Disaster Relief: Winston & Ruby, #4

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Ruby had the idea—help the magic users in New Orleans survive Hurricane Katrina. Pretty charitable for a tiny cat. Winston thought he knew why. The southeast Asia tsunami scared her, made her realize the vulnerability of her home on the Oregon Coast to natural disaster, too.

But when her offer of help turns into a rescue, Ruby watches helplessly as other familiars move into her little house. Being, after all, a cat, Winston expects a rebellion…

"Rusch is a great storyteller."

—RT Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540168955

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

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Disaster Relief

Disaster Relief

A Winston & Ruby Story

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

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Disaster Relief

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About the Author

Disaster Relief

Winston’s unusual sense of charity began late on Christmas night 2004. He and Ruby, his familiar, were watching television in the living room, Winston slouched on his couch, Ruby curled at his side. She had her tail wrapped around her small body, and her yellow eyes focused on the roaring fire.

They had exchanged a few gifts—he had made her a cat-sized box bed out of sandalwood, and she had given him half a dozen mice in various states of decay. He’d known what it had cost her to give them up—she’d probably been saving them for that proverbial rainy day—so he’d thanked her and placed them in a drawer to deal with later. He knew better than to give them back. He’d tried that with the dead rabbit on his birthday, and had hurt her feelings so badly that she hadn’t talked with him for nearly a week.

He was surfing, looking for something, anything, A Christmas Story, the horrible live-action version of the Grinch, when he saw the Breaking News icon at the bottom of CNN’s crawl.

Change it, Ruby muttered. It’s probably some new tape from Osama Bin Idiot out to ruin the holiday.

She’d been calling him that since the presidential election. She didn’t understand why someone didn’t wrap their front paws around his throat and kick out his stomach with their back paws. At least she hadn’t offered to get a familiar friend to sway his magical companion toward the dark side of magic to take care of the problem, like she had after 9/11. Then she had claimed she was taking the human approach to the problem, but Winston could see she was as broken up by the coverage as he had been.

He should have changed the channel; he realized that later. The moment he saw the Breaking News icon, the holiday really and truly was over even before he heard the word tsunami and heard that tens of thousands of people were feared dead.

Ruby shuddered against him as the initial video footage sent through some unbroken internet connection showed a huge wall of water sweeping a beach, overcoming a pool, and slamming into a hotel. She buried her