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“I’m trying, but your obsession with boning me is getting in the way.”

“Right, I am out of here. I am gone, I am done,” he says as he stands and goes to storm out. He gets as far as the door and halfway through a sentence I think is going to be You will rue the day you mocked me, and then he stops dead. Like something has just sunk in.

“You know, I almost fucking fell for that,” he says.

Then he turns back, and wags his finger at me.

Of course he’s wrong to, but I decide to go with it.

“Maybe you’re slipping. Maybe you really are getting old.”

“Maybe you are. Just lying there, listening to me yap. The you I knew would have bespelled seven thousand frogs and had them scoop me out of here by now. You’d have turned the front door and window into fifty feet of solid steel, into a fortress against all supernatural threats, then slept soundly as I tried to tunnel my way back in.”

He sounds almost disappointed, I think.

But as the sex thing already felt too weird for my liking, I skip over it.

“I remember your screams of agony when I did it that time to the gas station in the desert. The one being preyed upon by that pack of feral vampires. I practically turned it into Fort Knox, then watched you survive by turning their bodies into slowly disintegrating sun hats.”

“It took me a month to grow back all my skin. One of my eyeballs fell out.”

“Yeah, I can see it now. You looked like a human muscle anatomy picture in a high school textbook. To this day I struggle to eat very marbled meat. That was what your foot looked like when I accidentally yanked off your shoe.”

He tilts his head to one side, considering.

“Why did you yank off my shoe again?”

“You’re asking me? I’m just going on someone else’s memories.”

“But you’re always the same person, Mathilde, Maisy, Madison, Marley. That same attitude, that same voice always in my head. The same soul, so familiar it almost feels like my own. You’ve been in my life so long I scarcely remember anything else,” he says, and okay, now I’m really getting unnerved. His voice is close to soft, nearly wistful. And as he speaks he lifts himself off the ground. He lets himself drift to the ceiling of my office and then puts his hands flat to that smooth surface. He crouches there, like a huge spider, a few feet from my makeshift window.

It makes me go all shivery cold.

And doubly so when he starts crawling toward me.

Slow, slow, slow, and still speaking in that suddenly buttery voice. “It’s almost as if you like me there, as if you want me there—you know, you can just say if you do. We could just stop this and do something else entirely,” he says, so convincing that I can’t speak for a second.

I stare at his upside-down face, searching for the seams.

And for a moment, it almost seems like there aren’t any.

He means this, I think. Somehow, he does. I have to really fight this time to shake that sense off, and remember exactly who I’m dealing with. “That was a good effort at beguiling me,” I say, half laughing. Not quite convincing, I think. But it seems to have the desired effect.

That sincerity I thought I saw in his eyes turns flat, cold.

Like someone flicked a switch.

“I always have to test if it will work this time.” He sighs.

Then he shrugs, just to really drive home that he didn’t mean it at all.

“What would you do if it did? Make me your eternal servant? Have me finally unlock the secret stone that ends the human race? Get revenge on me for killing your entire vampire tribe? Force me to stab myself through the heart because you’re cursed to never be able to end it?” I ask. Some of them guesses I’ve come up with myself over the years. Some of them things Phone keeps suggesting to me.

Maybe he’s in a cult, and killing you is their most sacred goal, she said last Wednesday. Whoever manages it gets to wear the rock of triumph, and he’s furious that he always comes second to Gregory, the angry goblin.

Which makes about as much sense as what he actually answers.

“You don’t need to keep trying to find out the special reason I do this. I’ve told you it a thousand times before. You just never hear me. It’s almost like you can’t. I speak the words, then somehow you turn them into something else entirely. Even now I can see you misplacing the thread of what I’m saying. The only thing you ever believe is that I do it to torment you, and not because I just must, I must, I must. It is a compulsion, a fever, one that has possessed me for hundreds of years, and will possess me for hundreds of years more,” he says. Then just to really put the cherry on top of this rambling, nonsensical cake he starts singing.