Mite found the girl just before dawn. She was eating a shopping cart in a dead-end alley. Dark, rail thin, cruelly underdressed in a flimsy tank-top and torn jeans, she twirled the cart overhead. Rusted mesh basket strands twisted, each strand thinning, stretching skyward. A wheel plummeted past Mite's nose, and he ducked behind a dumpster to watch.

Wrist popping, the girl whirled the silver threads onto the carthandle, like a carny spinning cotton candy. Then she shoved it into her mouth. Morning light sparkled off the metal. The breeze tickled his nose with a scent of fresh-cut grass.

Then the wind shifted, force-feeding Mite the reek of garbage. "Unnggh." The world blackened and his spine jellied. His butt and the back of his head hit pavement.

When his vision cleared, the thin face was a foot away, a last bit of metal suckled like a toothpick between her teeth.

"Hell-lo. What's this?" Her eyes were like a bird's.

"I've been hunting you all night." Mite meant this to be threatening; it came out sullen and hoarse.

"Why the peekaboo? Shy?"

"No." Close up, she smelled clean as the morning after a thunderstorm.

"Come, hungry? Make you dinner proper, Gal will."

"Not now," he said, hoping she didn't hear his stomach's enthusiastic response.

Unperturbed, she bent at the waist, folding in an impossible, gut-crushing contortion that left her nose inches from his. She didn't blink, didn't have eyelids. "Gal's a pretty girl. What's your name, handsome? You like pizza?" The aroma of pepperoni and melted cheese replaced rancid garbage; steam rose from the dumpster.

He twisted away, made it to his feet. "We have to get out of here. Zoli's coming."

"Zoli?" She clambered up the side of the dumpster and leaned in, bending so far forward she nearly tumbled in as she made a singsong of Zoli's various titles. "Mabon of the Eastside. Leader of the Bone. Master."

"That's him." Zoli led a coalition of magical gangs and power cadres called the Bone Keepers Union. "Get down from there, okay?"

Mite had been born a sorcerer, carrying within him a bright core of magic as solidly his as an appendix. It was called a fetish, and he had thought it would protect him from anything.

Naïve, unwilling to wait for proper training, Mite had run away from home. Zoli found him before he had the stink of the bus off his clothes. He scooped Mite off the street, hungry and rain-chilled, his hoarded money half-squandered and half-stolen.

"Drink this," Zoli had said, offering him a chocolate soda. Sucking it down, Mite had vomited up his fetish into the bottle.

The girl—Gal—had vanished into the dumpster. Now she popped back out.

"Whee-la!" On the tips of the splayed fingers of one hand she flourished a soggy flattened cardboard box piled high with a mess of rotting vegetables. Spinning atop the heap was a drink coaster splattered with a cheap motion catalyst—no doubt by someone trying to amuse their kid. The catalyst's hex bottle glinted under a chunk of rutabaga, label stained with tomato. Mite could make out the words: "Mort's Animotion Mojo."

As the rutabaga tipped toward his mouth Mite shied back. But the steamy essence of hot Vishnu's Pepperoni Pizza snaked up his nose, beckoning to his rumbling gut. Mite wiped his mouth, nearly drooling in sudden, soul-deep hunger.

Closing his eyes, he shoved both hands out, encountered hot wedges of crust with his fingertips. He took a bite: hot mozzarella, spicy sauce, mushrooms, pepperoni, black olives, onion. A drinking straw nuzzled his teeth, icy cola to wash it down, caffeine slicing away the dopiness from a night of running. Blind, he reached for more. And again. He was bottomless—Zoli hadn't fed him in days.

He piled the food on, crushing fear against the bottom of his belly with slice after slice, laying pizza like bricks, mortaring them with the soda.

"All gone!" Gal chirped.

Panting, Mite opened his eyes. The veggies were gone, and so was the pizza box. A lone drinking straw hung foolishly from his lips.

He remembered again her scared, normal face. Zoli'd wanted wings, a spell that called for the ribcage of a girl …

"Hey, it's good, Gal did you up right, didn't she, handsome?"

"Mite," he said faintly.

He caught her gently around the waist with both hands, slid up like a teenager going for his first grope, stopping right below her breasts to squeeze, checking for the bones he knew were gone. Punishing himself, really.

Faint pressure pushed back, a powerful hum vibrating through the ribless balloon of her torso.

"Might what? Might tickle?"

"I'm Mite."

Last night he had tried to take the fetish back, but it wasn't in him now—he hadn't accomplished a reintegration. He felt at that loss, tender and blood coppery as the gap of a missing tooth. The old wound newly raw, more painful than when Zoli had first wrenched the fetish out. He should be whole; instead he was empty and alone.

"Might you may, may you be, Mite—awwlll-right!" Then, tilting her head: "Hear that?"

"What?" City sounds reached him, from the distance, cars on the overpass. In the alley it was quiet. He heard a bird and a wisp of wind, frisking around the building.

"What do you hear?"

She stepped close, then away, almost dancing. She smelled like limes and vanilla. "Wings … black and tattered." She swept her arms up, examined them with a frown. Then, shrugging, she twirled.

Mite leaned against the dumpster; it shifted with a light, hollow clang. Now that he wasn't starving or half-asleep, fear was taking center stage again. They had to escape.

"Come on." He pulled Gal toward the street, walking without looking where he was going. He knew this area like the inside of his own mouth. He was just blocks from the run-down hotel where the Bone held court, his home ever since Zoli decided to keep him.

