I’d never seen Alexander look anything besides 100 percent with-it and together, but now, he wiped a hand across his mouth, and I could swear he was shaking. There was also something about the way he was looking at David that I definitely did not like.

“It’s impossible,” he said. “Even with the ritual Blythe performed, there’s no way you should... No one has ever overcome the removal spell I did on you. Ever.”

Next to me, David gave a familiar shrug. “Well, I did.” He said it as a challenge, and as I watched, David pushed his shoulders back, meeting Alexander’s gaze head-on.

“What was it you saw?” Alexander asked, and David flexed his fingers. I was waiting for that answer myself, but if David wouldn’t tell me, I knew he wouldn’t tell Alexander. And sure enough, after a pause, he shook his head.

Alexander stood there, his hair still messy, his gaze fixed on David’s face, and while his expression didn’t change, it was like I could see the gears whirring in his head. I sometimes felt that with David, too, that I could sense all that was going on beneath the surface, and it was weird to have the same feeling watching Alexander.

Then he straightened up abruptly, fixing his tie and tugging at the unbuttoned cuff with a sniff. “The Peirasmos is cancelled,” he said in a tight voice, and I blinked, caught totally off guard.

“What?”

“There’s no need for it anymore,” Alexander continued, and when his eyes met mine, they were hard chips of pale green ice.

But I’d faced a lot of scarier things than one pissed-off snooty guy, so I met that cold gaze and asked, “Why? A few weeks ago, this was so important that if I didn’t do it, I’d die, and now you’re telling me, ‘oh, no big, totes cancelled, everyone go on your merry way!’”

Alexander stood ramrod straight, his fingers still on the cuff of his shirt. “I do not know what ‘totes’ means in this context, but I assure you, no one is ‘going on their merry way,’ Miss Price.”

With that, he crossed over to his desk, pulling open a drawer and yanking out an ancient-looking binder of some kind, the leather cracked and peeling. As he smacked it on top of his desk, he glanced up at the two of us.

“You may go now,” he said, lifting one long-fingered hand to more or less shoo us away.

I stayed right where I was, hands on my hips. “Um, I will not be shooed. What is going on here?”

“What is going on,” Alexander replied, bracing both hands on his desk to look up at me, “is that our Oracle is more powerful than I’d guessed, and now I have to rethink some things. Which I can do much better without you standing there yammering at me.”