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.”

She was right, I knew that, but putting my trust in her was not exactly the easiest thing to do.

When I said something to that effect, she heaved a deep sigh that seemed to come up from her toes. “I get that. But how many times do I have to say this?” Tilting her head down, she fixed me with a look over her sunglasses. “I. Am. Not. Doing this. For. You.” As if to punctuate the statement, she shoved her glasses back into place with one perfectly manicured finger. “This is not about saving your boyfriend or helping you all become one happy, magic-doing, future-seeing, butt-kicking threesome—not like that,” she added when it was clear Ryan was about to protest.

“It’s about me undoing the thing I did for people who never deserved my powers in the first place.”

There was something cold in her tone when she said that, something so bitter about the words, I felt like I could almost taste them. I didn’t know what had happened to Blythe after the Ephors took her, but whatever it was, it had clearly been bad.

“Blythe wasn’t there,” Bee suddenly said, and I turned to see her standing just behind me, arms folded tightly. “When I was with the Ephors, she wasn’t there.”

It was weird, remembering that Blythe and Bee had that in common, being held by the Ephors, and when I looked back to Blythe, a muscle twitched in her jaw.

“Yeah, let’s just say they made sure I was out of sight,” she said. “It wasn’t until Alexander died that I was even able to get out of that place.”

“How did you know he died?” I asked then, and Blythe gave another one of those eye rolls that suggested we were all wasting her time.

“I could feel it. There was a lot of magic going into keeping their headquarters running, and even more into making sure I couldn’t get out. When it just went away, I knew Alexander was gone. It was the only explanation.”

That made sense, I guessed, but this was all moving so fast—and I was very aware of curious eyes on us as people made their way to the parking lot—so I decided to cut to the chase.

“Okay, but why should we go with you when we already have a Mage?” I said. “You may not be impressed with Ryan’s powers, but he’s still every bit as useful to us as you would be, with the added bonus of not being insane.”

Throwing her hands up in the air, Blythe made a disgusted sound. “He can come, too, for all I care. But you need me. I’m the only one who can find the spell we need to stop him.”

People were starting to leave the country club now, my parents and aunts among them, and I gave them a quick little wave before gently taking Blythe’s arm and leading her closer to the tennis courts. There was no way I was going to be able to fake smile at her while my parents watched.