I didn’t want to burst his bubble by telling him I already had a contributor copy. This one was special.

“My pleasure. I’d have bought it even if I didn’t know you sang backup on two numbers.” He grinned widely while surreptitiously checking his watch.

Nine-thirty. He had plenty of time to drive the three miles to the hospital for his shift in the ER.

“We had fun tonight. I’d like to see you again, Tess,” he said softly, taking one of my hands.

His warmth and sincerity spread from his touch to the coldest part of my heart.

“I’d like that.” I bit my lip in indecision about something else.

“I have Wednesday off.”

“Yes.”

“But? You sound hesitant.”

“Sean, I haven’t had a lot of luck in my romantic choices. I need to go slow this time. I need to know that you will support me in the craziness and chaos I call a career, as much as I understand and support yours. If you truly want to continue dating, there’s something ...”

“There’s someone else.” His face fell from joy to crushing disappointment.

“No, there’s no one else.” No one available anyway.

“But? There’s always a but.”

“Squishy ... I mean Pat Newman confided in me a few weeks ago about a strangely deformed baby she helped you deliver.”

“A trick of the light.”

“Just think about it a moment. Then consider that one of the reasons I end up in your ER so often is because I’m working to keep other babies like that from being conceived.”

“Are you a geneticist in secret?”

“No.”

Quickly, before I lost my courage, I reached up and kissed his cheek. “I’m not insane. Read my books. Then think about it. Call me if you still want to do something on Wednesday. I’ll clear the day for you.”

I darted inside and closed the door. I leaned against it, waiting and listening.

He stood outside, silent for many long moments before I heard his footsteps retreat down the steps.

While I was playing hide and seek, I also retrieved a certain hair comb my Tess adores. I found it in Mum’s front yard a couple of years ago.

Like a lot of the detritus that finds its way into Imp Haven, the comb has magic. When my babe wears the comb she can see the truth in a person’s aura. We both need to know who and what this doctor is.

I don’t trust him. He’s not one of us.

He’s not Gollum.

Actually, I was hoping Sean would call.

Which felt stupid; like I was fourteen obsessing about my first crush.

Come to think on it, I hadn’t had a real date with a man who didn’t have an arcane agenda since back before I met Dill. Saturday night felt like my very first date.

The phone rang. I grabbed it on the first ring.

“Tess, have you seen Doreen?” Donovan asked. I heard a tenseness in his voice beneath his usual charming smoothness.

“Why would I have seen Doreen?” I tapped my foot impatiently, wanting to keep the line free for Sean. But something in his voice sent a frisson of alarm along my spine. I’d left with the crystal ball just as the Nörglein and his minions invaded the back office. Violently.

“She said you’d been by the store. I thought the two of you might be becoming friends.” Donovan sounded disappointed.

“I haven’t heard from her since she ordered me out of the store.”

“Oh.”

“Anything else, Donovan? Should I be worried that you can’t find your girlfriend?”

“No.” He hung up abruptly.

Frustrated and a little worried, I stretched and rotated my left ankle and knee until the muscles turned to pudding, desperate to rebuild my strength and limberness. Desperate to fill the hours.

An hour later, the phone rang again.

“Found her,” Donovan said. “No need to worry about us.” Then he hung up just as sharply as before.

What was that all about?

A timid knock came at the front door. I slid down the hall on stockinged feet. The slick wax on the hardwood floor sped me along the way before Allie could react from her nest in the living room surrounded with bride magazines and home décor books, along with her laptop and lesson plans. She’s always been better at multitasking than me. I obsess on one topic too much.

At the moment all I could think about was Sean’s reaction to the finale of our first date.

As fast as I moved, Scrap appeared out of nowhere and beat me to my destination. He clung with his toes, upside down, like a bat, peering through the wood panels.

I wished he wouldn’t do that. I hate bats. I hate any reminder of bats.

Donovan’s tribe of Damiri demons take a bat form in their natural state.

At the door, I paused long enough to breathe, smiled brightly, opened the door, and ...

My face stiffened into a stern frown. “Do I know you?” I asked two adolescent girls shifting from foot to foot and looking about anxiously.

