had seen evidence of it. The shaking hands, the sometimes befuddled look in Scott’s blue eyes. Occasionally the man forgot he had given an order, or forgot which day of the week it was. Other times he was so quick that Garrison felt he could never outthink the old man. It varied from day to day, and in degree and measure.

“You’re one of the few to deny it,” Mrs. Cunliffe said, her tone musing. “Of course, your carefully chosen words were not an exact denial, were they? More of a way of avoiding the question.”

That flush still warmed his neck. The woman was smarter than he expected, and not nearly as retiring as most women of his acquaintance. Of course, most women of his acquaintance were matrons who were concerned with their broods or girls who had just reached their majority and were interested in becoming an officer’s wife.

“Such a shy man,” Mrs. Cunliffe said. “Who would have thought such a big strong strapping fellow like you would be shy?”

He wasn’t shy, just focused. But he would let her take his actions any way she wanted. It was easier that way.

She led him across the yard directly toward the beauty he had been admiring moments ago.

“Shoo,” Mrs. Cunliffe said as they got close, waving her arm at the men who were surrounding the younger woman. “I have an introduction to make.”

To Garrison’s surprise, the men left, several with backwards glances at the beauty as if they had expected her to defend them. She said nothing, merely watched Mrs. Cunliffe with a polite and curious smile on her fox-like face.

“Serena,” Mrs. Cunliffe said, “I would like you to meet one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors. That we even have him here is a rare treat. Lieutenant Nathaniel Garrison, Serena Freneau.”

Miss Freneau offered her hand, small, delicate, and white, and he took it by the fingers, then bent over it, not quite kissing it. Her fingers were warm and smooth in his own.

“A pleasure, miss,” he said.

This time, her smile was all for him. “The pleasure’s mine.”

“I’ll leave you both,” Mrs. Cunliffe said. “And remember, Lieutenant. This is a party. No need to be so very serious.”

He looked after her, watching her black skirts sway as she walked away from him. A party, and he was too serious. Of course he was serious. There was a war going on, a war no one seemed to understand except him.

“Perhaps the city’s most eligible bachelor is interested in the city’s most famous widow.” Serena Freneau’s voice was soft and teasing, with a bit of a bite to it.

He looked back at her, unable to believe his lack of manners. He hadn’t let go of her fingers yet, and didn’t dare now. It would make him look even ruder than if he continued to hold them.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just that was our first conversation. I had no idea she even knew who I was.”

Miss Freneau’s eyes were a shade of brown that matched her hair. They twinkled at him. “You’re at her party, aren’t you? Of course she knows who you are.”

That flush—why was he cursed with it on this night?—rose again. A trickle of sweat followed the drying path along his back, tickling as it traced his spine. “I meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Slowly she looked down at his hand, still holding hers. “Aunt Evangeline always surprises people with her knowledge. Perhaps it is because men think knowledge is unusual in females.”

He almost felt trapped by those fingers in his, the way that she wasn’t protesting what was becoming almost a faux paus. “I don’t find knowledge unusual in females,” he said. “I’m just surprised that as important a personage as Mrs. Cunliffe would know who I am.”

“A member of General Scott’s staff? The only one, it’s said, who knows that a short war is what the country needs? Of course she knows who you are.”

And apparently Miss Freneau did as well. “I didn’t realize that Mrs. Cunliffe was your aunt.”

Miss Freneau smiled at him. This one was soft and rather indulgent. How many different versions of a smile did this woman have?

“You don’t have time to keep track of social conventions.” Her fingers squeezed his in acknowledgement of their touch, and then she broke the contact. “It’s simply nice to know our fair city is being kept safe by men such as you.”

“Our fair city is under no immediate danger.”

“That’s not what they say.” Miss Freneau leaned toward him. “I’ve heard that the Rebels want nothing more than to destroy the Capitol. What sort of disgrace is that?”

“It’s war, miss,” he said, and wished he hadn’t. When had he gotten so prim around women?

“Are you saying we should take their capital as well?”

“As your aunt just reminded me,” he said gently, “this is a party. There’s no need to be so serious.”

Miss Freneau’s eyes widened and then she laughed—that same musical sound he had heard before. It was entrancing, almost seductive, and he felt a small thrill of pride that he had caused it.

“Of course,” she said, taking his arm just as her aunt had. “I’m the one being rude. I’m asking you to discuss work and this gathering is supposed to make you forget about work, relax, and enjoy yourself.”

He placed a hand over hers, noting the looks he got from the men who had been gathered around her before. He remembered how she hadn’t touched any of them, but she had touched him. Again, that small pride ran through him.

“Would you like some punch, Miss Freneau?”

“I thought you would never ask,” she said, leading him to the outdoor table covered with punch and various cakes.

Her skirts brushed his legs. She wore a light perfume, so unique that it took him a moment to realize it was lilac water mixed with her own scent.

When they reached the table, he slipped out of her grasp and took the cut-glass punch cup an elderly female servant offered him, then handed it to Miss Freneau. He took another glass for himself. He was going to ask if she wanted cakes, when she leaned forward.

“There will be dancing later, Lieutenant,” she said. “My aunt has given permission for at least two waltzes. We’re being informal—no dance cards—but I would hope you save one waltz for me.”

This time he smiled. The waltz was a brazen dance not often allowed at social functions, especially social functions of this caliber. “Have you ever waltzed before, Miss Freneau?”

“Only with my dance instructor,” she said, “and only because I forced him to teach me.”

Garrison could see that. The woman had a strength about her that could not be denied. “To dance it might compromise your reputation.”

Her eyes twinkled and this time, her smile was wide. “Reputation? Lieutenant, we’re at war. In six months time, who will care about reputations?”

“If we do this right,” he said, “you won’t even notice the war.”

She tossed her ringlets back and sighed. “And here I was hoping for a measure of freedom.”

“That seems to be,” he said, “what everyone is hoping for these days.”

JUNE 17, 1911GARRISON TURNED, the remembered scent of lilac water still in his nose. That waltz had been the highlight of his life until that point, Serena Freneau’s small body moving with his in a sweeping motion, her skirts flaring behind her, his hand pressed against the small of her back, her bright eyes holding his as if there were no one else in the room—indeed, no one else in the world.

It had been the beginning of something, although not quite the something he had thought.

The laugh again, musical, warm. He scanned the deck chairs, saw no one laughing. Most of the passengers there were reading or talking softly, enjoying the maiden voyage of a ship he couldn’t even have imagined fifty years before.

The world had changed, so much that at times he barely recognized it.

He scanned until he saw a grouping around one of the iron tables placed on the deck by the crew before dawn. An umbrella shaded the table itself. The women who sat there were not the young creatures he had thought, but elderly, most of them wearing tasteful black gowns. Not the black silk that Mrs. Cunliffe had worn fifty years before, with reams of material over hoops, but long skirts that covered sensible shoes, black lace around the neck, and in the case of one woman, a long strand of pearls that added a bit of brightness.

He was about to turn away when he heard the laugh a third time. It came from the woman wearing the pearls. She had silver hair rolled into a bun at the back of her head, rather like that of an aging Gibson Girl. Softly curling tendrils fell along the sides of her narrow face.

The chin wasn’t as sharp as it had been and the skin look papery, like some women’s skin got when they aged, but the brown eyes were still sharp, maybe more sharp now that they no longer matched her hair.

He leaned against the rail, feeling sea spray mist him like tears. His breath was in his throat again, his heart racing like a boy’s.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. She had died, drowned as she tried to escape a U.S. naval blockade runner. The rough seas had pulled her under when the lifeboat she’d stolen capsized.

He’d seen the obituary, visited her grave. Clenched his fist on top of the stone and pounded until his skin rubbed away, and his blood stained the rounded edge.

If that were her, if she really lived, it meant she had told yet another lie, and another lie might be more than he could bear.

MAY 20, 1864HEAT, ALREADY, even though it was barely noon. Flies, on his face, his arms. Too tired to brush them off. Thinner than he’d ever been. The dysentery was bad. Not as bad as some, dying in the middle of the camp, no one noticing until they’d become so covered with flies that they looked like a strange hive. And the stench…

A man never got used to the stench.

Garrison sat, arms around his legs. Uniform was all rags, which was good in this heat. It’d been cold when he was captured, over a year ago now. Over a year and he hadn’t changed clothes since. Hadn’t really bathed except early on, when he didn’t know that he shouldn’t use his drinking water for washing.

He sat near the edge of the log stockade. Other men around him, though he barely noticed. He was too weak to notice much. His brain simply hummed as he tried not to think, tried not to think about any of it, from the first awful days.

Ahead of him, the line drawn in the cracked red Georgia clay, harsh now, deeper than it had been last summer—the days of the miserable heat. He’d tried to bury the dead then, had some strength, but when he’d collapsed, no one had picked him up. No one had helped. He just kept thinking of the bodies and the disease. Less than 16 acres this camp was, and, some said, more than twenty thousand men here—living men. Who knew how many dead?

And who cared anymore?

Still, he stared at the line. The dead line, they called it. One foot across it and a guard would shoot him, not care if they only wounded, let him rot in the wretched Georgia sun. Sometimes men cried from out there, whimpered, moaned in pain, and no one dared go help them. No one dared try. Not if he still valued his life.

Garrison sometimes wondered why he did. It would all end so easily. One foot across, maybe two. The perimeter wasn’t as well guarded here. There weren’t enough guards for all these men. That’s why, he guessed, the lack of food, the horrible conditions. Keep the men weak and they couldn’t run. They wouldn’t even try.

But he stared at the line. The dead line. Like he did every day. So easy to end it all. And so hard.

One shot, or maybe, escape. But to what?

The thoughts were too much and he willed his mind back to hum. It wasn’t going there, rarely did when he contemplated the dead line. For there was nothing left for him. Nothing at all.

No way he could face her. Anyone. No way he could face anyone from his past at all.

A hand on his back, then a crust of bread thrust at him. He looked over, saw Major Tom Winthrop of the New York Zouaves, his gaudy uniform now tatters, the colors faded and no longer joyful.

Winthrop thrust the bread at him again, and this time Garrison took it. The crust was so dry it crumbled in his hands. He knew how it would feel in his mouth, impossible to swallow without water—and he wouldn’t get his ration until that night, if he was lucky enough to survive that long.

Lucky enough. The thought almost made him chuckle.

Still he took a bite, forced himself to chew, swallow, nearly choking on the scratchy stale crust going down. He uttered a weak cough, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then checked it for blood.

None yet. But it was only a matter of time. Only a matter of time.

“New recruits today,” Winthrop said, using the term that had once been a joke and wasn’t any longer. More prisoners in the already overcrowded space. Raw and green and unable to know what horrors faced them, thinking at that point that they were better off than their fellows, at least they were alive. “There’s one you should see.”

It took Winthrop a while to make the whole sentence, but it took Garrison a while to follow it as well. They were well matched, like old men who had said everything they needed to long ago.

“Why?” Garrison asked.

“News. About that woman.”

Winthrop knew everything. Down to the ugliest detail, like a father confessor. There had been nothing else to do in here, but talk. Even then, Garrison hadn’t said much. Only to Winthrop whose unit had left him for dead, thinking he had betrayed them, when—in truth—he hadn’t. He knew who did, he had said, not that it mattered now. That man was free or dead or in some other camp. Winthrop was concerned with survival here.

“Don’t need news,” Garrison said.

“This you do.” Then Winthrop turned, slowly, like a man underwater, and waved his fingers at someone, beckoning him forward.

Garrison heard the footsteps, the intake of breath, saw a droplet of sweat hit the dry red clay. The man still had enough water in him to waste it in sweat. Some day, he would think that a luxury.

“My God in Heaven, are you all dying?”

Garrison looked up, saw a young man’s face, red whiskers sprouting in patches with the growth of a week, hair messy and covered with grime. New recruit, captured nearby. Not a long journey. Not a lot of suffering. Yet.

“Tell Lieutenant Garrison what you told me,” Winthrop said.

The boy waited for Winthrop to finish, impatiently, Garrison thought, obviously not used to the pace of life here. The conservation of life, the way energy had to be stored, held, a commodity as precious as water, twice as precious as bread.

“Lieutenant Garrison?” the boy asked. “Not Nathaniel Garrison?”

“Yes,” Winthrop said.

Garrison stared at the boy, the green eyes sliding back and forth, the beginnings of a panic that Garrison didn’t yet understand.

“I’m sorry, sir.” The boy bit his lower lip. “She said you were dead.”

“Who?” Garrison’s voice was little more than a whisper. The voice a man not yet dead. But close. Too damn close.

“Your wife.”

Garrison’s hand snaked out before he could stop it, all bone and sinew, and it caught the boy’s wrist, still fat with flesh. The boy looked down, startled, tried to wrench away and couldn’t.

“How do you know my wife?” Garrison asked.

“A party, last summer. She held a charity function for the widows and orphans campaign.” The boy’s voice was trembling. “Please, sir, you’re hurting me.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Sir, I—”

“Did you?”

The boy swallowed, his Adam’s Apple bobbing. Garrison envied him the saliva that made such a movement so simple, so involuntary.

“She said you were dead, sir.”

Garrison flung the boy away from him. How many lives this time, then? How many?

“And I suppose you told her everything you knew, figuring it wouldn’t hurt.”

The boy was rubbing his wrist. He studied Garrison for a moment, then an awful understanding filled his face, an understanding quickly denied. “Sir, I thought she was a loyal officer’s widow.”

“She was a loyal officer’s wife.” The words caught in Garrison’s throat like the crust had, and he coughed again, wiping, checking for blood, seeing none. Not yet. “But she was not loyal. Not loyal at all.”

APRIL 25, 1863IN HIS OWN BEDROOM, the window open, the spring air carrying the faint scents of cherry blossoms on the breeze, Garrison could almost see the future. His wife beside him, naked, her warm body pressed against his, both of them still sticky from love-making, the softness of the cotton ticking in the well-stuffed mattress lulling him toward sleep, it wasn’t hard to imagine years from now, the war over, how he would lie here, holding her, trying to make no noise so that the children wouldn’t hear.

Perhaps it was a fantasy. There were no children yet, neither of them wanting to bring a child into this horror, this world that was so far from the one he had known. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, only four months old, guaranteed that if the North won—when the North won—the world would be a different place from the one Garrison grew up in.

Serena had just been complaining about how difficult it was to keep help any more. She had grown up in Evangeline Cunliffe’s house where the servants had once been slaves who had stayed with the family after receiving their freedom—or so the Cunliffes had told Garrison. He doubted even that was true when, after the war began in earnest, the servants vanished one by one, like thieves in the night, stealing their freedom the way that their counterparts had for decades down South.

Serena sighed next to him and he wondered if she were drifting into sleep. They had promised to stay awake together—he only had twenty-four hours until he had to return to hell—but they had not always managed to keep that promise before.

“Where will you be?” she asked him, her voice sleepy. He felt her breath on his chest, and the softness of her hair beneath his hand.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said, hating to lie to her. The lie spoiled the beauty of the night. The war came back now in all its bloody terror, the stench of mud, the cold, the smell of gunpowder and smoke filling the air.

She raised up on one elbow and looked down at him. Her beauty was greater without the clothes, the way her neck rose out of her shoulders and collarbone, the way her torso tapered into a waist so small he could wrap his hand around it.

“I swear I don’t know why General Hooker trusts you as his attaché,” she said, that faint teasing look on her face, the one that had entranced him two years before. “Best hope you never have to lie for him, Nathaniel Garrison.”

“You know I’m not supposed to tell you,” he said, drawing her down.

But she put her other arm on his chest, keeping her face above his. His eyes had adjusted to the dark. He could almost see her expression, could imagine it even though it wasn’t completely clear.

“Who am I gonna tell?” she asked. “Evangeline? She disappeared a month ago. The other wives? They’re fearing a summer siege on Washington and have gone farther north. There’s no one, Nate, no one I’d trust to tell, not and risk your life.”

He pulled her down, kissed her, wished he could stay even one more night. “You don’t need to know.”

“Sure I do. If you die, how’ll I know? Silence for months and then a casualty list? At least—”

“You can watch the battle, see the number of dead, and worry that I’m in it?”

She pushed herself up again. “I do that anyway, only now I do that with all of them. Maybe if there was only one—”

“We’re trying for Richmond again,” he said. She could always get him to tell her, and she said it eased her mind. And knowing that she knew eased his. “And this time, I think we’ll take it.”

“You have a plan.”

“I don’t,” he said. “General Hooker does.”

“Is he as good as they say?”

“Better.” Garrison liked working with Hooker. So different from the other generals who had led the Army of the Potomac. The men were fed properly and had decent camps. Hooker had worked with the Calvary until Garrison believed they could take on Jeb Stuart, and he knew how to use the abundance of men. “He’s given us our confidence back.”

“Good.” She lay her head on him, her hair falling across his face. “Where will you be?”

“Chancellorsville, most likely,” he said, “although there’s a chance I might be in Fredericksburg.”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s part of the same maneuver,” he said. “It just depends on where Hooker puts me. He usually likes me to be in the thick of the action, so that means Chancellorsville.”

“You’re splitting the Army?”

“And hoping Lee heads the wrong way.”

She let out a small sigh, and said nothing for the longest time. He stroked her hair, memorizing it, knowing he would keep this memory with him through the worst of the battle—the waiting.

“Why can’t you stay here? You delivered your dispatch to the President. They don’t need you.”

But they did. There were men who relied on him. They listened to him, much to his surprise.

“If I did that, love,” he said, “I’d be hunted for a deserter.”

“We could live in Michigan, or maybe Canada. Far from all this. Maybe go West. No one would care.”

“Except me.”

She was silent for a moment, then she said, “It’s like a game to you all, isn’t it? Diverting Lee, trying to cross into Richmond, getting the capital, like the king in a game of chess.”

He hadn’t expected the outburst, although he should have. She had done it before. “Chess doesn’t cost lives,” he said.

He hadn’t meant to. He tried to keep most of the reality of the war from her.

