“Oh. Well. He was . . . tall? Young, not much older than you girls. Figured he was an intern or something. Asian fella, handsome as all get out.”

That description wasn’t familiar to me, but Blythe’s lips tightened, and her hands, clasped in her lap, flexed a bit.

“Y’all need me to go up with you?” Bob asked, and we both shook our heads.

“No, we know what we’re looking for,” I said, even though I was pretty sure we didn’t. “Won’t be a tick.”

The stairs creaked slightly as Blythe and I made our way up, Blythe heading unerringly for the last door on the left past the landing.

“So who was the handsome guy?” I asked, and she glanced back at me. When she didn’t answer immediately, I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on,” I said. “You clearly knew who he was talking about.”

Another little frown. “Dante,” she answered. “Alexander’s assistant . . . another Mage.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. “Another one?”

“It’s a long story,” she replied. “And one we don’t have time for now.”

With that, she turned to the nearest door on her left.

“You don’t know what we’re looking for?” I whispered, and she tossed her hair over her shoulders, turning the doorknob.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Saylor’s childhood bedroom looked a lot like . . . well, like mine. Sure, it was still solidly stuck in the 1970s, but apparently Saylor hadn’t been a trend follower any more than I was. The bed was dark cherrywood, the coverlet white Battenburg lace, and other than a peeling poster of some band called Bay City Rollers—guys even more devoted to plaid than David—on the wall, there wasn’t much to mark it as belonging to a teenage girl. Still, I was struck by something as I stood there, looking out the window to the empty lot across the street.

“She was normal,” I heard myself say.

Blythe had already moved past me, opening drawers and rifling through them. “What?”

I glanced back out in the hall, worried that Bob would come upstairs and find us pawing through Saylor’s stuff. True, we’d told him we were looking for something, but I didn’t think he’d be happy with just how roughly Blythe was treating Saylor’s things. I wasn’t sure I was happy with it, to be honest.

“This is stupid,” I whispered to Blythe even as I crossed over to a bookcase and began to looking for anything resembling a journal or a diary. “We have no idea where she could have hidden a spell. Or why she left it here, for that matter.”

Snorting, Blythe moved over to the dresser. “If I had to guess, whatever it was had to do with David, and with her being worried about his powers. Think about it. She’s gone for years, then suddenly turns up last summer, just when things started getting intense. Right before the Ephors found him. And besides, it’s here. I can feel it.”

“How?” I asked, picking out an old, well-thumbed copy of Jane Eyre, flipping through the pages. “You’ve said that a couple of times, but you haven’t mentioned exactly what you’re feeling or how you’re feeling it.”

Blythe paused, one hand still stuck in the dresser drawer, and I realized that she was actually attempting to formulate a serious answer rather than some mumbo jumbo or another reminder that I was totally stupid where all this stuff was involved.

“It’s like . . . a homing beacon,” she finally said. “Or the black boxes they put on planes. You know, like there’s something . . . beeping in my head, only it’s magic, not electrical.” She frowned, her cherubic face wrinkling. “Does that make sense?”

I thought about the way I could still feel David, just the vaguest sense of him. Or how I’d been able to feel that he was in danger, that sensation of Pop Rocks deep in my chest.

“Yeah,” I replied, sliding Jane Eyre back into its space. “It does, actually.”

Pleased, Blythe smiled and then turned back to her rifling while I did my best to help. I definitely wasn’t feeling any kind of “homing beacon,” but maybe it was just a Mage thing. I’d always wished that Ryan were the Mage here with us, but, watching Blythe move around Saylor’s old bedroom with the kind of efficiency usually limited to worker ants, I had to admit that she seemed pretty dedicated.

“Bob said she was just seventeen when she took off,” I said as Blythe continued her search. “Same age as me.”

When Blythe didn’t look up, I pressed a little more. “Same age as . . . us?”

She still didn’t lift her head, but her hands stilled. “Not quite. I’m nineteen.”

“How long has the Mage thing been happening for you, though?” I said, leaning back against the dresser.

Blythe heaved a sigh that just ruffled her bangs, but seemed deep enough to make the curtains flutter. And then she shut the drawer, looked at me, and said, “You really want to do this now?”

I shrugged. “Why not? Seems relevant to the task at hand and all.”

Blythe sighed, then shrugged herself, and said, “Fine. We can talk while we search.”

Feeling more pleased with myself than I should have, I sat down on the edge of the bed. “So how long have you been a Mage?”

“I’m not one, exactly.”

That startled me, although I guess it shouldn’t have. The previous Mage usually has to die before another one can take over, and Blythe had powers long before Saylor had died. Ugh, this was way too much rule-breaking to take in, honestly.

“Do you have hobbies?” Blythe asked, pulling me out of my thoughts, and I shook my head, confused.

“Okay, for one, I have, like, a thousand, and two, way to change the sub—”

“Magic was my hobby,” Blythe said, acting like I hadn’t even spoken. “All types of magic. The traditional witches-and-broomsticks kind, the weird hippie-herbal kind . . . and then one day, I came across the Greek kind. The Mage kind. And”—she gave a little shrug, moving over to Saylor’s closet—“that was clearly the most powerful kind, so that’s what I wanted. Why do anything if you can’t be the best at it, right?”

I really didn’t like how familiar that sounded, and I fidgeted, clutching the edge of the bed. “Was that the deal with that other guy, too? This Dante kid who was here?”

Blythe nodded. “I was better, so I was the official Mage for the Ephors, but Dante wasn’t . . . untalented, exactly.” She flashed me a brief smile. “Just not as good as me. By that time, the Ephors needed all the help they could get, so they weren’t about to let a perfectly-good-if-not-great Mage slip through their fingers.”

I wanted to ask more about that, but before I could, my fingers brushed something underneath the mattress.

Dropping to my knees, I reached, my hand almost immediately touching something hard.

I tugged and was aware of Blythe coming up to stand behind me as the book slid out from between the mattress and the box springs.

Glancing up, I looked into Blythe’s bright eyes and asked, “Is this what we’re looking for?”

“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, taking it from me.

Her fingers flew as they paged through the book, her face practically glowing.