Two weeks was all we’d given ourselves for this, and we were already two days in. Twelve days just didn’t seem nearly long enough to find Dante, get the spell back from wherever it was, and track David before he’d gone too far.
But, I reminded myself, I’d done lots of impossible things before. No one had thought we could afford five school dances in one year, and hadn’t I found the funds? And that time we’d competed in the state cheerleading competition despite having a squad of only six people? Sure, we hadn’t won, but we hadn’t come in last, either.
We could do this.
Blythe smiled at me then, finally opening the driver’s side door. “I can do it in one, promise,” she said, and I got out of the car, hoping yet again that she was actually telling the truth.
• • •
He wasn’t sure he was ever awake anymore.
Or maybe he never slept. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between sleeping and waking because the visions never stopped. Once, he thought, there had been a time when he could have shut the visions out, or at least waited for them to pass. Once, he thought, someone had set up wards to protect him from having visions. That had made him angry, but now as he lay in the darkness, his head splitting all the time, he understood that whoever that was had maybe been right.
That was another thing, the way names had slipped out of his mind. Sometimes he imagined that it wasn’t light pouring out of his eyes, but memories. Like he was leaking knowledge or losing . . . something. Maybe losing who he used to be.
But that was a crazy way to think. There was still enough of him inside his mind to know that. To know that something was wrong, that he was changing into something bad. But what? And how could he stop it?
Groaning, he rolled over. He thought he’d shut his eyes, but couldn’t tell. After the last girl, he’d known he couldn’t be around people anymore. It wasn’t safe. So he found a perfect spot to hide. But now he couldn’t remember how he’d found it or how he’d even gotten here. He was forgetting everything except the things he saw all the time. Blood on a yellow dress. A girl with green eyes, tears. Two other girls, but they couldn’t help. And that was good.
The girl with the green eyes was dangerous. She was coming for him, and he could feel her drawing closer. The girl with the green eyes made something ache inside his chest, and he knew there was more he should remember about her. More he should feel about her besides how dangerous she was. But that was another thing he was losing, a fading memory that belonged to whoever—whatever—he was before.
And those things didn’t matter anymore.
The girl with the green eyes wasn’t going to stop coming, he knew that. He could hide, but she would find him because she wanted . . . something.
With a groan, he pressed his head to the hard rock beneath him, wishing the pain would stop, just for a little while. If the pain would go away, he could think. He could remember why the girl made his chest ache with something that wasn’t just fear.
But the pain didn’t stop, and the light was so bright, burning and illuminating the walls around him, and he thought maybe he screamed, but that sound could have just been in his mind. He didn’t know anymore.
Still, lying there in the cold, damp dark, something came to him with a sharp clarity that burned everything else away. The yellow dress he kept seeing . . . was it hers? The girl’s? And the blood that stained the front of it was his. There was a part of him that didn’t feel bothered by that. A part that welcomed it. This wasn’t a life, after all, so who cared if it ended?
But the other part of him fought against that. He was ancient and powerful, not something that should be put down like a feral dog. He was the Oracle, and this girl, this Paladin, wanted to stop him. She would kill him.
Unless he killed her first.
Chapter 21
“NO.”
“Yes.”
“Except no.”
I sat in the driver’s seat, staring at the dive in front of me, my fingers tight around the steering wheel. At one point in its existence, the bar had maybe been called “Cowboys.” I was guessing this based on the cardboard cutout of a cowboy propped up near the door, and the fact that there was a sign on the roof that had an “O,” a “W,” and a “Y” on it. Other letters had fallen off or rotted away.
In short, it was clearly the worst place in the world, and I could not believe I was going to have to set foot in there.
Blythe was in the passenger seat, eyebrows raised as she looked over at me. “I’m telling you, this is where he is.”
From the backseat, Bee snorted. Her hair was loose tonight, and she pushed it back with impatient hands. “Why would anyone want to hang out here?” she asked. “This is a place where you end up on a true-crime TV show.”
Truer words had never been spoken, but Blythe folded her arms over her chest, staring at the bar. “In any case, this is the place where he is.”
Before we’d driven out of Ideal, Blythe had done a quick tracking spell on Dante. Apparently, his fingerprints on Saylor’s journal had been enough, and after a brief ritual done in a Shell station bathroom, Blythe had come out with a location in mind.
Stupidly, I’d assumed we’d be heading to a house. Maybe an apartment. Not this truly sad dive bar in eastern Georgia.
We’d been driving for about five hours, and while the sun had just gone down, the parking lot was already packed, telling me that the clientele here at “OW Y” took that whole “five o’clock is drinking time” thing seriously.
I was not looking forward to a night sifting through the local drunks for one guy.
But if this was where Dante was, then this was where we had to be. Still, I had some reservations.
“We’re teenagers,” I reminded her now. “They won’t let us in.”
“We’re girls,” Blythe countered. “They’ll let us in.”
She probably had a point there, but I still wondered if maybe Bee and I should hang out in the car.
Leaning forward, Blythe continued. “Plus we have mind-controlling magic. Haven’t y’all ever used the Mage’s powers to get into bars?”