Lucky Mite. Having a fetish was one thing, using it another—a fetish could be transplanted—but not into someone who already had one. And once moved, it behaved differently. The fetish was a battery, but the spells it powered varied from sorcerer to sorcerer.

Zoli had liked what Mite could do with his fetish, so he kept him alive, pimping his newfound possession for clients. "Eat this, honeybee—Lady Anne needs a ruby necklace. Eat this—I'm trading a fire breathing Dalmation to that buro in the Firehall …"

When he wasn't making treasure for the Bone, the fetish sat locked in an enchanted snowglobe, safely hidden in Zoli's vault.

Mite rubbed a hand over his eyes, remembering.

"Where we going, handsome?"

Suicide to go home. And the other way led to the arcade. Hunting Gal had led him in a circle.

The arcade. Jonas. Guilt and grief cramped his full belly.

Weeks ago, Zoli had found himself a spell for growing wings. He demanded a girl's ribcage from the hospital buros, but the days passed, unseasonably calm, almost no accidents, no victims the right age. Zoli got angrier and angrier, shaking Mite from sleep every morning like a dog. The daily demand came harder and faster. "Eat this, honeybee," Zoli would snarl, shoving something at Mite. Turnips or melons if he was lucky, but sometimes a quart of olives, pickled rattlesnake, or raw tripe. Force-fed until his throat bled, Zoli laughed as Mite vomited diamonds and glow-globes, dragon spores and beauty potions.

Then, last night, the memory like the inescapable stink of something vile on his shoe. Slinking home from a few stolen hours with his best friend Jonas, Mite saw Zoli had grown tired of waiting. A girl, bound and gagged, lay on the hotel's crimson carpet. Scared blue eyes stared up at Mite from under spiky dark hair.

"Eat that, honeybee."

Zoli had sworn the girl would be dead.

"What are you waiting for? Give me my wings."

He'd trembled, cried, begged. But then Zoli trotted out the threat.

Mite wiped a hand over his eyes, remembering.

"Give me my wings," Zoli had said, "Or I'll transplant the fetish into someone else."

So Mite opened his mouth, closed his eyes, felt distantly glad that Zoli shoved her in head-first so the screams stopped right away. The rush of magic, hot and delirious pleasure sizzling through his sinews, was the biggest since he lost the fetish. Drug strong, enough—almost—to drown the ache of his conscience.

But after, when Zoli was easing the accordioned wings out of his mouth, Mite felt her, moving inside him.

He'd found enough courage—or had it been hers, in him?—to cough the wings clear of his lips. Flowering like massive umbrellas, they flew across the room. Zoli chased the wings; Mite snatched the fetish in its snowglobe and fled.

The pale morning sunlight of the present moment warmed his skin, and Mite squinted, picturing things as they'd been last night when he lurched out onto the street. The sky like tinted window glass, that changing, possible feeling in the street, all through the city, that he loved usually. A little dark, a little lonely, but good somehow.

It had been a comfort, even with his twin priorities—reintegrate the fetish, heal the girl—lashing at him like whips. Belly full and desperate, and he'd needed help …

Fingers wriggled against his palm. Mite realized he was squeezing Gal's hand. He let go, and she held her hand in front of her face, turning it back to front, fluttering her fingers.

"Don't go that way." A voice which didn't echo, coming from the dimness behind them.

Gal screeched, hopping behind Mite, clinging to his shoulders as he pivoted to face the shadows. Her breath came in hot bursts behind his ear, and he could feel her pulse—light and rapid—in the warm patch of contact where her throat stretched over his shoulder to peek. "Ghost," she moaned, as if Mite couldn't see that for himself.

In life, Jonas had been short, thick-limbed, and near-sighted, with skin the color of teak, and blue-black hair. Lacking his glasses, the ghost looked both more innocent and more wise; freed from constraints like gravity, his slope-shouldered pose had been replaced with the feline grace which had commanded his rare unself-conscious moments.

Blinking back tears, Mite stared. His whole body was cold, all except the small points where Gal's flesh was pressed against him.

"Still loose, Mite? The Mabon's got cops and vultures hunting you." As Jonas spoke, the feral screech of a siren scraped the rooftops. The ghost flickered like a candleflame going out, reappearing moments later in a darkened second story window. There was a sound of bolts sliding back, and the door below cracked open an inch.

Gal's grip tightened.

"It's all right. He's my friend."

"Friend-ghost?"

They entered, finding a chemshop. Wish-puffs ignited as they closed the door; they came up only to half-watt, a low burnish of light. Neat rows of tinctures and telltales, bottles in deep colors of five-dimensional glass to hold volatile or unstable substances from other quantum folds.

Jonas appeared, floating over a crucible. A blur of dark red glow smudged the air about him, moving in jump-cut, out of sequence time to his movements. It would fade with time to rose, pearl, blue, then disappear.

After that Jonas the ghost would be as gone as Jonas the friend.

"Ghost-friend?" Gal said again. "Men, fight, screaming? Badness."

Jonas's wide, heavy brows rose.

"Do you remember?" Mite asked him.

Jonas nodded, his whole spectral self bobbing. "You showed up when I was closing the arcade. Belly big as a limo and the fetish in your mitt. You threw up a dead girl in my back room."

"She wasn't dead."

