Shifting Shadows

REDEMPTION

I knew, as soon as I brought Ben onstage in Moon Called, what his history was. I had to know so that his actions remained logically consistent throughout the series—though I didn’t know if I would ever bring them to light.

I am not an outline writer. The one book that I did write with a real, honest-to-goodness outline was really difficult for me to finish—since I already knew the ending, I didn’t feel that drive that usually pumps me through the last half of the book. That doesn’t mean I don’t do any planning on the large scale, but it makes for some interesting events on the small. Toward the end of Iron Kissed, Mercy is hurt. Adam, torn by guilt and unwilling to hurt her more, leaves Mercy—but not unguarded. Now who, I thought, should he send to guard Mercy? Warren was too . . . predictable. I could have sent one of the women. But, on a whim, I threw in Ben. What followed took me totally by surprise in the best of all possible ways—Ben was the perfect person.

Ben is in the process of change. We mere mortals have only seventy or so years in which to get over the bad things that have happened to us—and the bad things we’ve done. I found an event that would be pivotal for Ben—and a chance to bring in some of the weird and absurd things my husband ran into in his years as a DBA (database administrator) for a huge government contractor.

I would, in the interest of fairness, like to point out that although the IT (information technology) field is, for whatever reason, heavily dominated by men, Ben’s company, thanks to government hiring incentives, has many competent women in both the DBA and programming departments. But this is told (mostly) from Ben’s viewpoint, and Ben has issues with women in general, so his viewpoint is a little skewed.

The events in “Redemption” take place between Frost Burned and Night Broken.

“Hello, you have reached the Prophet support line. This is Bob, how may I help you?” said a cheery voice with a distinctively Indian accent, and Ben snorted.

For some reason, the database company thought it would sound better to give their overseas customer-service reps American names. Ben didn’t call the general number anymore, bouncing himself up the ladder of help-desk services a few tiers by using the personal number of a competent IT rep (IT stands for “information technology”—techspeak for people who know which end of a computer is up), so he could converse with someone who could actually do something. “Bob” was pretty sharp.

“Hey, Rajeev,” Ben said. “It’s me over here in Washington State. I need to talk to you about this f . . .” He drew in a deep breath and counted to ten. “Ducky. This ducky new package your company sold ours.”

“Ben?” Rajeev asked a little uncertainly. “Is this Ben?”

Rajeev and he had known each other, by phone, for a long time.

“It’s me,” Ben confirmed.

“Ducky?”

Thanks to Ben, Rajeev knew more English swearwords than all of his buddies in India combined—which explained his tentative greeting.

“I have a bet,” Ben told him. “No swearing for a week. There’s a bottle of eighteen-year-old scotch in the balance.” Werewolves might not get drunk, but that didn’t affect the flavor, or even the initial hit of a good, old, smoky scotch. It wasn’t that he couldn’t buy his own bottle of scotch, but the bet was with his Alpha—it was the principle of the thing.

“Ah.” In the following silence, Ben heard Rajeev calculating Ben’s chances for a moment before he recalled that someone might be monitoring the call for efficiency. “Good luck with that. You called with a problem?”

Reminded of his troubles, Ben growled. “Yes. This program is a piece of . . . of junk. My boss says his boss thought it would be a s . . . spiffy idea to replace my program that does a . . . perfectly adequate job already with this . . . program. I expect the . . . nice gentleman in question is getting a f . . . fiddling kickback.”

Rajeev laughed. “I think, my friend, that you might consider avoiding adjectives altogether.” There was the sound of keyboard keys clicking, then Rajeev sighed. “I see it. They have purchased the new release of Quotalk for your department. Your entire department.” There were things that he couldn’t say, or he’d lose his job. In the silence, Ben heard Rajeev’s unspoken dismay. What were they thinking selling this half-written spaghetti code to a customer who has never offended us? But Rajeev would never say such a thing over the phone because he, like Ben, needed his job.

Rajeev cleared his throat, and said carefully, “We have been getting calls all week with this iteration of the program.” There was nothing wrong with Rajeev’s English except a thick accent—two thick accents, really, India by way of Great Britain. Ben didn’t have any trouble with it because he already had the British half himself.

“Which is giving you trouble?” Rajeev continued, his voice carefully professional. “Is it the way the auto-installer doesn’t load or the way the program keeps overwriting your servlet container?” That was as close to sarcasm as Rajeev permitted himself. “I have a patch for the first, but the last is one we are still struggling with.”

The Prophet database (of course, the whole IT—computer geek—world called it the For-Profit database) was well written, but all the programs the mother company tried to sell with it were garbage. Because the Prophet was the gold standard of databases, the company who owned it got to sit on that reputation for everything else. Ben was pretty sure that if the people doing the buying had also been the people who had to use the programs, his life would be a lot easier.

As it was, once his company’s overlords bought the stupid add-ons, they made them mandatory. Happily for Ben, the security guys would call him a day before they conducted the mandatory just-to-make-sure-you-are-doing-as-you-are-told inspections of his hard drive so he’d have time to hide the unapproved programs he actually used somewhere else. Happy for the company, too, because if Ben actually had to use the crap—he arbitrarily decided that crap wasn’t a swearword—if he used the crap they mandated, nothing on any of the computers in the company would work.

“I wrote a patch to defend my servlet container settings,” he told Rajeev. “I’ll send it to you. And why are your programmers still using servlets, anyway?”

“To a man with a hammer,” said Rajeev wisely, “all problems look like nails. Thank you for your offer of help.”

“No trouble,” Ben told him.

Like his use of unapproved programs, sharing his code with someone who worked for another company was also against his company’s protocol. Code written by company IT personnel was supposed to be shown to marketing to see if it was a viable product. But geeks had to stick together. Also, if marketing ever decided to sell some of his code, he knew who would get stuck on a help desk for it—a business that would be as unpleasant for the customers as it would be for him: he would make certain of that. Happily, since Ben was officially a database administer, better known in the IT world as a DBA, the marketing department never thought to see if he also wrote his own programming.

“How did you fix it, anyway?” asked Rajeev. “Our programmers have been trying to figure out a work-around for several days.”

“The patch hides servlet container settings from your program,” Ben told him, “then reinstalls them once the program is up and running.” If Ben had enjoyed outthinking the stupid program, he didn’t have to admit it to anyone. “I figured out the install problem, too, thank you. It was the same problem another of Prophet’s products had, and I just modified my old patch. What I can’t fix is that the program won’t run unless the password is permanently set to PASSWORD and the username is permanently TEST. Since I’m working on databases that hold the US governmental secrets of the last hundred years, you’ll understand that is not acceptable.”

