Pat thought back to the time when they forced Danny to tell them the truth about himself by staging an intervention disguised as a birthday party. Only Danny hadn’t told them. He took their ultimatum—tell us who or what you really are, or we’re not friends—and made the wrong choice. They followed him home and it was the Greek Lockfriend, Hermia, who ended up telling them that Danny North was a Norse god, after a fashion. A gatemage, who could create passages through which people could pass instantaneously from one place to another.

Hermia also enlisted them as Danny’s servants. She was very cold about it. They weren’t Danny’s equals, and so the only way to be his friends was to serve his purposes. They had all agreed, though they really had no idea what it meant at the time. At first it was really cool—the amulets he made for them, that brought them to this clearing in the woods; the occasional trips anywhere in the world. The time he enlisted Hal and Wheeler to help him dig out an ancient cave opening in Egypt. The time he had them memorize a proclamation, then gated them to each of the great Families to recite it to them. It felt so much bigger than anything they had ever imagined.

Laurette and Sin immediately got flirty with Danny in a way they had never been before, but it was Xena who quite openly started lobbying to have his baby. Danny rejected her advances, kindly but clearly refusing to father children on anybody. Xena hadn’t let go of it—she imagined that because Danny wasn’t actually cruel to her, he was secretly in love with her.

Pat saw all this with something halfway between amusement and disgust. The only girl who worried her was the Greek gatemage, Hermia. Because she was a mage like Danny, only weaker—she couldn’t actually make gates, only find them and open and close them—he spent a lot of time with her. But Pat saw something about Hermia that Danny couldn’t see—that she was using him, that she could not be trusted. Hermia didn’t show any close bond to him. She wasn’t his.

And when Pat went to his house late one night to warn him about Hermia, something happened. Pat ended up confessing to him something she hadn’t realized until that moment: that she herself was in love with him—the only one of the girls who really was. And Danny responded by kissing her and telling her that he loved her in return. It was so overwhelming, emotionally, that if he had wanted to, she would have made love to him then and there.

But Danny refused. He wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t going to have sex with anybody until he actually made a lifelong commitment and married someone. Period. No exceptions, not even for true love.