The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,3

and the walker creaked away. He slammed the door behind him.

“Well, you were a lot of help,” Hannah said.

Dropping his hand, Tean said, “Don’t start with me.”

“He ought to be fired. I wasn’t joking about those pornos, either. He really does have them in his desk.”

“He wants to be fired, Hannah. And then he’s going to sue for ageism or who knows what.”

“He was only ever good for one thing, and that was rousting poachers, and he was only good at it because he did half the poaching himself. He’s a nightmare with public calls. He’s a disaster with clerical work. The Division has perfectly legitimate grounds to fire him.”

“You know it’s not that simple.”

“He’s creating a hostile work environment,” Hannah said. “He objectifies women, especially with those magazines. I feel sexually harassed. I’m going to sue.”

“Look, I will make him get rid of the magazines. I didn’t even know about the magazines. And I had no idea you felt like this was a hostile work environment. We’re going to—”

Hannah screamed as she got up from the chair. “I get so sick of being the only one around here with a pair of balls.”

She slammed the door even harder than Norbert had.

When the ringing in his ears died down, Tean got back to work on his most recent project: controlling an outbreak of canine distemper that was affecting populations of coyotes and feral dogs around Heber City. It was starting to get into the domestic populations, and there would be hell to pay if the virus worked its way north into Park City and someone’s designer Chihuahua caught it. He was just digging into the research around controlling outbreaks when his door flew open again.

Hannah gripped the handle, her face even splotchier than before, her hair like she was building up a static charge. She just stood there, breathing hard, arms folded across her chest. Tean braced himself. He and Hannah had worked together for years, and until recently, they’d gotten along well. She was smart, capable, dependable, and funny. Something had changed, though, and over the last weeks and months, she’d displayed a temper—not always unjustified, as the case with Norbert had shown—that was nevertheless out of character. A couple of weeks ago, she’d taken two sick days without any explanation, when she hadn’t taken sick days in years. She had dark rings under her eyes all the time, and although Tean felt like a bad person for thinking this, she’d put on a little weight.

Then Hannah stepped into the office, shutting the door behind her, and started to cry.

Lurching out of his seat, Tean made his way around the desk and hugged her. She cried for a long time, sobbing against his shoulder while he patted her back. His whole body was locking up at the sheer amount of contact with another person; he summoned up memories of the Darwin Awards to keep himself from climbing out of his skin. The guy who had tried to build his own rocket car. The guy who had performed experimental surgery on himself. The guy who had tried to chew through an overhead power line to prove that squirrels weren’t any better than humans.

Finally, Hannah squeezed his arm and pulled back. “I’m fine,” she said thickly, wiping her face. “I’m really fine. I just hate that I fell apart like that.”

“It’s ok.”

“It’s not ok. It’s this horrible female stereotype, and I hate playing into it.”

“I cried the other night when Jem made me watch the same episode of The Simpsons for the fourth time in a row.”

Hannah laughed, and then she coughed, and then she laughed some more.

“Want to sit down?” Tean asked. “Have some tea?”

Hannah nodded and said, “Not that horrible homemade nettle tea.”

“I’ll just go borrow some from your office then.”

So he sprinted to her office, stole two foil-wrapped bags of Morning Jazz, and sprinted back. He filled the electric kettle. While the water heated, he got the mugs and unwrapped the tea bags.

“How is Jem?” Hannah asked, obviously trying to keep the disapproving note from her voice and not quite succeeding.

“He’s the same as always. He breaks into my apartment whenever he wants, and I come home to find him and Scipio napping on the couch together. He makes me spend money I don’t have on clothes I don’t want, and then he proceeds to tell me I have no butt and gives me ridiculous orders about how many squats I should be doing. Oh, and he eats