The Glass God

Book 2: Magicals Anonymous

by Kate Griffin

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Sharon Li: apprentice shaman and community support officer for the magically inclined. It wasn't the career Sharon had in mind, but she's getting used to running Magicals Anonymous and learning how to Be One With The City. When the Midnight Mayor goes missing, leaving only a suspiciously innocent-looking umbrella behind him, Sharon finds herself promoted. Her first task: find the Midnight Mayor. The only clues she has are a city dryad's cryptic message of doom and several pairs of abandoned shoes . . . Suddenly, Sharon's job feels a whole lot harder. Shaman Sharon Li's adventures continue among the magical beings of modern-day London in this spell-binding sequel to Stray Souls.

Release date: July 9, 2013

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

He feels something press against his thigh, and half turns in indignation.

But the person who just brushed by is still walking calmly on, shoulders hunched, head down beneath a trilby hat, and Darren, as he brushes his leg, can’t feel any blood, and is already half wondering if he imagined it. Perhaps he did. He’s had a bit to drink and while he’s okay–of course, he’s fine!–it’s easy to get jumpy on a lonely night.

He walks on, past the shuttered convenience store and the locked-up laundrette, beneath the painting on the wall of the grinning monkey, banana in hand, and through the accusing stare of the policeman drawn on the metal grille that guards the tattoo parlour, whose graffittoed face warns all passers-by that this shop is his shop. He turns the corner into the terraced road where he lives, six to the flat share, a house with a nice back garden where they sometimes try to have a barbecue in order to force the weather to turn to rain, walks three more paces, and pauses.

Stops.

Stares at nothing in particular, then down at the ground.

He seems… surprised.

It appears to Darren, and indeed to anyone who might be observing Darren at the time, that suddenly everything he’s known up to this point has been meaningless. All that was has passed him by, and all that remains is everything which is, and yet to come. He is used to having such profound thoughts at two in the morning after a night in the pub, but it seems to him that this is, perhaps, revelatory. A feeling deeper, truer and more meaningful than anything he has ever experienced with or without the aid of illegal substances, ever before.

And so, for tomorrow can only come if we let go of today, he reaches down to his shoes, and carefully slips them off his feet. His socks are stripy, multicoloured, a reminder, he always felt, that underneath his veneer of clean white shirt and sensible trousers, he once fought for social freedoms and artistic expression. He flexes his toes on the ground, feeling the sudden damp chill of the paving stones rise up through the clean fabric, into the soles of his feet. He lifts up his shoes, carefully unpicking the knot in the laces, then, once they are free, ties the laces back together, one shoe to the other. He raises his head, looking for something suitable for his purposes, and sees a lamppost with a long neck sticking out over the street. He steps back a few paces, to get a better line of sight, then, whirling his shoes overhead, spins them like an Olympic champion and, with a great heave of his arm, lets the shoes fly. They tumble through the air, one over the other, and hook across the neck of the lamppost, tangling a few times round as they come to rest, to form a noose of shoelace across the metal top.

And, just like that, Darren is gone.

It began as a Facebook group.

The name of the group was:

Weird Shit Keeps Happening To Me And I Don’t Know Why But I Figure I Probably Need Help

As soon as he’d been granted admin privileges, Rhys had gone about changing that name, and the group had become known as: Weird Shit Keeps Happening. However, there were still too many people requesting permission to join who were simply troubled teenagers, or adults coming out of difficult relationships, or old folk who’d forgotten to take their medicine, and, of course, the ubiquitous spammers.

WEIRD SHIT HAPPENING TO YOU?? FOR ONLY $55 UNICURE WILL FIX IT!

Sharon had said, “Yeah, but isn’t it kinda indiscreet to just put up a sign, on the internet, proclaiming ‘magic is real and here we are’? Only I’ve seen movies, and usually what happens next is these government guys in black suits and glasses turn up and start asking you questions like ‘Have you now or have you ever been an agent for the Soviet government?’ and before you know it, there’s medical experimentation going on, and I can’t be having that.”

Sharon Li, it turned out, couldn’t be having a lot of things.

“Well, we can make it only open to friends of friends,” suggested Rhys carefully. “And we could message any applicants first, just to make sure that they understand what they’re getting into. And Facebook isn’t the only way, of course; I mean, there are other tools on the internet for social networking, especially if the network contains two vampires, five witches, three necromancers and a troll, see?”

