That night as Nick slept holding the guitar tightly to protect it from Lene, she sat and studied him, trying to untangle the enchantment that had wrapped so tightly around his mind. Pulling at the spell was like plucking uselessly at strings she didn't know how to play. Every bit of magic she unwrapped from Nick, another came from the cursed guitar holding on to him tightly. That guitar was the key. She had to get rid of it somehow, so she would be free to undo the spell. But how, when the last time she'd taken it away from him, his reaction had been so strong, almost violent?

Through the darkest hour of the night the girl sat watch and plotted.

At first morning light, Lene slipped quietly out of bed and shrugged into the small coat Nick had found for her in the closet. It was still a little too large for her and went down past her knees, so she had to roll up the sleeves a bit. She shouldered one of the bags that Nick already packed and buckled on her shoes. As Lene stood in the open doorway, her heart beat so loudly she thought it would wake him. She lifted her hand to his sleeping form from across the room, closed her eyes, and pulled. The guitar wrenched free from Nick's embrace and came sailing into her arms. 

Lene felt the enchantment reacting to the touch of her body, and the curse reached for her mind with its song of Oblivion. She batted the spell away. As long as she didn't try to play the instrument, she could fight off its magic.

With a start Nick jerked awake and stood up from the chair he had been sleeping in. His body swayed, befuddled with sleep. "What's happening?" He spotted Lene across the room standing in the doorway with the guitar. His eyes narrowed. "Where are you going with that?"

"I'm sorry, Nick."

In a split-second he charged at her, leaping with a suddenness that made Lene take a step back. She waved her hand, sending the stuffed mattress from the bed flying into him, knocking him to the floor. Then she shut the front door and ran. 

"Please don't open. Please don't open. Please don't open," she willed, trying to seal the door with magic as best as she could. But it was weak and wouldn't hold Nick for long.

The quiet vale was awash in pale gray light that showed her the way. Before he had been ensnared by the spell, Nick had told Lene that Nightingale Hill was visible further down the valley. She could feel the faint tug from the castle that was always there, inexplicably pulling her towards it. She ran through the tall grass, which swayed in the crisp morning breeze. Its dew soaked her skirt, plastering it to her legs, and the bottom of her coat hung damp and heavy. Lene wished she knew a spell that would make her fly.

At the far end of the valley, she looked back and her heart leapt into her throat. The wooden door of the cottage was splintered and broken, and Nick had just begun to give chase across the meadow. She had a few minutes' lead on him, but he was much bigger and faster than she was. Lene turned and bolted.

If Nick caught her, she didn't think he could actually harm her, but she didn't want to wait and find out. She came to the narrow pass between the mountains that Nick had described, and there she saw framed in the sky between the two mountains a cold sliver of white stone, Nightingale Hill. It was bigger than she'd ever seen it before, near enough for her to make out its twisting parapets and impossibly high towers that reached for the heavens. Beneath Lene's feet, the grass of the valley gave way to dry scrub and a worn gravel path. Her wet shoes lost traction, and she slipped on the loose gravel and went down, scraping her outer leg all the way up her thigh as her dress and coat rode up around her hips. Tears sprung to her eyes, and she smarted from the pain.

"Lene! You can't run from me forever! Give it back, and I promise I won't get mad!" Nick's voice echoed across the valley and off the sides of the mountain pass.

She gave a low moan of dread. How was he catching up so quickly? The girl scrambled to her feet and collected the guitar, which seemed no worse for wear though she had dropped it in her fall. For a moment she wondered if it were indestructible. Best hope not. Favoring her scraped leg, she continued on with a shuffling gait. Her lungs burned and she was gasping for breath, but somehow Lene managed to stay ahead of Nick. The trail wound back and forth between the mountains and then opened suddenly to join a wide thoroughfare that led directly to the next town. 

By this time, Lene was tired and limping and unsure of how much further she could go. She was coming up to a large artifact of jagged stone at the side of the road. "Welcome to…" it declared, but the name of the town had been scratched out long ago by someone or something.

And then she saw him. Nick burst through the mountain pass, his hair a wild golden mess, and he looked like a snarling beast that was about to froth at the mouth at any second. When he spotted Lene down the road, he came running at her, his eyes livid and rolling with madness. Nick closed the hundred or so yards between them in what felt like a matter of seconds. There was nowhere to run.

