“Mmm?” There was cat hair in my mouth. I spat it out as I rolled over and squinted at the clock. Almost eight. Either my after-work nap had run long, or I was about to be late for work the next—

No. Saturday. If it was morning, it was Saturday. Which meant it wasn’t morning, since nothing short of a major cosplay competition gets Mandy out of bed before noon on the weekend.

“That didn’t sound like a yes, but it didn’t sound like a no, either. Can I come in?”

“Depends.” I sat up, rubbing at my face with one hand. The checklist of my dreams was still swimming in the back of my mind—trees, screaming, the flower with the dragonfly-wing petals. They had been vibrating this time, tapping together like some kind of vegetable Morse code, almost comprehensible, if I could just hold on and force myself to listen …

The images were already fading. Whatever they’d had to tell me was going to need to wait until bedtime.

“Depends on what?”

“On whether Roxanna is with you.”

Mandy scoffed before she opened the door and stepped into my room, slipping through as lithely as Seymour weaving his way along the fireplace mantle. Not the worst comparison. Like my cat, she was small, quick, and disinclined to listen when people told her not to do something she wanted to do. Unlike my cat, she had some vague understanding of boundaries—enough, at least, to knock when there was a chance I wouldn’t have clothes on.

Her own clothes were more characteristic of “normal Mandy” than her work clothes: a fluffy pin-up girl skirt over an actual petticoat, covered in horror-movie-style Venus flytraps, some with severed human limbs in their mouths. I blinked. She beamed.

“Lucas told me what Roxanna had said, right before he took her out for dinner,” she said. “I figured this would be a good dress to have on when she got back.” Her smile was a knife, prepared to wound, refusing to be slid back into its sheath.

A warm wave of affection swept over me. I did not rush across the room to hug Mandy, but I thought about it very loudly. “You are the best.”

“I know.” She preened, fluffing her skirt before patting the perfect waves of her hair. “Just keep reminding yourself that she has many excellent qualities, even if we can’t see them, because if she didn’t, we would have to kill her, and that would make Lucas sad.”

“He’d get over it.”

“Yes, but he might also get new housemates, and I don’t want to move this close to Comic-Con.” Mandy brightened. “Do you want to come help me finish one of my costumes? I have a lot of rhinestones to attach.”

“Is this a sincere request, or a ‘Hey, Stasia, let me distract you for a while’ request?”