When I left, Clara was still leafing through the book. I trusted Bruce’s judgment not to have set her up with anything dangerous. Or anyone, when the time came.

And she seemed willing to listen to him. So, of course, I thought she was safe. I knew I should have said something about Silver Thorn.

I didn’t. Yeah, we know this is going towards stupid Jane. I even sort of knew at the time, but I didn’t want to step all over Bruce’s toes.

Or maybe a nasty part of me did want to use her as some kind of infiltration bait. Yeah, that was a nasty part of me indeed.

But I had to acknowledge it was there. Being a trickster’s daughter, perhaps. The manipulation. The using of people. Of course, I would never try to get Thor in a dress.

Of course, Thor in a dress had worked. And if somebody offered, I suppose, I’d take them up on it. We needed evidence to make them look bad.

Or even get somebody arrested for rape, but I doubted that would happen. It was hard enough at the best of times, let alone when faced with a group of people who, by their very nature, would close ranks.
They were probably all guilty to some degree. But I’d be a hypocrite if I risked her like that.

Even if I could coordinate with the ghost; which I wasn’t sure of. I let out a breath as I stepped back out into the snow.

I’d let Bruce take care of Clara and hope she listened to him. And hope she hadn’t already met them, already had some contact that might lead to her being pulled in. Prue, at least, I thought knew better.

She was the next person on my list to talk to, but she was sick the next day. Probably legitimately so – there was a pretty nasty little stomach bug going around. Seemed to be a bug, not the canteen food, at least not this time.

So, I settled down at lunch. “I found out what happened.”

“What?”

“Some pretty serious sexual harassment. Initiation ceremonies. I’ve kind of heard of that happening.”

Kanesha rolled her eyes. “And one of their victims had an overprotective ancestor.”

“I talked him out of killing them if, and only if, we can find another way to deal with it. I’d like to get them all up on sexual assault charges, but…”

“…but they’ll have each other alibi’d pretty well.”

“And I don’t want to risk malicious rumors that might track back to us.”

She nodded. “There’s ways of doing things anonymously on the internet. Did you…”

I shook my head. “I haven’t done a google search on them yet.”

“Let me handle it.” She flickered a grin. “I’ve seen what you do to computers.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m Dresden or something.” She was right, though – she was much better at the internet stuff than me.

Probably always would be.