“To say goodbye,” I tell it. “I want to see the old place one last time. Kirilli was right—houses are like people. I want to let the mansion know how much it meant to me.”

Very peculiar, the Kah-Gash says drily. I thought you had put such quaint human ways behind you forever.

“I thought so too,” I mutter, then wink at myself in the mirror. “But I’m glad that I haven’t.”

I head for the ground floor. The others are drinking in the kitchen, Kernel and Kirilli from glasses, Curly and Moe from bowls. I tell them I’ll be a few more minutes, then steel myself and open the door to the cellar.

Dervish’s wine collection—his pride and joy—is a mess. Lots of the racks have been knocked over, and hundreds of bottles lie smashed on the ground, their contents spilled. I was never bothered about wine, but I feel sad viewing the destruction, knowing how rare some of the bottles were and how much they meant to my uncle.

Stepping carefully through the wreckage, I open the secret panel that nestles behind a fake wine rack. I trudge down a long tunnel to the house’s second, secret cellar. This was where Dervish cast his more dangerous spells and communed with Lord Loss.

There’s magic in this room. I never asked Dervish where it came from. Maybe it has something to do with the lodestone buried in the cave not far from here.

I use my power to light the candles dotting the walls. The room flickers into view, and my eyes are drawn to the remains of a steel cage. We kept Bill-E in it when he was turning. I was a prisoner there too for a while. Hard to believe such puny bars could ever have held the likes of me. But I wasn’t a monster in those days.

I wander around the cellar, looking at the books, the scraps of burned paper, the chess pieces left over from when we challenged Lord Loss. I never liked this room, but it doesn’t scare me as it once did. Nothing really scares me now. Except the thought of Bec collaborating with the demons, or me destroying the universe. Heh!