There was a long silence. Then Rajeev said, very carefully “Someone hard-coded the passwords.”

“That’s what I’m seeing,” agreed Ben blandly.

There was a very long pause. “I haven’t heard that complaint before,” Rajeev said. He considered his words some more, and said, “At least not on this program.” There was another pause. “Perhaps it is because no one else has made it that far yet. I will inquire of our programmers to see if there is a way to fix this and call you back.” He paused and said, “The username is TEST?”

“That’s right,” Ben said.

Rajeev sighed and hung up.

Ben was still grinning when he sent the promised bit of code to Rajeev. Setting aside the task of making the new program behave until he got a call back, he continued his daily checklist to make sure all of his databases were running smoothly and likely to continue that way on aging servers with insufficient memory and slow processors. Galadriel was a crabby, high-maintenance server, and she’d been particularly cranky over the past few days. So he messed around with her, cleaning out a few old logs that were bogging her down.

Around him, the sounds of a giant, cubicle-filled room told him the secrets of the universe—or at least the universe of his company. He didn’t really pay attention on a conscious level, but the part of him that wasn’t a top-flight computer guru stored up the interesting bits and absorbed them.

Ben knew about the guy who was having an affair with three different women and a guy in marketing. He knew that one of the pretty young things in Web Applications was pregnant and wanted to divorce her husband before he found out because it wasn’t his child. Most people’s secrets were less salacious—things like surprise parties, wedding showers, and his DBA coworker who was running cosmetic sales from her work phone instead of doing her job. She was a crummy DBA, though, so that was okay because mostly what she did was make more work for the rest of them.

It wasn’t that he was a busybody who needed to have an ear in everyone’s business—he didn’t care enough about other people to want to hear gossip. It was that he was a bloody werewolf and couldn’t help overhearing.

All the main servers had names. Most of them were references to the usual geek favorites: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dr. Seuss characters. The only server name that was out of the ordinary was the server someone had named Tree a couple of years ago. Word was that on the eve of transferring to Washington, D.C., a DBA who never read anything but nonfiction had named it in a fit of defiance.

Ben was in the middle of coaxing a little more space out of Yertle when he heard the voice he’d been listening for carrying over the tops of the cubicles to his desk.

Mel Dreyer was the DBA group secretary. Cute, perky, and seven stone soaking wet, she was everything he hated in a woman. Little-girl voice. Check. Sensitive. Check. Cried easily. Check. Scared to death of him. Double check.

She was prey and brought up bad memories until it was all he could do to control his wolf when she was around.

Right now, she was talking to Mark Duffy, IT Services Group Junior Vice Director. It had been Duffy’s voice Ben had been listening for.

Ben pulled himself away from his task, grabbed a book off the top of his file cabinet, and stalked out of his cubicle. He allowed the wolf he kept balled up inside him out just enough to be scary but not enough to be dangerous, a more difficult balance than usual because the moon’s song was in his blood. Full moon was soon.

Mel’s desk was at the entrance to the double row of DBA cubicles, but she didn’t get a whole cubicle. She was stuck out on the end of their row, so she could catch visitors before they invaded the DBA’s domain beyond her. They’d taken away two of the walls and left her vulnerable to whoever decided to pester her.

Ben looked at the floor as he strode by the other cubicles of DBAs. He stretched his neck and heard the bones pop, a sign that the wolf was too prominent. Control, he thought at himself, don’t want to kill anyone. Even as he thought it, the dark inside him answered, Oh, didn’t he just. He knew what it was to feel the flesh part between his teeth and the taste of hot, fresh prey.

He passed the last cubicle, and Duffy’s smell and cologne that reeked of chemicals assaulted Ben’s sensitive nose. He had no trouble curling his lips in a snarl.

Duffy stood beside Mel’s desk, leaning over slightly until he hovered above her, a position of power. His expensive suit and haircut were designed to show anyone who looked that Mark Duffy was a man of consequence.

Ben bulled his way to Mel’s desk, forcing Duffy to step back or be body-checked. As Ben slammed the manual onto Mel’s desk with a crack that made her jump, Duffy flinched, and silence descended on their portion of cubicle hell.

“What is this?” Ben snapped at Mel, knowing the flush of anger on his English-pale cheeks made him even more intimidating. Humans couldn’t tell he was a werewolf unless he wanted them to, but some part of their psyche could smell predator.

Mel looked at the book and swallowed. She didn’t cringe, not quite, but when she answered, it was in a squeak. “The manual I got for you from the company library yesterday?”

He stabbed the paper with his finger. “Do you see the title? What does it say?”

“Is this really necessary?” said Duffy, and Ben looked at him briefly.

He turned back to Mel without answering Duffy. “Well? Can’t you read?”

“It says Advanced Concepts in JavaScript.” She didn’t sound terrified, though Ben knew she was scared of him. Everyone at his work was scared of him except his friend Rajeev because Rajeev was on the other side of the world. His wolf saw all humans as weak, and people could feel things like that.

“I asked you for the advanced Java manual,” he said. “I realize that JavaScript starts with Java, but you’ve been working here long enough that you should know that one program is nothing like the other. Sounds alike is not good enough. I called the library, and they pulled the correct book. I made it simple for you because simple seems to be all you can do. Go upstairs, take this book back, and bring me the book they give you.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, standing up. Which meant she looked him right in the collarbone, and she raised her chin. “You’ll have to get out of my way first.”

“You tell him, Mel,” said a faint voice a few rows over.

“Keep your nose in your business, Lincoln,” snapped Ben, effectively removing the voice’s anonymity.

He backed up and swept his arm out in a mockery of gentlemanliness and forced Duffy even farther back, clearing the way for Mel to head to the stairs, which were closer (and faster) than the elevator.

“Don’t start sniveling.” Ben scowled at her back as she skittered by him with her head tucked so no one could see it. “If you’d gotten it right the first time, neither of us would have been inconvenienced.”

“Don’t you think that was a little harsh?” asked Duffy, then, with unrecognized irony, “It is against company policy to harass other workers.”

Ben met his eyes—a dangerous move with his wolf so close to the surface. But Duffy looked away before Ben was driven to enforce his status as the dominant predator.

“If she doesn’t want to get yelled at, she can do her job,” Ben tried out his dominant position by sneering. “Just like everyone else does. What do you need?”

