“I totally did!” Josh said, indignant. “How the hell do you think I could afford a fucking Venetian palazzo?”

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 14

The old wood of Josh’s dining room table felt cool against Quentin’s forehead. In a few more seconds he’d sit up again. That’s how long it would take to roll his brain back to the state it was in before it thought that their troubles were over. Until that happened Quentin would just enjoy the cool solidity of the table for a second more. He let the despair wash over him. The button was gone. He thought about banging his head a few times, just lightly, but that would have been overdoing it.

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.

All right. He sat up. The blood drained back out of his face. Back to work.

“Okay. You sold the button.”

“Look, you must have had some other plan,” Josh said. “I mean, don’t tell me you were actually planning on randomly running into me in Venice and bumming the button off me. That’s not a plan.”

“Well, no,” Quentin said, “it’s not a plan. The plan was not to get booted out of Fillory, but that ship has sailed, so I’m working on a new plan. Who the hell did you sell the button to?”

“Well, that’s a story too!” Josh launched straight into the tale, untroubled by any further self-reproach. If Quentin had moved on then so could he, and this was obviously a much happier story than the one about his sojourn in the Neitherlands. “See, I realized I was through with that button. I was done with the Neitherlands and Fillory and all that stuff. If I was going to get laid—and I was—I was going to get laid right here in the real world. So I looked around for something to do on Earth, and I started picking up on this underground scene. The safe houses, all that stuff. Have you heard about that?”

“Julia’s been catching me up.”

“I mean, I always knew there were hedge witches out there, a few of them, but this thing goes deep, man. I had no idea. There are a lot of those guys. And a lot of them come through Venice—they figure it’s really old, so, hey, magic. They think maybe they’ll pick something up. It’s kinda sad, really. Some of them are the business, they’ve figured out a lot of what we know, and some stuff we don’t, but most of them have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re desperate. They’ll try anything.