It was two more hours before she got all the way through it for the first time. The words were right, and the pitch, and the rhythm. The hand positions were still a joke, but she was onto something. This was not fuck-all. When she stopped, her fingers left trails in the air. It was like a hallucination, the kind of optical effect you’d get from botched laser surgery, or maybe from staying up all night two nights in a row. She waved her hand and it left streaks of color across her vision: red from her thumb, yellow, green, blue, and then purple from her pinky.

She smelled that electric smell. It was Quentin’s smell.

Julia went up to the roof. She didn’t want to touch anything with the spell going—it was like having fresh fingernail polish on—but she had to go somewhere, so she climbed the steel ladder and cracked the trap door and emerged out into the jungle of tar paper and air conditioners. She stood on the roof and made rainbow patterns with her hands against the rapidly bluing predawn sky until it stopped working.

It was magic. Real magic! And she was doing it! Hakuna fucking matata. Either she wasn’t crazy, or she’d finally gone well and truly around the bend, and she wasn’t coming back. Either way she could have died for joy.

Then she went downstairs and slept for an hour. When she woke up she saw that her fingers had left multicolored stains on the sheets. Her chest felt painfully hollowed out, as if somebody had gone in and scraped out all the organs with a table knife, like scraping the pith out of a jack-o’-lantern. It wasn’t until then that she thought to try to trace the poster from the BBS, but when she checked the archive the post was already gone.

But the spell still worked. She set it going again, and it worked again. Then, careful not to touch her face with her candy-colored fingers, she put her head down on her desk and sobbed like a child who’d been beaten.

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 11

Quentin had Professor Geiger send them back to Chesterton. They materialized smoothly in the center of town. Geiger—a middle-aged woman, cheerfully overstuffed—had offered to send them directly to Quentin’s house, but he’d forgotten his parents’ address.