by AMColeman
UPDATES MONDAYS Isis Cassidy has had better weeks. A former Army CID investigator and State Department security officer, she's been quietly blacklisted from her career, and the only job on offer is protecting the twelve-year-old grandson of a reclusive Vermont aristocrat. It's easy work — until armed professionals start making serious attempts to take the boy, and the woman who hired her turns out to be considerably older, and considerably more dangerous, than she looks. Lady Elaine Burton has a past. A very long past. And the enemies she made in another life, in another world, have apparently decided that five centuries is long enough to wait. The Glorious Realm of Anzell is a portal fantasy following a no-nonsense modern bodyguard dropped into a secondary world of magic, clockwork automata, and ancient grudges — with her Glock, her tactical baton, and her professional refusal to be impressed by anything she can't hit. Told across multiple points of view — a pragmatic soldier, a tracker hunting someone she once knew, a ratling spy calculating very long odds, a Blood Caller intelligence agent who is always three steps ahead and presenting one, and a woman who has been quietly paying a debt for five hundred years — the story asks what it means to protect someone, what it costs to change, and whether the door between worlds opens for a reason. It's a story about competent people doing hard jobs in impossible places, and the kind of ending that doesn't tie everything up neatly, but lands exactly where it needs to
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