“Right. You can shut up, too,” I told it, and with my chin held high, I opened the case and took out the bag full of paperbacks that Bee had brought me over the duration of my stay. Clothing was the next to be removed in the form of the pajamas and utilitarian bathrobe that had been given to me, followed by the pants and shirt that I’d been wearing two years ago when I was carted off to the loony bin.

A small vanilla envelope lay underneath the last items, my name and admission date neatly printed in block letters. Inside were the contents of my pockets when I’d been hauled to the hospital—driver’s license, a little money, keys, and the jewelry I’d been wearing. I tossed the necklace and earrings into my jewelry box but stood frowning down at the remaining object.

It was a ring.

“Terrin’s ring,” I said, prodding it with my finger. I’d forgotten all about it, but there it was, sitting there looking like a perfectly normal ring.

It’s magic, he had said. I closed my eyes, for a moment swamped by the memories of that terrible night, but I hadn’t been ignoring the voice in my head for two years without learning some tricks.

“Fine, you want to be magic?” I shoved the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. “You just go ahead and try.”

I held out my hand, but of course nothing happened.

“You’re no more magic than I am,” I said with a snort of derision, and proceeded to put the rest of my things away in their proper place.

Swayed by Bee’s comments, I almost didn’t go to the GothFaire, but the memory of Dr. Barlind lecturing me on the subject of confronting issues rather than avoiding them resulted in me driving to the next town where the Faire was being held. “Fine, I’ll do it, but I refuse to have a cathartic experience,” I grumbled to myself as I parked in a familiar field. The GothFaire had returned to the same spot it had been in two years before, and just as it had been on that fateful night, people were streaming into the big tent, no doubt waiting for the band to start that night’s concert.

I sat in my car for a few minutes, my hands gripping the steering wheel in a way that had my knuckles turning white. My breath came in short little gasps.

“I can do this,” I told the silence around me. “It’s just a traveling circus. It’s not like Terrin is even here.”

Who’s to say he isn’t? the annoying voice in my head asked.

I got out of the car slowly, trying hard to hang on to the sense of calm that Dr. Barlind said would get me through the worst experiences.

Anxiety is your mind being a bully, she had said during a very bad week when she had ordered electroshock therapy. Don’t let it make you a victim. If you can master your fear, you can master anything.

“Easier said than done,” I muttered, shoving away the memories of that horrible week and locking the car before I followed a group of three girls heading straight for the big tent.

As I passed by the first row of cars, I couldn’t help glancing down the line, just in case a body was lying there. “Ha, smarty-pants brain. There’s nothing there, so you can just stop trying to freak me out and get on board with the ‘a whole mind is a healthy mind’ program that Dr. Barlind says is the key to happiness.”

The Faire was much as I remembered it—weird booths, loud music, and people indulging in the sort of excited laughter and high-volume chatter that went along with a day’s adventures. I strolled up and down the center aisle, not entering any of the booths but watching people with an eye that was soon much less vigilant.

“No Terrin,” I breathed with a sigh of relief. I hadn’t really expected him to show up, but as my brain had pointed out, who was to say he wouldn’t have? “See, inner self? Nothing here but a circus full of pierced people and demonologists.” I passed by a booth with a sign that read SPIRIT PET PSYCHIC. “And ghosts who talk to animals. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.”

I swear I could feel my brain pursing its lips in disbelief.

Ten minutes later I started up the car and bumped along the field toward the exit.

“Leaving so soon?” asked the young man who collected the money for parking. He had been sitting on a folding chair, a camping lantern next to him and a book in his hand. “You didn’t stay long. Do you want your money refunded? I’m afraid we don’t normally do that, but since you weren’t here long enough to partake in any of the delights to be found at the GothFaire—”

“That’s not necessary. I was just here… er… to check on something.”

“Oh? Did you find it?”

“No. As a matter of fact, it was anticlimactic in the extreme,” I answered with a friendly smile. “But no worries—now I can tell my therapist to relax. There’s no chance of me having another mental breakdown.”

“Er…” The man backed away from my car. “That’s good.”

“It is indeed!” I gave him a cheery wave, and the car lurched off the grass and onto the tarmac. I hummed to myself as I zipped along, enjoying the feeling of freedom after two years of incarceration.

“I have a bright new life ahead of me,” I told no one in particular. “Dr. Barlind said she was certain I have great potential in something. I just have to figure out what. Maybe I should try painting again. Or writing. Oh, poetry! Poets are always tortured and angsty, and after what I went through, I bet the dark, tormented poems would just ooze out of—Son of a fruit bat!”

The car fishtailed wildly when I slammed on the brakes, the horrible thumping sound of a large object being struck by the bumper echoing in my brain, but not even coming close to touching the sheer, utter horror I felt at the thought of hitting something. Ever since I had been a child and my father had hit a deer in a remote section in northern Sweden, I feared running down a living thing. And here I was, happily yacking away to myself and not paying attention to the road…

With a sick heart and even sicker stomach, I got out of the car, peering through the darkness at the road behind me.

“Please let it be something old and ready to die… please let it be something old and ready to die,” I repeated as I stumbled forward a few steps.

Just a sliver of the moon was out, but we were far enough north that we got the midnight sun effect—since the sun didn’t fully set at night, the sky wasn’t as pitch-black as it was elsewhere. Instead, we suffered through what I thought of as deep twilight—too dark to read but with enough residual light to see the silhouettes of large objects.