Lady Renegades

by Rachel Hawkins

  I nodded, but thinking about that—Saylor knowing that once she took David, she could never go back home again, and doing a quick spell on her journal, thinking she was leaving it somewhere safe—just made me feel sad all over again.

  “You know what?” I said, sliding out of the booth. “I’m not all that hungry.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Bee followed me out of the restaurant, and when we stood in the parking lot, she looked over at me. Well, down at me. Bee really was freakishly tall.

  “So I’m not sure if you know this,” she said, “but Blythe kind of sucks.”

  I crossed my arms. “She’s not my favorite person, I’ll admit, but . . . I don’t know. She hasn’t been as bad as I thought.”

  Bee shaded her eyes from the sun with one hand, squinting at me. “If you say so. You know, we could ditch her,” she suggested, and I wasn’t totally sure she was joking. “Let her find her own way back to wherever she came from.”

  Not gonna lie, the idea was tempting, but I thought of that book—all its secrets and weird spells or whatever—and knew that Blythe was still our best chance of fixing David. And with my powers out of whack, we needed all the help we could get. “No,” I said to Bee now. “Although I reserve the right to abandon her at a rest stop if she tries to shush me again.”

  Bee laughed at that and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, tugging me close. “Deal.” She gave me another quick squeeze before stepping back. “I swear, she’s lucky my Paladin powers are fading because the ‘shh’ thing definitely made me feel punchy.”

  Bee’s voice was light and she was still smiling, but I noticed the way she didn’t quite meet my eyes when she said it, and I touched her arm.

  “Are you bummed?” I asked her. “About your powers going away?”

  Bee shook her head, but she wasn’t smiling anymore. “Not . . . bummed, exactly? It was just that I’d kind of gotten used to them, I guess, and the idea of being, I don’t know, normal again while you and Ryan are still superheroes—”

  “My powers are on the fritz, too,” I reminded her. “And who knows what will happen with Ryan.”

  Bee looked over at me, her fingers tugging at the hem of her T-shirt. “You fought that girl at the motel,” she reminded me. “I didn’t see it, but it sounds like your powers were fine then.”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “It’s not like I’m getting weaker, it’s just that they keep . . . flickering on and off? Like a faulty switch or something.”

  That was the best way I could explain it. Honestly, I think it would’ve been a relief if they had just been getting weaker. Not knowing if I’d suddenly lose all my strength? That was the scary part.

  I was going to say that to Bee, but she just lifted her head, glancing around. “You wanna walk for a bit, see what’s what?”

  So that was clearly the end of that talk. I nodded, needing both the space from Blythe and some fresh air.

  We set off down the sidewalk. In a lot of ways, this little town was basically like Pine Grove. Well, like Pine Grove if people like my aunts and Saylor Stark hadn’t tried to take care of it. You got the sense that it had been pretty once, quaint and charming, all of that. But the big terra-cotta planters outside the shops were filled with dying flowers, and, perhaps most tragically of all, there were still Christmas decorations hanging up on the streetlights. I stared at a faded green tinsel tree for a long time, taking deep breaths and trying not to panic. For the first time, I actually felt far from home, and even though Bee and Blythe were with me, I felt lonely.

  Scared.

  In that moment, I would’ve given most anything to be able to get back in the car and drive all night to get to Pine Grove. To sleep in my own bed underneath my white-and-purple comforter and wake up in the morning to my mom burning bacon.

  I thought back to Saylor’s brother, and the sad, faded air of the town took on new significance. Had Saylor longed for this place like I longed for home now? Had she looked at the streets of Pine Grove and thought of another small southern town? It had been Saylor’s idea to put those big terra-cotta planters outside Magnolia House. After finding out that she was a Mage, I’d assumed everything she’d done as part of the Pine Grove Betterment Society had been about putting up wards, making the town safe for David. But maybe she’d really done some of those things just to make Pine Grove . . . better.

