Bear's demonic silhouette woke me at eight past two this morning. I almost lit her on fire for it; the only thing that stopped me was remembering that she's five. I still cussed at her, though.

"What do you want?" I asked once I was finished.

"I did a bad thing," she whispered. The sound of it hung suspended in the dark bedroom. I swore again before getting up and following her to the basement.

I turned on the light and the room blazed yellow. On the wall opposite was a bullet-riddled poster of Piers Morgan, and on the floor below it, a dead wolf spider. "I was trying to kill Piers," explained Bear, "but then that guy jumped in front of him."

"Since when do you need me to take care of these kinds of things?"

"We—I need your ebony."

"How much?"

"And the shed key."

"Jesus Christ." We were running out of yard space, fast. If Bear didn't grow out of this phase soon...But she was staring at me, then, with her scabby face and honest eyes, and all else was lost to me. Sighing, I had her bring the spider, which wasn't much more than legs and gore at this point, out to the shed at the back end of the yard. Its padlock clinked every other second while I picked it. I still hadn't found the actual key for it, but this tended to work just fine.

Inside were many mechanism, black against tonight's hazy moonlight as it flowed through a window behind them. Bear grabbed the one candle as I shut the door, then stuffed it into my hands so I could light it. "So this is all you need?" I asked her, holding the flame next to a set of drawers labeled Property of Ralph Simmons in black marker. We kept forgetting to fix that. "Because after this, I'm going back to bed and I won't be getting up again until breakfast."

"This is it."

"Mkay." I pulled out a stack of dark wood planks, then safety glasses and nails and clamps from a shelf she wasn't tall enough to reach yet. "Redo the shed lock when you leave."

"I know."

That's how I left her—pinning some wood to the workbench in the shed—but I didn't go to sleep. I sat on my bed and looked out the window at the backyard and especially at the small glow of candlelight that shone through the opened door while Bear worked to make sure the spider had a proper resting place. It took about twenty minutes for her to finish; she was getting faster all the time.

Her return to the yard was heralded by the extinguishing of the candle and subsequent blackening of the shed. Then, she came out with a new black coffin in a spot of great importance, only a few feet from the shoulder of Ralph Simmons himself where he lay deep in the ground.

I turned my attention to Ralph. He was doing well down there—a whole slew of greenery flourished atop him. We'd had to extend the garden almost six feet to keep him from being so obvious.

Just a little bit later, Bear finished burying the wolf spider and stood, the full extent of her dirtied clothes and hands becoming apparent as she faced the house. I jammed the window open before she could escape my line of sight. "You'd better wash that off before going to bed," I called. Bear came to an odd, bowlegged stop—she still had some troubles maneuvering her limbs—and her head swiveled around blankly for a few seconds before finally tilting back to regard me where I sat.

"You said you were going to bed!"

"I will, in a minute," I told her. Glancing at the smooth mound belonging to the wolf spider, then at the rest of the mounds dotting the yard, each with its own unique level of plant growth, I added, "You did a good job."

Bear beamed.