Of course you do, Scarp said and blew cigar smoke into their faces.

“Um ... Oak sent us,” the one on the left, the older of the two, said shyly. She had dark shaggy hair that curled in odd wisps. Tall and sinewy, she towered over me and her sister.

“She’s Blackberry. I’m Salal,” said the younger sister. Closer to my height, she was painfully thin but not emaciated. I guessed she was very supple.

If they mimicked their namesake plants, Blackberry should be bold, thrusting her personality on one and all. Salal should be shier, hiding under things, seeking dark, damp places. But then Blackberry seemed to be in the midst of changing from little girl to woman. Her human hormones should be raging, making her extremely uncomfortable in her own body. Who knew how long puberty lasted in Kajiri demons with extended life-spans.

Lady Lucia’s Damiri blood was so dilute she was unaware of it until she took thirty years to mature between eighteen and twenty-five. Even now, at the age of two hundred and four, she looked perhaps forty-five, maybe fifty.

These girls were a full half Nörglein. From newspaper reports of missing hikers in the local forest about fifty years ago, I suspected they were part of that batch of ill-conceived children.

“Why did your brother think I would talk to you?” I hedged, blocking the doorway.

Scrap moved to my shoulder. He stayed his normal gray-green translucence. Nothing threatening about these girls. Yet.

“Oak said you kind of understood us. That maybe you could help us ... um ... figure out some things,” Blackberry replied. She kept her gaze on the ground.

“Things like why your body is changing?” I’d spent a few years, early in my writing career, substitute teaching to help make ends meet. Adolescent girls didn’t scare me as much as they scared themselves.

Both girls blushed.

“Are you willing to part with some information too?” I asked.

“Like ...?” Blackberry asked, finally looking up with the boldness that fit her namesake plant.

“Like why your family invaded the back room at Cooper’s?” I wasn’t about to mention the crystal ball, just in case that hadn’t been the object of their quest.

Yeah, right.

“That’s family,” Blackberry said. She set her chin and clamped her mouth shut.

I made to close the door.

“They were looking for something to help heal Father,” Salal interjected. She rammed her delicate foot in front of the door.

Try as I might, I couldn’t close it, even if I was determined to crush her foot.

Demons have more strength than the average human. A lot more strength. I’d seen a Sasquatch teen, in human form, shoulder three of his fallen comrades and sprint a hundred yards without breathing hard.

Ever try to break a salal vine? The fibers will shred your hands first. Blackberries are worse with thorns that slide under fingernails and imbed deep into tender joint tissue.

“Something special that you wouldn’t know about,” Blackberry added.

Oh yeah? Scrap sneered.

Both girls looked at him, then away quickly, as if remembering they weren’t supposed to see him.

“Were your brothers the ones who beat up my friend, Starshine, trying to get her to part with that something special?”

“Um ...” Blackberry drew an intricate design on the floor with her bare toe. It absorbed all of her attention.

“Did you have any part in that?” I asked. My feet shifted to en garde and I held my hand out, palm up, ready for Scrap to transform.

But he didn’t. He rose up and fluttered around the girls’ heads, sticking his forked tongue out at them and lashing their hair with his tail.

“That was our brother, Cedar, and some of our father’s helpers,” Salal insisted. “We offered to go, but they wouldn’t let us. Cedar said it was men’s work. What makes one thing a man’s work and the next a woman’s?”

She tilted her head and stared at me in honest puzzlement.

“I think you girls should come in. I’ll make tea and we’ll talk,” Allie said from behind me. She’d moved up silently, ready to guard my back if needed.

I opened the door and stepped out of their way. The two girls made their way to the barstools, cautiously looking over their shoulders at me with each step.

We settled around the counter that separated the kitchen from the great room. Allie and I kept to the kitchen side. I wanted the girls to feel they could leave at any time without having to go through us. Possibly violently.

Ooooh, girl talk, Scrap crooned taking a perch on the wine glass rack.

“Does he have to be here?” Blackberry asked, pointing at my imp. We all knew that the girls could see Scrap. No sense in pretending anymore.

“He’s gay, no need to be embarrassed.”

