Here is a snippet from FATE’S EDGE to go with the cover.  Please be aware that the snippet is from the first draft.  It contains mistakes and is subject to change, so please read at your own risk.

Prologue

 

If you could have only one word to describe George Milano, it would be unflappable, Audrey reflected.  Stocky, hard, balding, he looked like he just walked out of Central Casting after successfully landing the role of “bulldog-jawed older detective.”  He ran Milano Investigative Services and under his supervision the firm worked like clockwork.  Nothing rattled George.  Nothing knocked him off his stride.  He never raised his voice.  Before moving to the Pacific Northwest, he’d retired from the Miami police department with over a thousand homicide cases under his belt.  He’d been there and done that, so nothing surprised him.

That’s why watching his furry eyebrows creep up on his forehead was so satisfying.

George plucked the top photograph from the stack on his desk.  On it, Spenser “Spense” Bailey jogged down the street.  Next shot showed him bending over.  The next one caught him in a classic baseball pitch pose, left leg raised, leaning back, a tennis ball in his fingers.  Which would be fine and dandy, except according to his doctor, Spense suffered from a herniated disk in his spine, which he acquired while restocking a warehouse, when a walk-behind forklift got away from him.  The accident caused him constant excruciating pain, which is why he could be frequently seen limping around the neighborhood with a cane or a walker.  He needed help to get into a car and he couldn’t drive because the injured disk pinched the nerve in his right leg.

George glanced at Audrey.  “These are great.  We’ve been following this guy for weeks and nothing.  How did you get these?”

Audrey grinned.  “A very short tennis skirt.  He hobbles past a tennis court every Tuesday and Thursday on the way to his physical therapy sessions.”  The hardest part was hitting the ball so it would fly over the tall fence.  A loud gasp and a run with an extra bounce in her step, and she had him.  “Keep looking.  It gets better.”

George flipped through the stack.  The next photo showed Spense with a goofy grin on his face carrying two cups of coffee as he maneuvered between tables at Starbucks with the grace of a deer.

“You bought him coffee?” George’s eyebrows crawled a little higher.

“Of course not.  He bought me coffee.  And a fruit salad.” Aubrey bit her lip to keep from cracking up.

“You really enjoy doing this, don’t you?” George reflected.

She nodded.  “Spense is a liar and a cheat.  He’s been hobbling around for months, while his company is picking up the bill.”  And he thought he was so smart.  He practically begged to be cut down to size and she had just the right pruning shears.  Chop-chop.

George moved the coffee picture aside and stopped.  “Is this what I think this is?”

The image showed Spense grasping a man in a warm-up suit from behind and tossing him backward over his head onto a mat.

“That would be Spense demonstrating a German suplex for me.”  Aubrey offered him a bright smile.  “Apparently he’s an amateur MMA fighter.  He goes to do his physical therapy on the first floor and after the session is over, he walks up the stairs to spar.”

George put his hands together and sighed.

Something was wrong.  The smile evaporated from Aubrey’s lips.  She leaned back, riffling through her mental list.  No, she made no mistakes. All of her evidence was solid and obtained by legal means.  “Did I do something wrong?”

George grimaced.  “I look at you and I’m confused.  People who do best in our line of work are unremarkable.  They look just like anyone else and they’re easily forgettable, so suspects don’t pay attention to them.  They have some law enforcement experience, usually at least some college.  You’re too pretty, your hair is too red, your eyes are too big, you laugh too loud, and according to your transcripts, you barely graduated from high school.”

Warning sirens wailed in her head.  George required proof of high school graduation before employment, so she brought him both her diploma and her senior year transcript.  For some reason he bothered to pull her file and review ots contents.  Her driver’s license was first rate, because it was real.  Her birth certificate and her high school record would pass a cursory inspection, but if he dug any deeper, he’d find smoke.

Audrey kept the smile firmly in place.  “I can’t help having big eyes.”

George sighed again.  “Here is the deal:  I hire freelancers to save money.  My guys are experienced and educated, which means I have to pay them a decent wage for their time. Unless there is serious money involved, I can’t afford for them to sit on a tough suspect for months, waiting for him to slip up.  They get a month to crack a case.  After that I outsource  this stuff to freelancers like you, because I can pay you per job.  An average freelancer might close one case every couple of months.  It’s a good part-time gig for most people.”

He was telling her things she already knew.  Nothing to do but nod.

