I munch on them. “You know, I think I’ll keep you around.”

He winks, and then his eyes widen in alarm. He stares at me strangely. A frown develops, brow creasing. “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

He looks down, messing with the triangular peg game again. “Nothing,” he mutters. “It’s nothing.”

I pry, but he’s got whatever’s bothering him under lock and key, so I eventually give up.

Hall overestimated the amount of food he can physically put inside of his body, facial muscles taut as three-fourths of his meal is shoveled into to-go boxes. He balances them in his arms as we weave back to the storefront to pay for dinner.

“Allow me,” Hall murmurs before I can sidle in front of the cash register, bumping me out of the way with his hip.

“Where are you getting money from?” He’s been buying stuff all day. Hall is only able to conjure Canadian money for some reason, which we exchange at the bank for American currency every couple of days.

“Somewhere in my pocket.” Tucking his chin into the top to-go box to hold his tower steady, he fumbles in his pockets. “Here, hold this.”

He hands me a lit sparkler.

“Jesus!” I cry, springing back. But then I take it from him before he can accidentally set something on fire as he keeps digging in his pockets.

“And this one,” he adds, handing me another sparkler.

“Hey, you can’t have that in here!” the cashier exclaims.

“Oh, hello,” Hall tells the cashier. “Thank you so much for this experience. It’s a magical wonderland here. You must love working at a place like this.” He fills my hands with treasures: a bottle of cologne (Pitbull Man, by Pitbull), a train whistle, a miniature rhyming dictionary, a flashlight, a Pez dispenser, a hermit crab. The cashier monitors us with growing incredulity.

The sparklers finally burn to nothing. I cast around, not knowing what to do with the charred sticks.

“Do you sell Cracker Barrel postcards?” Hall asks, at last retrieving a wad of green bills. “I want to remember this.”

The cashier rips her attention from my burnt-up sparklers, blinking. “Uh, yeah! We do, actually.”

I offer to pay for his postcards, since he covered the meal, but Hall holds up a staying hand. “Keep your money, Bettie. You’ve got to start saving.”

I snort. “Why on earth would I need to do that?”

He accepts his change and his bag of postcards, twisting to regard me with a serious expression that freezes my mocking smile in place. “You won’t have my . . .” He almost says magic, but there are people around so he says, “help, forever. I’m going away as soon as you’re sufficiently holiday-cheered.”

“What? Didn’t you say you might be here forever?”

“I can see now that I was wrong.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Do you want to go away?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want. I thought maybe this would be a permanent thing; it’s never happened to me before, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect. But I can feel it.” His brow furrows, sliding me an unsettled glance. The corners of his mouth are turned down, and for once he isn’t cheerful at all. He looks older somehow, more like an entity that’s lived for thousands of years. “My days are numbered. It’s like a countdown clock in here.” He taps his skull. “When everything is quiet, I hear the ticks.”