I’d never want to not have Jilly for a best friend. But they were times over the years when I wished it could have gone differently. That we could have had both.

“What do we do now?” Siobhan asked.

I blinked and looked away from Jilly’s card.

“Mother Crone said that the bogans who’ve been bothering us are camped nearby,” I said. “Along with a cousin she thinks is pretty powerful. So I don’t understand why we’re being shown this funeral.”

“You know how it is,” Cassie said. “It’s never completely clear if the cards are showing us the present or a possibility. And sometimes it’s . . .” She looked for a word. “. . . more like a metaphor, rather than something we should take as literal.”

“But we could go the Tombs, couldn’t we?” Siobhan said.

Cassie nodded. “Except if those bogans are there . . . well, for one thing, they outnumber us, and for another, they’re not exactly prone to talking to humans in the first place.”

“I don’t understand,” Andy said, still looking at the cards. “Why aren’t Jilly and Lizzie together? And if this is a metaphor, then what is it saying? Jilly in a forest, Lizzie riding a pony along some shoreline. She doesn’t even ride, does she?”

He looked to Siobhan.

“We both did some riding when we were kids,” she said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Whatever. It still doesn’t explain what this means.”

I tuned them out, trying to pin down something that was creeping around at the edge of my thoughts. And then I had it. Walker had told Lizzie to call his name three times if she needed his help.

“You don’t need a phone to call Joe,” I told Cassie. “You can just speak his name three times, can’t you?”

She shook her head. “I’d have to use his true name.”

“Oh, right.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Con asked.

“Joe wouldn’t be the only person to hear it,” Cassie explained. “It would give his name away to anyone who might also be listening—the bogans, for instance, or that cousin camping with them.”

“So what?”

“So it would give them a power over him,” Cassie said, her voice sharper than she probably meant it to be.

“Having the gift of someone’s name like that,” I explained, “isn’t something you can take lightly.”

“This isn’t anything light,” Siobhan said. “Who knows what kind of danger Lizzie and Jilly might be in?”

“The cards say they’re not,” I told her.

I didn’t want to say it. Just like her, I wanted to get Joe here right now. I wanted Jilly and Lizzie back. I wanted all these stupid problems to go away.

But we couldn’t do it like that.

“It wouldn’t be fair to give up Joe’s name unless it was a real crisis,” I added.