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  He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Edward hadn’t known he was the boy, the dogman and the woman. Not for a long time. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  He looked at her. “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who I thought would understand…me. Who might understand. I wouldn’t joke about that.”

  Her stomach dropped. Tovah stood, still with only one sound leg. Martin had shaped a lot of things, but he hadn’t shaped her whole. Only she would think to do that.

  So she did, sending out her will and making what she needed happen.

  “Martin, look at me.”

  He did.

  Tovah stepped toward him. She took his hand in hers and held it tight. When she kissed him, it was not because of the man he’d been, but the one she’d wished he was.

  “There is something you should know,” she told him gently.

  She shaped the truth. It was hard, here, but she pushed until the world around them started to change. She shaped what she remembered of the haven she’d created for Eddie, and what she could remember of what she knew.

  “What?” Martin looked down at her. His face didn’t change. “What is it?”

  She touched his face and closed her eyes against tears she didn’t want to shape away. She looked at him, though, determined not to be a coward when it came to this. “That man I told you about. The one from my dreams?”

  “The one who tried to break the…what did you call it?”

  “The Ephemeros. The dream world. Yes, him.”

  “What about him?”

  Tovah took both Martin’s hands and held them tight. Tighter. “His name was Edward.”

  “No.” Martin tried to jerk away but Tovah held him tight.

  It was impossible; she couldn’t be strong enough for this. Not to keep him. Not to hold him. But the harder he pulled, the tighter her grip got.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But you’re too dangerous, Martin. Do you know that?”

  “No!” He yanked, and when that didn’t work, swept her legs from under her with his.

  They fell to hard earth, jagged with stones. This was not soft grass, or even his kitchen floor. And he was not creating this.

  At first, no matter how hard he’d tried, he couldn’t stay awake. He knew now they’d drugged him, but back then all he’d known was he was too hungry not to drink the milk they brought. But the longer they kept him, the harder he tried to keep his eyes from closing.

  Until one day it had worked.

  He didn’t sleep. He didn’t dream. And Martin—Eddie, then, not Edward unless he was in trouble—had discovered something else.

  He could make things happen.

  Good things. Bad things, too. Some very bad things had happened to Angie and Stan and he’d done them. He’d put the blood on his small hands. Blood that wouldn’t come off no matter how often he washed, or what soap he used. Or bleach.

  “I’m sorry,” Tovah said again from underneath him this time, Martin covering her body like the lovers they’d never become. “But you can’t do this, any more.”

  He looked up and cried out in terror and disgust. “Not the house!”

  The white rancher, unmown grass. The basement. That was where they’d taken him. Kept him. Hurt him.

  Somehow he and Tovah were on their feet again, and she was walking with him toward the front door. Martin held back, but she had an inexorable strength and though she was so much smaller, she was much, much stronger.

  “Please,” he said as the basement formed around them. “Please, not this.”

  She still held tight to his hands but her voice softened. A shadow peeled away from the walls. Small. The shape of a boy.

  “Don’t you understand?” Tovah whispered. “I’m not the one doing this, Martin. It’s you.”

  He wept, then, and fell to his knees and she let him go. Her hand stroked softly on his hair. She knelt beside him. She smelled of lavender and sunshine. Martin buried his face in his hands.

  “And it doesn’t have to be this place,” she said. “Shape yourself a haven, Martin. And let yourself dream.”

  He looked up at her then. “No.”

  “You have to.”

  “I said no.” She was stronger, but this was not her world.

  It was his.

  Martin got to his feet. “I thought I told you to go back to sleep.”

  He didn’t need to use his hands to push her. Tovah stumbled back, her leg going out from under her. He didn’t like to hear her cry of pain but it was necessary.

  “Don’t do this!” she cried.

  “I have to,” he told her.

  Tovah struggled to get up, a feat he knew would be nearly impossible given that her leg was now again missing from the knee down. He’d done that. Guilt pricked him, but when he looked past her shoulder and saw those stone walls, when he smelled the scent of burning, he knew he couldn’t do what she said.

  “I killed them both,” he told her in a tight, hard voice that scraped his throat raw. “And then I burned the house down.”

  Weeping, she cupped her leg and rocked against what must’ve been intense pain. “You were a boy, Martin.”

  He looked down at her. “You might as well call me Edward. It’s what you want to call me, isn’t it? It’s who you want me to be.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t.”

  But he didn’t believe her. “Once anyone ever found out who I was, that’s all they cared about. All they thought they knew. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to be that boy, Tovah!”

  She closed her eyes and incredibly, he felt the steady push of her will against his. He watched her body change, watched her get to her feet. Both feet. She stood steady and strong, tears streaking her cheeks but her fists clenched.

  “Then stop being that boy! Stop doing these things.”

  The truth ripped from him. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Then let me help you!”

  He backed away from her touch, not trusting her. “No.”

  “Martin.” Tovah said his name with such sweetness, such gentleness…such love…he knew her mouth had to be full of lies. “Then let me stop you.”

  He didn’t need his hands to make things happen, but he put them up anyway. Mountains of glass and razors surged from the earth around them. The ground turned to black sand. A far-off wind howled like an angry, unfed dog. He had power. He could make things happen.

  Bad things.

  He dropped to his knees again, in front of her, and put his hands to the soft black sand. He put his forehead to it, too, and his mouth. It coated his lips, gritty and harsh. “I am so tired.”

  He felt her hand on his hair again. Soft touch of stroking fingers. How long had it been since anyone had comforted him in such a way? Since he’d allowed anyone close enough to touch him like that, or anyone had wanted to?

  He shook. The world shook, too. Only Tovah stayed strong and steady, her touch more than a solace.

  A salvation.

  “I will shape you a haven,” she whispered. “Full of soft grass and flowers and nothing but beauty. Do you want it?”

  “Yes,” he cried into the sand. “Oh, God. Yes. Please.”

  Her voice was hoarse with grief. “Then here it is.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Martin?” Tovah blinked. She was drenched with sweat, her stump aching and eyes blurred. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth. She was kneeling beside him.

  He wasn’t moving.

  “Martin!” She shook him but got no response.

  He was breathing, his eyes open, but Martin simply wasn’t there.

  It was too much, all of it. The trip in the ambulance. The admission. The smell of antiseptic and despair.

  “You should go home,” Ava told her. “This isn’t the place for you.”

  And, though Tovah didn’t want to leave him, she knew Ava was right. Martin might wake up in an hour, or a day. Or never. But she