Dire as everything was, that idea made me smile. David Stark, camping? I’d pay good money to see that. We’d taken a field trip to the nearby Boy Scout campgrounds in the sixth grade, and when they’d asked us to put up a tent, David had been hopeless. I still had a clear memory of him as a moving lump underneath a green nylon tarp, trying to get his poles stuck in the ground.

“You okay?”

I glanced up to see Bee watching me as she closed the book in her lap. “You had a weird look on your face,” she added, and I shook my head slightly, turning back to the book in front of me.

“Yeah, I’m good. Just . . . thinking.”

Bee’s eyes dropped a little lower, and I knew she was looking at the cut below my jaw. I touched it self-consciously. The cut had scabbed over in the night, and I was hoping that meant some of my super-healing powers were firing up again.

I kept my focus on the books in front of me for nearly an hour but was starting to lose faith. Saylor had had a ton of books on Oracle lore, but it was mostly history and stuff. Nothing about which spells to use should your Oracle go rogue, then disappear.

“No wonder this always went to crap for them,” I said, tossing aside a book in a way that would’ve made David scowl if he’d been here to see it. “They never have anything useful. And the prophecies are like that, too. ‘Oooh, when the black swan squawks at midnight, the stone will roll away.’”

Ryan blinked at me. “Whoa, did David ever say something like that?”

Rolling my eyes, I stood up, dusting off the backs of my legs. “I may have been exaggerating, but only slightly.”

“I remember,” Ryan said. “That night at the golf course, what was it he said to you? Something about choosing?”

I ignored that, pretending to be absorbed in scanning the bookshelves again. That word—“choose”—was a constant thrumming in my head. Over and over again, it seemed like people were telling me that’s what I’d have to do when it came to David. I thought in the end, I had chosen him, but it was pretty clear he hadn’t chosen me.

And now he was sending people after me.

“Still don’t really get what the point of having an Oracle is if he can’t give prophecies that make any sense,” Ryan commented.

“Well, yeah,” I replied, my fingers trailing over the spines of the books. “That was kind of the whole issue. The Ephors didn’t just want to kill David because male Oracles go crazy—they also suck at having visions. The male Oracles don’t see what will happen, just everything that might happen.”

I pulled a book from the shelf, upsetting a little Lord of the Rings figure that had been propped on top of it. There was an uncomfortable silence for a long moment, and then Bee cleared her throat. “I thought his visions had always been pretty clear.”

“They were,” I told her. “Once Blythe did the spell on him, it seemed like things were coming in clearer.”

“Seemed?” Ryan asked, glancing over. His auburn hair had gotten longer over the summer and was falling over his forehead. “He didn’t tell you?”

Ah yes, another embarrassing part of my whole Paladin experience. I’d been dating the Oracle, but he’d never really told me the truth about the things he’d see in his visions. Maybe they scared him.

Now I just shrugged at Ryan. “My job was to keep him safe, not interpret his visions,” I said, and Ryan’s eyes widened a little bit.

“I wasn’t talking about Paladin you,” he clarified. “I meant, like, girlfriend you.”

And that had always been the issue, hadn’t it? I’d never known which person to be, and being both at the same time never really worked.

“Maybe David needed some kind of interpreter,” Bee suggested, getting back on the subject of David’s prophecies, which I appreciated. “Or a—oh!” Her finger came down on one page with a thump. “This . . . might be something.”

“What is it?” I asked, and she looked up at me, her brown eyes bright.

“It’s kind of a mess,” she said. “Like, some of it is in English, some of it in Greek, I think, but I see the word ‘summoning.’”

I crossed the room to look down at the page she was pointing to. It’s true, the words were a jumble, which was something I’d seen in a lot of the books Saylor had collected. Like someone had attempted a translation, but in a kind of half-baked way either because some things just couldn’t be translated, or because the person had been in a hurry, copying things off scrolls or whatever. But this one also had an illustration with two guys in robes standing on a cliff top, a small pile of random things—what looked like a robe, a clay bowl, and what I was pretty sure was an empty turtle shell—gathered on the ground in front of them.

“Why do they have all that stuff?” Ryan asked, leaning over Bee’s shoulder and tapping the pile in front of the robed guys.

“Maybe those were things that belonged to the Oracle?” I suggested. “That would make sense if you were trying to summon one, right? Using things connected to him? Or her, I guess.”

Glancing around David’s room, I said, “Grab something. Anything easy to carry.”

Ryan’s hand came down on my wrist, not hard, but firm, definitive. “Hold up. We don’t even know this is the right ritual,” he said, and then nodded back at the book. “It doesn’t even say ‘Oracle.’”

“That we can tell,” I reminded him. “One of those Greek words could be it, and, I mean, come on, Ryan. Do you have any other ideas?”

I knew he didn’t, and while I’d like to say I was a little nervous about running off half-cocked like this, the truth was, I was so excited that it might actually work that I didn’t have time to feel nervous or like this was a bad idea.

Maybe I should have.

Chapter 7

WE’D DONE these kinds of rituals before, and they had almost always ended in total disaster. The last time we’d tried one, David had had a major Oracle freak-out that included his eyes going golden and his powers opening up cracks in the ground at the local golf course. So, yeah, we didn’t have the best track record with this kind of thing, but that wasn’t going to stop us this time.

Although we had learned to go farther out of town now.

We’d waited until night—this seemed like the kind of thing that worked best by moonlight—and picked a weed-choked field not too far past the city limits, and we’d picked it for a good reason. This is where the last Ephor, Alexander, had chosen to have his “headquarters,” a fancy house that, it turned out, he’d created solely with magic. The house had vanished when his powers failed, and Alexander died not too far from the spot where we all stood now. I’m not going to lie, being back here gave me a major case of the heebie-jeebies; but to my way of thinking, it made sense to attempt hard-core magic in a place where there had once been a lot of . . . well, hard-core magic. Bee and Ryan were both less than certain about all of it if the looks they kept trading were anything to go by.

I choked back irritation at that. Okay, maybe I didn’t always have the greatest plans, but what was the harm in trying to stack the deck a little? Still, my eyes kept drifting to that spot where I’d watched Alexander’s eyes go blank, and I had to work hard not to shiver even in the sticky heat of the night. Also, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was a little . . . desperate. Like Aunt Jewel had said: Most girls have to be talked out of texting an ex, and here I was using freaking magic to summon back a dude who had, for all intents and purposes, dumped me.