lauraanne_gilman | a taste of BURNING BRIDGES for your Friday afternoon hors d'oeuvres

“You Didier? Of course you’re Didier, who else would you be?”
He turned in the direction of the voice, and blinked at the sight of the creature standing in front of him.
“You’re…”
“Yeah, I know, I hear it all the time. Notoriety’s a bitch.” To the passer-by, he was merely a particularly grotesque old man, wizened and bent, with a face liked a dried apple and drool threatening to appear at the corner of its pale-skinned lips. Only the creature’s dark red eyes gave its species away: demon. Wren had told him that demon all looked different, except the eyes; she hadn’t said that one of them looked like Koshschey. Koshschey the Invulnerable. Koshschey the Damned. Koshschey the Murderer.
“You are Didier, right?”
“кузен дракона. I mean, right, yes, I am.” The sight had shocked him back into Russian, as though he were a six-year-old terrified by his father’s stories, all over again.
“Good, because if I had the wrong street again I was going to hand in my courier’s badge and go hibernate for another decade or seven. I hate this city.”
Of course it spoke Russian. Sergei had trouble keeping up, mentally translating in his head and stumbling over a few words. “You have a message for me?”
“Yeah. You’re supposed to meet Herself at Dante’s. Half an hour. Was more time but these damn streets twist and turn on another, I swear to god Kana'ti couldn’t find its way through this without a compass.”
The demon turned and walked away, its message delivered. Sergei stared after it, trying to parse what he’d just been told. She hadn’t come to get him herself, had sent a courier, a demon to fetch him like an errant schoolboy.

Going forward, I plan to post a monthly snippet from Book #5 up on the Cosa Nostradamus blog. So don't forget to check!