Fifteen minutes after Tiffany saved him, Giles got the call telling him his mother was dead.

His first thought was relief: the Planners would have to let him leave the festival early. He wouldn’t have to perform tonight. He looked for Carol, the Planner in charge of him.

One hour later, he was in his beat-up old car, headed for the San Francisco. As relief at being free from the nightmare faded, the grief at losing his mother rose. He was going to miss proud, calm Mary Hammond.

She had died at the very moment Tiffany saved him.

No, that was silly, he told himself, she had died hours before. The Miyazukis had found her just as Tiffany saved him.

Mary Hammond had lived on one of those special streets that, while not in any way closed to the public, seem to require a special invitation to find. Giles always needed to look at handwritten directions; his memory was vague and the GPS always dumped him in front of a dry cleaners next door to a pizza parlor called Cheeze Louise.

He turned off Portola Drive down a steep hill and took the sharp right that was so hard to find and after three more turns climbed steeply to the cul de sac where the really special houses started. They were a pair of old-style apartment buildings, stately grand dames lovingly painted in cream and caramel.

They seemed to have been planned as part of a town square and at the same time to have grown out of the hillside. Giles had wished he could live in a place like this ever since his mother had moved in 10 years ago.

He realized with shock that he just might get to do that now.

Hiyako Miyazuki met him at the curb with a soft hug. Giles had loved her and her family since his first visit to Mary Hammond’s home.

One of the world’s preeminent players of the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, Hiyako was as kind as a human can be. The deep meditative music she played seemed to have filled her to her fingertips. Giles usually needed words to follow a story but when she played a fifteen-minute piece about nesting cranes he could see the parents making the nest, the little ones growing and the parents finally expiring peacefully, full of hope for the next generation.

With a shock, he realized that Hiyako was a storyteller too. He resolved to keep that thought to himself. He didn’t want her dragged into the nightmare of the festivals.

“I’m so sorry about Mary,” she said in her quiet voice, kissing his cheek. “We all loved her.”

“Thank you.” Giles still felt in a daze. “I guess it was Jasmine who found her?”

“It certainly was. Come on in, Giles. There are some things you need to know, and soon.”

“Where is she now?” he asked as they climbed the stone stairs which switchbacked three times through trees to the door of the Spanish style building with the red tiled roof. There are some things you need to know?

“Well, that’s part of what we need to talk about. Come on inside.” She pushed open the wide double doors.

The alcove always smelled like breakfast and flowers at the same time. They climbed another set of stairs and went down a corridor carpeted in reds and browns. Around a corner which was sharper than 90 degrees (nothing in these buildings quite seemed to fit into them) they came to the solid brown wood door of the Miyazuki’s apartment.

Inside was just that kind of living space that Giles ached to own. Hardwood floors with a dark mellow gleam and a texture that bare feet would caress. Shelves and cabinets built into the walls, a little door that opened to let out an ironing board, cast iron light fixtures modified from their original use as gas jets. Sunlight splashed the white walls, ornaments graced the red brick fireplace. The Japanese art which Hiyako loved mixed harmoniously with the desert southwest art which RJ treasured. Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa and Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower at the Atake Bridge somehow worked well with the Hopi pottery and Navajo weaving, sparse and lovely as the endless desert.

Hiyako sat Giles at the kitchen table made of golden wood and brought him Sencha tea in a thick green cup. RJ came in from his studio where he did his landscape design drawings. He was a big quiet man with a thick beard and long black hair just getting its first touches of grey. He wore overalls and a red checked shirt, just like every time Giles had ever seen him. RJ Miyazuki had been born RJ Reynalds and had taken his wife’s name rather than continue to have the name of an aluminum company, or so he said.

Hiyako was petite, with straight black hair halfway down her back. Her mouth, set in a round face just getting its first wisdom lines, seemed always bowed into a hint of smile that promised mischief. But you knew that any trouble she caused would be the kind that shakes people out of their routine and brings them closer to each other; “holy mischief” Giles had once heard it called.

Giles had fantasized being lovers with Hiyako but RJ was too good-hearted and Giles too ethical for him to ever try. (But he secretly hoped they’d surprise him one day by saying they had an open relationship. No luck so far.)

