New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Mercedes Lackey presents three exciting short urban fantasy novels featuring three resourceful heroines and three different takes on the modern world and on magics both modern and ancient.Arcanum 101: Diana Tregarde, practicing witch, romance novelist, Guardian of the Earth. Studying at Harvard, Diana is approached by Joe OBrian, a young cop who has already seen more than one unusual thing during his budding career. The distraught mother of a kidnap victim is taking advice from a psychic and interfering in the police investigation. Will Diana prove that the psychic is a fake? Unfortunately, the psychic is not a fake, but a very wicked witchand the childs kidnapper. Drums: Jennifer Talldeer, shaman, private investigator, member of the Osage tribe. Most of Jennies work is regular PI stuff, but Nathan Begay brings her a problem Romance novelist and modern witch Diana Tregarde last appeared in a Lackey novel almost 20 years ago. She returns in a story introducing three novella-length urban fantasies, all featuring female sorceresses. “Arcanum 101” eavesdrops on Tregarde’s neophyte days in the super-secret coven of Guardians. As a freshman studying at Harvard, Diana is solicited by an officer intervening for a distraught mother whose daughter has been kidnapped. In hiring a psychic to find her daughter, the mother certainly means well, but Diana’s intuition quickly exposes the psychic as a witch with diabolical ends. In “Drums,” shaman and private investigator Jennifer Talldeer must thwart an angry Osage Indian spirit pestering a young couple. In “Ghost in the Machine,” Ellen McBridge is a computer programmer and techno-shaman who discovers that a wendigo is killing everyone in a popular computer game and arming itself to transcend computer code and enter the real world. Lackey’s well-seasoned talents for good storytelling and character development are on full display here. --Carl Hays Mercedes Lackey is the author of the bestselling Valdemar series, the Obsidian Trilogy ( The Outstretched Shadow , To Light a Candle , and When Darkness Falls ), the Enduring Flame trilogy ( The Phoenix Unchained , The Phoenix Endangered , and The Phoenix Transformed ), and the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. She has written many other books, including Phoenyx and Ashes , Sacred Ground , The Firebird , The Fairy Godmother , and Alta . Lackey is the co-author, with Andre Norton, of the Halfblood Chronicles, including Elvenborn . Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago and graduated from Purdue University. She has worked as an artist’s model, a computer programmer, and for American Airlines, and has written lyrics and recorded more than fifty songs. She lives in Oklahoma. TRIO OF SORCERY (Chapter One) This is the first Diana Tregarde story in decades. And in a sense this is the first Diana Tregarde story, period. It takes place in the early 1970s and it will be hard for anyone younger than thirty to realize what a very different world that was. Computers were the size of buildings. We were still putting men on the moon, but there is more computing power in a common iPhone than there was at all of Cape Kennedy. Watergate was about to happen. Nixon hadn’t yet resigned. U.S. soldiers were still fighting and dying in Vietnam. There was no such thing as being “openly gay.” There also was no such thing as HIV. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones were all recently dead of various self-indulgences, but John Lennon was still alive. The only time you saw windmills was on a farm or in Holland. Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, threatening to go up to thirty. No one had ever heard of, much less seen, a Japanese manga. Britney Spears wasn’t even born. Neither was Leonardo DiCaprio. Stand-up comedians only performed in nightclubs with bad reputations, or in Las Vegas. No one would consider going out for a night of comedy. There was no MTV. Anytime there was a rock-themed television program, it was an event. There was barely cable TV. Most people made do with three channels and what was not yet called PBS. When you had cable TV, you had a whole twelve channels! “Portable” music was via a transistor radio. No one had ever heard of rap. And if anyone had heard a rap song, they would have considered it a quaint offshoot of beat poetry, which was so, so 1950s. You bought most of your reading material at the drugstore from revolving racks, or digest-size monthly fiction magazines in a small magazine rack, unless you were really lucky and were in a town big enough to actually have a bookstore. Research meant going to the library and looking things up in books. So as you read this, if you find yourself thinking, “Well, why didn’t they just—” the answer is probably, “Because they didn’t have it then.” Enjoy. TRIO OF SORCERY Copyright © 2010 by Mercedes Lackey