I had no need to worry, though. She had never left Seth’s side—literally. She now sat in my spot, pressing Seth between her and the couch’s arm. Two stacks of books were on the coffee table, and an open one was on his lap. He finished signing it and glanced up at my entrance with a relieved look.

“But you see,” Mary was saying, “until O’Neill is able to confront the darkness within himself, he’ll never be able to open himself to Cady. He’s had his moments of vulnerability, of course—like the cave scene in Dominant Eclipse—but he’s still keeping his armor up—just like on the veranda in Memories of Man—and so it’s no wonder—”

“Hey,” I said cheerfully. “We should probably get going.”

Seth shot up from his seat, looking rather like a trapped animal who had just gnawed its own leg off and was about to run free. “Yes. We don’t want to detain Mary any further.”

Mary stood up too. “No, no! It’s okay. Really. And you have to finish signing my books.”

With a grimace, Seth grabbed the last three books and hastily scrawled his signature in them. “Thanks for talking to us,” he said. “It’s been great meeting you.”

“Are you sure you have to go?” she pleaded. “I was going to make some dinner soon.” She shot me an accusing look. “And if it’s Ginger who needs to leave, I can give you a ride home later in my van—”

“No, really,” said Seth, backing up to stand by me. “I appreciate it, but I have to, you know, get back to writing.”

Extricating ourselves was painful. Mary begged and kept offering everything from discount jewelry to thinly veiled sexual suggestions.

“Step on the gas and do not look back,” Seth told me when we got in the car.

I complied, peeling out of her driveway as fast as I could and kicking up dirt and gravel in the process.

“That right there,” I mused, “is the kind of fan who keeps authors in their crawlspace.”

Seth leaned his head back against the seat. “Do not ever do that to me again. Ever.”

“I wasn’t that far away. I would have heard you screaming.”

“Not if she used ether first. God, Georgina. She had her hand on my leg.”

“That’s Ginger to you.”

“Please tell me you got something useful out of that. I know you didn’t go to the bathroom.”

“Nope. I broke into her workroom and ransacked her files.”

He groaned. “Breaking and entering.”

“Hey, I’m a creature of Hell. And she technically let us in.”

“What’d you find?”

Eyes on the road, I reached into my purse and fumbled until I found the picture. I handed it to Seth.

“This is it?” he asked.