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She smiled, but there was no humor in it. Only a kind of sadness.

“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” she said. “One way or another, you can finish this business tonight.”

You know how in a dream you find yourself doing things that don’t make sense in retrospect, but in the dream they’re perfectly logical? That’s what this felt like. I got up and put my guitar in its stand, then made my way down from the stage and through the tables to the front door of the pub. No one paid the slightest attention to me except for Tommy, who gave me a smile and a thumbs-up as I passed the soundboard where he was sitting.

I thought of stopping to see if he could tell me what was going on, but then I remembered Miki saying something about there not being a lot of time, so I continued on to the door. Considering how weird everything else had gotten, I didn’t really expect Harnett’s Point to be still waiting for me outside. But it was. And that wasn’t all that was waiting for me.

I stepped out into the parking lot, then stopped dead in my tracks. Nita stood there, waiting in an open parking spot between an SUV and a Volvo station wagon. She looked as gorgeous as ever, and my heartbeat did a little skip of happiness before my chest went tight with anxiety. I looked to the left and right, searching for some sign of the butter spirit, but so far as I could tell we were alone.Which I knew meant nothing.

“Nita . . .” I said, stepping closer to her. “What are you doing here?”

The smile she’d been wearing faltered. “Your friend Miki . . . she asked me to come. She said we had to do this, then everything would be all right.”

I shook my head. What had Miki been thinking?

In the light from the bar’s signage behind me I could see that her eyes were already getting puffy and her nose was beginning to run—her allergy to me kicking in.

“I shouldn’t have come, should I?”Nita said. “I can tell. You don’t really want me here.”

The sadness I saw rising up in her broke my heart.

“No, it’s not that,” I told her. “It’s just . . . oh, Christ, Miki couldn’t have picked a worse night to have you come.”

She started to say something, but a voice to the side spoke first.

“Using words like that will just make it worse on you, Conn O’Neill.”

I turned and this time I spotted him. He was perched on the roof of an old Chevy two-door, one car over from the Volvo. The butter spirit with his hair like dreads and that glare in his eyes.

“I’m not afraid,”Nita told me.“Miki told me all about it.”

“I wish she’d told me,” I said.

The butter spirit jumped onto the roof of the Volvo and grinned down at me.

“Don’t know what you’ve got planned here, my wee boyo,” he said. “I just know it’s too late.”

Nita and I both felt it then, a sudden coldness in the air. Looking over her shoulder, I was the first to see him: a fog lifting from the pavement of the parking lot that became the figure of a man with a cloak of wreathing mist that swirled about him. The Grey Man, his features sharp and pale, framed by long grey hair. Old Boneless himself. He didn’t seem completely solid, and I remembered my dad telling me how he sustained himself on the smoke from chimneys and factories, on the exhaust from cars and other machines. That had never made sense until that moment.

His gaze had none of the butter spirit’s meanness. Instead, he appeared completely indifferent, and in him, that struck me as far more dangerous.

“Get away, girl,” the butter spirit told Nita. “Or you’ll suffer the same fate as your boyo.”

Nita ignored him. She moved closer to me.

“H-hold me,” she said.

She could barely get the words out, her allergy to me closing up her throat.

“But—”I began, but couldn’t finish.

She tried to speak, only she didn’t have the breath anymore. Swaying, she would have fallen if I hadn’t stepped forward and taken her into my arms. I lowered her to the pavement and knelt there, holding her tight,my heart filling with hopelessness and despair.

“Let her go,” the butter spirit said.

I wanted to. I knew I should get as far away from her as I could