Gaby was glad of the long walk home; it gave her muscles something to do while her mind spun wildly, over and over the same ideas. Will had come. He had actually come for her, here, now. Not someday, not three years from now, when they were eighteen; today. It was like waking up in August and being told that it was Christmas. She had not even begun to hope for it, had not even dared to think about when it might happen, and suddenly it was here.

Next came the doubt. Could it really be him? Was it possible it was some trick? This was when she pulled the note out and scrutinized it again. Her conclusion was the same every time: it could not have been written by anyone but Will. The odd lines and curlicues were a secret alphabet they had invented, but they hid something much more obscure: a secret language. The brother and sister closest to Will in age were twins, and he had always felt disappointed with them for not having had a “twin language.” When he and Gaby had met, they had decided to remedy this omission, and invented a language of their own: straightforward and unsubtle, but grammatically elegant. They had created the alphabet chiefly to disguise this achievement; to this day neither the Colvens nor the Rices knew that Will and Gaby could communicate in strange words as well as strange letters. They had both learned early in life that it was better to hide many of their accomplishments.

Even beyond this, there was the mention of her birthday, which could only have come from Will. Her actual birthday, April 12th, was still four days away. It was her secret birthday he meant, one of the dozens of secrets they had hoarded between them. If they had been ordinary children, it would have been reasonable to suppose that at least some of the secrets had been far more transparent than they realized. But she knew this was not the case. The message, the writing, the locker combination: it would be foolish to disbelieve their evidence. He was here.

Next came a turmoil of joy and fear. If he was here, then safety and calm and loneliness were gone from her life. The last three and a half years would vanish like a dream, and she would have again the things she had loved as a child: poring over books and maps and puzzles with their heads close together, firing ideas back and forth in rapid intellectual duet, seeing his quick slanting grin in response to something only the two of them found funny. And she would have again the things that had ended all that: the running and hiding and running again, the wakeful nights listening for danger, the distant howl of an unearthly hound, signalling that they were found and must flee. Blood and smoke; terror and loss. All hers again.

And what would happen next? And what had happened, since, to Will and to his family? Why had he come so soon? So many questions, impossible to answer until she saw him. Tomorrow. Until tomorrow. And then she was back to the shock, trying to make herself realize that he had really come, that he was here, in this city, and looking for her.

In the end, after the long walk home, after pacing from the kitchen to the living room to her bedroom and back again, after trying unsuccessfully to make herself sit down and eat something, she decided the only thing to do was put herself to bed. She put on a disc of Bach organ music, her last resort when she could not quiet her mind. The astringent precision of tone and pattern cleaned out her mire of thoughts, leaving her with a mental silence she could hold, at least until she slept.

It took her an unusually long time to realize she was dreaming. She drifted through strange scenes: a formal ball, all the guests in black and white, but with brightly colored masks, and a young man, his mask fringed in red and gold feathers, walking through the crowd, eyes glittering through the holes, looking searchingly at everyone he passed. She watched him go by with detached interest, and then turned to a small door in the wall beside her, and passed through it to a noisy waterfront. A young man, dark-skinned and cleanly dressed, stepped off a boat and strode purposefully toward a woman who limped around the dock, carrying a tray of needles and twine for mending fishing-nets. She saw the young man coming towards her, and half-turned away as he approached and laid a hand on her shoulder. His lips moved, and Gaby stepped closer to hear what he was saying. He turned and looked at her. At that moment Gaby remembered who she was, and that she was most likely asleep. The man’s dark eyes stared into hers, and she stared back, wondering if he knew too. Then, abruptly, the scene began to fade, and was replaced with a pine wood, where a young boy was picking his way through tangles of needles and spiderwebs, his face scratched and smudged. He, too, turned to look at Gaby.

“Who are you?” he said. “You don’t belong here.”

“No,” she agreed. “I’m looking for Will.” She hadn’t known this was true until she said it.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know a Will. I’m looking for a man who lives in a cabin in these woods.”

