“I don’t know,” I told her. “Soon.”

Seth’s leg against mine was starting to stir up some illicit feelings, something I felt a little ashamed of with Kayla there. I was further startled when I glanced up at him and saw not lust in his eyes, but rather, something soft and tender.

“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because of you,” he said. “Just the way you interact with her . . . it’s remarkable.”

“Because I can get her to talk?”

He shook his head. “Nah. More than that. I’ve seen it with the other girls. You have a knack with kids. You’d make a great mother.”

Maddie had made the same offhand comment. I don’t think Seth had ever really and truly grasped how much I’d pined for children. His words filled me with both elation and sorrow. For an instant, I considered telling him about Nyx’s dream and the bizarre pregnancy theory. Those things were too fragile and too precious to me, however, and the cheesecake’s serendipitous arrival saved me from further deliberation.

The cheesecake was lemon raspberry, a bit adventurous for Kayla, perhaps, but she ate it without hesitation. Seth gave up on his share before us, and she and I finished it down to the last bite.

“Perfect,” he mused. “I’ll return her to Terry and Andrea, just in time for her the sugar rush to kick in. They’ll never let her go out again.” He frowned. “Will you need her again? I think she has some kind of play-date thing tomorrow.”

I sighed, and reality dimmed my golden moment. “I don’t know. I’m running out of close places. I’ll have to head up north next, up around Edmonds, though Dante pointed out that Jerome could be farther out—out on the Olympic Peninsula or something. The summoners would want to keep him close, but ‘close’ could mean ten miles or a hundred.”

“You’re not going to be able to go out to the coast in an easy day trip,” observed Seth. Under the table, his hand rested on mine out of sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

I squeezed his hand in return. “It’ll be as it’ll be, I guess.”

“I still want to help if I can.”

I offered him a rueful smile. “You want to help me get back to being a succubus?”

His return smile was equally bittersweet. “There’s no way any of this can end well, Georgina. Sometimes . . . sometimes we have to choose the lesser of evils and simply enjoy our sweet moments while we can.”