In sheer terror, Lene burst into tears. A sudden rush of adrenaline propelled her feet, and she launched herself at the jagged welcome stone, blindly swinging the guitar through the air. It exploded with an ugly twang. She swung and swung, bits of wood splintering and flying all around her until the broken instrument hung limply in her hands. She could sense its magic disperse into the air and float away. Then she turned and reached out for Nick who was nearly upon her, grabbed a hold of the spell enchanting him, and pulled with all her might. His body hurled into hers, knocking her over. They fell at the side of the road, a tangle of bodies rolling over and over in the brush and weeds. 

When at last they came to a stop, Nick wasn't moving. Lene lay there beside him for the longest time, gasping in exhaustion and crying with relief that it was over. When at last she sat up, her hair was tangled in her face, full of dried bits of grass and dirt and wet with her tears. She pushed it back to look at Nick's motionless body. His eyes were open, and he was looking up at her expressionlessly. Had it not worked? Was the spell still upon him?

Finally, Nick blinked. "Lene, where are we?" he asked, seriously confused. "…And why are you crying?"

She threw her arms around him and started sobbing so hard she felt her heart would burst.

***

It took forever for Nick to piece together what had happened as he couldn't get Lene to stop bawling for more than a minute. The last thing he really remembered was finding the guitar and trying to play it, and from there everything became a blur. Based on Lene's fragmented explanations, he was able to gather that the guitar had been cursed with a powerful spell that made him so obsessed with playing he forgot everything else. When she finally managed to take it away from him, Nick had chased Lene all the way to the next town before she was able to destroy the guitar and lift the spell.

The little girl had gotten thoroughly bruised and scraped in the process. Cradling her in his arms, he carried her into town and unlocked the first house he came to, a large two story with red shuttered windows. The outside was shingled in natural wood siding, and the inside of the house had a rustic, woodsy feel.

"Don't cry… don't cry…" Nick whispered soothingly and stroked Lene's tangled hair as he carried her down the hall. Setting her on a bathroom counter, he unlocked the drawers and medicine cabinets looking for disinfectant. He found some, along with cotton pads and bandages. "Hold on just a second," he told her and then went to look for towels, which he discovered in a linen closet in the hallway.

Nick set Lene's backpack on the floor and helped her out of her coat then turned on the tap and let the water run until it was warm. The nine year old had stopped crying for the moment, but her body shook with dry sobs. "Sorry, but this might hurt a bit. You should bite down on this." He gave her a small, fluffy hand towel. "Here, open your mouth… Try to breathe through your nose, okay?"

When she was ready, Nick flushed out her wound with warm water, rinsing away the dirt and gravel, and then disinfected the scrape, which ran up the side of her left calf all the way to the middle of her thigh. Silent tears were streaming down Lene's face from the pain, but she sat and bore it until Nick was done. There wasn't much blood anymore, so he wrapped her leg loosely in a light cotton bandage with some antibiotic gel he'd found in one of the drawers.

"My brave girl," he smiled at her encouragingly when he was finished. 

Lene shook her head, her face screwing up tightly for another round of crying. "Nooooooo, not brave… it was all my fault." 

"Don't say that. If anything, I'm the one to blame. I'm so sorry I scared you. It wasn't your fault, baby."

"B-b-but it was! I knew, I KNEW what it was doing and I didn't stop it. I…" The nine year old didn't look at him, but her eyes brimmed with fresh tears.  "You're going to get mad at me if I tell you…" she whispered.

"No way," he told her, placing a hand on her back and rubbing gently. He was a bit alarmed because, as far as he could recall, he'd never seen anyone cry as much as she had been doing in the past hour. Still, whatever the problem was, it couldn't be as bad as she was making it out to be. "Just tell me what's wrong."

"…I don't want you to go away, Nick."

"Huh?" Her response threw him off. "What are you talking about, kid?"

"If we find that castle, you're going to go leave me. I'll be stuck here in Other World by myself while you go back home. I'll never see you again. I don't want to lose you!" she cried.

"Lene…" Nick had never considered what would happen to her once he got to the castle and found his way out of this place.

She continued on, tears streaming down her cheeks anew. "So when we found the guitar in that house… I let it curse you. I knew that it had a bad spell on it. I could have stopped it, but I wanted you to forget about going away so that we could stay together at the cottage with our cows and chickens forever. I'm so sorry, Nick!"

He was a bit shocked. "You let it curse me?" Nick repeated.

"I did it because I don't want you to leave me."

"Kid…" Nick's hand fell away from her back. "Don't you understand?  I have to get to Nightingale Hill." Grabbing a towel, he wiped the tears off her face, but they kept flowing. "Other World isn't my home.  I'm starting to remember more--my friends, my family, the world I belong in… I need to get back there."

