We headed up the street, right into the swarm of inquisitors.

  “I’ve sent an urgent request through the inquisitors to contact Elza,” Ilforte said with a smile, looking at me.

  “Your mother is the most powerful necromancer currently alive in this world, and I really hope she can help sense… something.”

  I nodded in understanding. Oh yes, my mom was a walking concentrate of pure darkness. If anyone would have an easy time casting here, it would be her — well, compared to me and other mages, anyway.

  “But the communication bracelets don’t work here,” Ilforte continued, tapping his artifact bracelet in frustration.

  “And I can’t cast anything at all here. Complete zero, not a single spark. No white magic, no dark magic… Just emptiness. So to contact Elza, I sent inquisitors to get outside the anti-magic zone and send her a message. I hope she responds quickly and comes to us. Well, if she’s in the mood today, of course,” Ilforte added with a heavy sigh.

  I couldn’t hold back a nervous chuckle.

  Ye-e-eah, my mom might be the First Arma and officially supposed to answer to the Armarillis Academy Mentor, but she only did so when she felt like it. When she herself was interested in unraveling some mystery or other.

  Otherwise, she could just ignore the Mentor, and there was nothing he could do about it, since arguing with my mom — let alone threatening her — would cost you more than it was worth.

  Demanding things from her or appealing to her conscience was equally useless. All we could do was hope she’d consider this problem serious enough to grace us with her presence in our search for whatever weird thing was happening.

  For now, our company consisted of several inquisitors and the General — the top brass of the entire General Staff, the largest stronghold of the Inquisition in all of Forland and all neighboring worlds.

  General Thomson Mackelberry was a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with a square jaw and an aquiline nose. A keen gaze and pursed lips, a cane with a jeweled head in his hands. General Mackelberry was a very serious man, taciturn and not inclined to humor, from what I’d heard about him. Like all inquisitors, he wore a dark purple robe, but his shoulders bore the appropriate general’s epaulettes and golden embroidery with the Inquisition emblem on his back — a large letter ‘I’ surrounded by stars and flames in a diamond pattern.

  We were just walking down the street when I stopped abruptly and stared at a small house with a tiled roof.

  Small, completely unremarkable at first glance, but the house triggered a strange reaction in me — my magical Spark responded with a short rhythmic pulse to the energy emanating from that house.

  I wasn’t the only one who stopped. Calypso also faltered and looked in the same direction.

  “Calypso? Lorelei?” the Mentor turned around when we stopped and frowned.

  “Did you see something?”

  “Something’s off about that house,” Calypso said firmly.

  I nodded. ‘Something’s off’ was currently the most accurate description I could give for what I was feeling.

  “Hm…” Ilforte said thoughtfully, frowning at the unassuming house.

  “I don’t sense anything, but let’s check…”

  The house was occupied, but the owners weren’t there, and the door was open for some reason. Several inquisitors went in first and searched all the rooms on the general’s orders before allowing anyone else inside.

  “There are a lot of empty houses around here,” Ilforte said quietly to us once we were all let in.

  “A tiny village, half-deserted. Most of the residents moved to a nearby newly built town.”

  “But this one’s occupied. At least someone was here fairly recently,” I said, noticing a glass with ice on the nightstand.

  “Look, the ice in the glass hasn’t even fully melted yet.”

  “And someone was brewing coffee in a still-warm pot,” added one inquisitor returning from the kitchen.

  “But didn’t finish,” Calypso noted, also peeking into the kitchen and seeing the coffee that had boiled over on the stove.

  “Something interrupted them.”

  “Or someone,” I whispered.

  “I’m leaning toward ‘something’ ” Calypso said, walking up to the stove and frowning at the coffee stains.

  However, searching the kitchen led nowhere, same as searching the other rooms. The house was empty, no signs of struggle or anything like that. Then again, many traces could be cleaned up with magic if someone wanted to, but no one could read those traces: typical search spells belonged to white magic, which continued to be absent as if it had never existed.

  “I can’t shake the feeling that we’re missing something,” Ilforte muttered, carefully examining the perimeter of the living room and tapping on the walls.

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  “Look for any secret passages.”

  “And I can’t shake the feeling that we’re wasting our time here,” General Mackelberry said grimly.

  “Maybe the homeowner just ran off on urgent business. My people have already looked into him: a Mr. Horkins lives here, alone, no wife or children, just an aunt left who lives with her family in central Forland. A farmer with his own small homestead that he lives off. Maybe some animal of his ran away and he dropped everything to chase after it, while we’re playing great detectives based on nothing but the empty words of some kids.”

  I grimaced and shot a contemptuous look at the general. He was wrong to dismiss us like that, very wrong.

  You can’t underestimate young people — the Mentor always said so, preparing us for the fact that in any battle with dark forces we might even face children. You never know at what age a wizard’s magical gift will flare up. And what about us Fortemins, who’ve been seriously trained in combat magic since childhood?

  Calypso didn’t just grimace with displeasure — his face actually twisted with indignation. He stepped forward with a combative look and opened his mouth, clearly about to say something scathing to the general, but I pulled him back by the arm.