Sharon still didn’t look happy. “But this is daft!” she exclaimed. “If every secret society the world over had an internet page, it’d be the death of conspiracy theories and late-night movies on Channel Five!”

“But… we’re not a secret society, are we? Aren’t we open to everyone who has a problem with their mystic nature?”

Sharon considered. Rhys had always admired the way in which Sharon Li considered, her entire face drawn together and her body stiff as if to declare that, while the world might be passing her by, nothing was more important than getting this thing right. It was an attitude she had extended most of her life, from learning the skills of a shaman, seer of the truth, knower of the path, wanderer of the misty way and so on and so forth, through to getting her five fruit and veg a day and organising the once monthly pub quiz night for members of the society.

“Okay,” she said at last. “Just call the damn thing Magicals Anonymous.”

So he had.

Few people could have been more surprised than Rhys was himself when offered the job of IT manager for Magicals Anonymous. Then again, he’d quickly discovered that being an IT manager in an office of two–himself and Sharon–was in fact a polite way of expressing the notion of universal dogsbody, administrative minion, sometime sort-of-secretary and, above all else, regular purveyor of cups of tea to all who came through the door. Within days he’d raised this last skill to a high art form, and could now prepare the perfect cup of tea for goblins, sidhes, magus and tuatha de danaan, although his first attempt at providing tea for the danaan had nearly resulted in a diplomatic incident when he put in two lumps of sugar rather than one. The tuatha de danaan, it turned out, took these things seriously.

If Rhys minded that his job had, in fact, little to do with computers, he didn’t show it. His last job had been heavily to do with computers, but had ended abruptly when it transpired that the computers in question were owned by a wendigo and his soul-enslaving committee of bankers: a termination process including no fewer than two trips to hospital and the destruction of a significant part of Tooting High Street. At heart, he concluded, he’d been a software man anyway, rather than a hardware kinda guy.

“But why hire me?” he’d asked Sharon, in a rare moment of boldness.

Sharon Li had looked up from her desk, with its magnificent collection of multicoloured highlighters, colour-coordinated folders and, stashed secretly in the lowest drawer, a book entitled Management for Beginners. “Well,” she said, “I figure I was hired to do this gig, not because I’ve got office experience or know anything about local government, which is what, I guess, we are, in a kinda social services way, but because I can walk through walls, and the souls of the city whisper their secrets to me from beneath the stones of the streets. So, when I was asked to find someone to work with me, I guess I just figured I shouldn’t get anyone who’d show me up too badly.”

Two weeks later, Rhys still wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad.

The office of Magicals Anonymous was on the ground floor of a polite Georgian terrace, conveniently sited, Rhys couldn’t help but feel, next to a walk-in medical, in one of the terraced streets that criss-crossed behind Coram’s Fields. Little Lion Street was presumably named after an incident hundreds of years ago which concerned something little and almost certainly involved a street but, Rhys felt, had in no way included a lion. Not quite Islington but definitely not Holborn, it was in an area defined by the superb transport links making great efforts to avoid it. Since the former family homes lining these wide, tree-shadowed byways were too large, impressive and old to be affordable as somewhere to live, dozens of little offices and firms had sprung up within them. Magicals Anonymous sat on the ground floor across the hall from where five ladies of a certain age and one male youth of infinite despondency published little books on gardening, cooking and healthy living, RRP £1.99 from all good organic food shops. One floor up, and a solicitor who spoke in the brisk tones of the contracts she perused held meetings behind a closed black door; on the other side of the landing from her, three young men, with their sleeves rolled up to demonstrate masculinity where no other clues were available, struggled to develop the Perfect App for the modern age, and bickered about operating systems and mobile phones.

If anyone asked Rhys what Magicals Anonymous did, he told them it was a magicians’ party service. Which, he realised, was unfortunate, as he had already received three letters asking if they did children’s birthdays, and one enquiring about weddings.

“I’m not sure how the kids would react to seeing Gretel,” Sharon had said. “Mind you… seven-foot trolls probably are fascinating when you’re five, and I’m sure she’d like making the cake.”

Sharon Li.

