It was another beautiful sunny day, and Bee looked just as beautiful and sunny herself as she jogged toward me in a lime-green shirt and white jeans. “Hey,” she breathed when she caught up with me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said with a quick nod, even though I felt anything but. The weirdness between me and David, knowing that Alexander was waiting... It was a lot on my mind, almost too much for me to focus on the fact that things with me and Bee weren’t exactly the best right now. But then she reached out, laying a hand on my shoulder, and looked down into my face.

“Are we okay?”

Taking a deep breath, I shook my head. “Probably not?” And then I smiled, a little shakily. “But we will be.”

Now it was Bee’s turn to take a deep breath, but she smiled back at me, squeezing my shoulder. “Good. That’s... good.”

I wanted to stay and talk to her longer, but I could already see David standing by my car, so with a little wave at Bee, I made my way toward him.

•••

“How?” It was the first thing Alexander had said to us when we walked in the door, and he seemed determined to repeat it now. We were in his office, but for once, he wasn’t sitting behind the desk. Instead, he was pacing, a hank of hair coming forward to fall over his forehead.

David and I stood on the rug like a couple of kids called to meet the principal, and I wondered why I felt so guilty. David could do whatever the heck he wanted with his visions, and while, yeah, it had gotten a little scary there for a second, it wasn’t like anyone had been hurt. Besides, he’d proven exactly how powerful he was, and that seemed like something we should actually be pretty pumped about.

“Was it from one of the books your Mage kept?” Alexander asked, almost frantic. His tie was loose, one cuff of his shirt unbuttoned where it peeked out from underneath his jacket sleeve. “A... a ritual or something that you found and decided to experiment with.”

“There wasn’t a book,” David told him, jamming his hands into his back pockets. “I just... I felt like if I tried, I could have a vision, and I did. It was cloudy and... I don’t know, murky. Like they used to be before Blythe did the ritual.”

Alexander stopped pacing, coming to stand in front of his desk with both hands braced on the edge. “But you did see something?”

David kept his hands in the pockets of his skinny jeans, his shoulders tight. After a moment, he nodded, and Alexander dropped his head with a deep sigh.