An unfamiliar ringing sound percolated into his consciousness, and Quentin stirred slowly at first. The noise was jarring, like an old telephone.

Telephone.

He jerked wide awake and grabbed the phone up from his bedside table. The light cast from the screen was bright, and he squinted as he thumbed the slide to answer the unfamiliar number.

“Yes?”

“Quentin? It’s Rufus.”

“Rufus,” he echoed. Another second and he was awake enough to realize who that was. “Ah. My apologies for any delay. I was asleep.”

He had no idea how he’d managed to get any sleep, and he certainly didn’t feel tremendously rested, but he supposed that any sleep was better than none whatsoever.

“Then I’m sorry I woke you,” Rufus said, though he didn’t sound sorry. “I have a spell which should protect Laurence’s mind from telepathy.”

Quentin swung his legs from the bed and stood quickly. He intended to go open the curtains, but two steps into the process remembered that he really didn’t know this room’s layout all that well and it was too small to just go striding around in the dark. “That’s excellent. Has it worked?”

“No. Laurence must still be wearing his talisman.”

Quentin felt for the edge of the bed, then crept his way through the narrow gap between it and the absurd desk crammed into one corner of the room. “I thought that Windsor would provide enough of an esoteric connection to override the pendant?” He felt blindly for the curtains and drew them open, but the effect that had on his ability to see around the room was negligible.

It was dark outside. There were street lights and the warmth of restaurants and pubs open at whatever hour this was, but other than that night had well and truly set in. Still, in early November that could mean it was barely six in the evening.

“I suspect, but can’t confirm, that it’s because Windsor is only an adolescent.” Rufus sounded more interested in the intellectual stimulation than in in the fact that he couldn’t reach Laurence. “It may be possible to overpower the connection, but that’d probably kill Windsor in the process. I’ve taken pictures of the spell you need, I’ll send them over as soon as this call’s done.”

“For Laurence to cast?” Quentin asked cautiously.

“Yes, because your brother will allow him all the time in the world to do that.” Rufus’ sarcasm dripped from the phone. “No, if he were to cast it on himself you’d need a different spell. This one is going to require chalk and some Latin. I presume you do speak Latin?” The sarcasm returned again.

“Of course,” Quentin snapped.

“Will wonders never cease. You’ll need to have Laurence in the same place as you when you cast, obviously. And you have to get that talisman off him and out of range of his aura. Usually anything over ten or twelve inches is plenty.”

Quentin nodded to himself as he watched a couple emerge from a restaurant down on the street. A man and a woman. They walked with their hands clasped together. She laughed at something he said to her, then they leaned in to kiss.

He felt a stab of jealousy flare in his chest, and turned his back on the window.

“You could fly to London,” he muttered.

Rufus laughed briefly. “This isn’t dial-a-witch, Quentin. I’m not going to fly half-way around the world for you.”

“For Laurence,” Quentin argued. “He’s your student, Rufus!”

“I never agreed to babysit either of you, and in this instance you don’t need me to. You can use magic and you’re immune to your brother’s psychic abilities. I’ve already had to leave my sanctum to use a phone. That’s more than enough to get the job done.”

Coward.

Rufus refused to leave his precious sanctum for much of anything, so far as he could tell, in case he was attacked.

Quentin ground his teeth and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was being unfair, and he knew it. Rufus’ parents were dead, for goodness’ sake, and he had no reason to believe that whoever had murdered them wouldn’t come for him also, given half the chance.

“I apologize,” he said once he trusted his voice. “You are quite right.”

Rufus paused, then sounded shocked. “Wow.” He sighed loudly. “I’m sorry too. I know this is scary for you. Look, let me send you the spell. There are some physical actions to perform with it. Are you familiar at all with oratory gestures?”

Quentin hesitated. “For rhetoric?”

“Perfect. It’s like you’ve been groomed to be a sorcerer or something.” Rufus’ tone turned dry. “If you get stuck call Myriam. She leaves more often than I do.”

“All right.” He perched his backside against the windowsill. “And thank you. I realize this has been quite an obscure spell to dredge up.”

“It was an interesting test of my organizing skills, that’s for sure. Next up, your location spell. That ain’t gonna work with the talisman in play, but I think I’ve found an alternative for you.”