He put his arm around her and pulled her back close. “Let’s not fight. I have to leave in the morning.”

She held the rigid posture for another moment, then collapsed against him. And he held her like he always did, as if it were going to be the last time.

MAY 6, 1863HE WASN’T EVEN SURE where he was. Somewhere in Virginia, but nowhere he recognized. His head ached. He had a lump on his forehead the size of a walnut, according to the man he was chained to. They were tied together like plowhorses, expected to eat and move and shit together like animals. He didn’t exactly know how he’d been captured, only that it had happened.

His last memories were of his rifle, hot in his hands, the bayonet bloody from the man he’d just stabbed, the morning sun rising, sending light and heat on the battlefield somewhere outside Chancellorsville.

Lee hadn’t retreated like Hooker thought he would. Faced with an army of superior size, Lee had charged forward, with strength and courage and fury. Hooker had expected Lee to turn tail and for some reason, Garrison had thought that would happen too, even though now, three days after the worst of it, three days after he’d been captured, he had no idea why. Lee was no coward, although some were saying Hooker was. Inept, cowardly, stupid. His plan had backfired. Somehow Lee had seen through the ruse at Fredericksburg, dodged the trap laid over the Rappahanock, and had come to Chancellorsville ready to fight.

And fight he had.

Garrison had lost his horse in the middle of it, the beast screaming and falling beneath him, throwing him clear. He hadn’t had time to see if the horse was dead—the momentum of the battle had carried him forward and he’d stabbed and shot and fought hand to hand with more men than he could remember, most of them younger than he was, most of them bloody and thin and filled with a fighting frenzy that seemed almost crazy.

He’d been fighting with his own frenzy, thinking how angry Serena would be if he died, how she would check the casualty lists and see his name, and that had driven him forward, over bodies, dead men, dead horses, and blood slicker than water on the ground. Forward until he heard—felt—a crack so loud that it shook the entire world, and then he had wakened, a day later, chained to other men, men who said they were sure he was going to die or never wake up because of the lump on his head.

They fed him, shared water with him, happy that he was awake and they wouldn’t have to drag his dead weight to whereever it was their guards were taking them.

Right now they sat in the woods, near the thin underbrush and the copse of trees, and waited, as they had done before. Their guards were scouting the path ahead, leaving a handful behind to watch the prisoners.

Garrison thought this might be an opportunity, but he wasn’t sure what kind of opportunity it was, a wise one, a foolish one. He was chained by the legs and arms to men he didn’t know, and he saw no way of escaping without dragging them all with him. That wouldn’t work for even the first mile, and even in his most hopeful state, he knew it.

One of the guards, a man nearer to forty than thirty, had been watching Garrison for the last day, a smirk on his face every time he caught Garrison’s eye. He was one of the ones left behind, and when he saw Garrison staring at him, he smiled.

“I can get you special favors if you like,” the guard said, strolling toward him as if they were at a lawn party instead of in the woods.

Garrison frowned, felt the tug against the bump on his forehead. “Me?”

“You’re Nathaniel Garrison, ain’t you?” The guard smiled, revealing a gold tooth. He had bars on his gray uniform, gold bars, and tassels too. He was someone, then.

“What’s it to you?”

“Ain’t had a chance to thank you.”

The men stirred around him. The ones chained to him moved away as if he were tainted. “For what?”

“Our greatest victory. Heard you made it possible, letting General Lee know he was facing a trap.”

“Wha—?” the man next to him started, but Garrison raised his right hand, stopping him.

“I haven’t spoken to Lee.”

“I know that.” The guard’s smile grew. “You didn’t speak to anyone except your wife. She says you was one of the toughest. Most men, they take a bit of tail now and then, but you was all proper, almost like a Southern gentleman, insisting on courtship and love and marriage. And she was willing, seeing what a prize a man like you was. Right hand man in the Army of Potomac not to one but to all of its generals. They liked you, didn’t they, Lieutenant?”

He rose, felt the chains hold him, but he stumbled forward anyway, and fell.

“Didn’t know that about your wife, now did you? Little Serena Freneau, one of the P. G. T. Beauregard’s special ladies, doing the work of Rose Greenhow, but doing it better. So much better, landing a prize like you. Do you think she done it so that she could be with Beau after the war? Or do you think it was the glory all along, like she said? The glory and the cause of it—”

Garrison lurched forward, dragging the others with him, reaching for the guard’s boots, but the guard stepped out of the way and laughed.

“Don’t like the way the lady took you by your testicles and—”

“That’s my wife you’re lying about.”

“Lying?” The guard crouched, just outside of arm’s reach. “Lying? Her aunt run to Richmond before they could put her in the Old Capital Prison, didn’t you hear? Mrs. Cunliffe’s in London now, making sure the English know we need them at our side.”

“Don’t listen,” one of the other prisoners said. “He’s just trying to make you do something stupid so that he can shoot you.”

But the guard was watching Garrison like he was enjoying the reaction. He didn’t look like a man bent on shooting anyone.

“You couldn’t know this,” Garrison said.

“I’m on Beau’s staff,” the man said. “I got the report direct from your wife’s contact, like I got the others. Then they told me you was here, and I was to come take care of you. Make you an offer, Lieutenant Garrison. You can join our side and stay with your wife, or you can become a prisoner of war like the rest. We could use someone like you, with the knowledge of the Yank force from the inside out.”

Garrison stared at him, at the gold tooth that caught the sunlight, dazzling the rest of the man’s mouth and making his tobacco-stained teeth seem even dingier by comparison.

“Think on it, Lieutenant. These men here know your traitorous bent. They’ll make sure you pay when you get to whatever camp they’re sending you to. You can die there or you can come to Richmond, see your wife, spend the rest of your life in relative luxury.”

“By becoming an agent for the Confederacy.”

The guard nodded. “Now you’re thinking.”

And he was thinking of it, for just a brief moment. An agent for the Confederacy, getting information and somehow sending it back to Washington. But he needed a network for that, and if the United States government knew about Serena, they would never trust his information.

Serena. Her face rose in his mind, the fox-like intensity, the way Evangeline Cunliffe introduced them, the way Serena had smiled at him when she hadn’t given time to any of the other men. A set-up, even then?

All this time, the warm words, the loving, all a diversion to get information?

Where will you be? She would ask, her voice sleepy, and he would tell her, things he had sworn to tell no one, thinking her an extension of himself, his wife, loyal to him and to all he was loyal to, believing as he did. Living as he did.

His wife.

“No,” he said. “I’ll never help your cause.”

Only the words came out thick and angry, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the Confederacy or Serena—her cause, not his, taken at the price of his trust.

Why was he believing a greasy guard with a single gold tooth over the gestures of his wife, the woman he’d pledged to before God?

Because the man knew too much, too many things, and it put all the questions in perspective.

Where will you be?

“Surely, Lieutenant, your life is worth more than that,” the guard said.

And Garrison stared at him, out of reach, the anger cold in his stomach. A killing anger that would have rampaged through this small section of woods if he were only free.

Here I was hoping for a measure of freedom, she had said on that first evening.

And he had replied, so blithely, almost flirting, That seems to be what everyone is hoping for these days.

“Lieutenant? Are you reconsidering?” the guard asked.

“I gave you my answer,” Garrison said.

The guard frowned. “She thought you would do it for her.”

Garrison looked up, that last more appalling than anything that had come before. Appalling perhaps because it held some truth. If he hadn’t known of the betrayal, he might have joined her in Richmond, might have found a way to continue his marriage without sacrificing too much of his soul.

The thought rocked him to his very essence.

“It seems,” he said slowly, “that my wife doesn’t know me as well as she thought she did.”

It was an affliction they both had suffered from although it looked, from his new vantage, as if he would suffer more for it.

If he lived.

MAY 20, 1864“I’M SORRY, SIR,” the boy was saying. “I didn’t know.”

Of course not. Garrison hadn’t known either. She had been so good at playing parts, not thinking of the consequences.

At least his discussion with the guard so long ago had done one thing. It had saved him from the wrath of the other prisoners. They had seen his face; they had known his betrayal of his own troops had been involuntary.

But he learned in the year that had gone on, through rumor and discussion and the general torment of the guards who had learned who he was, the cost of his midnight confession. Seventeen thousand lives lost, and just on his side. Seventeen thousand in a battle they should have won.

How many other lives, from Shiloh to Fredericksburg, could be laid directly on his love for his wife? How many?

He would never know.

“I didn’t bring him here to have him tell you that.” Winthrop had his hand on Garrison’s arm. He could feel the bones of Winthrop’s fingers, the unnatural scaliness of his skin. Winthrop was dying. They were all dying, slowly, and of more diseases than Garrison had thought imaginable. Disease exacerbated by starvation, heat, and the god-awful stench.

Garrison looked away. “He’s not the first to tell me he’s had her.”

It explained why she was so practiced, when he had been so inexperienced that he thought her skill normal for a woman of eighteen years. It explained so much.

All those nights he had thought of it, of her, going over the words they exchanged, the secrets, the way she had wheedled things out of him, even while he was discussing with first Scott, then Burnside, then Hooker, how to stop the flow of intelligence from the North to the South, how to deal with the disloyal women like Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a society woman just like Evangeline Cunliffe, who had created such a stir by being imprisoned early in the war.

“Why then?” he asked the boy. “Why are you here?”

The boy looked at the log stockade, the men sitting outside it, the dead line. He apparently thought Garrison wanted to know why he had come to Andersonville.

Garrison clarified. “What do you know about my wife?”

The boy winced at the word, but answered. He had more courage than Garrison wanted to acknowledge—or wanted to see. In a place like this, courage could get a man killed.

“Only that she’s dead, sir.”

That caught him. He saw, for a brief moment, her vivid brown eyes, remembered how, when he had looked in them on his wedding night, he knew she would outlive him. Nothing, he had thought then, could extinguish a flame like hers.

“How?”

“Drowned, sir. Trying to get back into the Confederacy. She’d been in England, and their ship was being pursued near the Carolina shoreline.”

“How do you know this?”

The boy looked down, his red whiskers standing out like bristles against the pasty skin. “I saw her, sir.”

Garrison frowned, trying to make sense of this. “You’re Navy?” They usually didn’t house Navy here.

The boy shook his head. “I was called to identify her.” He studied his hands. “It was known that I…”

Garrison studied his own hands. It would take little for them to wrap around the boy’s throat, and throttle him. It would actually be merciful, more merciful than living here, or slowly dying here as they all were.

Instead, he clenched his fists, placed them at his side in the baked clay, and asked, “Did the ship go down?”

“There was a storm, sir. She took a lifeboat, afraid their ship would run aground. If they caught her on it, apparently, she was to be hanged.”

Winthrop looked at Garrison. Garrison said nothing. Someone had found her out then, long before the boy. And the boy, then, had been under suspicion, to see if he sent secrets to the enemy. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he was here because he had betrayed the wrong person.

Garrison didn’t care.

He got up, staggered away from the dead line, trying to avoid the men sprawled like corpses in the dirt.

She was dead, then. The light in those eyes gone forever. That dry humor, the softness of her pressed against him in the night. Gone. He wouldn’t have to face her, wouldn’t have to face that moment which he had been certain would come, the one in which he would have to choose between his loyalty for his country and that passion, whatever it was, he had felt for her.

It had been so easy in the woods. He had just found out. She hadn’t been before him. He could still feel the hurt like an open wound.

But what if she had told him? What if she had leaned against him in the night, after their loving, and told him, then said, as she had that last night, We could live in Michigan, or maybe Canada. Far from all this. Maybe go West. No one would care.

Except him, he had said.

Except him.

JUNE 17, 1911HE HAD A CHOICE, he knew. He could walk away, chalk it up to coincidence, his illness, the dazed feeling men sometimes got while at sea.

But he remembered her eyes, their vividness, the way they had held him when she said her vows, his certainty that she had more life force than he.

Nothing, not time, not infirmity, not wishful thinking, could keep him away from that table.

He put his walking stick down forcefully, tried not to lean on it too hard, and made his way toward her.

The conversation stopped as he approached, the women staring up at him as if he were a curiosity. He could only see her. Eyes usually faded, got watery, lost their color and intensity with age and time, but hers had not. They still had a fire in them, a life force so intense he could feel it.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said, bowing as he had the first time he had seen her. He smiled as he stood, knowing he still had some of the old charm. “Forgive my interruption, but I would like to speak with Serena alone.”

She could have denied it, he supposed, and would have tried if she had been alone. But the other women turned toward her, looking surprised, as if they should have known all of her friends.

Her skin seemed paler than it had a moment ago, and up close, he could see the fine wrinkles, like flaws in parchment. “It’s all right,” she said. There was still a trace of Maryland in her voice. Like home, he used to think. Like home.

The women got up, gave him another glance, and then walked away. The stoutest of them, an imposing matron with the kind of power women of a certain age gained, patted a gloved hand on hers.

“If you need us, my dear, we’ll be on the deck chairs.” Then the woman looked at him as if warning him of all sorts of dire problems should he assault their friend.

He slipped into the chair the woman had just vacated, and after a moment, she left them alone. He hung his walking stick on the arm, using the movement to think about what he would say, what he would do.

He wondered if he could get the captain to place her under house arrest, if the United States government would pursue a 48 year-old case. War crimes, perhaps, treason of the highest order. Could he actually prove she had caused all those deaths, done all those things? Most of the witnesses were dead now, but he was still alive. He and a handful of others.

She was looking at him as if she couldn’t quite place him. He hoped it wasn’t an act. He had thought of her daily for the last fifty years. The first two with love so fierce he thought he would die from it, and the last with a hopelessness that seared him to his very soul.

He had never loved like that again, never trusted anyone again. He had held several women, almost brought two to wife, but could not bear the thought of letting them in his home, in his bed for an entire night. In the end, he had channeled his energies into his businesses, except for the time he made for his nieces and nephews, treating them as if they were his own. She had taken so much from him, more than the war ever could.

“You wished to speak to me?” she said, so impersonal, so formal, as if they had just met.

“Serena Freneau Garrison,” he said softly, “I saw your name on a grave in Washington, D.C.”

She stared at him for a long time, her eyes running over his face as if she were searching her memory, looking at portraits. Then tears came to her eyes. “Nathaniel.”

She said his name as she had when he loved her, half a whisper, filled with promises. His heart lurched again.

“They told me you died at Chancellorsville.”

“They told me you betrayed us two days before.”

Her eyes widened.

“I know it all,” he said. “The way you pulled information from me. The way you sent it all to Beauregard, who then used it to slaughter our men. Tell me, Serena, who died for you that day in 1864? A servant? A life you considered less valuable than your own?”

“It was all a mistake,” she said. “And the rumors were so terrible, I decided to let Serena Garrison go. I thought it better—”

He put a finger over her lips and she closed her eyes, the movement of a lover. She tilted her head into his touch ever so slightly, and he remembered how she let him hold her fingers so improperly that day on Mrs. Cunliffe’s lawn fifty years before.

“No more lies, Serena,” he said, and let his finger drop.

She opened her eyes. The tears were still in them. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “I was young and stupid—“

“Serena. No lies. I spent two years in Andersonville before I got exchanged out. You owe me the truth.”

She let out a small breath of air, glanced at the deck chairs where her friends sat. “I asked you to go away with me. I fell in love with you, Nathaniel. I mourned when they told me you were dead.”

“By your hand.”

She raised her chin slightly. So familiar. The gestures, the movements. He had remembered them perfectly. “We were at war.”

“You and I? Funny, I thought we were in love.”

A tear fell, glistening like a diamond as it hovered, caught on her cheek. He saw her more clearly now, how she had acted for him as if she were playing a part on the stage. But the young man inside him, the man who had hoped and believed her to be a part of him, he still wanted to believe her.

And the rest of him wanted to carry her to the rail and toss her over, let her drown for real.

This time, he was the one who glanced at her friends. The stout woman was glaring at him, her eyes accusing.

Serena followed his gaze.

“They’re making me uncomfortable,” he said. “Walk with me.”

She rose quicker than he did. He grabbed his walking stick, used it to lever himself up, then switched it to the other hand so that he could offer her his arm. She took it, her hand light and delicate against his coat. He felt absurdly like asking her if she wanted punch or perhaps to waltz.

They walked to the railing. He led her behind one of the lifeboats, roped in and covered at the edge of the deck. He had stopped shaking. He felt stronger than he had in weeks.

This would be his only chance, here, out of the sight of those women. He would still have to lift her, but only a little. And then a toss that might wrench his back and she would be falling, a scream floating up at him before she hit the froth below.

She was studying him, those dark fox-like eyes, probably seeing all the emotions on his face.

“There are people who will miss me,” she said. “Are you still such a terrible liar, Nathaniel?”

“No,” he said.

A small shudder went through her then. She hadn’t expected that, although she had seen on his face what he meant to do. He would be able to toss her over and lie about what he had done. Another of her legacies.

Garrison looked over the railing at the gray Atlantic. The vast ocean of nothingness, the place that was supposed to have claimed her, when in fact it hadn’t.

“I’m sorry, Nathaniel—” she started, but he didn’t let her finish.

He dropped his walking stick, grabbed her waist—not as small as it had once been—and hoisted her up. She didn’t scream, but she grabbed the railing and hung on, her body tense.

It wouldn’t be easy. Nothing with her was ever easy.

“My husband is a rich man,” she said. “We can pay you, Nathaniel. You could be rich.”

His hands tightened on her waist. “Who’s your husband?” he asked softly, as if he were intrigued by the notion of another man’s money.

“Lord Reginald Seton. Please, Nathaniel. Let me down.”

He let go so quickly that she nearly fell overboard anyway. Her body collapsed against the rail, her heels kicking against the side. She eased herself down and for a brief moment, he saw fear in her eyes.

“Does he know of your past life?” Garrison asked.

She raised that sharp chin. “I met him in London. During the war.”

One of the collaborators. One of the men who had hoped to fund the South.

“And how long have you been married?” Garrison asked.

She stepped away from him, the movement small but noticeable. “I thought you were dead.”

