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“I don’t know It feels like she is”

“OK I’ll leave you to it” Pluet obsessed with this, so try not to forget the big picture If there’s no hope, you have to proo”

She was right, of course Where did she get off, being wiser than him at twenty-one?

“I’ll let it go I promise Just not yet”

“I’ll leave you alone”

“I’m not alone,” Quentin said “Alice is here”

—

Later that day he tried fighting her He’d watched Alice face down Martin Chatwin hiic that he’d never seen before, but that was a long tio Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two He could chuck a ic-missile crisis

And Alice was playing with hie at least: he wasn’t playing Itsoht now Alice was in no condition to love, or be loved

He looked up the thickest, baddest-ass shielding spell he knew about and crudely attached a couple of hardening enhanceh the closet door and as quickly as he could cast the shield six ti invisibly in the air in front of hih six of them at once turned the air a little rosy-pink

Any more than six and they would have started to interfere with each other Di returns Plus he didn’t think he could do another one right noay

Then the s: treble-weight, electrically charged, ar, viciously poisoned He wouldn’t have dared to even prep the spell on Earth, let alone cast it, if the house hadn’t itself been so heavily shielded If he h the wall like paper, plus they were a long way fro to cast theet off on jurisdictional grounds

Alice rose to round, he noticed, though when she saw his, balletic almost, a joke—as if to say, res? Sure you do Re?

Quentin tried to kill her He knew he couldn’t, but he thought sheas she was a niffin this was virtually the only interaction they could have together He cast the th and then soreen, 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 aze the e of their convictions They forle file, and obediently encircled her waist in a sparking, fizzing green ring

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

Then Alice was across the rooht in front of hiht 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 ? Maybe the rage had been inside her already, and beco 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 y Her eyes were the brightest, angriest, nificently 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 theh 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 e 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 fraic didn’t even work that way, but if you were a niffin it worked however you wanted it to She did the sa the chairs

Quentin didn’t wait around for the ending He could see where this was heading Ceding the field of battle, he stepped back through the doorway Let her follow hilass to her She ainst the barrier, like a kid squishing her face against a , and looked at him with one antic eye, blue on blue

She was daring hi around! Don’t you want to have soht inside, like in a photographic negative

“Alice,” Quentin said “Alice”

He closed the red door He’d seen enough

—

She was the madwoman in the attic It eirdly intimate, this one-sided duel, just her and him, one on one Not like sex, but intireater depths, forcing hi frantically for the surface with his puny hu at his heels

Quentin kept records of his trips in a spiral notebook: where he went, where she went, what he’d done, what she’d done There wasn’t much point to it, because the performance went ht off sadness And he did notice one thing: Alice liked to herd hi him to open it That see

But if there was nothing else on offer? Their little dance was like the endga a beleaguered king around an e to check on in the queen’s a else she knew him better than he knew himself She always had

So that night, close to ain Alice wanted hiht for it Give her what she wants, see what she does with it He still didn’t knohat he was looking for, butfor

He prepped a couple of spells in advance, and cast the first one as soon as he’d stepped through the door It created a reasonably lifelike ie of him in every room in the house

It didn’t confuse her, but it ht have pissed her off, because Quentin barely made it to the stairs before she banished the illusion so harshly that he felt like soo back? In an undignified panic he feinted for the stairs, dodged past Alice at close quarters, arching his body like a bullfighter, and locked hi