Chapter 16
THE MOTEL BREEZEWAY was dim, fluorescent lights overhead buzzing as I made my way toward the vending machines, ice bucket in hand. I tried not to think too much about the stains on the concrete or where they might have come from. We had enough money—and enough magic—to stay somewhere nicer, but when you’re in the middle of nowhere Mississippi, you take what you can get, and this was the only motel for miles. Still, between the patches of darkness from blown bulbs, the persistent hum of traffic from the interstate, and the stifling heat of the night, it felt like I’d stumbled into a bad horror movie. If my mom or, God forbid, The Aunts, could see me now, I’d be on the way back to Pine Grove before I could so much as spit.
David, I reminded myself. You’re doing this for David.
But was I really? Blythe asked if this was about saving David or saving me. But weren’t they one and the same?
The fact that I was having trouble answering that question bugged me more than it should have, and even though the night was sticky hot, I wrapped my free arm around myself like I was cold.
It was just the first day, though, and I’d been driving for hours. Of course I was tired and out of sorts. Anyone would be, and I’d never been the type to do well without sleep. The sooner I got some ice and got back to the room, the sooner I could sleep and reorientate myself.
I moved faster, passing my car. Bee was in there, sitting in the passenger seat, her feet braced on the dashboard, a big smile on her face.
So Ryan was okay, then. I waggled my fingers at her as I passed, but she didn’t see me.
The vending machines were in a dim alcove past the creepy police-tape rooms, and I made my way there as quickly as possible, wishing I hadn’t stormed out so quickly. Blythe was irritating and all, but surely no more irritating than getting horribly murdered would be.
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself. “You are not going to be murdered unless it’s death by giant mosquito.”
Placing the bucket under the little plastic funnel, I pressed the button for ice. It rattled down and all that noise had to be why I didn’t hear her coming. All I had was the sudden sense of someone to my right and then a blur of motion.
But this time, unlike the night at the pool, my powers were strong as ever. Grabbing the edges of the bucket, I flung the contents at Shelley—of course it was freaking Shelley, Shelley with her billionaire romance novels and that look I knew I’d felt.
The ice hit her directly in the face, slowing her down just enough for me to drop and sweep out a leg, catching her under the ankles. It was a move I went to a lot, and one that, in my experience, almost always worked. Sure enough, she hit the pavement hard.
This is one of the most important parts of a fight, gaining the higher ground, and because I was short, I always had to get higher ground as fast as possible.
But there is one problem with gaining the higher ground, and that’s that you make a fairly easy target.
Shelley had barely landed when she lashed up and out with one leg, kicking me so hard in the thigh—the same spot Annie had hit that night in the locker room—that my leg threatened to buckle under me.
I gritted my teeth, falling back on my stronger leg, and . . .
Look, I’ve done a lot of things in my job as Paladin. I’ve head-butted dudes and fought while wearing formal gowns and nearly jujitsu-ed my then-boyfriend into an early grave. But kicking someone in the ribs while she was down?
Not one of my proudest moments.
Still, I was desperate and not because I was still shaken from the fight at the pool.
My powers weren’t as strong as they should have been. They weren’t as weak as they were that night, don’t get me wrong—I was still kicking with the best of them—but they weren’t anywhere near what they had been, and that rattled me. Besides, the sooner I got Shelley neutralized, the sooner I could interrogate her.
So I gritted my teeth, muttered, “Sorry,” and kicked.
But Shelley was a lot faster than I’d thought, and my foot barely connected with her ribs before she was rolling away, jackknifing her body, and leaping back to her feet.
Great.
In that case, we could fight and talk.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, dodging a punch and throwing one of my own.
Shelley grunted as I caught her under the chin, making her teeth clack together, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then she shook her head, her lank hair half falling out of a ponytail. Her hair had been down earlier, so I guessed she’d put it up to fight. And when she reached out for my own hair—still loose around my shoulders—I wished I’d known I was going to get involved in a throw-down before I’d come out here.
“You have to be stopped,” she said to me, and I caught her outstretched arm, pulling her close and driving an elbow hard into her hip.
The impact vibrated all the way up my arm, but Shelley’s knees buckled, giving me the upper hand again. “Says who?”
Shelley shook her head, then lunged forward. I just barely kept her teeth from sinking into my forearm and I scowled, tightening my grip around her neck.
“Okay, look, I am all for doing what it takes to win a fight,” I gritted out, “but biting is gross. Do you have any idea how filthy the human mou—ow!”
She drove her head back, her skull connecting with my sternum, and my hands dropped from around her, instinctively coming up to rub against my aching chest.
Shelley just stood there, watching me, almost bobbing on her toes. I recognized that stance—I’d used it a lot of times before. Usually just before I handed someone their backside.
“Who did this to you?” I asked. “Because you know this is something that was done to you, right? It’s not like you just woke up like this.”
Shelley smiled at me then, her teeth even and straight. “Like you don’t know,” she said. “You know who did this.”
I did, but I needed to hear her say it.
“It was a boy, right? Blond hair, terrible fashion sense? Glowing eyes?”