I looked over at her, scowling. “Um, no, we don’t use the special superpowers Ryan got because Saylor died in order to score beer, actually.”
But then Bee leaned in closer and said, a little sheepish, “One time, Ryan used it to get us into that new restaurant in Montgomery? The one it’s hard to get reservations to?”
I turned in my seat, blinking at her, and she shrugged. “It was our one-month anniversary, and he wanted to take me somewhere special. It didn’t hurt anyone.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned back around to face Blythe’s triumphant smile. “Okay,” I said, taking the keys out of the ignition. “Fine. Let’s go use the powers of the gods to dodge creepy guys and drink cheap beer and find this other guy who apparently holds the key to everything.”
We stepped out of the car, gravel crunching under our feet. The door was open, and loud, raucous music was pouring out into the night. I could hear the stomping of feet on the wooden floors, and the smell of stale beer and fried food hung like a fog over the building.
I stood there at the base of the steps leading up into the bar as Bee and Blythe walked in front of me, heading on in. “Seriously, why this place?” I muttered, but Blythe didn’t answer me. After a minute, I sighed and followed.
I wish I could say that “OW Y” was not what I expected and that I learned a valuable lesson about not making snap judgments, but no. No, I was totally right, and it was totally gross. The music was too loud, and despite the name of the bar—or what I was guessing was the name of the bar—I didn’t see a single cowboy hat. I saw a lot of baseball caps, though, and more fraternity shirts that I could count, plus a fair amount of giant belt buckles.
“Wait at the bar!” Blythe shouted over the music (some ungodly bro-co
untry song about trucks and rivers and girls in short shorts), and I caught her arm before she could disappear.
“Don’t you need us?” I asked, and she shook me off with an irritated look.
“Let me find him first,” she called out. “Better if I do that part on my own.”
With that, she turned away and was promptly swallowed up by a wave of plaid and denim.
Sighing, I wove my way through the crowd, making my way to the bar. Not that I wanted a beer—ew—but I did want somewhere to sit and a bottle of water. This place was packed, and also hot as Satan’s armpit.
There were two empty stools, and I propped my hip on one, leaning in to shout at the bartender. I’d just asked for the water when I sensed someone sliding onto the stool beside me, and without even bothering to look over, I held up one hand. “No. No to whatever you’re about to say; go away, please.”
A hand curled around mine, and I jerked my head around, prepared to send some redneck crashing through the opposite wall if I needed to, but it was just Bee, shaking her head and laughing at me.
“Easy there,” she said. “I was coming to be your wingwoman.”
Snorting, I took my bottle of water from the bartender, handing him a few crumpled dollars from my pocket. “Yeah, because picking up dudes is what I’m here for in this dump.”
Bee nodded and glanced around. “You think this guy is actually here?”
Shrugging, I unscrewed the lid on my bottle. “Let’s freaking hope so.”
Bee had her hair in both hands, twisting it over her shoulder, and at that, she lifted her eyebrows. “I can’t imagine she’d want to come here for fun, Harper.”
I couldn’t see Blythe in the press of bodies on the dance floor, so I had no idea where she was. Scowling slightly, I looked back to Bee. “No telling with her.”
“That’s the truth,” Bee replied, before looking back at me with a slight lift of her eyebrows.
“Not used to taking the backseat, huh?”
The words were light and teasing, and they shouldn’t have bugged me, but I found myself frowning and turning on my stool to face her better. “What?”
Clearly picking up on my tone, Bee gave an uneasy shrug. It was hot in the bar, and her hair was already curling in the humidity. “You’re just used to being in charge is all. And now, because Blythe has the magic we need, we have to trail after her.” Another lift of her shoulders. “It has to feel weird, is all.”
It did, but I didn’t really want to talk about that, not even with Bee. Especially since it made me wonder if this was what she had felt earlier in the year, me always trying to decide what was best, plowing on without actually asking anyone else how they felt about it.
I’d made her and Ryan ride shotgun—sometimes literally, but mostly metaphorically—a lot. Riding shotgun wasn’t a great feeling.
I smiled at Bee and tried to keep my tone light. “Not so weird. I’m just annoyed that we’re spending time in a dump like this.”
Leaning back on her stool, Bee fished in her pocket for her phone, pulling it out to take a picture of the stuffed dance floor. “For Ryan,” she told me, and I nodded and smiled and missed David.
I fumbled for my own phone, pulling it out of my pocket and scrolling through the picture gallery. There were lots of pictures of David. Him on the computer in the newspaper lab. Him grimacing as he held up one of the huge construction-paper daisies I’d made for the Spring Fling dance.
One of him sitting underneath a tree in the courtyard at the Grove, smiling at me. His hair was a wreck because of course it was, but the pale green shirt he was wearing made his eyes look especially blue, and the sunlight lined him in gold. Not from any magic, no crazy Oracle powers spilling out of him. Just a cute boy, smiling at me because he liked me.
My throat felt tight, and even though I knew it was stupid and pointless, I took a quick snap of the scene around me. The dudes in trucker hats, the girls in really short shorts, the general “this is where you come not only to drown your sorrows, but also to obliterate your brain” vibe.
