Eleven-year-old Eleanor Jane Kistler leaves Melitown Elementary and heads through City Center, crossing the plaza to Church Way to All Faiths Cemetery. She pushes her headphones off into her hood as she settles into the blanket of rounded leaves of the pony foot covering the well-tended grave of Jane Kistler.

“Hey, Gramma,” she says, digging into her backpack for her lunch leftovers. “Nothing new to report—school is boring. I’ve already finished the English textbook, and it’s only, well, November starts tomorrow. Oh yeah, Happy Halloween, huh?” She sighs and tosses a peanut, summoning the big crow that’s been lingering around her for about a year.

“At least someone wants to hang out with me.”

“That’s an uncharitable telling of the situation, even with your limited info.” Fable’s assertions fall on Eleanor’s ears as a series of squawks.  She flicks a few more peanuts in his direction and hugs her knees, resting her forehead on the paint-stained denim. I’ll just rest my eyes for a few minutes, she thinks, yawning.

Fable wastes no opportunity to do his job. He lights weightlessly on her curled shoulder, shielding his beak and her ear with a shimmering oil-slick wing, and translates threads from the Veil into a dream.

She’s at Gramma Jane’s house, in the garden, hands in the soil, scooping a fist of it aside to plant another cucumber seedling, completing the row. “Good job, my sundrop,” her grandmother says, looking radiant in her overalls, pale blue dotted Swiss button-down, and straw hat. They work together to tie lines of string to a wooden frame for the beans to climb, and she pokes holes in a long mound in even spaces for some sunflowers along the back fence. Sometimes, she is four or five; sometimes, she is older than seven, but her grandmother is still there, tinkering in the garden with her and telling her about the plants, the soil, and the insects. When it occurs to her that she’s dreaming, it shifts to the cemetery. Gramma Jane is sitting on the pony foot, leaning back on her marble headstone, smiling up at the Japanese maple. “It’s time to wake up, sundrop, and get yourself a treat,” she says, smiling at her, crinkling her green eyes. “It’s too cold to sit out here on the ground. Go on and shoo before it gets dark.”

Eleanor wakes to the glowing burgundy purple of the late sun on the leaves, waving her off. She gathers her bag and pulls her headphones on. She doesn’t see the crow around but suspects he is just a tossed peanut away.

In the distance, he watches her move through the grave markers to the path leading to Church Way and doesn’t take his eyes off her until she enters the ornate doors of the café.

René observes the sullen girl guiding the heavy door closed so it doesn’t bang, and the bells weakly jangle her arrival. Eyes to the floor, she steps up to the end of the line, fiddles with something in the kangaroo pocket of her hooded sweatshirt, and pulls her headphones down to rest around her neck—an indication she’s not planning to stay, he’d learned from her semi-regular but dwindling visits. A discreet tasting of the air to hopefully wow her with the perfect treat perks his interest. A powerful burst of curiosity—like someone opening an orange—fills the café, and his focus is now on the young boy sitting with a teenage girl who’d stopped in for hot cider and generous wedges of his pearsauce bunt with pecans.  He’s staring, fork raised and mouth open, at Eleanor, who is staring at nothing perceptible to the known and less-knowable worlds. I see, I see. Well, the devil files this away while boxing up a cranberry shortcake for the gorgon he was waiting on.

“Mademoiselle Aliénor! Step up closer, my dear,” he says when it’s her turn, but she’s made no move forward. She startles and looks around, embarrassed but relieved no one is behind her.

“Hello, René,” she nods, and he beams at her for not starting with Mister and correcting herself, which had taken almost a year. “Happy Halloween,” she adds, and he darkens a bit, noting the flatness.

“Maybe I can make it a bit happier? It fills me with warmth and joy that you’ve come to me, and I didn’t have to go looking for you. I told Mogieannah just this morning I wanted to see you and feed you copious amounts of sugar.”

Eleanor smiles. She loves how he always speaks as though the café’s resident toad was a regular customer. “I would love something sweet.”

“Go sit, and I will bring it out. This is too good for carryout. You wouldn’t dare deny me the opportunity to gift you one of my glorious presentations, right?” he says, waving her toward the tables.

“Certainly not. Whoever could?”

He nods approvingly. “Exactly so.”

She pushes her headset back into its hood-nest and unzips as she scans the café for a table and pauses, seeing the excited waving of the neighbor boy from across the street.

Amira Kino gives her a bright smile and waves her over, scooting further into her booth and motioning to the spot next to her. “Ellie! It’s good to see you. Come join us!”

