It was full of shining golden coins. They poured out onto the floor like a Vegas jackpot. They were like Mayakovsky’s coins, but there must have been hundreds of them. God, the amount of power here was unthinkable. What couldn’t you do with it? He had his master’s now, he was a master magician. He could fix Alice. He could fix anything. He stuffed his pockets with them.

Speaking of whom: Alice came drifting through the doorway behind him, slow-rolling languorously onto her back like an otter. Time to go. He juked past her and back through the door the other way.

In the workroom the snow was turning to rain, and the parquet had an inch of gray slush on it, and he half fell sprinting across it, his pockets heavy with treasure. He slammed shut the bathroom door but then fumbled the Sharpie and dropped it. No time. He spat out a spell that doubled his speed and scrambled up and over the sink and felt the hot prickle of way too much magic way too close on his trailing ankle. Alice was a blue blur behind him, and he wasn’t faster than she was but he was fast enough, just, to make it back across the landing and through the workroom and the red door and out into the real world.

She hadn’t gotten him. Not today. Not today. He stood there for a minute, puffing and blowing and pulling himself together, hands on his knees. Then he dug his hands in his pockets and spilled the gold out on the table. Show ’em what they’ve won.

He should have known. It was fairy gold, like in the stories—the kind that turns to dead leaves and dried flowers when the sun comes up. That’s what he’d found. The coins had turned to ordinary nickels.

It was never going to be that easy. This wasn’t working. There had to be another way. He needed sleep. His ankle was starting to burn where his close call with Alice had scorched it.

“Quentin.”

Eliot was standing in the doorway, looking in his Fillorian court finery like he’d just detached himself from a Hans Holbein painting. He held a tumbler from the kitchen in one hand, full of whiskey, which he raised in greeting.

“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

Quentin hugged him so hard that Eliot spilled his whiskey down his front, which he complained about loudly, but Quentin didn’t care. He had to make sure Eliot was real and solid. It made no sense that he was here, but thank God he was. Quentin had had enough of sadness and horror and futility for one day. He needed a friend, somebody who knew him from the old days.