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?”

Blythe threw a look at me over her shoulder. “I didn’t pick up on it before. Saylor must have set it up so it could only be sensed if she were dead.”

That made sense. After Saylor died, Blythe had been held by the Ephors until Alexander died, too.

“And another thing,” she added, pressing the doorbell harder than necessary, “I wasn’t sure this was something I wanted to go after on my own. Better two half-ass Paladins than no Paladins at all.”

I would’ve had a retort to that, but I could hear footsteps from inside and a cheerful male voice calling, “Coming!”

My mouth was dry when the door opened and a man with thick silver hair stood there in khaki shorts and a button-down shirt. Shoving his hands deep in his pockets, he looked at the three of us standing there on his doorstep with a bland smile. “Morning, ladies,” he said, his voice as smooth and southern as Saylor’s had been.

“Good morning,” I said, feeling the need to take charge of this situation before Blythe could say anything. “We’re . . . we’re friends of Miss Saylor’s,” I started, and the man’s smile became something actually genuine.

“You don’t say!” And then he leaned out, looking past us to the car in the driveway. “Is she with you?”

He didn’t know.

The knowledge sat so heavily in my stomach I thought I might throw up. When Saylor died, we’d done the best we could covering it up for the rest of Pine Grove, but it had never occurred to me that there were other people waiting to hear from her, wondering what had happened to her.

What was wrong with me that I hadn’t thought of that?

“Unfortunately no,” Blythe said, “but she’d asked us to stop by and say hello.”

Saylor’s brother nodded, clearly disappointed, and then surprised me further by saying, “She said people might be coming by one of these days.”

He stepped back, sweeping one arm. “Why don’t y’all come on in and let’s have a chat.”