“Oh, I um. Is it ok?” she asks, forehead wrinkling and glancing back at the counter. René nods like he’s noting her location and the older girl says, “Of course, of course. I feel like it’s been a long time since I saw you.”

Eleanor slides into the spot and looks at Simon, who takes a big bite from an empty fork and turns red, seeing the missing piece back on his plate. “What’dja order?” he asks, stabbing it this time.

“Oh, I don’t know. He just picks, and it’s always good,” she shrugs and fiddles with the slider part of her hoodie’s zipper. “You both got the same thing?”

“Amira doesn’t like to share,” he says.

“Simon has a unique definition of sharing,” his sister counters.

René arrives with a tray and sets a large mug of her favorite spiced cocoa in front of her and then a paper box shaped like an open coffin filled with smaller versions of her favorite cookies. “I thought you might like to share, but that was before I heard sharing isn’t popular with this crowd,” he says before she can protest, and then to the siblings, “How are your ciders? Need some more?”

Amira declines with her thanks. He tucks the tray beneath his arm and reaches his free hand to smooth Eleanor’s hair, a jade bead dangling from the ties of one of his leather bracelets bopping against her nose, purely unintentionally. “Trick or treat starts soon, so there’ll be a lot of noise. If you want, you and your friends can go into the drawing room and practice sharing.”

Eleanor smiles weakly and gives the mug a look that René’s vomeronasal organ—one of the more reptilian features devils possess—tells him is a deep longing for a to-go cup. She wants to bolt, and if he’s not careful, he might accidentally provoke her to scratch that itch. Now, a cloying yearning for attention wafting from the boy makes him take a step back, and he resists the urge for an undignified snort to cleanse his olfactory system.

“Oh, but first, you could give me a hand with the treats?”

She quickly nods, “Yeah, yeah! I can do that, ‘specially since you gave me so many cookies.” She motions to them, saying to Amira and Simon, “Please have some. They’re really good.” She takes a cashew butter hoofprint (a hoofprint-shaped arrangement of cashews pressed into a smooth, nutty, chewy cookie that Eleanor could happily eat by the handful daily) and slips from the booth to follow him into the back.

“Thank you,” she whispers as they cross the kitchen’s threshold.

“Aliénor, I know you are sad, but you’re not leaving any room for happiness to squeeze in,” he says, passing her a basket of caramel-coated popcorn balls and taking a larger tray of bright green candy-dipped apples. He leads her to the row of tables he’d already set up along the path from the door to the counter, which she’d missed in her dispirited entrance earlier.

“Oh, the café looks really nice,” she says, stacking the individually wrapped treats up like a pyramid on an empty tray next to the apples’ tray he’d just deposited. They shone in the light and looked day-glo lime and properly toxic. He is very good at Halloween.

Back in the kitchen for one more trip with some pretty spot-on eyeball truffles and cupcakes decorated with realistic snake tails poking out and curled around the otherwise-usual piped buttercream frosting. Another tray of cupcakes with swooshes of fudge that resemble slugs all too well makes her gasp out a little laugh. “These are kinda sick,” she admits, shaking her head.

“They are masterpieces. Wait and see. The kids will adore them.”

“I’m a kid.”

“Other kids, kids who love fun and are open to enjoying being a kid.”

“I’m like that.”

“You haven’t been recently, my favorite tiny trouble.”

“I’m sorry to trouble you.”

“Wrong kind of trouble. I mean the fun kind because, in case you weren’t aware, I love fun.”

“I miss fun.”

“I miss seeing you having fun. What’s stopping you from trying to make new friends?”

“It went so well last time.”

“It did! You made an excellent friend.”

“And she’s gone now.”

“You’re saying it like she’s never coming back.”

“Is she?”

“I bet you something good; you’ll see her again.”

“I want to see her now.”

“The bet isn’t about time. It’s about you seeing her again. You in?”

“What do you win when I see her on television accepting an award for being a genius or something?”

“So little trust in me? Fine. I will do you a favor every year you aren’t reunited.”

“What do you get if I’m wrong?”

“Hmm. You can do me a favor.”

“That’s just one favor.”

“I don’t really need anything.  One favor plus you have to say ‘René Akerregi is the coolest and is always correct’ in front of her.”

Eleanor huffs, “Sounds suspicious. Where do I sign?”

René grins, and for a moment, she thinks some lights from outside have caught his dark eyes and shifted them a warm honey amber. “Do we have a deal, Eleanor Jane Kistler?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

“Say it,” he says with a little more bass than she was used to.

“We have a deal.”