Despite working in what she dubbed “local government”, Sharon had made few concessions to the job in terms of personal appearance. For sure, on the first day she’d come into work in her mother’s oversized and mismatched trouser suit. But next day she’d gone right back to what she usually wore: tatty blue jeans, purple ankle-boots, bright orange tank top and, if she was feeling racy, a badge purloined from the vast collection pinned to the side of her battered green bag, proclaiming–Ask Me Anything, I’m A Shaman. With her straight black hair dyed bright blue at the front, and her almond skin polished to a well-fed glow, Sharon exuded the brightness of a firefly, the confidence of a double-decker bus, the optimism of a hedgehog and the tact of a small thermonuclear missile. However, aware perhaps that her CV mightn’t be ideal for a guidance counsellor to the polymorphically unstable and mystically inclined, she had embraced a do-it-yourself approach to management that, for almost every five minutes of toil, generated nearly ten minutes of memos.

“It’s important!” she’d exclaimed. “Apparently, when you’re in management and have a position of care in the community, you have to have rigorous paperwork in order to reduce future liability. What would happen if some wannabe demigod comes walking in here complaining about feelings of inadequacy and, instead of saying, ‘hey, you’re a wannabe demigod, would you like a cuppa tea and a chat?’ we give him a biscuit and tell him to get over it? The feelings of inadequacy will grow, with a sense of loneliness and confusion as he staggers through this uncaring mortal world, and, finally, explosions! Death! Fire! Destruction! Armageddon upon the earth! And when that comes, we, as responsible members of local government, have to make sure we documented our actions!”

“But… Ms Li… don’t we answer to the office of the Midnight Mayor?”

“Absolutely!”

“And isn’t the Midnight Mayor… I mean, doesn’t he have this thing about how all paperwork is, pardon my language, Ms Li, pestilential putrefaction designed to confound the real work of society in a quagmire of bullshit?”

“What is a quagmire?”

“I’m not sure, Ms Li, that’s just what I heard he said.”

“Can a quagmire be made of bullshit?”

Rhys managed, just, to clamp down on his response. Well, Ms Li, you are the shaman in this room, the one who is the knower of truth, and I’m just a humble web-designing druid; surely you should know? Its utterance would have made no one happy.

By day, community support officer for the magically inclined. It wasn’t the job description Sharon had in mind when she left school. But then again, when she’d left school, hairdresser had seemed like a challenging prospect.

And by night…?

“You gotta let ’em get used to you! You’re being thicko!”

Sharon considered this proposition. At three foot nothing, the author of this idea had as many hairs on his head as inches to his stature, but made up for this loss with a truly astonishing growth of nasal and, she suspected, navel hair, in whose thick fibres viscous and largely unimaginable fluids clung with all too solid reality. Dressed in a faded green hoodie which proclaimed Skate Or Die, Sammy the Elbow–sage, seer, scholar, goblin and, as he frequently liked to point out, second greatest shaman the world had ever seen–had a remarkably black and white view of the world for one whose understanding of the multifaceted layers of reality went so deep. Things were either “okay all things considered” or they were, more often, “crap, innit?”

How she had wound up with a goblin as her teacher, she still wasn’t sure. But he seemed the only thing going and, while Ofsted might not have approved of his methods, simply being there counted for something. Most of the time.

They stood, the goblin and his apprentice, in that grey world where reality falls away and all things that people choose not to perceive become visible at last. It was the invisible city, where the beggars dwelt, just out of sight, and where the shadows turned their heads to watch passers-by; a place where truths were written in the stones themselves, and the houses swayed with the weight of stories swimming against their darkened windows. Reality swept by, and occasionally through, the two shamans; great buses of lost faces, their wheels burning black rubber into the tarmac; taxis with only the yellow “for hire” sign blazing through the greyness like a dragon’s eye; half-lost figures moving down the street, over ground sticky with embedded chewing gum and the rubbed-off soles of a thousand, thousand steps which had gone before, their pasts written in their footsteps, whispers of things which had gone before and which might, perhaps, be yet to come. It was easy to grow distracted in this place, to let the eye wander through glimpses of,

the door that slammed in the night as the woman stormed away, I hate you, I hate you, never coming back, to return tomorrow cold and damp safety glass on the pavement as two kids, him thirteen, her twelve, smashed the window, first ever robbery, car radio far too well embedded for them to pull it out

police caught them two days later, a reprimand; don’t ever do that again, smash again in the dark two days later, this time they stole a map, so they could say they’d stolen something

roar of the garbage truck which mistakenly crushed an old lady’s cat

slipping of tiles down the roof in foul weather

shoe thrown over the telephone line, the man vanished beneath soft earth breaking beneath the city streets

smell of…

“Oi! Focus, soggy-brains!”

