Quentin hadn’t had much luck with father figures. Not Dean Fogg, not Mayakovsky, not Ember the ram god. They hadn’t dispensed a whole lot of paternal wisdom to him over the years. Whatever power and wisdom they had, they hadn’t been eager to share it with him. Maybe they didn’t want to be his father figures. Maybe he hadn’t made an especially appealing son figure.

Quentin tried to imagine what his father should have been like, the father he wished his father had been. Brilliant. Funny. Intense. A bit of a rogue—at times even eccentric—but steady in a crisis. A man of grit and energy, a man who faced the world around him and brought it to heel on his own terms. A magician’s father. A father who would have seen what Quentin had made of himself and been proud.

But Quentin’s father seemed not to have had any power at all, let alone any to share. Quentin’s actual father had had one wife, one son, no hobbies, and probably a case of mild clinical depression which he self-medicated with work. Not everybody led a double life, but Quentin’s father had barely led a single one. How could somebody who seemed so determined to be powerless have a magician for a son?

Unless he hadn’t been powerless, Quentin thought. Unless that wasn’t the whole story. It was starting to sound like a cover story—exactly the kind of cover story a magician would use.

Methodically Quentin examined the study for evidence that his father wasn’t what he seemed to be—that he’d left some legacy for his son that for whatever reason he couldn’t share with him while he was alive. He went through his father’s filing cabinets—there were charms for searching paper documents for keywords, the same way computers searched digital files. He checked for codes or hidden scripts. He got back no results of any significance.

He hadn’t expected any. That was merely due diligence. Now the hunt could begin in earnest.

He examined the light fixtures. He squeezed the couch cushions and pulled up the rugs. He used a spell to peer into the walls and under the floorboards. He looked behind the pictures. He scoured the room to the studs for any trace of hidden magic, but all he found was an old library book with a weak anti-theft charm put on it by somebody else, which in any case didn’t appear to have worked. At least the missing keys turned up in the couch.