Seanan McGuire lives and works in Northern California, in a crumbling farmhouse shared with her two improbably large blue cats, a wide assortment of books, and far too many creepy dolls. Since the release of her first novel in 2009, she has published more than twenty-five books, which feels more like a lifetime achievement than the work of less than a decade. She is widely believed not to sleep (and even more widely believed to be the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people, which would explain a lot). If you’d like to keep up with Seanan, we recommend looking for her at Disney World. Failing that, try www.seananmcguire.com.
According to friends, C. E. Murphy, who was born and raised in Alaska, began her writing career when she ran away from home at age five to write copy for the circus that had come to town. This is much more exciting than the truth, so she’s sticking with it.
More prosaically, she is the author of the bestselling Walker Papers series, has been told that she’s a crowdfunding pioneer, and lives with her family in Ireland, which is a magical place where it rains a lot and nothing one could seriously regard as winter ever actually arrives.
Joseph Nassise is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Templar Chronicles series, the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy, and the Great Undead War series. He is the coeditor, along with Del Howison, of Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, and he also writes epic fantasy (in conjunction with Steven Savile) under the pseudonym Matthew Caine. Visit him on the web at www.josephnassise.com.
Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, border crossers, narco punks, and human smugglers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and having a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His work has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, the New York Post, the Financial Times, Publishers Weekly, Peter Straub, Joe Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, Kevin J. Anderson, Tim Lebbon, and Christopher Golden. The American Library Association labeled him as one of the Major Horror Authors of the Twenty-First Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than twenty-six books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci-fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war.
Kat Richardson is the bestselling author of the Greywalker novels, as well as a small tantrum of short fantasy, science fiction, and mystery stories. She is an accomplished feeder of crows.
Diana Rowland has worked as a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss, a street cop, a detective, a computer forensics specialist, a crime scene investigator, and a morgue assistant, which means that she’s seen a helluva lot of weird crap. She won the marksmanship award in her police academy class, has a black belt in hapkido, has handled numerous dead bodies in various states of decomposition, once saved her family’s life by grabbing a roach, and can’t Rollerblade to save her life. She currently lives in south Louisiana, where she is deeply grateful for the existence of air-conditioning.
Steven Savile has written for popular franchises including Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, and Sherlock Holmes. He was a finalist for the People’s Book Prize in the UK and has won the Lifeboat Foundation’s Lifeboat to the Stars Award and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers Scribe Award. He wrote the storyline for the bestselling computer game Battlefield 3, which sold more than five million copies in its first week of release, and his novel Silver was one of the UK’s top thirty bestselling novels of 2011. Under the name Matt Langley his young adult fantasy novel Black Flag was the first original novel published by Cambridge University Press in the five hundred years since Henry VIII awarded them their royal charter. He has novels under option with CBS, Level One Entertainment, and Sony Entertainment. His forthcoming novels include Parallel Lines, a crime novel to be published by Titan in 2017, and Glass Town, a fantasy novel to be published by St. Martin’s in the fall of 2016, where you’ll meet Cadmus Damiola on his home turf.
Craig Schaefer’s books have taken readers to the seamy edge of a criminal underworld drenched in shadow (the Daniel Faust series); to a world torn by war, poison, and witchcraft (the Revanche Cycle); and across a modern America mired in occult mysteries and a conspiracy of lies (the Harmony Black series). Despite this, people say he’s strangely normal. Suspiciously normal, in fact.
Schaefer lives in Illinois with a small retinue of cats, all of whom try to interrupt his writing schedule and/or try to kill him on a regular basis. He practices sleight of hand in his spare time, though he’s not very good at it. His home on the web is www.craigschaeferbooks.com.
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. His feeble memory makes every day a joyous adventure of discovery and adventure even as it destroys personal relationships, and his weakness for adorable furry creatures leaves him with many cats. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates series of noir–science fiction novels from Orbit Books (www.avery-cates.com), the darkly hilarious crime novel Chum from Tyrus Books (www.chumthenovel.com), and most recently a tale of blood magic and short cons, We Are Not Good People, from Pocket Gallery (www.wearenotgoodpeople.com). He has published more than thirty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006, and “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through,” which appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris. He also writes about books for Barnes & Noble and About.com. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, the Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged, the fourteenth installment of which is Kitty Saves the World. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of eighty short stories. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An air force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
David Wellington is the author of seventeen books, including the Monster Island series of zombie novels and the Chimera trilogy of thrillers. He is perhaps best known for his Thirteen Bullets series, featuring the vampire hunter Laura Caxton. His work can be found online at www.david wellington.net and www.grimblyhall.com. He lives and works in New York City.
Jaye Wells is a USA Today bestselling author of urban fantasy and speculative crime fiction. Raised by booksellers, she loved reading books from a very young age. That gateway drug eventually led to a full-blown writing addiction. When she’s not chasing the word dragon, she loves to travel, drink good bourbon, and do things that scare her so she can put them in her books. Jaye lives in Texas.
Sam Witt writes dark thrillers infused with the supernatural. Informed by a rural Midwestern childhood and big-city adulthood, he combines down-home folklore and legends with a hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners writing style.
His Pitchfork County series follows the dark and twisting lives of a family intent on using their own cursed abilities to protect the place they call home from all manner of threats, from mad gods to meth cults.
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CREDITS
Cover design by Owen Corrigan
Cover photograph © Maciej Toporowicz / Arcangel Images
City illustration on title page © by 21/Shutterstock, Inc.
COPYRIGHT
“Ladies’ Fight” by Caitlin Kittredge and Jay
e Wells. Copyright © 2016 by Caitlin Kittredge and Jaye Wells.
“Tailed” by Seanan McGuire and Kelley Armstrong. Copyright © 2016 by Seanan McGuire and Kelley Armstrong.
“Sweet, Blissful Certainty” by Steven Savile and Craig Schaefer. Copyright © 2016 by Steven Savile and Craig Schaefer.
“Pig Roast” by Joseph Nassise and Sam Witt. Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Nassise and Sam Witt.
“Takes All Kinds” by Diana Rowland and Carrie Vaughn. Copyright © 2016 by Diana Rowland and Carrie Vaughn.
“The Lessons of Room 19” by Weston Ochse and David Wellington. Copyright © 2016 by Weston Ochse and David Wellington.
“Blood for Blood” by Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden. Copyright © 2016 by Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden.
“Spite House” by C. E. Murphy and Kat Richardson. Copyright © 2016 by C. E. Murphy and Kat Richardson.
“Crossed Wires” by Jeff Somers and Stephen Blackmoore. Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Somers and Stephen Blackmoore.
“Weaponized Hell” by Larry Correia and Jonathan Maberry. Copyright © 2016 by Larry Correia and Jonathan Maberry.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
URBAN ALLIES. Individual pieces copyright © 2016 by their respective author as noted above. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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ISBN 978-0-06-239134-6
EPub Edition July 2016 ISBN 9780062391353
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Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 34
