Lady Renegades (Rebel Belle #3)(40)

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.”

Two weeks was all we’d given ourselves for this, and we were already two days in. Twelve days just didn’t seem nearly long enough to find Dante, get the spell back from wherever it was, and track David before he’d gone too far.

But, I reminded myself, I’d done lots of impossible things before. No one had thought we could afford five school dances in one year, and hadn’t I found the funds? And that time we’d competed in the state cheerleading competition despite having a squad of only six people? Sure, we hadn’t won, but we hadn’t come in last, either.

We could do this.

Blythe smiled at me then, finally opening the driver’s side door. “I can do it in one, promise,” she said, and I got out of the car, hoping yet again that she was actually telling the truth.

? ? ?

He wasn’t sure he was ever awake anymore.

Or maybe he never slept. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between sleeping and waking because the visions never stopped. Once, he thought, there had been a time when he could have shut the visions out, or at least waited for them to pass. Once, he thought, someone had set up wards to protect him from having visions. That had made him angry, but now as he lay in the darkness, his head splitting all the time, he understood that whoever that was had maybe been right.

That was another thing, the way names had slipped out of his mind. Sometimes he imagined that it wasn’t light pouring out of his eyes, but memories. Like he was leaking knowledge or losing . . . something. Maybe losing who he used to be.

But that was a crazy way to think. There was still enough of him inside his mind to know that. To know that something was wrong, that he was changing into something bad. But what? And how could he stop it?

Groaning, he rolled over. He thought he’d shut his eyes, but couldn’t tell. After the last girl, he’d known he couldn’t be around people anymore. It wasn’t safe. So he found a perfect spot to hide. But now he couldn’t remember how he’d found it or how he’d even gotten here. He was forgetting everything except the things he saw all the time. Blood on a yellow dress. A girl with green eyes, tears. Two other girls, but they couldn’t help. And that was good.

The girl with the green eyes was dangerous. She was coming for him, and he could feel her drawing closer. The girl with the green eyes made something ache inside his chest, and he knew there was more he should remember about her. More he should feel about her besides how dangerous she was. But that was another thing he was losing, a fading memory that belonged to whoever—whatever—he was before.

And those things didn’t matter anymore.

The girl with the green eyes wasn’t going to stop coming, he knew that. He could hide, but she would find him because she wanted . . . something.

With a groan, he pressed his head to the hard rock beneath him, wishing the pain would stop, just for a little while. If the pain would go away, he could think. He could remember why the girl made his chest ache with something that wasn’t just fear.

But the pain didn’t stop, and the light was so bright, burning and illuminating the walls around him, and he thought maybe he screamed, but that sound could have just been in his mind. He didn’t know anymore.

Still, lying there in the cold, damp dark, something came to him with a sharp clarity that burned everything else away. The yellow dress he kept seeing . . . was it hers? The girl’s? And the blood that stained the front of it was his. There was a part of him that didn’t feel bothered by that. A part that welcomed it. This wasn’t a life, after all, so who cared if it ended?

But the other part of him fought against that. He was ancient and powerful, not something that should be put down like a feral dog. He was the Oracle, and this girl, this Paladin, wanted to stop him. She would kill him.

Unless he killed her first.





Chapter 21


“NO.”

“Yes.”

“Except no.”

I sat in the driver’s seat, staring at the dive in front of me, my fingers tight around the steering wheel. At one point in its existence, the bar had maybe been called “Cowboys.” I was guessing this based on the cardboard cutout of a cowboy propped up near the door, and the fact that there was a sign on the roof that had an “O,” a “W,” and a “Y” on it. Other letters had fallen off or rotted away.

In short, it was clearly the worst place in the world, and I could not believe I was going to have to set foot in there.

Blythe was in the passenger seat, eyebrows raised as she looked over at me. “I’m telling you, this is where he is.”