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The other nightmare was the puppy; this one is the wolf. The stable nightmare rears on two lupine legs, hardened and somehow more real than the one Yumi had seen on the fire escape, its eyes voids of actual rage. *Run*, Painter says, then shouts it. The word cuts through her terror and she bolts, clinging to the painter's bag because she needs something to hold on to.

Painter runs ahead and waves her into a hard left turn down an alley. The nightmare is too bulky for the corner — it skids past, then heaves itself back, fills the alley mouth with two enormous hands raking the brick, cracks a window, then drops to all fours and charges. They burst out the other end onto a sports court and playground. Painter leads her past the jungle gyms hoping the metal will slow it. It does not. The nightmare tears through the equipment and a hurled chunk catches Yumi in the side, knocking her flat. Her bag skids loose; the ink jar inside cracks. The nightmare sees the spreading ink and gives the spill a wide berth.

*Leave the bag*, Painter says, and gives her a plan: it can only see *him*, so he will run south and draw it off, and she will loop around to grab the bell and ring it. She nods, trusting him because her mouth will only scream if she opens it. He takes a deep, wide-eyed breath — even though he is a ghost and does not breathe — and runs out into the playground. The nightmare sees him and gives chase. She does as she was told.

She ends up against the back wall of a building in a dark alley, huffing, taut, spine to the bricks. *Move*, she tells herself. *Painter is running for his life. Move.* Her body will not. The narrator pauses to be clear: this is not cowardice. The body knows when something means to feed on it, and breaking that instinct requires training neither Yumi nor most of us have. The only alternative her body will accept is uncontrolled flight.

A hand grabs her arm. She swings a hysterical fist at it; the figure grunts and says her name. It is Tojin — and behind him, Akane, painter's bag on her shoulder. They had tailed Yumi from the apartment, lost her at the carnival, picked up the trail again. They both assume she has snuck out again to play hero. *You promised you wouldn't go out anymore.* Akane is the one who looks properly, sees the colour of her face, and asks if she saw another nightmare. Yumi can only nod. Tojin sighs the sigh of a man explaining once again that painters do this on purpose. She tears out of his grip — *bring your ink* — and bolts back to the playground for the bell, because she knows what they do not: two painters will not be enough.

She reaches her broken bag. The bell is sliced apart, jar shattered, everything stained black. While she is still trying to comprehend that, something darker than shadow uncoils out of a piece of fallen playground equipment and rises behind her to its full height. The nightmare has not been fooled. It has not *needed* to be fooled. It has known where Yumi was the whole time — could feel her presence the way a moth feels a fire. All those weeks of skulking, the narrator notes, were *waiting*. It had been watching her.

She turns; it is too late even to scream. The clawed paw rams into her chest — and fuzzes incorporeal as it strikes, so it can drink her essence directly. An icy cold blooms outward from her heart and pumps frost through her body. Her breath comes out as a cold mist. She is dying. And the dying part of her, somewhere underneath, finds it has one final refusal in it. She reaches a trembling hand to the side, picks up a chunk of broken concrete torn loose by the beast, and *stacks it on top of the one beside it*. The nightmare hesitates. The flow of her soul slows. She finds another chunk and places it. The monster does not look frightened, but it leans forward and stares at the stones with its white-pit eyes. Something in it seems to *remember*.

Then Tojin stumbles out of the alley behind it and falls back terrified at the sight; Akane screams from behind him. The nightmare rips away from Yumi — leaving her crumpled and freezing — and lopes toward easier prey, raising a claw over Tojin's body.

Then Painter arrives.

He steps over Tojin and thrusts out his hand. A paintbrush of silver light bursts out of his essence, formed of himself. He would not later be able to tell anyone how he did it. Akane cannot see him; neither can Tojin. Yumi can — her angle is just right. He shakes; his shape begins to crumble as if a wind were scraping the outer layer off a statue. He sees Tojin whimpering on the ground and something in him steels. He rams the silver brush into the ink puddle from Akane's broken jar — and begins to paint. Sweeping arcs across the concrete around himself and Tojin. Not paint. Create. Yumi understands: the brush is an extension of him, as natural as his own heart. The spirits did send her a hero.

The nightmare steps backward. The painted vision begins to *bind* it — its skeleton pops, its claws shorten, its face narrows; it is being forced into the shape Painter is painting on the ground around it, a friendly four-legged thing with a wagging tail. It recognises the shape, and *speaks* — a fully articulate howl — then breaks his spell, restores its true form, and lopes away into the night. Defeated, embarrassed, alive.

Painter drops to his knees as the silver brush burns away in his fingers. Then he sees that Yumi is not moving. Her vision is going dark at the edges. *So cold*, she manages. He hesitates with his hands above her, then closes them around her in a full embrace. Their essences mash together. Heat detonates inside her, a dying fire given air, his heat, their heat. She goes rigid, gasps like a drowning woman. He pulls back, slick with sweat and trembling. She kept breathing. By the time Akane and Tojin reach them to help her stand, she is alive again — and maybe now, the narrator notes, they will believe.