A sharp rap on Sharon’s shins snapped her back to attention. With his diminutive height, there were only so many parts of Sharon’s body which lent themselves to easy abuse on the part of her goblin teacher; over the months in which she’d been studying, her shins had taken a lot of punishment.

She sighed, and examined the object of Sammy’s interest. It was a lamppost, unremarkable in every way. It wasn’t quaintly old-fashioned, or modern and sleek. It wasn’t an old black Victorian job, where once a flame had burnt where now electricity shimmered; nor was there any aspect about it to denote a remarkable nature of any kind, not even a local planning permission sign cable-tied to its stalk.

“They’re very shy animals,” exclaimed Sammy. In this grey place his voice was so loud that Sharon half wondered if people passing by in the visible world just a breath away might hear it, and turn their heads, startled at the sound of a disembodied goblin giving a lecture. If they couldn’t hear Sammy, they’d surely smell him. A shaman’s invisibility didn’t stem from any trick of the light, but from the simple attribute of being so at one with their surroundings that, like their surroundings, most people simply didn’t bother to notice them. Which was a bit of a relief as, even on Streatham High Street, not the world’s most conventional length of road, a three-foot goblin in a hoodie might have stood out.

“You gotta let ’em get a sense of you, like a cat,” went on Sammy, his eyes glowing. “But, different from a cat, you don’t get to throttle ’em and eat ’em raw after.”

Sharon’s gaze stayed fixed on the lamppost. “Sammy,” she murmured, “I’m totally okay with you being a goblin and that–I mean, I’ve got used to it, because that’s what you gotta do–but do you have to relish it so much? You know that tearing the flesh of some-one’s cat with your bare teeth isn’t going to make you popular, but you still talk about it like you really like doing it and then–and this is the bit which I’ve gotta take issue with–then you get all self-righteous about why no one likes you, and I’m just saying, there’s a connection here.”

“Don’t try your self-help crap on me!” shrilled the goblin. “I’m the second greatest frickin’ shaman to ever walk the earth!”

“Self-help would be you realising that you’ve got a problem with your social skills and trying to fix it,” she sighed. “This is an intervention.” In reply, Sammy kicked her shins again. “See,” she went on wearily, barely noticing the pain. “That’s just so hostile.”

Sammy opened his mouth to say something, probably obscene, when a flicker of movement around the lamppost caught his eye. It caught Sharon’s attention, too, for she suddenly became very still and stiff, eyes locked on the dull metal framed beneath its own yellow glow. There again–a tiny pulse of something that seemed to move through the frame itself, as if the post were a liquid rather than a solid, a ripple spreading out from an invisible join in the smooth, galvanised steel.

Sharon took a cautious step closer. Another ripple, greater this time, the waves clearly shimmering across the surface of the lamp-post. She reached out a cautious hand towards it, felt a cold too deep and sharp and localised to be real, drew in a slow, shaky breath, and brushed the metal with the tips of her fingers.

A hand shot out.

It came from the metal itself, and was of the metal, a hand wrapped in silver-steel skin, threaded with wires for veins, glass for nails; it came straight out of the spine of the post and locked itself round Sharon’s wrist like a vice. She yelped and tried to pull away, but it clung on tight, visible to just past its own wrist. Thin yellow bursts of electric light rushed through it like pulses of blood. “Sammy!” wailed the shaman.

But the goblin just shrugged. “Think of it like… an intervention.”

The wrist began to draw back into the lamppost, pulling Sharon’s hand with it.

“Sammy, if I end up half lamppost, you’ll never hear the end of it!”

“What’s new?”

“Sammy!”

The hand gave a sudden tug, drawing right back into the lamp-post, and, with a great heave of strength and a shuddering of liquid metal, it pulled Sharon through after it.

There was a moment of uncertainty.

Sharon had an impression of the lamppost splitting open down the middle, a great black mouth full of humming and wires, the hand vanishing into its depths, her wrist trapped within it. It seemed that the darkness stretched and spread around her, curling out and then back in, smothering her, before, with a great, cold lurch, it swallowed her up.

