I turned from the window and my gaze fell on Jilly, peacefully asleep in her bed.

I couldn’t believe she’d actually broken up with Daniel. With everything else that was going on—knowing what I knew about Galfreya and her enchantment to keep me going to the mall, this trouble the band was having with bogans, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life—Jilly’s breaking up with Daniel was what I kept coming back to.

I felt terrible for her. Then I felt terrible for Daniel because I knew what it felt like to be blindsided by the person you loved. But Jilly’d been my friend for longer than I could remember and when I thought of that, I felt bad for her all over again.

I knew how hard it was for her to open up and let someone into her life the way she had with Daniel. And Daniel was perfect. Or that was the way it had certainly seemed, looking in from the outside. Which just went to show you that nothing was ever necessarily what it seemed.

I went into the bathroom, washed up and brushed my teeth, then lay down in my own bed. Just as I was starting to drift off, I remembered the man I’d seen watching Lizzie while we were playing “The Stray away Child.”

If it hadn’t been Grey, then who had it been?

Grey

It’s a funny thing. Sorrow and joy are both emotions, but they couldn’t be more different in how they take hold of a person. Joy’s always fleeting, while sorrow runs hard and deep when it’s got you in its grip. And if I’d ever needed confirmation, all I had to do was take a look down below to see just how hard and deep it can run.

I’m standing in a wide stretch of the between, outside the world where my people were born, outside the spiritlands, too. Long grey shoulders of rock fall like steps from a deep pine wood to the shores of a lake so wide you can’t see its far side. Where the water meets the granite, a driftwood fire burns, bright and tall, almost smokeless. Gathered around the fire are a couple dozen cerva—male and female, some in deer form, others standing like men but with deer heads.

There are even more standing in the shadows, out of the fire’s light. I see the taller shapes of moose spirits scattered here and there among them, their heads lifting from the crowd of deer men the way pine trees rise above the rest of the forest. Buffalo, too, broad-shouldered, their hair shaggy and dread-locked. Drums sound, creating the backdrop for voices raised in a sorrowful chant, feet and hooves stomping in a slow, shuffling dance around the fire.