Not one of my proudest moments.

Still, I was desperate and not because I was still shaken from the fight at the pool.

My powers weren’t as strong as they should have been. They weren’t as weak as they were that night, don’t get me wrong—I was still kicking with the best of them—but they weren’t anywhere near what they had been, and that rattled me. Besides, the sooner I got Shelley neutralized, the sooner I could interrogate her.

So I gritted my teeth, muttered, “Sorry,” and kicked.

But Shelley was a lot faster than I’d thought, and my foot barely connected with her ribs before she was rolling away, jackknifing her body, and leaping back to her feet.

Great.

In that case, we could fight and talk.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, dodging a punch and throwing one of my own.

Shelley grunted as I caught her under the chin, making her teeth clack together, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then she shook her head, her lank hair half falling out of a ponytail. Her hair had been down earlier, so I guessed she’d put it up to fight. And when she reached out for my own hair—still loose around my shoulders—I wished I’d known I was going to get involved in a throw-down before I’d come out here.

“You have to be stopped,” she said to me, and I caught her outstretched arm, pulling her close and driving an elbow hard into her hip.

The impact vibrated all the way up my arm, but Shelley’s knees buckled, giving me the upper hand again. “Says who?”

Shelley shook her head, then lunged forward. I just barely kept her teeth from sinking into my forearm and I scowled, tightening my grip around her neck.

“Okay, look, I am all for doing what it takes to win a fight,” I gritted out, “but biting is gross. Do you have any idea how filthy the human mou—ow!”

She drove her head back, her skull connecting with my sternum, and my hands dropped from around her, instinctively coming up to rub against my aching chest.

Shelley just stood there, watching me, almost bobbing on her toes. I recognized that stance—I’d used it a lot of times before. Usually just before I handed someone their backside.

“Who did this to you?” I asked. “Because you know this is something that was done to you, right? It’s not like you just woke up like this.”

Shelley smiled at me then, her teeth even and straight. “Like you don’t know,” she said. “You know who did this.”

I did, but I needed to hear her say it.

“It was a boy, right? Blond hair, terrible fashion sense? Glowing eyes?”

“You want to hurt him,” she said now, and even though that confirmed what Annie had said, my stomach still dropped.

“I don’t,” I told her.

Still circling, Shelley kept her eyes on me, fingers opening and closing at her sides. “I can’t let you hurt him,” she said, and I shook my head, holding up both my hands.

“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to hurt David—uh, the guy who did this to you—I’m trying to find him and help him.”

But Shelley nearly snarled at that. “You want to kill him,” she said, and I was shocked enough that this time, I did drop my guard, stumbling back a step.

It was apparently all the opening Shelley needed because she surged forward, and I felt my limbs go weak.

But just before she was on me, she froze. And I don’t mean “went still,” I mean she literally seemed to freeze in midair, one foot lifted off the ground, arms wide.

Behind her stood Blythe, her hands out, her breath coming fast.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and even though I was technically uninjured, I shook my head. I was tired and shaken, and my thoughts were in a whirl, so much so that I barely registered Blythe walking up to Shelley and putting her hands on either side of her face.

“She said he’s sending Paladins after me because he thinks I want to hurt him. Like what Annie said.”

That memory came back to me, sitting in the car after we’d first met Blythe, David telling me about his dream, the one where I was crying and killing him. I saw the vision I’d had in the fun house again, my knife at his throat, my own voice telling me I’d have to “choose.”

But choose what? Hurting David could not be any further from my mind.

There was a thump, and I turned to see Shelley slumped on the pavement, Blythe’s hands still pressed to her face.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and she glanced up at me.

“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.”