Forty-seven years. They had married while Garrison was starving in a camp she had sent him to. The camp she had condemned him to.

She had spent forty-seven years in London society under a different name, and no one had been the wiser. Forty-seven years in a marriage that had obviously worked, with a man who had a reputation to protect. A man, by the very nature of the peerage to which he belonged, could suffer no hint of impropriety.

“Where is he now?” Garrison asked.

“The smoking room, I believe,” she said.

“This early in the day?”

“He enjoys cards,” she said. And cards offended many of the women. The smoking room had become a replacement for some of the men’s clubs.

“Let’s go there.”

“I can’t.”

“But I can.” He took her arm, dragged her forward, then slipped her hand in his elbow again. “Walk normally,” he said softly, “and smile.”

She did. They were halfway across the deck when he realized he’d left his walking stick behind. He was functioning on something purer than energy now, something deeper. He would go through with this if it killed him.

Fortunately, they weren’t far from the smoking room. He pushed open the doors and saw, as he had hoped, the reporters that the White Star Line had hired to glorify the Olympic’s first trip.

“Gentlemen,” he said, as he dragged Serena forward. “Come with me.”

They did, of course. No one said no to Nathaniel Garrison. How ironic that he needed them, them and their scandal sheets, to get the only revenge possible now.

He would destroy her place in society. Once he revealed her identity, everyone would know who she was, who she had been. His story was familiar enough.

It was time to make that story hers as well.

He would ruin her life as she had once ruined his.

Garrison walked across the checked carpet, past rows of empty tables flanked by green leather chairs, to the center of the room.

There Lord Seton was already standing, his cards turned down in his large arthritic hands. He was a big man who did not stoop with age, with a large white mustache that seemed to have stolen all the hair from his head. His eyes were faded, so faded it took Garrison a moment to see the color.

“Serena,” Seton said. “What is the meaning of this?”

Garrison glanced at his side, made certain the reporters were there, saw Serena, her eyes wide, the fear evident now.

“Lord Seton,” Garrison said, letting Serena’s hand drop and placing his own on the small of her back. “My name is Nathaniel Garrison. I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you. Please allow me to introduce you to my wife.”

He paused for half a moment and saw the horror plain on Seton’s face. The reporters had gasped. Serena looked as if she were about to faint.

Garrison stared at her one last time, saw how years of good living had softened her, and knew the publicity, the scandal, the trial would be her Andersonville.

He nodded to her once, an acknowledgement that finally the table had turned. There was nowhere for her to go, no escape possible. She couldn’t even handle the lifeboats by herself.

Then he turned and left her there, surrounded by reporters, and a scandalized man who had only thought he was her husband for forty-seven years. Garrison, her real husband, left her to face her future alone—her bleak future—as she had once left him.

Fifty years to the day it began, the war was finally over.

____________________________________________

The Dead Line

Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in The Blue and the Gray Undercover, edited by Ed Gorman, Forge Books, November 2001Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2013 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Christophe Boisson/Dreamstime

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

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Homer Ziff wanted to know how his outdoor cats spent their days, so he attached a tiny digital camera to their collars—and discovered a mystery in his own backyard.

Winner of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award for 2008, this Anthony-nominated story was one of the most talked about stories of the year.

“Hitchhiking Across an Ancient Sea” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

The Secret Lives of CatsKristine Kathryn RuschHomer Ziff didn’t believe in old adages, but after his long and eventful spring, he couldn’t help but think that whoever put the words “curiosity,” “cat,” and “kill” in the same sentence had to be onto something.

It all began about his own curiosity—about his cats. Homer Ziff lived alone with two indoor cats and six outdoor cats. Well, six he could pet and hold; there were others—the friends, neighbors and hangers-on, he called them—who visited at meal time or for a rest on the back forty in the mid-afternoon sun.

Not that he had a real back forty. But his back yard was an impressive three acres, complete with woods and stream. One of the reasons he bought the house was that it had the best of both worlds: in the front, he had a small lawn that led to a quiet residential street; in the back, he had the acres of property that covered a protected wetland. No one would ever build behind him, the lots next to him were full, and the houses across the street had reached their maximum size according to code.

He knew his neighbors by sight (rather like he knew their cats) and he would nod at them whenever he saw them, but didn’t engage in conversation. He couldn’t bring himself to talk to them, not after his first attempt, when he’d stuttered at a man several doors down, and the man had rolled his eyes and walked away.

Homer would liked to have blamed his surly neighbor for his own lack of congeniality, but that wouldn’t be fair or accurate. Homer didn’t engage most people in conversation. He had a stutter that got worse when he was nervous.

Over the years, he’d learned to prefer his own company. He liked being alone with his thoughts and his cats and his property.

And it was his thoughts that made being alone possible. Not that his thoughts were original—sadly, they weren’t—but they were organized, and that had given him an edge. Once upon a time, he had been a professor of physics at Oregon State University. A rising star when he was hired, he’d become a stalled star by mid-career—a man for whom the great things expected never materialized.

Which would have been well and good except that stalled stars had to be stellar teachers and he was not. He was pathologically shy, and his stutter got worse in front of large groups. He was better one on one, but stalled stars weren’t allowed to teach the smaller classes. He had to teach some large sections as well, and he dreaded them like he dreaded a visit to the dentist.

But he did have one valuable skill. He could explain things clearly. His gift of clarity had gotten him through graduate school and into an important teaching position, but that gift also stalled him. And it made him into something of a rebel.

Because of his gift, he threw out the suggested text for 101 Physics (a more confusing book he’d never seen) and wrote a series of notes that sold in the campus bookstore—not just to his students, but to students from other physics classes. The bookstore owner called him one day to ask whether students at the nearby University of Oregon could purchase the notes. Then students from some of the private colleges made the drive from McMinnville and Portland to get his notes, and finally, the chairman of his department said, “Y’know, Ziff, you could make a fortune on those notes if you just turned them into a book.”

So he did. It became the number one 101 physics text in the country, which led his publisher to ask if he would write a simple physics book for the masses, which he did, and another for children, which he did, and suddenly Homer Ziff no longer needed to worry about being a stalled star. He had become a rising star again—or maybe even an established one—and could have his pick of the courseload within his department.

Only the books had given him another gift. Financial independence. He no longer had to teach. And since standing in front of students made him so nervous that he sometimes spent the hour before class in the restroom, he decided that the prudent move would be to quit.

He bought his marvelous house, made sure his finances were in order, and then retired to write a half dozen more popular science books, with more under contract.

Some days, the cats were his only companions. He didn’t mind, really. He never stuttered when he spoke to cats, and they didn’t care that he lacked original thought.

They were happy that he provided food and shelter and a bit of companionship.

He was happy to have them purr.

Because of them, he had become a little cat-obsessed.

He had been surfing the net one night when he discovered a website designed by a man in Germany. The man sounded like a kindred spirit. He lived with a cat to whom he devoted an inordinate amount of time. That cat was an indoor-outdoor cat, and the German man wondered how his cat spent his time outside the house.

So the man, who appeared to be some kind of engineer, modified a digital camera, put it around his cat’s neck, set it up to take pictures every minute and a half, and sent the cat on its way. The resulting photographs were charming and inspiring.

Homer found himself staring at his outdoor friends, wondering how their days went. One cat’s routine illuminated the life of one cat. Six cats’ routines might actually be the beginning of some kind of scientific study.

At least, that was what he told himself as he used the instructions on the German man’s website to build six catcams. After some struggle, Homer managed to attach them to five of his outdoor favorites (he gave up on the wily old tom—who not only drew blood, but managed to slice him up badly enough to require fifteen stitches on his left hand).

Then he sent the five on their mission, hoping to discover the secret lives of cats.

And he did. He discovered all sorts of marvelous things.

He saw the same feline faces in his yard, in his neighbor’s yard, at the century-old schoolhouse down the street. He realized that each cat had not only its own routine, but shared a neighborhood routine as well.

Mornings began at his house, with a treat of kibble and soft food, followed by a trek to the dumpster behind the local Burger King, then to a long rest under the bleachers at the old school.

The ground beneath his neighbors’ cars and his own Ford pick-up served as sites for daily conferences. A house three blocks away provided an afternoon snack, usually followed by a dumpster diving at a local fish market and the nearby Diary Queen.

On warm days, the cats tromped down to the wetlands for drinks from the springs that prevented anyone from building behind Homer’s property.

He would have blessed those springs, if he hadn’t seen something curious.

On the earliest photos the springs looked like a primeval swampland. Cats, due to their low-to-the-ground perspective, took the most amazing photographs. Apparently the wetlands at dawn (or was it dusk?) had ground fog, which made everything opaque and surreal.

The swamp (he didn’t know what else to call it) had tree limbs and branches and sticks rising from the muck, all hidden by the ghost-like grayness of the fog. To his surprise, the cats didn’t drink from the water here. They sat in front of it—all five of them—as if they were watching something.

Subsequent photos on different days showed something that resembled an elephant’s graveyard. What he’d initially thought were tree branches were bones sticking out of the mud. Some of the bones were covered in moss. Others had ivy growing around them like large green cobwebs.

The ivy gave him some perspective, but not enough. He couldn’t tell what kind of bones these were. Cats are small creatures and the cameras took photographs from that small perspective. Bones which seemed huge in some photographs seemed tiny in others.

Those others, he soon realized, were taken from some kind of height. Either that particular feline photographer had climbed a tree or it sat on a bank or it watched from a stump.

Homer found it curious that the cats never got close to the elephant’s graveyard. They always sat back. But as the weeks went on and the photographs accumulated, Homer realized that the graveyard was a spring haunt, just like the school had been in the winter.

The cats weren’t interested in food; they were observing something.

And that intrigued him.

Because cats, like humans, had a scientific turn of mind.

He had noticed that scientific frame of mind from the day he brought home his first kitten. Cats not only studied things, but they made a study of things. One of his cats decided to probe the mysteries of ice cubes—how they turned into water, whether they could be carried, why they sometimes shattered. Another spent an entire week learning how the front door knob turned. Eventually that cat learned how to turn the knob herself; fortunately she never did figure out the necessity of pulling the door open.

Or maybe opening the door didn’t interest her. The front door was the only one with a cut glass door knob. It refracted light. Maybe the cat had been more interested in the prisms inside the knob than in using that knob to go outside.

Homer never mentioned these thoughts to anyone else. He often felt as if he put too much time into his cats. And then he discovered that German man’s website, and realized he was not alone in his obsession with cat thought.

But, Homer would have wagered, the German man did not have an entire second computer devoted to the photographs that the cats created. Nor, Homer suspected, did the German man spend as much time trying to figure out what his cats were thinking as they stared—not just at the elephant graveyard, but also from underneath cars or beside Dumpsters.

The cats seemed involved in a part of life that Homer had somehow missed.

As the spring went on, he realized the cats were studying the elephant graveyard the same way that his indoor cat had studied that doorknob. They just hadn’t gotten to the touching stage yet.

He would know when they did. Daily, he got a series of photos of the back of pink tongues, lapping water from a puddle or a stream or a bowl that someone had placed outside. He would get photographs of near-dead prey wriggling out of a mouth.

But he saw nothing like that near the bones.

Only cats, watching the swampy water as if it held the secret of the universe.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, everything changed.

A little white female he called Mata Hari because of her attractiveness to the males (even after she was fixed) and her tendency to wander off on dangerous and secretive missions of her own brought home a defining photograph.

Every day, she sat in the same spot near the swamp. The little camera around her neck took a variation of the same photograph—a bone fragment sticking out of the primordial ooze. Sometimes the fragment was brown with mud and sometimes it looked almost white. But, over time, he realized it was the same fragment, which meant she sat in the same spot daily, studying something that she felt was important.

Only that Sunday, the fragment was covered by a human hand.

The hand loomed in the photograph, the fingers dominating the scene. They rose upward toward the sky, the ridges of the knuckles visible against the blackness of the muck. Dried cuts marred the flesh along the back, and the fingernails—clipped short—had dirt embedded all the way down to the skin.

Mata Hari had brought home ten pictures of the hand, which meant she spent fifteen minutes contemplating it, twice as long as she usually spent at that spot. The cat had managed to get several different angles, and oddly, each was farther away than the previous one.

The hand put the other bones in perspective. He returned to his photo files, opened the relevant pictures next to the photo of the hand and compared.

His breath caught. What had seemed like animal bones—small and fragile, old, abandoned, like elephants in their graveyard—were not. They were too large. He had been more accurate with the foggy photos when he’d thought of the bones as branches and logs.

These bones were large. No domesticated animal, except maybe a Husky or a Rotweiller, would have bones like that. Nor would most of the wild animals around here. This area was too populated for bears, even with the wetlands below. Maybe a deer or two had died down there, but certainly not a bunch of them. The coyotes were the size of raccoons, and barely larger than the cats, and there were no wolves here.

Which left only one other creature that could have provided the bones.

Humans.

And the latest victim had just arrived.

He needed to know if any of the other cats had photographs of the hand.

He got up and peered out his window. Two of the other cats had returned. He stepped outside and removed the memory card from both cameras, careful to put in a new card before he shut the cameras off. He’d tried night photos before, but the flash had scared the cat so badly that it had run in circles, screaming.

He hadn’t known cats could scream.

He gave each cat some pets and a small treat, then went back inside and downloaded the photographs.

In every bunch, a handful were duds—blurs, unrecognizable objects, a paw in front of the lens. These two batches were no different. But he set aside the blurs and unrecognizable objects this time, deciding they might be useful.

Then he scanned the images until he got to the swamp.

These cats had come to the graveyard as well, and at about the same time as Mata Hari. In fact, one of the unrecognizable objects might have been her haunch as the other cat sniffed her in greeting.

These cats stayed even farther away. He got found photographs of an entire arm, covered in bruises, and a bit of shoulder. His hands were shaking as he magnified the images.

The arm and hand had clearly come from the same place. He could see the bone fragment, the moss-covered bones, the ivy-covered bones and the brackish water. Now he knew why the cats didn’t drink here.

He wasn’t even sure why they came—they were well fed, so they didn’t need to eat decaying flesh. Were they watching something decompose? Or were they hunting the rats or some other creature that frequented the wetlands?

For the first time since he started this experiment, he felt frustrated that he couldn’t ask.

And then he found the money shot.

Or what would have been a money shot had he been a photographer along the lines of Weegee—the man who photographed corpses at crime scenes.

This shot was worthy of Weegee as well: a naked woman, her back arched, arms and legs splayed over what he had once thought were branches, her face turned toward the camera.

His shaking grew worse as he magnified this image. Her face had no real expression. The mouth was open, battered and bloody, the nose flattened, the cheeks covered in either blood or dirt.

But the eyes got to him. The eyes didn’t look human. They looked like something out of a bad horror movie—filmed over with white, unfocused, and empty. It wasn’t even fair to say that they were staring, because they weren’t. There was no intelligence behind them, no thought, no anything. No staring happened because there was no intelligence inside those eyes to stare.

He leaned away from the computer and frowned. Something about the image was familiar. At first he thought it was simply the way the woman had fallen, and then he realized what it was.

She had come to his door. Four days ago. She’d parked her SUV against the curb, the windows open, her daughter—who was ten, maybe eleven—crying inside.

The woman had knocked, and he almost didn’t answer because she looked so angry. But when he pulled the door open, she smiled at him.

“My daughter is selling candy so that her band can go to the regional tournaments.” She opened the box. “Would you like to buy something?”

He didn’t look at the candy. He looked at the crying girl in the SUV, wondering what her story was. He could probably guess. She didn’t want to sell the candy, but her mother tried to force her. And when that hadn’t worked, the mother decided to do it herself.

“She’s shy,” her mother said, as if confirming his thoughts.

He couldn’t condone this kind of behavior, not from an adult. He hated bullying in all its forms, having been a victim of it when he was young and skinny and too nerdy for his own good.

But the woman made him nervous, and he couldn’t say what he wanted to, which was, Let your daughter be herself. Not everyone is a good salesperson. Or good with people. Or even good one-on-one.

Instead, he struggled with, “N-N-No th-th-thanks.”

And shut the door.

The woman remained on the porch for a moment, as if she couldn’t believe he’d been that rude, and then she’d walked back to the SUV. She’d tossed the box of candy at her poor daughter before getting inside, and driving away.

If she was here, in this swamp, somewhere in the neighborhood, where was the little girl?

He was reaching for the phone before he even realized what he was doing, and dialed 911. When the operator answered, he said, “I think there’s a dead body in my neighborhood.”

And that brought the detectives to his door.

They were in plain clothes, but they showed him badges. He recognized both detectives from the local paper. They had been working on some kind of task force, and they had their pictures in the Metro section often enough that he could almost remember their names.

Fortunately for him, he didn’t need to. They introduced themselves.

The man with the silver hair trimmed so close to his neck that it looked like whiskers was Detective DeCarovich. His partner, a woman who looked like she could bench-press Homer without any effort, was Detective Ortiz.

They came inside Homer’s house without invitation, and wanted to know where he had seen the body. He brought them the photograph which he’d printed out on his laser printer, and they asked again where he had seen her.

So he had to explain—slowly because his stutter acted up—about the cat cameras and the experiment. The detectives stared at him as if he were crazy, so he finally waved them over to the computer and showed them the German man’s home page, complete with instructions on how to build the camera.

Ortiz was the one who finally realized that Homer was serious. She turned to him, her dark eyes wide and stunned. “You did this with your own cats?”

Then she turned toward Princess, his pampered white Persian who looked like she had starred in the Fancy Feast commercials. Princess was lying on top of the red satin pillow he had placed on his couch as a joke, and she looked about as indolent as a cat could get.

“Not her,” he said. “The outdoor cats. The more or less feral ones.”

DeCarovich crossed his arms. He clearly didn’t believe Homer and might even think Homer had something to do with the woman’s disappearance.

Homer crooked a finger. “Come with me,” he said. “But quietly.”

He led them into the kitchen which overlooked the back forty. Fortunately, Mata Hari was in her afternoon spot, on top of a rock near an overgrown rhododendron, stretched out and sound asleep.

