The Silver Mask (Magisterium #4)(25)

Call was jealous. Jealous of Alex because he was the kind of boy that people liked. Call knew Tamara hated Alex for killing Aaron and even if that had never happened, she still wouldn’t like Alex, because he had made her sister cry. He knew all that, but it didn’t help.

Whether or not Tamara actually had a crush on Call, it didn’t matter. Call liked her.

He liked her and he was going to have to tell her.

“So,” said Jasper, noting the strained silence. He gestured toward the sideboard. “Anyone for that chocolate cake?”

After dinner, Jasper, still working on his plan to impress Master Joseph, asked if the older mage could show him how to create the force fields of air that barred the windows. Alex, who was an air mage, immediately offered to co-teach.

“You’re not going to be able to use this information to escape, you know,” Alex said with obvious pleasure. “It’s very advanced stuff. Besides, even if you got out of the house, you’d never make it off the island.”

“Oh no,” Jasper said. “I wasn’t thinking of trying to escape.”

Master Joseph gave him an indulgent smile. “Of course not. Come along.” He led the way to one of the practice rooms.

The moment they disappeared, Tamara grabbed Call’s hand. “Come on,” she hissed, and dragged him out of the dining room, into the parlor. She shut the door and leaned against it.

“I have to tell you something,” she said, looking around as if someone might be lurking in the shadows, spying. She was wearing another pastel dress, this one pale apricot, with a lace skirt.

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.