“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, that irresistible smile growing stronger.
“Are . . . are you okay?” Helen asked, standing. She offered her hand to him. He took it and she felt an even stronger spark of connection pass between them. She knew it was just his power at work, that it was just the power to charm, but she didn’t care. After all, she had never been sure if the love in her life previous to this moment had ever been real anyway. At least Jason’s power gave her a thrill that certainly felt real enough. “Seriously, are you okay? Leis beat you pretty badly.”
“Yeah,” he said, standing and brushing off his clothing, the blood and debris fading away as he did so. “Don’t worry about me. I’m used to it. It happens all the time.”
MURDER, SHE WORKSHOPPED
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Spending six weeks at a writers’ workshop in the Midwest would drive an empath insane. Or maybe it would make the empath suicidal. Or homicidal, depending on the emotions swirling around the empath that day.
I think about such things because 1) I am trapped at just such a writers’ workshop, and 2) I am in the process of divorcing said empath. He’s at home, with all our belongings and our cats, while I’m here for week four, when my target finally arrives. Fortunately for me, said empath (who shall remain nameless) didn’t get the bright idea to clear out our bank accounts until yesterday. I had that bright idea three hours before I started researching my lawyer months ago. All the money once labeled ours is now in several accounts now labeled mine, and no matter how hard said empath screams over the phone, he’ll never be able to find them.
Empathy works two ways. He can feel all of my emotions when we talk and I can feel all of his. His are extremely powerful. Mine are generally muted, which explains the initial attraction.
It also explains why I do what I do.
I kill people. Well, not people per se. Evil magical creatures that misuse a human form. Lest you think I am insane myself and use this explanation to rationalize my murderous tendencies, let me simply tell you that I have few murderous tendencies. That’s why I get the jobs I do. I’m a highly skilled, highly paid assassin who works only once every four to five years.
I also happen to have a 100% success rate.
Which might completely vanish on this particular job, distracted as I am by said empath and by the silly workshop itself.
Here’s the problem: I’m thinking seriously of retiring and taking up writing as a new career. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to write.
But if you had asked me—oh, say, three weeks ago—which would be harder, becoming a writer or an assassin who specialized in magical creatures that misuse human form, I would have answered writer every time.
Then I met the first three of my so-called professional instructors. The best thing I’ve learned at this workshop is this: if they can become professional writers, then anyone can do it.
Sure wish I’d known that twenty years and five assassinations ago.
But I wouldn’t have ended up here on the campus of a major state university at a program for serious unpublished writers taught by the professionals. Theoretically, I’m here to assassinate someone.
In reality, I’m taking these six weeks to learn how to write.
So I’m a busy little writer bee, handing in a story per week to each new instructor and letting my fellow students shred me in public. At first, I thought I’d get assistance from the instructors, and while the first one was helpful, the instructor for week two was more interested in fomenting discord—which was relatively easy to do, considering most of the students have nothing to do except read about two short stories per night.
The instructors come from different fiction genres and are supposed to give us insights into their various disciplines. As I’m learning, the use of the word “discipline” along with the word “writer” verges on oxymoronic.
That oxymoron seems to apply more than usual to week three’s instructor, a has-been award-winning western writer who hasn’t published a book in more than a decade. She’s subbing for a bigger name who got sick and couldn’t come. She’s always the sub at this workshop because she needs the money. She doesn’t have a lot to teach except gloom and doom, and so after Discord from the week before, she’s only making things worse.
My handlers warned me this would happen. Apparently this workshop has a pattern. By the middle, the inmates—I mean students—have forgotten everything they knew about home and have now become convinced that the workshop is the world.
Weeks Three and Four are when the big blowups happen. Students quit, affairs end, and fistfights occur. One group stripped the least liked student naked, painted her green, and carried her like an offering to the dean of the English Department.
That was the year the workshop had to change university sponsors.
I was told to pay special attention starting in week three, because my target would arrive in week four, and she would make sure this workshop was one for the record books.
My target, Margarite Lawson, writes lurid bestselling novels based on actual crimes. Margarite picks a famous crime, changes the names, maybe even moves it to a new location, and gives it her personal spin. The weird thing about Margarite’s books is that the more she published, the more likely she was to have a hand in solving the famous crime. In fact, in the latter five books or so, the famous crime became famous because Margarite was on-site when it happened.
It’s become a joke that whenever Margarite shows up, someone is going to die. In fact, my workshop has been nervously kidding each other about this since our first night together. Everyone, that is, except me.
Because to me, Margarite’s talent for finding the crime in a given community isn’t coincidence. It’s part of her unnatural charm.
Margarite arrives on Friday night of week three, so that she can confer with the western writer before the poor sap leaves on Sunday morning. If all goes according to script, someone on this university campus will die on Saturday.
Margarite will organize the police investigation, handle the media, and solve the case by the following Friday. About two years from now, she’ll published a novel about the case.
She’ll get wealthier while she’s feeding the demon within.
