As he’d collected me.
I opened a text window and typed.
I’m in trouble.
I hit send. Then I heard sirens, so I backed farther away from the crowd, tucking myself behind a large tree to watch the campus police pull up to the building. As the first of the security guards stepped from their car, the crowd surged forward as one entity to voice their version of the events they’d just witnessed.
My phone pinged. I glanced down at a new text message.
> Where are you?
Oxford. University campus. Mississippi. I’m unharmed.
> Can you get to shelter? Somewhere private?
I glanced around. Campus security was pushing the crowd back, requesting that students head to their dorms or to the cafeterias. The guy who’d wanted to stand up to Byron was talking animatedly with a guard who was taking notes. Another guard was collecting cellphones.
I wasn’t sure where ‘shelter’ and ‘private’ would coincide, but I knew I’d figure it out eventually. I applied my thumbs to my keyboard.
Yes.
> Go. I’ll need an address and a picture.
I tucked my phone in my purse, thinking over my options. I clung to the anger evoked by watching Byron haul Kandy around like she was a bag of garbage. That fury overrode the fear that made me sluggish. It galvanized me, even if it was a false bravery built on adrenaline rather than ability.
Looking around at the still-gathering crowd, I was surprised that so many students were on campus for the summer semester. Perhaps the regular student body was just larger than I realized. Either way, some of the campus buildings had to be closed after hours or even for the entire summer. I just didn’t know how to identify them.
A dark-haired girl was watching me from around the corner of Coulter Hall. She ducked back when I saw her. But then she stuck her head out again, beckoning me.
Ettie’s friend from the hallway. Sara.
I glanced around but didn’t see anyone else paying attention to me. So I jogged around the corner of the building.
Sara had disappeared.
I crossed the short strip of lawn to a sidewalk that ran parallel to the main road, noting that students and security personnel were gathering behind Coulter Hall where I’d broken the lecture hall window.
I turned the opposite direction, heading back toward where I hoped the parking lot was … where I hoped I’d find the Brave. The RV had to be private enough for Blackwell, right?
“Are you okay?” Sara fell into step beside me, ducking out from behind a few other students as I passed by a bus stop.
“Why do you care?”
“Well … you’re friends with Ettie, right?”
I glanced over at the quarter-witch. She looked nervous and really tired. Maybe even strung out.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m friends with her brother.”
“Oh, even better.”
We continued walking down the sidewalk toward what I assumed was the center of campus. The university was just a maze of buildings and roads to me. At least I knew the parking lots were on the outer edges.
“Even better for what?” I asked.
Sara shrugged. “You know.”
“I don’t. Do you take classes with Ettie? Are you roommates?”
“Nah, not like that. Oh! We took first-year English together.”
The conversation was going nowhere, and I had everywhere else to be. “Listen. Sara, right? I’m looking for a … quiet spot.”
“Yeah, to lie low. You need to lie low, right? I saw them take Ettie and your friends, but not you.”
“Right. Yeah. Do you have a place in mind? Nearby?”
Sara bit her lip, then nodded. “Follow me.”
She turned abruptly, walking swiftly away at a ninety-degree angle.
Err, okay.
I hesitated. I’d never been stupid enough to follow strangers anywhere. Though Sara wasn’t exactly raising any stranger-danger flags, besides the possibly strung out thing. And whatever she had going with Ettie was strange. Strange enough that it might actually have something to do with the vision. Or possibly just be a lovers quarrel. Both options could be potentially useful, though.
The quarter-witch glanced back, frantically waving for me to follow her as she darted between two campus buildings.
So I did.
If I believed in magic, shouldn’t I believe it would steer me right when I needed direction?
I snorted. Even I couldn’t go that far. And I was supposed to be the damn oracle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I’m okay. I’m getting help.
Half-lying by text message was almost as bad as thinking about lying to Beau’s face. I was getting help. Just not the help Beau wanted me to get. Byron’s flunkies had probably confiscated his and Kandy’s phones, but I figured a text message couldn’t hurt.
As I followed Sara across the campus, I kept replaying the scene in the lab in my head.
The moment of Beau’s almost-death. The moment Chi Wen must have seen, but I hadn’t. Why hadn’t magic warned me? Or had Chi Wen already changed the future before he opened the pathway in my mind for the visions to return? And while I was thinking about that — it was scary as fuck that the far seer could mess with my brain like that.
Stop.
I didn’t need to think about that right now. It wasn’t remotely relevant to my current situation.
What I needed to be thankful for — and to focus on — was that they’d switched to stun guns. After Kandy saved Beau’s life and crushed Byron’s gun, they’d switched to nonlethal weapons. I had no idea why, except Ettie was in the mix and maybe they didn’t want to hurt her. But it meant they didn’t want to kill Beau and Kandy either. Not on campus, at least.
“Chi Wen said we’d survive,” I muttered to myself, willfully ignoring that I was currently bent on changing the future and potentially causing ripple effects myself. I didn’t know what the far seer had seen. Maybe this was all a part of his vision and I was simply fulfilling it. Yeah, I’d go with that.
