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a bright yellow dress shirt and lime-green slacks. The black and white checkered sneakers remained the same. His brow-less, mottled forehead was pulled down in a scowl.
    “Thank Betty Crocker you’re home. I’ve been worried sick. Didn’t you get my messages?”
    I could feel fault lines forming in my carefully constructed barrier, and his concern seeped through the cracks. Breathe, Zoey. Patch it up before the dam breaks. I inhaled through my nose and out through my mouth while being ushered into the kitchen. Maurice muttered to himself while he pushed me into a chair and poured me a glass of pink lemonade.
    “I got the cheese and wine,” I said, feeling like a naughty child as I pulled it out of my purse and put it on the table. The cheese was a little sweaty. After digging around for a moment, I located my phone. Five text messages and two voicemails, not all from Maurice.
    One text message and two hysterical phone calls were from Sara. The timing of my departure in conjunction with the accident had not gone unnoticed.
    I made a quick call to Sara letting her know she could stop worrying. No, I wasn’t in the accident. Yes, I was fine. Sorry I didn’t get the call earlier. I hung up and realized Sara was the easier of the two to placate.
    Maurice was staring at me.
    “Something else happened, didn’t it,” he said. The certainty in his voice and the fear on his face brought a flash of green eyes, causing me to shiver.
    I took a sip of lemonade through a bright orange and green bendy straw. My mouth made a pleased pucker. Not pink lemonade, strawberry lemonade. I held up my glass and peered through the frosty condensation. Chunks of fresh strawberry winked at me.
    I sighed. “Yes, something happened. But I’m fine now. Better than fine, I’m great.”
    His yellow eyes stared at me across the linoleum table without blinking. He wasn’t going to let it go.
    I gave it up like a homecoming queen on prom night. Once I started the story, it burbled out of me until it lay between us on the table, heavy and full of dark omens.
    Maurice was agitated and ran a gnarled hand through the few spiky hairs on his head. “Zoey, my gods, that was an incubus. You could have been sucked dry right there on the street.”
    He rose from his chair and paced across the tile floor, his shoes squeaking as he walked. I glanced down.
    “Did you mop the floor? It’s all…clean.”
    “Don’t change the subject, you’re in deep shit.”
    I watched him make two more circuits of the kitchen before I grabbed his wrist and yanked him into the chair next to me. The warmth of his pale skin still surprised me. I wondered how long it would take to get used to that.
    “He’s gone. I’m fine. Stop pacing, you’re making me queasy.”
    Maurice appeared to gather himself for another onslaught, then smoothed his face into a mask of calm. “Incubi are demons, Zo. Very bad. They feed off the emotions, the energy, of their victims. They seduce their victims into compliance and drain them until the brain is a shell filled with a gooey center. You’re a helper—an empath. You draw other people’s emotions to you, even with your bubble in place. For an incubus, you’re like an all-you-can-eat buffet with no sneeze guard.
    “And now he’s had a taste.”

Chapter Four
    Friday’s insanity melted into Saturday, which dawned a fresh kind of crazy. I took a few minutes to rebuild and examine my bubble shield for cracks and chips before poking my toes out from under the duvet. All secure. With an unfamiliar spring in my step and clad in a knee-length, retro Hong Kong Phooey nightshirt, I skipped outside and down my porch steps to get the paper at the end of the drive. Halfway across the lawn I whacked my shin against a protruding growth.
    Overnight, a mushroom with a cap the size of a cantaloupe had sprung up out of nowhere. I leaned forward to examine it and was thumped on the side of the head by a rogue dragonfly. The insect chittered at me and