"Poor Agnes." Mabel snickered. "When she starts spending that fake money…"

"She could go to jail," Escott completed for her.

"It'd serve her right, but I better let the police know that she stole a car."

Mabel put Hecate's Eye in its little box and went to the kitchen to make the call.

Escott and I looked at the gem, neither of us disposed to get closer.

A last bit of lightning from the fading storm played hob once more with the house lights. They flickered, leaving the one candle to take up the slack for an instant before brightening again.

"Did you see that?" I asked. "Tell me you saw that."

"Trick of the light, old man, nothing more." But Escott looked strangely pale. "It absolutely did not wink at us."

Dahlia Lynley-Chivers looked good in black; in fact, she looked great—and normally that was extremely important to her. But tonight she wasn't thinking about herself or about the picture she made sitting alone at the elaborately laid table in the upscale restaurant. Seeleys' tablecloths might have been designed to set her looks off: the undercloth was black like her hair; the overcloth was snowy white like her skin.

Dahlia had been dead for a very long time. Though she was sitting motionless, her back perfectly straight, Dahlia was conscious of the passing of time. The witch was late. Under any other circumstances, she would have left Seeleys and found something more amusing to do than wait for a human: but she'd gone to considerable trouble to arrange this meeting, and she wouldn't give up so easily.

Clifford Seeley, who'd arranged to wait tables at his dad's restaurant this evening, put a glass of TrueBlood in front of Dahlia with a theatrical flourish. "Something to sip on while you wait, madam," he said formally. Then he whispered, "I haven't worked here since I was twenty. Am I doing okay?"

Dahlia didn't exactly smile. She wasn't in the mood. But her face looked a bit less stony as she looked up at the tall young werewolf, and she inclined her head an infinitesimal degree. She liked Clifford, had since the moment she'd met him at her friend Taffy's wedding reception. Taffy, like Dahlia, had married into the Swiftfoot pack.

Taffy's husband Don was the packleader. Dahlia's husband was dead.

"Heads up," said Clifford suddenly, and swooped off to check his other tables. Dahlia saw the headwaiter gliding toward her, a young woman stumbling along behind him. Dahlia's attention sharpened. Since on their dullest day vampires had senses at least five times more acute than those of humans, this meant Dahlia might as well have been walking right next to the newcomer. The woman was plump, tousled, and breathing heavily, and she didn't seem to know how to walk on high heels. Dahlia, who wore stilettos on every possible occasion, let her nostrils flare in contempt, though she made sure to repress any expression well before the young woman reached her chair. That took longer than it should have, since Dahlia's guest was not Ms. Fitness.

When the newcomer was seated, considerable fuss ensued until she found a place for her purse, yanked at the shoulder of her dress, tossed her head so her long red hair would hang behind her shoulders, and asked the headwaiter for some water. (He replied, "I'll send your waiter, Clifford, right over," in a rather stiff voice.)

"I'm so sorry I'm late, Mrs. Swiftfoot. I caught the wrong bus, and after that, everything else seemed to go wrong," the young woman said.

Dahlia studied her silently. Making people squirm was something Dahlia did very well. "You are the Circe, the witch?" Dahlia said finally, in her frostiest voice. But her tone was not as cutting as she could make it. Dahlia had gone to too much trouble setting up the meeting to go overboard with the hostility.

"Yes, oh, yes, I didn't introduce myself!" The young witch giggled, tossed her head again. "I'm not the original Circe, of course. That was my—well, my many-times great-grandmother. But I'm the direct descendant, yes."

"And you are a trained witch?"

"Oh, yes, I went to school and everything." The Circe wore glasses, and she blinked anxiously at the tiny vampire across the table. "I graduated with honors."

"I was under the impression that witches were taught by their predecessors," Dahlia said. "I understood that the knowledge was passed along by word of mouth, and in the family grimoire. There's no—Hogwarts in your past, I presume?" The reference to Harry Potter was a real stretch for Dahlia, who tracked current culture with some effort. Dahlia had ventured the mild pleasantry to put the panting young woman at ease, but Dahlia was not terribly adept at mild or pleasant.

The Circe recoiled. "No," she snapped. "And I'll thank you not to refer to those books again. Everyone thinks we're cute now, and we've lost a lot of the respect we used to be accorded."

"Some would say that any publicity is good publicity," Dahlia said, curious about this unexpected sign of temper. No one had snapped at Dahlia in, oh, five decades. She'd caught an unexpected glimpse of the darker thing that lived inside the untidy young creature sitting across the table.

"If one more person asks me where my owl is, or how to get to Gringotts, I'll turn them into a…"

"Pig?" Dahlia suggested.

The Circe glared at her. "That was my ancestor's thing, not mine," she said.

Interesting. "Let's start again, from the beginning," Dahlia said. "Please don't call me Mrs. Swiftfoot. Swiftfoot was my husband's pack name. I've broken my connection with his pack."

Clifford, setting the witch's glass of water before her and supplying both of them with menus (though Dahlia didn't need one, of course), winked at Dahlia with his face carefully turned away from the Circe.

The Circe took several deep breaths in a visible effort to calm herself. "What shall I call you?" She smiled at her hostess, tossed the red hair again.

"You may call me Dahlia," the vampire said. "Do you have a human name?"

"Yes. Kathy Aenidis."

"Kathy?" Dahlia might have been saying "dead mouse."

"Yes," the young woman said defiantly. "I had to have one name that was easy to spell."

Dahlia raised her black brows. She'd never in her life done anything because it would be easy for humans. She'd changed her own original name, which was hardly pronounceable by modern tongues, to keep some protective coloration. That had been eighty years ago. "And you make your living by the practice of sorcery?" Dahlia asked in a gentle voice.

"Actually, a girl can't make a living at full-time sorcery anymore," Kathy said with a brave smile. "Not with so many of the supernaturals trying to do things the official, human way. The only sorcerer who's gone public is in Chicago, and I hear he's struggling. I'm a schoolteacher."

"You teach human children." There was no expression at all in Dahlia's voice.

Kathy nodded happily. "Oh, yes, third grade. They're so cute! It's an ideal age, I think, because they're all well past being potty-trained and they know their basic socialization skills; standing in line, waiting their turn to speak, sharing…"

"Potty-trained," Dahlia said, turning even whiter, if that were possible. Dahlia reflected that she herself had never learned any socialization skills, if Kathy Aenidis's list was complete.

The witch babbled on, while Dahlia considered the possibility that she'd made a huge mistake. Could her information be at fault? This woman was a blathering fool. Dahlia was tempted to get up and walk out, leaving the witch sitting at the table. But her sheriff, Cedric, and her one remaining friend in her husband's pack, Clifford, had worked hard to make this appointment for Dahlia, and she decided she should at least see this meeting through to the next step.