No, fear’s too tame a word.

I’m terrorized.

“Is that him?” Lizzie asks from beside me.

But I can’t answer. I can’t move.

Lizzie and the doonie get to their feet, neither of them quite sure what to do. It’s not like there’s any apparent threat. It’s just a good old boy and a priest and a cute little girl, holding her teddy bear.

“They’re so old now,” the priest says. “Why does the good Lord let sweet little girls grow up, anyway?”

Del grins. “What, they’re too old for your tastes? Well, you old perv, like the old saying goes, I may get older, but my girlfriends never will. ‘Cept here we don’t have to go looking for new ones. I can just make ‘em younger.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t say a thing, but I feel something happening to me. I can’t tell what until Lizzie speaks.

“What the fuck?”

It’s a little girl’s voice. I glance at her and see that she’s small now. Younger. Eight, maybe nine years old. I lift my hands and they’re a child’s hands. I’m still the me I always was, but now I look like a little kid, just as Lizzie does.

What has Del done to us?

“Fight this enchantment,” the doonie says. “It’s up to you how you appear in the otherworld—what shape you wear.”

My gaze goes to him. He’s unaffected by what’s happened to us.

What enchantment? I want to ask him. Since when did my white trash brother become some kind of wizard?

But my tongue’s still stuck to the roof of my mouth. Paralyzed with fear, I can’t speak, can’t move.

“I can’t do a lick with that boy,” Del says. “You wanna give it a try?”

Father Cleary shakes his head. “He’s just going to want to do dirty things with our little girls.”

He makes a brushing away motion with his hands and just like that, Timony’s gone.

They’re both wizards?

What kind of sick world have I made inside my head?

At that moment Lizzie rushes forward, but the two men sidestep her rush. Del sticks out a foot, and she goes sprawling in the grass.

“Somebody needs a good spanking,” the priest says.

Del laughs, but his gaze is on me.

“Knock yourself out,” he tells Father Cleary. “Me, I’ve got some unfinished business with little Jillian here.”

He takes a step closer, and I cringe back against the trunk of the tree.

“I hear you’ve been telling tales,” he says, “and you know what happens to little girls with big mouths, right?”

My gaze darts right and left. But there’s no help, no escape—even if I could get my muscles to work.