RJ pulled him up into a warm bear hug. “He-e-ey, Little Brother,” he rumbled. With no more preamble, he pushed Giles back into his chair and slid a plate of food in front of him: two fried eggs, soft fragrant corn bread, sautéed mushrooms with caramelized onions.

Giles realized only then how hungry he was. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and in the interim, he had faced death by lethal injection. He shivered at the thought of the creeping dark sleep, not gas and not liquid, which would have hollowed out his veins and arteries, turned his nerves into baked cables and left him hollow-eyed, cold and owning nothing but bleak despair, searching through nighttime mist.

Or at least that was how he pictured “death by injection of sleepy dark.” Nobody really knew what the ominous threat entailed.

He quickly filled his mouth with warm food, let the buttery gold of the corn bread chase away the darkness, moaning with pleasure at the outright deliciousness of RJ’s cooking. The big man tenderly watched him eat and Hiyako sipped her tea, foot tapping the floor in a tattoo that reflected his own energy and that slowed as he calmed.

The face of Tiffany floated before him. He wondered where she was, if she had even the most random stray thought for him.

The plate before him was empty and he could feel again. He tried on the thought, my mother is dead.

He had loved that marvelous and mysterious old woman, and yet he felt happy now. He saw Hiyako’s understanding smile and knew there was nothing wrong with him. Those things he “needed to know” would explain why he didn’t feel sad. He nodded at her and at RJ, though his attention always focused more on her. “I’m ready.”

As if they had choreographed their movements, Hiyako sat at the end of the table and took his hands and RJ, without in any way leaving the conversation, moved into the next room, picked up a brush which seemed slender as a willow wand in his big hands and applied it with comforting focus to the paper in front of him.

“Giles, this building is something more than an ordinary apartment building. You know this, don’t you?”

His heart beat faster and he nodded shyly. Things were about to be spoken that he’d wanted to hear all his life and he was afraid to say anything for fear of breaking the spell.

But Hiyako reassured him. “Don’t be afraid to speak, Giles. Everything you hear now will be exactly what you need to hear.” And nothing more, he filled in. With a painful twist, he remembered the awful Storytelling Festival. Anything I hear now might be wrung out of me when I’m back there. Hiyako nodded as she watched him realize this.

Now he did feel on the verge of tears. He didn’t feel sad for Mary Hammond but he did feel grief that he might not even now hear her full story because of the Planners and that Festival. Still afraid to speak, he stared into Hiyako’s eyes.

“The unseen world, that which the Planners call the Demon World, it flows in trickles and rivulets through this house. These things are true and yet the words are lies. Take them how you will for now. All of us who live here are blessed and carry this magic in our hearts.” (“Absolutely,” RJ’s deep voice brushed in from the other room.)

Giles burned with desire to live in this building, to be included among those blessed by faerie magic, to have the complexities of his life sifted down to this quiet simplicity. “How was she when Jasmine found her?” he asked.

He showed no surprise that a little girl should have been in his mother’s private apartment. Little Jasmine Miyazuki was one of the magic things about this house.

Every apartment was connected by a series of little secret tunnels, corridors which passed behind and between the rooms. You knew that when you moved in. Seven-year-old Jasmine roamed the spaces between the rooms with perfect freedom. Everybody in this building knew her and loved her.

She might show up when you were reading or talking in quiet voices or cooking. From his understanding, she had sometimes quelled arguments by putting a small hand on each of people involved. When people really needed privacy she somehow knew, and never drifted in where she was not welcome.

Giles loved her like the father he would probably never be; if he ever did have a child, he hoped she’d be like Jasmine. Earlier today, Jasmine would have stepped into his mother’s apartment in that way she had of completely belonging; you couldn’t imagine her not being there. Her big golden-green eyes would have seen Mary Hammond laying on the floor.

Hiyako’s eyes grew brighter, thinking of her daughter. “She found dear Mary lying on her own floor, knelt and stroked her face, then came and got us. ‘Silver Mary’s gone with her Gift,’ she told me.”

“Silver Mary,” Giles repeated. A smile played on his lips.

“That’s our Jasmine. But it was also Mary: she didn’t want to be Auntie or Mother or anything so she told Jasmine to come up with a special name for her.”

Silver Mary. It made her sound like a character in an old Irish legend.

But it was dangerous to think about someone being a character in a story.

It was all too likely that she would become one.