I closed the space that had lengthened between me and Sara.
We crossed through a sports field of some kind and jaywalked across a road. Then suddenly we were walking between regular-looking houses.
Quicker than I would have thought possible, Sara had led me to what appeared to be off-campus housing. Or at least a couple of blocks of two- and three-storey houses that were adjacent to the campus and appeared to either have been converted into apartments or set up for groups of students to rent.
Sara hadn’t spoken to me since she’d agreed to take me somewhere safe. So when she darted through a lopsided open gate between two high sections of an overgrown holly hedge, I hesitated. Peering up at the house beyond the spiny-leafed bushes, I reconsidered involving Blackwell.
Maybe the sorcerer was just an added complication? Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Beau’s carefully constructed contingency plans?
But I trusted my instincts.
I eyed the three-storey house. It was skirted along the front by a covered deck supported by narrow white pillars, and edged with a rickety railing. Blankets instead of curtains appeared to be pinned up over the interior of the lower windows. Twin mounds of cast-off shoes were piled on either side of the front door. The house had a distinct drug-den-in-the-making sort of feel.
“Come on,” Sara urged from the deck. “I have a room upstairs.”
The tall hedge hid the house from the street. Empty pizza and Chinese food boxes littered the area around the garbage bins, and I couldn’t see anyone else nearby. Blackwell had requested privacy, but this might be tipping the scale into secluded-serial-killer territory.
Sara was definitely jittery. But was she more on edge than normal for someone who thought she was helping someone on the run?
I spotted a decrepit two-car garage set back on the right side of the house. “What about the garage? Does anyone use that?”
Sara frowned, then followed my gaze as
she stepped over to the edge of the deck. “What? No. It doesn’t work. I mean, you can’t park cars in there. It doesn’t have one of those doors, you know. And it leaks.”
“Perfect.” I stepped toward the side of the house, batting a cluster of hydrangea bushes out of my way to follow the cracked and crooked path.
“I don’t have a key.”
“Okay.” I kept moving.
Sara watched me, her expression now pained for some reason. “I … do you mind if I go inside first? Sam might be back …”
“Sure. Don’t worry about me. I probably won’t be here for long. I just need to send some texts, you know.”
“Okay. I’ll bring you a granola bar later.”
Sara darted inside as I crossed around the house. The derelict garage was even creepier the closer I got to it. That was okay, though, I’d seen a lot of creepy in my life. Creepy couldn’t hurt me.
“Oh!” I heard footsteps scuttle across the front porch, and I turned back from the side door of the garage to see Sara hanging over the deck railing behind me. The old painted wood groaned under her weight and I grimaced, worried I was about to watch her take a face plant on the path. “What’s your name?”
“Rochelle.”
“You’ll put in a good word for me, hey, Rochelle? With Ettie? She wouldn’t hold out on you.”
I had no idea what Sara was talking about. But it sounded suspiciously as if she might have been trying to score from preppy, science-scholarship, backpack-wearing, better-than-all-of-us Ettie.
“Right. What’s Ettie selling these days? Just the crystal meth?”
“No, no. She’s got this new line on something called crimson bliss.”
“Right.”
“Who doesn’t want to feel invulnerable?” she said, as if she was quoting some sort of advertising tagline.
“Totally.”
“So you’ll talk to her for me? I just want to be near the top of her list, you know? She sells out so quickly, and … well, you get it.”
Apparently I looked like I understood what it was like to need an in with a drug dealer. “Completely. I’ll see what I can do.”
Sara grinned, gave me a double thumbs up, then slipped back into the house.
Great. Beau’s sister was a drug dealer. That was going to make him feel even better about leaving her to fend for herself at seventeen.
I had a sinking feeling that Ettie was on the road to her own destruction by choice. And that diverting the vision wasn’t going to be as easy as asking nicely. Or going camping.
I’d worry about that later. Beau and I could talk it all out, right after I got him back.
I tried turning the rust-challenged garage doorknob. As attested to by Sara, it was locked.
Keeping my left hand curled around the knob just in case the door miraculously opened under continued pressure, I momentarily gave in to the terror that was suddenly having a party in my belly. I pressed my right hand flat against the wooden door to steady myself. Old paint curled and crunched underneath my palm, but I ignored it. I refrained from pressing my forehead to the door as well, but only by reminding myself that I had no idea who was watching me from the house.
Beau would be able to pick this lock. Hell, Beau would be able to snap this lock with a twist of his wrist.
I gave the doorknob a jiggle, wondering if I had any bobby pins in my satchel. I’d never used a bobby pin in my life, so I was being utterly irrational, but at least I was still standing.
For the last year and a half, I had constantly wondered if I would be strong enough to keep moving without Beau. My knees actually buckled as that thought slid through my mind again.
Think, Rochelle. Break a window? Go into the house instead? But how private would that be?
I just needed to pop the lock.
An unfamiliar shock ran down my left forearm. I almost let go of the doorknob, but that wasn’t what had shocked me. I looked down at my tattoo of a skeleton key. The one Chi Wen had touched a couple of days ago. It looked … more rounded?
