The Streets Where We Live: Wyrd Sisters

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

When Portia receives a call from an old friend she hasn't talked to in years, she knows something terrible has happened. But when Portia realizes just how terrible—fifty kids missing from a Chicago theater with millions of dollars in damage left behind—she knows she'll need backup from her magical sisters.

Nothing about this latest case makes sense, magically or otherwise. And when she finally starts to discover the truth, Portia realizes that truth might be darker and more insidious than she ever imagined.

"Rusch is a great storyteller."

—RT Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: May 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386068051

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.

Book preview

The Streets Where We Live

The Streets Where We Live

A Wyrd Sisters Story

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

The Streets Where We Live

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Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

The Streets Where We Live

For me, the whole thing started with a phone call.

I was sitting in my office at Yale, in one of those pretentiously pseudo-Gothic buildings the campus is full of, and my secretary Edna Neagle barreled in, past the stacks of paper and the piles of books on the history of the Wyrd Sisters in various plays. (Yes, I’ve finally decided to go full-bore and research the family, after decades of resisting. That’s what one gigantic near-death case will do to a magical dramaturge.)

Edna is round and blue-haired, with a stentorian voice that makes her well suited for any role from the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet to Mrs. Pearce, Henry Higgins’ housekeeper in My Fair Lady. I’ve never mentioned this to her, because, to be honest, I’m a little frightened of her. But I don’t tell her that. She has enough power over me as it is.

You have a call, she said in an annoyed tone that makes her sound like Margaret Dumont from the Marx Brothers movies. You’d best take it.

When she says things like that, I can’t argue. She’s more at fault for getting me dramaturge jobs than I am, partly because I can’t say no when she stares at me, and partly because I don’t keep a phone in my office. (Technology and most of the magical don’t get along.)

I don’t teach magical dramaturgy at Yale. I teach Elizabethan and Theatrical Studies. Only a handful of people know about the magic thing but they are, as we say, the right people.

I stepped out of the office to the tiny table that held a rotary phone (it’s one of the few kinds that doesn’t break after a few weeks around me), picked up the receiver and said, This is Portia, in my best do-not-screw-with-me voice.

Porty?

No one calls me Porty. No one except my sister Rosalind, that is, and only when she’s trying to irritate me.

But this voice clearly didn’t belong to Rosalind.

It’s Genevieve Hill.

I must have paused too long after that, because she added quickly,

You know. From high school.

I did know. Gen ran her own theater company. It used to be for profit, but about ten years after she started it, she got involved with drama for disadvantaged youth, and turned the theater into a non-profit enterprise filled with energetic kids, cobbled together sets, and the kind of heart that usually only appears in Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies of the let’s-put-on-a-show variety.

We hadn’t been in touch since we graduated, but I kept up. Kinda sorta, thanks to my sister, Viola, the only one of us who can handle any kind of post-industrial tech, who lets me see what happens on her social media pages.

Yes, I said, recovering from my surprise, You run the Greater Chicagoland Youth Theater.

It was her turn to sound surprised. How did you know?

Jeez, Gen, I said, you’re doing great work out there. How could I not know?

Of course, I didn’t mention Viola. It sounded so much better to let Gen think I’d heard of her through the theatrical grapevine.

Huh, Gen said. I’d clearly thrown her off her planned speech. I, um. Wow. I didn’t know you knew.

And weirdly, her discomfort made me uncomfortable. When we were growing up, Gen was the one everyone in the drama club aspired to be. Gen was the one who had the theatrical talent we all wanted. Gen was the one who was clearly going to be a Star.

But I didn’t have time to reminisce. I had to get off this phone before the connection fritzed.

What can I help you with? I asked, then realized how rude that sounded. I mean, we hadn’t spoken to each other in (mumble-mumble) years, and here I was, trying to get her off the phone.

She made an amused sound. You’re still the same, Porty. Afraid the phone will break?

Had I told her about that? I didn’t remember telling anyone about magic in high school. But that didn’t mean my sisters were as circumspect.

We were born one right after the other over a space of 30 months, just like every other magical trio of daughters in our family going back as long as the records exist. Which meant that me, Rosalind, and Viola were sometimes in the same classes at the same time. We didn’t have the same friends, but we knew the same people.

Phones still don’t work well for me, I said honestly, figuring Gen knew more about me than I realized she had.

She took an audible breath, as if she were bracing herself, and then she said, I’m calling because I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t suppose you’ve heard about the kids?

What kids? I asked.

My kids, she said. They’ve completely disappeared.

It took some fancy conversational wrangling and a lot of explanation to get the whole story. Gen didn’t mean her biological children; like me and my sisters, she never had any. She meant