“See that box around her neck?” he said. “It has her camera. There are four other cats with cameras as well.”

“For godsake,” DeCarovich said and shook his head. He clearly wasn’t impressed. He acted more like a man who had thought he’d seen it all, only to be surprised by something this weird. “Why would you do that?”

“Curiosity,” Homer said. “I wondered what they do all day.”

“Eat and sleep,” Ortiz said.

“Actually, no,” Homer said. “They’re quite active…”

And then he let his voice trail off. The detectives weren’t interested in his cats. They were interested in the photographs. DeCarovich was looking at the dead woman again.

“You really don’t know where this is,” DeCarovich said.

“No,” Homer said. “And I’m not even sure it’s on my property. It could be anywhere in the neighborhood.”

“Or farther,” Ortiz said. “Cats can have a territory of twenty acres or more.”

DeCarovich turned toward her as if she had suddenly gone as crazy as Homer.

She shrugged. “I grew up around cats.”

DeCarovich let out a small laugh, the kind a person used when he discovered he was among people he thought beneath him. Homer had heard that laugh a lot as a kid, and he didn’t miss it.

His face heated, and his throat tightened. The stutter would get even worse. He knew the symptoms. He had to struggle just to start his next sentence, but he knew the tricks: don’t get stuck on one word. Instead, recast your sentence into something else.

“M-M-Maybe I can reconstruct where they go,” he said. He led the detectives back into his study so that he could open the computer photo files. “I have d-d-days worth of photos. Maybe th-th-there are l-l-landmarks.”

He called up the files and started with the swamp and elephant graveyard photos, working backwards through each cat’s imagery file. He wished now he hadn’t thrown out most of the blurred and unfocused photos. They might tell him something.

Ortiz was leaning over his shoulder as he worked. DeCarovich walked through the room, studying Homer’s books and his framed awards.

“You wrote these?” he asked after a moment.

“Y-Y-Yes,” Homer said.

“Science guy, huh?”

He wanted to go for a self-deprecating “kinda” but the “k” would give him trouble. He had to settle for another stammered “yes.”

“I guess guys like you would do stuff like this. Experiments, huh?”

But Homer was careful not to answer that vague a question. He still had the sense DeCarovich believed he was involved in that woman’s death.

“Th-Th-The p-p-pictures?”

“Yeah.” DeCarovich looked at him.

Homer nodded. His throat had tightened so badly he knew he wouldn’t be able to easily get out another sentence.

“Damn,” Ortiz said beside him. “These cats go underneath everything.”

They did too. Under leaves, between bushes, under rocks. There was no clear trail, nothing recognizable, at least to human eyes.

“You actually think this guy’s onto something?” DeCarovich asked, no longer trying to hide his contempt.

“I think we finally found the bone yard,” Ortiz said, and Homer was the one who shuddered.

He remembered the articles now. These detectives had just formed a task force to investigate a series of missing persons cases, all of women in their thirties who disappeared in broad daylight.

“Except we didn’t find it, not yet,” Ortiz was saying. “These cats can’t tell us where it is and if we try to follow them, we’ll make sure they never go there again.”

“We’ll have to do a grid search,” DeCarovich said.

“And destroy a lot of physical evidence along the way.” Ortiz sighed. “At least now we know what happened to Ann Kemmel.”

“Th-Th-That’s the woman?” Homer asked.

Ortiz nodded.

“Wh-Wh-What about her daughter?”

Both detectives stared at him as if he had just confessed. He swallowed and forced himself to tell them about the incident with the candy bars and the SUV.

“F-F-Four days ago,” he said.

“That’s when she disappeared,” DeCarovich said. “Only her kid wasn’t with her. Her kid was at home the whole time.”

Homer shook his head. “I saw her. She was in th-th-the c-c-car.”

“How would you know?” DeCarovich asked.

“She was c-c-crying real hard.” He felt his face get even redder. “I th-th-thought her mother was b-b-being mean.”

DeCarovich’s eyes narrowed, but Ortiz didn’t seem to notice. She turned toward him.

He raised his eyebrows. “I thought we were too easy on her.”

“I can’t believe she was lying,” Ortiz said. “She must have seen something. I’ll bet she was scared.”

DeCarovich shook his head. “She was just another—.”

He waved his hand at Homer, and Homer wondered what word DeCarovich left out.

“She st-st-st…” Homer couldn’t say the word. He never could under stress. “She has a speech d-d-defect?”

“Like you,” DeCarovich said.

Homer nodded. He had been right then. The mother had been treating her like his mother had treated him, believing that he could overcome his problems with just a little more hard work.

“She wasn’t in the car,” Ortiz said. “She was lying.”

“Lying,” Homer said slowly so that he wouldn’t stutter any more, “makes a speech problem worse. Any stress, even small stress, will make the problem worse.”

He got it out without a single mistake. His cheeks grew even hotter. DeCarovich frowned at him, but it was no longer the frown of the impatient. It was a frown of consideration.

“You think the kid saw something?” he asked Homer, and Homer got that sense again that DeCarovich still suspected him.

Homer’s throat tightened, so he shrugged.

“I’ll bet she did,” Ortiz said. “We need to reinterview.”

“With the photographic evidence.” DeCarovich picked up the print-out. “Can we keep that?”

Homer nodded.

“She’s going to be just as afraid of us as she was the last time.” Ortiz sighed.

Homer knew what she was imagining. Trying to interview a child whose mouth continually betrayed her would be difficult at best.

Ortiz took the photograph from DeCarovich. “Too bad you can’t put a video camera on those cats. Then we could just find the body and the evidence. There’s bound to be some if he’s been using that spot for the past five years.”

Five years. Homer started. They were investigating five years worth of disappearances. Five years of dumping dead women into a primeval swamp.

“It c-c-can’t be t-t-too cl-cl-close,” Homer said. “We’d smell it. Me and the neighbors. Bodies…”

He didn’t have to finish his sentence. Ortiz was nodding.

“You’re right,” she said. “We need a topo map.”

“You want wind charts too?” DeCarovich was being sarcastic.

“I’m serious,” Ortiz said. “If we can find the body without talking to that kid—”

“We have to talk to her,” DeCarovich said. “We have to know why she lied.”

Homer knew DeCarovich was right. But the two thoughts—the video camera and that little girl—gave him an idea.

“D-D-Don’t show her the photograph,” he said. “She won’t be able t-t-to t-t-talk after th-th-that.”

“Listen, buddy,” DeCarovich said, but Ortiz put a hand on his arm.

Homer made himself take a deep breath. “What I meant was I might b-b-be able t-t-to modify the c-c-cameras. Instead of every 90 seconds, I might be able t-t-to have images every five.”

“Which just show us more leaves and trees and rocks,” DeCarovich said. “Nice try, but that’s going to give us more of the same.”

“No,” Ortiz said. “It won’t. It might show us where the cats go into the woods. Can you set up a time stamp too?”

“Yes,” Homer said. “If we know where they go in, the angle of the sun might tell us what direction they’re going.”

He realized after he spoke that he was no longer nervous. He liked the female detective. She didn’t intimidate him.

“These cats aren’t looking up,” DeCarovich said. “We can’t see sunlight.”

“Through the leaves, on the ground, we’ll get some stuff. C’mon, Rick,” Ortiz said. “You’ve done similar things with shadow.”

“I still think we do a grid.”

“Let’s give Mr. Ziff a chance,” Ortiz said. “His cats might help us.”

DeCarovich snorted. “Like they can do that.”

“They already have,” Ortiz said. “They gave us Ann Kemmel, and a reason to reinterview her daughter.”

DeCarovich glared at Homer. “You get one day for this nonsense. One day. After that, we do a grid.”

As if Homer had a stake in not having a grid search. He just wanted them to find this poor woman’s body. And figure out what else was down in that swamp.

Near his house.

Someone had been dumping bodies near his house. Near the safest place he knew.

He shuddered.

“Would you like a c-c-copy of th-th-the photo files?” he asked Ortiz.

“Yeah,” she said. “We have some computer whizzes who might find some answers here. And give me the URL for that German website, so they know this is legit.”

He nodded, made copies onto a CD, and wrote down the web address for her.

She tapped him on the arm as a thank you. “This is kinda cool,” she said, holding up the CD in the jewel case he’d given her. “Who knew that cats did such interesting things?”

“Yeah,” DeCarovich said as he led her out the door. “Like staring at dead bodies. Who knew?”

Homer couldn’t let DeCarovich’s sarcasm and attitude get to him, even though it brought back not only Homer’s high school days, but his teaching days as well. More than once, he’d caught his students in the hall, making fun of his stutter. Often they were the students from his 101 Physics class, and it was right after the unit on particles.

He had no trouble discussing electrons and protons or baryons and mesons. But quarks. Quarks caught him every time. That “ka” sound tripped him up and it got worse the longer he taught. The closer he got to the discussion of elementary particles, the more difficulty he would have.

Just like that little girl. He wished he could interview her. His stutter would put her at ease. She would be able to tell him what she saw or didn’t see. She would be able to tell him how she survived when her mother hadn’t.

He sighed and turned to the project at hand. He was glad he still had that sixth camera, the one the old tom had fought off. Homer was able to experiment with it. He couldn’t set the timer for five seconds—it simply didn’t work—but it could go off every ten seconds.

The problem was that it used a lot of energy when it took that many pictures. He found some larger memory cards, but he didn’t have adequate batteries, and it was too late to buy any new ones.

So he would have to pick his times, hoping he got the right part of the day.

Then he checked his cupboards. He had a lot of canned salmon and tuna. He would need it. He would have to catch each of his feral photographers, remove their cameras, modify them, and reattach them. Then he’d have to catch the group again tomorrow and remove the memory card.

Twenty-four hours really wasn’t enough.

But it was all he had.

By dawn, he had replaced the cameras on all of the cats.

Mata Hari was the first to return. She brought him a lovely series of photographs of the undercarriage of every car on the street. Just as the memory of the camera filled, she had crawled under a fence near the school.

He wondered if that was where she would go to get to the swamp, but he had no way of knowing.

He removed the camera, reset its automatic timer to beginning shooting later the following day, but knew it would do no good.

DeCarovich would hold to the twenty-four hour rule. The man probably still suspected Homer. Homer knew that by now, his fingerprints would have been removed from the jewel case to see if he had a criminal record (he did not) and the computer crimes unit would make sure that he hadn’t dummied up the German website. They would find that he hadn’t faked the website and that his cats had been taking pictures now for more than a month.

DeCarovich would also check Homer’s work history, his phone usage (which was almost nil) and his bank records, which would probably surprise the detective. Popular science books made money—even if men like DeCarovich weren’t interested.

Although Homer didn’t know how someone like DeCarovich couldn’t be interested. His job was all about science. Just on this case alone, they’d be using topographic maps and sunlight angles; they’d be removing fingerprints and studying computer records; they’d probably be using DNA to identify what was left of the other bodies.

Just by that quick reckoning, Homer figured their work would touch on geography, physics, computer science, biology, and chemistry. And all of it—even the deductive reasoning that DeCarovich was probably using to continue to blame Homer—required a meticulousness that only the best scientists could achieve.

So Homer had to hope that the other cats would bring him something, something recognizable.

Something good.

The answers he sought came, surprisingly, from Einstein—a small shy male with a shock of white hair over his tiny furrowed brow. Einstein had been difficult to conquer: it had taken weeks to catch him to neuter him, and weeks after that to regain his trust. That he wore a camera at all was amazing; that he actually showed Homer the trail to the body was a shock.

Homer thought Einstein was one of the few cats who didn’t make a daily pilgrimage to the swamp. Apparently he did go, just didn’t stay as long as the others, and so sometimes he didn’t get a good photograph. Also, Einstein was the cat whose photos were most likely to blur because he ran almost everywhere.

But on this morning, he meandered toward the swamp—through the hole in the fence that Mata Hari had found, around a stone with the year 1908 carved into the top, and then down an embankment into a copse of trees.

Einstein actually followed a tiny trail. Homer hadn’t noticed it on the previous shots because it looked like a bare line in the earth, nothing spectacular. But on the ten-second shots, it was clear that the bare line was connected to other bare lines—a rabbit path that wound from the 1908 rock and into the trees.

There he saw a moss-covered old growth stump, some ancient logging, and several late-blooming irises in front of a ruined log that Einstein crawled on top of to peer into the swamp.

The body looked worse today; less like the woman Homer had met and more like a corpse. Einstein had gotten several good pictures of it, and Homer didn’t study any of them.

Instead, he copied the entire memory card onto a CD, printed the files, and called Ortiz.

She wasn’t at the station. The dispatch patched him into her cell. She answered on the fourth ring, sounding annoyed.

Homer identified himself, then said, “I think I know where the path is.”

“Thank God,” she said. “We’ll be right there.”

And they were. Within fifteen minutes, they had parked in front of his house. DeCarovich looked less dyspeptic today, but Ortiz seemed frustrated.

They had been talking to the little Kemmel girl when Homer called, although “talking,” DeCarovich said, “isn’t really the word for it.”

Homer didn’t ask about it. He figured they’d tell him if they wanted to. It wasn’t his investigation after all. He was just helping with one small part.

He put the printed photographs in a line, with little gaps between them. Next to them, he put a map of this section of the neighborhood.

“See this?” he said, pointing to the fence. “That’s part of this house.”

He pointed to a house not far from the school.

“And this rock?” he said. “It’s behind the school. They christened it last year as part of a rededication. It’s been there since the school was built.”

He had highlighted what he believed to be the path leading into the trees.

“I figure you can use the landmarks—the irises, the old-growth stump, the log—to find her.”

“You didn’t look?” DeCarovich asked.

Homer frowned at him. No one in his right mind would investigate this one on his own, not when he understood the science of trace and the importance of keeping a crime scene uncontaminated.

“No,” Homer said. “I figure th-th-that’s your job.”

The stutter surprised him. He thought he was confident enough in his map not to tighten up. But that hint of a threat in DeCarovich’s voice had been enough to bring back the stutter.

“We need to go down there,” DeCarovich said.

“Let’s send a team,” Ortiz said studying the photos.

“Let’s not waste taxpayer dollars until we know we’re in the right place.”

For once, Homer agreed with DeCarovich. They didn’t say much more to him. They took the printed photographs, the map, and the CD, and then they left.

He felt at loose ends. Despite his sensible thoughts about the crime scene, he did want to investigate it himself. He wished he were more involved.

After all, his cats had been the one to discover what Ortiz had called the body dump. If only they were trained cats. He could send them down the path to the swamp with cameras around their neck and watch as the detectives officially found Ann Kemmel’s body.

But he couldn’t assign the cats anything, and he could only view what they wanted to look at. Mostly, all they cared about was the undercarriage of cars.

Then he frowned and headed toward his computer. The cats loved the undercarriage of SUVs more than actual cars. SUVs had big tires and a wider frame, but a lower undercarriage than a truck. That gave the cat a lot of places to hide and even more places to visit with little feline friends, all in the comfort of a shady spot on the street.

But one photo had come to mind. A photo taken by yet another cat—Galileo—somewhere around the time of the candy selling incident. It had been a blur photo, and Homer had tossed it, but he hadn’t yet cleared off the memory card.

He grabbed all the cards that needed clearing and started cycling through them one by one. He didn’t find any more images of the path to the swamp—he knew he wouldn’t—but he did find several of a parked SUV with unfamiliar tires.

And then he found the photograph he was looking for. Two photographs, actually. One of a skinny leg with a single pink girl’s tennis shoe about to touch the pavement—and another of a pink-and-blue blur disappearing behind a bench across the street.

He closed his eyes, trying to remember what that crying girl had been wearing that afternoon. He just remembered her face, splotchy and humiliated, her eyes swollen from all the tears she’d shed. He could also remember the SUV, with its blue and silver metallic sides.

Silver, like the side where the pants leg brushed.

He opened his eyes and studied the next two frames. He didn’t see any more pink and blue blurs, but he did know where that bench was. It was several doors down from his, right across the street from his surly neighbor, the man who had rolled his eyes when he’d heard the ferocity of Homer’s stutter.

Homer went cold.

He wondered if he should call Ortiz. He didn’t want to bother her, not when she was looking at the crime scene.

Instead, he opened a file on his computer, looked at the neighborhood map he’d downloaded earlier and studied the wetlands.

They not only ran behind his house, they ran the entire length of this side of the street, ending (or beginning depending on your point of view) at the century-old school house.

Anyone who wanted to could carry a body from their own personal back forty into the wetlands and walk through the overgrown wooded area to the swamp without being seen.

No wonder DeCarovich had suspected Homer. Homer fit all kinds of profiles. He was reclusive. He lived alone. He had access to the so-called body dump. He even inserted himself in the investigation.

His hands were shaking again. He wasn’t sure if he had important information or not. The two detectives were still having trouble talking to the daughter. But Homer had evidence she left the SUV on her own and ran away.

Before or after her mother had disappeared?

He logged onto the internet and looked up what he could find on the disappearance of Ann Kemmel. She only ranked a few paragraphs in the paper on the day after her disappearance. But those few paragraphs were enough.

She and the SUV were missing.

She was last seen here on his quiet block in the middle of the afternoon on the day she disappeared, selling band candy for her daughter.

Just like he’d said.

He sank deeper into his chair. His mouth was dry. He was innocent. Ortiz knew that or she would have confiscated his computer. They would have come into his house with a warrant.

Or maybe they were waiting to find the body.

Maybe they needed just a little more for probable cause.

A knock on the door snapped him out of his reverie. His heart was pounding and his face was already flushed. He knew he looked guilty. For all his caution, he had done so much wrong.

It would only be a matter of time before someone would come to arrest him.

He managed to leave his study, walk across his living room and peer through the glass in the door.

Ortiz stood there, arms folded behind her back. There was no sign of DeCarovich.

When she saw Homer, she nodded. She didn’t smile.

Here it was: fair warning. She had come to ask if she could search his house. He would tell her to get a warrant. He would use his small fortune to hire the best criminal defense attorney in the state. He might even get his publisher’s publicist to get him some interviews on his good Samaritan deed gone wrong.

