The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(99)

And she never stopped smiling. Never. Blue lips, blue teeth. Maybe it was fun being a niffin. Maybe everybody had the wrong idea about it.

She followed him down to the first floor, through the dining room and back up the stairs, back down, back up, then back up to the third floor. She didn’t hurry, though when he hurried up so did she, as if that were one of the rules of the game. It might have been comical if he weren’t being chased by a blue demon who could burn him to nothing just by touching him, and probably without touching him. Sometimes she paid attention to the walls and the floors and the ceilings, sometimes she passed through them with no resistance.

Maybe the weirdest thing about this surreal duel was that he was starting to enjoy it. However distorted or transmuted she was, she was still Alice. He was spending time with her. She was pure magic now, pure rage and power, but he had always loved her rage and her power. Those were two of the greatest things about her. She wasn’t Alice, but she wasn’t quite not-Alice either.

At this rate he could stay ahead of her forever as long as he avoided dead ends. It was like he was a ghost, he thought giddily, and she was Pac-Man, or the other way around. (Though no—Pac-Man could eat the ghosts when they were blue. Never mind. Focus.) He wondered how long till she lost patience and went for him. It was like swimming with sharks, except that he knew what sharks wanted. He couldn’t guess within a million miles what Alice wanted.

There were moments when he wanted to throw himself at her, right into her arms, and let her burn him up in an instant. What an incredibly stupid f*cking idea.

After half an hour of this he doubled back through the red door, back home. This wasn’t getting them anywhere. He sat on the edge of the work table, gasping a little from all the stair climbing. He was still alive, but he wasn’t making progress. Someway or other he was doing this wrong.

He was still there when Plum came up around seven with coffee.

“Jesus,” she said. “Are you playing chicken with that thing?”

“With Alice.” He corrected her automatically. “I guess I am.”

“How’s it going?”

“Pretty well,” Quentin said. “I’m not dead.”

“And Alice—?”

“She’s still dead.”

Plum nodded.

“I don’t mean to sound at all critical,” she said, “but maybe you should just leave this alone? Stop tempting fate? I feel weird just being in the same house with it. Her.”

“I want to learn about her.”

“What’ve you got so far?”

“Not much. She likes to play. She could’ve killed me by now, but she hasn’t.”

“Christ! Quentin!”

They both watched the open doorway like it was a TV, or a hole through which they were ice fishing.

“It’s weird to think that she killed my great-great-uncle Martin,” Plum said. “But then it sounds like she had her reasons. Is she really alive in there?”

“I don’t know. It feels like she is.”

“OK. I’ll leave you to it.” Plum paused in the doorway. “Just—I know you’re going to get obsessed with this, so try not to forget the big picture. If there’s no hope, you have to promise me you’ll let her go.”

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 himself, with a whole arsenal of magic that he’d never seen before, but that was a long time ago. Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.

And Alice was playing with him. This was a game to her. Quentin had this advantage at least: he wasn’t playing. It made him feel sick, fighting somebody he wanted to love, but right 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 enhancements to it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the closet door and as quickly as he could cast the shield six times in a row, one after the other, six magic shields hanging invisibly in the air in front of him, or all but invisibly. Looking through 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. Diminishing returns. Plus he didn’t think he could do another one right now anyway.

Then the missiles. He’d made them in advance, with all the trimmings: treble-weight, electrically charged, armor-piercing, 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 missed they’d go through the wall like paper, plus they were a long way from street legal. Technically he was going to cast them in another dimension, so maybe he’d get off on jurisdictional grounds.

Alice rose to meet him: feeding time. She never quite touched the ground, he noticed, though when she saw him noticing she gave a little kick with her legs, balletic almost, a joke—as if to say, remember when I used to walk with these things? Sure you do. Remember when I used to spread them for you, my darling?