This, at last, was right. He was meeting her head-on, like Plum said. Strength to strength. He braced one leg behind him. No more skulking around in shadow worlds, this was real. He could feel the power of her, the buzz and snap of it. Could she feel him too? God, it was a relief to let go, to completely lose his shit and give it everything he had and find out once and for all if it was enough.

“Is that all, Alice?” he said. “Is that it? I want more. Give me everything.”

The metal glowed red and white around their hands now. Instead of shielding his own hands he made them metal too: he borrowed the steel of the couch frame and drew it into them. They started to glow as he dumped more and more of his precious energy into keeping the ward going and keeping himself from catching on fire. He was going to beat this thing, this magical abomination that had Alice trapped inside it, he was going to pry it open and pull her out like the jaws of fucking life.

His magician’s sixth sense warned him just as the balance shifted: this thing was going critical. His omega was steel, but at the end of the day it was only a couch frame, and he was asking more of it than it had to give. He managed one last shield, this one just around himself, then he let go. The metal glyph exploded into vapor in Alice’s hands.

The blast pushed them apart—he skidded backward a few feet across the living room floor. He let it all drop. His shield evaporated. His hands and arms were flesh again. It was just him and her, nothing between them, just empty air and silence and seven years of lost time.

All through the fight he’d kept expecting himself to panic, but the panic never came, and now he knew it wouldn’t. The old Quentin might have done it, but he wasn’t a creature of fear anymore, jumping at his own shadow, never knowing who he was or why. When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn’t afraid was when he was angry. He’d been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.

But that wasn’t real strength. He understood that now. They’d both come so far to be here. He was getting a second chance, and he wasn’t going to miss it.

“You,” she said.

“I’m not the boy you used to know, Alice,” he said. “Not anymore. That boy is gone. I know who I am now. But you don’t know me.”