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blue eye. He thrust a large six-fingered hand in my direction. My smaller five-fingered one fit inside his palm with room to spare. “Nice meeting you, Miss Tate. Welcome to Golgotham.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Lafo,” I replied.
    “Just call me Lafo. I’m not much for formalities.”
    “Lafo it is—and, please, call me Tate.”
    “Will do. FYI, when you get upstairs, I recommend the blackbird pie. I made it fresh this afternoon.” With that, Lafo returned to his post behind the bar, pouring drinks for his thirsty customers.
    “Who’s Esau?” I asked as I sipped my house wine.
    Hexe made a sour face, as if the very mention of the name were somehow painful to him. “He’s my uncle.”
    “I take it you two don’t get along?”
    “That’s a polite way of describing it.” He sighed. “Esau is my mother’s older brother, and therefore family . . . but there’s no love lost between us.”
    “I understand. You don’t have to explain. I’m sorry I brought him up.”
    Hexe waved his hand, dismissing my apology. “You’d find out about him sooner or later. This way, at least, you’re forewarned. Uncle Esau is a terrible misanthrope.”
    “He hates humans, I take it?”
    “Only slightly more than he hates me.”
    “You’re exaggerating, I’m sure.”
    “I wish I were. And it’s not as if I’ve given him any reason to be so ill disposed toward me. The old fecker has despised me since I was in diapers. I suspect it’s because his father—my grandfather—disinherited him in favor of my mother.”
    I was tempted to tell him that his family sounded suspiciously like my own, but I didn’t want to come off sounding either glib or proud of being dysfunctional.
    “I hope your boyfriend won’t take offense by my asking you out to dinner,” Hexe said as he drank from his tankard of barley wine.
    “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I replied.
    “I find that hard to believe, what with your being such an intelligent and lovely young woman.” He smiled.
    “Well, I am just getting out of a relationship,” I admitted.
    “Oh?”
    “The breakup was my idea,” I explained. “It’s part of the reason I moved. I decided I needed a change of scenery to get my head straight.”
    “I can understand that.” He nodded.
    Now that Hexe had finished his little fishing expedition, it was time for me to start mine. “How about you?” I asked. “Is your girlfriend cool with our dining together?”
    “She’d have to exist, first,” he laughed. “I’m not much of a catch, I’m afraid.”
    “Now that I find hard to believe,” I replied.
    A second maenad, this one a blond Brigitte Bar-dot clone, tapped Hexe on the shoulder. “Your table is ready, sir.”
    As we followed the hostess to the dining room above, I paused to look at a few of the framed photographs of famous celebrities arranged along the narrow staircase. Some were human, such as Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Wilde, and John Lennon; others, like Houdini, Bowie, Marilyn Manson, and Picasso, were long rumored to be either half-breeds or full-blooded Kymerans surgically altered in order to pass.
    “That’s my great-great-grandfather,” Hexe said, pointing to a steel engraving depicting three men posed in front of the horseshoe-shaped bar. They were dressed in colonial-era clothes, complete with buckled shoes and tricorn hats, and wore Freemason aprons about their waists. I recognized the men on either side of Hexe’s ancestor as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. “My family’s been coming here since Lafo’s great-great-grandmother first opened the doors.”
    The dining room was one large open room with a coffered ceiling and dark weathered wood. Save for me, everyone seated for dinner was a Kymeran. As we wended our way to our table, I was keenly aware of being watched. When I dared to challenge the stares aimed at me, most looked away, but one or two continued to glower in my direction, letting me know my presence was unwelcome.
    Once we were seated,