Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [1]
Finally, I wish to convey my thanks and gratitude to the following people: the heroic team at DAW Books, and particularly my editor, Betsy Wollheim; Daniel Dos Santos, the artist who created the wonderful cover for this novel; April Kihlstrom, whose advice I sought in the nick of time; and many friends who offered practical and/or moral support while I was wrestling this book to the ground, including (but not limited to) Mary Jo Putney, Zell Schulman, Jerry Spradlin, Cindy Person, and Toni Blake.
Esther Diamond, her friends, and her nemeses will all return soon for their next misadventure in Vamparazzi, wherein will we finally learn what Max’s issue with Lithuanians is.
1
As summer in New York City ripened into a swel-A tering stench of suffocating heat and humidity, I found myself arrested for prostitution, menaced by zombies (yes, zombies), and staked out as a human sacrifice. I also nearly got Lopez killed—again.
Although I realize this isn’t exactly the sort of stuff that happens to everyone on a bad hair day, I nonetheless maintain that these events were not my fault.
Well, not entirely my fault. I do feel responsible for what happened to Lopez. Cause and effect. If I hadn’t gotten him involved in my problem, then he wouldn’t have come so close to meeting the Lord of Death.
And I got him involved because I didn’t want a prostitution arrest on my police record. Indeed, I didn’t want a police record at all.
Getting picked up for prostitution, though . . . now that was not my fault. That, obviously, would have happened to anyone who happened to lose her cell phone in a struggle with deranged gargoyles (yes, gargoyles) and trip over a living corpse in Harlem at midnight while dressed like a hooker.
Oh, if only I were making this up.
I was in Harlem in the middle of a muggy midsummer night because I was working. I’d been cast in a guest role on The Dirty Thirty, the latest success in the Crime and Punishment franchise of prestigious police television dramas. Affectionately known to fans as D30, this was the C&P empire’s most controversial spin-off to date, a gritty, morally ambivalent show about rampant police corruption in the Thirtieth Precinct a.k.a. “the dirty Thirty.”
After being rejected by C&P’s regular network because of its raw subject matter and antihero protagonists, D30 had premiered on cable TV the previous summer, and it had soon become a critically acclaimed cult hit with a steadily growing audience. Some New York City cops condemned and boycotted the program, while others reputedly provided much of the show’s material from their own experiences on the force.
The show’s second season had begun airing this summer, when the competition mostly consisted of reruns, and ratings and reviews were good this year, too. So getting a guest role on D30 was a good opportunity for me. Especially since I had no other real work (i.e. acting work) lined up and had been “resting” (i.e. waiting tables fifty hours per week) for the past couple of months.
It was also a terrific role. Granted, my mother wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of my appearing on national television as a homeless bisexual junkie prostitute—but my mother is seldom thrilled about anything I do, so I let her oh-so-subtle comments about this job roll off my back. My father had declined to offer an opinion—though whether that was to avoid an argument with me or with my mother, I have no idea.
My parents live in Wisconsin and rarely visit New York—a city which, besides being an international epicenter for my profession, has the advantage of being eight hundred miles away from them.
However, parental dismay notwithstanding, Jilly C-Note (not her real name), was a challenging and satisfying character to play: tough, bold, ignorant but shrewd, impulsive, completely