  More like home.

  My eyes stung all of a sudden, and I could feel a lump welling up in my throat. Saylor’s death had hit us all hard, but it was almost like we’d all worked so hard to put it behind us that we’d never taken any time to mourn her. Standing in the streets of her hometown now, I missed her more than I had since she’d died, I think. I’d looked at Saylor for so long as the Woman Who Knew Everything. Even before all the Paladin stuff, she’d been my role model, and now I understood that we were more alike than I’d ever guessed. I didn’t just want her back to fix stuff for us or tell us what to do. I wanted her back so that we could talk about what she had been before. How she’d managed to choose her duties as a Mage over the life she’d led here in Ideal, Mississippi. If she’d ever regretted it.

  “Hey,” Bee said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “What’s wrong?”

  I really didn’t want to be the weird girl crying in the middle of a town square, so I did my best to stop the tears before they could fall, but it was a losing battle. I was already sniffling, and with a disgusted sound, I scrubbed at my face. “We should’ve told him,” I said. “Saylor’s brother. Or I should’ve told him. I . . . I owed that to Saylor.”

  Bee frowned, folding her arms over her chest. “But then he’d know she was dead. He’d have questions, Harper. How she died, where she’s buried, why no one called the police . . .”

  Sighing, I rubbed the back of my neck. “I know, but it feels wrong. To keep lying like this, to always be covering stuff up or wondering how to get away with things. I’m just . . .” Trailing off, I took another deep breath. “I’m tired of it.”

  She was right, obviously. Telling Saylor’s brother that she’d died would open up a whole other can of worms, one I didn’t have time for right now, but it was another reminder of just how badly magic could screw things up. Saylor had done a spell on her brother that would have him just kind of vaguely remembering her for the rest of his life.

  Was it worth it, preserving all these secrets at a cost like that?

  I was just about to turn and say so to Bee, but before I could, agony erupted in my head.

  Crying out, I slammed my eyes shut against the sudden flare of light, my vision completely whiting out, my stomach rolling with the pain in my temples. I had the briefest moment of wondering if I was having a migraine, and then it was like the entire world dropped away. I wasn’t on a street corner in Ideal anymore, surrounded by the heat of a southern summer. I was actually a little cold, standing in a dim space, the smell of moisture and earth all around me, a distant dripping sound in my ears.

  A man stood in front of me. Well, a boy, really. Dark hair curled over his ears, and he was wearing a dingy robe, the hem ragged and splattered with mud. His eyes were glowing so brightly that I fought the urge to cover my face against the glare.

  We were in a cave, I realized, glancing up to see stalactites dripping from the ceiling, and even though some part of my mind knew I was still standing on the sidewalk in Ideal, there was nothing of that here. This was a vision, I knew it, but it definitely felt real.

  The boy in front of me didn’t react to me, all his concentration centered on a crack in the ground in front of him, wispy steam rising up. At his side, his dirty fingers opened and closed, opened and closed.

  I’d seen David make that same gesture before when he was anxious, and something about it made my chest ache and my mouth go dry.

  And then, just as quickly as it had come on, the vision was gone, and I was gasping on the sidewalk, lean
ing on one of those giant planters, sweat dripping down my face.

  For one horrible second, I thought I was going to throw up right there in the middle of downtown, and I swallowed hard, sucking in a deep breath through my nose.

  What the heck had that been? I knew it was a vision of some kind, that the boy I’d seen had been an Oracle. Had it been Alaric?

  In my dreams, I’d seen a glimpse of someone who looked like him, and I knew that my dreams were somehow connected to David, but those had felt like dreams. Just hazy, distant things while I was sleeping.

  This was like a full-scale hallucination while I was wide-awake, and it scared the heck out of me.

