“And to answer your question,” Pouncy said, “who do we think we are? We are us. And you’re one of us now, and we’re damn glad you’re here. But we don’t take chances on people.” He waited for that to sink in. “There’s too much at stake.”

Julia crossed her arms fiercely, or with all the ferocity she could muster, to avoid giving them the impression that they were entirely forgiven. But God damn them all to Hades, she was curious. She wanted to know what the hell this place was, and what they were up to. She wanted to know what the game was, so she could play too.

“So whose house is this?” she said. “Who paid for all this?”

Obviously there was a lot of money washing around here. She’d stood by while Pouncy called the rental car company and, in fluent French, simply bought the scraped-up Peugeot with a credit card.

“It’s Pouncy’s,” Asmodeus said. “Mostly. He was a day trader for a while. He was pretty good at it.”

“Pretty good?” Pouncy lifted his finely drawn eyebrows.

Asmo shook her head. “If you’d gone into the math just a little further you could have done so much better. I keep telling you, if you look at the market as a chaotic system—”

“Whatever. It wasn’t an interesting problem. It was a means to an end.”

“If you’d just stake me—”

“We all put in money when we came here,” Failstaff said. “I put in all mine. What was I saving it for? What else is money for except to live like this, with them, somewhere like Murs?”

“No offense, but it all sounds kind of culty.”

“That’s exactly what it is!” Asmodeus said, clapping her hands. “The Cult of Pouncy!”

“I think of it more like CERN,” Pouncy said. “It’s an institute for high-energy magical studies.”

Julia hadn’t touched her wine. More than wine right now, she wanted control, a thing that was not fully compatible with wine.

“So I’m looking around for like a Large Hadron Collider or its magical equivalent.”

“Bup-bup-bup,” Pouncy said. “Baby steps. First we power-level you up to two hundred fifty. And then we shall see what we shall see.”

It emerged that the house at Murs was, in its way, a natural outgrowth of the safe-house scene. The scene was a filter: it caught a very few, rather unusual people, culled them out of the everyday world and into the safe houses, and gave them magic to chew on. Murs filtered the filtered, double-distilled them. Most people in the magic scene were happy chilling in the safe houses, faffing around with three-ring binders. It was a social thing for them. They liked the double-life aspect of it. They’d gone behind the veil. They liked knowing they had a secret. It was what they needed, and it was all they needed.