Gabriel slammed into the office, furious, and dropped into the visitor’s chair on the near side of the big metal desk. By all rights, he should have been on the other side, but—

“Vivienne, why are you in my chair?”

His mother swiveled away from the bank of security camera screens and gazed at him coolly. Her eyes were blue today, he noticed—fitting for someone as blond as she’d chosen to be.

“I’m keeping an eye on the club,” she said. “Which is more than I can say for some people in this room.”

“My eyes were in the club.”

“The only thing you had your eyes on was that chubby little redhead.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back in his chair. “I’m surprised at you, Gabriel. Such a non-starter.”

He bristled. “I don’t recall asking you to vet my selections.”

“You haven’t,” she said. “Nor would I want to. How … unseemly. Still, I don’t have to be holding auditions to have an opinion, do I?”

“As if anyone—or anything—could stop you,” he muttered.

“I’m just saying, she’s a nothing.” Vivienne lifted her chin and all but sniffed with disdain. “I stepped out into the club proper to get a sense of her, and I swear it was like looking at a black hole.”

Was she nuts? Lily had been electric with energy; he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes—or his hands—off her.

Not that she’d returned the sentiment, which was starting to make a horrible kind of sense now that he knew his mother had gotten herself involved.

“What did you do to her?” he demanded, too offended to even try to keep his tone civil.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You did something to her.”

“I did nothing.” She returned her attention to the screens, clearly bored. “Why would I?”

“She turned me down.”

Vivienne turned back to him slowly. “She did what?”

“I asked her to dance and she said no.” He let the fury roll through him, glad to have somewhere to direct his frustration. How dare she interfere? “What did you do to her?”

“What did you do to her?” she countered. “When I saw her, she was dancing with you.”

Stuck, he just looked at her.

A nasty smile crept across Vivienne’s face. “I thought you weren’t going to be enthralling anyone anymore. It felt like cheating, and all that?”

He scowled at her. “I just gave her a little pull. To get her to dance.”

“So, your moral fiber didn’t outlast even the first time you wanted something,” she observed archly. “It’s good to see there’s something of me in you, after all.”

He said nothing to that. What was there to say? He found her abhorrent, and didn’t want to be anything like her—but he had compelled Lily when she’d said no.

Still, it had been such a small thing. Just a little pull, through the place where their hands were touching. He hadn’t kept it going, and she’d still been almost purring against him.

And then … nothing. She’d walked away.

“Some people are more resistant than others.” Vivienne shrugged. “You know this.”

Yes, he knew that. And yes, he’d met people strong enough to resist his aura, his general presence. But he’d never met anyone who had responded to a pull … and then turned him down.

He thought of it as a pull because that was what it felt like. As a child, he’d gone fishing with his father—mostly upstate, but once all the way to the mountains of New Hampshire—and he’d learned early how to set a hook and reel a fish in slowly, carefully. One didn’t want to dislodge the hook and lose the fish—and, quite probably, the bait.

Enthralling someone was like setting a hook and reeling them in. Even before Vivienne, before he’d known what he was actually doing, that was how he’d envisioned it. He’d reeled in plenty of women in high school and college, and in the years since. He’d thought it was because he was fit and good-looking—there was no need for false modesty, as far as he was concerned—and those qualities paved his way until someone got to know him.

And while being handsome didn’t hurt, he’d liked knowing that once someone got to know him, she liked him even more.

Now, he couldn’t even stomach thinking about it. If it wasn’t real, if it wasn’t genuine, what was the point?

Except—he’d pulled Lily.

And she’d walked away regardless.

“It bears a little looking into, though,” Vivienne said, bringing his attention back to the present. “I wouldn’t have expected anybody so useless to have that kind of natural resistance, and it would have to be natural. She wasn’t shielded, or powerful, or … anything.” She shook her head, then reached down and pulled a long, thin, wickedly sharp knife out of her knee-high boot.

“Are you sure that’s below the legal limit?” he asked, allowing just a hint of derision in his voice.

“A woman that looks like I do, walking alone on the streets of New York?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “A little dagger in the boot is just an insurance policy.”

As if she would need a physical weapon for self-defense. It was ridiculous.

