“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.