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bitchiness,” he declared. He jerked a thumb toward himself. “I’m the fool that saved you and your world—and lost a father for my troubles. You would be dead without me. You owe me. Live with that!”
    Without a backward glance, Tim spun around and left the Queen of Faerie standing on the London sidewalk. He forced himself not to look back, to keep moving forward, to move as if he had some idea of where he might be going. He didn’t even care if she followed him, or sent gremlins on his trail or whatever the Queen of Faerie might do when raving. He didn’t care about anything at all. She was right about one thing: His father was dead—and it was all his fault.
    He found himself in a familiar location—the cemetery.
    Everything had gotten so confusing after his mother died; everything had changed. He missed his mum so much, but he never felt like he had anyplace to express it. He was always worried about his dad’s—Mr. Hunter’s—feelings. Mr. Hunter already blamed himself for Tim’s mother’s death, for not being the one to die. He was completely adrift without her. How could Tim add his own loss to that? So Tim had hidden his hurt and kept things to himself.
    Tim took the familiar winding path until hecame to his mother’s grave. He sank down beside the gravestone and leaned his head against it, feeling its hard coolness.
    Tim noticed scrawny little weeds poking skinny shoots up out of the dirt covering his mum’s grave. “What are these?” he muttered. He reached to pluck the pathetic-looking things. Then his hand froze as he remembered.
    When Tim had been dying in Faerie, he had been whisked out of his body by a pretty young woman who just happened to be the incarnation of Death. They had a long talk, and when Tim woke up back inside his body, he had found a packet of seeds in his pocket. A packet he had seen Death find in her messy apartment. When Tim returned to his own world, he had visited his mum’s grave and planted the seeds.
    The infant plants didn’t look like much, but Tim knew that appearances could be deceiving. Besides, he figured seeds given to him by Death herself must be pretty important. She’d gone through a lot of trouble to find them. It would probably be a bad idea to pull them up. Better to wait and see what they turned out to be.
    Tim stood up stiffly. Sometimes he felt better after visiting his mum’s grave. Not today, though. Today, he felt weighed down by Titania’s words. He had tried to drown them out, but they hit tooclose to home. He had caused Tamlin’s death, and there was no way he could argue himself out of that one. And she was right about his ignorance—it made him dangerous. But then why didn’t anyone teach him anything? It made no sense that the Trenchcoat Brigade would dump this ability into his lap without an instruction manual.
    No, nothing made sense to Tim. Least of all the adults who seemed to be bent on ripping his reality to shreds.

Chapter Four
    M ARYA CRADLED THE BALLERINA statue in her arms as she hurried to her tent. The conversation with Daniel had unsettled her.
    He needs so much , she thought. She felt bad but she knew his need was a bottomless pit, and nothing she said or did could ever fill it.
    There was something else, too. She felt she had finally hit upon a truth when she talked to him about the Shimmers. They couldn’t teach her what she needed to know. Only she could discover how to dance in the way she wanted to.
    She could pirouette, and pose in arabesque, and plié, but couldn’t use the movement to express what she was feeling inside. She could do the steps, make the patterns, but she couldn’t move with the transporting, compelling grace of a Shimmer. What she had realized while talking to Daniel was that dancing should be about whatwas inside her, not what her muscles and limbs could do. That was the difference between her and the