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the refrigerator sadly before giving me a wan smile. Then, as if in answer to my unspoken question, she said, “I’ve shared my weakness with you, Calliope, because I want you to feel that you can trust me with yours.”
    “Trust you with my weakness?” I stammered, starting to feel woozy with worry. “But I don’t know what it is.”
    Muna rolled her eyes at me again—boy, that number was really starting to get old—before leaping off her perch on the couch and landing gracefully on Madame Papillon’s shoulder.
    “You are an incredibly dense individual,” Muna said as she crawled on to the top of her mistress’s head and curled up in a ball, her violet eyes closing as she yawned sleepily.
    “Why am I dense?” I asked the Minx, but she was asleep before the words were out of my mouth.
    Madame Papillon stroked the Minx’s arm tenderly and smiled at me.
    “Minx exert so much energy while they’re awake that they spend more than half of their lives sleeping to make up for it,” Madame Papillon said.
    She whispered a few words under her breath that I didn’t catch, then touched a finger to Muna’s near-comatose form and the little Minx instantly turned into a puffy red ball of hair.
    “Let’s get back to the ‘weakness’ thing here,” I said, not giving a rat’s ass about Muna’s sleeping habits. This weakness stuff was, like, way more important.
    Madame Papillon nodded, and I decided that she looked about ten years younger now that she had her Minx pompadour back in place.
    “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, Calliope,” the older woman said softly, “felines are your weakness.”
    Okay, so that was why Muna said I was dense. I hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that cats were my weakness. I guess it hadn’t really registered with me because I had just assumed that if cats were truly my weakness, I would’ve already been dead from my run-in with Patience’s cat, Muffins, last Christmas.
    Of course, I was the supernatural newbie, so how was I supposed to know all the inner workings of immortality?
    “But this is something that you must only share with the people that you trust the most,” Madame Papillon continued, interrupting my thoughts. “Any enemy that discovers your weakness can use it against you . . . with dire consequences.”
    I swallowed hard. I definitely did not like the words “dire” and “consequences” in connection with anything to do with my life . Feeling overwhelmed by all this new information, I decided to file away the “cat weakness” stuff for perusal at a later date . . . when I wasn’t feeling like my head was gonna explode.
    “Okay, cats are my weakness. Got it,” I said, moving on to something Muna had said that I had never gotten a straight answer about. “Now, what was Muna talking about when she said that there was something wrong with my aura?”
    Madame Papillon sighed, setting her mug of tea down on my coffee table before settling into the overstuffed softness of the couch her Minx had almost shredded while in cat mode. I noticed that she had used one of the cute little coasters my coworker and friend Geneva had given me on my last birthday, which made me smile giddily.
    You see, each coaster was a picture of a different hunk in uniform—one was a policeman; one was a fireman; one was a construction worker—only the kick with these coasters was that the material they were made out of was heat sensitive, so that when you put something really hot or really cold down on top of them, they, well . . . transformed.
    Let’s just say that I’d learned a lot about myself since I’d acquired the coasters. I mean, until they’d graced my coffee table, I’d had no way of knowing about my penchant for men in shimmering gold thongs and matching fire-retardant boots!
    Forgetting about all the bad news that had just been leveled at me, I waited on tenterhooks for Madame Papillon to pick up her mug of tea and notice her naughty coaster. It only took a minute for my