We both looked up at the sound of the new voice to find Christy’s shadow, Christiana, lounging on one of the two club chairs set across from the sofa where we were sitting. She was a small woman, all red hair and skinny limbs in a pair of black tights and a baggy sweatshirt. She grinned at our looks of surprise.

“I hate it when she does that,” Christy said, “just appearing out of nowhere.”

He smiled as he spoke.

“Oh, right,” she said. “Like talking about me as if I’m not even here is so endearing.”

They have a complicated relationship. I just accept Christiana as the sister I never knew I had until a couple of years ago, but it’s different for Christy. Supposedly, she was made up of all the bits of himself that he cast off when he was seven. When he cast those parts of himself away, they became Christiana—a seven-year-old girl as real as you or me who decided to call herself Christiana, a mash-up of Christy’s name and that of his first-grade school crush, Anna. Since then, they’ve each grown to become their own individual person, though in a lot of ways I think they’re more alike than either will admit.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

“What did you mean about the city being a nexus?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Just that Newford’s a funny place that draws the weird and the wonderful to it. It brought our brother here, didn’t it?, and he hasn’t left yet.”

“I hope I’m part of the wonderful,” he said.

She gave him a shocked look, as though saying, how could it be any other way?, but when he glanced away, she winked at me.

“So,” she asked me, “are you still playing at the fairy revels?”

“I did last night. But a funny thing happened. I was going to tell Christy about it just before you showed up.”

That got their attention. Christiana had as much curiosity as our brother, especially when it came to the mysterious and the strange, though considering her background, she probably had more of the answers, as well. I mean, she lives in the otherworld.

“Was it at the revel?” Christy asked.

“Not so much at it, as after.”

I went on to describe the odd feeling that had briefly woken me this morning, and how I’d realized what it was when I finally got up. I looked back and forth between them as I spoke, the way you do when you’re telling a story, and caught the pleased look on Christiana’s face before she was able to hide it from me.

“I get the feeling you know something about this,” I said.

She shrugged. “Well, I might have talked to Mother Crone this morning.”