Joe explained it to me, how when you cross over into the otherworld, you appear the way you want to see yourself. Life for me as Jilly Coppercom began when I was in my late teens—in my head I’ve always ignored the hopeless little victim girl called Jillian Carter that I’d been growing up. I didn’t have any fond memories until I started going to college, when I started hanging around with Geordie and Sophie and Wendy, and realized that life didn’t have to be a horror show. That it could be something good, too. You had to work at it, you had to make it good, but it was possible. So that was how I always saw myself, and that’s how I appeared when I finally did cross over: this twenty-something artist with a mad head of hair and more enthusiastic energy than she knew what to do with.

And it’s like that tonight, too, in this dream I’m having. I’m young and I can move without pain.

I’m in a forest of immense cathedral trees—the Greatwood, where I spent most of my time when I was first crossing over. Think redwoods, but bigger. Way bigger. I’ve missed the deep peace to be found under their immense boughs. It’s like the whole world is calm and gentle, and everybody cares for each other.

Mind you, I’m not particularly calm. I’m so full of happiness and energy, that I do a few cartwheels in between the giant tree trunks before I finally plunk myself down and lean back against one and stare up through the twilit air to how the boughs of the trees seem to go on forever.

I am so loving this dream.

And ‘round about then is when I realize that I’m no longer alone. She’s standing so quietly that I could almost mistake her for part of the forest. Then I realize that she is a part of the forest—its spiritual heart. She’s the woman I met the last time I was in the otherworld, when I traded my own chance for health to bring my sister Raylene back to life. A nameless spirit who’s been known as Mystery and Fate and White Deer Woman, though I wonder at the latter name, since her skin’s a coppery brown, while her hair’s a black curly cloud surrounding her round moon of a face.

I scramble to my feet—and how cool is it that I can be sitting on the ground and just get up like that?

“Am I really here?” I ask her as I walk over to where she’s standing. “Because I thought the otherworld was closed to me after . . . you know, all that happened.”