“You want to hurt him,” she said now, and even though that confirmed what Annie had said, my stomach still dropped.
“I don’t,” I told her.
Still circling, Shelley kept her eyes on me, fingers opening and closing at her sides. “I can’t let you hurt him,” she said, and I shook my head, holding up both my hands.
“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to hurt David—uh, the guy who did this to you—I’m trying to find him and help him.”
But Shelley nearly snarled at that. “You want to kill him,” she said, and I was shocked enough that this time, I did drop my guard, stumbling back a step.
It was apparently all the opening Shelley needed because she surged forward, and I felt my limbs go weak.
But just before she was on me, she froze. And I don’t mean “went still,” I mean she literally seemed to freeze in midair, one foot lifted off the ground, arms wide.
Behind her stood Blythe, her hands out, her breath coming fast.
“Are you all right?” she asked, and even though I was technically uninjured, I shook my head. I was tired and shaken, and my thoughts were in a whirl, so much so that I barely registered Blythe walking up to Shelley and putting her hands on either side of her face.
“She said he’s sending Paladins after me because he thinks I want to hurt him. Like what Annie said.”
That memory came back to me, sitting in the car after we’d first met Blythe, David telling me about his dream, the one where I was crying and killing him. I saw the vision I’d had in the fun house again, my knife at his throat, my own voice telling me I’d have to “choose.”
But choose what? Hurting David could not be any further from my mind.
There was a thump, and I turned to see Shelley slumped on the pavement, Blythe’s hands still pressed to her face.
> “What are you doing?” I asked, and she glanced up at me.
“Undoing what your boyfriend did.”
There was a slight glow around Blythe’s fingers, like she was cupping her palms around a light, and Shelley made a soft noise, her eyes still closed.
“You can do that?” I asked, and Blythe snorted.
“Obvi,” she replied. “It’ll erase her memory, but at least—”
“No!” I cried, my hand coming down on Blythe’s shoulder. “She might be connected to David. She might know where he is.”
But it was too late. Shelley’s eyes were already fluttering open and looking at us with total confusion. “What happened?” she muttered, her voice raspy, and then, as the pain of all my blows registered, she winced, nearly curling into a ball.
Just a regular girl again.
Blythe rose to her feet then, sighing, and I had the weirdest feeling she was relieved, and not just because Shelley was back to normal.
Chapter 17
“I’M JUST SAYING, it would have been helpful to talk to her before you gave her the big Eternal Sunshine treatment.”
It was an argument Blythe and I had been having since this morning, an argument that had carried us through two highways and four counties, and I wasn’t quite done having it yet.
Nor was Blythe done being irritated by it.
She was wearing sunglasses, but I could feel her rolling her eyes at me as she sat in the backseat, her arms folded over her chest like a sulky toddler.
“What would she have told you that you didn’t already know?” Blythe asked, shifting in her seat. “David made her. David sent her. David wants to kill you because he’s gone super mega nutbar. None of that is new information, Harper. It’s exactly what we got from Annie, and this time, has to be said, it didn’t look like David was in any rush to call her off.”
From the passenger seat, Bee made a frustrated noise, tipping her head back. She was probably getting sick of this argument, too, I thought, but then she said, “We actually don’t know any of that. We’re guessing based on what Annie, and now this Shelley person, said. Why would David think Harper wants to kill him?”
Bee had missed out on everything last night, and I got the sense she felt a little guilty about it. Or maybe she was just being a good best friend, automatically taking my side.
Blythe sat up in the backseat, looking at us over the rims of her sunglasses in a move that reminded me uncomfortably of David. He’d looked at me like that more times than I could count.
“Did you miss the ‘super mega nutbar’ part?” she asked Bee. “He thinks she wants to kill him because of that. The nutbar—”
“Yeah, I heard,” Bee said, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “But there’s no confirmation, since we didn’t get to ask Shelley what she knew.”
“Mmm,” Blythe said, nodding. “Sure, I’ll own that. But I could have done worse. I mean, what if I had helped him escape wards that were set in place to keep him safe? Now that, that would be something to feel bad about.”
“Okay, enough,” I said, feeling kind of like a kindergarten teacher. “Playing the blame game is probably not the best use of our time right now.”
I could feel Bee’s gaze on the side of my face but kept my eyes on the road. Look, I had forgiven her for everything that had happened with David—or at least I was really trying to—but that didn’t mean it was something I wanted to talk about, especially not with Blythe in the car.
But Blythe never met an uncomfortable moment she didn’t want to exploit. “Maybe if you’d been around last night, you could have gotten your own answers from Shelley,” she said to Bee. “But since you were too busy talking to your boyfriend, I guess we’ll never know.”
“Enough!” I snapped again, my hands tightening on the wheel of the car. At the GPS’s instruction—we were finally approaching the address Blythe had given me before we’d started our road trip—we’d exited the interstate for a little town called Ideal, and I was navigating the downtown area. It reminded me of Pine Grove, and even though we’d only been gone a couple of days, I was feeling a little homesick.
