Lady Renegades (12 page)

“
T
ELL ME
AGAIN.”

I took another gulp of bottled water, closing my eyes for a second. We were sitting in my car in a parking lot at a local ball field, and the occasional
crack
of wooden bats against baseballs was making my head hurt even more than it already did.

“I've told you twice now,” I said to Blythe, reaching out to turn the air-conditioning even higher, the cold air blowing my sweaty hair away from my face. Blythe frowned, closing the driver's side vents with more force than was necessary in my opinion, and from the backseat, Bee made a sound of protest. She was lying down back there, knees tucked up to her chest. Both of us were clearly worse for wear after . . . whatever had happened, and repeating the story to Blythe was exacerbating everything.

But Blythe was nothing if not determined, and she kept looking at me until I tipped my head back against the seat and, in a dull voice, repeated everything I'd seen. The dark-haired boy with the glowing eyes, the cave, the wispy vapor snaking up from the cracked earth . . .

When I was finished, Blythe's frown only deepened, and she reached down for the bag at her feet, rummaging through it.

“So you were dreaming about David or seeing whatever he's been seeing in visions,” she confirmed, and I gave a weak nod.

“And now,” she continued, “you're having full-on visions in the middle of the day. Both of you.”

“Seems to be the case,” Bee offered, sitting up. She was still a little pale, and she'd drained one bottle of water already, another half empty in her hands.

Retrieving Saylor's journal, Blythe flipped through it while I stared listlessly through the chain-link fence in front of us. A kid around our age was running bases, his dark blond hair shaggy underneath a cap.

“Why did you bring us here?” I asked. Blythe had found both of us standing on the street, shaky and rattled, and for the first time on this trip, I'd gratefully turned my keys over to her. She'd driven unerringly to this field before putting the car in park and demanding to know what happened. She'd asked on the street, too, but Bee and I had both been too wiped to get into it there.

Now she looked up briefly, watching that boy jog past us. “Cute boys,” she said, as though that were explanation enough.

“Eye candy helps you think?” Bee asked, sounding a little more like herself, and Blythe gave a little shrug.

“Doesn't hurt.”

It was hard to argue with that, and I sipped more water, taking deep breaths and waiting for the weight in my chest to lessen. It didn't, though, no matter how many baseball players I attempted to ogle.

Seeing what David was seeing, sharing a vision with him . . . was that something good or something bad? Did it mean we were getting closer to him, or that he was getting worse?

Or both?

Next to me, Blythe made a sound of surprise, her finger stabbing at one of the pages. “Okay, here we go. So when Alaric super-Oracled out, the Paladins couldn't find him for days.”

I looked over at the page she was reading from, but it was just another mess of Greek and symbols with the occasional English word thrown in. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that we were having to trust Blythe a lot on this thing. We were trusting that her magic could fix this,
and
we were assuming she was telling the truth about whatever it was she was finding in Saylor's journal.

I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

For now, though, I just leaned closer, encouraging her to go on. “Turned out he'd hidden himself away in some cave for days, sort of . . .” Blythe lifted her head, nose wrinkling. “Leveling up, I guess. Concentrating his powers, getting ready for what was coming next.”

I didn't like the sound of that and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

“What does that mean?” Bee asked, leaning forward slightly.

“Well, we know he killed most of the Paladins, for one,” Blythe said, and turned her attention back to the journal, one chipped pink nail skating underneath the words and symbols there. “But before he did that, he went back to his hometown, Aruza. And he—”

Her words died abruptly, and Blythe's finger slid from the page.

“What?” I asked, and she looked over at me, her dark eyes unreadable. “He, um. He blew it up, basically. Mages had put symbols all over the town to keep him safe there, and I guess after he escaped, he felt like those symbols might be used to hold him back or something.” She shrugged, narrow shoulder moving underneath the bright pink and white stripes of her sundress. “Or maybe he was just really pissed they'd put them up in the first place.”

I'd thought that sick feeling was fading away, but now I stared at Blythe, my palms suddenly sweaty on the water bottle. “So what, you think David's seeing Alaric when he went crazy?”

“I think there's a good chance, yeah,” she said, closing Saylor's journal. I noticed the way her fingers curled around the book, and thought she might not even realize she was doing that. “Like I said, I don't know anything about Paladin stuff, but if you're both having daytime visions now,
and
you're both seeing what he's seeing, we could be close. That has to be what that means, right?”

She looked at both me and Bee, and I didn't know what to tell her. She was bringing the Mage knowledge on this trip, and if we were supposed to bring the Paladin knowledge, we weren't doing the best job.

But I sat up straighter in my seat, twisting the cap back onto my water bottle. “That has to be what it means,” I said. “And maybe it's a clue, too. If he's seeing Alaric when he went nuts, he could be following the same path.”

The more I said, the more excited and energized I suddenly felt, and I fumbled with my seat belt, already waving at Blythe to get out of the car and switch places with me. “So he might be heading for a cave, and there are tons of caves in the South. We'll look at a—I don't know—a guidebook or something. Check out Google.”

“We have to find him before he gets there, though,” Blythe said. “Once he's at the cave and doing whatever it is that makes him all super Oracle, it'll be too late.”

That made my stomach hurt a little, but I waved it off, still going. “If Bee and I are connected to him, we might be able to sense which one it is, and then there he'll be, and—”

But Blythe wasn't moving and just watched me, still scowling slightly.

“And what are we going to do if we find him?” she asked, then shook her head. “No, we have to get the
spell
first. Whatever it was Dante took out of this.” She shook the journal at me. “Once we have that, we can use the visions and your connection to David to find him.”

I froze, my hand still on the door handle. “But . . . we could find him without all that,” I said, my skin feeling itchy with the desire to move. “We've only been after him for two days, and we could already be
there.
” Between the vision and that strange, almost-tugging sensation in my chest, I knew that David wasn't that far away, and when I looked back to Bee, she nodded, confirming that she felt him nearby, too.

“And without the spell, all that will happen is he'll blast us into the next century,” Blythe argued. “Maybe literally for all we
know. There's no telling what a rogue Oracle is capable of. I get that you want to find him, but we need the magic to
fix
him first. No.” She shook her head again. “Our best plan is to find Dante and that spell. And what Alexander wanted with it,” she added, almost to herself, and my frustration nearly had me shouting.

“Who cares what Alexander wanted with it? He's
dead,
and it doesn't matter. What matters is that we finally have a way to track David and get to him and—”

“And?” Blythe echoed, raising her eyebrows. “Seriously, Harper, what are you going to do if you find him?”

When I didn't have an immediate answer, she pointed a finger at me. “Without magic, all we have is your Paladin power, but that's kind of useless against him, isn't it? You can't hurt him, so what's the point of you charging in after him if you can't use magic
and
you can't kill him?”

Bee was watching me but she didn't say anything.

Killing David had always been there, a dark whisper in the back of my mind. Saylor had warned me that I might have to one day, and David had seen me driving a sword through him. I'd seen myself killing him in one of the trials Alexander had set up last year. But that didn't mean I was willing to accept it was an actual option.

But Blythe had a point—no spell, no plan.

Closing my eyes, I sagged back against the seat. “Dammit,” I muttered, and Bee sighed.

I wondered if it was with relief.

But then I opened my eyes and looked at Blythe, pointing at
her. “But no more than two days,” I told her. “We can't let him get too far away, and we're running out of time.”

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.