Two great wings unfolded, shaped like enormous bat wings, but webbed like the wings of a dragonfly. They kept unfolding until they extended to an impossible span.

And two red eyes opened and blinked.

From the cage in Ceese's hand, a tiny high voice cried out. "Here, Master! I'm here! She went that way! She's over there! Head for the temple of Pan! Set me free to help you!"

Ceese dropped to his knees and closed his fist over the golden cage. Then he crawled onto the brick path until he was small enough to stand up and walk.

He strode across the patio and opened the back door. The golden cage now was the size of a grapefruit in his hand. Inside the lacework of golden wires, Puck hung by his hands from the wires, his body racked with great sobs. "God help me!" he cried, again and again. "I hate him! I hate him!" And then, more softly, "Beloved master, beautiful king."

Chapter 23

SLUG

As soon as Ceese left the clearing, bearing away Puck in his golden cage, Titania flung her arms around Mack and clung to him. "He's coming," she whispered. "I can feel him rising."

"We've got to go," Mack said. "It's a good long run."

"You forget that I'm in my power now." She kissed him. "I'm so afraid."

"There's a chance that we'll lose?"

"If he wins today, I'll win tomorrow. No, I'm afraid that if I win, he won't love me anymore. You won't love me anymore."

"But he does," she said. "The only reason you don't love me is you're upset because you think I betrayed Puck. You're so good and pure, Mack. But if you were a little more wicked and selfish like me, you'd realize that Puck was a tool that Oberon could have used against me. Now he can't."

"I understand that," said Mack.

"With your mind," said Titania. "But in here"—she touched his chest—"you would never be able to do such a thing. So loyal and true. Fly with me, Mack Street."

"I can't fly."

"But I can." In a quick, sudden movement she swung herself around behind him, gripped him across his chest and under his arms, then wrapped her legs around him. All the while, she was beating her wings, so she weighed nothing. Less than nothing: Under her wings they both rose from the ground.

In a moment they were above the clearing. She took one soaring circle. No birds came near them. Mack could see the glorious spring forest spreading in all directions. Only now did he realize that in all his wanderings, he had never seen spring. Perhaps there was no spring when Titania wasn't free in this world.

Not so far away, smoke was rising from a gap in the hills—the place where the drainpipe rose in the other world.

"He's coming up now," said Titania. "Away we go."

He was surprised at how fast she flew. Like a dragonfly, not a moth. She could hover in one place, then dart like a rocket. He could feel the muscles flexing in her chest and arms as they balanced and responded to the exertions of her wing muscles. As womanly as this fairy queen might be, she was also a magnificent creature, overwhelmingly strong.

"So the pixie dust thing is just a myth," said Mack.

She laughed. "J. M. Barrie knew boys. But he didn't know fairies. Not like Shakespeare. He glimpsed Puck once, and one of my daughters. He thought the sparks of light were fairy dust. He had no idea what was going on."

"What was going on?"

"Oberon's first attempt to make you," said Titania. "Using Puck as the father. And no humans at all. It didn't work."

"How many tries?"

"Four. Five counting you. The last two could have done it, but they were never able to connect with the people around them. Never able to catch the dreams. It takes a village to raise a changeling."

"That's what humans never understand," said Titania. "They're so seduced by the material world, they think that's what's real. But all the things they touch and see and measure, they're just—wishes come true. The reality is the wishing. The desire. The only things that are real are beings who wish.

And their wishes become the causes of things. Wishes flow like rivers; causality bubbles up from the earth like springs. We fairies drink wishes like wine, and inside us they're digested and turned to reality. Brought to life. All this life!"

"More to the right," Mack directed her. "That hill over there. You're heading for Cheviot Hills."

"I never did get the grasp of LA. Too much asphalt. Tar smeared over the face of the earth."

"On which you rode that motorcycle."

"It was the closest I could come to flying like this. Only they would never let me ride naked."

"So the dreams that I absorbed and stored—they're real."

"Dreams are the stuff that life is made of," said Titania.

"And what am I made of, then? Coming into the world after gestating only an hour?"

"You're Oberon's wish. All his wishes for beauty and truth and life. For order and system, for kindness and love. Poured out into the body of a woman and allowed to grow in the form that she dreamed of."

"So she really was my mother."

"The mother of your shape. But Oberon was father and mother of your soul."

"I thought I didn't have one."

Titania laughed lightly, like music in the hurtling wind.

"So," said Mack. "How are we going to fight him?"

"I don't know," said Titania.

That was not good news. "I thought you had a plan."

"I have a plan to make me as strong as possible. And him a little weaker. But once you start hurling unformed causality around, you never quite know what's going to happen. I'll do some things.

He'll do some things. The things we do will change the way things work. So we'll do different things.

Until I'm strong enough to bind him."

"What does it mean, to bind him?"

"So it's all about you and him."

"That's right. I draw power from the fairy circle. And he can't see it. He won't know they're there. At first, anyway."

Mack thought about that. "What am I here for? Why didn't you send me back with Ceese?"

No answer.

"Yo Yo?"

No answer.

"Titania, tell me. I should know."

"You're his fairy circle," she said. "The power he's been storing up for years. Storying up, so to speak."

"So I'm on his side?"

"In a way," she said. "But by having you near me, he can't do anything really awful to me."

Now he understood. "I'm your hostage."

"It's a similar relationship. Except that normally, hostages don't get eaten."

"You're going to eat me?"

"No, silly. I love you. He wants to eat you. Or the dreams stored in you, I mean. He'd spit the rest of you back out."

"So I'd live?"

"It won't happen, so don't worry about it."

"Why won't it happen?"

"Because he knows that while he's eating the dreams out of you, I would reunite you with him.

I'd restore the virtues he drove out of him."

"And he doesn't want that?"

"Suddenly he'd have a conscience again. He'd remember how much he loves me. It would completely ruin his side of this little war."

"What would happen to me?"

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know," she said. "Like I told you, baby. I don't know how this will all come out. We just play with the causalities he gives us, and throw our own realities back at him."

She settled lightly to the ground in the middle of the henge of seventeen columns. She unwrapped herself from Mack's body. "Time to do your art, baby."

Mack set to work at once with a red magic marker, drawing a small heart on each column and moving quickly on.

Word was exhausted at the end of his sermon. His listeners weren't—after all, it was still daylight when he finished, and they were all hoping that his healing touch would come into their lives, too. But he was finished because the invisible hand down his back had finally let him go. He had nothing left.