and the world did that flippy down-is-up thing I was only this second remembering it’d done on the way in.
A few struggling, panting, and excruciatingly long seconds later I was under what, in autumn in Britain, passed for sunlight, flopping onto the bank of a pond on Hampstead Heath, with six large wolves beside me and a couple of teenagers filming me on their phones.
On the plus side, I was dressed. On the downside, I was wearing a very wet white shirt. Well piss.
“Will you fuck off,” I yelled. “Can’t a woman walk her dogs in peace?”
“These are all yours?” asked one of the teenagers, incredulously.
There was no reason at all that I needed to defend myself to these people. “Yes,” I said. “I’m an eccentric millionaire and I have a large collection of wolfhounds.”
“Some of them look ill.”
“You know it’s illegal for you to be filming this?”
“Is it?” The kid looked genuinely worried.
“Data protection.” It was a lie, but he didn’t need to know that. “Now sod off and let me dry out on my own.”
They sodded. Given that it was, by my best guess because my watch was fucked and my phone was still in the car, early afternoon it made sense for the wolves to stay wolves. I retrieved their clothes—those of them that had clothes—from the side of the pond where they’d been left mercifully unmolested by passing ramblers. Then we walked the half-mile back to where Flick, Sofia, and a medium-sized army of chauffeurs were waiting for us.
We bundled the rescue-wolves into the back of one of the cars, where they shifted back to their human forms to save space. At this point it was kind of down to Sofia, which I hoped wasn’t too much of a headfuck for her, because from what I could remember of being nineteen, I wouldn’t have been confident having complete responsibility for somebody else’s life and free will dropped in my lap.
“How do I do this?” She looked up at me very, very uncertain.
There wasn’t much I could do but shrug. “I don’t know. It’s sort of instinct, at least for me. Whatever you do when the glowy thing happens, do the same, but maybe focus it a bit more.”
“That’s … unhelpful.”
“Don’t blame me, blame Apollo. Maybe it would be better if you thought of it more as a medical procedure? What would you do if somebody came to you with regular glass in their eyes?”
She pulled a still not helping face. “I’d send them to somebody much better qualified.” Still, she got on with it, kneeling by the car door because there wasn’t room for four wolves and her inside the vehicle. She took the first werewolf’s face in her hands, peering at her ruined eyes with what looked like real medical interest.
“Okay,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice for somebody dealing with such an objectively unnatural problem, “let’s take a look at you.”
I had no idea what she was hoping to see, and probably neither did she. There wasn’t a lot that could be done with massive chunks of mirror in the face beyond the obvious, but the ritual of it seemed to help her. And she managed to avoid the more annoying GP questions like does it hurt when I do this. I was beginning to think she’d make a pretty ace doctor in a few years.
With a gentleness that I would actually totally have expected because unlike most of the women I knew, Sofia really did come across as nurturing in quite a traditional way as she examined the mirror-shards. And then, somehow, something seemed to take over, and it was like she’d always known exactly what she was doing. A delicate radiance gathered around her fingertips, and she brushed them gently across the mirror-fragments, which began to melt rapidly, like ice rather than glass, becoming a clear water that ran down the werewolf’s cheeks as though she was crying.
I looked away. She had it in hand, and I’d done enough staring at the victims of faery fuckery for one day-slash-lifetime. Letting myself into one of the other cars—or rather getting the driver to let me in because we were in the world of the posh now and doing things yourself was this weird social taboo—I sat down on the back seat and stared at the ceiling.
Tara slid in next to me. She’d redressed, which I was thankful for—not that I didn’t respect her body confidence, but I was never quite sure where