"What about me? I'm going to be stuck behind when you leave! All alone. S'like I don't even matter. You don't care about me, do you?" she bawled.

"That's not true, and you know it." Nick wrapped his arms around the nine year old, hugging her close. "I do care about you, kid. I'm not doing this because I want to abandon you. I'm sorry I didn't think more about what my leaving would mean. Don't cry anymore, please."

Lene pressed her face into his chest. "You're still going to leave me though…"

"Baby, I don't know what I'm going to do now." He kneeled down so that he was eye-level with her. "But we're going to figure something out, all right?"

She nodded while he soothed her dark curls then hugged Nick around the neck. "I love you, Nick," Lene whispered. "I'm gonna miss you when you go."

"I love you, too, kid. And let's not worry about splitting up right now. Let's just focus on getting to that castle," he said. "But first, maybe we should find some clean clothes." His jeans had gotten torn at the knees when he fell, while one side of Lene's skirt was pink with blood from her fall in the mountain pass. He lifted her down from the counter. "Can you walk?"

"I think so." The girl took a few steps forward, gingerly limping on her left leg.

Nick shook his head. "I don't think so." He scooped her up again right away and carried her out of the bathroom and back down the hall. "There's no way you're walking on that leg. I guess the castle can wait just one more day."

***

Nick breathed heavily. He'd been watching her all night, mesmerized by the sway of her hips and the laughter in her face as she played hard to get. The dance floor was crowded with bodies gyrating, pulsing, grinding against one another to the beat. They saw each other from across the room and pretended to ignore one another. It was all part of the chase. He tried to act cool, of course, letting her wonder until finally he ventured to buy her a drink. From there things progressed smoothly--her name, her phone number, more drinks, flirtation, and then the invitation back to her place readily accepted.

Her apartment was stylish and located in a swanky part of the city, but it was like a million other apartments he'd been in before, just as she was like a million other girls he'd slept with--long, bottle-blonde straightened hair; a superficial mind; and an attractive body enhanced by regular visits to the gym, trips to the tanning salon and, more likely than not, a bit of plastic surgery. But none of that mattered, not while Nick's head swam from all the liquor he'd consumed. 

All he could think of right now was how beautiful this girl was, even if her beauty was artificial, and how much he wanted her, even if she was just another empty conquest. Clothes were discarded beside the bed haphazardly. Hands, mouths roamed… Voices murmured low. Her eyelids were heavy as she climbed on top of him, straddling his hips, and he had a perfect view of her luscious body. Such full breasts, gorgeous curves, a flat belly, and her hands were like sin as they moved across his stomach and down… down… down…

Nick awoke with a groan. He sat up and pressed his hand to his beating chest, the sheet he slept with falling away from him. It had just been a dream, a terribly realistic dream. But how was he supposed to go back to sleep with this aching feeling inside? Nick looked around the darkened room. Lene was sleeping beside him, and it was still the middle of the night. Although he usually gave her the bed while he took the floor or a separate chair, after her heart-wrenching confession the little girl had refused to leave his side. When they went to bed that night, she had insisted on curling up beside him on the floor. It made no sense for the both of them to sleep on the ground, so Nick had caved and climbed into bed, letting her join him.

Now he climbed out of bed, needing to go outside and take a walk for a bit. With a grimace, he reached down and adjusted himself. He wasn't some sicko who could just lie there with an erection next to his little sister--well practically his little sister, anyway. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for them to share a bed. Although Nick had dreamt of sleeping with other women before tonight's mystery girl, this time had definitely been the most vivid. If he was going to continue having such intense dreams, he would have to insist to Lene on sleeping alone.

Clumsy from sleep, Nick accidentally whacked the bulge in his pajama pants with the bedroom door as he opened it and yelped. Quickly he glanced up to see if he'd woken Lene, but the nine year old appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

Nick hobbled uncomfortably down the hallway, downstairs, and out the front door into the cold. A few minutes was all it took, and then he was climbing back into bed again. He growled deep in his throat and turned over onto his stomach to bury his face in his pillow. He desperately needed sleep as they were supposed to start traveling again in the morning, not a night filled with restless tossing and turning. Nick shut his eyes and tried not to think about the sweet breasts of that bleach blonde. Before he finally drifted back to sleep, he reflected that every dream had been with a different girl. Back in his own world Nick seemed to have quite the uncontrollable libido. 

Well soon he would be out of Other World, he told himself, and soon he would be able to satisfy the intense urges he felt inside.