Lady Renegades (Rebel Belle #3)(13)

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.

I thrust my shoulders back and took a deep breath. “So,” I said, holding the page I’d torn out of the book, “we all have items of David’s, right?”

Ryan lifted the journal he’d taken from David’s desk, while Bee waggled the pen. I took the jump drive out of my pocket, and we each threw our item onto the ground in front of us. In the distance I could hear a car go by, and overhead the moon was bright.

“All right, now we all need to picture David in our minds, as clearly as we can.”

Sighing, Ryan closed his eyes and shifted his weight. “I’m all for finding the guy,” he said, lifting one foot to scratch the opposite ankle with his toe, “if that’s what you really want, Harper, but I have to admit, standing in a field on a moonlit night picturing his face feels kinda weird.”

Bee gave a little snort of laughter that she tried to cover with her hand, and I frowned at both of them. “Y’all. Focus.”

When the three of us linked hands, I could feel the vague thrum of magic surging through us. It wasn’t strong, the way it was when we did it with David, but it was still there, and I took some comfort in that. So my powers were fading, or kind of on the fritz. At least they weren’t gone.

But if your powers are fading, some evil voice in the back of my mind whispered, why are Bee’s and Ryan’s just as strong as ever?

That wasn’t something I wanted to think about too hard, so I lowered my head, trying to ignore the dull ache still at the base of my scalp from where that girl had pulled my hair.

David. I was focusing on David. I called him up in my mind as best as I could, trying not to remember how he’d looked those last few days—his skin grayish, his cheekbones too prominent, his eyes haunted—but how he used to look, back when we first fell into this thing.

That David grinned at me in my mind’s eye, his blond hair sticking up in weird little tufts, his eyes blue behind his glasses. I thought of the freckles across the bridge of his nose, and the way he would lift just one corner of his mouth in a smile. I thought of the way he called me Pres, and how his hands would flex on my waist when we kissed.

I thought of the night we’d gone out to the golf course to try to help David have a vision.

Or, more accurately, I thought of what had happened after, when we’d gone back to David’s house.

Thank goodness it was dark because I’m pretty sure my face flamed red at that memory. And thank goodness Bee and Ryan couldn’t read my mind during this little hand-holding sesh because, man, would that have been awkward.

Well, more awkward than it already was, doing a spell to literally force him to come back to me.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. For the three of us to suddenly get some picture of where David was? Like a hologram in those stupid sci-fi movies he liked? Or that we’d just suddenly know where he was, the way I knew how to get to Ryan’s house or how to maneuver my way to Bee’s locker?

But in the end, we just stood in that hot field, grass tickling our calves, our palms sweaty against one another’s, and there was no sign of David, no sudden realization of where he’d been hiding or what he was doing.

Why he was making Paladins.

Frustrated, I dropped Bee’s and Ryan’s hands, wiping my palms on the back of my shorts. “Anything?” I asked, wondering if they’d felt something different. Maybe it was just me who couldn’t find David. But they both shook their heads, too, Ryan toeing at the dirt, Bee worrying the end of her braid in her fingertips.

“We could try something else?” I wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of staying in this field. I was pretty sure I’d heard something scuttle through the tall grass on the side of the bare spot where we stood, but I wasn’t ready to give up. “That was just one ritual; maybe there are other things?”

I really wanted there to be, trust, but it had taken us over an hour just to find this one, and having dragged them out to the middle of a field for no apparent reason, I felt more than a little silly. Plus all the adrenaline was finally wearing off, and I was suddenly really exhausted. All I wanted was to go home, get a shower, and collapse into bed, maybe try to forget this entire night had ever happened.