“You’ve been freelancing for me for five months.  You closed fourteen cases.  That’s a case every two weeks.  You made twenty grand.”  George fixed her with his unblinking stare.  “I can’t afford to keep you on as a freelancer.”

What? “I made you money!”

He held up his hand.  “You’re too expensive, Aubrey.  The only way this professional relationship is going to survive is if you come to work for me full time.”

She blinked.

“I’ll start you off at thirty grand a year with benefits.  Here is the paperwork.”  George handed her a manila envelope.  “Think about it.  If you decide to take me up on it, I’ll see you Monday.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You do that.”

Aubrey swiped the file and left the office.

A real job.  With benefits.  Holy crap.

She took the stairs, jogging down the steps to burn off some excitement.  Too much giddiness made you clumsy and careless.  She could bounce off the walls all she wanted once she got home.

A real job being one of the good guys.  How about that?  If her parents ever found out, they would flip.

 

Aubrey drove down Rough Ocean road away from Olympia.  Her blue Honda Element powered on through the grey drizzle that steadily soaked the west side of Cascades.  A thick blanket of dense clouds smothered the sky, turning the early evening gloomy and dark.  Trees flanked the road: majestic Douglas firs with long emerald needles; black cottonwoods, tall and lean, catching the rain with their branches; red alders, graceful and mast-straight, their silver-grey bark almost glowing in the dusk.

A mile and a half ahead a lonely subdivision of identical houses waited, cradled in the fold of the hill, but meanwhile the road was empty.  Nothing but the trees.

Audrey glanced at the clock.  Thirty two minutes so far, not counting the time it took her to stop at a convenience store to get some teriyaki jerky for Ling.  If she took George up on his offer, she’d have to commute just like the subdivision cubicle slaves.

If.  Ha!

She loved the job.  She loved every moment of it, from quietly hiding in a car to watch a suspect to running a con on the conmen. They thought they were slick.  They didn’t know what slick was.

To be fair, most of the suspects she ran across were conmen of opportunity.  They got hurt on the job and liked the disability or they got tangled in an affair and were too afraid or too arrogant to tell their spouses.  They didn’t see what they were doing as a con.  They viewed it as a little white lie, the easiest path out of a tough situation.  Most of them went about their deception in an amateur way.  She had been running cons since she could talk.

Ahead the road forked.  The main street rolled right, up the hill, toward the subdivision, while the smaller road branched left, ducking under the canopy of trees.  Audrey checked the rear view mirror.  The ribbon of pavement behind her stretched into the distance, deserted.  The coast was clear.

She smoothly made the turn onto the smaller road and braced herself.   Panic punched her right in the stomach, in the tight knot of nerves.  Audrey gasped.  The world swirled in a dizzying rush and she let go of the wheel for a second to keep from wrenching the vehicle off the pavement.  Aubrey was prepared for the pain, but when it followed, sharp, prickling every inch of her skin with red hot needles, it still caught her by surprise.  And then, just like that, it vanished.  She had passed through the boundary.

A warm feeling spread through her, flowing from her chest all the way to her fingertips.  Audrey smiled and snapped her fingers.  With a warm tingle, tendrils of green glow swirled around her hand.   Magic.  Also known as flash.  She let it die and kept driving.

Back on the main road, in the city of Olympia, in the state of Washington, magic didn’t exist.   People who lived there tried to pretend that it did.  They flirted with the idea of psychics and street magicians, but they had never encountered the real thing.  Most of them wouldn’t even see the side road she took.  For them it simply wasn’t there – the woods continued uninterrupted.  Every time she crossed into their world, her magic was stripped from her in a rush of pain.  That’s why people like her called that place the Broken – when you passed into it, you gave up a part of yourself and it left you feeling incomplete.  Broken like a clock with a missing gear.

Far ahead, past mountains and miles of rough terrain another world waited, a mirror to the Broken, full of magic and light on technology.  Well, not exactly true, Audrey reflected.  The Weird had plenty of complex technology, but they took it in a different direction.  Most of it functioned with the aid of magic.  In the Weird the power of your magic, the color of your flash, and your pedigree decided everything.

The Weird, like the Broken, was a place of rules and laws.  That’s why she preferred to live here, in the no-man’s land between the two dimensions.  The locals called it the Edge, and they were right. It was the Edge of both worlds, the place without countries or cops, where the cast-offs like her washed ashore.  Connecting the two dimensions like a secret overpass, the Edge took everyone, swindlers, thieves, crazed separatists, clannish families, all were welcome, all were dirt poor, and all kept to themselves.  The Edgers gave no quarter and expected no sympathy.

