A weird meeting he didn’t want to go to, and he knew how it was going to go, and it was his own fault. Cash again had an impulse to ask more about this, but he didn’t know what to do about it — because he’d pried more than he meant to alread, and he didn’t want to make Ford talk about anything he didn’t want to talk about.

He was so startled by the question about his family, in the rest of all of this, that he ground his cigarette out in the ashtray. Cash steadied his gaze so that he was looking at Greengrass — he was stifling his first instinct, which was to look and see if any of his male relatives were here, or nearby, or listening.

It was a shame that Ford was asking about this in Black’s as opposed to anywhere else, because Cash had some great lines about being weird and inbred, but he wasn’t going to say anything about that here.

”I hadn’t heard that,” Cash said after a beat, which was true — he tended to remain slightly out of the loop on the regular news, so never mind Witch Weekly. ”But it really doesn’t have to do anything with a curse.” As far as he was aware, at least — actually, Cash could say that with confidence, because if there was a curse then Ellory would have slipped and told him by now.

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