Duffy opened his mouth, but no words came out. Hah. Humans were no match for a werewolf.

Ben waved his hand back down the line. “Did you need something from the DBAs?”

“Uh,” said Duffy. “No.”

“Fine.” Ben turned on his heel and stalked down the row, which was unusually silent. DBAs didn’t spend a lot of time talking, but keyboards are not quiet—everyone had been listening to his interchange.

Ben’s cubicle was the farthest one, and he liked it that way because people with random issues usually stopped elsewhere before they got to him. By the time he got there, the noise level had begun to resume its normal clatter.

“Here,” one of the other DBAs whispered from the hallway just outside Ben’s cubicle. “Just wait here. He’ll be with you as soon as he surfaces.”

Ben had hung a whiteboard on the outside of the cubicle wall next to the entrance of his lair. On it he had written: I know you are here. Wait silently, and I’ll get to you as soon as I am able. If you speak before then, you will not find me helpful. On the floor just inside his cubicle was a mat with a pair of black footprints and “Wait here” painted on it.

“I have work—”

“Shhh,” hissed the second voice. “Heed the warning.”

It took Ben a couple of minutes to tidy everything so nothing would blow up behind him. When he turned around, there was one of the programmers whose face he vaguely recognized waiting for him.

Ben raised an eyebrow.

“I’m told you’re the one who wiped out my data,” the programmer said belligerently.

“Probably,” agreed Ben. “Who are you?”

“Stan Brown.”

He knew that name.

Ben had been trying to figure out what had been filling the hard drive of a priority backup server he’d been fine-tuning when he’d discovered a huge block of data, property of one Stan Brown, that turned out to be a collection of every blue film made in the last century as well as carefully organized files of photographs from bestiality to kink and beyond.

Private files on the critical backup servers, which were very expensive real estate in electron land, were prohibited. Pornography at work was a firing offence. There had been a massive firing of people caught just surfing for porn on company computers. The scandal predated Ben, but he’d heard about it from people still traumatized by the winnowing.

So Ben had talked about Stan’s files to the head of security, who wasn’t a total . . . jerk, and they decided, between the two of them that they should just erase it and pretend it had never been there. Save the guy’s job instead of letting some boss look good to his overlords.

“Yes,” said Ben slowly. “I had a good look at those files. I wondered what kind of critical data you could possibly have that was that big. When I saw what it was, I got rid of it.”

“So it was you,” Stan said hotly. “I had to lean on the security guys to give me your name.”

The security guys were probably huddled on the other side of the cubicle wall just to hear the set down Ben gave him. They were in for a disappointment because he couldn’t swear—or he’d lose that scotch—so scaring off stupid people just wasn’t as much fun as usual.

Stan was still twittering on. “Do you know how long it took me to put that collection together? Some of those aren’t available anywhere anymore. You can’t just go around erasing people’s files.”

Ben tapped a little framed certificate on the wall.

“DBA,” he said in case the guy couldn’t read. “I maintain the data systems. I take out things that don’t belong as part of my job description. Porn doesn’t belong. Especially illegal porn—and in Washington State, bestiality is illegal ever since that guy died at the sheep farm.”

“Horse farm,” said Lee, the DBA in the next cubicle. “And I think it might just be the act of bestiality that’s good for jail time, not films or photos.”

“You would know,” muttered someone behind his other wall. It sounded like one of the security people. If Ben hadn’t had werewolf ears, he wouldn’t have heard her—or the very quiet snickers that accompanied the remark.

“You had no right,” whined Stan, who wasn’t cursed with Ben’s hearing. “No right to steal my stuff, man. I’m going to go to the police and report it.”

Ben was too bemused to be angry. Was this guy really that dumb? Hadn’t he gotten the same on-hire speech about what was and was not allowed on-site that Ben had?

“I tell you what, Stan,” he said slowly because that was how he talked to people too stupid to live. “Those were on the critical backup server, I still have backups of your files—and will for the next decade, because, hey, critical backup server. You get your supervisor to sign a letter asking me to restore those files—detailing exactly what kind of data we are talking about—and I’ll restore them for you.”

Stan threw out his chest as if he’d won the battle. “I’ll do that.”

When he had left, Fitz, in the cubicle with all the security people, stuck his head over the partition, and said, in awe, “There goes the stupidest man I’ve ever heard. Do you suppose he’ll really try to get a letter?”

“Hey, Ben,” said someone farther down. “Can I get a copy of the backup files?”

“Would you all shut up so I can get some work done?” said Lori, the makeup lady.

Several hours later, it was the smell of coffee that pulled Ben out of electronland. He would have dismissed it—no one brought him coffee—except that Mel was standing, very quietly, on his mat. He made a few changes and buttoned up the database he was working on.

When he turned around, Mel held out a cup of gourmet coffee that hadn’t come out of the company kitchen. Her hand barely shook. He frowned at her and made no move to take it.

“What?” he said.

She set it down on the desk beside him and cleared her throat. “You know I’m married.”

He raised his eyebrow. “I would have propositioned you, but I have a harem at home, and you just wouldn’t fit in.”

Her face flushed. “That’s not what I meant. My husband is overseas for another six months.”

He waited in obvious irritation. Her fluttering and flinching made him want to bite her. His wolf said she was easy prey.

“The coffee is from my husband,” she said, quietly, so no one else would hear her. “I finally figured you out—my husband did, actually—so your snarling isn’t going to make me flinch anymore.”

He tried a subvocal growl, and, by Saint Andrew’s great hairy b . . . balloons, she didn’t back off.

“Duffy got a secretary fired when she turned him down,” Mel told him. “Another girl, who couldn’t afford to lose her job, let him . . . you know.”

Ben tried a raised eyebrow again, but it had noticeably less effect than it had the last time he’d done it to her. No tears. Not even any flinching or cringing.

“I’m married, and he still . . .” She shuddered. “Between him and you, I was pretty upset this weekend when my husband called. I told him about everything that had been happening here, and he said”—her voice dropped into what was evidently her attempt to sound like her husband—“‘It sounds like every time Duffy comes out to bother you, Shaw emerges to yell at you and make you run stupid errands.’ I agreed, and he told me to think about that, then get you a cup of good coffee from him.” She smiled, revealing a charming dimple. Ben reminded himself he hated dimples almost as much as gratitude. “So here’s a cup of—”

“Ben,” trilled Lorna Winkler, head of IT.

