But nuclear winter was coming, and magic wasn’t keeping her warm. It was getting cold, tainted snow was falling, and the earth was getting thirsty again, thirsty for balm. The black dog was hunting. Julia was feeling it again, the blackness.

Or really blackness would have been a relief, blackness would have been a field trip compared with where she was headed, which was despair. That stuff had no color. She wished it were made of blackness, velvety soft blackness, that she could curl up and fall asleep in, but it was so much worse than that. Think of it as the difference between zero and the empty set, the set that contains nothing, not even zero. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. All these seem to laugh,/Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

December came, and the days shortened. Snow quietened the traffic on Throop Avenue. And then one day, St. Lucy’s Day as it should happen, the day of the Donne poem, it all went down. And when it did, it went down Western-style: a stranger came to town.

She had a nice look about her, the stranger, an Ivy League look. Twenty-nine maybe, dark suit, dark hair pulled back and secured with crossed chopsticks. A round face, baby fat, nerd glasses, but hard: there might once have been a time when she was pushed around, but that time was long past. As per Throop Avenue protocol, as soon as she was in the door the big gun stepped to her, the big gun being Julia.

Well. Ivy League took off her jacket and unbuttoned her cuffs. Both arms were sleeved in stars up to the shoulders. She spread them wide, in the manner of our savior, to show a 100-spot on the inside of each wrist. The room got very quiet. Julia showed Ivy League her stars. Then Ivy League made her prove it.

This had never happened to Julia before, but she knew the drill. She would have to walk through every spell she knew, every test she’d ever passed, to satisfy Ivy that she had earned her stars. Step-by-step, level by level, coins, nails, fires, magnets, the whole utility belt, from level one to level seventy-seven, which was as far as Julia had gotten. It took four hours, while the sun set and the short-timers and day students went home.

Of course Julia lived for this shit. She only flubbed a couple, in the midfifties, but the bylaws allowed her a few retakes, and she got through it, shaking but still fierce. Whereupon Ivy League nodded coldly, rolled down her sleeves, put her jacket back on, and left.