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and lonesome, coming from some far distance. I almost recognized the tune, but then the sound was gone.
    I looked around, but I was alone in the parking lot with my brother’s car. Or so I thought.
    I opened the back door and laid my fiddlecase on the seat. As I was straightening up, my gaze became level with that of one of the small twig and leaf fairies that were regulars at the mall revels. She was lying on the roof of the car, pixie-featured and grinning, head propped on her elbows, her vine-like hair pulled back into a thick Rasta ponytail. She wasn’t really made of twigs and leaves and vines—or at least I didn’t think so—but her skin was the mottled colour of a forest, all greens and browns.
    “Hello, Hazel,” I said.
    “Hello, your own self.” She got up, tucking her ankles under her knees so that she was sitting cross-legged. “Can I get a lift into town?”
    “Sure. What’re you up to?”
    She shrugged. “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”
    “In other words, some kind of mischief.”
    She made her features go very serious and said, “I don’t think so,” but she couldn’t hold it. Laughing, she fell back onto the roof and then kicked her feet in the air.
    “Well, come on,” I said.
    She jumped to the ground when I shut the back door. Standing, she came up to about my waist, a skinny little gamine in baggy cropped blue jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt, and a yellow bandana tied loosely at her neck. Her feet were bare on the pavement.
    “You’re not cold?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “But I could pretend to be, if you like.”
    I laughed and opened the driver’s door, standing aside so that she could climb in and scramble to the passenger’s side of the bench seat.
    “Buckle up,” I told her after I got in.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “You won’t get a ticket. I won’t let the policemen see me.”
    Handy thing, being a fairy and only being seen when you wanted to be. Unless you had the gift of the Sight, or had it given to you as I had by Galfreya, so that none of the more impish fairies could play tricks on me.
    “That won’t help if I have to brake suddenly,” I said, “and you go flying up against the windshield.”
    Hazel sighed theatrically, but she already knew that I wouldn’t start driving until she did as I’d asked. It was an old argument, but that didn’t stop her from trying every time I gave her a lift.
    “How did you get so boring?” she asked. “Did you have to practice?”
    “I was just born that way.”
    “Boring.”
    I laughed. “Yes, sad isn’t it?”
    Once Hazel was buckled in, I started the car and pulled out of my parking spot. With the lot empty, I ignored the designated lanes and drove straight for the exit. There was already traffic as we pulled out onto the highway—commuters driving in from rural communities. They came in early to beat the rush, and subsequently were able to leave early as well, but all it really did was spread the traffic congestion over a longer space of time. Rush hour in the city was now three to four hours long, depending on the weather.
    “How come you didn’t stay with herself?” Hazel asked.
    I shrugged. “I’m just tired. I’ve been up all night. I had a gig before tonight’s revel, remember, and I don’t exactly have a fairy’s stamina. I don’t think you people ever need to sleep.”
    “Of course we do. If we didn’t sleep, how could we dream?”
    I didn’t see the logic of that—there were many other, and I’d say far more pressing, reasons to get one’s sleep, starting with how exhausted and stupid you end up feeling when you don’t get enough—but there was no point in arguing logic with fairies.
    “She really does like you, you know,” Hazel said.
    “I know.”
    “It’s just she—”
    “I know,” I repeated.
    “Grouch.”
    “Moxie.”
    “I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
    “It means you’re annoyingly full of verve and pep.”
    She smiled. “Oh,