"Is it just me, or is everyone getting together these days?" Solomon asked the air rhetorically and perfectly blandly. "Or is it that other phrase? Hooking up? I remember the days when people actually got courted. Skulduggery, I'm disappointed. Your manners have declined. You haven't even taken Gabe out for dinner yet, have you?"

One of the many good things he'd discovered over the course of the afternoon was that Skulduggery blushed. True, he couldn't exactly see the man's face, but the light behind his panes tinged pink, or red, when he was embarrassed. It was giving Solomon endless amounts of amusement.

The fact that angels blushed too was only the capper.

He grinned unrepentantly in the angel's direction. "And it is, by the way. I can't be held responsible for not keeping him updated, either. I was busy being tortured at the time."

"Technically speaking, no one was in charge of the country at the time," Corrival pointed out. "I'm not taking responsibility for things that happened while I wasn't Grand Mage. Technically speaking the duty then falls to the nearest Sanctuary official. Which would be the Prime Detective. Fancy that."

"By the way," Solomon added smoothly, this time looking to Skulduggery, "you owe me a cane."