“It’s weird to think that she killed my great-great-uncle Martin,” Plum said. “But then it sounds like she had her reasons. Is she really alive in there?”

“I don’t know. It feels like she is.”

“OK. I’ll leave you to it.” Plum paused in the doorway. “Just—I know you’re going to get obsessed with this, so try not to forget the big picture. If there’s no hope, you have to promise me you’ll let her go.”

She was right, of course. Where did she get off, being wiser than him at twenty-one?

“I’ll let it go. I promise. Just not yet.”

“I’ll leave you alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Quentin said. “Alice is here.”

—

Later that day he tried fighting her. He’d watched Alice face down Martin Chatwin himself, with a whole arsenal of magic that he’d never seen before, but that was a long time ago. Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.

And Alice was playing with him. This was a game to her. Quentin had this advantage at least: he wasn’t playing. It made him feel sick, fighting somebody he wanted to love, but right now Alice was in no condition to love, or be loved.

He looked up the thickest, baddest-ass shielding spell he knew about and crudely attached a couple of hardening enhancements to it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the closet door and as quickly as he could cast the shield six times in a row, one after the other, six magic shields hanging invisibly in the air in front of him, or all but invisibly. Looking through six of them at once turned the air a little rosy-pink.

Any more than six and they would have started to interfere with each other. Diminishing returns. Plus he didn’t think he could do another one right now anyway.

Then the missiles. He’d made them in advance, with all the trimmings: treble-weight, electrically charged, armor-piercing, viciously poisoned. He wouldn’t have dared to even prep the spell on Earth, let alone cast it, if the house hadn’t itself been so heavily shielded. If he missed they’d go through the wall like paper, plus they were a long way from street legal. Technically he was going to cast them in another dimension, so maybe he’d get off on jurisdictional grounds.

Alice rose to meet him: feeding time. She never quite touched the ground, he noticed, though when she saw him noticing she gave a little kick with her legs, balletic almost, a joke—as if to say, remember when I used to walk with these things? Sure you do. Remember when I used to spread them for you, my darling?