He pulled open the door.

“We found her.” Ortiz sounded tired. “And the others, most likely. I just wanted you to know. Your cats were right.”

He waited for her to say the next part, the part about searching his house or getting a warrant. But she didn’t.

She seemed to be done.

“Wow,” he said. “The photos worked?”

“There was a cat path,” she said. “The lab techs are down there now. It’s a mess. But no one would have smelled it. Too far from houses. Too far from that school.”

“The cats had to know.”

“The cats must have smelled something decaying, but it didn’t interest them. None of them are starving.”

He smiled in spite of himself. Her comment had echoed his thoughts.

And besides, she’d seen his outdoor cats. They clearly weren’t starving.

“Um,” he said. “I was wondering one other thing. Th-th-that girl? Did she run away from her mother?”

Ortiz frowned at him. “How did you know?”

“I th-th-think I found some more pictures.”

She came inside without asking, but she did take off her shoes. They had a swampy smell—or maybe she did—the beginnings of decay.

Princess and his other indoor cat, King, came out of the bedroom, sniffing the air. So that smell did attract them.

“I think I found pictures of the SUV,” he said, and told her about the underbellies of cars, how cats socialized there, and how much they seemed to like a shady spot on the road.

“We were talking to her when you called,” Ortiz said. “Poor kid. She’s going to need therapy for the rest of her life.”

He looked at the detective. She was already peering at the photographs on his computer.

“Why?”

“She says her mother went inside a house to sell band candy, and she ran away. She went to her grandmother’s, but her grandmother brought her home.”

“And no one saw the mother again.”

“That’s right,” Ortiz said. “Missing Persons wasn’t even that interested since the SUV was gone too. They figured the mother had run off.”

He pointed out the skinny leg, the pink shoes, the blur of blue-and-pink across the street.

“And you know where this is, don’t you?” Ortiz said.

He nodded.

She grinned at him. “Too bad we can’t put those cats of yours on payroll.”

“You wouldn’t like them as employees,” he said. “They go their own way.”

And it wasn’t until after she left, with more printed photographs and more files on CD, that he realized he had had an entire conversation with a woman he liked and hadn’t stammered.

At least, not much.

He thought of it as a victory.

He didn’t realize it was also the beginning of an odyssey.

Ortiz and DeCarovich got a search warrant for the surly neighbor’s house and found blood in the basement, and all sorts of other grisly things. The man had done exactly what Homer had hypothesized: killed the women (after abusing them sexually), then waited until dark and carried their bodies through the wetlands to the wider swampy area, dumping them there. Sometimes he would move their cars before he killed them, sometimes afterwards.

DeCarovich believed that there was a car dump like there was a body dump, but so far, no one had found it.

Ortiz kept Homer apprised of all of it. She even visited him a few times, always asking about his cats. Finally she told him she wanted to go to dinner with him, but she couldn’t, not until the trial was over.

The trial. He hadn’t thought of it. The grand jury, the testimony. The cross-examination.

He could already see what was coming:

He was a central part of the case—actually, his cats were—and he would feel like a failing professor all over again. Stammering his way through his stories, wishing that he could find a way to mitigate the talking part, and still explain—meticulously—his role in the arrest.

He decided to write out his testimony, to plan it, detail by detail. And as he did, he threaded the photographs through the text.

It only took him a week to figure out what he had.

A true crime book.

An unusual true crime book.

No one else had ever written anything like it.

He summoned up his courage and showed it to his agent. She loved it. She proposed a few other books as well—one just a book of photography by his cats. She showed him some curious coffee-table book from several years before of cats painting (actually just sweeping their paint-covered paws over walls and floors) and told him it had been a bestseller.

He agreed to do it all, but prosecutors wanted him to wait until his testimony was finished so that he wouldn’t be accused of helping the police for money.

He wondered how anyone would think he had rigged his cameras to his feral cats for money, but he knew that people could believe anything.

So he waited. And he testified. And he did feel humiliated.

Until Detective Ortiz—her first name was Susan—took him out for a celebratory steak dinner. She had praised him, called him brilliant, and even said he was interesting.

He didn’t feel interesting.

But he liked her attention.

He liked her.

He was so glad that the case had wrapped up quickly. He had been a star witness—not the star witness, though. That proved to be the little girl, with her father at her side, pointing out the man she’d last seen with her mother.

The surly neighbor, who no longer rolled his eyes at people who stuttered.

They had convicted him, two of the people he held in contempt. They had ended his life on the outside.

Two stammerers—two momentary stars—and five wandering cats, reluctantly sharing their secret lives bit by tiny bit.

____________________________________________

The Secret Lives of Cats

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July, 2008Published by WMG PublishingCover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © IleanaolaruDreamstime

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

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Denny and Nikki share a similar history. Or so it seems to Denny when Nikki shows up, bruised and withdrawn, in the quiet Oregon Coast town he now calls home.

But history creates a powerful pull on the psyche. Sometimes in good ways. Sometimes in bad. And sometimes, the end of a journey actually marks a new beginning.

“Hitchhiking Across an Ancient Sea” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Hitchhiking Across an Ancient SeaKristine Kathryn RuschThe prairie grass, rich and tall and fine, tickles my chest as I walk. A child could get lost here. I’m six-eight, and I feel dwarfed by the endless vista of grasses, undulating in the breeze. The air smells fresh, like a sea breeze, and I wonder what Karen will think as she stands at the edge of the prairie, land stretching far as the eye can see.

The rain slanted sideways the day Nikki arrived, hard, pelting rain without chill, the kind of storm unique to the Pacific coast. I had just pulled my boat in—the day’s catch not quite what I expected—when she stopped in front of McIver’s Store.

She was driving a brand new Volvo, dark blue, obviously a tourist car because the paint-job wouldn’t have survived in the salt-laden air more than a month. Her legs were long, her hair dark and red, her eyes covered with sunglasses despite the darkness of the day. But it wasn’t so much her body I was looking at. It was the air of silence she carried around her, like a piece of fragile glass separating her from the world. Sylvia Plath called that glass a bell jar, and I hadn’t seen one since my mother’s shattered twenty-five years before.

I left the boat and the catch to Bill, my assistant, and I hurried up the sand-covered path, not caring that I still wore my rain gear and smelled of fish. I pushed open the screen door, and let it slam back with a bang. McIver’s smelled of coffee, day-old donuts, and wood smoke. She stood in front of the cash register, sunglasses still on, hands shaking as she counted out fifteen dollars for her groceries.

Long tapered nails, painted red. Two nails on the right hand broken below the skin line. Polish chipped on the other three. A bruise growing purple between her thumb and her forefinger. I couldn’t turn away, not even then.

“Help you, Denny?” Old Man McIver asked, caution in his voice. He had seen the glasses, seen the bruise, put it all together. And he knew me. Remembered when I arrived, just as bruised, just as silent.

I grabbed the coffeepot, and poured the old brew into the remaining Styrofoam cup. “Cold one,” I said. “Damn rain kept up all day.”

“Surprised you go out in it,” McIver said. “Most of the other boys spend their days in Ike’s, drinking and waiting for the clouds to clear.”

“Most of the other boys make a half-assed living off the sea.” The cup warmed my hands.

She didn’t look up as she took the packages from McIver. “There’s a sign in your window about cottages.”

He glanced at her, then at me, both looks measuring and tough. “Yup. You interested by the week or the month?”

“Month,” she said.

He stared at me, pale blue eyes going watery in the store’s dim light. I grabbed my cup and went outside, the message clear. He wasn’t going to say a thing until I left. He saw my interest, knew that common wounds bind deep. He wanted me to leave her alone.

I leaned against a post for a minute, watching the rain slant in front of me like someone sketched it in the air. Then I wandered back down to the boat.

She and I would have time enough for talking later.

Took three nights driving to get here. Karen woke up once in Montana, looked at a daybreak sky full of clouds from the fires in Yellowstone, and said, “It’s pretty, Dad.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” And thought briefly about stopping. Who came to Montana, after all? It was long and rugged and cold. There was fishing in clear mountain streams. Not a living, maybe, but a way of life.

Then I looked over at her little four-year-old face pressed into the pillow, almost blocking the view from the passenger window, the Volvo’s plastic cracked from too much wear, and knew Montana was too harsh for us. We belong in Kansas, in prairie grasses that extend forever, willows that bow over a patch of land like islands rising out of the sea. The land is old, and has seen more bloodshed than the rest of the West combined.

So much death that a little more only enriches the soil, enriches the land.

Bloody Kansas.

We’ve come home.

When I first arrived in Emmett’s Cove, I wore a three-piece suit and shoes that shined so clearly I could see my own reflection. My only experience out of doors had been a two-day camping trip in Yosemite, where I’d spent most of my time staring at Sequoias and wondering if trees that tall were filled with wisdom. Height and wisdom once had a correlation for me: I had gotten into Northwestern on a basketball scholarship—basketball being the only escape from Chicago’s South Side, at least for boys like me. I blew out my knee second term and pulled a week’s worth of all-nighters in the hospital, studying so that I could stay even if I never walked again. I walked, but not on the court, and by the time I graduated, I had a straight-A average, and enough recommendations to get me into Harvard Law.

I graduated summa cum laude, turned down jobs with prestige firms in New York and L.A., and returned to the South Side, thinking that even though I was in private practice, I could be the Clarence Darrow of my generation. Five Cook County detectives mistaking me for a five-nine robber in a ski mask (“Why else you in the neighborhood, boy?”—a nightstick across the mouth preventing me from saying my office was half a block away), and a six-week stay in Sacred Heart Hospital changed my mind on that. Somehow I had thought that the law degree would protect me from the ignorance and violence I had grown up with. But nothing could protect me—I couldn’t even protect myself against five armed men. Perhaps it was that knowledge, more than the beating, that made me leave.

So ten years later, I knew how Nikki felt when she arrived in that Volvo: wanting space and silence in a place where no one knew her name; wishing she could hide her face, and the story it told; hoping no one would ask one small question, a tiny show of concern.

Places like Emmett’s Cove, though, the concern came in glances, in questions not asked, in answers not given and in one-hundred dollars rent for a furnished cabin that would command over five-hundred dollars in the height of the season. There was also warmth, if you knew how to find it and loneliness, everywhere you looked.

The motel room smells musty. Thin chenille bedspreads cover rubbery old blankets. Karen balks at sleeping in daylight, but I can see the exhaustion in the shadows that hollow out her eyes.

I stand at the window until her breathing evens, staring at a grouping of cottonwood trees that breaks my view of the prairie. The motel is old, used as little as the highway now that the interstate sweeps cars by this forgotten expanse of land. People here are as taciturn as people on the coast, but they’re different, rooted. It’s as if the land has reached up and wrapped itself around their ankles, drawing them inward like a slow quicksand no one wants to fight.

My daughter sighs in her sleep. She is the best of both of us: skin a fine milk chocolate, hair a deep brown with red highlights—not quite auburn, not quite black. Wrapped in the chenille, she looks small and desperate, her tiny hands clutching a stuffed dog that somehow survived the fiery house.

We need roots, Karen and I. Not a past to chase us like an angry demon across a burning landscape, but roots to hold us, so we can turn and face that past with the strength of generations.

I hope we’ll find that strength here, in the prairie, on land that once stood beneath the waters of an ancient sea.

I found the cottage easily enough. Nikki made no attempt to hide the Volvo, which spoke to two possibilities: she had been planning her escape for a long time and the Volvo was new or no one remained to look for her. Her lack of caution suggested no one remained.

Every evening, she walked on the beach, arms wrapped around her despite the oversized cable sweater she wore. I began bringing my boat back early, sometimes abandoning a sweet run, much to Bill’s chagrin. He worked with me because I worked, one of the few in this town who refused to let the sea beat me. I learned fishing from Old Man McIver during two tough years when I was always cold, always aching. I figured that if the sea beat me, I would have nothing left, having let the urban jungle close its door behind me.

A week into my changed routine, Bill abandoned a line to see me standing at the prow. His gaze followed mine, rooted on Nikki standing near Cutter’s Rock, looking thin and forlorn. He stared with me for a moment, then grunted. “That explains it,” he said, and went back to his work.

But it didn’t, not really. I had lived in Emmett’s Cove for a decade. Lived alone, had few friends, and never dated. My house had become my refuge, filled with hundreds of books, recordings, and videos. Sometimes I drove inland, sold my fish to a handful of stores beyond my regulars, or attended a class in Portland or Salem, but rarely did I spend time with anyone else.

And I was not the only one with this solitary routine. Emmett’s Cove stood at the mouth of an isolated stretch of beach. Highway 101 went through, but most drivers never made it that far. They turned on one of the highways leading to civilization. Emmett’s Cove would have died decades before if it weren’t for the great fishing just off the inlet. Tourists drove through in the summer, but most drove on, searching for towns with artsy-crafty shops and twenty-four hour grocery stores. Part-time fishermen took the summer cabins, and everyone else belonged.

Or was a refugee like me, running from an unsettled score, a violent past. Living in a kind of stasis, waiting for the world to catch up.

That night I got off the boat, removed my gear, and washed up in the small shed at the edge of the dock. Bill took care of the line and the catch, shaking his head all the while. I walked down the beach to Cutter’s Rock, keeping my pace friendly, splashing at the wave’s edges to make my presence known.

Still, Nikki jumped when I said hello.

She wasn’t wearing her sunglasses. Her right eye was purplish yellow and swollen almost shut. Four fading bruises ran like fingerprints down one cheek, with a matching thumbprint near her jaw. She didn’t smile at me. In fact, she took half a step back.

I held out my hands to show I meant no harm. My height, my very presence on an Oregon beach was enough to unnerve most people. “I come in peace,” I said, only half humorously.

She nodded once, gaze skittering away from me like a stone atop of waves. I stood beside her. From the land, the ocean looked like a picture postcard, dressed up with salt and sea tang, an unreal vista. On the boat, I felt like a beetle on the back of a lion. One false move and I would fall to my death.

“It’s like standing on the edge of the world,” I said.

Maybe that was what it was. We had run so far we couldn’t run any farther. The coastal mountains rose behind us like giants guarding a fairyland.

“Sometimes I pretend that the rest of the world has gone away,” I said. “There’s only us, here. Now.”

I got the smile then. It lit her entire face, made the bruises fade, gave her a beauty I only suspected she possessed. “I wish,” she said, the words plaintive and full of such longing that I felt to continue the conversation would diminish us both.

We stood, side by side, until the ocean swallowed the sun, and night surrounded us.

At daybreak, Karen and I walk down the dusty back highway that will lead us to the creek. I have filled my backpack with two vacuum bottles filled with water, prepackaged sandwiches from the grocery store, and a bunch of bananas. Karen carries her stuffed dog, not quite understanding this pilgrimage, but willing to go along with it.

As the road plunges into the prairie, she stops and holds up her hands, a wordless request that I carry her. I pick her up and we stare at the grass. Waves rippled through it as the breeze touches it. Karen watches with a solemnity she once had for the ocean. The stuffed dog lies between us, a soft barrier. Dust whirls around us. The day will be hot.

At the base of the hollow stand three oak trees. A half-dry creek runs between them, and on one side is a half-collapsed barn. A few yards away, a fireplace stands like a lone sentry.

A hundred and thirty-five years ago, my great-grandmother hid under the hay in this barn, listening as white men circled outside, their dogs baying. She had seen her father attacked by dogs—barely enough of him left to lynch, she once said—and she knew if she got found the dogs wouldn’t get her first. For three hours, she didn’t move, scarcely breathed, felt hay tickle her nose, her chin, her very being.

Finally they left. At dawn, her contact, a big, eastern white man named Sam came, wrapped her in a blanket and stuck her in the back of his car like a slab of sausage. He went through three picket points, telling guards in a joking tone that he had runaway slaves in the back of his cart. The guards all laughed, never checked, and she made it to Chicago, where she lived long enough to tell a little boy that if she had it to do over again, she would have gone back to Kansas, because that was where freedom began.

“Is this it?” Karen asks, clearly disappointed.

“This is it,” I say, wishing that it felt more like home.

Somehow I expected the earth to reach up here and grab me, small vines that would circle my ankles and pull me inward. But my daughter and I sit in the shade, feeling the humidity grow as the sun shortens the shadows. I feel the history seeping out of the land. If I close my eyes, I can almost see my great-grandmother’s childish face, drawn tight with terror. And before her, the generation of nomadic peoples who fished the prairie as if the sea waters never retreated. The land was old, and I was only a heartbeat in its history.

“Ready to go?” I ask.

Karen nods.

I take her hand, and we make our way back up the dusty trail, the heat fierce against our backs. We have nowhere left to go. Our search for home is like the Christian search for the grail. It rises like a beacon before us, but we can never touch it. We will remain, forever, hitchhikers crossing an ancient sea.

The first time was as natural as breathing. One moment we were in Nikki’s living room, the next between the sheets, my dark hand covering her white. She tasted of rainwater and summer sunshine. And I was gentle, especially after I saw the scars tracing her skin like war wounds.

She never told me. I never asked. But over the years I pieced it together.

He had been a colleague, a bit older, more confident. The attraction was rich and fine, fraught with danger that blossomed under stress or after too many drinks. And she, somehow, grew to believe she deserved it, grew to think his fists were part of his love. Until the night in the grocery store parking lot, where a fight erupted into a beating, the beating into a brawl. She lost the baby; he lost his life; and at the hospital, the detective told her they would file no charges, since it was clearly self-defense.

To the detective perhaps. To Nikki the incident spoke of the possibilities of love. She wore the bell jar as protection, guarding a side I would never touch, no matter how gentle my finger, how soft my tone. After Karen, the bell jar became more fragile—perhaps a baby’s cries were more threatening than my masculine needs—and when it shattered, the shards fell over all of us.

Another man resides in the hotel. Fortyish, he fancies himself a Midwestern Christo. He is working on a masterpiece in the prairie. He will unveil it in two days.