Zoli's vultures had been right behind him. He'd barely laid the girl down, barely looked at the hollow, squishy mess of her chest when the fight broke out in the arcade. A bunch of the West's trogs had been playing the video games, and they took the vultures' interruption as a challenge. In the melee, Mite had fumbled the fetish case, panicking as it flew end over end through the air. Bright and inaccessible, it had changed from frog to apple to dog head to diamond.

Then Jonas caught the case, getting into a tugging match for it with a grabby vulture.

"The snowglobe cracked—" Jonas said.

"And it was booby-trapped." He swallowed, unable to come up with an adequate apology. He had been struggling with two vultures when he heard the sound of glass cracking. Jonas went one way, screaming and bleeding as the shards of the snowglobe chewed him up. Blown sideways, the vulture and fetish both fell onto the dying girl in a glowing pile.

By the time he was loose, the three of them—girl, vulture, and fetish—were gone. The back window was open, shutters flapping in the breeze.

"Where you been all night?" Mite asked. When Jonas died, he figured the ghost would come straight around to haunt him. "I was starting to think Zoli caught you."

"Nah. Just snooping around."

"You could have been spotted."

Jonas shrugged and held his palm over a wishtale flame. "He's busy throwing everything in the Bone at you."

A small hope bloomed. "What about the Westside, Jonas? If trogs got hurt, Filiad must have noticed."

"Sure, he's powering up for a fight."

"Maybe I can get away while the East and West gangs hack at each other."

"You wish. Coptalk has it that Filiad thinks you're trying to grab your own piece of the city. So—ta-dah—the West is after you, not the Bone."

"Uh-oh," Gal said. "Bad? Right? Bad. Want a snack?" She was head down in a disposal chute, slurping magical byproducts. A sweet wind seemed to flutter the cuffs of her jeans.

"They could still clash." The ghost radiated familiar satisfaction; Jonas loved being the one with the facts. "Zoli thinks you did it to join Filiad."

"Why would Zoli think that?"

"Because he doesn't understand you doing it to save some girl's life …"

He zeroed as it suddenly hit him. Jonas was dead, everything was a mess, but—

"I'm free."

"Free like a mosquito flying with bats," Jonas said. "Fight him, Mite. Zoli's fetish isn't half as powerful as yours."

If he'd known then what he knew now, Mite would have expected Zoli to eat his fetish then and there, absorbing it into himself. That would have been the end of it for Mite—and maybe he would have been better off. But Zoli was a sorcerer already, with a fetish of his own, and the two couldn't be combined. Not within one body, anyway. All he could do was steal Mite's power, control it externally and Mite along with it.

"Yeah, well. Check out my fetish." Mite pointed at Gal.

She came up out of the disposal chute. "Whee—abbodanza!" She held a charred and bloody heart aloft, dripping steaming yellow quagmire sludge and bits of detritus. Brandishing it, she swooped down on Mite. Bits of heart and quagmire splatted across the floor. An overwhelming aroma of apple pie filled the room.

"Got any suggestions, Jonas?"

"That's … you'll never win if you don't reintegrate."

"She'd die."

Jonas brightened. "Then you may as well kill yourself now."

Mite ignored this. New ghosts were always counseling suicide—the loneliness gnawed so they couldn't help themselves. Gal thrust the heart under his nose. A sticky hunk of yellow slime ran down her cheek. Mite held out his hands. It felt like pie, oven-warm and its edges were sharply triangular, like the beak of a bird.

Mite took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and devoured the heart, staring into Gal's eyes. Pie, warm and sweet. The pastry melted flakily in his mouth.

Gal's head tilted to one side, slender neck bending like a flower stalk, black hair brushing a sharp shoulder, her once blue eyes now like black marbles. Quagmire slime dripped from her elbows, down her wrists, splattered from her fingertips to the walls as she flung her hands out to the sides, slime dripping off them. "So Gal—is? Mite-fetish, vulture, gal? Who …" She put both bony hands on his chest. The smell coming off her was autumn air and fresh-mown grass. "What's Gal?"

He stroked her hair. "Gal's a pretty girl."

"Hopeless," Jonas said. Then the deep, shivering sound of thousands of tiny bells drenched the air. "Vultures," he said. "That's the chemshop's proximity alert."

Mite seized Gal's shoulders, peered into the huge black pupils. The vultures were there, etched on the blackness of her eyes, creeping toward the laboratory door. They might have passed for human, strange people with long necks and limbs, their razor-tipped talons hidden under flapping black coatsleeves.

"Come on," he said, pulling Gal toward the disposal chute.

"Hungry?" she said uncertainly.

By now the bells were so loud they were vibrating the hexed gold of his fillings. Metal shrieked as the vultures took their talons to the door. He yanked open the chute, lifted Gal inside. She was light, hollow-boned.

"Escape," Mite explained, shuddering as she sank into the gloop. A fresh breeze lifted off the byproduct stew where her limbs parted it, stirred through her hair and up to bathe Mite's face. He dove, gripping her hand before it disappeared. "See you in the sewers, Jonas." Deep breath.

"It's not going to help. And Mite—"

Jonas' voice, the horrible vibration of the bells, and the screeching of the vultures at the door were all abruptly silenced as the gloop closed over his head. He held Gal's hand, gripping it tight, eyes squeezed closed as they slid down. The gloop thinned, their fall accelerating as it broke down into special sewer chemicals and spells the further into the sewer tube they slipped.

Soon they were speeding along at a rush that pushed Mite's shirt up and caressed his whole body like rough silk. Lungs bursting, head singing, he fell out of the branch tube into a main tributary of the sewer in a shower of honeysuckle-scented byproducts. Blinking slime out his eyes, he focused on Gal.

