Unbroken Familiar

By Annie Reed

Nothing can break the bond between a familiar and a wizard.

Except death.

Nothing can break the spirit of a bonded familiar.

Except the murder of her wizard.

Someone—or some thing—murdered an elderly wizard who practiced black-market magic, leaving a young familiar caught between her human and animal forms. Twig, a street-wise elf, becomes embroiled in an elaborate game of murder and revenge when she joins forces with the familiar to track down the wizard's killer.

“One of the best writers I’ve come across in years. Annie excels at whatever genre of fiction she chooses to write.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, award-winning editor and writer of The Retrieval Artist series

“You can’t go wrong with Annie Reed. Her deftly-crafted tales—with characters as memorable as the stories themselves—far surpass most of what’s out there. She deserves a wide audience.” –Michael J. Totten, author of Resurrection

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thunder Valley Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370804962

Annie Reed

Award-winning author and editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls Annie Reed “one of the best writers I’ve come across in years.”Annie’s won recognition for her stellar writing across multiple genres. Her story “The Color of Guilt” originally published in Fiction River: Hidden in Crime, was selected as one of The Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016. Her story “One Sun, No Waiting” was one of the first science fiction stories honored with a literary fellowship award by the Nevada Arts Foundation, and her novel PRETTY LITTLE HORSES was among the finalists in the Best First Private Eye Novel sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and the Private Eye Writers of America.A frequent contributor to the Fiction River anthologies and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Annie’s recent work includes the superhero origin novel FASTER, the near-future science fiction short novel IN DREAMS, and UNBROKEN FAMILIAR, a gritty urban fantasy mystery short novel. Annie’s also one of the founding members of the innovative Uncollected Anthology, a quarterly series of themed urban fantasy stories written by some of the best writers working today.Annie’s mystery novels include the Abby Maxon private investigator novels PRETTY LITTLE HORSES and PAPER BULLETS, the Jill Jordan mystery A DEATH IN CUMBERLAND, and the suspense novel SHADOW LIFE, written under the name Kris Sparks, as well as numerous other projects she can’t wait to get to. For more information about Annie, including news about upcoming bundles and publications, go to www.annie-reed.com.

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Unbroken Familiar

Copyright © 2017 by Annie Reed

Published by Thunder Valley Press

Cover and Layout copyright © 2017 Thunder Valley Press

Cover art copyright © outsiderzone/bigstock.com

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.

Nothing can break the bond between a familiar and a wizard.

Except death.

Nothing can break the spirit of a bonded familiar.

Except the murder of her wizard.

Someone—or some thing—murdered an elderly wizard who practiced black-market magic, leaving a young familiar caught between her human and animal forms. Twig, a street-wise elf, becomes embroiled in an elaborate game of murder and revenge when she joins forces with the familiar to track down the wizard's killer.

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UNBROKEN FAMILIAR

1

A cold rain plastered Twig’s hair to her scalp and the back of her neck, dripped in large drops from the long, delicate points of her ears, and raised goosebumps on her skin.

Rain was nothing new in Moretown Bay. The Pacific Northwest city that hugged the bay of the same name saw more rain than sun, and more cold days year round than warm ones. The cold didn’t usually bother Twig, but tonight was different.

She leaned against the wet brick wall outside the strip club her friend Jocko owned. He’d named the place Snow’s Palace, a dig at some movie Twig had never seen. Apparently Jocko, the tallest dwarf Twig had ever known, had a serious dislike of the way dwarves had been depicted in the film.

Jocko’s twisted sense of humor had been the first thing (other than his sheer size; Jocko stood well over six feet tall) that Twig had noticed about the big, hairy guy when they’d met years ago. Her own twisted sense of humor, as well as her diminutive size, had caught his attention, and they’d been friends—after a fashion—ever since.

