Quentin tried to kill her. He knew he couldn’t, but he thought she might feel it, and as long as she was a niffin this was virtually the only interaction they could have together. He cast the magic missiles, full strength and then some; they practically took his fingertips off. They were green, seething things that darted at Alice like hungry fish.

But about ten feet from her they slowed to a crawl. She looked at them, pleased, as if Quentin had made her cookies. You shouldn’t have! Under her gaze the missiles lost the courage of their convictions. They formed a line, single file, and obediently encircled her waist in a sparking, fizzing green ring.

Then the ring burst out in all directions. Two of the missiles whanged resonantly off Quentin’s sextuple shield. He flinched. He wouldn’t have survived even one of them.

Then Alice was across the room and hanging in the air right in front of him. He couldn’t tell if she’d teleported or just darted straight at him, she was that fast. For the first time she looked pissed off. She bared her sapphire teeth. Was it being a niffin that made her this angry? Or had she been this angry all along? Maybe the rage had been inside her already, and becoming a niffin had just revealed it—burned away the protective shielding.

Either way she was Alice to the life, he’d know her anywhere; she was more than alive, she was humming and crackling with energy. Her eyes were the brightest, angriest, most magnificently amused eyes he’d ever seen. She reached out and put a hand on the first of his six shields, pressed on it with two blue fingertips, then put them through it. The shield flared and died.

The second shield buzzed angrily when she touched it. That should have killed her too; he’d laced it with a magical charge he’d only read about, and in a book he shouldn’t have been reading. She wiggled her fingers with sensual pleasure. Delightful! With both hands she grasped the third shield and picked it up—set it aside as if it were a physical object, an old picture frame maybe, and leaned it against a wall. It was a joke, magic didn’t even work that way, but if you were a niffin it worked however you wanted it to. She did the same thing with the next one, and the next, stacking them neatly like folding chairs.