For a moment, Blythe stood there, looking around. And then she said, “It looks different.”

“When was the last time you were here?” I asked, and Blythe frowned. All three of us had changed in a rest-stop bathroom on the way here. We’d chosen to wear black for this little expedition (which was maybe a little drama queen of us, but it had felt appropriate for sneaking into an abandoned high-rise), and Blythe’s hair swung over her bare shoulders, her skin pale against her dark tank top.

“A few years ago,” she said. “When they interviewed me.”

She didn’t even bother whispering, so I didn’t worry about keeping my footsteps quiet as we walked through the lobby, heading for a long hallway of doors. A few of them were open, but when I glanced inside, I didn’t see anything. No desks, no chairs. Just plain, square rooms, some with a window, others completely dark.

We stopped in front of a closed door at the end of the hall. The doorknob turned in Blythe’s hand, but the door stuck slightly in the jamb, and she applied her shoulder to it. “This is where I met Dante.”

The door swung open, and I followed Blythe into the office, my heart thudding.

If the rest of the office had seemed generic, this one room was anything but. This was so clearly Alexander’s space that I half expected to see him sitting behind the desk. The desk was the same heavy, wooden monstrosity he’d sat behind at the house outside of Pine Grove, and even the carpet on the floor looked the same, a pattern of heavy swirls on a crimson background.

It was clear no one had been in here in a while. Overhead was a broken skylight that had let in rain and leaves, and books had fallen off the tall bookcases, their pages warped with damp. How long had it been abandoned like this? And why had no one noticed?

“Told you things went to hell when Alexander died,” Blythe said, shining the beam of her flashlight up.

“But you can’t tell from the outside,” I argued, and Blythe shrugged.

“Most of the magic went to hell. Not all of it.”

Next to me, I could see the corners of Bee’s mouth pulling down, and she wrapped her arms tightly around her body. “Is this where they brought you?” I asked her, keeping my voice low. It wasn’t like I was afraid anyone would overhear. It was just that in this office, surrounded by Alexander’s things, the sound of my voice was too loud in my ears.

Bee must have felt the same because she was basically whispering when she said, “I don’t know. Maybe? It’s . . .” Trailing off, she looked around. “It feels the same. I know that sounds dumb, but—”

“Not dumb,” I assured her, grimacing as something crunched under my feet. Could’ve been broken glass, could’ve been some rodent’s or bird’s skeleton. I definitely wasn’t going to try to find out.

“You don’t remember because they mostly kept you in a kind of stasis,” Blythe told us, her own footsteps crunching as she moved around the room. In the darkness, she was just a small, shadowy figure.

“Alexander didn’t know what to do with you once I brought you back,” she continued. “I thought he’d want proof that what I’d done had worked. I’d done the ritual, David was juiced up, and he could make Paladins. But instead, he was just mad I hadn’t brought the Oracle back.”

She turned to Bee then. “That’s why your memories feel fuzzy. You were kept upstairs”—she gestured with her flashlight—“for weeks before Alexander worked out that he might be able to use you to get to her.” The beam of light swung in my direction now.

“The Oracle was always the only thing that mattered to Alexander,” she said. “I was supposed to charge him up and then bring him back, and when I couldn’t . . .”

The silence that followed those words was heavy. Finally, Blythe cleared her throat, turning away.

“Let’s just say he didn’t have any use for me after that.” She kept moving around the office. Bee and I might have been freaked, but Blythe clearly did not share our hesitation. Flashlight bobbing, she scanned the shelves and heavy wood desk near the farthest wall. “If the spell is here, it’ll be in this room,” she said, her free hand smoothing back her hair. “This was it, the main place where he always was, doing . . . whatever. And he never liked me in here.”

There was something about the way she said that that made me turn around and look at her. As always, she’d pulled her hair up in a high ponytail, and she had her free hand propped on her hip. She seemed determined and fierce, but underneath all of that was something else. It was almost like . . .

“Blythe, does this place scare you?” I asked, and she didn’t look over at me. Instead, she took a deep breath through her nose, and for a long moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer me at all.

And then she walked closer to the big desk and said, “Nothing scares me.”

She looked over at me, a dimple appearing in one cheek. It was a smile, but one I’d never seen from her before. Blythe’s grins were usually of the “I am tiny and filled with magic and insane” variety, but this was almost rueful. “Still don’t like this place, though,” she added. “Can’t you feel it?”

“It’s a creepy abandoned building,” I said, looking up and turning in a slow circle, taking in those endless ceilings and the jagged hole from the skylight. “All creepy abandoned buildings feel weird.”

“This is a special one, though,” Blythe said, walking around the desk to stare at the drawers. She reached for one, but it was clearly locked, and she rattled it harder, trying to break it by force before trying magic.

Or maybe she just felt like breaking something. I understood that.

I walked over, once again ignoring the little things going crunch underneath my tennis shoes, and nudged her aside. “This calls for my particular skill set,” I told her. I curled my fingers around the drawer’s knob, and when I yanked, the wood gave with a satisfying crack.

But the satisfaction was short-lived, since the drawer was empty. Or at least that’s how it looked to me. But Blythe reached in anyway, waving her hands in the empty space, eyes closed. “Like I said, most of the magic around this place faded when Alexander died,” she told me, “but there’s still a little bit left. The really strong stuff hangs around even after the person who made it is gone.”

We stood there in the silence while Blythe waved her hands around, and I tried not to feel too frustrated when once again, she pulled out a book.

Bee, however, clearly had no problem saying what was on her mind. “Oh, yay,” she said, crossing one ankle in front of the other. “Another book probably filled with gibberish. Just what we need.”

I probably should have tried to play peacekeeper, but sometimes the joy of having a best friend around is having her say the things you can’t.

“Any sign of those sheets Dante tore out?” I asked.

But Blythe was already leafing through the book, her eyes roaming over the pages. Unlike Saylor’s book, this one was in decent shape, a slim, black day-planner kind of thing that made my office-supply-loving heart sing.

“Seriously, Blythe, do you see—”

Blythe suddenly stopped on a page that was absolutely covered in writing, so dense that you could barely see the white of the paper for all the black ink. And then she offered me the book.