Giles snapped wrenchingly into Ed’s body again.

He smelled the gold liquid which he, Ed, had vomited up. If he could make himself drink it, any of it, he would be saved. It had tasted bland when he ate the fruit. He could suck his guts in and drink it now, never mind how disgusting it was.

If he got any of that gold stuff inside him again, he would be the stranger who continued in the story. He could somehow fulfill the Boss’s mission. This jagged, cut-off rock might be the Gilt Edge he’d been sent to find…

Giles felt awkwardly that he should let it happen. He could do more in the story as “Ed.” He might figure out who had sent Ed traveling in time and what it was all about.

But the man’s mind was like a cinderblock vault toilet that needed cleaning. Lusting after a pretty lab assistant, dropping lewd remarks every chance he got, spinning an endless self-righteous tales of wrongs and petty grievances. Everyone who had ever lived had wronged him…

Giles pulled back, recognizing with self-loathing how his own petty grievances about the storytelling festival would sound to an outsider. Instantly he was the standing man again, Robby. Robby who was still in love with his ex-wife who worked for some secret government project, Robby who followed up on news stories with shy courage.

He liked Robby. That was the man he wanted to be.

He kicked the man on the ground. Ed winced, face screwed into a tight morsel of pain, and his skull clunked against the rock. That seemed to be the end of the fight. Ed just lay still with his mouth muttering; this was the latest in his litany of grievances.

The voice called again, “Hey look, who are you? ‘ve you hurt our Doree?” Still from down below but the owner of that voice would be up here in a moment.

Giles/Robby knelt and scooped a handful of the liquid gold, stomach turning. But it smelled as sweet as the fruit had tasted.

Ed’s hand pulled at his arm. “Leggo that, you faggoty lil moron.” Some of the gold sloshed but some stayed in Robby’s cupped palm.

Robby pulled his hand closer to his mouth, against Ed’s feeble grip. If Ed had turned his head at that moment and licked at the gold in which he lay, he would have won. But all his effort stayed bent on stopping his rival.

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Giles sipped the sweet life force again and with a thrummmmm which shook Cloud Rock to its core, Robby became solid and merged into the body of the stranger.

Thrilled, Giles pushed himself up again. The other body was gone. Everyone shouted again, even louder. But Giles had ears and eyes for only the small form which lay unconscious before him. The girl who would grow into the demon goddess he loved.

Her hands were purest silver, her palms were soft yellow gold, and they gleamed with power.

A hand reached through his mother’s wall as she had known it would. It was silver and the palm was gold. There was no plaster dust, no hole in the wall; the scraping sound had been the thunder of a waterfall, heard on a magic night when she was young. Her heart leaped with hope as the hand approached…

It was Tiffany’s hand which had touched Mary Hammond’s heart and taken the life from her. She had gone gladly, but Tiffany had killed her.

“Yes, yes, oh dear one, yes!” Tiffany had murmured through passionate kisses in the meadow under the Chaos. “I want you. I’ve always wanted you.” Pulling back, she had gazed in rapture at his face, drinking it in. Giles, sure she was seeing someone she’d known in another time, had searched inside himself for some answering memory…

Giles cringed back from the small figure as if she were a baby cobra.

Tiffany had been his mother’s lover, long ago when she was a saucy-tongued black-haired lass. He was sure of it. It was Mary Hammond Tiffany had missed so much, had yearned for. It was Mary Hammond Tiffany saw in the face of Mary’s only son; Mary Hammond was the someone Tiffany had known ages ago in another time.

But it wasn’t this which shocked him, this piece fit with everything he knew of his mother. He had wanted to know something about his mother’s secret love life since he’d been a teen, and now he knew. This wasn’t what made him now look at the small, still form with horror.

It was because, as she kissed Giles, surrendering to passion, treating herself to the pleasure she thought she’d never know again, she had started, slowly and deliberately, to pull off her black gloves.

To reveal the silver hands with the palms of gold which had touched his mother’s heart and killed her stone dead.

But she had stopped. She hadn’t done it. There was that.

“Doree!!” the approaching voices called. “Are you solid? Who is that with you?”

Giles was in the story now as Robby and when Doree a while later would see him and think he wasn’t the same stranger she had talked to before, she’d be right. He had to get through the next few hours of story and then he could sit on the stairs beside this sprite and hold her hand and talk to her.

Maybe then he would understand more.

Stooping, Giles kissed the cheek of this child who would grow into the dangerous, fascinating creature who had kissed him full on the lips.

Whatever she would become, she was the sweet, brassy, spunky girl from his story. He had lived the next hours inside her head, and she hadn’t had a malicious bone in her body.

Not yet.