“How so?”

“Well when Windsor first brought Myriam here, it was because he wanted me to find a way to send him to Laurence. He knew Laurence was in trouble, but Windsor can’t fly that far. He’s too young. It wouldn’t take me much longer to figure that one out.”

“But the talisman?” Quentin prompted.

“Yeah, that’s the catch. But I could send him to you instead.”

Quentin frowned deeply. “Wouldn’t you require some of my blood?”

“Only if I didn’t know where you were. Location spells are a pain in the ass. But I can send him anywhere I have a personal connection to.”

Quentin crinkled his nose at that. “And that means what, exactly?”

“It means I need to have been there in person and formed an emotional connection to the location. Fond memories, an important moment, that kind of thing. I can send him, all you need to do is be there to meet him when he arrives, or he’ll probably try to fly the whole way to Laurence himself.”

“And you’ve been to London?” He eased away from the window and into the horrible stiff chair by the desk, where he grabbed a cheap biro and flicked the lid of it off with his thumb. He drew the hotel’s headed notepad over and poised pen tip to paper. “What address?”

Rufus snorted at him. “No, I haven’t. But I have been to Paris.”

Quentin blinked slowly. “Paris,” he echoed.

“It’s an outdoor location, so he’ll look pretty natural there. Assuming they have ravens in Paris, but people will probably just think he’s a really big crow if they don’t anyway.”

“Rufus!” He slapped the pen down. “I’m not in bloody France!”

“Details,” Rufus dismissed. “There’s a direct train to Paris every like five minutes or whatever. The trick is getting Windsor back to England, but I think what you can do is get the train out to get there as fast as possible, then just take the ferry from Calais to Dover. He can get himself on the ferry. All you have to do is meet him on it.”

Quentin momentarily wondered whether he could reach out through the telephone to strangle Rufus. He’d never thought to test the range of his telekinesis, but now was an incredibly appealing time to imagine how it might work.

“You can Google up all that stuff yourself, though,” Rufus went on. “Or ask Siri. Whatever works for you. Go to Paris, text Myriam your ETA, then we’ll figure out when’s best to do this. Probably once it’s night in Paris, but I’d estimate sunset’s probably around five or six in the evening as it’s the northern hemisphere and Paris is around fifty degrees north, so kinda around the same latitude as Vancouver-”

“Rufus,” Quentin cut in.

“Huh?”

“The address,” he reminded the witch.

“Oh, you don’t need one. It’s the Jardins du Trocadéro. Do you know it?”

Quentin narrowed his eyes and tried to recall. While he had attended a few catwalk events in Paris, the city was hardly one he knew backwards. “I think I know the Trocadéro,” he hazarded. “Near the Eiffel Tower?”

“Bingo! There are a bunch of water cannon at the Trocadéro end of the pool. I can send Windsor there.”

Quentin scribbled Trocadéro on the notepad, since he found it best to write down the things he truly wished to recall later, and nodded. “You left your sanctum?” He asked it as a light tease, on the off-chance that he could perhaps build a few bridges and make some sort of rudimentary friendship with the man Laurence spent half his free time with.

“Text Myriam with an ETA,” Rufus said, suddenly curt. “Can you make it?”

Quentin twiddled the pen, then set it down with care. That was, apparently, not a subject to probe further. “I will make enquiries,” he said.

“Good. Speak later. I’ll send the files over now.”

Rufus hung up, and Quentin pocketed the phone so that he wouldn’t have to look at images of spell book pages just yet. He had too important a mission ahead of him, and no desire to destroy a second hotel room.

Paris.

He eyed the notepad with its single word.

The hotel had no concierge. He couldn’t simply pick up the phone and tell them to make the arrangements for him.

His phone buzzed against his thigh, likely with the arrival of Rufus’ documents, and broke him out of his mindlessness. He could do this! He had made it around the world several times. He had managed to figure out the Heathrow Express. He could bloody well work this out, too.

And then he would have to learn a spell.

Magic.

To save Laurence. There was no other choice. Either he allowed his fear to consume him, or it would destroy Laurence, and he wasn’t having any of that. They’d both come too far to allow fear to tear them apart.

Quentin reached for his phone and held the home button, then grabbed the pen once more.

“Siri, how do I get to Paris?”