We sit on rusted metal lawn furniture and drink beer in late summer twilight, just after I put Karen to bed. His hands are gnarled, his face sea-weathered. I wonder if he has lived on the coast.

I tell him about my search. He laughs, voice booming across the expanse of land.

“People like you,” he says, “do not know how to live. You encounter tragedy and flee as if it were the enemy, instead of embracing it and all of its possibilities. And because you run, you do not feel, and because you do not feel, you do not live.”

I stand then, unwilling to let a man I hardly know make pronouncements about my life.

“See?” he says. “You run, even now.”

I go inside. The day’s heat is trapped in here. Karen’s legs poke out of the sheets, her hair sprawled across the pillow. I close the windows, turn on the ancient air conditioner, figuring its rattle is preferable to the heat. Karen sighs once and turns. I cover her, then sit in the darkness and watch her sleep.

I knew even before the sirens began. Out on the boat, just beyond the inlet, I made Bill turn back. “Squall?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

Perhaps I saw unconscious cues. Perhaps I saw the smoke. Or perhaps I had a premonition. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that as soon as the boat scraped the dock I was off and running toward the house.

Smoke billowed around the point, black and ugly. The sirens started when I was two blocks away. I arrived to find Karen on the front lawn, arms wrapped around her stuffed dog, rocking back and forth. The house was engulfed—not even the volunteer firefighters would go inside.

There had been small signs, sure. An unexplained fire on top of the stove. A space heater catching a towel. Somehow I always found a reason that had nothing to do with Nikki. Karen didn’t understand that towels on heaters caused fires. Karen splattered grease on the stove. Never noticing, of course, that each time, Karen had been outside, safe and protected, her stuffed dog for company.

Hard to believe that a woman I loved was unstable. Harder still to believe that all the things we never talked about, all the hints, the imagined stories, might not have linked us after all.

I didn’t want to think that I had not been enough, that the shattered place inside Nikki finally engulfed her like fire engulfed the wooden house.

All Karen and I had left was the Volvo. The insurance man tracked us down, didn’t meet my gaze when he apologized for the death of my wife, as if it were his fault, as if his insurance didn’t provide the proper magic. His check bought us clothes and the ability to travel. I rented the boat to Bill, and we left.

Running again from the scene of a crime.

The day of the unveiling is cool and spring-like, odd for Kansas in July. We wander down a gravel road, a group of pilgrims united only in our quest to see what an artist has created in the prairie heat.

Karen walks beside me, stuffed dog tucked under her arm. He has not left her side since the fire, her own magic against all future tragedies. She holds me too, as if her grip ensures that I will never leave her.

We haven’t talked about the fire, have said little to each other since we left the coast. The shadows under her eyes have grown deeper, and I wonder if perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we should have stayed and faced the burned-down ruin, discussed the scars that tragedy left.

I pick Karen up and squeeze her. She squawks in protest. I put her down, and we walk together, a part of a Kansas crowd going to see a Kansas event.

The artist is there, sitting on top of his pickup truck, as immobile as a statue. He doesn’t acknowledge me, even when I wave. He watches the people pass by, listens as the gasps rise.

I am taller, so I can see it from the rise. Three sails rising out of prairie grass, looking forever like a ship sailing the inland sea. The grass undulates around it, waves battering its sides. An emptiness flows through me, a longing deeper than any I had ever felt before.

Karen tugs my arm. “Daddy,” she says, and I realize she cannot see. I pick her up, feeling her four-year-old weight. Someday she will be too big to hold. Someday, she will be all grown up, with passions of her own.

I point and her gaze follows, then she gasps and squirms again. I cannot hold her. She slips through my arms and into the grass, only the ripples showing her passage.

“Karen!” I follow, half embarrassed by her outburst, but unable to prevent her passage. The artist stands on his truck, watching. The crowd is silent. I trace the ripples as I would the wake of a boat, and reach the sails a moment after Karen.

They are three tall masts pounded into the earth, the grass hollowed out around them to simulate a ship. She walks around and around, looking lost. The she kicks a sail. The shiver runs along the mast, makes the fabric slap in a non-existent breeze.

“It’s not real,” she says.

I grab her, pull her into my arms. She fights against me for a moment, then collapses against my shoulder, deep wracking sobs flowing from her chest. The passion missing from me and my wife has found a home in our child. The roots I’m searching for Karen already has. They’re on a coast half a continent away, near a burned-out house overlooking the sea.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and the words have more power than I ever thought they could. I stand and carry my sobbing daughter out of the waving grass.

She is right. The sea is not here. It receded eons ago to a world filled with sharp edges, with cliffs and rocks and slanting rain. Odd to have found a beacon and be blinded by its light. I never knew what I had because I never let myself see.

I emerge covered with dirt and straw. Like my great-grandmother, a hundred and thirty-five years before, I feel free. She was right. Freedom begins in Kansas, but she was wrong too. It is something we can take home with us. And I learned it, not from an old woman near death, but from a young girl near birth.

The artist smiles at us as we walk past. Karen shifts in my arms, body calm after her bout of tears. I nod once, glad to be embracing life.

____________________________________________

Hitchhiking Across an Ancient Sea

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Grails, Quests, Visitations And Other Occurrences, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Gilliam and Ed Kramer, Unnamable Press, 1992Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Jill Battaglia/Dreamstime

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

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I put together a fun video for Pulphouse Magazine just in time for the annual subscription renewal Kickstarter, which began Tuesday. I had initially set this post to go up automatically on Tuesday, but it didn’t for some reason. Sigh.

So I’m letting you know now. We’ve hit four stretch goals so far, and we’re trying to hit another over the weekend. (120 backers by Sunday.) This means that if you back the Kickstarter, you’ll get your six issue subscription with really great fiction inside and four anthologies. Writers will get several opportunities to send stories to Pulphouse which is truly special because the magazine is closed to submissions most of the time.

I also put together the Kickstarter video, which is fun, but not as much fun as this one. Yep, I’m playing with iMovie only because I haven’t had the time (literally) to relearn a much more sophisticated program. I’m getting there. I’m hoping my time frees up soon.

In the meantime, I need two things from you. The second thing first: check out the Kickstarter. Lots of great rewards and even more wonderful fiction. First thing second: watch the video below. Enjoy!

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Pamela Jackson’s secrets forced her to change her identity and move to the Oregon Coast.

When Pamela finds herself called to jury duty—and worse, selected for the jury on a murder trial—she fears she must see it through to keep up appearances as an upstanding citizen.

But Pamela might know a little too much about murder to pull it off.

“Jury Duty,” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Jury DutyKristine Kathryn RuschPamela sat in the center of the courtroom, not too close to the front because she didn’t want to call attention to herself, and not in the back because she didn’t want people to think she was hiding. She had done everything she could to blend in: she wore no make-up, and her clothes were Northwest business casual—a pair of brown slacks with an off-white sweater. With her left hand, she fingered her juror number—267—thoughtfully provided on a little wooden keychain so that she wouldn’t lose it.

The court clerk pulled numbers out of a box and handed them to the judge. He was balding, and the top of his head shone in the fluorescent lights. His nasal voice boomed through the courtroom without the aid of a microphone, “Five-hundred-and-eighty-one. Five, eight, one.”

As the unlucky man rose from his seat on the left side of the courtroom, the remaining members of the jury pool swiveled to watch him walk toward the jury box. Six people sat there already, hands folded, heads down, waiting.

The judge had said they would pick twenty-seven, enough for two juries and three extras. Both juries would listen to the case, although one jury would be designated as “alternate.” The remaining three people were alternates also, added protection for a death penalty case that could last over a month.

Pamela had been called up two weeks ago, along with 1,000 others out of this county of 50,000, and she had stood in her kitchen, clutching the letter, feeling an uncomfortable sense of irony.

When she had come to Rickets Rock, a town so small that it seldom showed up on any map, she had decided that she would live as quietly as she could. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, good or bad. That meant getting a driver’s license, registering to vote, being a good citizen. It meant concocting a history, and trying to smile at the locals. It meant lying, each and every day.

The jury summons had caught her in the lie: she couldn’t back out because she had used a false name on her voter registration form. She had to go along with the fiction that she was Pamela Jackson, and hope that something about Pamela would keep her off the largest and most notorious jury the county had seen in decades.

“Juror thirty-four,” the judge said. “Three-four.”

A woman two seats from Pamela stood, and nearly tripped as she tried to get out of the row. Pamela kept turning her number over and over, the hard wood edges catching on her fingertips.

She had decided, when she had gone to orientation and received the outrageously long questionnaire, that she wouldn’t lie if at all possible: she knew that trying to remember too many lies had tripped up more than one person.

So she had placed her personal views on the pages, thinking that they would disqualify her. Particularly the carefully worded questions on pages 10 through 13, the ones about law, the death penalty, and murder.

Question 33: Do you believe that some acts are so heinous that they can only be punished by death?

To which she had replied: Yes.

Question 50: Have you known or are you related to anyone who was murdered?

To which she had replied: Yes.

And Question 117: Do you believe Raymond Northrup is guilty of the crimes of which he has been accused?

To which she had replied: I could care less.

She had felt certain that the defense attorney, going through the questionnaires, would demand she be taken out of the jury pool, especially when she had had to explain her answer to question 50 on a later questionnaire. (How was the deceased related to you? Husband; Explain the circumstances of the death: He was a jackass. Of course, she didn’t write that. Instead, she made up a lie about a beloved uncle who died in a convenience store robbery.)

“Two-sixty-seven,” the judge said. “Two, six, seven.”

Pamela’s hand clenched around the number. She touched her round juror button, pinned to her sweater, and cursed silently. Her luck had abandoned her.

Now her goal was to be dismissed in the voir dire.

She grabbed her book—Patricia Cornwell’s treatise on forensics and Jack the Ripper—and slung her purse over her shoulder.

Then Pamela eased out of the row, past the loggers and the truck drivers and the waitresses, and walked, head down, shoulders slumped forward, to the jury box.

Her heart was pounding. She had often pictured herself in a courtroom, but not here, not among the jury.

Instead, she expected to be at the tables, an attorney beside her, defending what was left of her miserable little life.

Another half hour went by before the rest of the twenty-seven victims were chosen. Then the questioning began, starting with the first juror picked, a dapper man who was the only person in the room, besides the attorneys, to wear a suit. Fifteen minutes into his voir dire, he was dismissed for claiming he did not have a strong stomach.

As he stepped down, the clerk drew a new number from the box, and another prospective juror took the first juror’s place.

Pamela noted the excuse, and apparently so had the second juror. He made the same claim, which caused the judge to issue a gusty sigh.

“If we dismiss everyone with a weak stomach, we’ll have no one left.” He faced the defense attorney, who had posed the question. “If you believe these crimes are too graphic, we’ll make sure there’ll be no crime scene photos after lunch and we’ll provide sickness bags, just like the airlines. Now, move on.”

Pamela was the first up after the luncheon break. She returned to the courtroom loggy from the personal pan she’d had at the nearby Pizza Hut, and exhausted by a morning of listening to other people’s lives.

During lunch she had toyed with changing her strategy, possibly saying that she did not approve of the death penalty or that she did not believe a person was innocent until proven guilty. But all of those answers would have contradicted her juror’s questionnaire, a questionnaire that had informed her on the top of every page that her answers had the force of answers given under oath.

A new answer would call attention to her. If she was lucky, she would escape without much attention being paid to her at all.

Finally, the attorneys reached her. She had to repeat her name and her address.

“You own a bookstore, Ms. Jackson?” The prosecutor, Daphne Sullivan, stood in front of the jury box. She was a middle-aged woman who wore a stylish black suit that seemed out of place in this small county.

“Yes.” Main Street Books, the new-and-used bookstore she had opened in what passed for Rickets Rock’s downtown. When she had first received her jury letter, she had hoped that being a small business owner would disqualify her, but the clerk of courts had quizzed her, found out that she had a part-time assistant, and that the store sometimes closed when Pamela planned a day off, and decided that the store could afford to lose Pamela for a few weeks with little or no hardship.

“Do you enjoy reading?” Sullivan asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you often read books like that one?” Sullivan nodded at the Cornwell.

“Yes.” That was a deliberate lie, one concocted to get Pamela off the jury.

“Would you hold the book up so that everyone can see it?”

Pamela did. Her copy, a hardcover with a shiny dust, looked black and official.

“We won’t have to worry about a weak stomach with this one,” the judge muttered, even his soft words echoing throughout the courtroom.

“Do you watch CSI?” Sullivan asked.

“Sometimes,” Pamela said.

“Cold Case Files? The forensics programs on The Learning Channel?”

“Sometimes,” Pamela said.

“So you feel you have a grasp on the forensic side of police procedure?” Sullivan asked.

Pamela shrugged.

The judge said, “We’ll need a verbal response for the record, Ms. Jackson.”

“When you say ‘a grasp,’ I don’t know what that means,” Pamela said.

“Do you understand it?” Sullivan said.

“It’s just science,” Pamela said.

“And you understand science?”

Of course, you fool. I have more advanced degrees in biology and chemistry than you can dream up.

Pamela had to bite back the response. She wasn’t a scientist now. She owned a bookstore. She was a mousy woman with mousy clothes who tried to disappear when people looked at her.

“I try to understand it,” she said, which was as close to the truth as she could come.

“I have no problem with this juror,” the prosecutor said, and turned toward the defense attorney, Jake Chivara.

He was too slick for this part of Oregon. His suit had the shine of silk, and his hands were manicured. His black hair had a layered cut that cost more than Pamela’s entire outfit, but his eyes shone with an intelligence that she recognized as a match for her own.

He adjusted his suit coat as he walked toward the rail. “Do you consider murder your hobby?”

Her fingers clutched the book, its hard edges biting into her palm. “My hobby?”

He nodded toward the book she held. “You read about it. You watch television programs about it. You obviously think about it a lot.”

True enough. She didn’t like how perceptive he was. “I watch television programs about politics and biography and history, too, but I don’t consider them my hobbies. I live alone. I run a bookstore. I read almost everything that comes through the door.”

“But you brought that book for a reason, didn’t you?” Chivara asked.

“To read while I waited,” she said.

“You could have brought a romance novel,” he said.

She shrugged. “I would have finished it in the time allowed. I wanted something that would last me all day.”

“Be honest, Ms. Jackson. You brought that book so that we’d assume you know police procedure. You wanted to force us to kick you off the jury.”

She looked at him in surprise and knew, at that moment, she had been caught. She had never been caught before, at least, not in her manipulations. It was a strange sensation.

Chivara smiled at her. “I don’t like being manipulated, Ms. Jackson.”

Pamela’s hands slid on the book’s cover. She was sweating.

“Your questionnaire says you believe that some crimes should be punished by death,” Chivara said.

“Yes.” She swallowed hard. This was the first time, in all of the questioning, that someone had mentioned the questionnaire.

“Does that mean you believe in the death penalty?” he asked.

“I haven’t given it any thought.” At least not in that way. The law was the law and she had nothing do with it. She didn’t plan it nor could she change it. Human laws weren’t immutable like scientific ones, but they existed and nowadays she did her best to live within them.

“Do you have a problem sending a man to his death?” he asked.

“Not in the right circumstances.” Her answer had too much of an edge to it. She wished she could take the words back the moment she uttered them.

Chivara smiled again. “What sorts of circumstances, Ms. Jackson?”

Her mouth was dry. “I thought we were talking about the death penalty.”

“We are. What circumstances? These circumstances?”

“If he did it,” she said.

“Do you think he did it?” Chivara asked.

“I could care less,” she said, repeating her answer from the questionnaire.

“Really? You don’t care one way or another?”

She didn’t like this attorney. He was irritating her. “Unless you put me on this jury, this crime has no impact on my life. I don’t really care what that man did. I don’t really care what the President does either, and he has a lot larger impact on my life than some petty murderer.”

“Petty murderer,” Chivara repeated softly. “You’re quite interesting, Ms. Jackson. You know science and read about the law, but you say this case doesn’t concern you. If we put you on the jury, would you care then?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’d just be doing this because you’re making me.”

Chivara’s smile became broad. “At least you’re honest.”

He walked back to his table, examined his notes, and then leaned over the railing, clearly speaking to his jury consultant.

Pamela’s heart pounded hard. She tried to keep an impassive expression on her face, but she found it difficult. For the first time since she’d shown up in this courtroom, she was frightened.

After a moment, Chivara looked up.

“Ms. Jackson, do you know my client?” Chivara swept his arm toward the defendant. Until this moment, Pamela had refrained from looking at him.

She had seen his photograph on the county newspapers and once on the front page of the Oregonian, but she hadn’t really looked at him. Nor had she looked at him the one or two times he waited on her.

“We’ve never formally met,” she said.

“But you have met,” the attorney said.

“He waited on me once at the Sneaker Wave,” she said. “And at the Italian Noodle.”

“Did you have a conversation?”

She shrugged, then added for the record, “Probably not.”

“Probably not?” Chivara repeated.

“I go out alone with a book,” she said. “I usually don’t have conversations.”

Truthful again.

Chivara’s eyes narrowed, and she had the sense that he thought she was holding something back.

Chivara turned away, and she hoped he would dismiss her for cause. Instead, he said, “I have no problems with this juror.”

The judge turned to her. “Is there any reason you believe you should not sit on this jury?”

Dozens. She had dozens of reasons, but none she could admit to. Neither attorney had given her a way out.

“I don’t know if I can be impartial,” she said, “given that I’ve met him.”

The judge let out another of his gusty sighs. “The interactions you’ve had with the defendant are no different than sitting across a courtroom from him day in and day out. So give it a try, Ms. Jackson.”

“Your honor,” Chivara said, “this is why we wanted the trial moved.”

“You made that motion and I dismissed it,” the judge said. “If you want to try this case for the court of appeals and not for the jury, go ahead, Mr. Chivara. Otherwise, get over the loss and move on.”

Pamela’s cheeks were warm. Her ploy hadn’t worked, might even have backfired.

“Juror two-six-seven,” the judge said, “you’ll be sitting on this case.”