“We don’t care if he’s happy. He is male,” Salal said also looking askance at Scrap’s antics. But her eyes didn’t truly focus on him, just tracked his general movements.

“In today’s slang, gay means that he likes boys. Homosexual,” Allie explained.

Our two guests stared at each other in some long unspoken communication. “Fir,” they whispered.

“We’d still like this to be private,” Blackberry mumbled.

“Can you take a powder, pal?” I asked. “Go find some mold to gorge on in the basement. I’ll call if I need you.”

Ah, you’re no fun, he pouted.

Women who pout to get their own way drive me crazy. I’ve known too many of them—including my own mother—to put up with their practiced manipulation.

But on Scrap, the expression looked more ridiculous.

Swallowing my mirth I banished him with a gesture. I sensed he only went as far as my office and eavesdropped shamelessly.

“What do you need to know?” Allie asked, forthright and no nonsense.

“Why do I bleed?” Blackberry asked, equally forthright.

I got out a blank notebook and colored pencils. The discussion went downhill from there. I’d never had to teach sex education before but I knew how, part of my general education degree.

“In our culture, women don’t have to have babies just because the men want them to,” I finished.

Blackberry opened and closed her mouth a couple of times.

“Spit it out,” I said gently.

“We ... we spend a lot of time in Old Town.” Blackberry traced an arcane pattern on the counter with her fingertip.

“And?”

“And I’ve made friends with an old woman at the Asian pharmacy.”

Portland has a small but thriving Chinatown and a large Asian population, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, the whole range of Oriental cultures.

“And ...”

“She’s been giving me black cohosh once a month since I started, you know ...” She tapped the drawings we’d made in the notebook.

“To keep you from getting pregnant.”

“I guess.” She shrugged and turned her back to us, studying the river through the broad windows.

“Okay. But a girl your age shouldn’t need it. You shouldn’t have to have sex unless you want it. Even then I think you are too young to fully understand a deep relationship.” Gee, I sounded preachy. But I think Blackberry needed to hear that.

She shrugged again, without looking at me.

“A woman gets to choose who she has sex with and when. For the man to force her is a heinous crime,” Allie expanded my statement.

“Sex is best when shared by a couple with deep affection. It is the ultimate in communication; communication that goes beyond words. Sex should be an extension of true and abiding intimacy, not just to make babies,” I added.

We walked all around the issue of their father being a scumbag who needed to be wiped out, the sooner the better.

I hoped the lingering wound I gave him from the Celestial Blade festered and caused him a great deal of hideous pain.

Salal’s jaw dropped as the idea behind the words penetrated her mind first.

“How does your father feel about you having sex?”

“He has never mentioned it. He doesn’t talk to us about his women and the new babies that will come to him.” she whispered.

Blackberry looked off into a corner, clamping her jaw shut. I saw the muscles around her mouth twitch, as if she was grinding her teeth.

“He only talks to us about our mission to nurture the forest. Keeping out the invasive nonnative plants is a never-ending job. It’s a sacred duty,” Blackberry added, obviously more comfortable talking about work than life. Like most people.

Then again, a lot of people mistook their work for life. Like me.

Allie seemed to recently have made the distinction and chose the better alternative.

“What does your father do when he traps a woman and takes her home?” I asked. The girls weren’t ready for the idea that their father was a nonnative invasive plant. If he didn’t belong in this ecology, then they didn’t either.

“Trap? He doesn’t trap them. Traps are for vicious animals that go rogue,” Blackberry insisted.

“He changes the paths so a woman gets lost. Then he offers her a return to safety in exchange for sex. That’s a trap, coercion. And I call it rape,” Allie returned equally forceful.

“What about when he traps a man, then shape-changes and spends the night with that man’s wife?” I pressed on. “That’s trickery of the worst kind.”

“Wh ... what do you call it when he gives me to our brothers, or his helpers to practice on?” Blackberry studied her tea mug as if the depths of the liquid held the answer. The whirlpool in her cup betrayed her agitation and shaking hands.

“That’s abuse of the worse kind. You don’t have to put up with it,” I said, horror-struck.

“You don’t have to go back to it,” Allie added.