“Duncan Laird,” Ann said lowering her eyes. “He came to my house the morning after our first circle and told me he wanted me to recommend him as your tutor. Of course I said no, but then he said he had enough Aelvesgold to make Jessica well forever. He told me he didn’t want to hurt you. He said he was the incubus and he only needed some time with you …” She raised bloodshot, hooded eyes to my face and gasped. “Did he do that to you, dear?” She raised a trembling hand to my face.

“Duncan Laird did this when I used a spell last night to unmask him. Are you really sure that he’s the incubus? I didn’t know incubi had claws.”

Soheila picked up a book from the coffee table, flipped through it and laid it back down open to a full color insert. The picture that leered up from among the teacups was a reproduction of Fuseli’s Nightmare – a pointy-eared imp with long claws leering evilly as he crouched on the breast of a swooning maiden. Was that the face that would have greeted me if Duncan hadn’t struck me? Was that why he had lashed out – so I wouldn’t see him like that?

Ann craned her neck to look over at the picture and shuddered. “Is that what they look like in their natural state?”

“We have no natural state,” Soheila answered. “Incubi and succubi feed on human desire. We take the shapes humans imagine for us. We become their dreams … or their nightmares. I tried to explain that to Angus when he went up against your incubus to destroy him …” Soheila’s eyes glistened when she mentioned Angus’s name.

“You don’t have to talk about it if it’s too painful,” I told her. It wasn’t just Soheila I wanted to spare; I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how the creature I’d once slept with had killed the man Soheila loved.

“I think you should know,” Soheila said, wrapping her hands around the mug of tea Liz handed to her. “After Angus saw his sister destroyed by the incubus he spent years studying the lore of the incubus, but in the end it wasn’t the stories about incubi that helped him, it was one of the old Scottish ballads that gave him what he needed.”

“A Scottish ballad?” I asked, feeling a strange chill. “Was it ‘Tam Lin’?”

“How did you know?” Soheila asked, clearly surprised.

“My parents told me the story when I was little …” I stopped, trying to recall something on the edge of my memory. Some other time when I’d heard the ballad recently, but the thin filament of memory had already slipped away.