The Wizard Behind the Curtain (Uncollected Anthology: Dragons Book 31)

Diz and Dee, our favorite private investigators, are back in their longest—and wildest—adventure yet!

Dee should know better. Whenever her mom asks for a simple little favor, like tracking down who trashed her craft store and stole her yarn, things inevitably get weird. Of course, when you’re an otherwise unremarkable human with an unreliable touch of precognition, a dog who only sometimes looks like a Golden Retriever, and a long-standing secret crush on your hunky but grumpy elf partner, you measure weird on a sliding scale.

But this one takes the cake!

In a tale that involves dragons in disguise, a pissed off goblin, an annoyed halfling, a remorseful troll, and—oh yeah—a being who calls itself Crimson Death, Diz and Dee find themselves in a battle to the death for not only the fate of Moretown Bay, but the entire world!

A must read for Diz and Dee fans everywhere, The Wizard Behind the Curtain weaves aspects from Annie’s other Moretown Bay stories into a compelling page-turner you won’t be able to put down. Available as a standalone ebook or part of the Uncollected Anthology’s Diversity of Dragons issue #31.

Annie Reed is a master short fiction writer.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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The Wizard Behind the Curtain

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Chapter One

It’s never a good thing when my day starts off with a call from my mother.

It’s not that I don’t love my mother. I do. It’s just that she’s my mother and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t approve of my life choices.

Like the fact that I’m not married and I haven’t given her any grandchildren like my perfect cousin Stacy, who gave my Aunt Gloria two perfect grandchildren. Or the fact that I quit a perfectly good job as a detective with the Moretown Bay Police Department to open a private detective agency that manages to bring in just enough paying business to make the rent and occasionally splurge on a massage from the masseuse across the street.

Not that I tell my mother about the massages.

Especially since some of them involve a two-for-one deal with the second massage going to my partner, an incredibly well-toned and rarely serene elf named Diz.

My name is Dee. I’m not an elf, just a plain old human female with hair that frizzes when it’s damp—it’s always damp in this part of the Pacific Northwest—and an unreliable sense of precognition. I live in an apartment on the second floor of a building that used to house a bakery on the ground floor. Our office is on the ground floor, which gives me a killer commute. Handy on days like today when I slept in a little later than I intended.

I share my apartment (and the office) with my cat and a dog that only looks like a Golden Retriever. He’s really a magical being who for some reason decided to hang around with me for a while. My cat is not amused.

Together with Diz, we operate D & D Investigations. We specialize in finding missing persons. It even says so on our storefront window.

The persons part of our business has always eluded my mother. I first started getting precog visions in my teens, which came as a shock not only to me but also to my mother since I was the first and only member of our family to exhibit any magical ability whatsoever. Once she got over her shock, she started to ask me to do my thing, which in her world meant I was supposed to find all sorts of lost objects. Like her car keys. Her fabric scissors. Or the remote to the TV. (That last one was easy. I didn’t need to use anything other than common sense to know a lost remote could always be found beneath the cushion of my dad’s easy chair.)

Finding lost objects isn’t exactly how my precog abilities work. I don’t have a crystal ball in my head. What I usually get are flashes of things that might (and I stress might) happen at some point in the future. If my mother was going to lose her car keys, sometimes I could see what she was going to do with them then—like the time she was going to put them in the freezer instead of the ice cream she’d bought at the grocery store.

Not that I could keep her from putting her keys in the freezer. If the things I see are actually going to happen, not mere possibilities, I can’t change that. Most of the time that means if I see where the missing person we’re looking for is going to be, Diz and I head there to make sure we get a chance to talk to whoever went missing to see if they might like to go back to the people who care about them enough to pay us to find them.

Or in the case of the keys my mother put in the freezer, I made sure I jogged down the stairs, opened the freezer, and handed my confused mother her chilly keys.

At least that’s how my visions used to work. Since Dog came into my life—and yes, he prefers the name Dog—my visions have become a little erratic. I’m not sure if he has anything to do with that, or if it means that my ability is maturing. Diz tells me it’s because I’m becoming more Zen about the whole thing, and he claims credit for that.

Whatever.

All I know is that I still have precious little control over when my precog ability decides to kick in and what it decides to show me.

But can I convince my mother of that? Not on your life. Or mine.

So when she calls me out of the blue, it’s usually because something’s gone missing. Last time it was her rescue turkey Simpkins. He’d been birdnapped right before Thanksgiving. Diz and I managed to rescue him in the nick of time before he became the ritual sacrifice of a turkey-worshipping cult.

Happy mother, happy bird, and she sent me home from Thanksgiving dinner with a nice chunk of ham.

This morning’s missing object emergency?

Yarn.

My craft store’s been robbed! my mother said when I answered my phone. And they took yarn, can you imagine? Yarn! Who breaks into a store to steal yarn?

I rubbed my eyes and tried to wake up. Yarn? I asked, just to make sure I’d heard what I thought I had.

Yarn, she said. They took every single skein in the store.

I pulled my cell phone away from my ear long enough to peer at its tiny time display. It was seven-thirty in the morning. No self-respecting craft store in the suburbs would be open at seven-thirty in the morning. Since my parents live in Merlin Heights, a slice of suburbia right out of the last century, and my mother wouldn’t go into the city to shop—she’d order online before she’d set foot anywhere near where I live and work—she had to be talking about a craft store in her area.

That meant the robbery had to have happened overnight and my mother just found out about it this morning. Probably from my Aunt Gloria. My aunt is an incurable gossip. She lives in the Heights too, and her gossip chain is a thing to behold.

I sat up in bed, earning a disgruntled meow from my cat. She’s convinced the bed is really hers and she just allows me to sleep on part of it. A very small part.

Can’t you do your thing and find out where my yarn is? my mother asked.

Your yarn? I could have sworn she said a craft store had been robbed.

Yes. Her tone had gone from urgent to exasperated. Did I just wake you up? What are you doing still sleeping at this time of the morning?

Normally I wouldn’t still be in bed, but Diz and I had been out late the night before tracking down a cobbler’s runaway apprentice, a halfling named Aurora May. We’d spent two days chasing down a bunch of leads until we eventually found her in a group home with a bunch of other halflings. The group home looked like party central—lots of legal and semi-legal substances, lots of loud polka music (yes, I said polka. Apparently halflings like polka. Go figure), and a spread of late-night snacks like you wouldn’t believe.

Next to eating, smoking some pretty questionable substances must be about the best thing in the world as far as the halflings in the group home were concerned. I think I had a contact high by the time we left since we’d spent a good half hour trying to talk Aurora into going back to work. I did have one heck of a headache.

I’d done most of the talking, which turned out to be mostly shouting thanks to all that blaring polka music. Diz glowered, but none of the halflings took him seriously. I blame the questionable substances.

Most people take Diz