  Suddenly I remembered Bee, and that she’d had just as many dreams of David as I had. If that was true, then shouldn’t she—

  Sure enough, when I lifted my head, I saw Bee leaning against a brick wall, her face pale, her hands on her thighs as she took deep breaths. Her blond hair was sweaty against her temples, and when her eyes met mine, I had my answer.

  Whatever it was that had happened, it had happened to both of us.

  Chapter 20

  “TELL ME AGAIN.”

  I took another gulp of bottled water, closing my eyes for a second. We were sitting in my car in a parking lot at a local ball field, and the occasional crack of wooden bats against baseballs was making my head hurt even more than it already did.

  “I’ve told you twice now,” I said to Blythe, reaching out to turn the air-conditioning even higher, the cold air blowing my sweaty hair away from my face. Blythe frowned, closing the driver’s side vents with more force than was necessary in my opinion, and from the backseat, Bee made a sound of protest. She was lying down back there, knees tucked up to her chest. Both of us were clearly worse for wear after . . . whatever had happened, and repeating the story to Blythe was exacerbating everything.

  But Blythe was nothing if not determined, and she kept looking at me until I tipped my head back against the seat and, in a dull voice, repeated everything I’d seen. The dark-haired boy with the glowing eyes, the cave, the wispy vapor snaking up from the cracked earth . . .

  When I was finished, Blythe’s frown only deepened, and she reached down for the bag at her feet, rummaging through it.

  “So you were dreaming about David or seeing whatever he’s been seeing in visions,” she confirmed, and I gave a weak nod.

  “And now,” she continued, “you’re having full-on visions in the middle of the day. Both of you.”

  “Seems to be the case,” Bee offered, sitting up. She was still a little pale, and she’d drained one bottle of water already, another half empty in her hands.

  Retrieving Saylor’s journal, Blythe flipped through it while I stared listlessly through the chain-link fence in front of us. A kid around our age was running bases, his dark blond hair shaggy underneath a cap.

  “Why did you bring us here?” I asked. Blythe had found both of us standing on the street, shaky and rattled, and for the first time on this trip, I’d gratefully turned my keys over to her. She’d driven unerringly to this field before putting the car in park and demanding to know what happened. She’d asked on the street, too, but Bee and I had both been too wiped to get into it there.

  Now she looked up briefly, watching that boy jog past us. “Cute boys,” she said, as though that were explanation enough.

  “Eye candy helps you think?” Bee asked, sounding a little more like herself, and Blythe gave a little shrug.

  “Doesn’t hurt.”

  It was hard to argue with that, and I sipped more water, taking deep breaths and waiting for the weight in my chest to lessen. It didn’t, though, no matter how many baseball players I attempted to ogle.

  Seeing what David was seeing, sharing a vision with him . . . was that something good or something bad? Did it mean we were getting closer to him, or that he was getting worse?

  Or both?

  Next to me, Blythe made a sound of surprise, her finger stabbing at one of the pages. “Okay, here we go. So when Alaric super-Oracled out, the Paladins couldn’t find him for days.”

  I looked over at the page she was reading from, but it was just another mess of Greek and symbols with the occasional English word thrown in. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that we were having to trust Blythe a lot on this thing. We were trusting that her magic could fix this, and we were assuming she was telling the truth about whatever it was she was finding in Saylor’s journal.

  I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  For now, though, I just leaned closer, encouraging her to go on. “Turned out he’d hidden himself away in some cave for days, sort of . . .” Blythe lifted her head, nose wrinkling. “Leveling up, I guess. Concentrating his powers, getting ready for what was coming next.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

  “What does that mean?” Bee asked, leaning forward slightly.

  “Well, we know he killed most of the Paladins, for one,” Blythe said, and turned her attention back to the journal, one chipped pink nail skating underneath the words and symbols there. “But before he did that, he went back to his hometown, Aruza. And he—”

  Her words died abruptly, and Blythe’s finger slid from the page.

