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    Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection: Winston & Ruby
    Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection: Winston & Ruby
    Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection: Winston & Ruby
    Ebook165 pages2 hours

    Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection: Winston & Ruby

    By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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    About this ebook

    Winston: A kind and quiet wizard possessed of small magic.

    Ruby: A familiar with a big mouth and even bigger heart.

    Together: Two of masterful author Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s most beloved characters.

    Included are five Winston & Ruby stories: “Familiar Territory,” “Saving Face,” “Searching for the Familiar,” “Disaster Relief,” and “Un-Familiar.”

    “Rusch is a great storyteller.”

    —RT Book Reviews

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateJan 26, 2018
    ISBN9781386915560
    Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection: Winston & Ruby
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      Familiarity - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection

      Familiarity: A Winston & Ruby Collection

      Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      WMG Publishing Inc.

      Contents

      Hard Cat Years

      Familiar Territory

      Saving Face

      Searching for the Familiar

      Disaster Relief

      Un-Familiar

      Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      Newsletter sign-up

      About the Author

      Hard Cat Years

      I grew up with dogs. My parents didn’t like cats. My mother called them filthy creatures, and my father—well, he spent his summers on a farm, and it was his job as a young boy (back in the 1920s) to get rid of the kittens. I’ll spare you the details, but his eyes would fill with tears at the very mention of that task. By their very existence, cats reminded him of those days.

      When I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I moved into an apartment, not a dorm, and the place seemed empty. The complex banned dogs. So, my then-husband got the bright idea to get cats—and boy, was that a learning experience. From litter boxes to what actually happens when cats drink milk (ick!) to how affectionate cats actually are, I had a crash course in cat handling while dealing with my sophomore year of college.

      I loved it. I haven’t been without a cat in my house for forty years now.

      When my current husband, Dean, and I moved in together, we moved into a big empty house out in the country. We ended up with twelve cats, all indoor (and one mighty orange tom outside). We called that group Yours, Mine, Ours, and Theirs because we combined our feline households (his two cats, my three), adopted the cats the previous tenants of the house had abandoned (three), and immediately received the gift of kittens. (There were some other cats, given to us by friends moving, in that mix, as well.) We kept one of the kittens, kept the abandoned cats, kept our five cats, and ended up with nine, whom we moved to the Oregon Coast when we came here.

      Cats age, just like all mammals, and what I never realized until forced to look at it was that cat generations act like all generations. They tend to get old and die en masse.

      Thus: Hard Cat Years. Years when entire groups of cats move to their tenth life, somewhere in the great beyond.

      1997 was a Hard Cat Year, so hard in fact, that I can’t tell you which cat proved the initial inspiration for Buster in Familiar Territory. I know it wasn’t Ashley, our princess, because she inspired my most reprinted story ever, What Fluffy Knew (which isn’t in this collection but is in Five Feline Fancies).

      But I had initially thought our cat Spike inspired Familiar Territory. Because I was mourning a cat when I wrote the story, and I was telling the story to myself to make myself feel better.

      As I looked up the date for Familiar Territory, however, I realized Spike couldn’t have provided the spark for the story. Because Spike, a black-and-white leader who would’ve worn faded denims, a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, and had his hair greased back had he been human, left us on September 15, 2001. I remember this, because President Bush had declared that date the National Day of Mourning for 9/11, and I figured it was just like Spike to use something that monumental as a distraction so no one would notice that he had moved on.

      Except me and Dean, of course.

      2001. Another Hard Cat Year.

      Spike did provide the inspiration, though, for Buster. As often happens when I write, my best intentions morph into something else entirely. Buster had Attitude, and so did Spike, even though Buster’s desire for a Viking funeral probably wasn’t very Spike-like, as it turned out later. At the time, I didn’t know that. At the time I wrote the story, I figured Spike would’ve been all-in on the drama.

      Winston came along with Buster, spending their quiet days together until Buster was no more. The story wrote itself in maybe two hours, and to my surprise, introduced a third character. Ruby is unlike any cat I’ve ever lived with, and yet is just like most of them.

      By this, I mean she’s not based on any one cat. She is the most original cat character I’ve ever created. She came into Familiar Territory talking, and she has talked to me ever since.

      From the moment she appeared, I have wanted to write more Winston & Ruby stories. I adore them both, Winston with his small magic, and Ruby with her big mouth and even bigger heart.

      I write a lot of series, though, and I am always pulled in one direction or another, which leads me away from some of the stories I want to tell. I didn’t come back to Winston & Ruby for two years, when anthologist Martin H. Greenberg asked me to write a story about magic spells.

      I had written Familiar Territory for a Marty Greenberg anthology about wizards, so this magic spell thing seemed the perfect time to write another Winston & Ruby story. I liked the small store on the Oregon Coast, and spells often go awry, so I figured, let’s see what happens next.

