Well, his world hadn’t done them any good. They would go rooting around in hers for a while.

“So who was that Warren guy?” Quentin said. “Seems like you guys have some history.”

“Warren is nobody. He knows a little magic, so he hangs around the college and tries to impress undergraduates and teach them some things so he can bang them.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

“What happened to him at the end there? With his arm—what was that?”

“Warren is not human. He is something else, wood spirit of some kind. He just has a thing for humans. When he gets upset he cannot keep up the disguise.”

“So did Warren ‘bang’ you?” he said.

Who knew where it came from. It just bubbled up out of nowhere: a flash of jealousy, sour and hot like acid reflux. He didn’t see it coming. He’d had a lot to absorb in one day, or night, whatever it had just been, and it was just a little too much too fast. It spilled over.

Julia leaned across the table and slapped Quentin. She only did it once, but she did it hard.

“You have no idea what I had to do to get what was handed to you on a plate,” she hissed. “And yeah, I banged Warren. I did a lot worse things too.”

You could almost see the waves of anger coming off her, like fumes off gasoline. Quentin touched his cheek where she’d hit him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not sorry enough.”

A few people looked over, but just a few. It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12

It was another year and a half before Julia saw Quentin again. He’d become a hard boy to find. He didn’t seem to have a cell phone, or even a phone, or even an e-mail address. His parents talked in vaguenesses. She wasn’t convinced that even they knew how to find him. But she knew how to find them, and he had to come back home once in a while, like a dog to its vomit. Quentin wasn’t close to his parents, but he wasn’t the type to cut them off all the way. Frankly he wouldn’t have the stones for it.

Julia, though. Julia had the stones for it. She was a flight risk, no strong ties to the community. When she heard that the Coldwaters had sold up and moved to Massachusetts, she pulled up stakes and followed them. Even a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton had Internet connections and temp agencies—no, especially a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton—and that was all she needed to get by. She rented a room over a garage from a retired guy with a janitor mustache who probably had a Web cam hidden in the bathroom. She bought a beat-up Honda Civic with a wired-shut trunk.