Nothing But Blue Skies by Tom Holt

goldfish?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Goldfish. Little orange bugger with fins and a face like William Hague. You see, a friend of ours had one stolen recently, and we just thought we’d ask—’
    The question seemed to offend the pet-shop man, because he went a funny reddish colour. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m in the habit of buying stolen goldfish from people who walk in off the street. That’s precisely the way I run my business.’
    â€˜Is it? Ah. In that case, the next time someone comes in with one, could you possibly ring this number—?’
    â€˜Get out.’ The pet-shop man was snarling now. ‘Go on, bugger off, before I set the rabbits on you.’
    â€˜Actually,’ said the senior aide, ‘we’re pretty well off for rabbits right now. In fact—’
    â€˜Out!’
    Â 
    I will be good , Karen promised. I will control my emotions. Big girls don’t rain .
    Hard enough to say that immediately after the phone call, when guilt and shock were fresh enough in her mind. Harder still, now that she was looking out of a train window, rattling away from all the reasons she’d come down here in the first place. Wingless bipeds, of course, didn’t rain when they were sad. The closest they could get was a slight seepage from the eyes, a token shedding of water, as vestigial and useless as the human appendix. But she hadn’t quite worked out how to do that yet, so all she could do was sit still and try not to think about it. Concentrate on the job in hand, the work that was still to do, and you forgot about the things that were outside your control, no matter how all-encompassingly awful they might seem; that was what a dragon would say, her father would say, if he was here, which he wasn’t.
    And if that didn’t work, get on a train and go to Wolverhampton.
    Simple draconian logic; Wolverhampton was near as made no odds, the centre of England, and if you were planning on conducting a thorough search, it made sense to start at the centre and work outwards. As to how one went about looking for a missing dragon, she hadn’t the faintest idea. Obviously he wasn’t in dragon shape, or a search wouldn’t be necessary, which meant he was either a human or a goldfish. There were quite a lot of both of those in England, rather too many for a straightforward process of elimination to be practical. As far as alternative strategies went, she didn’t even know if there were any. To put it another way, she hadn’t a clue what she was supposed to be looking for, where it was likely to be, or how she’d recognise it if she did happen to stumble across it. Hardly scientific; but very human. After all, it was precisely the technique humans used when looking for a prospective mate, the one special person in the whole world who was meant for them, and if the bulk of human literature (up to and including the chocolate and perfume commercials) was to be believed, the technique worked for most people.
    When on Earth, do as the humans do.
    And it had worked for her, as far as finding that one special person was concerned. All she’d had to do was glance sideways out of the corner of her eye, as she was seeding a low cloud directly above the office where he worked. All she’d seen was a tall, rather angular human shape scurrying from the office doorway to the bus shelter, a newspaper held over his head to ward off the rain; that was all she’d needed to see. The odds against it - all the computers in Silicon Valley couldn’t handle such a complex calculation, or even work out the formula needed to do the maths. But it had happened, just as it happened for millions upon millions of others.
    (Nor was it particularly relevant that she was now leaving him behind, with That Bloody Woman poised like a dog begging at table to snap him up as soon as she was safely out of the way. Finding and winning were two