The Magicians - Lev Grossman [92]
“And then when Mayakovsky tried to give her the bag of sheep fat, she threw it back in his face!”
“I meant to hand it back to him,” Alice said quietly from the window seat. “But it was so cold and I was shaking so badly, I sort of flung it at him. He was all ‘chyort vozmi!’”
“Why didn’t you just take it?”
“I don’t know.” She put the book down. “I’d made all these plans for getting by without it, it just threw me off. Plus I wanted him to stop looking at me naked. And anyway I didn’t know he was going to have mutton fat for us. I hadn’t even prepared the Chkhartishvili.”
That was a white lie. Like Alice couldn’t have cast Chkhartishvili cold. He had missed her so much.
“So what did you do for heat?” he said.
“I tried using some of those German thermogenesis charms, but they kept fading away whenever I fell asleep. By the second night I was waking myself up every fifteen minutes just to make sure I was still alive. By the third day I was losing my mind. So I ended up using a tweaked Miller Flare.”
“I don’t get it.” Josh frowned. “How is that supposed to help?”
“If you kind of mangle it a little it becomes inefficient. The extra energy comes out as heat instead of light.”
“You know you could have cooked yourself by accident?” Janet said.
“I know. But when I realized the German thing wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“I think I saw you once,” Quentin said quietly. “At night.”
“You couldn’t have missed me. I looked like a road flare.”
“A naked road flare,” Josh said.
Eliot came in with a tureen full of viscous, unappetizing flip and began ladling it into teacups. Alice picked up her book and headed for the stairs.
“Hang on, I’m coming back with the hot ones!” Eliot called, busily grating nutmeg.
Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.
At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.
He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture—a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer—and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway—it made an outraged squawk—and flopped down on the other twin bed.
“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set—they were in the bookcase in the bathroom.” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of The World in the Walls.
“I had that exact same edition.” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.
“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them?”
Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.
“I may have taken a look.”
Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me?”
Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.
“Here. Budge over.”
He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up