"Ghost gone?"

"He'll catch up." Taking her hand, he led her in a direction that smelled like west. Without his fetish, he couldn't be sure …

… and yet he was.

Concentrating, Mite reached within himself, looking for power, the sun-bright piece of himself that had been taken so long ago. It wasn't there, at least most of it wasn't. A candleflame of power glimmered in the halls of his mind, a small dribble leaking from Gal, too dim to light anything but his way west.

He blew on the sensation, got a whiff of Filiad and a lot of trogs, heard the vultures snick their talons like razors. A pleasant tingle suffused his skin, jump-started his heart, cleared his mind.

"Hurts," said Gal, pressing a hand to her heart.

Irritated, he let go. The sense of his fetish dwindled; Gal shrugged and smiled.

Their steps swished—ankle, sometimes knee-deep. Despite the spells and cleaner chemicals, the stench should have been debilitating, burning their eyes and lungs. But walking beside Gal, Mite noticed only the gentlest scents. Sometimes they passed another tributary gushing sanitized byproduct in livid colors, or glowing palely. The curved, rough walls of the sewer tunnel glowed with lichens and fungi. Some were intelligent, little voices that echoed as they passed. They whispered half-familiar words in a language of their own, sentience so alien it gave Mite a shiver.

Tiny reflected bits of their surroundings glowed in Gal's eyes.

They reached a five-way branching; still following the dim glimmer of westness, Mite turned down a wider, taller passage. The byproduct flowed more sluggishly here, its color thick. It was colder. The ceiling disappeared into yawning darkness above them.

Gal dragged back on his hand. "Not so very good."

"It will be okay."

The yard-long all-mouth face of a mushzoovrite dropped down on its long, spongy stalk of neck out of the darkness above. Its three-tiered mouth yawned open. Zoli's voice boomed. "There you are, you little shit!"

The mushzoo's thick black tongue unfurled and wrapped around Mite, choking off breath. It zipped around him, wet, arm-thick bands looped at chest, stomach, hips, squeezing so tight his vision went dark with shooting red stars.

"Handsome!" Gal shouted. Arms flying, she tackled him, bearing him down into the sewer's flow. The mushzoo's tongue stretched, tightened, and he felt his ribs straining against breaking force, felt burning sickness as the pressure squeezed his cock and balls. Gasping, half-conscious, his mouth filled with the black, oily sludge.

"Eat that!" Zoli's laughter howled back and forth in the tunnels, drilling through the muck in his ears.

He struggled to bend, to force his head back into the air. Gal, too light to hold him, shifted, bounced into the stream. She emerged slick with filth as the mushzoo lips sucked off Mite's running shoes.

Gal spat sludge in a stream against Mite's lips. "Cocoa."

Was he passing out, or had the mushzoo's grip weakened?

He opened wide, started swallowing, and forgot everything but the dusky taste of chocolate, smooth and thick with whipped cream, laced with sweet, melting flecks of marshmallow. Beside him, Gal's warm hand twined with his, fingers bony through her skin, one of her elbows in his side, while a sharp hip dug into his thigh.

Strength and milky calm filled him. The fetish blazed suddenly incandescent in his mind. For one drop of a moment it was his again.

A flap of ragged black wings echoed, bottomless shadow cutting through the brightness, and the incandescence was gone. Mite blinked, momentarily blind. Gal squirmed loose and helped him to his feet. The mushzoo's tongue had slid away, lolling from the thing's ugly mouth. Panting, she nudged the black tongue, making a finger-shaped hole in it. The tongue shifted slowly, subsiding around the depression. The whole mushzoovrite had been crisped to thick, sludgy ash.

A dull red burnish filled the tunnel as Jonas appeared. He pushed the glasses he no longer wore up on his nose. "I was gonna warn you about those."

"Thanks anyway. There some way out of here?"

"Forget running. Neighborhood's locked down tight, and there's vultures gathering."

"Wings," Gal said softly.

"So," Jonas asked hopefully, "how're you liking freedom so far?"

"Just like I always figured. One golden moment after another." Stretching, he took stock of himself, finding his bones intact, finding fewer bruises than he expected. He'd made good use of his power … for the moment that he'd had it.

"Solace is just a wrist-slash away, man. I'm sure you could find a blade in this slop."

"Pass for now, Jonas." Mite's gaze turned from the dark and hazardous bore of the westward tunnel to the wider pit encompassed by Jonas's gesture. He and Gal had drained much of the sludge; it flowed ankle deep now, instead of over his knees. Sandbars and shoals of garbage had risen from the stream.

"What, then? Try and make it to Filiad?"

"Let them come to us. Filiad'll get here first. He's closer."

He pulled Gal to her feet. Hot, sugary wind blasted off of her. Her hands were dry and a little rubbery, like chicken feet. The humanity he had seen earlier had receded, leaving the dark eyes and sharp nose prominent. Mite trailed his fingertips over her face.

"Whoever she was—the girl part, I mean—it's gone," Jonas said.

Mite nodded. "Too much transformation."

"You can't get your fetish back?"

"Feels like I could yank it out, but …" She was so pale; dusk threatened the skin under her eyes.

"Smell like chocolate." She licked his thumb when it strayed close to her lips. "Handsome does. Allee-oop."

"Do I?"

"Mm-hmm, good. Eat some more things?" She sounded as hopeful as Jonas.

