In front of us, the street was sloping, rising into our brown hill, in all its tawny hauntedness. What better place was there to return the changeling to? That hill, being ours, was more magical than any proper forest.

“Do you think ghosts are real?” Ruth asked me, thinking, maybe, of the hill also. I could feel my pulse pressing against my fingertips. My head was thick and dizzy. This felt like a very brave thing we were doing, because it was so frightening. In Ruth’s backpack, the changeling stirred, bringing its curled fist up against its mouth. I lowered my voice, and looked away from it.

“Sure,” I murmured, imagining that mountain-lion-mauled girl watching us, imagining fairies darting their glittering carapaces through the ragged gap of her ghost throat.

“Yeah.” Ruth scraped her foot against the grass at the edge of the road. I wondered what she was doing, jarring the baby like that. “Have you ever met one?”

“What?” As if I would not have told her, before anyone else.

“I have,” Ruth whispered. “I have. My mother’s a ghost.”

“Aunt Vera’s not dead.” Though I knew, already, and furiously, what she meant.

“Not her. My mother. She’s dead, that’s why I’m here. And she’s a ghost. And when I’m frightened or upset, she comes and she’s with me. I can feel her. She opens doors in my house and makes things creak. She was with me when I stayed with you, she said that this was all right. She said we were doing the right thing.”

“She wasn’t,” I muttered. “She didn’t.” We were climbing the hill now, our feet sliding a little in the dust. That bit of scraggly lot was the closest things to woods we had. It opened, if you followed it far enough, into a park, which even had a river running through it and true groves of trees. We didn’t need to go that far, though, only to the edge of the woods. The changeling was stirring insistently against Ruth’s chest now, squirming, and she squeezed it to try to make it still. “Your mother’s not even dead. How would you know if she was dead?”

“She is,” Ruth said. I could see, not far ahead, the oak tree that we had been sitting on last time we came here. We would have to climb just a little past that, I decided. Just to the grove past that.

“Your mother’s alive,” I snapped at Ruth, too loud, my voice too much of a crack in the evening-stained air. A car blew past below us, and I waited until it was gone. “Your mother’s alive,” I said again. “She just didn’t want you. Aunt Vera wanted you.”

The changeling started to scream.

It was such an inhuman sound, splitting and ringing and awful. Ruth and I both clutched our ears, and she dropped her backpack, almost, caught it against her chest before it hit the ground. The changeling wailed again. Its eyes were open and set narrow. I knew it was going to stop us.