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growing closer as a cry of betrayal built and built and effectively killed the mood dead.
    My partner stopped calling out my name and appropriately freaked out, dashing half-clothed from the room. I never saw her again.
    “NNNNNigel! Hhhhhow could youuuuuu!”
a breathy, ethereal voice raged at me.
    “I, uh … think there’s been a mistake. Who are you?”
    A red apparition swirled into form, very proper and charming and allowing me to note details of the dress, which helped me place her origins later. The illusion of propriety broke down around the mouth: It gaped unnaturally wide as it shouted at me. “I’m your fiancée! Gwendolyn!”
    “What? Hey, I’m not the guy you’re looking for. My name’s not really Nigel either.”
    “Liaaaaarr!”
    The furniture got really aggressive at that point and clocked me pretty good, and there was very little I could do but run. There’s nothing a Druid can do about a ghost, honestly. Nothing physical about them to bind or unbind, and my cold iron amulet is just a hunk of metal to them.
    That does not mean, however, that ghosts are not subject to being bound—they are typically bound to a space near where they died, albeit by intangible spiritual tethers rather than anything tied to the earth. For me to escape her, all I had to do was escape the building. Or so I thought.
    As I pelted through the hall and then down the grand staircase leading to the exit, all manner of papers and books and dust devils followed me along with her screams. I got a textbook to the temple at one point and fell down but scrambled back up again, staggering a bit. She chased me right out the door in a rather shockingly immodest display and then, much to my horror, kept going. Now that she’d found her Nigel, she had moored herself to me and unchained herself from the building. I had to skedaddle, which I think is the best possible word for getting the hell out when a poltergeist thinks you’ve jilted her. Where the university’s law library is now, there used to be a giant old oak that I had tethered to Tír na nÓg, and I used that to shift away to safety and do some research on who or what she was.
    Later on, I shifted back in and waited to be attacked, but Gwendolyn the poltergeist wasn’t lurking by the oak. She had probably returned to the building she had haunted before, but there was no way I was returning to check. I picked up what few things I had at my lodgings and took off before she could locate me again, never to return to Toronto until today.
     Oberon said as I rinsed him off.
    “Yep.”
    
    “Yep. She appears to have quite the impressive memory for a ghost.”
    
    “That’s right. Except this time I will try to be her Nigel instead of the pre-med student she mistook for him. She’s capable of talking—she has things she desperately wants to say to Nigel, you see—and I have something I need to say too.”
    
    “Uh, that’s
breast,
Oberon, savage breast, not savage ghost. William Congreve wrote the original line, and he gets misquoted a lot.”
    
    “You’ve been a good hound in the bath. Let’s get you dried off and feed you a sausage or two.”

CHAPTER 4

    F ew things chap me tits worse than big cities. Smelly things, choked with cars, and the horizon choked with big rectangular signs telling people to buy newer cars. I says to Greta, “I love it when ye kick me arse, but this city is doing it in a way I can’t fight back. This Paradise Valley of yours is no paradise to me, love. I simply can’t live here in this fecking wasteland of concrete and cactus. I need me trees.” And gods bless her, she says