Ben felt a headache coming on. For such a promising day, it was going to end badly. If Mel triggered his dislike of women, Lorna clubbed him over the head with it. He wasn’t fond of the company’s policy of women bosses—but he might have dealt if they had mitigated the damage by hiring the smart ones.

Lorna was beautiful, power mad, and needed help to send e-mail—just exactly the person to put in charge of a bunch of computer nerds. Whenever she came down from on high to invade his cubicle—which she did to everyone because it was “friendlier than summoning you up to my office”—he figured there was a fifty-fifty chance he was going to quit in the next ten minutes. In the time he’d worked there, she’d visited him, personally, twice.

He’d overheard enough of her “friendly pep talks” to know that she liked to begin speaking well before she made it down to the cubicle of whoever she was aimed at. Her first calling out of his name had started near Mel’s desk.

“I’ve had a report from one of my people,” she warbled at him from halfway down the hall, “that you are harassing our secretary.”

Mel raised her eyebrows at him, and Ben curled his lip, and whispered, “Duffy’s been whining to Mummy, again.”

Mel grinned, then covered her mouth as Winkler, all six feet of the immaculately groomed gorgeousness that had allowed her to be Miss California a decade earlier, entered his sanctuary.

She clearly hadn’t been expecting Mel. She stopped, regrouped, and began again. “I’m so glad you’re here, Mel, so that Ben can apologize to you. Our company has a firm policy against harassment.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ben, with patent insincerity.

“He’s not harassing me,” Mel said at exactly the same moment. She continued with a confident smile. “He can get a little grouchy, but everyone knows that. And we all make allowances for genius, right?”

Winkler wasn’t pleased with having the rug pulled out from under her. “Don’t you consider having books slammed in front of you harassing? It was hostile and aggressive. I won’t have any woman in my department made uncomfortable.”

“I wasn’t uncomfortable,” Mel said agreeably. “I’m sorry if Mr. Duffy had that impression.”

Ben wasn’t used to having a woman defend him. It made him feel odd. Odder than it should. Wrong. Especially given that it was Mel defending him. It felt even odder than the impulse that had begun his game of keep the secretary safe from Duffy. It was so disconcerting that he didn’t say anything.

Winkler wasn’t ready to give up. Maybe she’d promised Duffy that she was going to fire him. “I’ve also had reports that Ben’s language is objectionable.”

Mel looked proud, and said, “He quit swearing two days ago. The whole DBA group has money on when he’ll break, but so far he’s doing really well, and we appreciate his effort to change his behavior. Ken Lincoln even promised that if Ben can quit swearing, he’ll agree to quit smoking.”

Adam laughed at his consternation as Ben told him the whole story later. “I’m so sorry,” his Alpha told him carefully, “that you’ve been used as a motivational force for good in your workplace.”

“It’s your fault,” Ben groused, sinking lower in Adam’s couch. “If I hadn’t been trying for that scotch, it wouldn’t have happened.”

He’d come to Adam because . . . He didn’t think of Adam as his father. He’d had one father, and that was enough for him. But Adam was good at sorting out people. This past month, Ben was starting not to recognize himself. He needed to know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Do you know why I did it?” he asked, because he was bewildered by the need that had driven him to protect Mel—whom he didn’t even like.

“Because she’s your secretary,” Adam said, then grinned at Ben’s expression. “How long have you been working in the DBA group?”

“Something over two years.” If Adam was going somewhere with this, Ben didn’t know where it was.

“Ben,” Adam said, “are you a dominant wolf or a submissive wolf?”

“Dominant.” Not very. Bottom of the pack now that Peter was gone.

“What makes up a dominant personality?”

All of his life, Ben had always been considered brilliant—troubled, obnoxious, criminal, occasionally violent, but always brilliant. He didn’t like the feeling that he was missing something, and he liked the hint of patience in Adam’s voice that told him that Adam expected him to miss something even less. Ben’s first Alpha had been more beast than man, and he’d never explained anything about dominance other than the absolute rule that Ben had to obey everyone he couldn’t take down.

“Willingness to fight,” Ben said, trying not to sound belligerent as he tried to work out what Adam wanted from him. “Difficulty with authority.” He jerked his gaze up to his Alpha, who looked a little amused at Ben’s realization about how that last one sounded. “Most authority.”

“Anyone who hasn’t proved that he deserves respect,” Adam said tactfully.

“If they can’t thrash me, they are prey,” Ben said, trying to stretch the rule that had been forcibly explained to him when he’d become a werewolf into a shape that Adam would find acceptable.

Adam looked at him. “Okay. Are you my prey?”

Ben stood up abruptly and stalked to the window, his back to his Alpha because he didn’t have an expression he wanted to show him. “I’ve been a werewolf for long enough that I shouldn’t always feel like a bloody beginner.” Adam didn’t say anything, so Ben finally muttered, “I hope I am not prey to you.” Silence continued, somehow disapproving.

“Do you feel like my prey?” Adam asked, his voice quiet and a little hurt.

Ben threw away what he knew and tried to go with what he felt—which was difficult for him because facts had never failed him the way emotions had. “No.” That was right. “No.” Adam put all of his abilities, physical and mental, to protecting the pack from anything that would hurt them.

“Someone should write a book about how to be a werewolf,” Mercy, Adam’s mate, said, sailing in with a plate of brownies, which she set down on the table with a thunk and the burnt motor-oil smell that was a part of her. It used to irritate him—and now it irritated him that he associated the smell with pack and safety. “I sometimes feel like I know more about being a werewolf than all of you combined.” She sat next to Adam and looked up at Ben.

He’d asked for a minute alone with Adam, which she apparently thought she’d given them. He opened his mouth to ask her to leave, but when he spoke, it was to Adam. “So you think I’m looking at Mel as if she were part of my pack? That I’m feeling protective of that sniveling little—” He swallowed the descriptor that came to mind. “Annoying wimpy chit.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” agreed Adam. “The reason you are not more dominant has more to do with the other wolves than with you. Part of submitting to a more dominant wolf is the belief that they will protect you better than you can protect yourself. They don’t believe you’ll protect them, so they won’t yield to you.”

Ben turned back to the window and absorbed the information like a blow. He didn’t care how dominant he was, he didn’t, though he disliked obeying other wolves intensely.

Adam’s orders were the single exception because Adam would never hurt him or allow him to be hurt outside of the discipline needed to keep peace within the pack. Which sort of drove Adam’s previous point about what really made a dominant wolf right home, didn’t it?

