“I wouldn’t call it a bribe,” he said, his voice sulky. “Just a little taste of what could be.”

“But it cannot be,” I said, trying not to let him hear the regret and frustration in my voice or how much I wanted to love him. “I don’t love you … yet … and I can’t love you when you try to make me love you, so you’ll suck the life out of me before I can love you.”

He frowned. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked confused. He looked sweet when he was confused, like the little boy he must have been centuries ago before he became … this. I could have loved that boy, I thought, but then his confusion turned to anger.

“Nonsense,” he hissed, “those are just words.” His body curled into a coil of black smoke. “If you could feel what it’s like …”

The coil of smoke whipped against the windowpanes, smashing wood and glass. Moonlight flooded in, only it wasn’t moonlight anymore, it was silver water rushing into the room, a wave crashing over my bed, the water shockingly cold after the warm breeze and his hot kisses. I still couldn’t move. I was powerless to save myself as the water rose around me. It began pouring from the ceiling, down the walls, into my mouth. As the waters rose his face floated above me, watching without pity as I drowned. This is what I had done to him, his expression seemed to say; I had exiled my incubus lover to the Borderlands and condemned him to an eternity under water.

I awoke, gasping in the moonlit bedroom, my body chilled despite the hot summer night. I’d never really feel warm again while he was trapped beneath all that cold water. I’d never love anyone if I couldn’t love him.

CHAPTER ONE

ONE OF THE perks of academia – the part that was supposed to make up for the low salary, living in a hick town a hundred miles from a good shoe store and a decent hair salon, putting up with demanding, entitled 18–22-year-olds, and navigating departmental politics – was getting summers off. I had always imagined that once I was established in a tenure track job I would spend my summers abroad. Sure, I’d pin the trip on some worthy research goal – reading the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë at the British Library, or researching the court fairy tales of Marie d’Aulnoy at the Bibliothèque Nationale – but there was no law saying that when those venerable institutions closed at dusk I couldn’t spend my evenings catching a show in the West End or listening to jazz in a Left Bank café.

What I had not pictured myself doing during my summer break was swatting through the humid, mosquito-infested woods of upstate New York in knee-high rubber boots.

I had known I was in trouble when I opened my door this morning to find Elizabeth Book, Dean of Fairwick College and my boss, Diana Hart, owner of the Hart Brake Inn, and Soheila Lilly, Middle Eastern Studies Professor, on my front porch. The first time these three women had shown up on my doorstep together had been last year, the night before Thanksgiving, when they’d come to banish an incorporeal incubus from my house.