“What happened to your hair?” Sel asks abruptly. Alice had asked the same thing, and I hadn’t had time to look. While he changes lanes again, I flip down the visor in the front seat. There, above my right eye, is a streak of shiny silver curls.

“I don’t know….” I pull at the curls, twirl them around my fingers. “They weren’t that color last night.”

“No, they weren’t.” His eyes narrow on the road. “That looks like Liege hair. How much power are you using?”

Liege hair. I swallow. I don’t know how one earns the hair that Gill and Samira and Lyssa and Ophelia have. Never asked. Assumed the gray hair was just from some form of accelerated aging, not from power use. “You think…”

“It’s not just that….” He lifts his nose, inhales. “Your scent is different.”

“Excuse me?”

His nose wrinkles. “You smell like Nicholas.”

I shift in my seat, skin suddenly hot against the leather.

Sel glances at me, at the bandage on my thumb. “You summoned Arthur. When?”

“After I left you.”

A long pause. “I see. And Nicholas?”

“He was there as Lancelot in Arthur’s memory.”

“And…?” He shakes his head, confused. “You were doing what, exactly?”

I gnaw on my thumb, shrinking in the seat. “I—I don’t know how the magic works.”

Sel’s golden eyes flick to mine, brow raised, then back to the road. A pause, a consideration. Then his head whips toward me. “Seriously?”

I squirm, heat burning my cheeks. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

He grits his teeth. His thumbs tap the steering wheel. “No, you do not. And I didn’t ask you to.”

“How long?” I ask.

He groans. “Another hour at least.” His nose scrunches up again—and he punches the button to roll down both our windows.

39

WE ARRIVE AT the cabin in forty-five minutes instead of sixty, because Sel speeds the whole way. By the time we pull off the exit, the sky is streaked in reds, peaches, and golds. Near sunrise.

“There’s the sign.” A billboard on the right displays a fifties-looking family in front of a lake house. “Sapphire Estates and Villas.”

Sel freezes as soon as he pulls into the parking lot. “Merlins.”

“What, where?” I twist in my seat.

Sel sniffs. “Not close by, but they were here recently. In the last hour.”

My pulse quickens, imagining Nick in their hands. Or struggling. Gone already. “We’re too late.”

Sel’s voice is stone. “Maybe. Look.” He points to a row of three dark vehicles in an open-air garage off the main welcome building. “If they already had Nicholas, why would they still be here?”

“Would they have…?” I trail off.

“I would have felt it already,” he mutters, craning his neck slightly to look past the cars. “There are Merlins inside the cars still. Heat waves rolling off the engines.”