[Lorelei]

  It was decided that the Mentor would come down to the basement with us: he figured that since only we’d managed to find the secret passage, it made sense to bring us along to explore the basement — who knows what else we might pick up on.

  While the inquisitors talked among themselves, I cautiously peered down into the darkness where you couldn’t even see the bottom of the stairs.

  God, it was terrifying to descend into a dark basement where something strange was going on, without being able to scan the space with magic or put up protective shields in case of an attack!

  I felt horribly vulnerable at that moment. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, and I wasn’t afraid of facing dark creatures. I wasn’t afraid of much in life, honestly.

  But today my whole worldview had been shaken, and I realized what scared me most was helplessness. It scared me in the sense that I was helpless to fix my own problematic magic. And now I was terrified by my inability to shield myself with a protective dome.

  “It’s too dark down there,” Ilforte said, stepping down the stairs first.

  “Someone bring me a lamp or something.”

  “But Mr. Brandt, there isn’t a single lamp in the house!” said an inquisitor with short dark hair and rectangular glasses.

  The only non-magical light sources we found were candles.

  “Doesn’t matter, anything will do. Light the candles then.”

  “But how?” the inquisitor said, confused.

  “Magic isn’t working, we can’t light the candles!..”

  “Has nobody ever heard of matches?” Ilforte said irritably.

  “Come on, think faster, find some matches and get me those candles!”

  Finding matches turned out to be quite the quest, because the homeowner didn’t keep any, clearly relying entirely on magic. Even the smokers among the inquisitors had no matches or lighters, because everyone was used to snapping their fingers to summon a little flame instead of striking matches. Such simple everyday things that nobody thought twice about, taking them for granted…

  Finally, under Ilforte’s grumbling of ‘Where’s Moris when you need him, you guys are hopeless,’ the matches were found, the candles lit, and we began our descent down the rickety, creaking staircase in single file. The Mentor went first while we followed close behind, listening to every sound. Calypso and I had to descend holding hands to keep maintaining our merged magical aura, and I caught myself thinking — ridiculously — that I was starting to get used to this…

  “Down below there’s a very powerful concentration of dark magic,” Calypso said quietly.

  “Very powerful… Makes you sick to your stomach.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating: the powerful concentrate of darkness was literally making me nauseous. My head even started spinning a little.

  “Is there something or someone down there we should be worried about?” Ilforte asked.

  “There’s no one down there… No one alive, anyway,” Calypso clarified grimly.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs and the candlelight illuminated the space, I understood why he’d said that. I froze in place, grimacing at the sight before me and gripping Calypso’s hand tight, as if that could somehow help me handle my emotions at what we were seeing.

  A pentagram. A large pentagram took up most of the basement. And in the center of the pentagram lay a man, definitely dead. His body was disfigured with runic inscriptions that had clearly been carved with a ritual knife. On his forehead was a zigzag symbol that had been etched with particular care, judging by the even lines.

  “What is that symbol?” I whispered to Calypso while the inquisitors bustled around examining the pentagram and the victim inside it.

  “I’m not sure, but I’ve seen it somewhere,” he whispered back.

  “Can’t remember where right now… I’ll need to dig through the ancient tomes in the academy library.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I tried not to look at the fact that the power points of the pentagram were lined with Mr. Horkins’s carved-out internal organs. When you work with dark forces, unfortunately, sometimes you have to look at some pretty nasty stuff.

  Though I personally hadn’t encountered anything like this before, mostly due to my strict homeschooling.

  “This isn’t the work of dark creatures, it looks more like it was done by a human,” Ilforte said.

  Unlike me, he was examining the power points and every mark of the pentagram very closely.

  “A professional did this.”

  “Or possibly a greater demon,” Calypso added.

  Ilforte nodded.

  “Possibly. But only Elza can tell us for sure.”

  The victim in the center of the pentagram was radiating very strong dark energy, but Calypso and I couldn’t make sense of anything more — our knowledge in this area clearly wasn’t enough, and neither was our ability to cast properly.

