Lady Renegades (Rebel Belle #3)(48)

“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 leafing 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.