Only then they hadn’t been tricked out in knee-high rubber boots and fishing tackle. I knew that Fairwick was big on fishing. The town had been plastered with “Fishermen Welcome!” signs since Memorial Day. There was a “Small Fry Fry-Up” at the Village Diner, an “Angler’s Weekend” at the Motel 6 on the Highway, and a “Romantic Rainbow Trout Dinner for Two” at DiNapoli’s. Out-of-town RVs with airbrushed vistas of rushing streams and leaping trout had been clogging Main Street for the last few weeks. Our part of the Catskills was apparently the fly-fishing capital of the Northeast. Still fishing seemed like a rather mundane activity for these three women. The dean, as I’d learned this past year, was a witch, Diana an ancient deer-fairy, and Soheila was a succubus. A reformed, non-practicing succubus. But still. A succubus, an ancient supernatural entity that lived off the desire of human beings.

“What’s up?” I asked guardedly. “Is this an intervention for my plumbing? It has been making some strange sounds.”

I was only half joking. One of the reasons I had opted to stay home this summer was to get some work done on Honeysuckle House, the lovely – but time consuming – old Victorian house I’d bought last fall. Since I’d been forced to banish my boyfriend four months ago I’d thrown myself into an orgy of home repair. I’d been breathing dust and paint fumes for weeks. Today I’d been waiting for the arrival of Brock, my handyman (who also happened to be an ancient Norse divinity), to fix some broken roof tiles, when the doorbell rang.

“No, dear,” Diana said, her freckled face breaking into an awkward smile. When the three of them had come to banish the incubus from my house I’d joked that they were there for an intervention, but when four months later Diana and Soheila had come to break it to me that my lover, Liam Doyle, was that same incubus and that he was draining not just me of my life force but a dozen students, the joke hadn’t seemed so funny. I think they all felt a little guilty when we found out Liam was innocent of attacking the students. But he’d been an incubus and you couldn’t go on living with an incubus no matter how great the sex was, because eventually he would suck the life force out of you.

“I’m afraid we have a problem that only you can help us with,” Liz said.

“You need me to open the door?” I had learned over the past year that I was descended, on my father’s side, from a long line of “doorkeepers” – a type of fairy who could open the door between the two worlds. By a lucky – or perhaps unlucky, depending on how you looked at it – coincidence, the last door to Faerie was here in Fairwick, New York. So far my unusual talent had cost me nothing but grief and trouble.

“Yes!” they all three said together.