Now Peez stared at the impassive face of her recalcitrant secretary and gritted her teeth in silent frustration. Too bad she's not a golem, she thought. At least a golem obeys orders. With the sigh of the much put-upon she replied, "If it weren't for me, Wilma dear, you'd never have discovered the Way of the Great Mother and you'd still be doing those dreary covered-dish suppers at that former church of yours. I'm sure that if you do me this one itsy-bitsy favor, She'll forgive you. She's good that way."

"She's not good, She's just Great." Again that slow, weighty, side-to-side turning of Wilma's almost cubic head on her nigh-nonexistent neck. Peez found herself marveling at the fact that her secretary's terra-cotta-colored hair shed real dandruff and not flakes of dried clay. "You can't guarantee that She'll forgive me," Wilma intoned in a voice so husky it spoke of a three-box-a-day cigar habit begun some time in kindergarten. "She might even get angry. You know what happens when the Great Mother gets angry."

Peez sighed again, bringing this one all the way up from the soles of her plain black ballet flats. Of course she knew what happened when the Great Mother got angry. So did Wilma, having just achieved the rank of Junior High Priestess of the Sacred Grove, cum laude. However, Peez reasoned, if she took the time to enumerate the various afflictions that could ensue from the Great Mother's anger, perhaps her off-the-cuff filibustering would take up so much time that those pests on the line from Chicago would get tired of waiting for her to answer and would hang up.

One by one she uncurled her fingers, reckoning up the sum of divine displeasure: "Floods, droughts, crop blights, cattle murrain, slowed download times, failure of the cacao crop, plagues of feral hamsters, skyrocketing movie ticket prices—"

She could have gone on for a much longer time, ticking off all the ways that the Great Mother had on tap to let mortals know that they'd pissed Her off, but Wilma cut in with the last item on the list.

"—zits," Wilma said in a no-nonsense tone of voice that let Peez know that further disaster-listing was unnecessary and would be punished to the full extent of a secretary's considerable powers. "I know about all the rest and I can handle them just fine, but I'm not going to risk zits. Not this weekend. I've got a date."

"You've ... got ... a ... what?"

A little while later, after she had sent Wilma off to do some filing and had dealt with the call from Chicago (more whining about the whole human sacrifice squabble, which somehow had managed to slip out of committee and turn into a full-blown flamewar on the Net), Peez leaned back in her butter-soft leather desk chair with built-in footrest, CD player, aromatherapy dispenser, heating and massage capabilities, and wished she were dead.

"Brilliant," she told the ceiling. "I am just so brilliant. If I were any more brilliant, I'd be a black hole. What was I thinking?"

"You were thinking that Wilma Pilut, the girl voted Most Likely to Date Mount Rushmore, has romantic plans for this weekend and you don't."

The voice that responded to Peez's self-deprecating declaration was a little too thin and a lot too sweet to be anything human. The sweetness, however, was all inherent in the false-as-a-padded-bra tone of voice, not in the cold, cruel words it spoke.

"Then you thought that Wilma didn't notice how shocked you were to hear about her upcoming date. But you know that she did notice; she's only built thick." The voice skirled up into a trill of nerve-grating giggles. It was coming from one of Peez's desk drawers and it showed no signs of shutting up any time soon. "Then you thought you covered that little faux pas by pretending that you'd misheard her, that you thought she'd said she had some bait this weekend, so you asked her where she was going fishing. Oh, that was a brave effort! Remember how you never got cast in any of your school plays? Ever wonder why? Well, if you can't figure it out after having given that lousy performance for an audience of one very ticked-off secretary, maybe you're the one with clay between your ears! And then do you want to know what you thought?" The desk drawer rattled loudly. Something inside was trying to get out. "Do you? Do you? Huh, huh, do you?"

Peez closed her eyes and tucked a limp strand of her long, dull black hair behind one ear. "Tell me," she said wearily.

"Take me out first," said the thing in the desk.

"Why should I? I know you can let yourself out any time you like. And I also know what I was thinking, and just how stupid it was, so I don't really need you to tell me that."

"But it's not the same unless you hear it from me, is it Peezie-pie?" The drawer shook with a new attack of those high-pitched giggles.

"No." This time Peez's sigh seemed to come from somewhere beneath the continental shelf. "It's not the same when I don't hear it from you, Teddy Tumtum." She bent over and slid the desk drawer open.

The little stuffed bear grinned up at her, malice shining in his green glass eyes.

"And then," he said, picking up where he'd left off. "And then, last but not least, you thought: 'Why me?' Or should I say: 'Why not me?' I couldn't say for sure. It all depends on whether you were pondering the fact that you are so very, very, very much alone, the undisputed queen of the Dateless Wonders, Wallflowers, and Social Rejects Chowder and Marching Society, or whether you were instead dealing with the fact that even Pavement-Puss Pilut has got herself a date this weekend while all you've got is me!" The unholy bear ended his speech on a nasty note of triumph, then broke into a fresh batch of giggles.

Peez's hand shot out and seized the demonic toy by his pink-beribboned neck. "Give me one good reason not to run you through the shredder," she snarled.

"I'll go you one better and give you two," the bear replied, not even mildly flustered by her threat. "One: Because the shredder only does paper. Two: Because if you could shred me, who would you have left to talk to?" The bear's black-stitched mouth squirmed into a horrible parody of a sincerely affectionate smile. "I is your ittoo Teddy Tumtum an' I jes' wuuvs oo all to pieces, Peezie-pie."

"Well, I don't love you," Peez snapped, shaking the toy roughly.

"No fooling. Wow. Big surprise." The bear's smile was a sneer once more, and it looked much more credible. "You might not love me, lady, but you do need me. A lot. Any dumb floppy-eared beagle puppy with four paws too big for his body can be loved. I'll settle for being indispensable."

"I don't need you," Peez shot back. "I've got plenty of—"

"—friends?" the bear finished for her. Then it laughed in her face—not giggles, full- out guffaws of the purest scorn. "Yeah, sure, all of those wonderful, close friends you made back in your hometown of— What was it called again? Oh right, I remember now: Loserville. Brother, when you were in high school, you couldn't even get the chess club nerds to hang out with you!"

Peez didn't deny Teddy Tumtum's words. She couldn't. She'd had the uncanny little bear for as long as she could remember, a present from her mother. What Edwina hadn't bothered to mention to her firstborn when she'd given her the bear was that there was something ... special about Teddy Tumtum. She'd had only the best intentions, of course—didn't she always?—when she'd enspelled the toy so that it would be more than a simple, inanimate source of comfort for her lonely daughter. Using the powers she'd acquired in her spiritual scavenger-hunt past, Edwina Godz had attached Teddy Tumtum to Peez by an unbreakable (albeit glacially slow-acting) homing hex, plus she'd empowered it with more than an ordinary teddy bear's ability merely to listen to a little girl's private wishes, dreams, and sorrows.