She’s got some kind of canid connection, which seems funny to me because we come from the same gene pool and I don’t have cousin blood. At least, it’s never shown up and that’s what everybody tells me. She made her own way into the otherworld, dreaming herself here in the body of a wolf. The trouble came when she started running with a pack of other dreaming wolves, hunting and killing.

She didn’t know better. She thought she was just dreaming. But she knows now, and she would never do it again. But I doubt those friends of Joe’s who gave her her walking papers would take the time to see that. Whiskey Jack and Nanobozo. If it hadn’t been for Joe, they would have killed her then and there and been done with it.

“They’d have to go through me first,” I tell her.

She smiles. “What would you do? Once upon a time them into kinder, gentler canids? Somehow I doubt that’d take. I think it only works here, on the things that you’ve been carrying around in your head.”

“I guess.”

“So, what are you going to do now?” she asks.

I give her a blank look.

“With Del,” she says. “With this place. Are you going to shut it down and make it all go away?”

“I don’t know that I should.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

I shake my head. “All of this is a part of who I am. I already tried to cut it out of my memories and hide it away. And you see how well that turned out.”

“So you’re just going to let him run free in here?”

“No. Him I’ll once upon a time into something better. But this place, the memories . . . I’m just going to accept that it all happened. That it wasn’t my fault. And get on with the real business of my life.”

“Living.”

I nod.

“You ever wake up in a cold sweat, thinking you’re back in those days?” she asks.

“That never went away. It probably never will. But if it happens again, I’m not going to pretend it never happened. I’m going to hold it up to the light and tell myself that it happened, but it’s done now.”

“I hope it works.”

“It has to,” I say.

She smiles. “Yeah. And you’re a tough little cookie. If anyone can make it happen, you can.”

“What about you?”

She shrugs. “Like I told you. I’ve been done with it since I saw him in the trailer park. Sometimes I still wake up from the bad dream that I’m just a kid again and he’s coming into my room, but I deal.”