Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) Read Free Page A

care back.
    She must have stared, because he swallowed, Adam’s apple rising and falling hugely, and said, “I suppose some people might be allergic to ginger nuts? I’m sorry, I didn’t really know what kind of thing you were supposed to bring to this sort of meeting, see?” He tried a grin, dazzling as a squally shower on an overcast day. “I suppose next time I’ll bring some fruit salad.”
    “What?”
    “Fruit salad? Although some people don’t like pineapple, which I don’t understand because I really like pineapple but everyone is different aren’t they? I mean of course they are that’s why we’re here I suppose, even though actually,” a laugh designed to be rich found itself on hard times, “we’re not really!”
    He pushed the packet of biscuits among the rest, and mumbled, “Would you like a hand with the tea?”
    Sharon said, “Uh, thanks, I mean… yeah. That’d be great, cheers.”
    “I’m Rhys,” the man explained brightly, occupying himself over thetea with the dedication of the truly relieved. “Rhys Ellis.” Then, in a lower, conspiratorial voice, “I’m a druid.”
    “Really?” exclaimed Sharon, and now she too found that the mugs of tea were the most interesting things she’d ever handled. “That’s very uh… that’s very…”
    “Welsh?”
    “Kind of, yeah.”
    “I learned druiding in Birmingham.”
    “That’s less Welsh.”
    “Yes, but my second teacher was from Swansea. Actually, my first was from Bangkok and he smoked these nasty cigarettes all the time. At first I thought they were some kind of herbal thing, see, to enhance his communing with the primal forces of the city, but in fact they were just cheap.” He laughed, so Sharon dutifully laughed as well. Before the laughter could end and words could muscle back in with disastrous consequence, she grabbed a handful of mugs and turned to the other people there.
    “Tea!” she shrilled. “Who’d like a nice cuppa?”

Chapter 8
Cast Off Your Chains and Soar
    “Before we begin,” said a voice, “I totally have a question?”
    All eyes turned to the speaker. If he’d had the vascular capability, he might have blushed. Peroxide-blond hair on a bone-white face, skinny blue jeans, leather shoes and a tight-fitting white T-shirt all proclaimed the owner, a man of probably no more than twenty-five years old, to be comfortable with his sexuality, even if the rest of the world wasn’t. “So yeah, hi there. I’m just wondering, with this meeting–are we going to change the hours for daylight saving? Only my complexion really takes some looking after and I can’t be having too much sun, if you know what I mean.”
    Silence in the hall.
    Eyes turned inexorably to Sharon. She rose to her feet. This moment was something she’d been preparing for.
    She said, “Uh…”
    And stopped. Somehow, in all those hours spent in front of the mirror practising being open-minded and understanding, with help from books carrying titles like
Everything I Ever Needed to Know Was Inside Me Already,
the rallying cry of “Uh” hadn’t been mentioned.
    “… these are issues,” she added hastily, because you couldn’t go wrong with a good “issue” or maybe even a “challenge”, “which we can all address. If anyone has any concerns about the set-up of thisgroup then of course please do say so, and we’ll try to, like, address that.”
    It had been going so well.
    “Excuse me?” The voice wasn’t loud or aggressive or even particularly projected but there was something in it, an indefinable thickness of sound, that cut through every conversation. The speaker was hard to focus on. There was a sensation of bulk, aided by the fact that the speaker’s chair seemed to be warping under pressure. But as Sharon looked and tried to gain an exact sense of weight or height or skin, or even gender, such information seemed to slip just out of her grasp, like wet soap in a hot bath.
    “Excuse me,” he, or maybe she, or