"It's nothing he didn't know," I answered. "Nothing you didn’t know, come to think of it. I don't think people are fools to believe in it, particularly, but I don't."

"Would you believe in it if you saw it?" he asked.

I considered it, and took the coward's way out. "I don't think we can know how to answer that until we're faced with it."

"But you can't outright say that you'd always think it was a sham."

"Well, I like to think I have at least a little bit of an open mind. Why?"

He shrugged.

"You're not angry at me for being a skeptic, are you?" I asked. "You told me yourself that your help with the twins was a trick. I don't think you go to church, either, do you?"

"No, not usually," he agreed. He was walking with shoulders hunched and head down, watching our feet crunch through the frost on the road. "I'm trying to decide how to say things, that's all. I'm not good at saying things, you know that."

"I think you're fine at saying things."

"Not...not in ways most people understand, though," he said. "You're different."

"So you've said. And, well, thank you, but I don't know how true that is."

"It's just difficult to know where to start."

I put my hands in my pockets, idling along at the slow pace he'd set. "All right, that's fair. Can I tell you something that might help?"

"Sure, if you think it will."

"You know I used to live in Chicago."

"Sure."

"But I didn't own a bookstore there. I worked in business – I made a lot of money, actually," I said, remembering the sixty-hour weeks I had put in, hating every second of it. I sure did like the money though, and I'd liked what it bought me. "I wouldn't be able to keep Dusk Books if I hadn't. Most years I barely break even, after taxes."

"This is a very weird way of reassuring me," he said.

"Sorry, I wandered. I studied economics at school – what's so funny?" I asked, when he laughed.

"I just pictured you as the English Major type. Maybe History."

"Well, my parents were paying for college, they wanted a businessman. Then around the time I realized it wasn't for me, my mother died and I didn't want to stress my dad out, and the pay would be good. Still not the point," I added. "The point is that I had this internship during school at a big office building. Filing. Dad thought it'd get me a foot in the door. There was a huge room full of files and cabinets, and a bunch of us spent most of the day reading and sorting them."

"That really doesn't sound like you, Christopher."

"It isn't. Not anymore. Anyway, I was working with this one woman – I think she was fond of me. We talked a lot, as we filed, because it wasn't really a job two intelligent people need all their brainpower for."

"What did you talk about?"

"This and that, I suppose. She was religious, she knew I wasn't – I didn't tell her, someone else probably did. One day she asked me if I believed in God."

"What did you say?"

"I remember it because it seemed like such a good answer at the time," I said, smiling ruefully. "I told her that I'd never really needed to believe in God."

"What?"

"I said I'd depended on myself instead, and if I could get by without His help I didn't see why I should ask for it."

"Oh, Christopher," he sighed. "Even I know better than that."

"I know! How arrogant could I be? I managed to dismiss her entire faith and imply that she needed an emotional crutch all at once. I feel like an asshole about it now. What I mean, though, is that it's still kind of true, but these days I just think everyone has a crutch. Some people believe in God, some believe in magic, some believe in science...we all have something to get us through the day."

"What do you believe in?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Books, I suppose."

"That's good news for me. You trust books."

"I trust books to always be what they are," I qualified cautiously. "I don't always believe what they say, but I believe in their power to speak. The nice thing about books is that the same book will always show you the same words. It's up to you to figure out what they mean."

"A constant," Lucas suggested.

"Within reason. Until the ideas or the words become unintelligible with time."

Lucas fell silent and we continued on with the comfortable crunch of the snow in our ears. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke again.

"The book you helped me find," he began hesitantly, "It has information in it. Things people have forgotten or don't believe in anymore. It...definitely speaks to me."

"Oh, like myths and stuff?" I said. "I'm glad you're enjoying it."

"More than that. I believe in it. I think there aren't just myths. They aren't just myths. They're...processes. Ways of changing things. Like in the Metamorphoses you gave me."