I took it, wondering if I’d even understand what it was that had her so freaked, or if it would just be more Mage Stuff.

But this time, the words scrawled over the page weren’t indecipherable.

And they made my stomach drop to my knees.

Chapter 25

“SO WHAT does this even mean?” Bee asked, leaning over my arm, her eyes scanning the page.

“David’s parents. The ones we’ve always wondered about?” I said, my heart practically in my mouth. “They weren’t just normal people who had a magical baby. They were Alexander and the Oracle.”

We all went quiet, lost in our thoughts. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe an Oracle baby was just an Oracle baby, and coming from magical parents didn’t necessarily make him special.

And then I read just a little bit further.

“Alaric,” I said softly, and Blythe nodded, her expression grim while Bee raised her eyebrows at me.

“What about him?” she asked.

“He was another male Oracle born to an Oracle,” I said, “and we know how he turned out.”

Crazy, super-charged, murdering Paladins, and blowing an entire town off the map.

Bee was leaning so close to me that her hair brushed the back of my arm. “But it doesn’t make any sense. If Alexander was David’s father, why would he want him dead?”

But he hadn’t wanted David dead. He’d wanted me dead so I’d be out of the way, allowing him to perform a ritual on David. A ritual that would make him more powerful and, he’d hoped, more stable. It had worked in one regard, and been an abysmal failure in the other. David became incredibly powerful, but the visions had still messed him up pretty badly.

When he’d skipped town, his powers had blown through all the wards Alexander had put up.

Wards that I now knew weren’t necessarily about trapping David in Pine Grove, but protecting him.

I went back through all the time I’d spent with Alexander, trying to think of any moment I could remember when there was even the slightest hint that he cared about David. I remembered him talking to me about how getting personally attached to an Oracle would only hurt me, but had he really been talking about himself?

“Did you know this?” I asked Blythe now. “Or even suspect?”

Her face was pale in the dim light. “Suspected, yeah. Well, not this exactly, but that David meant more to him than just being his Oracle. There were only two people in the world who had a vested interest in David—besides you, Harper. And that was Saylor and Alexander.”

She braced her hands on the desk, her eyes still on the book. “If anyone was trying to find a way to fix him—or to stop an Oracle gone rogue—it would be one of them.”

“That’s what that spell was about, then. Why Alexander wanted it.”

She nodded and kept paging through the book, frowning.

“Alexander spent years researching what had happened to Alaric. The Ephors had tried to stop Alaric, had looked for ways of, I don’t know, neutralizing him, I guess. Bringing him back from madness.”

“Why bother?” Bee asked. She had stepped back a little, and I heard another crunch as she, too, stepped on either glass or something unmentionable. Seriously, the sooner we were out of this place, the better.

“Why not just kill him?”

For a second, I thought Bee was talking about David, and my head shot up.

“Alaric,” Bee clarified. “If he was seeing things and making Paladins and sending them after the Ephors, why did they bother trying to save him?”

“Because they weren’t monsters,” Blythe said, not looking up from the book. “Maybe they wanted to find some way to help him instead of putting him down like a dog.”

“It didn’t work, though,” I reminded her, that cold feeling still sitting at the base of my spine. “They did kill him.”

Now Blythe lifted her head, her eyes meeting mine. “Because it was the last resort,” she said. “It happens. Once he’d gotten to that cave and started powering up, there wasn’t anything they could do but kill him.”

I didn’t like the way she said that but wasn’t sure exactly how to reply.

And then Blythe looked down at the book and sucked in a breath.

There, at the end of the book, was a little paper pocket affixed to the back cover. It was probably just the slightly wavering beam of the flashlight that made it seem like Blythe’s fingers were trembling as she pulled out two worn, folded sheets of paper.

When she unfolded them, gently smoothing the paper with her hands, I looked down, hoping I’d be able to understand what was written there.

This was another one of Saylor’s weird ciphers, part Greek, part English, part symbols, and it all swam in front of my eyes.

Whatever was on those pages, though, Blythe got it. I actually watched her go pale, saw her eyes widen as she took it in.

“Well?” I asked, louder than I should have, but the suspense had me feeling like something was crawling all over my skin.

“It’s definitely the spell,” she said, and the paper crinkled as she lifted it, turning to look at the back. This time, there was no doubt her hands were shaking.

“Duh,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Will it help? Can you do it?”

To my surprise, Blythe didn’t look all that enthused. This was what she’d been looking for—what we’d brought her along for, after all—and instead of seeming pumped, she looked a little . . . sick, to be honest.

Frowning again, she turned back to the pages. “It’s harder than I thought it would be,” she said, and there it was again, that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“But you can do it,” I pressed, and her head shot up, dark eyes meeting mine.

“You saw how things went with Dante. This kind of magic, it’s . . . it’s really complicated, Harper. It’s unwieldy. This”—she rattled the papers at me—“won’t just take David’s powers, it’ll wipe his mind, too.”

I thought of Dante, sitting in that field, the confusion on his face. “Oh. Right. I . . . forgot that bit.”

A David who was normal but didn’t remember me? Or anything, for that matter? It was worth a shot, surely.

I thought about Bee, asking why they didn’t just kill the Oracle when that was clearly the easiest course of action.

The idea of David looking at me blankly, no idea who I was . . . it sucked. It sucked a lot.

But it was better than the alternative.

“What about the other part?” I asked, and Blythe’s head jerked up.

“What?”

“In the memory,” I reminded her. “Dante said there was another part to that spell, some scary, intense thing he didn’t think people should try.”

Blythe glanced back at the paper. “Not sure,” she said, then looked up, startled, as we heard a noise from outside.

The three of us froze. We heard footsteps, quick and soft, and saw a thin line of light underneath the closed office door.

Blythe turned off her own flashlight, plunging us into near darkness, and as quietly as she could, she slid the book from the desk, shoving it awkwardly in the waistband of her pants.

There was no sign that this was Paladin-related stuff, and we hadn’t been attacked since that first night at the motel, but I was taking no chances. Wordlessly, I held my hand out, and Blythe put the flashlight in my open palm.