“Really! I’d like to know! You were here all this time, doing magic and scarfing humane local foie gras and I don’t even know what else and you didn’t even tell me? Instead you made me pass a test. Another test! As if I haven’t passed enough tests in my life!”

Maddeningly, a tear coursed down her cheek. She snapped her hand to her face like she’d been stung.

“Julia.” You could practically feel it when Failstaff talked, his voice was that deep. It practically rattled the silverware.

“We’re sorry,” Asmodeus said, all sisterly. “We all went through it.”

“Believe me, it gave us no pleasure to think about you at that Bed-Stuy safe house.” Pouncy set his wine glass aside. “But think about it. When you dropped off the radar on FTB we had a pretty good sense that you’d hooked up with the magic scene. So we waited. We gave you time to get your feet under you, get the basics out of the way, all that low-level crap. Get your finger positions straight, crack the major language groups. To see if this was for you or not.”

“Well, thanks a fucking million. That was really thoughtful of you.” All that time she’d spent wandering in the wilderness, wondering if there was anything out there, and they’d been here this whole time, watching her. She took a shaky breath. “You don’t know what I went through.”

“We know,” Failstaff said.

She looked at them, sipping their wine, a fancy Rhône red so dark it was almost black, lolling in the golden fucking Merchant-Ivory sunlight. The house was surrounded by hay fields gone to seed. They seemed to absorb sound, leaving them alone in an ocean of hush.

“You were paying your dues,” Pouncy said. “Call it a rite of passage.”

“Let’s call it what it is,” Julia said. “You were testing me. Who do you think you are? To test me?”

“Yes, we fucking tested you!” Pouncy was exasperated, but in a decorous, good-natured way. “You would have done the same thing to us! We tested the shit out of you. Not to see if you were smart. We know you’re smart. You’re a goddamned genius, though Iris says your Old Church Slavonic is crap. But we had to know why you were here. It wouldn’t work if you were just here to play with us. It wasn’t enough for you to love us. You had to love magic.”

“We all did it, Julia,” Asmodeus repeated. “Everybody here did, and we were all pissed when we found out the truth, and we all got over it.”

Julia snorted. “You’re what, seventeen? Are you going to tell me you paid your dues?”

“I paid, Julia,” she said evenly. A challenge.