  “Don’t,” I whispered, leaning toward his ear.

  “The general’s wrong, of course, but he’s not someone you want to make an enemy of, you know that…”

  But Calypso wasn’t listening anymore. He flinched strangely at my touch, and for a second I thought: damn, did I somehow hurt him even through the gloves?.. But then Calypso unexpectedly took my hand more firmly, gripping it tighter. He asked me:

  “Do you feel that too?”

  At first I didn’t understand what he meant and was about to ask, but then… then I felt it. A very dark mass of energy, coming from somewhere on the floor, maybe… So dark and dense that goosebumps ran across my skin.

  The whole time I’d been in the house I’d felt uneasy, as if sensing something unpleasant, vile nearby. And now that feeling had intensified tenfold, and I had some sense of the direction the darkness was coming from.

  “Why couldn’t I sense this energy before?” I muttered, frowning down at my feet, hoping to see something there.

  “It’s because of the merged auras,” Calypso said thoughtfully.

  “Regular scanning spells are white magic, which we can’t use right now, and separately you and I don’t fully sense the vibrations of dark magic, but when we merge our auras our senses sharpen. Let’s try to examine the living room floor together. It's radiating the strongest.”

  Together we got down on the floor, carefully examining every inch. Given that we were literally crawling around on all fours among the bustling inquisitors, we couldn’t help but draw attention.

  “Uh… guys?” Ilforte said cautiously, staring at us crawling around in bewilderment.

  “Are you okay? What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a hidden passage,” I said dismissively, continuing to move my palm over the rug and listening to my senses.

  “Holding hands?” the Mentor’s eyebrows shot up.

  His gaze fixed in confusion on our hands, since Calypso and I had to hold hands to maintain the magical connection.

  “Be glad we’re not making out in front of you,” and that we both muttered simultaneously, almost in the exact same tone.

  We said it, looked at each other in surprise, and burst out laughing. Either releasing nervous tension or trying to hide our awkwardness behind laughter… I was definitely trying to, my cheeks had even turned pink.

  And while the Mentor was looking back and forth between me and Calypso with concern, trying to figure out if we needed help, I felt a strange vibration again… But this time — a pleasant one.

  It seemed to come from our intertwined fingers, traveling up my arm, spreading pleasantly through my body and filling me with gentle warmth. This warmth intensified my sense of the magical currents in the air many times over, and in that moment I clearly understood exactly where that dark vibration we’d been sensing was coming from.

  And this strange gentle warmth also made me want to smile. Just because. I drew a sharp breath and broke into a wide smile that I couldn’t hold back.

  I had the feeling Calypso felt something similar. At least he also drew a sharp breath, and a beautiful smile appeared on his face. Probably just as blissful as mine.

  I don’t even want to know how we looked from the outside in those moments. Two young Fortemins holding hands, crawling around on all fours, and smiling blissfully at nothing — not a sight for the faint of heart, I’d imagine.

  Good thing the Mentor wasn’t one of those. And the general… Well, his job meant dealing with strange and nerve-wracking things all the time. Let him stay on his toes.

  “Done!” Calypso exclaimed after several minutes of complex magical manipulations.

  He’d finally managed to reveal a hidden hatch in the floor, located in the far corner of the room. That was exactly where Calypso and I had clearly sensed the black magic flowing in a thick, viscous stream.

  The hidden hatch turned out to be a wooden door leading to a basement. And we’d all walked around and over that door a hundred times, but still, no one had been able to sense anything.

  “Why couldn’t we find it?” the general said in an irritated voice, when the inquisitors carefully opened the door and saw a long staircase leading down into a dark basement.

  “The entrance was concealed by dark magic,” Calypso said.

  “Hidden by an illusion, so no amount of tapping or any mechanical methods would have helped find the hatch. Only magic can help here.”

  “Which isn’t working right now,” General Mackelberry noted skeptically.

  “Not all magic isn’t working,” Calypso explained carefully, glancing at the general clearly not wanting to mention the controversial shadow magic in front of him.

  “Care to be more specific?” Mackelberry pressed.

  “Only white magic isn’t working completely right now. Some types of magic can still be used.”

  “More specific?” the general continued to push.

  “What magic exactly did you just use, young man?”

  Calypso pressed his lips together and narrowed his eyes at the general.

  I understood his hesitation. The general would hardly approve of dabbling in shadow magic, and there was no desire to argue with him about it right now or explain his position. But saying nothing at all wasn’t a great option either.

  The general was a very important figure, not just in Forland — he also maintained connections with inquisitors on other continents and had significant influence over all government structures.

  “Some Fortemins have their own methods for casting in difficult situations,” Ilforte stepped in with an explanation.

  “You don’t need to know the names of these techniques, they wouldn’t work for you anyway given your different nature, General. So I suggest we not get hung up on this and examine the basement as quickly as possible.”

  The general grimaced, not hiding his displeasure, but didn’t argue.

  And I caught a brief grateful look from Calypso toward his father. For shutting the general down, for shielding him from unnecessary questions. That was exactly what was needed right now.