"Yes. Something to make us strong."

"Crunchies?" She gestured at the glittering heaps of trash, and he nodded, steering her through the slop like an old timey gentleman handing a lady up to a carriage.

"Mite, what are you gonna do?"

"Make a deal with Filiad, if I can. Then …" He'd rather run, but dead or alive, he wasn't going back to being Zoli's whore. "Then …"

"Then what? Fight the Mabon without your fetish?"

"I'll have to get lucky." They climbed onto the biggest shoal, and Gal squatted, running her fingers through discarded hypodermics and leaking batteries, piling them between her knees. High pitched clicking sounds emanated from the back of her throat, sounds that were not quite notes but which nevertheless made a tune.

Jonas beamed, ghost-style: his face lit up with a smile that glowed behind his skin, making lambent portals of his eyes, nostrils, the cracks between his spectral teeth. "Take Zoli's fetish. If you can yank his fetish, then you could trade it to Filiad and he'd make a trog body for me."

Mite contemplated the chances of his extracting Zoli's fetish. He was no practiced sorcerer, no smooth-talker with a booby-trapped soda bottle. Still … "You want that, Jonas?"

"Anything's better than this."

Heavy steps echoed in the west tunnel.

Gal continued sorting, not looking up even as bleached light pushed down the tunnel, crawling over its rough, lichen and fungus crusted curves, over trash heaps and viscous byproduct streams. Crowding behind the light came the bristling, multi-formed presence of a small army of trogs. Light poured from the eyes, mouths, and fingertips of the trogs on point. This was what Jonas could be, if entrogged; thwarted from its natural progression out of the visible, a ghost's caught essence eventually alchemized to this stinging, lurid glow.

Still … not all of them were ugly, and not all were zombies. There were the boys who hung out at the arcade, beautiful dead who'd kept themselves earthside by signing pacts with the West. Filiad kept a servant—a luminous, sensitive woman—who made the rounds through City Hall, bribing the West's network of buros.

The trogs slowed, formed into a loose semi-circle fanned around the fugitives. A bulk of bodies filled the cavern. It shifted slightly, with barely a murmur, indicating a movement through its ranks. Finally, a squat trog standing on two of its eight arms—no legs—shifted from beside a winsome trog with long, sinuous muscles to make a gap.

The light stung tears from Mite's eyes. Gal clicked and sorted.

Filiad emerged through the trog gap into the circle of light. He was a plain-faced man in a brown leather coat and workboots. Mite only knew that he was Filiad because of the prickling that came with his entrance, an electrical caress like a probing hand on his skin. It slid over him, thorough and intimate, as Filiad looked at him out of wintry eyes.

"Mite." He bit off the word. "You are run to ground. Zoli's coming."

"Tell me something I don't know." He managed to sound brave.

"With your play for power all but dead, and you soon to follow …"

Mite laughed. "All I wanted was my freedom."

"Running?" Filiad's mouth flapped—he seemed almost affronted. "You've botched it badly."

"Just tell me what you want."

"I want, as I always have, a city unified."

"Under your control, you mean."

"You're the Mabon's creature, Mite. I could hand you to him."

"Coward," hissed Jonas.

"You want Zoli dead," Mite said. "You could kill him yourself, maybe, but that's no sure thing. I do it, you're clean."

"Shhhh." Filiad held a long finger up to his lips, then extended the hand, upturned, across the water toward Mite. Giant reflections of his fingers undulated on the sickly surface. "You must face him—whether I help or not. True?"

The reality of it digested, tightening his guts in knots, but he nodded.

"Filiad offers two things. One—should you die, I shall take your friends under my wing. Two—" He paused, bony wings rattled in the upper tunnels. "Should you live, I will smooth your way along whatever path you choose. The police will not trouble you."

"And in return?"

"A fetish for the West. His, yours … whoever does not survive. It is a generous offer."

"Sure. Not even remotely self-interested," he muttered.

"You killed your friend for this girl," Filiad said. "Tilted our world for her."

Blood flooded his cheeks. "It was an accident!"

"If you fail, I shall see she survives."

"You'd keep her anyway. She has my fetish."

"But I won't remove it. She'll live."

Mite shook his head. "Not enough."

"Mite, Mite." The words lapped back at him, echoing off the waterfall. "Swallow just a thimble of that newborn pride."

"I've swallowed enough today already."

"Very well, I'll sweeten the deal. If you live, the Bone Keepers are yours to lead."

"He doesn't want the Bone," Jonas said. "He wants you to trog me. Top-flight body, no servitude clauses. You could use that light-fingered prettyboy you've got in storage."

Filiad's eyebrows contracted in a frown. "Your ghost has been snooping in my freezers."

"He can't help himself." Mite glared at Jonas. When had his survival become a committee issue?

"And I want my body to have killer eyesight," Jonas said.

"Jonas …"

Filiad turned his hand in a gesture, a flourish. The viscous water stirred below the reflection of his hand; jumping shadows cast by trog-light brushed dark breezes and half-heard, bass echoes through the tunnel. The fingertouch of power bumped against Mite. He swayed, heart pounding.

Gal started as it passed by her, looking up from her pile of garbage. Filiad's lids half-shuttered as their eyes met, her face all bone and nose.

"Little farrago." His gaze came back to Mite. "Do not be so quick to close doors. Always consider, Mite."

"I don't want the Bone." He sucked air through the fear starting to ice over his insides. "You've heard our deal."