Gaby looked at him curiously. “Are you dreaming?” she asked. She knew the answer, but wondered what he’d say.

“Of course, we both are,” he said. “Now I have to go. Good luck.” And with crashes of bracken he disappeared from sight.

Gaby turned away slowly, pondering. It wasn’t often she met someone in a dream who was also lucid. She and Will had tried, many times, but only rarely encountered another person, and never the same person twice. This would be interesting to discuss with him. Now that she knew she was looking for him, she turned away from the pine wood, focusing her mind on Will. She had come across him in dreams dozens of times, these last few years, when she didn’t want to; it shouldn’t be too hard to find him now that she did.

She found him immediately, but not the way she’d been expecting. He stood at the airport, eleven years old, backed by his mother, brother, and sister, all four of them in wilted, shabby clothes and looking so disheveled that every security guard they passed eyed them suspiciously. She knew that scene by heart, and turned her head to see herself, as she had been three years ago, matching them in her grubby appearance but standing apart, already distancing herself from them, scanning the stream of incoming passengers for two familiar faces. Then she saw her mother and father hurrying toward her from the gate, running forward, faces taut with the anxiety she had never seen in them before that day. And she saw the young Gaby turn to the young Will, and their eyes met…

Gaby turned; she did not want to watch that parting. Once had been enough. The scene changed to a dingy motel room, and the same four people plus herself. Will’s jaw was set and he was clutching Gaby’s hand so tightly that her nails were white. Nick had his arms around Julia, whose face was buried in his shoulder. And their mother stood alone, her face grey and frozen with shock, staring fixedly as though, if she stared long enough, what she was seeing would change. And Gaby knew what she would see but she looked anyway, and saw Will’s father sprawled on the motel bed, with blood everywhere, soaking the coverlet and the carpet, and nothing but a mass of blood where his throat should have been…

Gaby turned again, trying hard to fix her mind on Will as he was now, not as they had been. But she heard the snarling and snapping of dogs as the next scene came into view, and she knew it was no good. They were all running now, eight of them this time, but Will’s sister Hannah had fallen behind. And at her heels was a stream of shadows, rippling over the brown grass, nearly upon her—then she shrieked as the shadows leapt up on her, and she was knocked to the ground. And then Nick was there, whirling a stick as if it was a cudgel, and there were sharp yelps as the shadows fell away. He pulled his sister to her feet and started to lead her away, but her hand was seized, one dark shadow clamped over it, and pulling away as the blood began to flow…

Gaby turned, and saw a towering conflagration at the top of a hill, a giant’s bonfire where once there had been a house. The eight of them stood watching: herself and Will, his mother and father, Paul, Hannah, Nick, and Julia. She knew this scene as well as she knew the others, but she lingered there to look at their faces, horrified but looking somehow so innocent, thinking that this was only a catastrophe, and not the beginning of a nightmare. And then, distantly, a hound’s howl, and the four youngest of them starting in fright, Will and Gaby looking at each other with a mutual, nameless dread. They moved close together, reaching for each other’s hands. Then, to her surprise, the dream-Will turned to herself, the real Gaby, and said clearly, “It’s beginning again, but this time we’ll end it.”

She moved closer to him, a thousand words on her lips, about to cry out and ask where he was, why he did not come to her directly, but she was stopped by a high keen howl. She frowned; they shouldn’t be hearing that, not yet, and then she saw by the faces of the eight in the dream that they hadn’t heard it. The scene faded away as the howl sounded again, distant and cold and not quite like an ordinary dog’s howl. Then Gaby was aware of the sheets on top of her, the tingling in her arm where she’d been lying on it, and the sound of the heater blowing through the vent in her room. She opened her eyes to the familiar shadows of her dresser and her closet door. She lay still for a minute, waiting, and then it came again, unmistakably real: the cry of a hound, somewhere on the streets.