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The boy had trusted Tovah for one minute, had given her his true name, and in that minute the world had ceased its shaking. He had stopped being afraid.

“I remember,” he said slowly, looking at her with wonder. “Oh. I remember now!”

The grass and sky and flowers made him want to dance, but he tipped his face to bright yellow sun and laughed instead. “But I’m okay here. I’m really okay! This isn’t the bad place. I’m not in the bad place anymore!”

And he wasn’t, until the edges of the yellow sun began to turn black, like the time he’d held a leaf over the campfire to see what would happen to it. The edges had crisped brown, then black, and the smoke had started. He’d burned his fingers, crying out and sucking them, and his mother had given him a piece of ice and a sip of her soda.

“Tovah?”

Her face had gone long and sad, and she shook her head. “Oh, honey.”

The witchwoman stood. The dogman stood. No longer dolls.

“What’s happening?” The boy cried out. “What are you doing?”

Tovah wiped her face and looked behind him. “You didn’t know, did you? Please. Tell me you didn’t know.”

The boy turned. Tovah wasn’t talking to him, nor to her friends, but to Edward. He looked like Eddie’s dad had when Eddie did something stupid, like left the water running from the hose so it flooded the basement and ruined his dad’s new band saw in the workshop.

“You told me to trust you, and this is what you do?” Edward jerked his chin around at the pretty place Tovah had made to keep them safe. “You’re no better than them!”

He pointed to Tovah’s friends. She’d called one Spider, and Eddie remembered he’d really been a spider. The other one, Ben, had tried to fight the witchwoman whose name was Angie and been knocked to the sand, but Eddie had saved him. He’d saved the spider, too, opening the cage in which Angie had stuffed him.

Why did they still want to hurt him?

“Edward. Stop this.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Edward held out his hands as though he meant to hurt Tovah.

“No!” Eddie cried. “Don’t do that! She’s nice!”

Tovah turned and went to her knees, clutching Eddie’s shoulders. She looked deep into his eyes. “You stay here. No matter what happens, you stay here, okay?”

She got up and faced the man again.

Everything around them, all the nice things she’d made, began to disappear.

Tovah couldn’t hold on to the haven. Not against Edward’s will. And it was his will, she realized with a stab of sorrow, not the boy’s. Not the woman’s, not the dogman’s. They were all the same. One man, split into pieces by what had been done to him as a child.

She pulled out of the meadow and stood again on the mountain, black sand under her feet. Edward followed. His lip curled, showing white teeth. His features blurred, shifting, showing her each of the faces he’d worn. His body shaped and reshaped, taller, broader, leaner, longer. He shook with the changes, some coming so fast it was like watching a wink.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” she soothed.

Spider came to one side of her. Ben to the other. But Tovah, unwilling to be bound between them again, stepped forward. Her motion drew Edward’s attention as swift as a rubber band snapping. His head whipped around, his face fixing solid for one moment. Something familiar in the lines of brow and jaw called to her, but the eyes were blank and dark, without emotion.

“You are wrong,” he told her. “I am not afraid. Not that. Not ever again.”

She began to shape again. Another haven. A safe place for her dream lover to rest. To be safe.

Edward grabbed her by the upper arms and shoved her back. Her left leg twinged, then erupted into pain as her representation dissolved. She teetered for a moment, then hit the ground with a thud. She couldn’t even cry out, could only clutch at her limb and try to shape away the agony.

“I’m sorry,” Edward told her. “But there is a reason why we dream what we dream. Your Spider was right about that. And I can’t let you take it away from me.”

Edward needed no weapons. No bullet. No blade. He needed only the effort and force of his desire to cause harm, and he used it with as much skill and confidence as he’d used his charm and will to help, before.

“Don’t do this!” Tovah cried, body twisting in the black sand.

Edward stared down at her. “I have to.”

Tovah cried out then, her protest as nothing to him. He hit Spider first, wrenching the older man to the ground and pinning him there with no more than a wave of his hand. Spider bucked against an unseen pressure, arms and legs flailing, but Edward paid no more attention to him than if he’d seen a beetle struggling on its back.

Spider died.

No blood or fanfare, just a sighing-out of breath. His eyes glazed and fingers twitched once, twice. Ben was at his side, grabbing up his hand, before Tovah could do more than take a step.