The road turned to dirt.  The trees had changed too.  Ancient spruces spread broad branches from massive buttressed trunks, their limbs dripping with long emerald-green beards of tangled moss. Towering narrow hemlocks thrust into the sky, their roots cushioned in ferns.   Blue haze clung to narrow spaces between the trunks, hiding otherworldly things with glowing eyes who prowled in search of prey.

As Audrey drove through, bright yellow blossoms of Edger primrose sensed the vibration of the car and snapped open with faint puffs of luminescent  pollen.  By day the flowers stayed closed and harmless.  At night, it was a different story.  Take a couple of puffs in your face and pretty soon you’d forget where you were or why you were here.  A couple of weeks ago, Rook, one of the local Edger idiots, got drunk and fell asleep near a patch of those.  They found him two days later, sitting on a tree stump butt naked and covered in ants.  This was an old forest, nourished by magic.  It didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.

The dirt road split and Audrey made another left turn.  Her Honda Element rolled over the bulges in the dirt made by thick roots that burrowed under the road and popped out into the clearing.  On the right the ground dropped off sharply, plunging down the side of the mountain.  On the left, a squat pale building sat in the shadow of an giant spruce.  It was a simple structure, a huge stone block of a roof resting on sturdy columns that guarded the wooden walls of the house within like bars of a stone cage.  Each column offered a carving: dragons and men caught in the heat of a battle.  A wide bas relief decorated the roof as well, showing a woman in a chariot pulled by birds with snake heads.  She  gazed down on the slaughter like a goddess from heaven.

Nobody knew who had built the ruins or why.  They dotted this part of the Edge, a tower here, a temple there, gutted by time and elements and covered with moss.  The Edgers, being poor and thrifty, knew better than to let them go to waste.  They built wooden walls inside the stone frameworks, put in indoor plumbing and electricity illegally siphoned from the neighboring city, and moved right in.  If any ancient gods took offense, they had yet to do anything about it.

Audrey parked the car under an old scarred maple and turned off the engine.   Home, sweet home.

A ball of grey fur dropped off the maple branch and landed on her hood.

Audrey jumped in her seat.  Jesus.

The raccoon danced up and down on the hood, chittering in outrage, bright eyes glowing with orange like two bloody moons.

“Ling the Merciless!  You get off my car this instant!”

The raccoon spun in place, her grey fur standing on end, put her hand-paws on the windshield and tried to bite the glass.

“What is with you?”  Audrey popped the car door open.

Ling scurried off the car and leaped into her lap, squirming and coughing.  Audrey glanced up.  The curtains on her kitchen window were parted slightly.  A hair-thin line of bright yellow light spilled through gap.

Somebody was in her house.

Audrey slipped from the seat, dropping Ling gently to the ground, circled the car and opened the hatch back.  A tan tarp waited inside.  She jerked it aside and pulled out an Excalibur crossbow.  It set her back nine hundred bucks of hard-earned money, and it was worth every penny.  Audrey cocked the crossbow and padded to the house, silent and quick.  A couple of seconds and she pressed against the wall next to the door.  She tried the handle.  Locked.

Who breaks into a house and locks the door?

She peeled from the wall and circled the house, moving fast on her toes.  At the back, she slipped between the stone framework and the wooden wall and felt around for the hidden latch.  It sprang open under the pressure of her fingers.  She edged the secret door open and padded inside, into the walk-in closet, and out into her bedroom.  The house had only three rooms: a long rectangular bedroom, an equally long bathroom, and the rest of it was taken up by a wide open space, most of which served as her living room and kitchen, with the stove, fridge, and counters at the north wall.

Audrey peeked out of the doorway.  An older man with curly reddish-brown hair stood at the kitchen stove, mixing a batter in a glass bowl, his slightly stooped back turned to her.

She would know that posture anywhere.

Audrey raised her crossbow and took a step into the living room.

The man reached for a bag of flour sitting on the counter.  Audrey squeezed the trigger.  The string snapped with a satisfying twang.  The bolt punched through the bag inches from the man’s fingers.

The man turned and grinned at her, his blue eye sparking.  She knew the smile too.  It was his con smile.

“Hi munchikin.”

Audrey let her crossbow point to the floor.  “Hi, Dad.”