“Well,” I deadpan. “How useful.”

I think the insinuation of not being useful wounds him. “It’s a lyric,” he blurts, then gulps his cocoa. Spits it out. “That’s not hot chocolate!” He looks down into his cup, giving it a slosh. “Oh, it’s hot chalk. My bad.” To me, he adds apologetically, “I’m new at this. Sometimes I get excited and things end up . . . half-magicked.”

I’m still stuck on this magic-words-and-wishing thing. “A lyric to what?”

He leans an inch forward, eyes trained on me with laser focus, trying to tell me without telling me. “Oh!” I exclaim. “The song that conjured you? ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You?’ ”

He nods, gaze glittering. “Yes.”

I reach for my phone, but it’s not in my pocket. “Where’s my . . . ?”

“Other room,” he supplies. “I’ll get it.” Then instantly, it appears on the kitchen table.

I Google the lyrics, reciting them out loud. When I complete the seventh line, he smacks the table so hard that I jolt.

I look up. “So I can just say that I want more time, and . . . ?”

“Correct.” He leans ever forward, a touch of mania in those otherworldly eyes. They’re the color of peeled grapes. “Do it.”

Most of my ideas are bad. I ignore this. “I want more time. Make my wish come true.”

Hall grasps my hand, there’s a flashbang of light, and we’re barreling through a black hole, audibly ripping through the fabric of the universe. We’re falling backward, my skin sucked tight against my bones, every single one of them on the verge of crushing into powder, into molecules. Gravity pulls at my hair, my fingernails, stripping my socks off. The speed at which we’re traveling forces my mouth wide open, all moisture on my tongue and lips evaporating. My teeth rattle and the pressure against my eye sockets is unbearable, but all I can do is take it, I can’t do anything, not even shout—

We both slam, hard, into a cold floor. As I drag my eyelids open, my vision crosses but I make out twin blurs of Eileen’s withered fiddle leaf fig.

Hall groans nearby, rubbing his head. I think he smacked it on the microwave. “Ohhhh, that was bad. I did not enjoy that at all.”

My response is a woozy “Errff.” My mouth’s the Sahara, lips cracked. That fierce wind is still in my head, howling between my ears. I clap my hands over them, tears pricking my eyes. “Make it stop.”

Singing abruptly fills the room at a clamor that could wake the dead. It’s BTS, and they’re coming from every speaker. They’re coming from the microwave. From a battery-operated Billy Bass fish on the wall that is wearing a Santa hat, which I did not put there. My desiccated throat manages a pathetic, barely audible “Eghh.”

“Sorry,” Hall rasps. “I accidentally made it pop instead of stop.”

The noise dies at once, but Billy Bass’s tail is still flapping. Now he’s singing “A Holly Jolly Christmas” in Michael Bublé’s voice.