Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

EXCEPT . . .

If I died, who is telling this story?

Interesting fact—a last one: Some of the myths about salamanders are more or less true.

The room burned around me, my hair and clothing crinkled and burned, the beams overhead groaned and burned. The fire department got there, snaked their hoses into the inferno, and found five dead people. Or so they thought.

Then one of them moved.

Myth has it that a salamander can extinguish fire with the cold dampness of its body. Aristotle believed it, and some of the other old Greeks. Nonsense, of course, as even Pliny pointed out—but strangely enough, not entirely.

I lost my fingers, three toes, my voice, and most of my skin. A normal man would have died. They kept me in a coma for weeks. My looks disturbed hardened nurses for months.

But that was a year ago.

By the time I was in any shape to be questioned, there were really no questions left. They sent Frank to do the interview, even though he’d had nothing to do with the case other than passing on what I sent him. I don’t know, maybe I made them nervous.

Anyway, Frank told me a lot more than he asked me.

I knew about the scandals and the headlines, of course—when you’re in the hospital, they leave the television on a lot. So I’d sort of vaguely heard about the police raids and the government shake-ups; I’d heard the outraged speeches and the wild rumors and the dueling news stations. Even wrapped in my blanket of pain and drugs, I was aware of the shift of public opinion that made every SalaMan into a hero.

WeWeb closed down, after nine out of ten users canceled their pages, even though WeWeb did nothing but sell the ads.

A bill went in front of Congress to ban targeted ads, although no one thought it would pass.

What was expected to pass was a slew of bills reforming how science was done. Labs across the country were shut down or raided because of the links Dr. Curtis had formed with organized crime—nothing glues people to headlines like a modern-day Mengele: high-ranking scientist hires thugs to kidnap the raw material for his experiments; thugs go on to search the victims’ houses for more raw material; thugs set fires to discourage snoops.

And there’s nothing that makes the lawyers drool like a case linking universities and government agencies and organized crime and weird, mostly beautiful people like the SalaMen. It’s going to make the Nuremberg Trials look like squirrel food.

And you want to know the thing that astonishes me most, in all this? That Uncle Sam had in fact done exactly what it said it would: lock the door on the SalaMan files and make sure no one knew who we were. Which would’ve been a good and fair thing, except it meant that when we started disappearing, the FBI didn’t notice, since there was no reason to tie the disappearances together. The police didn’t notice, because the victims were so spread out. The media didn’t catch it, because even if they’d heard, who would believe it? Nobody noticed but Harry Savoy, and Harry was too paranoid to trust the FBI, the police, or the media.

Me? I kept out of everything. I had to shut my office, although I could’ve been busy a thousand hours a week if I’d been in any shape to work. I’m thinking that when I open again, I may actually call myself SalaMan Investigations. I might even try just working for my own people for a while.

But when might that be? Well, last night, while Lizzie and I were . . . well, as we were occupied with things that married people do, she said “Ow!” and sat up, rubbing her ribs. When she pulled her hand away, we both saw the red welt, up the side of her pale skin. I held the stubs of my fingers under the light, and studied them.

Sure enough, there among the scar tissue was a tiny rough protuberance. It looked for all the world like a baby’s fingernail.

SHADOW THIEVES

A Garrett, P.I., Story

by Glen Cook

Glen Cook is the bestselling author of more than forty books. He’s perhaps best known for the Black Company books, which include The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose, The Silver Spike, Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel, Bleak Seasons, She Is the Darkness, Water Sleeps, and Soldiers Live, detailing the adventures of a band of hard-bitten mercenaries in a gritty fantasy world, but he is also the author of the long-running Garrett, P.I., series, including Sweet Silver Blues, Bitter Gold Hearts, Cold Copper Tears, and ten others, a mixed fantasy/mystery series relating the strange cases of a private investigator who works mean streets on both sides of the divide between our world and the supernatural world. The prolific Cook is also the author of the science fiction Starfishers series, as well as the eight-volume Dread Empire series, the three-volume Darkwar series, and the recent Instrumentalities of the Night series, as well as nine stand-alone novels such as The Heirs of Babylon and The Dragon Never Sleeps. His most recent books are Passage at Arms, a new Starfishers novel; A Fortress in Shadow, a new Dread Empire novel; Surrender to the Will of the Night, a new Instrumentalities of the Night novel; and two new Garrett, P.I., novels, Cruel Zinc Melodies and Gilded Latten Bones. Cook lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

In the action-packed tale that follows, Garrett learns that when trouble comes knocking at your door, sometimes it’s better not to answer.

I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN THE BROOM CLOSET I CALL AN OFFICE. SOMEBODY hammered on the front door. Odd that they should. I wasn’t home much anymore.

This time I was hiding out from the craziness that comes down on the newly engaged. My future in-laws dished me make-crazy stuff relentlessly.

I began disentangling myself from my desk and chair.

Old Dean, my cook and housekeeper, trundled past my doorway. He was long, lean, slightly bent, gray, and almost eighty, but spry. “I’ll get it, Mr. Garrett. I’m expecting a delivery.”

That was one impatient deliveryman. He was yelling. He was pounding. I couldn’t understand a word. That door was fortress grade.

Dean did not use the peephole. He assumed the noise came from whoever he was expecting. He