The flash made the whole thing look even more depressing, but it made me smile a little anyway as I texted it to David’s number, a number I knew wasn’t working anymore.
Wish you were here, I typed, and then, before I could let myself think, I hit send.
There wasn’t any reply; I hadn’t expected there to be. But I still watched my phone for a long time.
“Hey, pretty lady,” a voice slurred, and the stool on the opposite side of me jostled slightly.
I didn’t bother looking up. “No,” I said, raising one hand, eyes still trained on my phone.
A gust of boozy breath, and then a slurred “I ain’t even asked you a question yet!”
“No,” I repeated, keeping my hand up, and after a moment, there was another huff of breath, and then he was gone, lumbering off to find some other girl.
I looked up at Bee, then, but she was still grinning down at her phone, clearly texting with Ryan.
Sighing and feeling way more sorry for myself than was attractive, I stood up, determined to find Blythe. If she hadn’t already found Dante, I was willing to give her about ten more minutes in this place.
I gingerly made my way around the dance floor, trying to keep my toes un-stomped while scanning for Blythe. This was where being short was a real pain in the butt, because I could barely see anything, and I was searching for someone even littler than I was.
I completed a full circuit of the floor and didn’t see Blythe.
This was not only a giant waste of time, but also completely gross, and if there are any two things I hate in this world, it’s wheel-spinning and nasty bars.
My hands felt gritty from just touching the chairs in this place, so I made my way to the ladies’ room—sorry, the “Cowgirls’ Room” according to the sign—determined to wash up before enlisting Bee in my search for Blythe.
But when I opened the door to the bathroom, Blythe was already in there, standing by the sinks, fists clenched at her sides.
And at her feet was a guy, blood slowly trickling from his temple.
Chapter 22
“OH MY GOD, are you okay?” I asked, stepping over the guy’s prostrate form to go to Blythe. She was breathing heavy and some of the hair had come out of her ponytail, but other than that, she seemed all right.
“Good!” she said, almost chipper, and held up a can of hair spray. “Stole this out of your bag and put it in my purse, hope you don’t mind.”
I looked at the bit of blood clinging to the bottom of the can and swallowed hard. I couldn’t fault a girl for improvising a weapon, but now that can of Big Sexy Hair was headed for the nearest garbage can.
“If he touched you, I hope you at least gave him a concussion,” I said, kicking at the bottom of the guy’s shoe with my toes. “Now can we please—”
And then I looked closer at the guy on the floor.
Tall, Asian, definitely handsome despite the blood dripping from his temple . . .
“Dante?” I asked, and Blythe nodded, tossing the hair spray can in the trash.
“Yup. So no worries about me being okay. I knocked him out in the hall and dragged him in here.”
I stared at her for a second, then looked back to Dante, who was starting to moan and move around a bit. “And the purpose of knocking him out was . . . ?”
Blythe put her hands on her hips. “I told you I always hated that dude.”
Taking a deep breath through my nose, I studied my reflection in the grimy mirrors over the sink, telling myself I’d count to ten before I said something I regretted. “We have to ask him all kinds of questions,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “so maybe giving him a concussion was a less-than-stellar plan?”
Dante moaned again, and I added, “And also, would’ve been nice to hear you’d found him before you clocked him.?
??
Blythe tugged at the hem of her shirt, sniffing. “Fine. I just . . . I have trouble not leading, I guess.”
That cut close to home. I nodded, then turned back to the guy on the floor.
Dante was conscious again, staring at both of us, befuddled. Whether that was because he’d been listening to us or from the damage Blythe had done with that can of Big Sexy Hair, I couldn’t say.
“Ugh, finally,” Blythe said, stepping over to Dante. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”
“Why did you hit me at all?” he said, hand still to his head. Then he glanced back and forth between us, wary.
“You’re not, like, going to steal my kidney or something, are you? I saw that kind of thing on the news once.”
Rolling her eyes, Blythe crossed her arms and cocked one knee. “Oh my God, Dante, don’t act like you don’t know me.”
His eyes traveled over her, and if he was acting, he was doing a damn good job of it because he genuinely looked confused and scared. “I . . . don’t?” And then he scowled. “Other than as the crazy bitch who hit me with . . . was that hair spray?”
Blythe dropped her arms and moved closer to Dante. “What are you talking about? Of course you know me. We worked together for over a year. We . . .” She glanced over at me, and then dropped her voice. “We made out that one time? At the office?”
The word “office” surprised me. It was so . . . normal. Did the Ephors have a regular building somewhere with, like, cubicles and fax machines? That was almost too bizarre to contemplate. As was the idea of Blythe making out with anyone. She seemed so . . . okay, no-nonsense isn’t right, because Lord knew there was plenty of nonsense around Blythe, but she was . . . determined. Serious. She might have taken us to the ball field to ogle boys, but I hadn’t actually seen her doing any ogling. I wasn’t sure Blythe even liked boys. Or girls, for that matter.
Still, the idea that the same kind of drama that had been dogging me, David, Ryan, and Bee was also an issue for the Ephors was kind of funny, I had to admit.