Since it was the off-season, the cut-rate hotel that the court used to sequester juries was happy to have them. The jurors even got to have their own rooms, a luxury for which Pamela was grateful. She didn’t like company in the best of circumstances, and this certainly was not the best of circumstances.

That first two days in the courtroom were difficult, especially for the other jurors. The prosecution laid out its case, and the defense gave its own theory of the crime. Most of the jurors were already familiar with the crime, but the details made them squeamish.

Pamela didn’t mind the details, but she had trouble wrapping her mind around the crime at all.

Apparently, the defendant, Raymond Northrup, arrived home one afternoon in a rage. He shot his wife, his two daughters, and his infant son, supposedly planning to kill himself as well. In the end, he chickened out (or “came to his senses,” as Prosecutor Sullivan said), and called 9-1-1 instead. The paramedics arrived to find a house filled with blood, and Ray Northrup sitting on the couch, watching reruns of The Simpsons as if nothing was wrong.

The prosecution promised pictures and the tape of the 9-1-1 call; the defense promised experts showing how the police botched the investigation, figuring that they already had the killer when, of course, the defense claimed, they had not.

Pamela listened with—she thought—clinical detachment, picturing both versions of the crime: a man pushed to his limits by bills, sick children and a nagging wife, hauling the shotgun out of the front closet and turning it on all of them; and the same man pushed to his limits, who arrived home after a hard day’s work as a waiter (he could get nothing else in this small town) to find his entire family slaughtered.

But the clinical detachment didn’t take, or perhaps it was a façade, designed to fool even herself. For that night, and two nights thereafter, Pamela had the nightmare, the one she had fled when she had come to Oregon.

The images were jumbled: Jason stumbling backwards, his hand up; Jason on the floor, his face gone; Jason’s blood staining the wall beside their stove. She started to grab things—her ring, his watch, their checkbook, and then she set them down.

She knew better—even her dreamself knew better—and instead, she took the cash from the drawer, and the bike leaning against the old Billingsly house next door.

More images from before: the water from the shower draining pink; her clothing in the wash machine, the smell of bleach in the air; the half-eaten ham sandwich that had started it all.

She had been clutching it, trying to force it down, when he had walked in. You can’t do anything right, she had said to him. I wanted hot mustard, not sweet. Don’t you ever listen?

His voice, meek and soft, infuriated her, and at that moment, she woke up, covered in sweat, shaking, uncertain where she was, figuring at first it was some anonymous hotel on the trip west, then remembering how she had gotten herself into this new predicament years after the fact.

The hotel looked the same as the others: a double-bed barely bigger than the single she’d had in her first apartment; end-tables so cheap that if she leaned on them, they’d crack; a television set bolted to the dresser, and a double-size window with a single pane of glass so thin that it could shatter with the pressure of a determined fist.

Pamela got up and paced, her feet cold against the worn carpet. She was glad she was alone—who knew what she had cried out, what she had actually said?

That first night, she didn’t go back to the bed, sleeping instead on the scratchy sofa, an equally scratchy blanket pulled over her scrunched-up form. She didn’t sleep much and when she did, she dreamed of being uncomfortable, not of the past.

And she returned to that couch after every day of difficult testimony, after every photograph and replaying of the 9-1-1 call, until the clinical detachment she thought she had achieved that first day became an actual reality.

She could listen, store facts, theories, and opinions in one side of her brain, and kept them separate from the other side.

The emotion side.

The side that had always given her too much trouble.

Three-plus weeks of testimony, arguments, breaks and confusion. Three-plus weeks of “retiring” to the jury room to wait while the lawyers and the judge worked something out. Three-plus weeks of small talk with people who probably never would have entered her store, people who probably hadn’t voluntarily picked up a book in their lives, people who—with the exception of the transplanted Californian—had never lived anywhere but here.

Small minds with nothing but television and the trial to occupy them. Talk of the trial was off-limits until the testimony was over, so the Small Minds discussed the previous night’s Frasier or the Buffy rerun or the late-night movie they were given on tape so they wouldn’t watch the local news and talk shows.

She didn’t watch any of it. She didn’t discuss any of it either, preferring to read. The guards—at least they felt like guards—let her assistant deliver books, sometimes four and five a day, and Pamela read rather than socialized. So long as her mind was busy, her body remained calm.

The guards would paw through the bags, of course, verifying that everything Pamela’s assistant brought were books, verifying that her assistant hadn’t hid a newspaper article about the trial as a bookmark, verifying that there was no note advising her how to vote at the end of the trial.

But no one looked at the titles either. She finished the Cornwell, moved onto a history of the fingerprint, then followed that with a history of the corpse. A few tomes on forensics, a study of ballistics, and of course, dozens and dozens of novels—all shapes and sizes.

She read and thought and listened, and wished she had known all of this years ago, before she had come west. She would have done things oh so very differently. How easy it would have been to make it seem like he had gotten angry over the sandwich, he had hit her repeatedly, he had grabbed the gun.

But she hadn’t known any of it. She had done the best she could with the little bits of knowledge she had, and she had managed to escape.

She lived here now, a new life she mostly enjoyed, and saw no use re-evaluating every second of the past.

Then, finally, the moment arrived. The closing arguments ended, the jury instructions were repeated ad nauseum, the defendant staring at jurors as if he were trying to fathom what each and every one of them were thinking.

This time, when they went into the jury room, there was a palpable sense of relief. The restrictions were off: they could discuss anything now, and the Small Minds all started to talk at once, offering opinions, offering advice, discussing what an ordeal they’d been through, how they couldn’t stand the pictures.

Pamela couldn’t stand the voices. Middle-class, grating, most of them with that slightly dulled speech she’d learned to recognize from locals. She sat in one of the upholstered chairs nearest the door, and wondered how she would get through this.

The jury room itself was small with two exits—one leading back into the courtroom, the other into the hallway. The room had no windows. Whoever had designed this room had certainly visited and obviously enjoyed the ambiance of hell’s anteroom, because even the temperature was correct: hot enough to make the already small space seem unbearably stuffy.

“Right, Ms. Jackson?”

She heard her name and looked up. The transplanted Californian was looking at her. He was a wiry blond with a scraggly mustache whose rope-thin body and denim shirt made him look like a man who belonged outdoors, not trapped in a room furnished with modular office chairs and a cheap fake-wood conference table.

“I’m sorry,” she said, peering at his name badge. Z. Wilson. She should have learned his name in the past few weeks. She should have learned all of their names, but of course, she hadn’t.

“I said, I think we should get around to electing a foreman first, then talk about the case. What do you think?” His blue eyes studied her with an openness she didn’t like. Obviously he expected her to be on his side.

“Looks like you’re already doing a fine job,” she said. “We don’t need a vote.”

“We’ll vote.” His voice had that irritated edge Jason used to get when she didn’t give him the answer he liked.

She leaned back in her chair, deciding to give Z. Wilson some distance.

The woman who wore the giant silver cross on the front of her blouse each and every day reached to the center of the table and took twelve little pieces of paper from a notepad. Then she grabbed pencils and handed them out as if she were a school teacher.

She gave Pamela her paper and pencil last, smiling at her. Pamela did not smile back.

“Perhaps,” said the Silver Cross, “perhaps we should say a small prayer so that God will guide our work.”

“A small prayer?” Pamela asked, unable to keep silent in the face of this new irritation. “What kind of guidance do you want? Dearest God, please let us know if you want this killer to go free or if you want the state to fry him. Amen.”

“Ms. Jackson,” said the Californian. “That’s enough.”

She shrugged and pressed her lips together, but she had made her point. Two of the Small Minds who hadn’t said anything yet—the first man chosen, and one of the other women—glared at Pamela as if she had killed the three children and the namby-pamby wife.

The wife, quite frankly, sounded like she deserved it, but the kids, well, Pamela didn’t believe in killing kids. Kids couldn’t be blamed for the situations they found themselves in. Only the parents were responsible for that.

“Write down the name of the person you think most suited for jury foreman,” the Californian said. “Then put your paper in this little bowl next to the notepad. Don’t sign your name.”

“Why don’t we just have a real election?” Pamela asked, clutching her pencil. “You and whoever else is enough of a control freak to want this idiot job?”

“You mean you?” another Small Mind asked.

“I don’t want it,” Pamela said.

“Vote for whomever you’d like,” the Californian said.

Pamela sighed and shook her head. Then she wrote down Z. Wilson: Because I believe in validating power grabs, folded the paper into tiny squares and set it in the bowl.

Hers was the sixth. One Small Mind—a twenty-something man who was already going bald—chewed his pencil and looked from person to person before writing on his paper. He was the eleventh to put his vote in the bowl. The Silver Cross lady was the last, and she looked spooked.

“Mr. Acenan,” the Californian said to yet another Small Mind, “would you mind reading the results? Mrs. Dunbar will tally them.”

The Dunbar woman took another sheet of paper from the stack and held her pencil poised. The man dug inside the bowl, removed a piece of paper and read the results aloud.

Pamela wished she could take the book out of her purse. Who would’ve thought that average citizens would take this job so very seriously?

The Small Mind reading the papers had finally gotten to Pamela’s. He glanced at her, his face flushed, and only read the name, not the commentary.

“You know,” Pamela said mildly, “censorship is against the law.”

“And you’re a disgrace,” the Small Mind said, still clutching her paper. “Can’t you be serious about this?”

She thought of answering him honestly, but she knew the word “no” would piss him off. So she said, “I just want to get down to business. I’ve already lost a month of my life to this mess. I don’t want to lose another one because you people dither.”

“An election isn’t dithering, Ms. Jackson,” the Californian said.

“You’ve already taken over,” Pamela said. “Why do we have to bother with the election?”

“Because,” the Californian said, “it’s part of the instructions. See? Item four. Elect a jury foreperson.”

“You said foreman before. Can I change my vote?” Pamela asked. “I didn’t consider any women.”

Someone made a sound of disgust. Mrs. Dunbar said loudly, “We already have a majority for Mr. Wilson. So he is our foreperson, unless there’s an objection.”

Pamela almost objected, just out of spite. She had to entertain herself somehow. But she was beginning to realize that her own antics might prolong this already painful situation, so she said nothing.

She crossed her arms and listened to Mr. California-Wilson read the jury instructions that the judge had already read to them, then ask if there were any questions that needed discussion or clarification before they got down to the “nitty-gritty.”

Everyone said no, except Pamela, of course, who really didn’t like the grade-school way this deliberation session was turning out. But she had decided to be quiet, and so she would be. She listened, or pretended to, while the jury discussed the rules, then reviewed the rules, and then discussed them even more.

Finally, at four o’clock, Mr. California-Wilson suggested that they take a preliminary vote—gosh! Just like the instructions suggested!—to see how far apart they all were. The vote would be anonymous, of course, and all the little pieces of paper would go into that damn bowl again.

She put her little piece of paper on top of her book, a novel called A Certain Justice which Pamela had chosen more out of irony than interest, and then paused.

She really hadn’t given the fate of Mr. Raymond Northrup much thought, although she had done her part. She had listened, without prejudice and with that hard-won clinical detachment, to days and days of repetitive testimony, to argumentative lawyers and bad judicial rulings, to witnesses who hadn’t known a damn thing and to witnesses who believed they had.

She had listened, she had absorbed, and she had come to no conclusion.

Yet they were asking her for one now. And if she was going to be the good citizen she was pretending to be, she had to give a real opinion. She supposed finding him guilty would get her out of here the quickest. After all, that was what the Small Minds seemed to believe, if their post-trial conversation was any indication.

But she couldn’t write guilty on her piece of paper. Her hand froze over the page every single time. She was stunned to discover that the decision really did matter to her.

After all, she could have been the person sitting next to Chivara. She could have been pacing some jail cell right now, wondering if 12 disparate people would sentence her to a lifetime of imprisonment. She owed Northrup as much consideration as she had, mostly because she hoped someone would give her the same consideration if (when?) her time came.

She bit her lower lip, then glanced up at the bowl. It looked full. A number of the Small Minds were staring at her again.

Her hand shook over the paper. She gripped the pencil tightly and wrote Not, leaving off the guilty. She didn’t want Mr. California-Wilson to misconstrue her intent.

She folded her piece of paper in half this time, just like everyone else had, and then she shoved it into the bowl. The Silver Cross woman grabbed it and handed it to California-Wilson as if he weren’t capable of grabbing it himself.

He nodded toward the Dunbar woman and she got out yet another piece of paper so that she could tally the results.

Pamela expected more than one not-guilty vote. After all, it was pretty obvious that Northrup didn’t have the balls to kill his entire family, no matter how angry and frustrated he got.

But she was the only not-guilty. California-Wilson tried not to ask for names, but she knew they’d find out, so she admitted it.

And that was when the clerk of the courts arrived, and told them to break for the night.

The next morning, the Small Minds had game plan ready. They were going to review the evidence to convince her.

“Don’t you want to know why I think he didn’t do it?” Pamela asked.

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Silver Cross said. “You obviously didn’t care enough to listen.”

“I listened,” Pamela said. “I even made notes every evening. Did you people bother doing that?”

No one answered her. No one even looked at her.

“Look,” she said. “I could change my vote so that we could get the hell out of here. Lord knows, I don’t ever want to see you people again. But I don’t think this guy did it, and I’m not going to send him to jail just because I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

She was rather proud of herself. She sounded like a Real Citizen, like someone who cared about her fellow man.

“So,” Mr. California-Wilson said with a notable lack of interest, “why do you think he didn’t do it?”

“Because,” Pamela said, careful to keep her tone respectful and polite, “he didn’t run.”

“Most people know better than to run,” Wilson said.

“Most people know better than to kill their families,” one of the Small Minds muttered.

“What?” Mrs. Dunbar asked.

The man shrugged. “I’m just saying if you’re going to apply that kind of logic, then the whole case all falls apart.”

The Small Minds argued among themselves for a long time, apparently forgetting that Pamela was the one they had to convince to change her mind. For a while, she thought she had convinced a few of them, but no.

They simply liked arguing.

And another day went by without any progress at all.

The week blurred into a series of questions and answers, followed by arguments.

“Ms. Jackson,” someone asked at one point, “how can you think he didn’t do it? He was covered in blood.”

“So was the house,” she said. “Didn’t you look at the pictures? He sat on the couch, by his own admission. It was soaked in blood. Maybe he even hugged one of the kids like the defense attorney said. What would you do if you came home to your entire family dead?”

Of course, during the ensuing argument, she didn’t say that she wouldn’t have hugged a dead kid. But the arguments were never really about her, anyway.

“Ms. Jackson,” one of the Small Minds said long about day three, “he told everybody at work that he was on edge, that he felt like he was going to explode. It’s pretty clear that he did.”

“Hell,” she snapped. “I’m on edge. Does that mean I’m going to go on a rampage and kill you all to calm myself?”

It sounded tempting, but she knew better. She hadn’t hurt anyone—deliberately—since she washed her husband’s blood off her skin five years ago.

“Ms. Jackson,” the Silver Cross idiot said to her on day five, “who else could have killed that family? Nothing was stolen and no one else even knew them, so no one else had a reason to kill them.”

“You mean someone has a reason to kill an infant?” Pamela snapped. She ignored the wife. The wife bothered her. Pamela would have killed the wife given half a chance. Just because the woman hadn’t been happy with her reproductive choices and her husband’s inability to earn a living didn’t give her the right to whine all the damn time.

Like these people were doing. The room really had to be bigger, much bigger, so that Pamela could pace.

She was alone and remained alone on this not-guilty thing. Even when she convinced the entire jury to go back into the courtroom and listen to the read-back of some testimony about the way that Northrup was found. His voice on the 9-1-1 tape, filled with emotion (she knew from personal experience that after killing someone, the emotion drained away), and the way he sat on that couch—as one cop put it—like he had nothing left to live for.

Ten days. Ten days they argued and fought and screamed at each other. (She didn’t scream. She hated raised voices.) And they couldn’t make her change her mind.

Ten days and 3 hours. The lunch break was when Mr. California-Wilson, whom she’d taken to calling the remaining Beach Boy to his face because he irritated her, knocked on the court-side door, and told the clerk that the jury was hung.

Fascinating word, hung. Past tense of “hang,” an active but unhappy word which meant to suspend or to die by hanging or to deadlock. All of those meanings had a little murder in them.

Just a little.

She had committed a killing after all.

And like the one she had committed before, she hadn’t given it much thought until she actually completed the act. By then, the deed was done and she had to deal with it. It simply felt wrong to change her mind, as if she had lost a principle or something.

So when the judge polled the jurors—all of them, including her—and asked if there was any way to resolve the deadlock, she had spoken a forceful no.

The judge had no choice but to release the jury from its duty. The case was over, and the prosecutor had lost by one vote. The defense didn’t cheer, although Northrup had looked for someone—anyone—to hug and got no volunteers.

Pamela filed back into the jury room with the Small Minds, happy she would never see them again, collected her things, and left the courthouse.

She had to go to the hotel to pack, and then she would be able to go home. Packing took longer than she expected—she had lived in this dive for nearly two months—and when it was over, she found that she would actually miss the place.

She’d learned to sleep in the bed, finally feeling like the ghost of Jason and his hideous death were behind her. The nightmare, completely gone.

It was almost as if she had been on trial and had forgiven herself.

The drive from the hotel to Rickets Rock took her past the courthouse. The cameras and crowds were gone. The place looked almost deserted. She was nearly past it when she realized that she had left her book inside.

She almost thought of donating it, then changed her mind.

She had donated enough to this stupid cause already.

She parked in the lot, just like she had on that very first day, and went inside by the front door. The anteroom was empty except for one of the court employees, sitting behind a counter.

The employee looked up, and clearly didn’t recognize her. Pamela had taken off her juror button the moment they had been excused.

“May I help you?”

“I was on the Northrup jury,” Pamela said, “and I left a book in the jury room.”

The employee swiveled her chair, looked behind her, and reached down, lifting A Certain Justice. “This it?”

It was. Pamela had never summoned enough energy to read it. She thanked the woman, took the book, and turned.

“Ms. Jackson?”

