A great, warm calm was in him, welling up out of the hidden reservoir where it had been waiting all this time, if only he’d known where to find it. Alice’s eyes narrowed. She hung back, suspicious, studying him. Quentin began pulling his shirt off, started unbuttoning it and then just tore it off. It was time to go all in.

He nearly missed his chance. Having decided, evidently, that Quentin was bluffing, Alice went for him, and this time she was coming to kill him. He turned away and shouted a word he hadn’t heard since he was twenty-two. He didn’t know if Alice was technically a demon or not, but either way he had an empty demon trap tattooed on his back, and he was going to use it. It was all he had left.

He didn’t see it happen, but there was a great inrush of air, like a giant gasping in surprise, and Alice cried out angrily—

“No. No!”

—and he heard the cry go up an octave and then cut off sharply.

Then the room was silent, and he was alone except for drifting motes of couch-fluff in the air. At the same moment his tattoo lit up with cold fire; it was like somebody had dumped liquid nitrogen on his back. When Fogg put a cacodemon in his back the night before graduation he’d felt nothing at all, but this wasn’t nothing. This hurt. And there was pressure inside him, massive pressure. He couldn’t breathe. He groaned like a woman in labor, trying to let some of it out, but it only got worse.

He could feel Alice in there. He felt her rage and her power and something like ecstasy. Quentin pressed his back against the coolness of the wall to try to ease the burning, but it did nothing. He felt like his rib cage was cracking. The veins were glowing in the backs of his hands.

The front door slammed open.

“What did you do? Where’s Alice?”

Plum and Eliot were staring at him. They’d burst in ready for the fight of their lives.

“And you took your shirt off,” Plum added.

“She’s in my back,” he whispered. He couldn’t speak any louder. “I know.”

He detached himself from the wall and began walking stiffly up the stairs. Sweat was starting out across his forehead, trickling down his chest.

“You should go,” he whispered.

“What are you doing?” Plum asked, but he couldn’t even answer her. He could feel Alice stirring inside him like a genie in her lamp. She wanted out by whatever exit she could find or make. In his mind he was putting things together, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and then ignoring the answers when they weren’t reassuring.

“What are you doing?” Plum shouted after him.

“Come on,” Eliot said. “We have to help him.”