"The West accepts. I will protect your friends. If you survive and turn over Zoli's fetish, I will transform Jonas." Filiad grinned, the sharp points of his canines glinting in the light, and the trogs who had mouths smiled along with him. "He's coming."

"Good." Mite laid his hand on Gal's stash of sharp and shiny objects. "Know what I really like to eat, Gal? Know what's my favorite of all?"

She shook her head, lower lip caught under her front teeth, face alight with anticipation and curiosity.

He looked at the images of vultures moving in her eyes. It had to be this, his favorite, Mite-affirming food. His last meal, and he wanted to enjoy it. He conjured the memory. Summer nights, the backyard with his parents. Himself on small feet chasing phosphairies across heated cement and cool grass. Heavy scents of grass, charcoal, the warm, lilac-flavored smoke of Dad's prosaic magic.

He whispered the words. "Burgers, with goat cheese, grilled peppers, onions, and mushrooms." As he spoke, a teasing hint of summer rose off her and his shirt stirred as a cool, smoky breeze skirled from his skin.

"Yummy burgers with goatmelt and veggies. Handsome and Gal'll have a picnic."

"What about you, Gal? What's your favorite?"

"Same, same, and," she started ticking things off on her fingers, "Watermelon, pirogies, dead mice, they're good, hearts and eyeballs, gyros and pistachio ice cream. Lots of special bests."

"I liked sardines," Jonas offered.

Gal touched an old crucible battery under Mite's hand, rusty and acid-streaked. The aroma of grilled burgers enveloped him. A toasted bun, heavy and thick with burger, melty, tangy cheese and a slather of onions, mushrooms and peppers filled his hand.

They ate.

He was reaching for seconds when the chamber's high ceiling melted away, the concrete bubbling in a circle fifteen feet in diameter. Wet drops of cement dripped in a rush to the floor, creating an instant stalagmite. Gal's talon-fingers clutched his ankle; she made a noise through a filled mouth that might have been a whimper or perhaps a question.

"Mi-iiiite." The low, grating voice scratched at the walls, sent ratberries scuttling past the trogs for the exit tunnels. On its way around the room the sound warped, played variations. "Mite bite fite tite kite rite site nite. Mitey mite, fighty fight?" Zoli's laughter exploded the top of the stalagmite, shearing it to a flat-topped dais, sending little pieces of concrete flying everywhere. Striking Mite, they burned, like charcoal briquettes or wasp stings. Gal pressed a burger into his hand and he sucked a string of goat cheese.

Wings crackling, Zoli drifted through the hole in the ceiling, settled onto the truncated stalagmite. Afternoon sun trickled down after him, bathing him in dust-moted light. Far above them, through layers of melted cement and city infrastructure, was a burning blue chip of sky.

Falling after him, vultures circled down. Whispering and clicking, they hissed at the trogs as they gathered in the eastward tunnels.

Mite chewed a last bite and swallowed. He felt—like himself: solid, real, incredibly present.

Zoli was going to wipe the floor with him.

The wings rose behind Zoli, silver and blue veined membranes. Incongruous on him, heavy as he was. He gave the wings a shake and furled them with a leathery rustle, tendons cricking. Zoli's bedroom eyes, heavy-lidded in his lugubrious, jowled face, glittered as they fastened on Mite.

"Very bad, Mitey mite. Ungrateful you, honey bee. Feed you suicide's blood and bitter ire for a year; break each of the little bones in your feet and hands; hang you from a hook for the demon-manders to lick. Punish, punish."

Gal's fingers tightened on his ankle. Taking her hand, he pooled spit in his mouth, rolled it, touching his fetish through her as gently as he could. The burger-fed saliva formed a marble, cool and heavy with magic. He tucked it in his cheek.

"I thought you came to fight, Mabon, not natter like a toothless old man."

The eyes slitted. "That. Was. Your. One. Chance." Each word was separated by a breath. Darkness and stench blew over them in oily puffs, overwhelming the barbecue wind. Mite braced.

It was Jonas who attacked, swiping in from the side. Suddenly, terribly solid, a wraith made of salt crystals and razor edges, he sliced into Mite's arm and ribcage, shredding the soiled second skin of his shirt. Pain burned ten sharp lines from nipple to haunch.

Mite pushed the hard ball of magic back against his wisdom tooth, sucked at it like a lozenge, drawing hamburger flavor and a tiny portion of power deep into himself. Scabs formed, the burning turned to itching, and the blood stopped flowing.

"Filiad," Mite shouted. "You're supposed to be protecting him!"

Jonas came again, frontal assault this time, fingers straining forward and eager to dig out his lungs. Mite held him off. The transparent digits grew longer, stretching toward flesh. Under the crystalline lids, Jonas's eyes agonized, pleaded. Sharp points pressed bloody dimples in circles under Mite's collarbone.

Then the crystals dropped in a heavy rain of salt, splatting to the wet ground. Shiny, they seemed to melt, boil, and then become mist. Piece by piece Jonas reconstituted himself, eventually drifting toward Filiad.

"This fight is between us," Mite shouted up at Zoli, his face wet. "Leave the others out of it!"

Zoli roared, jumping with shocking agility from the stalagmite. The wings buffeted air. Mite threw up an arm and his master's soft neck collided with his elbow. The force of the descent drove Mite to his knees.

Iron fingers encased in soft flesh curled around Mite's chin, clawed his jaw down.