Ben opened his mouth to swear, then closed it again.

“I didn’t know how much the willingness to protect the others beneath a wolf in the pack structure affected the position of a dominant wolf until you came to our pack,” Adam offered gently. “Until then, I was pretty convinced that dominance was about who was the better or more aggressive fighter. You are as willing as Darryl is when it comes to taking on an opponent, and not half-bad in a fight—and still Darryl is much, much more dominant because the other wolves trust him to take care of them.”

“Have a brownie, Ben,” Mercy said prosaically. “And congratulations.”

Ben turned around and dropped into an overstuffed chair with a sigh, taking a brownie almost as an afterthought. “Congratulations on what?”

“Your new upward mobility in the pack structure,” Mercy said. “They’ll figure out that you’ve changed pretty soon.”

Adam met his eyes and smiled. Ben felt better suddenly, and it wasn’t Mercy’s congratulations or the brownie that did it, but the respect in his Alpha’s face. He remembered what Adam had told him a while ago. It might be taking a long time to get out from under what the Old Man had done to him, but he had time, didn’t he? A wolf’s immortality was a gift for him to use wisely or poorly.

He finished the brownie, thanked Adam for his time, and headed back home, feeling like himself again. No. Better than that. He fed his better self a nice dinner, watched a little telly, and took himself off to bed with a smile on his face.

He’d dreamed about him that night. Woke up with the sound of his mother’s voice in his ears. “Benjamin, your father wants you to see him in the study.”

Ben sat up, so certain he’d heard her voice that he was in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a bass drum in a marching band. Hard on the realization that he’d been dreaming was the knowledge that the wolf wanted out.

He managed not to change—just barely managed. But the struggle left him with a headache and the temper of an asp that accompanied him all the way to work. He answered Mel’s cheery good morning with a growl and buried himself in his computer. He ignored lunch, which was stupid, because when Lorna Winkler came into his office without a word of warning, he emerged from coaxing a little more speed out of one of his database-monitoring programs hungry, and she smelled like food.

“Ben, I was talking to Mark Duffy about your admirable attempt to stop swearing, and he suggested that we organize something for the whole division. It would raise morale if we could encourage people not to drink, smoke, or to lose ten pounds—and perhaps lower our health-insurance costs. I’d like you to spearhead the project.”

Various responses occurred to him.

“No,” he said mildly when he was sure that was what would come out of his mouth. Then he gave her his back and started typing random lines of code.

“No?” Winkler’s voice was shocked, as if she thought she’d misheard because no one would refuse her suggestion.

He didn’t look around when he said, “I’m a DBA, not a motivational speaker.”

“Thank God,” someone said. Ben heard them, but Winkler wouldn’t have.

“But—” she said.

He slowly turned his chair around so he could see her. He met her eyes. “Ms. Winkler,” he said, “you pay me a lot of money to be a good nerd, which I am. There is not enough money in the world to make me be in charge of a company morale-improvement exercise.”

She backed away from the expression on his face and left. He wondered, as he returned to work, if he was going to be fired. He hadn’t threatened her with words, but she and he both knew that there hadn’t been happy happy joy joy in his eyes. There might have been not-human stuff in his eyes, which was something he usually avoided because he had no intention of advertising to the world that he was a werewolf. The wolves who were out were expected to be exemplary and well behaved, which he was not. But his mood was so black that he couldn’t find it in himself to care one way or the other about the job or the wolf.

He worked a while more, surfacing now and again because of the dream about his mother in a cold shaking sweat, imagining that he’d gotten a whiff of her perfume or heard her voice. But he was deep into the heart of Spock, who was at 84 percent capacity, when he was yanked out again.

“I have that address for you, Mr. Duffy.”

The voice belonged to one of the women who worked in human resources, though it wasn’t her voice, but Duffy’s name, that jerked Ben out of his databases. He blinked and saw that it was dark out. Really dark. As soon as he noticed, the moon’s song lit him up from the inside, and his monster was ready to tango.

It wasn’t full moon yet, but he usually changed for the nights on either side because fighting it was tough. No use at all fighting if the moon was full, she called his wolf right out. It was dangerous to be at work this late, this close to the full moon.

“Thank you, Karen,” Duffy said. That was the human-resources woman’s name, Karen Sinclair-Ramsay.

If Ben could trust his ears, Duffy was somewhere near the elevator. If there had been more people in the building, Ben would never have been able to hear him so clearly.

“I forgot to ask Mel before she left,” Duffy was saying smoothly, “and she said she’d get the figures worked up for me for Monday if I got her the information tonight. I think I’ll stop and get her a bottle of wine for putting up with me.”

The wolf that was Ben lunged to the fore with a snarl. His human half pulled him back. Mel was no concern of his despite what Adam had said. Ben cared for no one and nothing. No one had watched out for him, and he’d survived, hadn’t he? That’s what he’d had that dream for, to remind him about people.

Karen Sinclair-Ramsay sounded a little uncomfortable when she said, “I’m sure she’d appreciate a bottle of wine.” Maybe it was only now occurring to her that Mel was the DBA secretary, that Duffy had his own secretary. That a bottle of wine was just . . . not quite the right thing to be bringing a secretary who’d agreed to work the weekend.

No. It was none of his business. Mel wasn’t pack, wasn’t his. It wasn’t his job to watch out for her.

Benjamin, your father wants you. He could almost see her sitting in front of him, his beautiful mother sipping her tea as she read a magazine about the latest fashion. He could see, as if it were right before his eyes instead of decades in the past, the high-heeled black-and-white sandals worn by the model on the cover of the magazine. Be a dear and go to the study. She didn’t look at him when she spoke, her reading apparently absorbing his mother’s attention.

She didn’t need a reply. Back then, he’d been a good kid. He’d done exactly what he was told. The destructive anger and black despair that drove him now, that hadn’t affected him much yet.

Ben had almost opened his mouth, almost asked her if she knew what his father wanted him for in that study. But he was afraid, so afraid, that she knew. And if she knew . . . his world would self-destruct and take him with it.

But even as he walked down the stairs to his father’s study, some part, the hidden, angry part that was growing inside and would, eventually, consume him, understood that she had to know. She was such a good mother, everyone said so. Her son was well mannered, well-groomed, and did well in school. Wasn’t he lucky to have such a good mother?

