It was Eliot who finally took control of the situation. He almost seemed like his old self again. Calendars were cleared. Nobody had any serious obligations pending, not compared to this, nothing that couldn’t be delayed or sicked out of or blatantly welched on. He clapped his hands and gave orders, and everybody seemed to enjoy being serious and efficient for a change.

Nobody knew Anaïs especially well—not even Josh, really—but she turned out to be a highly useful individual. Her circle of acquaintance included somebody who knew somebody who owned a place upstate, a comfortable old farmhouse on a hundred acres, somewhere private enough and defensible enough to use as a staging area for whatever it was they were going to do next. And that first somebody was also a magician senior enough to open a portal to get them there. She would come by later that afternoon, as soon as the Nets game was over.

They had to do it on the roof, because the very effective and thorough triple-triple wards they’d just that morning set up (and were now about to abandon) prevented any magical transport directly in or out of the apartment. By five thirty that afternoon they were looking out over the crowded cocktail-tray skyline of lower Manhattan. No one else was up there in winter. The roof was littered with windblown, overturned plastic lawn furniture and char-encrusted barbecue implements. A lonely wind chime burbled to itself from the eaves of a utility shed.

They hugged themselves against the cold and scuffed the gravel with their feet as they watched a hale, gray-haired Belgian sorceress with nicotine-stained fingers and a rather sinister wicker fetish on a string around her neck pull open the portal. It was a five-sided portal, the bottom edge running parallel to the ground, and its vertices shed tiny sputtering actinic blue-white sparks—a purely cosmetic touch, Quentin suspected, but they gave the scene an air that was both melancholy and festive at the same time.

There was a sense of momentous occasion. They were embarking on a grand adventure on the spur of the moment. Isn’t that what it means to be alive, Goddamn it? When the portal was finished and stable, the gray-haired witch kissed Anaïs on both cheeks, said something in French, and left hurriedly, but not before Janet made her take a picture of all of them together with their trunks and bundles and bags full of groceries piled up behind them, using a disposable camera.