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when Spider brought the package to his mouth and began to eat. “Yes. Ava sends her regards.”
    Spider snorted. “She forgive me for the television yet?”
    “No.”
    Soft grass, each individual blade a different shade of green, brushed Tovah’s fingertips as she did a slow, even cartwheel. Then a split, something she couldn’t do in the waking world, no matter how hard she tried. She laughed, feeling lighter.
    It was good to have people who loved her, even if they were a St. Bernard and a man who represented as an arachnid. Spider scuttled forward, the earth shaping with his every step to leave a trail of flowers behind him. It was a nice effect, though what purpose he meant for it to serve she had no idea.
    “Just to be pretty.” He couldn’t read her mind, but he had no problem reading her face. “Flowers are pretty. You should try it.”
    “Leaving a trail of flowers behind me? What’s next, jewels falling from my lips with every word?”
    “You could do that, too, but flowers smell good.”
    As he said it, the scent of roses and lavender filled the air. Tovah took a deep, hungry sniff. “They do. Thanks, Spider.”
    “Anything for my girl. You know that.”
    “Anything?” Tovah bent to scoop up a handful of flowers. The details were amazing, if not entirely correct. Spider was skilled, but even he needed to know what something really looked like in order to shape it accurately. He’d taken liberties with the petals, shaping them like hearts. Or maybe he’d done that on purpose. “Will you wake up for a while?”
    His only answer was the turning of his back.
    “Spider…”
    No answer. Tovah looked around the meadow. To please him, she shaped a bird or two. Some butterflies. When she looked back at him, he’d shrunk from the size of a midsized dog to a large rat. The vibrant reds and golds had gone to muted browns and greens.
    “So you’re going to abandon me? Is that it? Just walk away because you don’t like something I had to say? I don’t like a lot of the stuff you say to me, but I don’t ever run away.” She took a few running steps toward him, but he’d shaped the air to a thickness that made moving difficult. She concentrated and managed to thin it, but the birds and the butterflies disappeared, winking out in her field of vision like candles being snuffed. “Spider, dammit! You can’t sleep all the damn time! If you don’t wake up you’re going to—”
    All at once he was huge, the size of a compact car, then bigger. He loomed over her. Fangs the size of her arm dripped venom that hissed and burned the ground where it struck.
    “Don’t you say it!” The words shot from Spider’s mouth with the force of bullets.
    Tovah flinched but stood her ground, even though her pulse thudded in her ears and wrists and her body tensed to flee. Spider wouldn’t hurt her.
    “Don’t you say it,” he repeated.
    Tovah held out her hands to him. “I don’t want to lose you, that’s all.”
    His laughter echoed around them. The grass leaped up beneath her feet, thick and strong. The scent of flowers filled the air. Spider returned to his normal size.
    “You won’t ever lose me, kiddo. I’ll be around for-fucking-ever.”
    “Nobody can be around forever,” she told him. “Not even you.”
    For one rare instant, the spider flickered and vanished, replaced by Henry representing as the man he must have been before his stint in the hospital. Tall, strong, with powerful arms and legs. All his hair. A man who looked like he could rule the world.
    The Ephemeros shuddered.
    As though a door somewhere had slammed hard enough to shake the pictures on the walls, or something fragile had been dropped and shattered, the world rippled around them. Henry gasped, and Tovah went to one knee, on her good leg. The other had changed and she cried out, not only disturbed at how someone had shifted her representation, but with true grief at experiencing her loss all over again.
    Henry helped her up and held