Ben left work with his head down and with quick strides aimed at letting people know that he didn’t have time to talk. He smelled Karen Sinclair-Ramsay in the parking lot and deliberately looked up at her. She was dressed in a business suit that looked good on her without being inappropriate. She had her hair braided back to display nicely shaped ears and dangly earrings. She was pretty in a well-cared-for, comfortable way.

Women were always smiling and pretty on the outside.

He got into his truck and backed out of his parking spot. He did not look at Duffy’s red Mustang as he drove past it on his way out of the parking lot and out onto the Bypass Highway he needed to take home.

Mel’s rental house was very small. The wind whistled through it, and the floors creaked. Chris had told her he didn’t want his wife living in a building he thought was going to fall over in the next good storm. But Chris was overseas, and she wouldn’t get to see him again for six months.

He didn’t have to live by himself in a house with too many ghosts and not enough people. When Chris’s unit left for overseas, Mel had moved to Richland to take care of her mom, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. She was supposed to have had more time, but Mel had still been unpacking when her mom died.

So Mel sold the house she’d grown up in to pay her mother’s medical bills and rented a one-bedroom cottage built when Richland was born during World War II. It wasn’t fancy, but it was charming once she’d gotten through with it. If she hadn’t sent Chris a photo when he’d requested it, he wouldn’t have worried about it. But he’d asked and she’d sent and so she had to deal with the consequences.

Chris wanted her to move back to the base in North Carolina, but she’d grown up in Richland, and she liked her job—except for the last month or so, and even that was better now. When Chris came back, they would talk. Until then, she’d wait for him here.

She was watching TV when someone knocked at the door. Though it was dark, it wasn’t late; the news was just coming on. She didn’t even think about checking to see who was at the door. Richland was a safe place to live.

She got a look at who waited on the porch and put her leg and shoulder against the door to hold it where it was.

“Mr. Duffy,” she said, trying not to show the fear she felt. What was he doing here?

He smiled at her and held out a bottle of wine. “Mel, honey. We need to talk.” He brushed past her and into her house without her quite knowing how he did.

He glanced at her living room and walked by it into the small kitchen, set the bottle on the table, and started opening cupboards.

“Charming house,” he said. “I just knew it would be. You have a way of making a place warm wherever you go.”

“Mr. Duffy,” she said, instinct keeping her by the front door because it felt like an avenue of escape. “This is inappropriate.”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Now where do you . . . there they are.” And he got down the long-stemmed crystal glasses that had been a wedding present from Chris’s sister. He popped the cork with a corkscrew he’d brought and filled the glasses with wine.

“Come in and sit down, Mel,” he said, with a sharp smile. “And let me explain a few things to you.”

She twisted the front doorknob.

“You do need your job,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some proof that you are selling proprietary secrets.”

For a moment, indignation overcame fear. “I did not.”

He sat down at her table and swirled the rust-colored wine, then sipped it. “But I have proof. I’ll show it to you. We are going to talk about how you will end up jobless and in jail. But that’s just you. You need to consider how it will look for your Marine if his wife is convicted of selling the location of nuclear material to interested parties.”

She felt the blood leave her face as she understood just how far he was willing to go. She should have left when she had a chance.

“Or”—he smiled and her stomach tightened with revulsion—“you can become my secretary with a healthy raise. Marie is transferring to another department and her post is open. Of course, you’ll have to persuade me.”

“Persuade you?” Her voice sounded wobbly, and she wished, harder than she ever had in her life, that Chris were here. Chris would wipe the floor with him.

Duffy tilted his glass toward the untouched one on the table. “Sit down, Mel. Don’t look so terrified. I’m hardly a rapist. Who knows? You might like it.”

Ben drove home from work trying not to think about anything, but the scent of his mother’s perfume lingering in his imagination left him restless and angry. He made it into his house, then stared unseeing at the food in his refrigerator. He knew he needed to eat, but he was too distracted to focus on food.

He hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Not since he’d killed Terry.

He stopped in the middle of his kitchen and did some deep breathing to keep the wolf back. Now that he was home, there was no one who would know or care what he was. But it was a bad idea to let the wolf out while he was this angry, and thoughts of Terry made him . . . very angry or something very near it.

He paced from the fridge to the door and back, kicking the dustbin in frustration when it got in the way. He hadn’t thought of Terry in months.

Terry had been the pack’s second in London, in Ben’s first pack. He worked for the Alpha, who was a loan shark. The whole pack worked for him, really, but Terry got paid for it. Terry’s job was to go collect from people who weren’t making their payments. Shortly after Ben was Changed, he was sent to tag along to make sure matters were discreet. The Alpha felt that Terry might forget himself and hang around until the police came by.

So after his real IT job, Ben got to trail Terry around three days a week, and that’s when he found out what he’d really been sent to do. Terry didn’t just beat up the people because they weren’t quick with their money; he beat up people because he liked it. Ben’s real job was to stop him before there was a dead body. Murder was more interesting to the police than loan-sharking.

One day, as they were leaving the apartment where their last reminder call lived, a woman walked by who caught Terry’s eye.

“My old girlfriend,” he’d said, and even now Ben wasn’t sure it was true. He wasn’t sure that was the first one for Terry, or if he’d been controlling himself because Ben was a new watcher.

He didn’t kill her. But she wouldn’t be walking around in her high-heeled black boots for a few months after he finished with her. Bruises and a broken leg, the newspaper reported the next day, and two men whose faces she hadn’t been able to see in the dark.

Terry was higher-ranked in the pack, and most of the pack were afraid of him. Ben wasn’t—there wasn’t much Terry could do to him that hadn’t already been done—but he was a realist. Terry could wipe the floor with him. And . . . there had been something cathartic about watching Terry beat up the woman.

Ben had come a long way from the good little boy of his childhood. He’d gotten in more than a little trouble that his father’s money had bought him out of. He’d never hurt anyone, but he’d done about everything else. He still wondered about the fate that made him end up a werewolf instead of dead in a dark alley of an overdose or a knife in his belly. Time was he’d been convinced that he’d ended up with the worst end of that stick.

When he approached his Alpha about Terry’s transgression, the old wolf had just grunted. “Your job isn’t to police what Terry chooses to do,” he’d said. “He’s the one making the calls. You just make sure no one is killed and keep watch for the police.”

Ben went out and bought a knife, and he did as he’d been ordered. Terry went hunting with Ben as observer; sometimes it was one of the other wolves, but mostly it was Ben—and Terry liked that part of it, too—and so did some dark part of Ben. At first it had only been once every couple of months, but by the end it was weekly. Terry liked those black, high-heeled boots. He’d follow women who wore them home and wait until the lights went out, then he and Ben would break in, muffling the sound of violence with the magic of the pack.