Darkness.

Sharon opened her eyes.

Then closed them again.

She wasn’t at all sure she was enjoying her own sense data, and wanted it to consider if this was really what they meant to tell her brain.

She risked opening her eyes again and, yes, there was no getting round it, she was inside a lamppost. And it was vast. Great cliffs of metal, huge humming cables, flashing bursts of brilliant streetlight; she was in a lamppost and it was a tower, a majestic tower heading to a point of yellow light overhead that shone through the metal interior like a private star. There was a continual buzz and hiss of electricity, and, as she turned to inspect her surroundings, beneath her feet the floor crackled and sparked.

There was no sign of an exit, but right now this was, she concluded a low priority. She turned back to face where she’d begun, and the dryad was there instantly, a city dryad: skin of steel, hair of flowing, billowing copper, body pulsing with yellow light, eyes curved with the Perspex shell that framed a streetlight bulb. At some point in their history, the old dryads of the forests had realised that trees weren’t such reliable homes any more, and gone in search of a new forest to claim for their own; and what forests the cities had become, and how welcoming they had been. In a moment of panic, Sharon tried to remember what Sammy had told her about dryads, the ancient spirits linked to their lamppost homes; and came up a blank. Did they have any customs? Any dos and do nots for a first encounter? Almost certainly; but as it was, she was out of ideas. So, falling back on traditionalism, she thrust out her still-smarting hand and exclaimed, “Hi there! I’m Sharon! I love what you’ve done with the place.”

The dryad stared down at the hand, its head twisting from side to side, like a slow-motion pigeon examining its target from every angle before making a decision. Sharon slowly withdrew her hand, flexing the fingers nervously as if that had been her plan all along. “My teacher didn’t really tell me much about dryads, so sorry if I get anything wrong,” she added hastily. “But it’s really nice to meet you and, uh… your lamppost.”

The dryad’s head rose slowly from where Sharon’s hand had retreated, to Sharon’s eyes, as if trying now to fathom which part of its human guest served what function. Its eyes, she noticed, were the same streetlamp yellow that burnt in the real world, beyond the lamppost: unblinking, but flickering slightly with their own internal filament light. “If I’d known I was coming,” she went on, “I’d have bought something to say hi. I don’t know what kind of thing–I mean, usually it’s tea, because I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t appreciate a cuppa tea–but you might not be so… into… that sorta… thing?” Her voice trailed away beneath the glow of the dryad’s implacable stare.

“I’ll uh… I’ll be going now, shall I? I mean, this is great, but don’t want to intrude and that…”

Sharon turned again, looking for an exit. She was perfectly comfortable with the notion of walking through walls; it was something she’d grown used to over the years, but the thought stayed with her–if she was inside a lamppost, and she tried to walk out through anything other than the front door, wasn’t there a danger she’d re-emerge into the street two inches tall? It was something she wanted to ask her host about, but wasn’t at all sure the communication barrier would sustain the exchange.

She took a slow, deep breath. “Okay,” she sang out softly, to no one but herself. “No problem.”

“He wakes.”

The voice behind her was cracked, full of pops, as if being relayed through an ancient set of speakers. Sharon turned carefully to see the dryad, still staring at her as if she couldn’t work out which part of Sharon was sentient. “He wakes,” repeated the creature again, head bobbing slightly in an attempt to modulate the sound crackling up from her throat. “He wakes.”

“Um… okay. Any ‘he’ in particular?”

“He wakes.”

Sharon bit her lip. “Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m not a positive kinda girl, because I am, always trying to think the best and that, but there’s something about being sucked into a lamppost by a dryad to be told that ‘he wakes’ which just gives me this kinda queasy feeling–do you get that? Queasy feelings? I guess it’s all psychological anyway, so maybe you’re okay, but point is… this’d be way easier if you’d just send me an email. With, like, attachments and diagrams and that. I know I don’t look stupid,” she added, “but just this once, let’s pretend that I am because, ironically, I figure that’d be the smart thing to do.”

The dryad’s head twitched again, processing Sharon’s words. Then she stepped forward, so sharply that Sharon took an instinctive step back. The dryad hesitated, then unfolded one long finger and pointed it directly down at Sharon’s feet. “He,” she explained, emphasising first one purple boot, then the other. “Wakes.”