  So after examining the basement, where nothing else important was found, we went back up to the living room, where I breathed a sigh of relief at the fresh air.

  My head was still spinning a little and I felt slightly sick: all that concentrated darkness combined with my own already excessive darkness wasn’t agreeing with me. Unlike me, Calypso clearly felt better.

  “You okay?” he asked me quietly.

  I shrugged vaguely and felt Calypso touch my hand. Almost immediately I felt better, as if someone had poured a stream of something refreshing and pleasant into me.

  “Thanks,” I smiled shyly.

  “What did you just do? Shared some of your power with me?”

  Calypso smirked and shook his head.

  “The opposite. Actually I took some of yours. You’ve got plenty of your own darkness, and an overload from the outside definitely won’t help. But taking a little bit away should make you feel better, right?”

  I nodded and took a deep breath, enjoying the pleasant warmth spreading through my body.

  “And your aura gets more stable too,” Calypso said quietly.

  “Have the Mentor and your parents tried relieving your inner darkness this way?”

  “Of course they have. They’ve tried everything. But nothing ever worked for them. Doesn’t it hurt you right now, by the way?”

  “Should it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Everyone who’s tried to pull dark magic out of me has said they can’t do it because it makes them nauseous, dizzy, their whole body starts aching… A toxic effect kicks in, you could say. And pretty fast too. Less than a minute. But you don’t seem to feel anything like that. Strange.”

  “Hmm,” Calypso said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin.

  “Maybe it’s related to my work with shadow magic…”

  “How could that be related?”

  “I’ll explain in more detail later. But if your dark magic can actually be drawn out without harming others, there’s definitely a way to stabilize it for good, through shadow magic for instance, hmm… I’ll need to think this through carefully and work out some options.”

  “Sometimes I feel like there just aren’t any options,” I sighed heavily.

  “Nobody can figure anything out, nobody can handle this…”

  “I’ll handle it,” Calypso said confidently.

  “It’s personal now.”

  “Pretty sure it’s personal for the Mentor and my parents too,” I said skeptically.

  “But as you can see, they’re not handling it.”

  “Well, that just means they’re not insane enough. Unlike me.”

  “Don’t you mean insistent?”

  “Insistent too,” Calypso nodded seriously.

  I smirked, and the next moment I nearly jumped out of my skin when the room lit up with bright blue flames and a black Harley appeared out of nowhere right on the table in the middle of the living room, with a woman in a red helmet sitting on it.

  Judging by the blue tongues of flame, this wasn’t regular teleportation, which wasn’t working now — the spell was dark magic.

  The table wasn’t built for that kind of weight and collapsed with a pitiful crunch. The woman slid down the tilted tabletop in the dead silence, broken only by the roar of the engine, and came to a stop literally a step away from General Mackelberry, then hopped nimbly off the bike.

  “Could’ve cleared some space before I got here! You rushed me here and couldn’t even clear a spot…,” the blue-eyed woman said irritably, taking off her helmet and shaking out her beautiful golden hair.

  She was wearing leather pants, a short leather jacket with metal chains that jingled softly with every step. All topped off with red stilettos, of all things.

  “Get me some coffee,” the woman immediately addressed the nearest inquisitor, patting him on the shoulder.

  “With cream and half a teaspoon of sugar. Come on, move it, what are you standing there for?”

  The inquisitor started to object, but seeing how dangerously her eyes had turned black, he nodded silently and shot off to the kitchen.

  “That’s better,” the blonde said in a satisfied voice, then turned to another inquisitor standing nearby.

  “And you find me something to eat. I haven’t eaten since this morning and I’m starving. Some crappy sandwich will do.”

  “Madam, don’t you think you’ve mistaken my subordinates for your own?” General Mackelberry said in an angry voice.

  “Maybe a little,” she waved him off without even glancing at the general, but beamed at Ilforte.

  “Hey, Il!..”

  So yeah, allow me to introduce you: this is my mom. Everyone else’s mom is just a mom, but mine is a demon. A greater demon. A greater demon who fights for the forces of light and answers to Armarillis. Quite the paradox.