The familiar voice sent a shiver through her. She looked over her shoulder. “Mr. Chivara. I thought you’d be off celebrating with your client.”

Chivara smiled. It wasn’t that predatory smile he used in court, but a rather wistful one. “I had a few things to get out of the courtroom. I see you did too.”

She nodded, tucked the book under her arm, and started to leave. He kept pace with her.

“I understand you’re the one who hung my jury,” he said.

“So?” she asked.

“So,” he said as he pushed open the door leading outside, “it surprised me.”

“I’m sure it didn’t, counselor,” she said. “You picked me for some reason and it wasn’t my good looks.”

He laughed. The sound echoed across the empty street. “That’s true. I thought you’d help my client, but not in this part of the case.”

She stopped. “What does that mean?”

“It means, Ms. Jackson, we found that you lied on your jury questionnaire.”

She felt cold. She knew better than to say anything. If she confirmed or denied, she would play right into his little game, whatever it was.

“And since we found that out, we figured we could use you as the basis for our appeal.”

“You planned an appeal?” she asked.

“Every good defense attorney keeps one eye on the current case, and one eye on appeal. You were my ace-in-the-hole.”

“I was your ace-in-the-hole when you picked me?”

“Now that wouldn’t be quite right, now would it?” This time he gave her the predatory smile. “Of course, no one can prove when we learned that you didn’t have a murdered uncle. Nor can they prove when we discovered that Pamela Jackson isn’t your real name.”

Her chill increased.

“Lying on a jury questionnaire is perjury, Ms. Jackson,” Chivara said, “and I’m an officer of the court. Technically, I can’t let you get away with that.”

She forced herself to breathe. Then she turned around. “I can’t say anything to you. You’re accusing me and doing it in a do-you-beat-your-wife fashion.”

“Am I?” he asked, his arms crossed.

“Besides,” she said because she had to, because she couldn’t keep silent, “if I did lie, and you discovered it, are you going to serve your client by reporting it? After all, I did hang your jury.”

Chivara studied her for a long moment. “If I were still prosecuting, I’d already have you for identity fraud, and perjury. If I keep digging, what else would I find?”

A trail of temper, which had ceased. She had found her own kind of peace here in Seavy County.

“I like fiction, Mr. Chivara,” she said. “We established that on the day of jury selection.”

“You like crime dramas, Ms. Jackson,” he said. “We never established that you liked only fiction.”

She remembered the feeling she’d had that first day in the courtroom—that he was the only worthy adversary she had ever found. He was as smart as she was, which was a problem.

“We never established what lengths you’ll go to in order to win a case,” she said softly. “Looks like we’ll learn that one today.”

Then she turned around and headed down the steps to her car, feeling his gaze on her back. She half-expected to hear his footsteps following her, to feel his hand grab her arm, to pull her back and take her into that courtroom.

She’d be the one going to jail, and then she’d be the one going to trial, defended by someone like Chivara. Just like she’d imagined.

Just like she’d feared for the past five years.

But Chivara didn’t follow her down the stairs. In fact, when she got into her car, and looked out the window, he was still watching her.

He had to choose between letting the client he had clearly thought guilty (after all, why else scheme for the appeal?) go free or letting a woman who had changed her identity and committed at least two small crimes that he knew of go free.

Poor Mr. Chivara. Such choices he had.

Such choices she had. Did she stay and pretend like nothing happened, trust the bastard to do what was in his best interest? Or did she run, again, losing all the money she’d put into her store and her home?

She clutched the key to her car. People who ran were guilty: she had argued that in the jury room, and her argument would come back to him. He’d know she’d done something.

But if she stayed, he’d have only his own conscious to wrestle with.

As a good defense attorney, he did that each and every day.

She put the key in the ignition and started the car. Chivara was still watching her.

She waved at him as she drove out of the parking lot.

Away from the courtroom and juries and the law.

Screw Chivara and his suspicions. She was going back to her store, her home and her life, her solitary life as a model citizen, a woman who did her duty and nothing more, just like everybody else.

____________________________________________

Jury Duty

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn RuschFirst published in Crimewave 8, 2005.Published by WMG PublishingCover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG PublishingCover design by WMG PublishingCover art copyright © Aleksandar Radovanovic/Dreamstime

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

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All of our writing workshops on Teachable.com are 50% off for a little over 24 hours. Yep! You can get whatever workshop you want (out of hundreds) for half price. That includes items like bundles, which are already discounted.

If you want more information, click here. If you already know what you want to purchase, click here to go directly to Teachable where you can use the code GREATBUNDLE at checkout.

I hope you find something you really want.

Enjoy!

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For a long time, we’ve been trying to figure out how to bring new writers into our online writing workshops. Over the years, we’ve put together almost a thousand workshops. Many (most) are geared toward already established writers who want to improve their craft. But a lot of them are good for beginners as well.

Finally Dean Wesley Smith got the bright idea to put them into bundles by topic. There are so many…and they’re all 50% off right now. I’m going to copy one of his posts here:

Any bundle is 50% off on Teachable. And we are still adding in new bundles to focus on certain topics We have six now with more coming soon.

To get a bundle at half price, simply go to WMG Teachable, find the bundle or bundles you want, and hit purchase. Then put in the code…

GREATBUNDLE

And hit apply and you will have it for 50% off. And most bundles are really good deals to start with.

We are doing this because we are launching the FOCUS BUNDLE series.

But first let me list the large bundles, the ones we call Lifetime Subscriptions (yes, they are all 50% off as well.)

• • LIFETIME EVERYTHING SUBSCRIPTION. Includes EVERYTHING on WMG Teachable and all new stuff going forward. Over $100,000 in value. Regular cost is $10,000. Sale price is $5,000 and if you have another lifetime subscription, write me for more of a discount.
  • LIFETIME WORKSHOP SUBSCRIPTION. Includes over 80 plus workshops, special, classic, and regular with over 3,200 teaching videos and more being added regularly. Valued at over $15,000, regular price is $3,000. Sale price is $1,500.
  • LIFETIME POP-UP SUBSCRIPTION. Includes almost 90 classes on all topics and more being added regularly. Valued at over $13,000, regular price is $3,000. Sale price is $1,500.
  • LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTIONS TO LECTURES* and STUDY ALONGS* are also available.

We have a lot of other great bundles that are on sale… They include…

• • THE CREATIVE SURVIVAL BUNDLE 2024… All four quarters of creative survival lectures to help you build and survive in the writing career. At least 4 videos every Monday morning for 52 weeks. Original price for all four quarters is $1,500. Sale price is $750.
  • INDIE WRITER’S GUIDE TO SHOPIFY BUNDLE… Two different nine-week classes in this with recorded webinar when it was done. This has a value of $900. Sale price is $450. Entire class is available.
  • INDIE WRITER’S PRODUCTS CLASS BUNDLE… Two different nine-week classes in this with recorded webinar when it was done. This has a value of $900. Sale price is $450. Entire class is available.
  • THE MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY BUNDLE 2024… All four quarters of motivational lectures to help you build and survive in the writing career. At least 4 videos every Monday morning for 52 weeks. Original price for all four quarters is $800. Sale price is $400.
  • BITE-SIZED COPYRIGHT BUNDLE 2023 … All four quarters of copyright lectures to help you learn copyright in an easy fashion. This had at least 4 videos every Monday morning for 52 weeks. Original price for all four quarters is $1,500. Sale price is $750. Entire class is available.
  • THE DECADE AHEAD BUNDLE 2023 … All four quarters of lectures to help you learn how to prosper and deal with the coming ten years. This had at least 4 videos every Monday morning for 52 weeks. Original price for all four quarters is $1,500. Sale price is $750. Entire class is available.
  • FULL YEAR OF ALL 2024 ADVANCED CRAFT CLASSES. 6 different nine-week classes for advanced craft. Don’t worry, they will repeat every year so if you want you can take two a year. These are advanced. Original price is $2500. Sale price is $1,250. Again, they repeat regularly with assignments every week during the class.
  • FULL YEAR OF ALL 2023 ADVANCED CRAFT CLASSES. 6 different nine-week classes for advanced craft. Don’t worry, they will repeat every year so if you want you can take two a year. These are advanced. Original price is $2500. Sale price is $1,250. Again, they repeat regularly with assignments every week during the class.

There are also some other bundles on sale, but the genre bundles for mystery, science fiction, and fantasy are not all recorded yet and are delayed into the summer. But you can grab them on sale if you don’t mind waiting.

NEW FOCUS BUNDLESWe have six of them up with seven classes per bundle on focused topics.

Topics to Include… + Depth (How to open a story… all the different courses) AVAILABLE + Learn Beyond Basic Depth AVAILABLE + Productivity… AVAILABLE + Basic Writing Business… AVAILABLE + Writing Science Fiction… AVAILABLE + Focus on Characterization… AVAILABLE + Writing Mystery + Writing Fantasy + Licensing + Writing Attitude + General Writing Techniques + Writing Short Fiction + Promotion the Right Way*

Anyone else have suggestions for bundles combining different classes, pop-ups, and lectures, let me know by email or in the comments. Again, no bundles will be in these FOCUS BUNDLES and they will not be in any LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTIONS… Why? Because if you have the Everything Lifetime, you have these already and can use the bundle for a guide. All of them will be a mix of regular classes, workshops, pop-ups, and lectures.

Sale will last until I get all these FOCUS BUNDLES up, so don’t want too long.

To get a bundle at half price, simply go to WMG Teachable, find the bundle or bundles you want, and hit purchase. Then put in the code…

GREATBUNDLE

And hit apply and you will have it for 50% off. And most bundles are really good deals to start with.

Write Dean directly at Dean dot wmgworkshops at gmail for more information.

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…you know what I mean. (That Reese’s ad has a lot to answer for. Just sayin’)

Anyway. I curated a Storybundle that features Fantasy and Steampunk together, for the second time. (We did one last year.) It’s in honor of my Qavnerian Protectorate series, which is a side series of the Fey. I have an exclusive book in this bundle: The ebook for Barkson’s Journey, which is in the series, but does standalone. (You can start here, in other words.)

This is a great way to get the book early, because you’ll get it with nine other ebooks. And those ebooks will really augment your summer reading list. You’ll find steampunk from favorites like Gail Carriger, Colleen Gleason, and Christine Pope, as well as books from new favorites like Kari Kilgore and Michael Warren Lucas. There are also short stories, in three different volumes. A collection from J. Daniel Sawyer, and two different anthologies. The first from Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier takes steampunk to a whole new level (adding aliens!) and then our own Fiction River steampunk volume with more of your favorite authors.

We are also giving you the opportunity to support one of my favorite charities, Girls on the Run. It helps young girls all over the country gain confidence in their bodies. Girls on the Run trains girls from grades three to eight to run, yes, but also to believe in themselves. I like to think that it teaches girls how to be like the heroines in their favorite books. If you want to see what they do, click here.

And if you want the Storybundle (and I hope you do!) please click here. You have a little over a week to get this great deal.

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Before the pandemic, we did an Anthology Workshop in person every year. The last one was in February of 2020. Yeah, you all know what that means.

We decided to return to the Anthology Workshop this year. They take a lot of work to set up and get underway. This year’s will happen in August, and it is…sadly…closed. The next one will be in two years, because the workshops are harder to organize in Las Vegas than they were on the Oregon Coast (we miss you, Kip!) and we want to make sure all of the anthologies are published before we do the next one. We have six anthologies this year, and they will all be part of the rebrand of Fiction River. (Yes, it’s coming back!)

This year, we added a feature called “Prepare Ahead,” which is for the writers who are attending. They get a workshop for free that explains the genre and has an interview with the editor or editors about what they want to see from the writers. (And what they don’t want to see.)

We decided to open the Prepare Ahead classes to anyone who wanted to take them (and maybe submit a story). Initially, we sold them as a bundle, but we only have two classes left. One of them starts tonight. (Yes, I’m late, as usual.) And it’s my second anthology, the Science Fiction Mystery anthology. I’m so excited about this. I love science fiction mystery. I can’t wait to read the stories. I suspect my excitement translated into my video…and will translate into the class.

Anyway, if you’re at all interested, here’s a link to the class. I think you’ll have a lot of fun with it!

But hurry! The class starts tonight!

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When Detective Webster Coninck arrives at the murder scene outside Tups Tavern, he quickly identifies the body: Tom Johanssen. Former classmate, full of charisma, and a man with enough enemies to line up interviews into next week.

Webb finds himself off the case because of his personal history with Johanssen, but Webb believes his local knowledge holds the key to solving the case. But only if he can face his own painful history.

Chosen as one of the best American mystery stories of 2011.

“Local Knowledge,” by international bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook here.

Local KnowledgeBy Kristine Kathryn RuschThe call came in at 11:54 a.m., December 15, 1995. Body found at Tups Tavern, 35 East 35th street. Webb thought the call routine until he arrived.

Tups, frequented by sailors and longshoremen, was on the lakefront. Superior glistened, never freezing over, never covered with snow. But not pretty either, not in this part of town. In this part of town, the massive lake was dark and dirty, not sky blue like it was everywhere else.

Drug deals went down nearby and the local hookers worked dockside. Knifings were common. But this victim hadn’t been knifed.

He’d been shot.

Patrols had followed procedure. Two squads, parked at an angle on the broken concrete parking lot, colored the tavern’s gray walls red, blue, red, blue. Barflies stood near the open gunmetal doors, drinks in hand, coats draped over their shoulders to protect them against the cold.

They watched Webb as if he were one of them.

Which, in a way, he was.

He slipped between the dented bumpers, thankful he still fit in small places. Fifty crunches, one-armed push-ups, a half-hour run around the football field, all required before he allowed himself to hug a bar stool and drink until his tongue was numb. He always said the exercise let his body perform his job, and the booze kept his mind from dwelling on it.

But he wondered sometimes, especially when he saw himself reflected in those shabby tattered people whose drinks were more important to them than the life drained on the concrete.

He didn’t acknowledge them. Instead, he stopped beside the squads and memorized the scene.

Body belonged to a tall middle-aged man, lambswool coat—too rich for this part of town—exit wound a bloody mess in his back. Shoes shiny Italian leather, almost no scuff marks on the soles, dirt caking the right toe and the left heel. Right hand outstretched, slightly sun-wrinkled, white, with a gold ring, large ruby in the center. Salt-and-pepper hair, neatly trimmed, no strands out of place. Face pressed against the ice- and sand-covered concrete, features not visible from above.

Daylight was thin under a thick layer of clouds. Coroner would have to work in artificial light. Webb slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, crouched, and touched the back of the outstretched wrist.

Still warm. Webb glanced up, saw bloodstained holes in the pile of ice-covered snow plowed to the edge of parking lot.

“Anyone know him?” he asked, as he crouched lower, and peered at the man’s face. Then he realized he didn’t need to ask.

He knew the man. Tom Johanssen, returning home, after thirty-three years.

Tom Johanssen. The first time Webb had seen him, they’d been in high school. Webb was the gangly new kid from Louisiana—a whole country and half a culture away from Northern Wisconsin. Tom was all black hair and smiles, broad shoulders, chiseled features, and smarter than anyone else. Only he didn’t flaunt it, just like he didn’t flaunt the girls. Boys liked him too, wanted to be in his shadow, and that was the first time, maybe the only time, Webb had ever experienced—had ever fallen under the spell of—true charisma.

Then Tom shattered it all, the entire brilliant future, the golden dreams, by getting Jenna Hastings pregnant. Two days after graduation, they married, and Webb saw Tom only occasionally: buying groceries at the Red Owl; or riding home from work in the big yellow electric company truck. Webb went to college and Tom stayed behind, and it wasn’t until five years later that Tom surfaced again, playing lead in a local country band.

Webb had gone to see the band just after he graduated from Mankato State and just before he entered the police academy. Tom stood center stage, black hair curling over his forehead, guitar slung across his shoulder. Girls crowded him as if he were Elvis, and Jenna was nowhere to be seen. Webb had watched mesmerized, and had wondered then if Tom was divorced.

But the divorce came after the scandal, leaving Jenna with four boys and Tom with another mistake on his record. He joined the service, and went to Germany. Married again, became successful, and sent his folks piles of money. Year after year, he promised to come home, the prodigal son, now back in favor.

He never did come home. Not for his grandmother’s funeral or his grandfather’s. His sister’s wedding or his son’s.

He never came home.

Until now.

“I’m taking you off the case.” Bernard was hunched over his desk, beefy arms covering two separate piles of papers. He was staring at the file in front of him as if his next words were written on it.

Webb leaned against the door, arms crossed. Despite the stuffy heat of Bernard’s office, Webb still felt a chill, as if the cold from the death scene had got deep into his bones. “I can be objective.”

“Like hell.” Bernard caught a thin strand of hair and twirled it over his bald spot. “You went to high school with him. Florence—”

“I went to high school with him, Ethan went to high school with him, and Mike Conner is Jenna’s brother-in-law. Stanton’s kid married Tom’s kids’ half sister—and Pete flew Tom out of town in sixty-two. Everybody in this town is connected to Tom somehow. You lived next door to him for six years.” Webb’s hands, hidden beneath his arms, were clenched into fists. He didn’t know why he was fighting for this one so hard.

“I know,” Bernard said. “That’s why I want to give this one to Darcy.”

“Darcy?” Webb tilted his head back so his crown hit the wood. Bernard was watching him, tiny blue eyes lost in his florid face.

Webb had trouble arguing this one. He’d fought for Darcy Danvers. No one had wanted to hire a woman cop, let alone a woman cop from out of town. She’d come in with more ribbons than anyone, more experience with real crime. She was athletic and tough, smartest woman he’d ever met—hell, smartest anyone he’d ever met—and a real street fighter.

“She doesn’t know this town,” he said, trying not to wince. That had been Bernard’s argument against hiring her, the city’s argument against keeping her, and the basis of Webb’s defense of her five years back.

“She knows it good enough,” Bernard said. “She’ll follow through where the rest of us won’t.”

“I’d follow through,” Webb said.

“Even on Flo?”