We could do this.

Blythe smiled at me then, finally opening the driver’s side door. “I can do it in one, promise,” she said, and I got out of the car, hoping yet again that she was actually telling the truth.

• • •

He wasn’t sure he was ever awake anymore.

Or maybe he never slept. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between sleeping and waking because the visions never stopped. Once, he thought, there had been a time when he could have shut the visions out, or at least waited for them to pass. Once, he thought, someone had set up wards to protect him from having visions. That had made him angry, but now as he lay in the darkness, his head splitting all the time, he understood that whoever that was had maybe been right.

That was another thing, the way names had slipped out of his mind. Sometimes he imagined that it wasn’t light pouring out of his eyes, but memories. Like he was leaking knowledge or losing . . . something. Maybe losing who he used to be.

But that was a crazy way to think. There was still enough of him inside his mind to know that. To know that something was wrong, that he was changing into something bad. But what? And how could he stop it?

Groaning, he rolled over. He thought he’d shut his eyes, but couldn’t tell. After the last girl, he’d known he couldn’t be around people anymore. It wasn’t safe. So he found a perfect spot to hide. But now he couldn’t remember how he’d found it or how he’d even gotten here. He was forgetting everything except the things he saw all the time. Blood on a yellow dress. A girl with green eyes, tears. Two other girls, but they couldn’t help. And that was good.

The girl with the green eyes was dangerous. She was coming for him, and he could feel her drawing closer. The girl with the green eyes made something ache inside his chest, and he knew there was more he should remember about her. More he should feel about her besides how dangerous she was. But that was another thing he was losing, a fading memory that belonged to whoever—whatever—he was before.

And those things didn’t matter anymore.

The girl with the green eyes wasn’t going to stop coming, he knew that. He could hide, but she would find him because she wanted . . . something.

With a groan, he pressed his head to the hard rock beneath him, wishing the pain would stop, just for a little while. If the pain would go away, he could think. He could remember why the girl made his chest ache with something that wasn’t just fear.

But the pain didn’t stop, and the light was so bright, burning and illuminating the walls around him, and he thought maybe he screamed, but that sound could have just been in his mind. He didn’t know anymore.

Still, lying there in the cold, damp dark, something came to him with a sharp clarity that burned everything else away. The yellow dress he kept seeing . . . was it hers? The girl’s? And the blood that stained the front of it was his. There was a part of him that didn’t feel bothered by that. A part that welcomed it. This wasn’t a life, after all, so who cared if it ended?

But the other part of him fought against that. He was ancient and powerful, not something that should be put down like a feral dog. He was the Oracle, and this girl, this Paladin, wanted to stop him. She would kill him.

Unless he killed her first.

Chapter 21

“NO.”

“Yes.”

“Except no.”

I sat in the driver’s seat, staring at the dive in front of me, my fingers tight around the steering wheel. At one point in its existence, the bar had maybe been called “Cowboys.” I was guessing this based on the cardboard cutout of a cowboy propped up near the door, and the fact that there was a sign on the roof that had an “O,” a “W,” and a “Y” on it. Other letters had fallen off or rotted away.

In short, it was clearly the worst place in the world, and I could not believe I was going to have to set foot in there.

Blythe was in the passenger seat, eyebrows raised as she looked over at me. “I’m telling you, this is where he is.”

From the backseat, Bee snorted. Her hair was loose tonight, and she pushed it back with impatient hands. “Why would anyone want to hang out here?” she asked. “This is a place where you end up on a true-crime TV show.”

Truer words had never been spoken, but Blythe folded her arms over her chest, staring at the bar. “In any case, this is the place where he is.”

Before we’d driven out of Ideal, Blythe had done a quick tracking spell on Dante. Apparently, his fingerprints on Saylor’s journal had been enough, and after a brief ritual done in a Shell station bathroom, Blythe had come out with a location in mind.

Stupidly, I’d assumed we’d be heading to a house. Maybe an apartment. Not this truly sad dive bar in eastern Georgia.

We’d been driving for about five hours, and while the sun had just gone down, the parking lot was already packed, telling me that the clientele here at “OW Y” took that whole “five o’clock is drinking time” thing seriously.

I was not looking forward to a night sifting through the local drunks for one guy.

But if this was where Dante was, then this was where we had to be. Still, I had some reservations.

“We’re teenagers,” I reminded her now. “They won’t let us in.”

“We’re girls,” Blythe countered. “They’ll let us in.”

She probably had a point there, but I still wondered if maybe Bee and I should hang out in the car.

Leaning forward, Blythe continued. “Plus we have mind-controlling magic. Haven’t y’all ever used the Mage’s powers to get into bars?”

I looked over at her, scowling. “Um, no, we don’t use the special superpowers Ryan got because Saylor died in order to score beer, actually.”

But then Bee leaned in closer and said, a little sheepish, “One time, Ryan used it to get us into that new restaurant in Montgomery? The one it’s hard to get reservations to?”

I turned in my seat, blinking at her, and she shrugged. “It was our one-month anniversary, and he wanted to take me somewhere special. It didn’t hurt anyone.”

Rolling my eyes, I turned back around to face Blythe’s triumphant smile. “Okay,” I said, taking the keys out of the ignition. “Fine. Let’s go use the powers of the gods to dodge creepy guys and drink cheap beer and find this other guy who apparently holds the key to everything.”

We stepped out of the car, gravel crunching under our feet. The door was open, and loud, raucous music was pouring out into the night. I could hear the stomping of feet on the wooden floors, and the smell of stale beer and fried food hung like a fog over the building.

I stood there at the base of the steps leading up into the bar as Bee and Blythe walked in front of me, heading on in. “Seriously, why this place?” I muttered, but Blythe didn’t answer me. After a minute, I sighed and followed.

I wish I could say that “OW Y” was not what I expected and that I learned a valuable lesson about not making snap judgments, but no. No, I was totally right, and it was totally gross. The music was too loud, and despite the name of the bar—or what I was guessing was the name of the bar—I didn’t see a single cowboy hat. I saw a lot of baseball caps, though, and more fraternity shirts that I could count, plus a fair amount of giant belt buckles.