My assignment is simple: I’m supposed to stop her once and for all. If possible, I take her out on Friday night, before anyone else gets hurt.
But after nearly three full weeks undercover in this rather unique circle of hell, I’m not sure I want to prevent anyone from getting hurt. I’m tired of the drama, the petty jealousies, the bickering, and the backbiting.
These people need something real to whine about.
And I figure Margarite Lawson is going to give that to them.
Nine AM Friday morning, the workshop meets as usual. We have full run of a graduate student dorm that opens into a private courtyard. At one end of that courtyard is the so-called lounge—really an oversized conference room filled with uncomfortable upholstered chairs, flimsy tables, and one extremely loud Coke machine. Laptop users have to make certain the batteries are charged before they arrive, or fight for a seat nearest one of two unused outlets on the only wall without a window. That wall is covered with whiteboards, because—apparently—in university circles, chalkboards have become passé.
My “student” laptop—a battered first generation iBook—is always charged. Whenever I’m out in public, I carry that thing.
My business laptop stays in my silly little graduate student suite, under lock and key. The laptop is unlike anything anyone around here has seen, except maybe in some of the secret R&D labs around campus. Maybe not even there.
Because this thing is high-powered—not just with tech, but with the occasional magical connection. And how to explain magic to the nonbelievers in my audience? It’s simple, really.
Magic slips into the real world. Or the real world slips into the magical world, depending on your point of view. Mine is the point of view of a person who uncomforta
bly straddles both worlds. I can see the magical, even though I have little magic myself.
I have little magic, but I have access to magic. Thanks to engineers with magic who also happen to design computers, I have at my fingertips the simplest of spells. I also have commonsense nonmagical remedies to magical potions, and other such things that occasionally come in handy when dealing with the other side of reality.
In truth, I’ve only used those things with said empath’s friends. In my work, I’ve used the standard gun/ knife/whatever’s handy to complete the job.
Which is looming.
That’s what I’m thinking as I approach my usual chair. It’s a wingback with high arms that sits directly across the room from the instructor’s chair.
I staked out this chair on day one of the workshop, and although one of my less observant compatriots tried to take it from me on day two, no one will ever try that again.
They say I’m touchy.
I’m just a little protective.
The problem is that I don’t look touchy. If you were to walk into our little critique session on this Friday morning, I’m the one you’d ignore. I’m older than most of the class for one thing. I also have cultivated the don’t-pay-attention-to-me vibe so essential in my job.
Maybe it’s one of my little magics.
If you glanced at me, you’d see a once- pretty woman who allowed time and lack of attention to make her seem faded. But if you looked, really looked, you’d notice a few anomalies. I wear baggy clothes to give the impression of flab, when in truth I have none. I also have a hard time hiding the intelligence in my eyes, so I look through my eyelashes a lot like an unrepentant Southern belle.
My fellow students have yet to notice these things about me, but the instructor week two, Discord, noticed right away. He never picked on me, even though I was the one who had two (rather mediocre) stories in for critique that week. Instead, he avoided me as much as possible, making him rank just a bit higher in my mind than he normally would have.
Apparently, he became a bestselling thriller writer through observation, not through all that tough-talk he imparted to the other students.
But I digress.
I also arrive at my seat before everyone else, so I can watch them enter. I ignore most of them. They’re the background for my two missions. But a handful of people are impossible to miss.
Like our teaching assistant, Raj O’Driscoll. He’s a glorified gofer, and not bright enough to realize that should anything go wrong with this workshop, he will get the blame.
Then there is the faculty advisor, Lawrence B. Hallerhaven. Hallerhaven has taken on the job to schmooze with the famous writers. He’s terrible at planning and even worse at following through. He leaves all of that to poor Raj, who is spending this morning preparing for Margarite Lawson.
Apparently, she made an unusual list of demands before she agreed to come. Raj is trying to meet those demands before her arrival tonight.
All of his running about makes me nervous, and I’m just sitting in my chair, typing random thoughts in my student laptop as the rest of the class arrive.
They’re carrying a variety of things: the laptops, hardcopy manuscripts covered with their inept scrawls, and various poisons from lattes to regular coffees to donuts to apples to leftover pizza.
We don’t have a lot to say to each other any more except Shut up or Move your ass, I need some room here or Were we supposed to read Steve’s story for today?, so there’s a lot of rustling without a lot of conversation.
That’s okay. It gives me a chance to figure out, once and for all, who is going to die.
That person has to have no redeeming characteristics. This is the person we all love to hate. When that person dies, we’re all going to be relieved he’s dead. We’ll just wonder why someone hasn’t killed him sooner.
As the class wanders in, I contemplate the possible candidates.
The three likeliest victims arrive in a clump. These three are miserable and proud of it, because they believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that misery begets book contracts.