“No,” she said conversationally, unable to believe what Edward had just done. She looked at her once-upon-a-time lover and couldn’t believe the hands she’d once let roam her body had done this savage thing.

Edward lifted his hands, palms up, to stare at them as though they belonged to someone else. But in the next moment his expression hardened, full mouth twisting into a sneer. He looked to where Ben knelt next to Spider with his hands on Spider’s chest, compressing in the steady pattern Tovah recognized as CPR.

“C’mon,” Ben muttered over and over while Tovah stood, frozen and useless. “Not you. C’mon, Spider. We need you.”

She did need Spider, there was no question of that, but watching Ben perform a waking-world cure smacked Tovah’s face with its futility. She reached her hands toward her two friends and began to shape.

“No, no. No.” Edward turned to her. “I can’t let you do that, Tovah.”

“Fuck you!” she screamed, shaping. Pushing. Pulling.

Edward shook his head. “Why couldn’t you just love me?”

The world blurred, but not from being shaped. Acid tears filled her eyes and slipped, burning, down her cheeks. Tovah pushed harder, but Spider lay still and silent with Ben beside him.

Tovah lurched to her knee, residual limb stuck out in front of her. She used her hands to push upward, seeking to get on her feet. At the last minute she shaped crutches, but they came through as no more than a crudely hobbled together conglomeration of sticks tied with twine. She used one to lever herself upright.

Tovah hobbled to Ben and Spider and fell on her knee on the soft earth, neither green grass nor black sand now but brown, crumbling dirt mixed with rocks that cut her skin. She ignored it, concentrating on Spider.

“I can’t do it.” Ben’s voice had gone hoarse with his own tears. He gripped Spider’s limp hand and bent his head to it, shoulders bent. “He’s gone.”

“No.”

You’ll never get rid of me. I’ll be around for-fucking-ever.

Tovah put her hand on Ben’s shoulder, urging him to look at her. “We can’t think that way.”

There had been many moments shared between them, looks and words. Sometimes anger, always something more. Ben’s lips parted, but he said nothing.

“Why me?” Tovah asked. “Why me, that first time?”

Ben reached to touch her face. His hand cupped her cheek and drew her closer, the tips of his fingers curving just behind her ear. Tovah didn’t need the tug of his will to move her; she was already moving on her own.

“Because I was lost,” Ben whispered, “and I needed someone to guide me. And you were there for me, Tovah. All this time, it’s always been you who kept me from being lost again.”

She saw him kiss her, clearly. She felt the pressure of Ben’s mouth on hers. She tasted him. But it didn’t happen.

A shadow loomed over them both and pitched them into darkness.

“So it’s him.” Edward’s flat voice was like the slap of waves on a dark shore. “He’s the reason?”

Tovah got to her feet, Ben a moment behind her. She faced Edward, took a step toward him. “I’m sorry, Edward.”

“Why are you lying? You’re not sorry you love him! You’re not sorry one fucking bit!” Anguished, Edward fell to his knees in front of her. A vast black lake spread out behind him, endless and smooth as glass. “I was everything to you, everything you could ever want!
Why not me?
”

“Maybe it’s because you’re a crazy fuck.” Ben snapped the words like individual punches, each one hitting Edward in someplace vulnerable.

“I am not crazy.”

Split into four, each unaware of the part the others played in the whole, how could he be anything resembling sane? Yet Tovah remembered feeling her mind fall apart and wanting so desperately for it not to be true that she’d denied it until it had nearly killed her.

Edward looked up from his place on the ground. “I never meant to hurt you, Tovah.”

She didn’t have enough time to step between Edward and Ben, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if she had. Edward rose up atop the sudden wave of black water that hung over them, rich with the smell of secrets. Tovah’s legs buckled, twisting at the last moment, subject to the push of someone’s will—whose, she wasn’t sure, but when her legs melded and grew glittering scales to become the muscular tail of a fish, she knew. Ben had done this once again, pushed her hard and fast into a shape that wasn’t hers.

She didn’t have time to be grateful before the water curling into a solid wave above them crashed down on top of them all.

