“What do you want me to let in?” I asked suspiciously. The last creature I’d let in from Faerie had tried to eat me.

“Nothing!” Diana insisted, her freckles standing out on her pale skin the way they did when she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “We want you to let something out. A lot of somethings, actually …”

Liz sighed, squeezed Diana’s hand, and finished for her. “Undines,” she said. “About two dozen of them. Unless you can help us get them back to Faerie they’re all going to die.”

*

“It’s their spawning season,” Soheila explained as we tramped through the woods that started on the edge of my backyard. “It only happens once every one hundred years. The undine eggs …”

“Eggs? Undines come from eggs?” I asked, appalled. The only undine I knew about was the water nymph in the German fairy tale who marries a human husband and then, when he is unfaithful to her, curses him to cease breathing the moment he falls asleep.

“Of course, dear,” Diana answered, looking back over her shoulder. The path obliged us to walk in twos and Diana and Liz were up in front. “They have tails at this stage so you couldn’t very well expect them to give birth …”

“Okay, okay,” I interrupted. Although I’d written a book called The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about the sex lives of fish-tailed undines. Thankfully, Diana took the hint and left out the more graphic details of the undines’ sex life, concentrating instead on the life-cycle of their young.

“The eggs are laid in a pool at the headwaters of the Undine …”

“Is that why the stream is called the Undine?” I asked. I’d heard of the stream. The lower branch, south of the village, was popular with fishermen, but the upper branch, which had its headwaters somewhere in these woods, had been declared off limits by the Department of Ecological Conservation.

Liz Book sighed. “The locals started calling it that because of a legend about a young woman who lured fishermen into the depths of the trout pools and then drowned them.”

“They probably just fell in after a few too many drinks,” Soheila said. “It’s true that undines seduce human men – if they get one to marry them, they get a soul – but they don’t kill them unless they’re betrayed.” Soheila pushed back a vine and let it snap behind her, nearly hitting me in the face. Soheila was normally the most charming and sophisticated of women, and I had the feeling that the subject was a sensitive one for her. I’d learned this past year that Soheila had become part human when a mortal man fell in love with her, but he had died because her succubus nature had drained the life out of him. Since then she’d scrupulously avoided any physical contact with mortal men, even though I suspected she had a crush on our American Studies professor, Frank Delmarco. A suspicion confirmed by how melancholy she’d been since Frank had gone away a few weeks ago to a conference on “The Discourses of Witchcraft” in Salem, Massachusetts.