Sebastian

in that direction, he glanced down the street.
    Instead of leading her to the table, he curled a hand around her arm and led her away from the courtyard.
    Sebastian stiffened. That son of a succubus! If Teaser thought to have some fun playing a game of rival-rival, he'd find himself looking for another landscape to live in. There wasn't time for games. Lynnea wouldn't be here more than a few hours. And he needed those hours more than he wanted to admit.
    As he shifted to set the wineglass on the table, he felt someone approach. The explicit warning to leave him alone never made it past the thought as Glorianna slipped into the chair next to his, her back to the street.
    There was so much to tell her, but he blurted out the thing most important to his heart at that moment.
    "She doesn't belong here."
    Glorianna reached for the wine bottle and poured a glass for herself. "No one comes to the Den by mistake."
    "She did."
    She sipped the wine and studied him. "Are you sure?"
    "She was supposed to go to the Landscapers' School, but something happened and she ended up here."
    "Then something here must have resonated with something inside her."
    Me . But he wasn't going to say that. Not to Glorianna Belladonna. "I'm going to take her to the Landscapers' School after she's had some sleep."
    Glorianna hesitated. "If that's what you need to do."
    "It's the right thing to do." His voice sounded harsh, but he heard the plea beneath the harshness. Tell me I'm wrong, Glorianna. Tell me I can keep her here with me without taking away the life she should have had .
    But Glorianna said nothing, just stared at the wine in her glass. Finally she said quietly, "There may be trouble at the school. Serious trouble, if the Landscapers ignored the warning signs. But it should be safe enough for you and Lynnea to go to the school, since neither of you will be there for long."
    He shifted, folding his arms to lean on the table, bringing him closer to her. "What's happened?"
    "The Eater of the World is free in the landscapes again."
    "The Eater of the World is a myth," Sebastian protested. "An evil that children whisper about to scare one another—or adults use to scare children into behaving."
    "It's real, Sebastian," Glorianna replied. "It was confined for so long, most people don't remember It as anything but a story. But now It has escaped. The landscapes that were sealed up with It aren't sealed anymore, and It has the power to connect those places with other landscapes to create access points from which It can emerge to hunt. It will feed on the fear It creates, strengthening Its power over a place until the dark facets of the heart are the only things that shine in that landscape. Until the Light is so dimmed people won't be able to find it in themselves. Hope, happiness, love. Those feelings will fade until they're little more than a memory barely remembered."
    Sebastian refilled his glass, then downed half the wine. "Do you think that… thing… has been hunting in the Den?"
    "I know It came here. It tried to anchor one of Its landscapes to the alley where the woman was killed. I altered the Den after I saw what It had done."
    He told her how the alley had shifted when he, Teaser, and the bull demon had gone in to investigate the body. Then he told her about the other death in the waterhorses' landscape.
    "I can understand why this Eater would come hunting in the Den," he said as he poured the rest of the wine into their glasses. "The Den is a dark landscape with plenty of humans and humanlike demons in a small area. But why kill a waterhorse? They're demons that prey on humans when they get the chance.
    Wouldn't this thing want to… embrace them?"
    Glorianna shook her head. "Like the bull demons and the Merry Makers and some of the others, the waterhorses are a dark aspect of Ephemera—a natural one. The Eater didn't shape them. It can't control them, so It will hunt them, too." She hesitated. "Sebastian, don't stay away from the Den too long. Do what you have to do, but don't stay away too long."
    "Why?" There was something she didn't want to tell him, but this wasn't the time for more secrets, not if she was right about this Eater of the World being loose in Ephemera's landscapes.
    He didn't like the look in her eyes. Pride and regret—and both those feelings aimed at him.
    "Because you're the Den's anchor," she finally said. "The others who live here provide… texture… but the Den, at its core, is what you want it to be,