Something clunked, deep in the lamppost, an electric fizz. The dryad’s head whipped round, eyes flaring brightly yellow in the electric gloom. Then she reached up and grabbed Sharon by the shoulders, head turning slowly back like clockwork to look into the shaman’s eyes. “Stop him,” she hissed, and, with a shove, sent Sharon staggering backwards, into darkness.

Blackness.

Cold.

An unfolding.

A closing down.

Sharon stumbled bottom-first into the street, tripped on her own scrambling feet and fell over. She landed in a gangly heap on the paving stones, the world back in full city-night technicolour. In the shop windows lining the road, bright red hair extensions for the socialite lady jarred with ironing board covers and ripped-off hi-fi systems from truly impeccable sources, lined up for customer speculation and delight. The traffic was sparse, thinned out by the time of night, but what drivers there were had sensed a rhythm in the traffic lights and were hurling themselves uphill, determined to catch nothing but greens all the way to Morden. As a man on a bicycle pedalled by, his head swung round to glance at Sharon before he looked away, muttering under his breath. She swallowed and scrambled to her feet, walking a few quick steps to find that perfect place where what was gave way to the rather more shady question of what was perceived, to find Sammy standing in the greyness, waiting for her, arms folded and one foot tapping irritably on the paving stones.

“Took you long enough!” he fumed. “You never heard of getting on with things, pudding-brain?”

“I was talking,” she retorted, “with a dryad. You may rush through these sorta social encounters like you’re having a pee, but I wanted to appreciate the moment, so don’t give me this crap.”

To her surprise, Sammy’s eyes widened. “The dryad talked?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“What’d she say?”

“Why?” demanded Sharon, her face crinkling with suspicion.

Sammy’s arms tightened in a knot across his small chest. “Dryads don’t talk much, is all,” he grumbled. “Sorta like… a privilege and that, if they say something to you. Which isn’t to say you’re any good at talking to dryads,” he added. “Because falling on your arse on the way out is stupid for a shaman and you looked like a right lemon and, when you’re being a professional on the job, that kinda thing can’t be stood for. It’s amateur, is what it is, and I’m not training up amateurs! But if the dryad spoke… that’s summat.”

Sharon was patting her knees and elbows down instinctively for any cuts or grazes from the fall, and murmured, only half aware of what she did, “ ‘He wakes’.”

“Who wakes?”

“Dunno. That’s all she said.”

“Is that it? You didn’t press her?”

“Sammy, I was talking with a dryad, in a lamppost; it’s not like I was gonna stick around for twenty questions!”

“But that could mean anything!” fumed the goblin. “Bloody hell, can’t young people have a frickin’ conversation these days?”

“I got the feeling it was bad news, if that’s what you’re asking.”

To her surprise, the goblin flinched. “Lotsa prats walk around these days saying pretentious stupid things in stupid voices, cos there’s plenty of cash in that line of work, but dryads only really talk when they got something important to say. You sure there was nothing else?”

“Uh… ‘stop him’.”

“Well that’s useful, innit! Now we got twice the sense of death and half the information! What have I been telling you about learning the truth and following the path and all that? In one ear, out the other!”

“Hey!” Sharon gestured at the lamppost. “You want to go and have a chat with a dryad, be my guest!”

Sammy’s nose crinkled with distaste. “Not good for one of us to spend too much time in there,” he grumbled, gesturing with his chin at the lamppost. “People get… squishy.”

“Lovely. Well, if you don’t mind…”–Sharon straightened up, scanning the street with what she hoped was her best, decisive glare–“… I’ve got meetings at nine tomorrow morning. So, since ‘he wakes’ and ‘stop him’ is about as useful as roast beef at a vegan party, I’m gonna find a train.” To her surprise, Sammy just nodded, distracted, eyes still fixed on the lamppost. “Hey… Sammy?”

“Eh?”

“There isn’t anything we can do, is there?”

“What? No, ’course not, soggy-brains! It’s friggin’ cryptic, can’t never do nothing with friggin’ cryptic bollocks, that’s why you should’ve done more of the truth stuff and less of the standing around like a lemon. Too late now,” he added thoughtfully. “Not that it’s probably none of our business anyway.”

“Fine,” she growled. “Maybe I’ll put it in a memo.”

Sh