Bingle smiled and touched the side of his nose and said nothing.
Quentin was weary. He’d woken up in Venice that morning, and spent the day in England, and another half day in Fillory. He’d already been drunk once and sobered up, and now he was getting drunk again, sitting there on a hard splintery bench in the
That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to choose which way you went. Except of course he had chosen.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” he said. “Did you find the keys?” Eliot nodded.
“We found some of them. It was always either a fight or a riddle, one or the other. One was a huge beast like a giant spiny lobster. It had the key inside its heart. Then there was a beach that was all made of keys, millions of them, and we had to go through them till we found the right one. There was probably a trick to that one, but no one could think what it was, so we brute-forced it instead—took shifts, trying keys on the key ring, round the clock. After a couple of weeks we got a fit.
“Now I’m sorry if I’m a bit direct about this, but you have to remember, we’ve been at this for a full year, week in and week out, and frankly all this questing is wearing pretty thin. So here it is: we have five of the seven keys. One the dwarves gave us, and four we found. Do you have one? The one from After Island?”
“No,” Quentin said. “Julia and I left it behind when we went through the door. Didn’t somebody take it?”
Quentin looked at Bingle, then at Benedict. Neither one of them met his eye.
“No? But we don’t have it either.”
“Damn,” Eliot said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“But what happened? It can’t just have disappeared. It must still be on After Island.”
“It’s not,” Benedict said. “We looked everywhere.”
“Well, we’ll just have to keep looking.” Eliot sighed and raised his glass to be refilled. “So it looks like you’re going to see some adventuring after all.”
CHAPTER 18
The house in Bed-Stuy was Julia’s first safe house, and it was the end of Stanford. She was never going to college now. It was her parents’ hearts broken for the second and final time. It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it.
She could have said no, of course. She could have finished dialing the number of the car service, and turned her back on the man with the porkpie hat, and waited till the black town car came, and gotten in and repeated her home address to the Guatemalan highlander behind the wheel until he finally understood and whisked her away from it all. Or she couldn’t have, but she wished she could. She wished it then, and she would rewish it many times in the years to come.
But she couldn’t walk away, because the dream, the dream of magic, wasn’t dead. She’d tried to kill it, to beat the life out of it with work and drugs and therapy and family and the Free Traders, but she couldn’t. It was stronger than she was.
The owlish young man who was working the door of the Bed-Stuy safe house that night was named Jared. He was about thirty, not tall, with a bright smile and heavy black stubble and heavy black glasses. He’d been working on a doctorate in linguistics at NYU for the past nine years. Nights and weekends, he worked magic.
They weren’t all like that—nerdy, academic, what you’d think. It was a surprisingly heterogeneous crowd. There was a twelve-year-old prodigy from the neighborhood, and a sixty-five-year-old widow who drove down from Westchester County in a BMW SUV on weekends. In all there was a rotating cast of about twentyfive: physicists and receptionists and pipe fitters and musicians and undergrads and hedge-fund guys and barely functional, socially marginal nutjobs. And now there was Julia.
Some of them came in once a month to work on spells, and some of them showed up at six in the morning every morning and stayed till ten at night, or slept there, though house rules kept that to a minimum. Some of them were high-functioning in their daily lives, had careers and families and no obvious signs of eccentricity or physical debilitation. But doing magic alongside all that other stuff was a tricky balancing act, and when you lost it and fell you hit the floor hard. Even if you got up again, you got up limping. And everybody fell sooner or later.
See, when you had magic in your life, it turned out, when you lived the double life of a secret underground magician, you paid a certain price, which was that your secret other life pulled at you always. Your magician self, that loopy doppelganger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway. Your real self, the one that mattered, was the other one, the one waving her hands around and chanting in a dead Slavic dialect on the busted-ass couch in the lime-green clapboard house on Throop Avenue.
Julia kept her job, but she was at the house most nights and all day on weekends. The lust was back, and this time it looked like she could slake it. She had the scent, and she was going to make the kill. She went quiet on FTB. The Free Traders could wait. They were used to members dropping off the grid unexpectedly for months or years at a time. In the chronic mood disorder community, that was well within normal operating parameters.
As for her parents . . . Julia cut herself off. She knew what she was doing, and she knew how hard it would be for them, watching her fall back into the obsession and get skinny again and stop bathing and all the rest of it, and she did it anyway. She felt like she had no choice. It was an addiction. Thinking about the consequences for her family, really thinking about them, would have annihilated her with remorse. So she didn’t. The first morning she caught herself absentmindedly, almost sensuously, running a thumbnail along her arm at the breakfast table, leaving a red line behind, or rather when she caught her mother catching her doing it, no words were spoken. But she saw part of her mother die that morning. And Julia did not take heroic measures to resuscitate her.
Julia could have died that morning too, she knew. She almost did. But you let a drowning woman cling to you, she’ll drag you down with her, and what’s the point of that? That’s what she told herself, anyway. You have to look her in the eye and pry her fingers off your arm and watch her sink down into the airless green depths and perish there. It’s either that or you’ll both die. What’s the point?
Her sister knew that. You could see the disappointment in her quick brown foxy eyes, then you could see it change and harden into something clear and smooth and protective. She was young enough, she could still swerve around the wreck and keep moving. She let Julia go, her sister with her black secrets. Smart kid. She had made a sensible deal. Julia made one too.
And what did Julia get, for her deal? When you put your family and your heart and your life and your future up on the block, how much does that net you? What do you walk away with in return? Show her what she’s won, Bob!
A lot, it turns out. A motherfuckingload of arcane lore is what it gets you, for starters.
That first day they tested her. From the second you got in the door—Jared actually started up the stopwatch widget on his iPhone as she crossed the threshold—you had fifteen minutes to learn and execute the flash spell that Quentin punted at the Winston safe house, or you had to leave, and you couldn’t come back for a month. They called it, boringly, the First Flash. You could try again at another safe house, of course—they didn’t share information—but there were only two in New York City, so if you wanted to get your magic on in the five boroughs you had to go big or go home.
Tired as she was Julia did it in eight minutes flat. If she’d had any muscle tone left over from her rainbow- witch phase she wouldn’t even have needed that long.
As it turned out, they didn’t know the rainbow spell, so she printed out the scan she’d downloaded from the Internet that one time, it was already two years ago now, and brought it in. Jared the linguist, with great pomp and