      That became Saving Face. Saving Face introduced two characters who would become regulars: Boyce Theriot in New Orleans and police officer Scott Park on the Oregon Coast. Officer Park became friends with Winston & Ruby, which was why Winston could trust him to find Ruby when she went missing in Searching for the Familiar.

      That story came about two years after Saving Face, and only because Denise Little asked me to write a story for a familiars anthology. I had no idea I had put Winston & Ruby on the back burner for so long.

      Fast-forward a few years. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and I immediately thought of Boyce Theriot. What happened to him and his familiar? What happened to all of the magical based in that city? That question wasn’t just mine; it was Ruby’s as well. And she came up with a solution, almost as quickly as she identified the problem.

      Cats do occasionally do kind things for others. Sometimes, though, the cats regret their actions, particularly when it doesn’t go their way. Ruby taught me that, with the help of my then-bevy of cats, who didn’t always get along with each other.

      At this point, I was writing an occasional story about characters I loved, but readers saw as one-offs. Because the anthologies were published years apart, and went out of print quickly, no one saw more than one or two Winston & Ruby stories.

      I had planned (still plan) a Winston & Ruby novel, and I figured I’d collect the stories then. But, as always, my attention got diverted, and time went by.

      This time, as the years slid past, the world changed. The ebook became a thing, and Dean and I started a publishing company. Our first task was to put our entire backlist into ebooks, and that included short stories.

      I inaugurated a feature on my website (kriswrites.com) called Free Fiction Monday. Every Monday, I put up a free short story. I take the story down the following Monday and put up another free short story. I managed to do that for almost five years before I had to repeat a story.

      Through Free Fiction Monday, readers discovered my only-for-me series stories, like Winston & Ruby. (There are Whale Rock stories, and Spade/Paladin stories, and a handful of other series as well.) Readers would read one of the four Winston & Ruby series, then buy the other three stories.

      Then the readers would send me letters, asking for more Winston & Ruby. Oh, and a collection, too, please.

      In the interim, I had joined the Uncollected Anthology, a group of writers who write stories on the same theme as if we were writing for an anthology, but weren’t. This is very convoluted and has gotten more so over time (you can now get the Collected Uncollected every quarter), but suffice to say that Fall 2016’s theme was…familiars.

      And, boy, did I have a familiar I needed to write about. I was stunned that it had been nine years since I wrote about Winston & Ruby. It felt like yesterday. And, as usual, Ruby took over the story, with her usual feistiness and her compassion. She surprised Winston in the story, and she surprised me. (Spoiler alert: there’s a dog.)

      By writing Un-Familiar, though, I ended up with five stories, which is what I needed for the first collection of Winston & Ruby tales. I promise: there will be more. There have to be. Because there’s the story of the woman Winston once loved, and some crossover from another one of my series (Abracadabra Inc) and then there’s the wizards and…

      Yes, yes, I’ll get to it.

      I have to.

      Because I just promised you.

      And since I’ve just come to the end of another Hard Cat Year, I have some new stories to tell. Stories about Ella a.k.a. The Voice and Sir Galahad of Kitten, maybe even stories about his successor, Young Gavin a.k.a. Driveby and Gavin’s best buddy Cheeps. (Both of whom are doing fine, thank you. They’re young and energetic and opinionated, as cats should be.)

      So, here you go. Stories about small magic and Viking funerals as imagined by a cat. Cat-nappings and spells gone sideways. Disasters both real and magical. I envy you meeting Ruby for the first time. You won’t forget her.

      And Winston, whose magic might be small, but whose heart is as big as the sea.

      Enjoy!

      —Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      Lincoln City, Oregon

      January 25, 2018

      Familiar Territory

      Every morning they went clamming. Winston would carry the pail, and Buster would trail behind, stopping to sniff dead fish and complaining when his delicate paws sank in wet sand. Sometimes people would coo over him—they seemed drawn to a cat on the beach—but usually they would watch from a distance.

      Winston knew the town thought him strange. They called him that crazy guy with the cat, and most never visited his shop. Only tourists came in, and they usually bought the mass-produced items, not his specialty items. Those he sold to select customers who never returned, although they recommended the store to their friends. He did a steady mail order business, shipping weekly all over the United States, Canada, and Europe.

      He didn’t care about the money. It was merely a way to maintain his warm and cozy home, built on a cliff overlooking the sea. He had worn a path from the back door to the beach near the small town of Seavy Village, and he and Buster tramped down the path daily at first light, crabbing if the tides allowed, and playing in the sand until nine a.m. Then Winston returned home, showered, and drove to his shop on a decrepit section of Highway 101. Buster complained about the drive, but flirted with the customers shamelessly while Winston studied his books behind the counter.

      It was a small life, as magic ones went, but it was his, his and Buster’s. They had shared it since Winston fled San Francisco twenty years before and arrived in Seavy Village to find the cliff house for sale, and a rain-soaked kitten who spoke perfect English

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