"EAT THIS!" Zoli's free hand blurred down and something round and hard and too-big smashed against his teeth. Drawing back the arm, he revealed a paperweight, a glass ball full of tiny foil sharks who gathered in a grinning frenzy against a smear of Mite's blood on the outside of the glass.

Mite swallowed just a little more of his power; blood from his gums made the hamburger taste rare. Gal flinched and trilled.

Another slam against his lips. A tooth gave, rattling over his tongue. The hard lump of the paperweight forced itself inside him, stretching his jaw to the breaking point, pressing his tongue flat. Glass ground against the sharp edges of his molars. He tried, uselessly, to force his tongue to move. He had swallowed whole bathtubs, live animals, even a swingset once. Now, without Gal's help, his mouth was normal sized, inflexibly real. Zoli rammed on the paperweight again, forcing it deeper, crushing Mite's sinus cavities, crushing defiance.

The broken tooth and the marble of magic slid down Mite's unresisting throat. He gagged, swallowing reflexively, then choked, jaw clenching, arms straining uselessly against Zoli. The paperweight cracked as Zoli rammed it against Mite's clenching molars. Liquid gushed into Mite's mouth and the tiny sharks darted down his throat like razor-finned goldfish. Minute, slicing pains scissored and tore through his esophagus and gut.

A ululating shriek—Gal?—cut across Zoli's laughter. She leapt, perched on his wings, wrapping her legs around his neck and clawing for his eyes with taloned fingers.

Zoli let go and Mite doubled over to hands and knees. He spit out broken glass and coughed as a shudder of fire shot through his bowels. Retching, he spit up clots and gouts of blood, shreds of flesh. Another hollowing pain shuddered and echoed through his belly. He hacked up a deep, dark clot, nearly blacking out; the tooth and the marble spit out on ropes of bloody bile.

Head spinning, Mite reached shaking fingers and gathered up tooth, marble, and shreds of his insides. He slipped the marble back in his mouth, desperately slurping lilac memory with mushroom and burger essence while picturing shark filets going stripey golden on the grill. The pain in his gut receded to a ringing echo.

Clutching tooth and guts in one hand, he turned, half-rising, just as Gal was flung shrieking off Zoli's shoulders. She landed with a splash in an ungainly sprawl beside Mite. He grabbed for her, wound his fingers with her withered, Zoli-bloodied claws, the tooth pressed between their palms.

"Blood pudding," he rasped. "Giant, deep pudding—beneath him." Pinching a retched-up shred of his intestine between the finger and thumb of his free hand, he rolled it like a piece of clay. The fleshy shred grew, thinning and stretching until it coiled beside him, a length of twine as strong as Mite's desire for freedom.

Zoli wasn't sitting still for it. He brought a wing down like a scythe, chopping the link between them, opening a slit on Mite's knuckles as he flung Gal back and away. She tumbled toward the trogs. The tooth disappeared into muck.

Mite stared into Zoli's eyes. Power strained between himself and Gal, a fat bulb in a long balloon, slipping from one end to the other.

Take it and survive, maybe … but Gal wouldn't live without the fetish to sustain her.

"All right." He closed himself off from the magic. The marble popped like a bubble as he let go of power, standing before Zoli. Nothing but Mite now—no tricks or traps, no luck, no hope. He couldn't use Gal as he'd been used for so long. Better to go with Jonas, face the afterlife together. He dropped the hand he'd thrown up, protectively, in front of his face.

Zoli's eyes glowed hot with victory. Meaty hands closing on Mite's arms, he pulled back his thick lips. A whip-thin flicker of serpent's tongue darted from the recesses of his throat and drove into Mite's mouth to drill into the throbbing, bloody hole where his tooth had been.

Strangely, he wasn't afraid anymore.

"Mite!" Gal's voice, a furious, hoarse screech. He rolled her a glance, even as Zoli's tongue dug into his gum, driving bolts of nausea and agony into his skull. In that moment she looked almost human.

He'd saved Gal. He'd done the right thing. She'd live.

Driving a long finger down into her throat, Gal began to vomit up garbage.

The fetish slammed into him, pure, untarnished, and complete.

Finish it fast. The coil of flesh-twine still hung from his fingers, and he lassoed a hoop around Zoli's throat. Power whipped his arm like a propeller, and the twine twisted about the Mabon's wings, hands, immediately tight. Fear blossomed through the victory in Zoli's eyes.

"Blood pudding," Mite repeated, this time talking to himself. He sucked Zoli's tongue down over his, stretched out his hand. His fingers felt infinitely long as they closed around the hot crust. Meatsmell wormed through his throbbing senses.

He devoured Zoli with one yawning swallow.

His teeth clicked shut in sudden quiet. Zoli's absence hovered around him, holding back the sound of Gal's trilling cries. The vultures glared. Trogs shifted here, there, and Filiad waited.

A pulse of power surged through Mite, every molecule of his body tingling as the air around him flashed citrine, violet, white. Then another, surfeit of vigor as his fetish clashed against Zoli's. Mite bent his concentration. A shudder pulsed through him. For a moment he was blind with power, he was lightning, the fetish a reek of ozone in his nose and mouth.

Then he belched.

Zoli's fetish fell out of his mouth into his hands, a buzz of ball lightning. Mite contained it before it could dissipate. It floated between his palms, first a phosphor-white bone, then an old key, then a pale, nacreous shell, then the bone again. Fingers tingling, Mite gazed at the fetish with awe. Zoli could have done marvels with it.

