Before Tony could tell her, Arra muttered, “Sleep.” And her eyes closed.

“Why did you do that?”

“Easier than explanations. Also . . .” Stepping away from the sink, she indicated that Tony should pick the snoring young woman up. “. . . easier transport.”

“So, easier?” He swung the girl up into his arms. Grunted, shifted her weight, and headed for the bathroom door. “I thought you said it was going to get terrible?”

Arra snorted, as she retrieved the backpack. “I’ve only been on this world for seven years, but even I know that if a young man gets caught carrying an unconscious young woman from the ladies’ room in a Baptist church, terrible will be an understatement.”

She had a point.

“What’s with the ‘you’?”

Arra twisted around from checking on their two passengers and frowned toward Tony. “The what?”

“Every time a shadow sees you, it says ‘you!’ in exactly the same way.”

She shrugged. “The shadows are all cast by a single source; this makes their reactions less than original.”

“Makes sense.”

“Thank you.”

Ouch. Sarcasm that cut. “In the dream I had, the shadow didn’t want to go back to the Shadowlord; it didn’t want to lose its sense of self.”

“So?”

His turn to shrug; his shadow, dark against the pale upholstery, shrugging with him. “So maybe we can reason with them.”

“Reason with them?” She sounded surprised.

No, he decided, pulling out to pass a line of Sunday drivers heading home to the city, surprise wasn’t quite enough. Astonished.

“They’re still evil, Tony, even if they’re only bits of evil. And you don’t reason with evil!”

“Granted. But you can, you know, reform it. During the war on your world, didn’t anyone ever try to . . . ?”

“No!”

“Why . . .”

“Because that’s not the way it works!”

Rolling his eyes, he tried again. Old people often had trouble with new ideas. “But . . .”

“If you want to meet your Nightwalker at 9:30, you’d best concentrate more on driving and less on suggesting perversions!”

She had a point although perversions seemed a little harsh. “It’s just . . .”

“When I said concentrate less, I meant not at all!”

Right.

“Arra, you don’t have to go with us tonight. We’ve got the potion; Henry and I can handle things at the studio. There’s only the one shadow left.”

Eyes locked on the spider solitaire game, Arra grunted something that might have been good. Or sure. Or get stuffed, were “get stuffed” only a single syllable long.

“You can move that black jack.”

From her tea cozy position on the dining room table, Zazu hissed at him.

“Or not.”

The wizard’s concentration on the game—games, since she was running one on each computer—was a little disturbing.