Free The Glass God by Kate Griffin Page A

furious. “So,” she murmured, straightening up and looking round the bare unit. “Matthew Swift… he’s not just human, is he? I mean, there’s the blue electric angels, too, and they’re big on phones, yeah?”
    “They are, in fact, a composite life form created from the magic of the telephones.” Miles spoke in the prim voice of a man who’s read a textbook and hopes everyone else will appreciate the same. “If we take the old adage that life is magic, then wherever life goes, so magic will spring, and of course the telephones are just screaming with life…⁠”
    “And boom, blue electric angels?”
    “Exactly so – boom. I hadn’t thought of saying ‘boom’ before; but yes, that’s highly apt, where these creatures are concerned.”
    “And they’re part of Swift?”
    “Or he’s part of them. No one is really sure of the distinction, any more. What are you thinking, Ms Li?”
    Sharon shrugged. “Stinky commercial unit in Deptford, mystic umbrella, missing sorcerer, crispy telephone line… dunno. Am I supposed to know already? I mean, I get that it’s a big responsibility, investigating a missing Midnight Mayor and that, but I kinda assumed that there was a difference between brilliant, incisive leaps and rushing into things like a pillock.” She looked to Rhys for assurance, but he merely widened his helpless smile.
    Sharon looked around once more, then bent down until her nose almost brushed the floor, examining the swirls left in the dirt by a wet cloth. She stood up, walked towards a wall and pressed her shoulder blades against it, then got back down on her hands and knees and turned her head this way and that, scrutinising the floor.
    “It’s okay,” said Rhys, seeing Miles’s frown of speculation. “I’m sure this is a shaman thing.”
    “You seeing this?” asked Sharon, still on all fours.
    “Um… seeing what, Ms Li?”
    “Someone’s cleaned this place up, right? I mean, really scrubbed it.”
    “Yes…⁠”
    “But they didn’t bother with cleaning everything, only the stuff they’d made dirty.”
    “Um…⁠”
    Sharon sprang back up and grabbed Rhys by the elbow, pulling him back until he could see nearly all the floor. “They cleaned up their mess,” she exclaimed, “so now the things what were dirty are much cleaner than everything else! Look at where the floor is clean, and what do you see?”
    Rhys looked. He saw great sweeps of floor made pale by scrubbing, splashes where water had sloshed from a bucket, a mess of tide marks in one corner where someone had scrubbed so hard they’d almost peeled the sand out of the concrete itself. And, if he looked in just the right way, then perhaps, in all the ebbs and flows of dirt, he saw…
    “A circle.”
    Rhys bit his lip as Miles spoke, then managed a manly nod of assent.
    The Alderman walked along the edge of a stretch of cleaned floor, marking out with his black polished toe the course of a cleaner stretch of clean that did indeed make, quite distinctly, a circle.
    “Too small to be a summoning circle,” he mused. “You need more room, just to ensure enough oxygen content in the atmosphere. Maybe an enchanting or binding circle? Hard to tell now they’ve washed it away. Not meant to be used again, otherwise they’d have used paint to draw it. Chalk, maybe? Bit old-fashioned, but all right as a temporary solution.”
    Sharon opened her mouth, then closed it. Then, very slowly, she said, “So, will it undermine my super-cool investigative vibe if I admit that we haven’t done magic circles in class yet?”
    “Oh no, Ms Li!” blurted Rhys.
    “Do shamans use magic circles?” asked Miles.
    “Dunno. Maybe we don’t. Maybe that’s why we haven’t covered them in class. You know what it’s like being taught by a goblin – he’s great on things to do with carved wyvern bone, but not so hot when it comes to syllabus breakdowns. Then again,” Sharon brightened, “you gotta know your limitations and trust your