She swam. The dark water and the taste of despair choked her, but she breathed. She opened her eyes and could see in the blackness. She pushed with her tail and pulled with her arms, unable to find up from down. She tumbled over and over as the water retreated and then she was on the wet sand, bruised and aching but alive.

Spider was gone. Ben lay curled on the sand, his eyes closed, blood and bruises already forming on every patch of skin Tovah could see. He’d saved her, but not himself.

Edward, perfectly dry and unharmed, stepped down the retreating wave as though it was a set of stairs, coming to land beside her. His bare toes curled into the sand by her face. He looked down at her helplessness, the form Ben had given her useless on the ground.

“Apparently I am,” he said without a trace of emotion, “a crazy fuck.”

Ben didn’t move. Tovah looked up at Edward. He looked back at her with yet another stranger’s face.

He’d encouraged her to climb the mountain, taught her she could do anything. This world had no limits for her but those that existed in her mind. And at last Tovah had reason to banish all of them.

She was strong. Unstoppable. She got to her feet without struggling, changing her form as fast as she thought it. The black lake vanished in a blink, the sand in a breath.

“You are done, Edward.”

Edward rippled but Tovah held him in place with the lift of a finger. He cried out. She’d hurt him.

Good.

She caged him with her desire that he be so caged. Silver bars pressed him on all sides, the representation of her will made solid. It hurt her when he broke them, in a place deep inside, but she didn’t retreat.

“You are done,” she repeated.

She shaped a haven, once again, the green grass of her meadow, the trees and flowers, the brook. It shaped around them seamless and effortless. Her dream within a dream. The boy looked up from his place in the grass where he’d been playing with his puppets. He got to his feet, face alarmed.

Tovah looked at Edward. “You took away two people I loved.”

Edward groaned, falling again to his knees and clutching his guts, but Tovah refused to be fooled by this display. She sealed off all hints of anything other than the meadow.

“Get up,” she told Edward and, groaning, he did, though not of his own volition.

Eddie, eyes wide, clutched his puppets to his chest.

“Look at him.” Tovah jerked Edward’s eyes toward the boy, who did not move or speak. “Face your fears. It’s about time.”

“No.” Edward tried to shake his head, tried to turn his eyes away, but Tovah would not let him.

Fury and sorrow swirled around her. When the cold bite of steel pressed the bare skin of her back, she crossed her arms, each hand going to its opposite shoulder. She was an angel with wings made of glass and razors, and her hair waved around her as her will pushed Edward toward Eddie.

“Face your fears, Edward.”

“Why are you doing this?” Edward’s shout ripped from his throat. He pushed back but there was no stopping her. Not now.

Not ever again.

“Because you are lost and need someone to guide you,” Tovah said in a voice that stunned and sliced.

“Please,” whispered Edward, his hands raised to ward her off.

The Ephemeros had shaken and broken in the face of Edward’s fear. In the face of Tovah’s fury it did something worse.

It began to unknit.

The blades of her wings whirred, stretching out behind her, but she ignored them. Tovah saw nothing but the man and the boy, face to face, one and the same.

The boy reached first, a puppet in each of his hands. The man made to back away, but the snicker-snack of glass-shard wings slashed the air behind him, and he stayed where he was. He turned his head to Tovah.

“I’m sorry,” Edward said.

Tovah faced him with her wings of glass spread out behind her. She didn’t need to fly. “I’m sorry, too.”

Eddie whimpered. Tovah turned.

She pushed. Something new broke inside her and she pushed on, anyway. Like overlaying shadows, she shaped one on top of the other. Silhouettes. The small, frail shadow of Eddie disappeared beneath Angie’s curving form, which vanished under Stan’s snouted profile. Three in one.

Edward shouted like he’d been stabbed in the back and turned, running toward the shadow tableau Tovah had created. He ran so fast he kicked up grass and skidded to a stop. He reached, but his hands passed through the shadows without stopping.

He faced her. “What have you done?”

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Tovah said. “Let me help you.”

“Oh, you stupid, stupid bitch,” Edward moaned, staggering. The shadows rose up. Black water. “Don’t you understand? Now I’ll never be able to get away from them!”

Hands fisted, he stood his ground before the wave he’d created. It loomed over him, dripping acid that hissed and sizzled on the sand and turned it to slick glass. The roar of the surf filled the air.