Giles’s eyes snapped open. A hairy body went staggering, then recovered its balance with a grunt. “Feck,” it muttered conversationally.

He was in the corridors. Jasmine stood three feet from his elbow, her brown face gleaming in the silver torchlight.

But she needed no rescuing. Bright shining resourceful Jasmine was telling a story. She already understood and had mastered what he still struggled to learn. She told the story of the old woman and the red rock hillside and Robby the reporter and Mrs. Benz while the demons listened, their heads cocked to one side.

He could almost see that powdery red hilltop on a bright winter day. Such pure, achingly desirable blue sky! Jasmine disappeared from the tunnels. Tiffany faded. Giles reached after them…

The next thing he knew, he crouched on red rock, feeling it warm under his fingertips on this cold day. There was his character Robby Baker, with a thatch of straight brown hair combed in a sideways lick. He wore a hat which he probably thought a reporter should wear. The old woman faced him and Giles understood that she was not just “Mrs. Benz” but that her first name was Dilyéhé. They made one tableau. To their right and out of their sight was a second tableau: Tiffany whispered something to Jasmine, then with a dark whisk like bats against a starry sky, Tiffany disappeared into the old woman.

Jasmine stared at something in the sky; she didn’t see him. Giles wondered how to get out of this story: she clearly didn’t need him.

But maybe she did. Giles felt something push against his back and smelled a ripe animal smell.

The two demons. They hadn’t broken through into this story, not yet. But they pushed against the barrier between their dark corridors and this bright place. And Jasmine watched the power growing in the winter sky and did not know her danger.

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Giles flung his arms wide like a cop trying to hold back a mob. But no, it wasn’t like they were a mob and he was the authority holding them back. He had the strangest sense that they were cold, quiet authority and he, Giles, struggled to keep them from destroying a work of art.

The demons strained against him. They were still faint but growing more present.

Then came the thing that he had forgotten would happen. The sky filled with rushing stone, the old woman flung a grown man up into that other world and God ripped away everything but Chaos.

No man could stand through that. He fell to his knees and felt the demonic glee as they pushed his body out of the way.

The next moment Tiffany was at his side, exhausted from the effort of throwing a mortal between worlds. Silently she faced them, clearly determined that Jasmine should hear nothing. Giles pushed himself to trembling feet and stood beside her. Deliberately, from frighteningly silver hands, she flung a bold of gold that wove tight the doorway between their place and this. But from behind Giles, a rumbling menace still threatened.

The last shadow of the two demons faded against the blinding Chaos that filled what had been such beautiful blue sky. The menace from behind swelled louder. Giles reeled around. There was nothing that he could see: Jasmine and old Mrs. Benz disappeared down the rounded shoulder of red rock.

Tiffany collapsed, drained and depleted, helpless against naked stone. A monstrous roar rushed up from behind. Giles knelt and scooped Tiffany into his arms to protect her…

Tires screeched. He was on an effing freeway!

The rented car swerved as his hands wrenched the wheel. Arms of force pulled him against the window and then threw him the other way. A furious Titanian horn belted out a roaring curse as a dirty silver truck grew huge for a moment and then pulled away again.

The rented Camry seemed like a sea turtle flapping gently bemused flippers at the road, but it came down hard and solid and Giles got control back. Trembling, he looked for a roadside rest or an exit where he could recover.

He’d slipped out of this moment and into yet another story. He couldn’t do that, he barely knew who and what he was in the current story! Driving a car back from New Mexico to the Bay Area implied some past where he’d rented the car and driven to Arizona, but he’d never done that, ever. Panting, he squinted ahead for highway signs, looked left. Then he looked to his right.

Tiffany was fast asleep in the passenger seat.

Giles jerked and nearly crashed the car again before he steadied it out.