“Look, it doesn’t matter if you were trying to summon me or not. Point is, I’m here now, and we all want the same thing: to find the Oracle.”
My pulse leapt. The attack at the pool—what if it was actually Blythe’s doing? The idea that I had been right, that David would never send people to hurt me, nearly made my knees weak with relief. “Why do you want to find him?”
She turned to me, wiping her palms on her skirt. “Because he’s gone rogue, right? Scampered right off with more magic than he knows what to do with? Seems like a potentially yikes-y thing.”
“How did you know that?” Ryan asked, stepping forward a little bit, but Blythe waved a hand at him like he was a particularly annoying mosquito.
“Believe it or not, you’re not the only ones connected to the Oracle,” she said. “Thanks to that little ritual I did on him at your cotillion, I’m just as connected to him as his Paladin. Magic does bond people.”
“You mean like the magic that you did that had him making Paladins?” I suggested, lifting my eyebrows. “The magic that, for all we know, you’re doing again?”
That seemed to genuinely surprise Blythe. She stepped back just the littlest bit, lifting her chin, her dark eyes wide. “You think it’s my fault that he’s descending into crazy-town?”
We were still standing just outside the country club, and I knew people would be coming out soon. Bee was already looking toward the door, probably keeping an eye out for her parents. I turned back to Blythe. “You can’t exactly blame us for thinking it.”
She paused, considering that, and then shrugged. “Fair enough. But I promise you, this”—she looked down at the little purse dangling from her shoulder, opening it up and pulling out a folded piece of newspaper—“has nothing to do with me.”
I took the paper. It was from yesterday’s edition of the Ellery News. Ellery was a medium-sized town, big enough to have a weekend edition. Yesterday’s headline was about a missing girl from Piedmont, Mississippi, who had turned up in Ellery with no memory of how she’d gotten to Alabama.
“Read it,” Blythe instructed. “The last thing she remembers is meeting some guy with, and I believe I’m quoting this correctly, ‘glowing eyes.’”
My heart seemed to stutter in my chest. There was no picture of the girl, and even if there had been one, I’d never actually seen who attacked me at the pool. But, reading this, it became pretty clear this was her. Her name was Annie Jameson, and she seemed . . . a lot like me, actually. From what I could gather reading the brief snippet, she was an upcoming senior at Piedmont High School, an honor student, no history of trouble . . . I still didn’t understand why she’d run off, or how she could suddenly be . . . de-Paladined. None of this made any sense, and my skin felt itchy, my nerves jumping.
Piedmont wasn’t very far from here.
I was still looking at the paper when Blythe turned to me and said, “So when are we leaving to go after him?”
Chapter 10
STARTLED, I LOOKED up from the piece of newsprint. “What?”
“He’s making Paladins,” Blythe said, tapping the paper. “It’s a little bit my fault for doing that ritual on him, sure, but it’s also your fault for letting him get away.”
I tried very hard not to look at Ryan and Bee, but I could sense them shuffling next to me. Placing blame was pointless at this stage in the game.
“We can’t,” I told Blythe now, but the words were hollow. “It’s not feasible.”
Blythe shoved her glasses back on top of her head, blinking at me. “Are you kidding? Isn’t this, like, your entire sacred duty?”
I gestured around to Bee and Ryan. “It’s . . . Look, I don’t know how you got here or where you came from, but it isn’t easy for us to just go gallivanting around the country for a few months. We have things like responsibilities. And parents.”
The second the words were out of my mouth, I felt kind of bad. I mean, I had no idea if Blythe had a family or not. Obviously, she had at one time, but what did they think happened to her after she ran off to be a crazy Mage?
But then I remembered that Blythe cast a spell on my boyfriend, kidnapped my best friend, and tried to kill me multiple times—once with a letter opener—and my sympathetic feelings disappeared in a big poof.
Blythe rolled her huge dark eyes. “You also have magic,” she said. “Buttloads of it. Mostly mine since this redheaded Ken doll over here seems kinda worthless.”
Ryan frowned, one hand touching the back of his head. “My hair isn’t red.” Glancing over at Bee, he raised his eyebrows. “It’s not, right?”
She patted his leg. “It’s only a little red,” she assured him, and Ryan’s frown deepened.
Blythe gave a little smirk before turning back to me and crossing one leg over the other, the heel of her bright yellow ballet flat slipping off as she propped one toe on the sidewalk. “We have to find the Oracle and put a stop to this before it gets any worse.”