Lady Renegades

by Rachel Hawkins

  Everything was still and quiet as we followed Blythe across the parking lot to the front doors. They weren’t locked—or else they just opened for Blythe—and we walked into a large lobby that was mostly empty.

  “Is this place magicked or just abandoned?” I asked, and she looked over her shoulder at me as we moved toward the elevator.

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other. There was magic over it to keep people out, but once the person who did the magic died, it started falling apart pretty quickly. Locals think it’s just an abandoned high-rise.”

  “And you’re sure this isn’t going to get us arrested?” Bee asked once the elevator doors were closed.

  Blythe shook her head, drumming her fingers on the steel rail behind her, and Bee and I met each other’s eyes behind her back. Whatever happened with Dante was still clearly weighing on Blythe’s mind.

  The doors opened, and the three of us stepped out into a deserted lobby, where there was an empty desk and a few chairs. The carpet underfoot felt almost damp, and there was a musty, unused smell to the place.

  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 leafi
ng 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.

  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.

  The three of us held very still, shrinking back into the s
hadows as I tried to think of what to do. Was it better to rush out, taking whoever it was out there by surprise, or should we wait, hoping they passed us by?

  But then the door swung open, making the choice for me.

  My fingers were tight around the handle of the flashlight, ready to swing.

  A pair of teenagers came stumbling in, and I was about to leap at them when I realized they were giggling, arms looped around each other.

  Not Paladins sent by David. Just . . . kids exploring a deserted building.

  The guy was tall, his hair blonder and shaggier than David’s, but there was still enough of a resemblance to make my stomach flutter. The girl in front of him was a little taller than me, but her hair seemed as dark in the dim light, and when she turned to face him, winding her arms around his neck, the gesture seemed familiar.

  It was all still so mixed up for me—the Oracle, the boyfriend, the guy I’d known for so long—and I couldn’t sort out how I felt about any of it. Stopping the Oracle might still mean losing David, and while this was still the best way, I wanted . . . something more.

  Something easier.

  I was so caught up in those thoughts that I didn’t even notice Blythe until she was stepping slightly in front of me, hand raised, murmuring under her breath.

  The couple stopped kissing. Or, rather, they froze, lips still touching, and Blythe gave a satisfied sigh. “Okay, that trick lasts like a minute,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  We hurried past the unmoving couple, making our way out into the silent hallway. Even before we got to the street, Blythe was already pulling the pages out of her waistband, and as soon as we were in the car, she was looking at them again.

  “You can do it, right?” I asked, starting the car. Blythe had reached up, turning on the dome light overhead and making it slightly trickier to see the darkened streets in front of me.