Star Promise by G. J. Walker-Smith Page A

half-smiled. “She wasn’t done. Eshe decided that essentially her plan was a good one – she just needed to conceal the thread better; so the next night, she sewed the finest string she could find.”
    “Silk?”
    I shook my head. “Spider web.”
    Despite the fact that the story had strayed further than anything his closed mind could believe in, Jean-Luc allowed me to continue.
    “It held up perfectly and from that day forward, every time Ufa strayed a little bit, Eshe tugged on the spider web and pulled him back to her side. They stayed together forever.”
    My time was up. The king whacked the edge of his desk with his hand. “Right, well that was an education,” he teased. “Pointless, but –”
    “I’m not done yet,” I interrupted. “I was just getting to the good part.”
    He slumped back and stretched out his arms. “The floor is yours.”
    “Eshe’s sister Habibah took it a step further,” I continued.
    “As if tying a man to herself against his will wasn’t far enough?”
    “Habibah sold the spider web thread to all and sundry. Any woman burdened with a man with a wandering eye bought it.”
    The king smirked. “A little entrepreneurism never hurt anyone.”
    “In this case it did,” I said gravely. “Men far and wide were tied by invisible threads. Thousands and thousands of yards of tiny strings of fate. Everything was fine until the most powerful imp in the land, Pipui, caught wind of it.”
    Pipui was a stickler for rules. As soon as she found out that Eshe and Habibah were running amok with the fate of others for profit, she intervened.
    “She conjured up a massive storm,” I said theatrically. “The wild winds broke all the webs and sent them flying off in different directions.”
    “And the men were freed?” he asked.
    “Not exactly.” I shook my head. “Spider webs are sticky, right?” Unbelievably, he nodded. “When the weather calmed, each web attached itself to someone new. In one short storm, Pipui changed the fate of everybody in the whole world.”
    If Adam had been the recipient of the story, he would’ve been content to leave it at that. But Jean-Luc was no Adam. He hit me with a barrage of questions in quick succession, probably the same way he examined people in court.
    “And what did that achieve?” he asked.
    My shoulders lifted. “People who ordinarily would never have met were now destined to be together, bound by invisible strings of fate.”
    He straightened up. “One generation,” he said holding a finger up. “At best, it would’ve been good for only one generation.”
    My smile was one of pure triumph. I’d won, and that never happened when Jean-Luc was my opponent.
    “Have you never heard the term ‘storm of the century’?” I asked smugly.
    “Of course.”
    “Well, Pipui was so thrilled with the result that she now spends her days travelling the earth, conjuring up storms all over the place. Her invisible strings of fate have endured many generations. To this day, unlikely lovers from all over the world are finding each other.”
    Jean-Luc stared at me for a long time, deliberating. It wasn’t uncomfortable. The mere gesture of thinking it through was good enough incentive to sit there and await his verdict.
    “Spider webs,” he mumbled finally. “You think they are the ties that bind?”
    “Maybe,” I shrugged. “I’m yet to hear a better explanation of why a boy from New York would find a girl from Tasmania.”
    Jean-Luc groaned as if he’d just sat through an ordeal. Far-fetched, totally implausible and incredibly ridiculous was his summation.
    “But you listened,” I reminded him. “There was a time that you wouldn’t have. No one is immune to magic, Jean-Luc, not even the king.”

14. LUCKY STARS
Adam
    My days ended best when I escaped my office during daylight hours. Sometimes that was all it took to turn a bad day good. When Charli called and asked me to collect Bridget from Ryan’s that afternoon, I didn’t think