First through the door is Hamlet Thorshov who deserves the Most Miserable Person of the Workshop Award just because his horrible parents decided to name him Hamlet. He’s an underdeveloped twenty-something of very obvious Russian lineage. His white-blond hair matches the color of his white-blond skin and fails to accent his pale blue eyes. He has somehow managed to find T-shirts that are too small for him, and he wears a watch half the size of his arm.
His watch is where the trouble begins, every single workshop. The damn thing can probably fly an airplane on its own. And he toys with it in the middle of the first critique, pressing buttons as if he were setting the stop-watch for his mid- morning run (if he ever exercised, which he most clearly does not).
No one tries to get him to stop any longer, although two days ago, Carlotta Sternke—one of the other three troublemakers—tried to cover the thing in bubble wrap, just to silence it.
That was probably the only time the workshop cheered for her. Carlotta Sternke was the workshop goat long before we decided to pick on Hamlet.
Carlotta is chubby and shows way too much skin through fishnet stockings, tops that deliberately leave her stomach bare, and leather skirts that are both too short and too tight. Her lips are always covered with black gloss and she outlines her eyes in late season raccoon.
Her hair is black with a white streak that might be deliberate, although with Carlotta, it’s impossible to tell. She’s as unpleasant as her clothing, with a high-pitched nervous giggle that makes me long for fingernails running along blackboards.
She feels like she needs to police everyone—hence the bubble wrap on Hamlet’s giant watch. And the person she loves to police more than anyone else is the third in our nasty triumvirate.
Norman Zell makes a good first impression. He’s tall, lanky, and reasonably good-looking. He’s embarrassed by the name “Norman,” so he insists that everyone he meet call him Zell, which, I have to admit, is an improvement.
The problem is that Zell has the attention span of a gnat and the energy level of a hummingbird. He’s in constant motion—either one knee jiggles or an arm or every single finger (and not in unison). In the first week, he managed to sleep with or proposition every woman here (I said no with probably more enthusiasm than I needed to express), and made it clear by the end of the week that he considered every woman who tumbled into his bed to be a conquest.
A conquest that he had the right to write about in Margarite Lawson roman-a-clef style. Only he wasn’t nearly as good at changing the names or the events. The instructor in week two actually made Zell stand in front of the group and apologize to everyone.
Zell burst into tears in the middle of his apology and yet somehow didn’t command any sympathy. We all had had enough by then, and even though the tears were probably genuine, they wouldn’t change his behavior. And sure enough, by week’s end, Zell was sleeping his way through the cafeteria staff, and the first story he turned in this week is titled, “Love in A Time of Meatballs.”
This morning, Hamlet, Carlotta, and Zell manage to sit equidistant from each other, forming a perfect equilateral triangle. They are getting out the first story for critique when the door opens again, and Margarite Lawson sweeps into the room.
She’s taller than I imagined she would be, blonder, and prettier. Or maybe that’s just how her human covering manifests itself in person. She wears a gauze lilac tunic over black pants, and manages to appear imposing and charming at the very same time.
I can see the magic flickering off her, sending sparks around the room. And inside that marvelous human form, I see the TrueSelf, spiny, scaly, and moss green—rather like an upright alligator with tusks.
She surveys the room and sees exactly what she should see: surprise, shock, and dismay. Surprise because she’s hours early. Shock because no one picked her up at the airport. And dismay because most of us were looking forward to our last few private hours wi
th our sad sack western writer.
“Well,” Margarite says, “what a motley crew.”
She actually licks her lips, but it doesn’t look out of place unless you can see those tusks like I can. Everyone else just stares at her, no one more than Raj. I don’t have to be an empath to know he’s worried about losing his job. Somehow he failed to escort the most important guest writer of the workshop to her accommodation. Never mind that no one told him she’d be early. Never mind that she probably didn’t tell anyone that she’d be early.
Margarite doesn’t seem upset by the reaction to her appearance. If anything, she’s probably pleased by it, although she doesn’t show that pleasure. She doesn’t dare. It would ruin her entire plan.
How do I know her plan? Because if you chart the appearances she’s made before a murder, you can see a pattern of twenty- two months between unfortunate events.
The twenty-two months are the tip-off to the fact that she’s a chaos dragon. The first part of the name fits—she does thrive (and I mean thrive, as in need it to live) on chaos. The second name is a misnomer given by someone like me who can see the upright alligator in these imposters and somehow mistook it for a dragon.
More accurately, you should probably call her a chaos reptile or a chaos demon—but again, you find yourself in linguistic hell. Since she doesn’t have as many powers as the average demon, and she has considerably more than the average reptile.
Still, the bottom line is that every twenty-two months, she needs to snack on the distress caused by the release of a soul. That soul must die by murder most foul, and there must be some kind of investigation in which at least five people are suspects. If the chaos dragon doesn’t get her negative emotions within a two-year window, she will waste away.
Unfortunately, for her, she can’t overindulge either. The handful of chaos dragons who become police detectives or defense lawyers tend to explode—quite literally. These deaths are usually blamed on bombs or car accidents or, in one rather dramatic case, some weird kind of poison.
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