Gal arched and shrieked in an inhuman voice, on her back and flailing her arms in muck, like a bird with broken wings. Just beyond her floated Jonas. Fighting had burned his aura to pearl. At most, he had an hour left.

Mite gave his own power an experimental tug, straining so hard his still-bleeding gum ruptured. Nothing moved. His fetish was fully integrated now, locked back into Mite.

"Filiad?" Eyes wide and hopeful as he knelt beside Gal. "Will you entrog Jonas?"

"Beautifully." Filiad's dark eyes reflected the shining bone drifting as he gestured to Zoli's fetish. It drifted across the sewer to him.

"What about … would you do it for something besides Zoli's mojo?"

"Mite," said Jonas. His eyes were wide and betrayed. Mite couldn't hold his gaze.

Filiad shook his head. "I'm no charity, farrago."

"Jonas, she'll die. She's my responsibility."

"So am I." The whispered reply hit him like freezing rain. "This is your fault, remember?"

Mite's being cried against the only other choice. He touched Gal's forehead, smoothing hair that felt like feathers. Her hex-altered black eyes were flecked with spreading patches of blue, the original color coming back now that the magic had left her. Her gaze focused on him as if from far away. Her cries softened to squeaking whimpers. "Filiad, can you get my mojo out of me?"

Filiad's cold eyes shuttered slightly, distancing, and his lips thinned with distaste. "Fetish-theft is the Bone's way. You are a sorcerer born, Mite. Would you give it up again?"

He looked from Gal to Jonas. And said—very calmly, he thought—"You'll do the hexing?"

"Always slamming doors, Mite." Cold wind whipped their ankles.

"I choose …"

"To squander the freedom you fought for?"

"To preserve her life."

Filiad scowled. "I can do the hex. But we must do it now, before she dies."

Mite nodded. Taking a last second with his power, he caressed himself like a child, shivering in the joyful warmth of being whole. He picked up a scrap of tin, licked it into a silver ring and slid it over his finger. "Do it."

Filiad brought his wrist around in a precise and delicate circle, as if he was sculpting something in the air. A finger nudged Mite's ribs, sending tiny ripples of pressure out to Mite's heart, stomach, lungs. Something disconnected, wobbling faintly like a child's loosened tooth.

"You know what to do?" Filiad asked.

He did. He bent down, bumped noses with Gal.

"Handsome." The skin around her eyes crinkled. "Don't."

"Warm milk," he whispered. A chill seeped into his fingers and toes, numbness creeping from his extremities into the larger bones of his legs and wrists.

He kissed her. Her lip was hard and ridged, like bone, like a bird's beak. Exhaling warmth onto her tongue, down her throat, he felt the rough edge of her mouth change to something softer. His fingers, entwined in her hair, became ghosts, translucent and insubstantial, a red haze which flowed into Gal's dark eyes and up her nostrils, into her ears and between her front teeth, a slow motion hemorrhage, in reverse. Unsupported, her head dropped back onto the junkpile.

Gal sucked his lower lip into the warming cavity of her mouth, breathing him in.

Mite slid past gleaming teeth and dark moist tongue, tasted her. Warmth, heat, coolness, all together. Jumbles of sensations, velvet, clover, gingerale, mint. His phantom limbs tingled as she imbibed his body like wine.

Mite had owned a kaleidoscope once. Now he felt like one. The world within Gal was a rushing surge of color, texture, depth, open stretches and unexpected turns into darkness, then back to weird luminosities. Sound, sight, smell … clicks and sighs and soft, distant bells, whispering thoughts, vulture's shriek, a girl's laughter. Smokey scents of butterscotch, whiskey, roasting coffee, old meat, crunchy sinews; clean ones of green stalks, storm wind, ocean salt, vectors of air ridden on black wings, deep night, peaches in the sun.

Vulture bits, girl bits; drawn through fragile tissue, deep into bone, through the rich surge and tincture of blood. Crevice, nook, engram, synapse, and cranny, Mite sank through her like a nourishing fog of warm milk.

Then he found himself shuddering on the junk pile next to her, empty of his fetish once more, a raw, bloody gum robbed of its tooth.

Except … he tasted a hidden glimmer, a sliver of mirror that resided in each minute portion of himself, and nowhere. It reflected Gal, connected them. He sampled the connection, and responsibility fell on him like a winter coat, heavy but sheltering. They were linked and bound—if one died now, the other would go too.

"Mite?" It was Jonas.

"Quite the ride." Climbing to his feet, he pulled Gal up too.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Great." Covered head to toe in slime, needing days of dental hexing and healer spells he couldn't afford, scratched on the outside and with bits of his own intestines splashed on his hands. Knees shaking, jaw throbbing, horribly fetish-empty. But …

Free.

"Come on," he said. "Filiad's gonna grow you a body, Jonas. Right, Filiad?"

"As fine a trog as I've made."

"With great eyesight."

"And then what?" Gal's voice lilted, nearly human. Her eyes were fully black again, but there were variations in texture: dark pupils, the stitched circle of an iris. "Eat, sleep, play?" She smiled at Mite, then spun to watch the vultures slouching and bristling into tunnel shadows. One looked back at her, and their gazes locked. She shivered visibly and looked away as it rejoined the darkness.

"Play," she repeated, seriously this time.

"Yeah, Mite. What now?" Jonas asked.

"Whatever we want," Mite answered, and each word tasted golden. He began to climb the stalagmite, leading his friends up into afternoon sunshine.