In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, Tom Holt Page A

asking the wrong questions. The right question, of course, was: what would Paul Carpenter do, assuming Paul Carpenter’s IQ was at least double his shoe size?
    â€˜Having problems?’ said a voice to his left.
    He jumped up – he’d been crouching on the ground so that he could whisper into the slot without having to crick his neck – and looked round to see who’d spoken. There was a beautiful girl standing next to him – tall, willowy, natural redhead, lovely smile that almost managed to conceal the fact that it had only just evolved from a rather distinctive grin—
    â€˜You,’ Paul growled. Then he remembered. ‘I thought you were off on maternity leave or something.’
    â€˜I am,’ the flame-haired beauty replied. ‘Been for my check-up. Harley Street, just over there.’ She waved a hand in some direction or other. ‘Only goblin gynaecologist in Western Europe.’
    â€˜Right,’ Paul said. ‘And I suppose that – skin you’re wearing is just some old thing you found at the back of the wardrobe.’
    â€˜I like to look nice,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied. ‘What’s wrong with that? I mean, which would you rather look at, this or a six-months-pregnant goblin?’
    Paul shrugged. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘the answer to your question is yes.’
    Mr Tanner’s mum took a step towards the bank machine and sniffed. ‘Let me guess,’ she said.
    â€˜Wyvern, right? And you’ve been feeding it plastic.’
    Paul nodded. ‘That’s a mistake, isn’t it?’
    She smiled. ‘’Fraid so,’ she said. ‘Only two ways to shift wyverns, short of high explosives: gas ’em or starve ’em. Me, I’d have gone for fifty mil of SlayMore mixed twenty-five to one—’
    â€˜Yes, I know,’ Paul interrupted. ‘But I haven’t got any bloody SlayMore, have I? And I can’t go back to the office to get any, because—’
    â€˜Right.’ She was not-sniggering. ‘Well, in that case, you’re left with Plan C.’
    â€˜Plan what?’
    She twitched her nose at him; probably a goblin thing. ‘Best summed up in the words of the late Richard Nixon: when you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Lucky it’s a doe and not a buck.’
    â€˜Is it? How’d you know that?’
    â€˜Tut,’ replied Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘Who hasn’t done his reading assignments, then? Page 774 of the office-procedures manual; it’s wyvern breeding season, as you ought to know but obviously don’t. What you’ve got there is a broody young doe. Probably got half a dozen eggs. Crisp new Bank of England tenners are their preferred nest material.’
    â€˜Oh,’ Paul replied, and for some reason he blushed. Mr Tanner’s mum had the knack of making anything remotely concerned with procreation sound totally obscene. ‘How does that help?’ he added.
    She gave him a pitying look. ‘Shut up and keep perfectly still,’ she said. ‘At this point I’d usually say it won’t hurt a bit, but I read somewhere that lying makes you fat.’ She snapped her fingers, and—
    Paul managed to keep from a forced landing on the hard pavement by flapping his wings. That was fine, except that it made him think, Wings? What wings? and that interfered with the instinct that was keeping him airborne. He tried to remedy that by flapping harder, but all that achieved was to zoom him fast and head first into the wall.
    That hurt; also, it hadn’t done anything to solve his gravity problems, which were starting to get urgent again. He flapped wildly, but all he was managing to do was hang in the air, like the cat in the cartoons when it’s just run off the edge of a cliff. Help! he tried to shout, but all that came out was a terrified kitten-like mewing. Then, as if that