MO AND I HAVE BEEN MARRIED FOR YEARS: ONE OF THE SECRETS of our success is that we don’t harbor grudges in silence. If Mo figures I deserve it, she vents at me and we hammer out an apology or an agreement or a peace treaty or whatever it takes immediately. So it’s a sign of how serious this quarrel is that she sat on it for nearly a month. And when she finally decides it’s time to draw it to my attention, it’s very ripe and stinky.

“You shouldn’t have dragged Pete into it,” she tells me one midweek evening as I’m clearing the kitchen table of the remains of a passable lasagne, and topping up our wine glasses. “It wasn’t fair on Sandy. Or the kid.”

“I—”

She raises her hand, and that’s when I work out she still needs to vent. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to insist that it was time-critical, that you didn’t think we had anyone on tap who could do whatever it was you needed Pete to do, and that the survival of the human race depended on it. And you’re ready to back up those talking points with a well-reasoned, sensible explanation. But I’m still angry.”

The worst part of it is, she’s right about everything except my having an arsenal of well-reasoned, sensible explanations to back this up. The sad fact is, Gerry Lockhart emphasized the level of confidentiality attached to that last job by ordering me not to talk about it to anyone. And the geas that’s part of my oath of office won’t let me break that order. It’s extremely heavy-handed of him: Mo has been working as an external asset since before I heard the term, and I’ve been part of her support framework, and hitherto it’s been mutual. However, I can’t tell her a word about GOD GAME BLACK without his permission unless I want my hair to catch fire and my brains to leak out of my nose. The geas is intended to maintain internal security, but sometimes it has unpleasant consequences.

So I just sit there and take it, with a defensive grin on my face.

“It was grossly irresponsible of you to drag him into—whatever.” (So Pete hasn’t told her exactly what I asked him to do for me, which was to read a stolen scan of the appendices of a rather variant version of the Bible, and give me an opinion on the sanity of the cult who were using it. It turned out to be a road map for engineering the Second Coming—not of Jesus, but of an ancient undead nightmare from the deep cosmological past. The cult was a mega-church in Colorado Springs, yours truly was part of the team trying to stop them, and the consequences are classified GOD GAME BLACK.)