The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(97)

Fatigue and disappointment were giving them both a slightly hysterical edge.

“It’s like a giant closet,” Plum said. “We could store stuff in here. We’d have more closet space than anybody in New York City.”

“We’re not going to store stuff in here.”

“Put a couple of flat-screens in here, Xbox, easy chair: man-cave!”

They’d made their way up to the top floor again when they heard a heavy clunk from the floor below. Her bedroom.

“I guess that’s the other shoe,” Quentin said. “Wands out, Harry.”

Plum snorted—charitably, because she was a good person—but she took his point. She went defensive: a nice hard blocking spell. Charge it up and you could hold it back till you needed it; it would just take a gesture to release it. Whatever Quentin was prepping, it gave off a high rising whine.

But when they got there the bedroom was empty, except that Plum’s desk chair was now lying on its back, its little feet in the air, like it was playing dead: ah—they got me! Slowly Quentin lifted it up and set it on its feet.

“The chair fell over,” he said brightly.

“All right, all right.”

It was like they were daring each other to be the first to lose their nerve. They tromped downstairs to the second floor. Another thing: color photographs had faded to black and white.

“I wonder—” But Quentin was cut off by that same clunk as before, from over their heads now. The chair again.

“Huh.” Neither of them wanted to look. “I wonder what’s outside?”

“I don’t,” Plum said. “And I dare you to not look.”

For a second they both thought there was something in Quentin’s bed, but he jerked the covers back and it was just a pillow. This was seriously creeping her out. Something shattered downstairs in the kitchen—it sounded like somebody dropping a wineglass.

Obediently, they both trotted downstairs, Quentin first. Lo, a lone wineglass lay in pieces right in the middle of the floor. Lookee there.

“Must have been the wind,” Plum said.

Now she was doing it. Her shrink would say she was using humor to avoid deeper feelings. She would be right.

They rummaged around aimlessly; they were both hoping to stumble on something that would make the land exciting, and magical, and Romantic, the way they were hoping it would be, but they didn’t. She didn’t like this land. It was like they’d dialed a wrong number. This wasn’t what they’d ordered.

“I wonder, if there’s food here, if you can eat it?” Quentin said.

She nerved herself to open the fridge. There had been a bowl of green grapes in it, but the grapes had become green glass marbles.

Quentin was picking up books one after the other and opening them.

“Dude. They’re all going to be blank.”

“Maybe. This isn’t what I expected, but I don’t know why it’s not what I expected. It felt right when we were casting it, but something must have gone wrong.”

He put the book down and walked boldly over to the front door, but before he could open it there was a muffled thud from the second floor. It might have been a lamp falling over onto a rug. He stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“Quentin—”

“I know,” he said. “This is definitely a land, but I’m not completely sure it’s our land.”

“Whose then?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. It was literally everything she could do not to start humming “This Land Is Your Land.”

“Well, we made it,” Plum said.

“I know, I know. Want to go see who knocked over the lamp?”

“Let’s go.”

She followed Quentin up the stairs but he stopped halfway, listening.

“Why do I feel like we’re getting decoyed here?” He turned around and edged past her, back down the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”

“Famous last words.”

She watched him reach the bottom of the stairs and freeze, staring at something out of view.

“Shit.”

“What is it?”

Except that she knew even as she was asking him. There were blue highlights on the polished banister next to him. She knew that blue.

“Run!”

He pelted up the stairs at her, white-faced.

“Jesus, run!”

He would have run straight over her if she hadn’t snapped out of it and taken off like a shot ahead of him. It shouldn’t be here. It was like something from a dream had followed her into the real world, or maybe it was the other way—she’d followed it into the dream. Quentin covered a lot of ground with those long legs—he overtook her on the second floor, sprinting right past her, but he grabbed her hand as he passed her and pulled her along, practically yanking her arm out of its socket. He barked his shin hard on an ottoman as he ran, which must have hurt like hell.

“Run run run! Come on!”

On the third-floor landing Quentin paused and sent a spell down the stairs over her shoulder, something that flashed hot on her face, then they were running shoulder to shoulder up the stairs and into the workroom and through the door and out into the real world.

She slammed the door behind them, then blasted out the blocking spell she’d had ready for good measure. She’d totally forgotten about it till then. The air in front of the door shivered.