When Ben got home from those nights, he spent the next hour or so in the bathroom until there was nothing more to throw up. It hadn’t escaped his notice that he’d taken on the role of his mother, which was bad enough. But the thing that made it nigh unbearable was that he liked it. When the woman screamed, it was his mother’s voice he heard. And he craved it as much as Terry did.

Terry always cried afterward, patting his victim’s heads and calling them darling as he blamed them for making him beat them up. They were a proper unhinged pair, he and Terry. None of their victims died because the object of Terry’s kink was not murder but pain.

And so it went for almost a year and a half, fourteen victims. The fifteenth lay unconscious on the floor, her skirt rucked up over a hip displaying a tattoo of a wolf.

“Well, my boyo, lookee there,” Terry said. “She’s marked herself for me.”

The sickness was already churning in Ben’s gut. “You’ve done what you came for,” he said. “Time to go.”

“No,” Terry said, unzipping his trousers. “Time to step up the game for you.” He smiled. “I’ve been teaching you and you’re learning pretty well. Now we get to the good stuff.”

And the woman on the ground wasn’t Ben’s mother anymore.

“Time to go,” Ben told Terry. The woman was like him, like Ben. A victim. And he could take the easy route, like his mother had, as he had been doing all this time, or he could stop it.

Terry gave him an irritated look. “Bugger off yourself, then.” He bent down and patted her tattoo. “This one’s mine.”

And Ben did what he’d told himself he was going to do when he bought the knife in the first place. He cut Terry’s throat, then ripped off his head. He left the body in the poor woman’s apartment.

He’d cleaned up and headed over to turn himself in to the Alpha for punishment only to find that there had been a change in leadership. The wolf who ruled the rest of London had decided to take over the rival pack. Ben was too freaked from killing Terry to recognize that the pack bonds had been trying to tell him the old Alpha was dead.

The new Alpha didn’t kill Ben, but the police were looking for Terry’s accomplice. So he’d exiled Ben to the good old U. S. of A., and Ben had been given to Adam to see if there was anything worth saving inside Ben’s skin. Luckily for him, Adam seemed to view him as a challenge.

And right now he needed to pull his reformed head out of his arse because he’d just left a little helpless lamb out for a man who thought himself the big bad wolf. If she’d been Mercy, he wouldn’t be worried; Duffy would be lucky if he could walk tomorrow. But if she’d been Mercy, Duffy would never have chosen her as a target.

Mel kept her back against the door as if that might help. “No,” she said. “I won’t.” But she knew that she would, and so did Duffy; it was in the confidence of his voice and body. For Chris, she would do anything.

The doorknob turned, and the door, rather gently, pushed her to the side and Ben the Grouch—that’s what the office workers called him—came in. She stared at him in shock.

“Blackmail, Duffy?” said Ben, toeing off his snow-covered shoes and stowing them next to hers—as if he’d done it a hundred times. “That’s pretty low, even for you.” There was something funny with his voice. It was deeper and less crisp than usual, almost slurry, and she wondered if he’d had too much to drink. His body language was a little off, too. He kept his gaze slightly averted, never looking directly at Duffy or her.

Duffy set the wine down on the table abruptly, losing the smile. There was a flash of rage before it was replaced by sternness—did he practice his expressions in front of a mirror?

“I’m sorry that it had to go down this way, Mel,” he said so sincerely she almost could have believed that they’d been having a business discussion instead of a proposition.

Duffy turned to Ben, his face serious, “I don’t know how much you overheard, but it’s not what you think. Someone has been leaking information, and I just narrowed it down to Melinda. I was trying to see how far it had gotten by letting her believe I would cover for her, but you put the kibosh on that.”

She’d never seen anyone lie so smoothly. People would believe him, he was influential and he had money.

“Are you really selling secrets, Mel?” Ben sounded amused, in the mocking sort of way he had. “Shame, shame. So where is all the money going?” He glanced around, making a big production of the tiny living room and kitchen that comprised half of her apartment. He stretched his neck from one side to the other as if it were stiff, and when he was done, he focused on Duffy.

“Your eyes—” Duffy momentarily lost his usual confidence and looked shaken.

“What big teeth you have, dear,” said Ben. At least that’s what she thought he said, though it didn’t make any sense.

Duffy took a gulp of his wine, regrouped quickly from whatever had bothered him. He said, “All the more reason that getting on my bad side would be a terrible idea if you want to keep your job, Shaw. Walk away, and I’ll forget what I’ve seen.”

Ben laughed, and the sound made her take a step away from him. It was not a good laugh.

“You’re making a mistake.” Duffy stood up. He was a big man, taller and heavier built than Ben. He worked out—he’d told her that along with tales of his black belt when he had been trying to impress her.

“No,” said Ben. “I’ve made lots of mistakes. I know what that feels like. This is not a mistake. And as for what I am, whoop-de-f . . . freaking-do. It’s not a crime.”

“She’s a traitor,” Duffy said. “And I can make your job very uncomfortable.”

Ben snorted. “She’s a secretary, she doesn’t have access to anything. My doddering old mum in Merry Old England knows more about hacking than she does.”

He smiled, and Mel found herself stepping away from that smile until her legs hit the bookcase under the TV. The smile hadn’t been aimed at her, though. Duffy stumbled as he backed up against the counter in the kitchen—which was as far as he could go.

Ben followed him, crowding him by just standing in the kitchen. There was no amusement in his voice when he growled, “And if you’ve manufactured something that you think will implicate her, let me tell you that you aren’t hacker enough to cover your tracks from me.”

Then he stepped to the side and pointed to the front door. “Leave. Right now.”

Duffy didn’t even so much as glance at Mel as he bolted out the door.

She closed the door and glanced over at Ben. He was bent over, hands on his thighs as if he had just run a race.

“Ben?” she said. “Thank you.” She hugged herself. “But this was a mistake. We’re both going to be out of work.” She had no family, and only her friends at work. With Duffy spinning stories, she’d have to stay away from them. “Maybe in jail.”

“I watched a man brutalize women once,” he told her without looking up. “I was under orders, but finally put a stop to it anyway. Never again.”

She blinked at him. “Under orders? In the military?”

He laughed, coughed, and said, “In a manner of speaking. Pack business.”

