He nodded. “But different, too. She’d never leave the mall. She wouldn’t, you know, just drop by the loft, or go rambling through Crowsea late at night, or hang out in a diner, or take in a movie or a concert. Everything we did together, we did at the mall, or at her place in the between.”

It was funny. All those things he’d just mentioned were things we used to do together.

But all I said was, “I guess most relationships are like that—one person always seems to be putting more into it than the other.”

“Pretty much.” He gave me a flash of a smile. “You’d think we’d get it right after all the years human beings have been in the world.”

“We’re slow learners or something, I guess.”

The smile returned. “Or something.”

He put his fiddle and bow back into their case and closed it up.

“So, what do you think about all this fairy business?” he asked. “Bogans attacking Lizzie, Siobhan getting pushed down the stairs.”

“I don’t know what to think. I just hope you’ll be careful up on stage this afternoon and tonight.”

“Careful doesn’t make for great art.”

I stuck my tongue out at him for quoting me back to myself. How many times had I given that advice? Too many to count.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“I do,” he told me. “And I will.”

Edgan

Saturday night, closing in on eight o’clock. The last of the cleaning staff had left by now and the warehouse-sized interior of Computer World was dark except for what light came in from the lampposts out in the parking lot and a few strategic fluorescent overheads that had been left on inside. But Edgan didn’t need light to go about his business.

He was a curious little man, born a treekin—a kind of fairy about the height of a man’s knee, made of twigs and mulch and leaves and moss, all held together in the shape of a human body with a weaving of braided grasses and vines. Treekin needed to replenish their body parts from time to time—when a twig got old and chipped, or when a grass braid snapped and the press of leaves and moss that gave shape to limbs began to fall away. The materials they needed for repair were easy to find, even in a city, for there were always gardens and parks to plunder amongst the tall towers of concrete and steel.