Hero Dust
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About this ebook
Bram understands the importance of stories. After all, he convinced Stoker to write Dracula to frighten the world.
One of the original vampire hunters, Bram has seen vampires in action. But he grows weary of the job. He needs a replacement. Only the world of the 21st century doesn't lend itself to heroes—not of the kind he needs anyway.
Until he realizes that perhaps he should look for a heroine instead.
Like early Ray Bradbury, Rusch has the ability to switch on a universal dark.
—the Times of London
[Rusch's horror stories are] horror in the same way that Robert Bloch's Psycho is—horror of the soul.
—Locus
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. 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.
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Book preview
Hero Dust - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Hero Dust
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
WMG PublishingContents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Newsletter sign-up
Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
About the Author
Weigh’d in the balance, hero dust
Is vile as vulgar clay
—Lord Byron
Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte
1
The weather that summer was frightful. Much later—nearly 200 years later—he learned that the amazing storms with their torrential downpours and terrifying lightning shows occurred as a meteorological reaction to the eruption of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia.
But on those nights in 1816, which he spent leaning against the wall of the villa listening to the voices echo from the veranda, the weather seemed like some special gift from hell. The rain was warm and powerful, the worst he had seen in his young life, hitting the bare flesh of his arms so hard that he sometimes worried the water would bruise him; and the lightning so bright that he sometimes had to scuttle backwards to avoid being seen by the storytellers gathered in a circle on the stone tiles.
Bram was not supposed to be there: George Gordon Noel Byron, the 6 th Baron Byron, had his doctor, John Polidori, rent the villa so no one would know that the famous poet planned to spend the summer on the shore of Lake Geneva. But Bram wasn’t there to see Lord Byron—he had never heard of the man before that May. Bram had come because his mentor ordered it.
His mentor, a man whose name Bram never spoke, not even now, because heroes, Bram had been taught, worked in silence and were not—should not—ever be remembered.
The stars say a power will emerge near the summer solstice, his mentor had said. I have heard from two other sources as well. The world shall change at the Villa Diodoti on