“I need to pop this lock,” I murmured.
Energy ran down my forearm again like a rippling muscle spasm. Then the key … shifted. It was still entwined in my tattooed barbed wire, so maybe it couldn’t lift free as the butterfly had. But it could slide, twining down my arm and into the palm of my hand.
Nothing else happened.
Then I tried turning the doorknob again.
The lock clicked.
I didn’t bother to question this newfound ability — because if I questioned it, I might start wondering whether any of this was truly real, and I didn’t need to get caught in that loop again. Instead, I walked into the dark garage as if I owned the place … and not like I was breaking and entering by magical means.
I closed the door behind me, digging into my satchel for the keys to the Brave. Beau had attached a tiny Maglite to my keychain. Then I remembered that Blackwell had said something about needing an address as well as a picture.
I had no idea where I was.
Damn it.
I dashed back out to the sidewalk. Noting that my key tattoo was back in its proper place, I used my phone to take pictures of the street sign, the front of the house including the address, then the garage.
Now the neighbors would definitely think I was crazy. Though this close to the university, maybe they’d just assume I was majoring in photography.
I made my way back into the garage, where a bit more exploration revealed that it featured a bare bulb overhead that actually worked. I texted the pictures to Blackwell. Then I looked around.
The garage floor was only half-complete, as if someone had dumped quick-dry cement on the dirt floor, doused it with water, then pushed it around until it ran out. Old workbenches covered with random hand tools and dusty mason jars of nails and screws ran along the paved side of the garage.
Like Sara had said, no car was parked inside. I wasn’t sure the double doors on the wall that led to the overgrown driveway running alongside the house could even open. They looked nailed shut. A few bikes were stored along the opposite wall, but they looked forgotten.
Blackwell arrived in a rush of electric magic that blew past me, then immediately faded. He cast his dark gaze around the derelict garage, then tilted his head in my direction.
I scuffed my feet in the dirt, then stopped myself. His gaze dropped to my necklace. I was clutching it — though I hadn’t realized I was doing so.
“You said private,” I said.
“And you provided.” Blackwell’s dark hair was a bit longer than usual. It fell over his high forehead but was otherwise perfectly coiffed as always. He was wearing his signature dark suit and a pressed white dress shirt, but no tie. The suit was charcoal gray with a white-and-gray-striped silk handkerchief in the pocket. His face was almost gaunt, his cheekbones more sharply defined than usual. He might have lost weight since I’d seen him last.
“Are you done?” Blackwell asked, opening his hands to the sides with his palms facing me. He was smiling, but it was a tight-lipped, almost tense expression.
I’d been seeing him in my head since I was sixteen. But seeing him in person was still surreal. I knew every inch of him … in a completely nonphysical way.
I knew he constantly wore a ruby-and-gold amulet underneath his perfectly ironed shirt. That with one touch, that amulet could transport him anywhere in the world … and that apparently, he needed only an address and a few pictures to guide him. I was also fairly certain he’d stolen that amulet from a dragon many, many years ago.
I’d seen a vision of that … the first vision I ever had. All the gold decor and other artifacts were a dead giveaway — or at least they were now, because I now knew about dragons. I had visions of the child of a guardian dragon. Yeah, Jade Godfrey, who was always surrounded by a halo of gold herself, and who was prone to seeking out and constructing artifacts.
Plus, Blackwell was fearful of dragons in general. Which made sense if he’d stolen something f
rom them.
Also, he either loathed or loved Jade Godfrey. Maybe at the same time.
But even with understanding all that, I didn’t know even the simplest details about him, including his age or anything of his background.
“How old are you?” I blurted.
The sorcerer raised a perfectly black, arched eyebrow at me. “Thirty-four.”
“You look about that,” I said. “But you feel older.”
“Did you ask me here to talk about what determines how old we seem at any given time? Perhaps it is the accumulation of knowledge. Or perhaps reincarnation.”
I stared at him, then slowly shook my head.
“Well, then …” He spread his hands in that palms-open gesture again, though with bent arms this time.
Was he trying to be … accessible? Amenable? It didn’t suit him.
“Beau and Kandy have been taken.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. A drug lord, I think. Some guy who has a beef with Beau’s stepdad.”
“And the werewolf? She just went willingly? With a human?” Blackwell appeared far too amused by the idea of Kandy being kidnapped. But then, the sorcerer played fast and loose with the pack.
“They had stun guns. You know, electric shock weapons. Tasers. A lot of Tasers.”
“And why are you in Mississippi?”
“A vision of Beau’s sister, Ettie, brought us here.”
“Ettie doing what?”
“Dying.”
Blackwell mulled over this information. Then he asked the question I had expected to be the first thing out of his mouth. “And what does the dowser have to do with it? Why is the werewolf here?”
“Nothing. Kandy was tasked by the far seer.”
Blackwell rocked back on the heels of his insanely expensive-looking black leather shoes. Any discussion of Chi Wen always muted the sorcerer. Even by text message, which was how we usually communicated.
“Call in the pack.”
I squared my shoulders. “I don’t want to. You are …”
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