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She pressed it with her thumb and the car that was standing beside her on the pavement – a very jaunty-looking little number that was wasp-yellow and sleek and elongated at the front end in a way that suggested a great amount of discreetly stabled horsepower – made a self-satisfied warbling sound. Juliet opened the door.

‘Get in,’ she said.

I stared incredulously at this transport of delight. I’m not a car fetishist by any means, but I know something way out of my price range when I see it. The badge on the bonnet bore the distinctive trident logo of Maserati – a sweet little touch for a demon’s wheels.

It had a very low centre of gravity, the sculpted cowling underneath the front bumper almost touching the road. It had the look of a car that might have ‘Gransport’ in its name, and maybe ‘Spyder’ too.

‘Is there something wrong, Castor?’ Juliet asked, with an edge of impatience.

‘No,’ I assured her. ‘No, I’m fine. It’s just – you can drive now?’

‘Obviously. I’ve been living among human beings for more than a year, Castor.

I’m not intimidated by your technologies.’

‘And – you drive this?’

‘It was a gift,’ Juliet said simply, sliding in behind the wheel with the sinuous grace of a cat curling itself up to sleep.

I didn’t ask. But don’t think I didn’t want to know.

9

It’s probably not a great idea to kid Juliet about her diet, considering I once came close to being an item on it. And what I said about pretending that she needs to eat wasn’t even strictly accurate, because she can take a certain amount of nourishment and even pleasure from things that you and I would call food.

It’s just that when you strip away all the niceties and get down to basics, the fuel that drives her best – the stuff she’s made to run on – is the flesh and blood and souls of sexually aroused men. Her jaw-droppingly good looks are an adaptive mechanism along the lines of the sweet liquid in the calyx of a pitcher plant that tempts bees and wasps in with its scent and then digests them when they fall into it.

Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any the less. Most of the time it’s hard not to feel that being devoured in the middle of coitus would be a price worth paying for Juliet’s undivided attention. But it’s no damn good. Men make her hungry in all the wrong ways: now she’s discovered a way to keep her sex life and her nutritional needs apart, and she says she’s sticking to it.