Alice and Martin sparred savagely for a solid minute. The armor spell must have come with a bonus of martial arts savvy, because Alice whipped her faerie glaive around in a complicated pattern, two-handed now; it had a small, vicious spike on its butt end that drew blood. Sweat matted her hair to her forehead, but she never lost focus. After another minute the armor vanished—the spell must have expired—and she did something that froze the air around the Beast into an intricate frostwork mummy. Even his clothes froze and fell to pieces in shards, leaving him naked and fish-belly white.
But by then he was close enough to seize her arm. Suddenly she was a girl again, small and vulnerable.
But not for long. She spat out a ferocious sequence of syllables and transformed into a tawny lioness with a white scruff of beard under her chin. She and Martin went down grappling, mouths gaping, trying to get their teeth into each other. Alice worked with her huge back legs to scratch and disembowel, caterwauling angrily.
Janet was circling the fight, trying to cram bullets into the revolver and dropping them freely on the sand, but there was nowhere to aim anyway. They were all tangled up together. The next moment the Beast was in the coils of a massive spotted anaconda, then Alice was an eagle, then a huge brindled bear, then a horrific man-size scorpion with pincing legs and its venomous sting, the size of a crane hook, lodged in Martin Chatwin’s back. Light flashed and crackled around them as they fought, and their struggling bodies rose from the ground. The Beast was on top of her, and Alice expanded hugely to become a limber, sinuous white dragon on its back, her enormous wings slapping the sand and sending everybody scrambling. The Beast grew with her, so that she was wrestling a giant. She gripped him in her talons and screamed a torrent of blue fire like jet exhaust straight into his face.
For a minute he writhed in Alice’s grip. His eyebrows were gone, and his face was comically blackened. Quentin could hear the Alice-dragon panting raggedly. The Beast shuddered and was still for a moment. Then he appeared to compose himself, and he punched Alice once, hard, in the face.
Instantly she was human again. Her nose was bleeding. Martin rolled neatly to one side and got to his feet. Naked though he was, he produced a clean handkerchief from somewhere and used it to dab some of the soot from his face.
“Dammit,” Quentin rasped. “Somebody do something! Help her!”
Janet got one last bullet in and fired, then she threw the pistol overhand. It bounced off the back of Martin Chatwin’s head without mussing his hair.
“Fuck you!” she shouted.
Martin took a step toward Alice. No. This had to end.
“Hey, asshole!” Quentin managed. “You forgot one thing.”
He spat blood and switched to his best
Quentin whispered the catchword Fogg had given him the night of graduation. He’d imagined it in his head a hundred times, and now as he pronounced the final syllable something big and hard was struggling and thrashing under his shirt, scrabbling at the skin of his back.
Looking up at it, Quentin noticed that his cacodemon was wearing a little pair of round spectacles hooked over its pointy ears. What the fuck, his cacodemon had glasses? It stood over him, uncertain, looking learned and thoughtful. It didn’t know whom to fight.
“The naked guy,” Quentin said in a hoarse whisper. “Go! Save the girl!”
The demon skidded to a stop ten feet from its prey. It feinted left, then left again, like it was playing one-on-one with Martin, trying to break his ankles, before it gathered itself and sprang directly for his face. Wearily, as if to express to them the unfairness of the trouble they were putting him through, Martin put up a hand to catch it in flight. The demon tore at his fingers, hissing. Martin began slowly stuffing it into his mouth, like a gecko eating a spider, while it pulled his hair and gouged at his eyes.
Quentin waved at Alice frantically to run—maybe if they all split up?—but she wasn’t looking at him. She licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ears with both hands. She got to her feet.
Something had changed in her face. She had made a decision. She began to work with her hands, the preliminaries to something very advanced. At the sound both Martin and the cacodemon looked at her. Martin took the opportunity to break the demon’s neck and push the rest of its body into his mouth.
“So,” she said. “So you think you’re the biggest monster in this room?”
“Don’t,” Janet said, but Alice didn’t stop. She was trying something. Everybody seemed to get it except Quentin.
“No, no, no!” Eliot said angrily. “Wait!”
“You’re not even a magician at all, are you, Martin?” Alice said quietly. “You’re just a little boy. That’s all you are. That’s all you ever were.” She bit back a sob. “Well, I’m sorry.”
