At once, an unbearable itching sensation spread across my palms, while tingles spread up and down my arms. Tay caught my face in her hands, her mouth twisted with emotion, but she couldn’t stop her own hands from turning me around until my gaze connected with Adair’s.
“Get me out of here,” he said.
My hands moved to obey even as my mind screamed at me to stop. I could no more have resisted than I could have stopped breathing. As his cell door opened, Adair shoved his way out, joining Tay, whose expression brimmed with remorse. I tried to speak, but my mouth felt as though it was superglued shut.
Adair grinned, gesturing at the two liches who guarded the jail doors. “Burn them.”
Flames leapt from my hands, as though of their own accord, reducing both liches to twin piles of ashes. Adair then seized my arm and dragged me out into the light. Tay walked along behind us, not speaking, as the node beside the jail came into view.
“You can’t go through there,” I ground out through clenched teeth. “That’s the Death King’s personal node. Nobody living can use it.”
Adair reached for the pendant around my neck. “You have a way around that, don’t you? You go first.”
Shit. I did. The transporter spell. He grabbed the pendant and pulled me one-handedly into the node. The transporter spell flashed, and unbearable pain speared my body from within.
I landed on my knees on hard ground, the crumbled remains of the Family’s estate nearby. My head hit the earth, my vision fading until nothing remained but darkness.
I woke up in a cell. Or something like it. The small empty room looked more like a cave, but I saw enough to know I was back in the Family’s home.
I slumped back into a sitting position. I was screwed. I’d already lost my chance to save Tay from Adair’s influence and stop the Family unleashing their cantrips on the city, and to add insult to injury, it turned out the infected cantrips could hurt me after all. By now though, sensation had come back into my limbs, and the rash had vanished from sight. The others who’d picked them up wouldn’t be so lucky.
Lex walked into view, a smile on her mouth. “I have to say, you look much better than you did when Adair sent you here.”
“Was this the ‘chaos’ you were talking about?” I spat. “Sending your assassins into London and unleashing inferno cantrips on innocent people? Setting the Houses against one another and spreading lethal cantrips through Elysium’s capital after cutting off the nodes so nobody could get out? That doesn’t look like staying out of the magical world’s business to me.”
“Oh, most of that wasn’t our doing,” she said. “I heard you did your level best to intervene, regardless, but it’s pointless.”
Who needed a war when they’d already killed countless people without laying a finger on them? Worse, a node linked the two realms more closely than ever before, the Order and the Houses were in disarray, and the Family would have free rein to run amok in both realms if we weren’t careful. Unless Devon had a cantrip to hand to turn off the node in Elysium’s citadel… but my friends would have to handle that alone. I wouldn’t be getting out of this cell anytime soon.
I fixed a glare on my face to cover my panic. “Yeah, it’s always my pleasure to screw things up for you.”
“I have to say, I was surprised your friend was the one who finally convinced you to help Adair escape,” she added. “Loyalty is hard to find, isn’t it?”
Damn her. Tay had been fighting Adair’s control all along. That she’d managed to delay for any length of time at all had been a small miracle.
“Bet that pissed you off,” I said. “How she stopped you from taking over the House of Fire by killing the jailor you sent to infiltrate their ranks, I mean.”
“Clever of her,” said Lex. “Very clever, given the limited options at her disposal. If I’d known how good she was, I might have recruited her sooner.”
“You ruined her life,” I said. “As much as you ruined mine. You must have known giving magical enhancements to a child would end in tragedy.”
“Her family were fully complicit,” she said. “They’re more to blame than I am. They wanted a rare mage whose skills they could exploit. I suppose she never told you that. She was ashamed, I imagine.”
“You haven’t the right to play with people’s lives like that,” I said to her. “Not you, and not Roth either. Where’s he hiding, anyway?”
“Roth is watching the action,” she said. “Chaos is easy to unleash but harder to manipulate, and we don’t want the whole system to collapse just yet.”
“So that’s the plan.” Bitterness laced my words. “You want the Houses of the Elements totally under your control, not awash in total anarchy.”
“Of course we do,” she said. “We almost had them once already, before you stopped us.”
“I’m not going to apologise for it,” I said. “I saved lives by burning this shithole to the ground. I forced you to stop your plans in their tracks.”
But they’d resumed their strategy the instant they’d escaped and found their way back here. Of course they had. They were resourceful and cunning, traits they’d passed onto me, and which I’d need to employ if I wanted to get the hell out of here.
“Yes, you did.” She glanced behind her. “It’s awfully quiet out here, isn’t it? That’s one thing I always noticed after the war… the silence.”
“You lived through the war thirty years ago,” I said. “You took advantage back then, too.”
“Of course we did,” she said. “When the mage council had their falling-out, someone had to be there to pick up the pieces.”
“What makes you so sure the spirit mages will win this time?” I said. “Last time, they lost. Everyone else did, too.”
“Exactly,” she said. “They have the same