She wrapped her bare arms around herself, trying not to shiver. Heat and cold, sunshine and rain, all the permutations of the elements weren’t supposed to affect elves, but tonight Twig didn’t feel much like an elf at all.

Her family had disowned her.

She’d torn up the parchment a coal black crow had delivered less than an hour ago. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t get the formal, stilted language of the proclamation out of her brain.

Activities unbecoming your station.

And…

Dishonored your family.

And her most damning sin:

You have associated with a dwarf who has himself dishonored his own kin.

Twig supposed she should have known this was coming.

In the Shadows, the locals’ name for the hard-luck neighborhood down by the commercial piers in Moretown Bay, sin was a way of life. Jocko’s strip club wouldn’t even be classified as sin light by the Shadows’ standards.

Drug deals, kidnapping, murder. It all happened after dark in the Shadows. Even the cops didn’t patrol the area all that much. Back when Jocko had worked vice, he’d been one of the cops who did venture past the boundaries between the places most law-abiding citizens called home and the places where crime didn’t bother to hide its face.

Jocko had been one of the good guys. He still was, but that didn’t matter to Twig’s family. Just like it didn’t matter to her family that she wasn’t a stripper, or that she didn’t have anything to do with drugs. Or that she didn’t do any number of things that the mortal world considered criminal.

To the elves of Marlette Island, and especially the elves, like her family, who had royal blood flowing in their veins, merely associating with sinners was sufficient reason for banishment.

The garish neon sign advertising Snow’s Palace reflected off the slick pavement of the street outside the club. Loud surfer music—the only kind of music Jocko allowed in his club—blasted into the night air as the door opened and a group of drunken humans poured themselves into a taxi waiting at the curb.

The club’s bouncer watched the men get into the taxi and then turned toward where Twig stood in the rain beyond the awning that covered the club’s entrance.

Don’t you have enough sense to come in out of the rain? he asked.

He was a muscle-bound weight lifter hired to intimidate anyone who wanted to get fresh with the dancers. Twig had grabbed him by the nuts and squeezed—hard—when he’d tried to intimidate her back when they’d first met six months ago.

The bouncer hadn’t been around back when Twig first went to work for Jocko. She’d been gone from Moretown Bay and Jocko’s life for nearly a decade helping a friend, but circumstances had brought her back to the Shadows. She’d tried to get inside the club to see Jocko, and she hadn’t had any time to spare. That’s what happened when someone was out to kill you.

The bouncer had thought she was a kid, and he’d tried to stop her from going inside the club. The Marlette elves, especially those with royal blood like Twig, looked perpetually young. Other than her long, delicately pointed ears, her youthful appearance was the only thing that gave away her heritage.

The bouncer hadn’t taken her seriously when she’d told him she was probably old enough to be his mother, so she’d taught him looks were unreliable when it came to elves.

Consequently, the bouncer didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him. But at least he’d contented himself to only jab at her with words.

She certainly wasn’t about to explain to him why she’d come outside in the rain.

She didn’t want to be surrounded by her adopted family—Jocko and the changeling dancers and her fellow bartenders—when her own kin had disowned her. It all hurt too much.

If she was the type who drowned her sorrows in alcohol, she’d be inside drinking away a week’s worth of wages, but that had never been her style. She was brash and bold—ten years spent with a motorcycle gang while she was trying to help her friend tended to do that to a person—and she never, ever let anyone see her hurting.

Fuck off, she told the bouncer. I like the rain.

Nutty elf, he muttered under his breath before he went back to his post just inside the door.

Stupid man. He could have whispered, and she still would have heard him over the music.

Twig heard more things than humans could ever imagine with her long, delicately pointed ears. More than music and speech and the whisper of a breeze rustling the garbage in an alleyway at noon.

She heard magic.

She ignored most of it, the way she imagined humans ignored the sound of their beating hearts. They only paid attention when something went wrong.

Twig ignored the everyday sounds of magic in the city. She’d learned to tune them out early, or they would have been like thousands