“Do you really think the Family is back in their old house?” he said.
“No idea,” I said. “I destroyed the entire estate, but maybe they got their earth mage allies to build a new house.”
“Why do they never show up in person?” he asked. “Aside from your brother, I mean?”
“They have this thing about maintaining secrecy,” I said. “The Houses didn’t actually know their identities until they caught me.”
He shot me a sideways look. “They caught you? I thought you turned them in.”
“I did,” I said, “but I also let the House’s guards catch me first. It was the only way I could think of to ensure the consequences didn’t come back to bite me if they failed to get the Family behind bars. I left them unconscious and tied up when I destroyed their estate, but I couldn’t bring all three of them with me single-handedly.”
“So you let the Houses catch you first.” A note of sympathy came into his voice, which might have bothered me if it’d come from anyone else.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was easier than I anticipated, but the Family never saw it coming. They didn’t expect anyone to best them.”
Especially one of their own creations.
“I bet,” he said. “But how did they recruit people to join them if they never came into the city in person?”
“They used to send recruiters on their behalf, mostly,” I said. “They hired humans, practitioners usually, equipped with some of their experimental cantrips. Might be doing the same again, for all I know. We saw some of those assassins in the attack the other week, so they’re definitely still up to their old tricks.”
Which made them more likely to be at the old base, but I would have thought the Houses would have at least sent someone to check up on their old address after their escape.
“And your brother?” he said. “Adair? He showed his face in public.”
“He wanted revenge on me,” I replied. “That’s why he got openly involved with Shawn and the other spirit mages. The others don’t like getting their hands dirty. Not directly.”
“You’d think someone would have searched their house, though.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “You would think so.”
We walked on through the outskirts of the city, until the buildings gave way to wasteland broken by the occasional crumbled ruin of an old house. The wasteland had once been fields, the buildings comprising towns or villages or farms. Most of the Parallel looked the same these days. The Death King controlled only one small portion of the wasteland compared to how far it actually stretched, though there were large areas which were inaccessible thanks to the aftereffects of the war. This one wasn’t, but I still watched my step, in case I trod on the magical equivalent of a landmine. Even with my speed, it took half an hour before I started to see familiar sights. A forest of twisted trees. Ruined buildings. Broken pieces of metal fence. And then…
I halted in front of a gate which had been ripped up from its roots, around a burned stretch of earth. “Here we are.”
“Nice decor.” Miles floated up to my side.
The house itself lay in a heap of charred ruins, but the ground around it was turbulent, as though churned up by giant hands. Or earth mages. This place is still in operation, all right. Worse, they seemed to have brought in new staff.
Miles caught sight of the piles of upturned soil, too. “Is that what I think it is? Are there earth mages down there?”
“There were always tunnels under the estate,” I whispered. “I thought they collapsed. But I guess they started recruiting from the House of Earth for a reason.”
I’d been too wrapped up in looking for their new hideout to even consider that they might not have abandoned the old one, regardless of the fact that the Houses knew where it was now. But then, why wouldn’t they, if they planned to take over the Houses from within? I should’ve known better.
Miles sucked in a breath. “What… what is that?”
I followed his gaze to the side of a cliff which formed the far boundary of the grounds. Without the house blocking the way, the golden sheen of the metal forming the cliffside was starkly obvious now.
“That,” I said, “is why they built the tunnels. I guess they reopened the mine.”
Truth be told, I’d expected someone else to swoop in and claim it first, but the few who’d known the Family lived here might have been too frightened of their potential return to risk breaking onto their property.
“The mine,” he echoed. “So—they’re making cantrips out of that stuff?”
“Nah, they don’t have the finesse,” I said. “If I had to guess, they’re having someone else dig it up and then handing it over to practitioners. That’s what they did before.”
Question was, where were the practitioners? I wouldn’t have thought the Family would let them live on the property, but no other buildings or landmarks were within sight. The Family had picked this place to build their estate for a reason other than its remoteness: the metal, infused with magic, was the material used to make cantrips, and I hadn’t been able to make a dent in it even after I’d razed the place to the ground.
“I suppose we could close off the tunnels and slow them down,” I said to Miles. “That ought to put a dent in their smuggling operation.”
“Where are the rest of the Family, though?” he asked. “Are they underground, do you think?”
“I honestly have no idea.” I scanned the ground for a tunnel opening and felt the distant rumble of movement below the earth as I walked a little further until I came to a tunnel which was large enough for a person to walk into. While part of me wanted to check for any potential stragglers before I caved it in, a bigger part
