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whispered. “I was trying not to wake you.”
    I smothered a yawn. The sky outside was black. “How long did I sleep?”
    “Two and a half episodes.”
    I slid my hand around her waist, feeling the warm skin of her back. She tilted her head to kiss my chin. A second kiss, this one to the base of my neck, carried an unspoken question. I kissed the top of her head in response, but nothing more. After that, neither of us moved for a long time.
    I mentally checked off another box on the list of diagnostic criteria for depression: anhedonia, a decrease in enjoyment of most day-to-day activities, including a loss of interest in sex.
    Eventually, she stirred enough to ask, “Walk me out to my tree?” Her breath tickled my neck.
    “Sure.”
    The air outside had cooled, and the night was quiet save for the whisper of leaves. We walked hand-in-hand to her grove. I tensed as we approached. Memories of sharp-featured metal constructs and white-furred monsters flashed through my thoughts.
    “We’re alone here,” Lena said.
    She would have known had anyone violated her grove. I knew that, but it didn’t help my heightened sense of wariness. We were safe tonight. How long would that last?
    Jeneta knew about Lena’s grove, as did the Ghost Army. Even if Lena transferred herself into another oak tree, a process that was a hell of a lot harder than moving into a new apartment, they had found her tree once before.
    I had watched one dryad devastate an entire block. If they took Lena away, turned her into another Deifilia . . .
    “I’m sorry about Deifilia,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t recall if I had ever spoken the words.
    “Thank you.” She pulled away, her movements tight. One hand touched her tree where Deifilia had died. “I can still hear her sometimes. Only whispers and shadows, impressions of who she was, preserved in the wood like insects in amber.”
    I wasn’t sure how to react to the revelation that Lena’s oak contained the echoes of a woman who had been prepared to kill us both.
    She must have seen my concern. “They’re little more than memories, Isaac.”
    “I’m glad you have them.”
    It was the right thing to say. She smiled and kissed me. “Do me a favor,” she said as she pulled away. “Don’t stay up until three in the morning again searching for answers that might not exist.”
    “There are always answers,” I said automatically.
    “That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find them,” she shot back. “Or that the cost of those answers is worth paying.” She pulled me in for another kiss, ending the argument quite effectively, and in a way that left me with no complaints.
    “Promise me?” she asked when we broke away. “If you can’t sleep, fine, but no reading anything related to ghosts, Jeneta, Gutenberg, Bi Sheng, or the imminent end of the world.”
    “I promise.” I waited while she entered her tree, her flesh merging into the wood like the bark was clay molding itself around her. I put a hand on the tree once she had disappeared, but felt nothing of Lena or the power in her oak. “Good night, love.”

    After a brief debate the following morning, we ended up taking my pickup truck to Wisconsin. Neither my convertible nor Lena’s motorcycle could comfortably carry three, and the last time we used Nidhi’s car to do something magic-related, wendigos had pretty well totaled it. Nidhi was still fighting the insurance company over that one.
    Lena drove, giving me time to read. I had kept my word the night before, trying to lose myself in an old Terry Pratchett novel and finally falling asleep around two in the morning. ButI hadn’t made any such promise about today. I leaned against the passenger door, books and papers around my feet, trying to track down any references to the Ghost Army from the past five hundred years.
    Nidhi sat in the back, working on what I guessed to be case notes, though I couldn’t be certain since I didn’t read Gujarati. Smudge rode on the