“Pack?” The word should mean something to her, she knew, but she was still worried about what she was going to do without a job.

He lifted his head, and she saw what Duffy had. His eyes weren’t human.

“You’re a werewolf,” she whispered. She’d never seen a werewolf in person before, though she knew there were some in the Tri-Cities. She had seen a wolf at the zoo, though, and it had had the same hungry golden eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “And I didn’t even need to appear on four paws before you got it.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” she said, hurt, though she thought that she ought to be more afraid. A werewolf. That explained some things about Ben.

He bent his head down again and huffed as if he was having trouble catching his breath. Or maybe he was laughing. “You know it’s bad when they start quoting Oscar.”

“Oscar?”

He glanced at her. “Oscar Wilde.” His face contorted, released, and then contorted again as his light English complexion darkened. “F-f-f-f . . . freaking fire truck that hurts.” He bent back down and made a noise that made her cringe.

She wanted to help, but she didn’t know how. She was out of work, possibly about to be arrested, and Ben was changing into a scary beast right in front of her. And that was something else he’d given up to try to help her. If he’d wanted people to know what he was, he’d have told them before this.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “About your being a werewolf. At work, I mean. Not that I have a job anymore.”

“Ssst.” He interrupted her nervous babble. “Won’t matter whom you tell; Duffy will announce it to the world. Now shut up a moment and let me get this out because I don’t have much time. If you are fired, I can find you work while you sue for sexual harassment. I and the rest of the DBAs will be happy to testify. Duffy has squat on you.” He looked up again, and she wished he hadn’t. His face was . . . wrong. “Unless you have been selling secrets?”

“No,” she said.

“Thought not. Whatever he has is made up—and he’s not good enough with computers to make a convincing case. He can barely open his own flipping e-mail.” He bent down again, his fingers whitened as he took a stronger grip on his calves. “Full moon tomorrow, luv. And apparently I’m not man enough to stave off the change. I’m about to go werewolf on you so listen up. I have help coming, should be here in about a half hour. You go into your bedroom and shut the door like a good girl, and don’t come out for about fifteen minutes.”

He breathed hard and with obvious effort, but he didn’t stop talking until his whole body tightened up and shook. When it stopped, he took a deep breath. “Right. I won’t hurt you, but watching someone change is pretty gross for you and painful for me and we’ll both be happier if you tuck yourself away until I’m done.”

“Okay,” she whispered, but her feet were frozen to the floor, and she knew exactly how a deer felt, stuck out there in the middle of the road with a truck bearing down on it but too shocked by the bright lights to run.

He looked up and snorted. His face was distorted by sharp teeth that looked too big for his mouth. She covered her own mouth with her hands.

“Now,” he growled.

She did better than just shut the door. She crawled onto her bed and pulled the blankets up around her ears so she didn’t have to hear the noises he was making. The TV made it sound so romantic to be a werewolf. It didn’t sound romantic. It sounded scary, and it sounded like it hurt.

Ben stretched and glanced at the shreds of his pants. He’d managed to shed most of his clothes after Mel had rabbited into her bedroom, but the pants had stayed on and suffered the beast’s wrath. He shook himself and looked around for a place to wait for Mercy, who’d promised to hurry to Mel’s house as soon as he’d called, but she was all the way out in Finley, and it would take her a while to get here.

He took a step and his hip hit one of the kitchen chairs. He stepped back and bumped into the cabinets. The house was small, tiny even. There wasn’t any place he could see in Mel’s house big enough for him to sit down except the love seat—and even it would be iffy.

He hopped up, careful not to dig his claws into the faded, floral-print fabric. The arm made a nice chin rest.

Mel’s house was like her: small, not too bright, but warm and uncluttered. Safe. His secretary. His.

He snorted and wondered what the other DBAs would say if they realized that he thought of them as his people. He wiggled a little to get more comfortable while he waited for Mercy to pick him up.

Mel sat among the DBAs who had tried their best to get front row. They hadn’t succeeded because the security team had made it to the auditorium ahead of everyone else.

Lorna Winkler took the stage first, and all the men around Mel straightened in their chairs and brushed dandruff off their shoulders. Mel exchanged a rueful look with Amanda, one of the few women in the DBA division. Lorna might not be brilliant or even know much about computers, but she was able to get the IT department all aimed in the same direction when she needed to if only because all the men in IT would do anything she asked of them as long as she did it in her beautifully modulated voice. And the men outnumbered women in the IT department by better than three to one.

As Lorna spoke of how impressed she’d been with their performance last quarter, Mel imagined her practicing it in front of the mirror. There were bets about how often “world peace” would come up in the speech; the most in a previous speech had been six, though Mel hadn’t been there for that one. Rumor was that once she hadn’t said those two words together, but no one believed it. Mel was glad her mother had never sent her out to be scarred from too many beauty pageants at too young an age.

“I believe that we must, all of us, strive every day to become better people,” Lorna said, smiling so that everyone could see her perfectly capped white teeth. “Small steps lead to great ones, like world peace and liberty for all. In that vein, I have to tell you that it pleases me to encourage you by presenting one of your own who has overcome a very bad habit. He has agreed to speak to us today about how he accomplished that and how you might improve yourselves. I give you Ben Shaw”—she smiled—“IT’s favorite werewolf.”

A polite applause arose and stopped.

Ben got up and put an empty decanter of whiskey on the side of the podium.

“My speech,” he said, reading awkwardly from a sheet of paper in front of him, “is about how I broke my fucking habit of drinking shitty whiskey.”

By the time he’d finished, the audience was in stitches. He’d kept a serious demeanor the whole time, along with that awkward, serious voice that managed to counter the impression of intelligence Ben’s British accent encouraged. The contrast between his tone and the words he was using made Mel want to clear the wax out of her ears because the combination was just so wrong. And funny.

Ken Lincoln, sitting next to Mel, said, in awe, “I don’t think I’ve heard that many swearwords in such a short period in my life, and I was in the army. And the best part is that I don’t have to quit smoking.”

“What exactly is a pony-shagging, bitch-faced, ball buster?” asked Amanda, sounding strangled as she wiped her eyes.

Mel was watching Lorna Winkler’s face as one of the upper management, a grin on his face, shook her hand. She was pretty good at lip-reading, but he was faced half-away. She caught “comedy routine” and “not boring” and, as Lorna smiled graciously, “good idea.”

Ben smiled slyly at Mel, then joined Lorna and shook hands with Lorna’s bosses.