“I guess I don’t,” I tell her. “I guess no matter what I say or do, you’ll find something wrong with it.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, seriously. You remind me of these friends of mine, the crow girls. They’re just as—” I’m about to say “illogical” and amend it quickly to “—quirky.”

“Well, I don’t like them.”

“I didn’t expect you would. What do you like?”

“Oh, the usual.” She counts them off on her little fingers. “To be left alone. To not have strangers tramping around my woods, pretending to be polite. Daggers made of sugar and left-handed pinwheels. Songs that only make sense when they’re sung backwards. Anything with a clock mechanism in it.”

“Well, I don’t have a dagger or a pinwheel. I don’t have that sort of song either, or anything with a clock mechanism in it. But I can leave you alone and not tramp around in your woods anymore. I just need to know which woods are yours so that I can leave them and not accidentally intrude on them again.”

“They’re all mine,” Emily informs me. “Every last stick, twig, and leaf of them.”

“Oh. I guess we have a problem then.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have a problem. Only you do. Once Grath eats you, everything will be fine again.”

I make a point of keeping my gaze on her face and not looking at the bear.

“Is there anything I can do so that Grath won’t eat me?” I ask.

“Can you stop them from coming to my bedroom late at night and hurting me?”

Oh no, I think. How can that kind of thing exist here as well? But then I realize that if human dreamers can appear in the otherworld, they’re not necessarily always going to be nice people. Pedophile freaks are going to have dreams just like everybody else.

“I know about being hurt like that,” I tell her.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “Nobody’s cut off your nose. Nobody’s made a necklace out of your fingers and toes.”

“Nobody’s done that to you, either. At least, you seem to still have your nose and all your fingers, and they’re very pretty, too, I might add.”

“I don’t want to be pretty.”

“Well, the world’s full of stuff we don’t want. We just have to make do with it as best we can.”

“They won’t let me make do. They just want me to do what they say. They just want to hurt me, and they’ll hurt me even more if I tell.”

I’ve been concentrating on her, but as she gets more agitated, the bear looming at her side growls and stands taller. I steal a glance at him and wish I hadn’t, because the shaking in my legs starts up again, worse than before.