I stared at her for a moment before turning my gaze to my other side, where Jim sat, and gave the demon a good glare.

Its eyebrows rose. "Hey, don't look at me, I don't even like lobster."'

"Who is new? This is my fifth GODTAM conference," Tiffany chirped happily, giving us all another blast of her tooth paste -commercial- white smile. "Oooh, fruit cups! I love the fruit cups. Fruit is the flower of our souls, don't you think?"

There were eight of us at the round table, one of about two hundred tables that filled the huge conference ballroom. We were sitting along the left edge of the room, near enough to the podium that we could see the speakers but out of the main crush in the center of the room.

"I am Monish Lakshmanan, and this is Tej, my apprentice. I am a part-time oracle." The speaker was a small, dark-haired man with lovely large brown eyes. He spoke English with great precision, biting off each word as if he was afraid it was going to escape from him. Next to him was a friendly-looking young man of about eighteen, dressed in a faded T-shirt and a sports jacket that was probably two sizes too small for him. He smiled at us all as his mentor continued, "We are from Bangalore. That is in India."

"Oracles! Part-time ones at that!" A woman on the other side of Jim, with big moussed I980s hair, snorted in an Ozarky twang, digging her elbow into the rabbity man next to her. "Honey, you haven't seen an oracle till you meet my Hank. That's Hank O'Hallahan. You've heard of him, of course. We were on Jerry Springer. Show 'em what you can do, Hank."

Hank, wearing a slightly hunted look, sat up straight as everyone at the table looked at him. One hand automatically tugged at his tie until it was a bit askew. "Oh. Uh. Here? You think here, Marvabelle? Is that a... uh... good idea? Someone might overhear. There are those book people who are interested in my thoughts, you remember."

A suspicious look stole over his wife's face as she narrowed her eyes at the rest of us. "You're right, muffin. You shouldn't show them your stuff, not right out here where anyone could steal your wonderful deep oracle thoughts and sell them to publishers. You just never know about people."

Silence descended at our table with a thud. I stared at the atrocious Marvabelle, surprised and outraged on behalf of everyone she'd just insulted. Before I could inform her that I doubted anyone would be interested in stealing Hank's oracular thoughts, the eighth person at the table, a middle-aged black woman with bright red glasses and a dramatic white streak down the middle of her ebony hair, spoke. "Hullo. My name is Nora Charles—no relationship to the fictional character, I assure you—and I live in London. I'm a Guardian, and this is my fifth conference. I have a dog as well," she added, smiling at Jim. "His name is Paco. He's a Chihuahua, but he's not a demon."

"I see you're still blind as a bat," Marvabelle said, making a grimace that no doubt passed as her version of a smile. "Just jokin', honey. You know me."

"Yes," Nora said in a very neutral tone of voice that spoke volumes.

"You know each other?" I couldn't help but ask, glancing from the rather garishly made-up Marvabelle to the quiet Nora.

"I was a Guardian, too, years and years ago, when I was young and foolish," MarvabeLle said, cutting across Nora's response. "Nora and I studied under the same mentor for a year. But I gave it up when I married Hank.

"Oracles are just so much more important than Guardians, you know."

"And you?" Monish looked at Jim and me, thankfully ending the embarrassed silence that had followed Marvabelle's verbal slap in the face.

I tried my best to look poised and not at all like the sort of woman who falls down in hotel lobbies. "Oh. Hi, everyone, it's a pleasure to meet you all. I'm Aisling, and this is Jim, my demon. This is our first conference, and as you might have guessed, I'm a Guardian. Kind of. Not quite, but I hope to be. I think. It depends on whether I find a mentor or not."

Five sets of eyes opened wide, then hurriedly looked away from me. The sixth, Nora's, watched me with a faint frown wrinkling her brow. "You are not yet a fully trained Guardian?" Her eyes slid over to Jim. "But you have a demon."

"Yeah, but Jim is kind of a mistake."

The demon sniffled in mock sadness. "You mean that you and Daddy didn't plan to have me? Oh, the pain! Oh, the heartache!"

I pinched its paw, "When I say mistake, I mean—" My hands waved around in an inarticulate sort of manner. The rest of the table watched me with silent avidity, waiting expectantly. I gave up trying to come up with a lucid explanation of just how I'd come to summon Jim. There was no way I could explain without taking up the rest of the evening. "Well, I guess mistake is as good a word as any. No, I'm not a trained Guardian. I'm here hoping to find someone who'll be willing to teach me all the ins and outs of the job. I don't suppose you're looking for an apprentice?"

"As it happens, I am," she said, her gaze dropping to the bowl of chilled fruit that a waiter had set before her.

"Ah." She looked less than thrilled with the idea of me. Then again, she might just be shy. "Perhaps we can talk later?"

The waiter placed a bowl on Jim's plate, then slid one in front of me. Nora murmured something about setting up an appointment.

I heaved a mental sigh over her lack of enthusiasm and shook out a napkin to tuck into Jim's collar.

"I believe we can start. Everyone else is eating," Tiffany said, flicking a long blond corkscrew curl over her shoulder, suddenly freezing into a pose with pouting lips and arched neck. I was just about to ask her if she was all right when a flash went off behind me.

A photographer skulked over to another table.

"That was Shy Eyes," Tiffany said to me, her soft European accent giving an odd but pleasing lilt to the words.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Shy Eyes. It is one of my fabulous looks. I have many of them. In addition to being a professional virgin, I am a model very much successful. I do it because being a professional virgin doesn't take up much of my time, and you know, the world would be much happier if everyone used their time to smile. I like to share my smile with people everywhere. It is a duty when you are as beautiful as me, do you not think?"

"Uh . . . sure." I picked up my spoon, stirring the fruit and wondering why weird people always seemed to sit next to me. Then again, I was the one with a demonic Newfie.... Oh, lord, I had become one of the weird people!