This was it. She was about to tell Call she liked him.

No, he should tell her first. Because once she got talking he was going to go all tongue-tied and make a fool of himself. He was going to get caught up in saying the right thing and might not be able to say anything at all.

“I like you!” he blurted out. “I think you’re pretty and I like you and I always liked you, even back when you really didn’t like me. You’re brave and smart and great and I think I am going to stop talking now.”

“There are tunnels under the house,” Tamara said at nearly the same time.

The floor seemed to tilt under his feet. She hadn’t been about to confess her feelings. In fact, she was looking at him as though he was some new species of bug that she’d never encountered before.

His face heated. “Tunnels?” he echoed numbly.

“Jasper and I eavesdropped and heard Hugo and Master Joseph talking about them. Apparently deliveries come in through there, and they store extra supplies there, too. They called them the catacombs.” She spoke a bit stiltedly, as though stunned by his news.

“Oh,” said Call, realizing belatedly what Tamara’s gesturing had been about. “You were trying to mime catacomb.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But if we’re going to explore them, we have to go there now, if we’re going to go. While Jasper is keeping Master Joseph distracted. We can talk later.”

“I’m ready to go,” said Call, trying to act normal. “But we don’t need to talk about what I said. Like, ever.”

Anastasia had been wrong — of course she’d been wrong. Tamara didn’t like him. She’d never had a crush on him.

He’d only believed it because he’d wanted it to be true.

Tamara gave Call a small smile and pushed past him to the center of the room. A thick Persian rug was on the floor. She started to roll it up, revealing the square of a trapdoor underneath. She glanced up. “Come and help me.”

Call went over and knelt down by her, his leg twinging. For several minutes they wrestled with the door, trying to find a handle or a pressure point or anything that would open it.

Finally, Call bit his lip. “Let me try something,” he said.

He placed his hand on top of the door and thought hard about the chaos magic he’d been doing, the reaching through the void to try to find something. The wild, churning emptiness of the chaos element. He drew that darkness up, as if he were lifting smoke, and let it flow down out of his hand.

Blackness like ink spilled across the trapdoor. It gave a twitch under Call’s hand and vanished, ripped away into the void, revealing a ladder leading downward.

Tamara exhaled. “Was that hard?” she whispered.

“No,” Call said. It was true. Using chaos magic had once been difficult, but now it was becoming more and more like using any other element. He didn’t know if that should scare him or not.

The only problem was, he’d just eaten away a section of the floor, so if someone walked across the rug, they’d fall into a hole. But right now, brokenhearted, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to care.

At least they were friends, he told himself. At least they would always be friends.

They climbed down into a long, dark tunnel with stone walls. Master Rufus had always taught him that chaos was not in itself evil. It was an element like any other. But there were plenty of places where Makars were killed at birth because chaos had so much power to destroy. It was why Anastasia had moved Constantine to America after he was born, to save his life.

And look how that turned out.

Tamara had lit a small flame in the palm of her hand. They were navigating by it, the orange light picking out the twists and turns of the corridors, the many rooms that led off them. Most were empty. Some contained stacked crates or jars that were clearly meant to hold elementals. One held a pile of steel chains that Call recognized; Master Joseph had once used them to imprison Aaron.

Tamara paused in front of one door. “In here,” she said in a low voice.

They stepped inside, and Call immediately saw what she’d noticed. A bow and arrow hung on one wall, and a sharp lance was propped against another. The whole room was a jumble of weird items — books, photo albums, boys’ clothes, furniture, sports equipment.

A cold feeling had set up house in Call’s stomach. Tamara had picked up a dagger with some initials etched on it — JM.

“Jericho Madden,” he said. “This must be Jericho’s stuff.”

“What’s it doing down here?” she asked.

Call frowned. “Probably Constantine had it stored for when he brought his brother back.”

It must have been here for maybe twenty years. And now that Jericho’s body was destroyed, it would be down here for a lot longer.

Call couldn’t help wondering where Aaron’s stuff was, but he couldn’t talk about that. It would definitely tip her off that he was considering bringing Aaron back.

Aaron, who would definitely not laugh if Call told him the stupid thing he had done.

Okay, Aaron hadn’t been perfect. He might have laughed.

Pushing all those thoughts away, Call lifted stacks of things and looked around. He found a few schoolbooks and novels and then a small, unmarked leather notepad. Call opened it. The handwriting looked like it belonged to a teenage boy. Drawings of lizards and other kids decorated the edges of the pages. Unlike Constantine’s notes, these weren’t just graphs and experiments.

I am doing a special project with Master Joseph and Con. Master Rufus gave me this book and told me to take notes on what happens, so that’s what I am going to do. So far, being the brother of the Makar means I get shuffled off wherever he goes. I am barely considered a mage in my own right anymore. Everyone only considers me his counterweight. No one wants to know how weird it is to feel his soul pulling at my own.

Call held the book up with a shudder to show Tamara. “Jericho kept a diary,” he told her.

Tamara’s eyebrows rose. She was looking at a Polaroid that she turned toward Call. It was of Anastasia with two little boys dressed in white. In the photograph, Anastasia had on a flowered dress and was sitting in the grass, unsmiling. Tamara turned it over. Someone had written the year on the back.

With a sigh, since Call knew how all of this turned out, he tucked the diary into a pocket of his flannel, to be read later.

“Maybe there’s something here they overlooked,” Tamara said. “Something they wouldn’t let us have on our own, but they kept for him?”

“Like a tornado phone?” Call asked, thinking of the one on Master Rufus’s desk he’d used to contact his father when he’d first come to the Magisterium.

“Too good to hope for,” Tamara said.

They searched and searched, but they didn’t find anything else that seemed useful. The only thing remotely interesting was a bunch of old books about Makars from all over the world and their dubious achievements. A few of them had been called things like the Scythe of Souls, the Hooded Kestrel, Devourer of Men, the Maw, Shaper of Flesh, the Scourge of Luxembourg, and the Face Harvester — definitely inspirations for Constantine’s “Enemy of Death.” Several claimed to have discovered the secret of immortality, among other scary things, but obviously, the books didn’t actually tell you what the secrets were. Finally, Tamara sat down on a nearby chair.