“Just be careful with him, Daisy.” She gave me a serious look. “I told you, you’re like catnip to these things. He may be older and have more control, but that just makes him more dangerous.”

“Like you?” I asked as she turned onto the street. It was probably a boundary-crossing question, but what the hell. Drunk as I was, I had an excuse.

Lurine didn’t answer right away. The passing streetlights illuminated her face intermittently, and she looked different in their glow. Not older, exactly; for as long as I’d known her, Lurine had looked about twenty-seven or-eight, and assuming I remained resigned to accepting my own mortality, it wouldn’t be all that many years before I’d be able to pass for her older sister, which was sort of an unpleasant thought.

Anyway, it was a sense like age, as though I could see the shadows of antiquity stretching behind her.

“In some ways, yes,” she said eventually. “We do what is necessary to ensure our survival. In others, no. I am no danger to you. That does not mean I’m not dangerous to mankind.” She turned her gaze on me. “Do you really want to know more?”

The streetlights caught a hypnotic glitter in her pupils: not the avid hunger of a ghoul, but the steady predator’s gaze of a snake fixing its prey.

“Umm . . .” I swallowed. “I’m going to go with no.”

She turned her attention back to the road. “Daisy, you’re Hel’s liaison, and I will tell you anything you truly wish to know. But in the eldritch community, it’s not wise to ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers.”

“Gotcha.” The thought occurred to me that if Lurine had shed her borrowed glamour and turned that basilisk stare on Matthew Mollenkamp, he would have peed in his pants, begged for his mommy, and told us the whole unvarnished truth instead of bragging about being a true son of Triton. Of course, that probably would have resulted in half the town of Appeldoorn camping outside the infamous Lurine Hollister’s estate with pitchforks, which was the point of the glamour in the first place. “So what do you think about Lord Matt’s Masters of the Universe story?”

Lurine pursed her lips. “It all comes down to sex, doesn’t it? That’s the one thing that boy wasn’t lying about.”

“Uh-huh.” I attempted to nod sagely, and found my head was still a bit wobbly on my neck. “But with who? Or what?”

“Nothing human.” She pulled adeptly onto the highway. “But there’s no way it was one of the local water elementals.” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare lie to me. And there’s no way those boys could catch or lure one.”