“Have you heard anything?” Izzy almost barked at them.

Larry shook his head no. “You?”

“Leanne, can you make some tea, please?” she asked.

Leanne shot Larry a look, and he nodded. She headed toward the juniper tree where she kept the teacups hidden in a wooden box.

“They found some remains,” Izzy said.

“What-now?”

“Human remains. At an abandoned mine site.”

“So what?”

“He’s been gone three weeks now, Larry.” She showed him the text on her phone.

“You think that was him? That ain’t him.”

Izzy tried to gulp down the sand dune in her throat. “I’m going to look,” she said.

“Look where?”

“The mines.”

“You have any idea how many mines there are out there?”

“Over three hundred. You have that old map anymore?”

“I don’t like the idea of you running around out there by yourself. Did you hear about that couple that got lost?” Larry made a face like he’d tasted dirt. “Lost. They just found them, skeletons hanging on to each other. He’d shot her first, then himself.”

Izzy had heard. So messed up. But then what wasn’t?

“Desert plays tricks on the mind,” Larry said. “You should know as well as anyone.”

She looked at him the way she had as a child when she wanted something. “I’m going. With or without your damn map.”

“Hang on,” he said now. He went back into the trailer, passing Leanne who placed the teacups out one by one.

“Tea?” Leanne asked, pouring some water into a cup. Izzy knew the conversation with Larry was over. She couldn’t ask him more with her mother around.

Leanne began to drone on about the thirty-one elements of the folk tale. Izzy tried to breathe away the frustration tightening her jaw.

“Think about these story elements in terms of your life,” Leanne said. “It might help! Have you ever violated an interdiction? You’ve left home and faced a difficult task. Then asked yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I devoting myself to this thing that might ultimately destroy me?”

She looked at Izzy, who shivered with a preternatural cold. “But you go on anyway. Have you received a magical agent? Performed a reconnaissance mission? And what about branding?

“What about transfiguration?” Leanne went on. “Have you ever been broken?” She fixed her eyes on Izzy. “Have you been made whole?”

“Stop,” Izzy said.

Leanne smiled, beneficent. “Oh, I got you a present. Well, Alma gave him to me. I almost forgot.” Newly energized, she scampered off behind the trailer and came back hauling a large mannequin like the one under the juniper tree. But this one was male.

“I thought you’d like him,” Leanne said.

Izzy almost gagged on her own spit. She knew she’d have to take the thing with her to appease her mother.

And there was another gift, too.