Bee’s voice was lower as she said, “I hate that I couldn’t help last night.”
“It’s fine,” I told her.
“And even if you could have,” Blythe piped up, “your powers are just as unreliable as Harper’s right now. There’s no telling if you would’ve been any use or not.”
Bee nodded, and I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror. “Shouldn’t they be getting better now?” I asked, turning up the air conditioner just a smidgen. “If our powers were fading because we were far from David, the reverse should be true, right? Closer we get, stronger we feel?”
Blythe shrugged, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. “No idea. That’s Paladin stuff.”
I looked over at Bee, noticing that she looked a little pale, and that there were soft violet shadows under her eyes. “Dreams?” I asked in a low voice, and she startled a little.
“Yeah,” she said at last, crossing her arms tight over her chest. “The same one I was having before we left yesterday. With the—”
“Yellow dress and the blood,” I finished up, nodding. I’d woken up from my own nightmare this morning, my breath coming in short bursts, my heart racing. The dream wasn’t exactly any clearer—I still wasn’t sure what was happening in it, only that there was blood and this strange, echoing effect to the voices I’d heard, saying words I couldn’t quite make out—but it had felt . . . stronger. More vivid.
From the backseat, Blythe leaned forward. “You both had the dreams? Remember the part where I said to tell me that?”
I frowned, passing a white car on my right, the needle ticking just over the speed limit. “We’re telling you now,” I said, and Blythe blew out a frustrated breath.
“Okay, fine. Well, the good news is, if the dreams are getting stronger, we’re on the right track.”
Bee twisted in her seat to look at Blythe, tucking her hair behind her ears as she did. “So you can’t sense David, just the magic we need to fix him.”
Adjusting her sunglasses, Blythe stared straight ahead. “I can kind of sense him,” she clarified, “but it’s not precise. Like how your dreams getting stronger is a clue but not an exact science. I can track the spell, though. It takes all three of us working together to find him, like a . . . triangulation, I guess.”
Snorting, Bee turned back around. “Whatever.”
I didn’t want another argument, so I changed the subject.
“So we’re here now because of Saylor, right?” I said to Blythe.
She made a little humming sound of agreement. “Yup. She left something here—a spell. It’s sending out a signal, so it must be important.”
“A signal,” Bee repeated, and Blythe nodded.
“Only detectable to Mages. Well, to this Mage, at least. We’re close, right?” she asked me.
I looked down. My phone rested in the center console, the map app pulled up, and according to that, we were only about a mile from a house at 562 Deer Path Lane.
Sitting up, Blythe leaned between me and Bee, peering through the windshield as we drove down a quiet residential street with big oak trees that created a median down its center. The houses looked older than the ones on my block back in Pine Grove. There were lots of low brick ranchers, the occasional two-story A-frame breaking through. It was one of these that sat at 562, a solid-looking house painted a pale yellow with olive-green shutters. A newish-looking pickup truck sat in the driveway, and a birdbath in the front yard, the stone streaked with green moss.
All in all, it was a pretty enough place, but something felt . . . off to me.
“Who lives here?” I asked, and Blythe shrugged.
“Saylor Stark.”
She was out of the car then, already heading for the
front door while Bee and I sat there in silence for a second. And then I was throwing open the driver’s side door, catching Blythe’s arm just as she started up the front walk. “Hold up,” I said, keeping my voice low. “What the heck does that mean? Saylor is dead.”
Blythe threw off my hand with an impatient huff. “Duh. She doesn’t live here now. This is just where she grew up. And now it’s where her brother lives.”
I looked up at the house. “This is where the spell is?”
Tilting her own head back, Blythe followed my gaze, but I got the sense she was looking at something specific rather than just taking in the house as a whole. “Did you think we were going to the Great Spell Outlet Mall or something?”
Bee was behind us now and she made a disbelieving sound. “Why would Saylor have left a spell you could sense?”
The corners of Blythe’s mouth turned down, her dimples appearing. “Okay, maybe she didn’t technically leave it for me, but for the Mage who came after her.”
“Which is Ryan,” I reminded her, and now it was Blythe’s turn to make a disbelieving sound.
“I told you. That boy is fine as hell, don’t get me wrong.” She glanced over at Bee. “Good on you for that, by the way.” Her eyes slid to me. “And you, too, I guess.” Shaking her head, she added, “Man, you guys really did want to make everything a thousand times more complicated than it had to be, didn’t you?”
“Point, Blythe,” I said through gritted teeth, and she shrugged, hair bouncing.
“Point is, when it comes to Saylor’s actual heir in terms of magic, that’s me. She left a spell in this house and sent out a signal for another Mage to come find it. Did Pretty Boy sense anything like this?”
It felt disloyal to shake my head, but if Ryan had ever sensed anything like this, he sure hadn’t mentioned it to me. And he clearly hadn’t said anything to Bee, either, because she shook her head, too.
Satisfied, Blythe gave a little nod and turned back to the door.
“If you knew there was something here,” I asked, just as she raised her hand to ring the doorbell, “why not go after it before? Why wait until now?”