“I bet he did,” Daphne grumbles, her knuckles white around the gearshift. “Let me guess: ‘They’re super dangerous, August. You’d better let me spirit you away to Transylvania where you’ll be safe and never heard from again. Tallyho!’”

In spite of myself, I giggle. “First, your British accent is terrible, please never stop using it. And second … Okay, it was kind of like that. But I don’t think he was just trying to scare me. Some of the things he said kind of … made sense.”

She frowns sharply at this. “What exactly did he say?” So I start to tell her, but I don’t get any further than League of the Dark Star before Daphne curses out loud. “Duclos, of course. I wondered when we’d hear from her.”

“You were expecting this?” I can’t quite keep the annoyance out of my tone, since what the actual fuck? “Why didn’t you say something before?!”

“You weren’t supposed to know who I was before!” she protests. “This isn’t easy, by the way. All the lying and subterfuge and shit.”

I run my tongue along my lips and my teeth, refusing to be lured. Daphne saved me, and I trust her way more than I trust anyone who isn’t named either Pfeiffer or Adriana, but she lied until her hand was forced. “What do you know about Viviane Duclos?”

“Not much, unfortunately,” she growls. “What did he tell you about her?”

“Not much,” I echo. “Unfortunately. French sorceress, blah blah, nobody’s ever seen her, she might be fake, et cetera. You got anything else?”

Her fingernails tapping the gearshift, she surprises me by saying, “Yeah, actually, I guess I do. The basics are these: She’s not fake. Her origins aren’t totally clear, but the first time she came to anyone’s attention, she was a courtesan in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV.”

“Courtesan?”

“A … professional companion. Basically like a fancy sex worker,” Daphne explains. “That’s not what it means exclusively, but in her case it does. Access to the royal court was a big deal back then, and if you had it, you didn’t squander it. A lot of high society types—of all genders—who’d been forced to enter into marriages of convenience with people they didn’t particularly like, looked for companionship elsewhere. Viviane Duclos was a popular courtesan, known for her shrewdness, her intellect, and her ability to tell the future.”

“She was a psychic?”