  “What?” I asked, and she looked over at me, her dark eyes unreadable. “He, um. He blew it up, basically. Mages had put symbols all over the town to keep him safe there, and I guess after he escaped, he felt like those symbols might be used to hold him back or something.” She shrugged, narrow shoulder moving underneath the bright pink and white stripes of her sundress. “Or maybe he was just really pissed they’d put them up in the first place.”

  I’d thought that sick feeling was fading away, but now I stared at Blythe, my palms suddenly sweaty on the water bottle. “So what, you think David’s seeing Alaric when he went crazy?”

  “I think there’s a good chance, yeah,” she said, closing Saylor’s journal. I noticed the way her fingers curled around the book, and thought she might not even realize she was doing that. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about Paladin stuff, but if you’re both having daytime visions now, and you’re both seeing what he’s seeing, we could be close. That has to be what that means, right?”

  She looked at both me and Bee, and I didn’t know what to tell her. She was bringing the Mage knowledge on this trip, and if we were supposed to bring the Paladin knowledge, we weren’t doing the best job.

  But I sat up straighter in my seat, twisting the cap back onto my water bottle. “That has to be what it means,” I said. “And maybe it’s a clue, too. If he’s seeing Alaric when he went nuts, he could be following the same path.”

  The more I said, the more excited and energized I suddenly felt, and I fumbled with my seat belt, already waving at Blythe to get out of the car and switch places with me. “So he might be heading for a cave, and there are tons of caves in the South. We’ll look at a—I don’t know—a guidebook or something. Check out Google.”

  “We have to find him before he gets there, though,” Blythe said. “Once he’s at the cave and doing whatever it is that makes him all super Oracle, it’ll be too late.”

  That made my stomach hurt a little, but I waved it off, still going. “If Bee and I are connected to him, we might be able to sense which one it is, and then there he’ll be, and—”

  But Blythe wasn’t moving and just watched me, still scowling slightly.

  “And what are we going to do if we find him?” she asked, then shook her head. “No, we have to get the spell first. Whatever it was Dante took out of this.” She shook the journal at me. “Once we have that, we can use the visions and your connection to David to find him.”

  I froze, my hand still on the door handle. “But . . . we could find him without all that,” I said, my skin feeling itchy with the desire to move. “We’ve only been after
him for two days, and we could already be there.” Between the vision and that strange, almost-tugging sensation in my chest, I knew that David wasn’t that far away, and when I looked back to Bee, she nodded, confirming that she felt him nearby, too.

  “And without the spell, all that will happen is he’ll blast us into the next century,” Blythe argued. “Maybe literally for all we know. There’s no telling what a rogue Oracle is capable of. I get that you want to find him, but we need the magic to fix him first. No.” She shook her head again. “Our best plan is to find Dante and that spell. And what Alexander wanted with it,” she added, almost to herself, and my frustration nearly had me shouting.

  “Who cares what Alexander wanted with it? He’s dead, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we finally have a way to track David and get to him and—”

  “And?” Blythe echoed, raising her eyebrows. “Seriously, Harper, what are you going to do if you find him?”

  When I didn’t have an immediate answer, she pointed a finger at me. “Without magic, all we have is your Paladin power, but that’s kind of useless against him, isn’t it? You can’t hurt him, so what’s the point of you charging in after him if you can’t use magic and you can’t kill him?”

  Bee was watching me but she didn’t say anything.

  Killing David had always been there, a dark whisper in the back of my mind. Saylor had warned me that I might have to one day, and David had seen me driving a sword through him. I’d seen myself killing him in one of the trials Alexander had set up last year. But that didn’t mean I was willing to accept it was an actual option.

  But Blythe had a point—no spell, no plan.

  Closing my eyes, I sagged back against the seat. “Dammit,” I muttered, and Bee sighed.

  I wondered if it was with relief.

  But then I opened my eyes and looked at Blythe, pointing at her. “But no more than two days,” I told her. “We can’t let him get too far away, and we’re running out of time.”