I ended up staying for a while. As it turned out, Stefan’s method was a lot like the creative visualization techniques my mom taught me when I was a kid, except instead of focusing on containing my emotions and getting rid of them—or wrapping them up to be dealt with later—it was about deflecting them. Stefan had me visualize a shield with an interior polished to mirror brightness and then hold it between us in my mind.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it wasn’t.

For one thing, I’d never seen a shield in real life. All I had to work from was movies. God knows I’d seen enough of them, but still, it wasn’t the same. Apparently, you had to be really precise about the details, and I kept waffling between one half-remembered vision—Perseus in Clash of the Titans, Captain America, Richard the Lionheart in various versions of Robin Hood—and another.

After an hour, Stefan gave up. “You’ve a good grasp of the concept, Daisy,” he said to me. “You just need to articulate your vision.”

“I know, I know.” My head was aching with the effort. “I’ll try looking online later. Or maybe the library has a good book on armor.”

Again, there was a brief hesitation. “I may be able to procure something that would assist you. Allow me some time to . . . assess the matter.”

That seemed a little unnecessarily cryptic, but then, that was par for the course among the eldritch. “Okay, thanks.” My phone buzzed. Glancing down, I saw that it was a text from Sinclair, and also that it was later than I’d realized. “I should really be going.”

“Of course.” Stefan inclined his head to me. “Thank you for the courtesy of your visit. It is appreciated.”

Cooper escorted me out of the bar, his hands shoved back into his pockets. Oddly enough, I felt safer in his presence than I did with any other ghoul except Stefan—and maybe even than with Stefan, come to think of it, since there was no risk of my being attracted to a skinny Irish kid who looked six or seven years younger than me. But between the fact that he’d died daring God and the deference with which the others treated him, I had a feeling he was pretty badass in his own right, and given the care he was taking not to touch me, I suspected he was rigorous about enforcing Stefan’s orders.

“How long have you known Stefan?” I asked him at the door.

“Oh, a while.” His narrow shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Since the late eighteen hundreds, I reckon.” He gave me a challenging look. “He’s a good one, you know. Most of us aren’t.”

“Why is that?”