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said Ebby.

"I'll tell you what," said Mack. "Somebody needs to tell that woman what they planning to do."

"And I guess that means you plan to be that somebody?"

"Who else? I already talked to her once."

Ebby was taken aback. "When you talk to her?"

"She give me a ride to school a couple of weeks ago."

"And you didn't mention that last night?" Ebby asked.

"Didn't come up," he said.

"The very woman everybody was talking about in a whole meeting and it 'didn't come up'?"

Was Ebby going insane on him? "I told you she went by Yo Yo," said Mack. "So I must have met her. If you asked me how, I would've told you."

"I thought we was friends, Mack Street." And she turned around and went back inside her house, leaving him out on the street, feeling, for the first time in many years, excluded from one of the homes in Baldwin Hills.

Chapter 14

PLAYING POOL Mack had a cold dream that night, and it was Yolanda White's dream.

In the dream, Yo Yo rode a powerful horse across a prairie, with herds of cattle grazing in the shade of scattered trees or drinking from shallow streams. But the sky wasn't the shining blue of cowboy country, it was sick yellow and brown, like the worst day of smog all wrapped up in a dust storm.

In the dream Mack saw a mountain of bones, and perched on top of it a creature like a banana slug, it was so filthy and slimy and thick. Only after creeping and sliming around awhile on top of the pile of bones it unfolded a huge pair of wings like a moth and took off up into the smoky sky in search of more, because it was always hungry.

It was Yo Yo's job to stop it from eating her cattle.

The thing is, through that whole dream, Yo Yo wasn't alone. It drove Mack crazy because try as he might, he couldn't bend the dream, couldn't make the woman turn her head and see who it was riding with her. Sometimes Mack thought the other person was on the horse behind her, and sometimes he thought the other person was flying alongside like a bird, or running like a dog, always just out of sight.

Mack couldn't help but think: Maybe it's me.

Maybe she needs me and that's why I'm seeing this dream. Maybe her deep wish is not the death of the dragonslug. Maybe what she's wishing for is that invisible companion.

The girl rode up to the mountain of old bones, and the huge slug spread its wings and flew, and it was time to kill it or give up and let it devour the whole herd. Only then did she realize that she didn't have a gun or a spear or even so much as a rock to throw. Somehow she had lost her weapon - though in the dream Mack never noticed her having a weapon in the first place.

The flying slug was spiraling down at her, and then suddenly the bird or dog or man who was with her, he - or it - leapt at the monster. Always it was visible only out of the corner of her eye, so Mack couldn't see who it was or whether the monster killed it or whether it sank its teeth or a beak or a knife into the beast. Because just at the moment when Yo Yo was turning to look, the dream stopped.

It stopped, and not because Mack had been able to turn it into his own dream of the canyon. It just stopped.

But he remembered his dream, and realized that his dream and hers were alike. She had somebody beside her in her dream, and Mack had somebody beside him in his. Somebody you could never quite look at.

Each of us is in the other one's dream.

She needs me to kill that dragonslug. And I need her to... or do I? She's the one driving, if she's the person in my dream. She's the one who drives me into danger.

But in her dream she needs me. In her dream I'm the hero who slays the...

If it's me. If I'm the one who attacks that flying slug.

If I'm part of her wish, and her wish comes true, then it'll come true some ugly way, and do I want to be a part of that?

So he decided not to go up the street to her house today. Instead, though it was so early in the morning that