From the pocket of her little leather miniskirt, she pulled a small, round compact. Its surface was dull, scuffed bronze, and it was inlaid with glossy, polished bits of what Gabriel knew—to his disgust—to be human bone.

Vivienne opened it deftly, one-handed, and set it on the desk in front of her. Its scratched and warped twin mirrors cast dull circles of light onto the wall beside the desk.

“Wait—” he began, leaning forward, but it was too late.

With a swift indrawn hiss and an oddly delicate motion, she sliced the knife along the meatiest part of her thumb. Blood welled up and spilled over immediately; she moved her hand so the steady droplets of blood landed on one of the mirrors.

Gabriel watched her lips move as she counted drops, but he didn’t speak; talking while she was conjuring could have disastrous results. One did not divide one’s concentration when summoning an imp.

As the tenth fat droplet fell, light flashed from the mirror, bright enough that Gabriel squinted against it. The air filled with the stench of rotten eggs. There was a hollow pop—it felt like all the air was briefly sucked out of the room—and his mother’s favorite imp appeared on the desk.

Pusboil was basically human-shaped, though only about two feet tall, with leathery gray skin, huge bat-like ears, and irregular tufts of matted white hair under its arms and in the region of what would have been its genitals, had it any—which it did not. Its eyes glowed pink in the dim room as it slowly looked from Vivienne to Gabriel, then back again.

Finally, it spoke, its voice somehow soft and shrieky and gravelly and echoey all at once. “What do you want now, Vivienne?”

“You’re supposed to call me ‘Mistress,’” Vivienne said sternly.

“And you’re supposed to be seven feet tall and have bat wings,” it said, “but here you are, all tarted up trying to look good for a bunch of puny humans.”

Vivienne’s fingers closed around its throat and she picked it straight up off the desk, where it dangled, glaring at her with its watery pink eyes. “I look good for myself, Pusboil,” she snarled, and Gabriel almost laughed at the incongruity of a creature like Vivienne spouting quasi-feminist Cosmopolitan-Magazine-style bullshit.

As though it had read Gabriel’s mind—and honestly, Gabriel couldn’t swear it couldn’t read minds, what did he know?—Pusboil said, “Yes, you’ve come a long way, baby. Put me down, please.”

Vivienne set it on the desk and leaned back in her—in Gabriel’s—chair, folding her arms over her chest. “I have a job for you,” she said. “It’s very simple, but it’s also important. And you must not be seen, no matter what, because we are dealing with an unknown quantity here.”

The imp leaned back with its tail propping it up, and crossed its own arms. “An unknown quantity of what? I hope it’s something tasty, like kittens.”

“That’s quite enough,” Vivienne snapped. “Now, Gabriel was just downstairs leg-humping some nobody, and she left the club fewer than fifteen minutes ago. You go get a whiff of her, find her trail, and follow her home.”

The imp nodded.

“I want to know everything she does, and with whom she does it. Any sense you can get from her of whether there’s anything otherworldly about her, or any of her friends or acquaintances, I want to know about it.”

The imp nodded again.

“Oh, and anything you overhear her say about my darling son, of course.”

“Leave me out of it,” Gabriel said, knowing neither she nor the imp would listen but wanting to register his displeasure formally. Formality was important in this sort of thing—for all the casual language, she was forging a contract with the imp. He wanted his objections on the record. “It doesn’t matter what she says or does, about me or about anything else. I doubt she’ll be back.”

“Be that as it may,” Vivienne said, “your reservations are noted, but immaterial. Pusboil, do you understand your obligations?”

“You betcha,” the imp said, and hopped down from the desk and strode over to Gabriel. Without warning, and before Gabriel could even think to ask what it was planning, the imp had buried its face in Gabriel’s groin and begun sniffing around.

Gabriel backhanded the repulsive little thing across the room and into the opposite wall, but it just continued to grin as it dropped lightly to the floor, landing cat-like on its feet.

“That’s where I could smell her best,” it said, and its grin was … well, impish. “Don’t blame me that’s what you lot get up to.”

And with another pop, Pusboil was gone, and Gabriel was left to deal with the imp snot on his zipper.