David made a face at me and tugged at the hem of his sweater. “This is a classic,” he informed me, and I leaned over to give him one more quick kiss.

“Sure it is.”

Across the street, a group of boys came stumbling out the front door of the redbrick Sigma Kappa Nu house, one of them breaking away to puke in the azalea bushes.

Charming.

“Abigail and Amanda, the things I do for you,” I muttered as I got out of the car, shutting the door behind me.

Pushing my shoulders back, I did the best I could to saunter across the lawn, projecting confidence while also trying not to draw too much attention to myself. That’s why I’d picked this dress. Should things get... out of hand, “girl in a black dress” wasn’t all that memorable of a description.

The door to the frat house was hanging open as I approached, thanks to the puking guy and his friends, so I was able to slip inside unnoticed.

If the bass had been pounding from outside, it was like a physical presence in the house, rattling my teeth and starting an immediate headache behind my eyes.

And the smell...

Beer, boy, old pizza, and carpet that probably hadn’t been cleaned since they’d built this place back in the sixties.

Ugh. Frats were the worst.

But I was here on a mission, and I switched my purse from one shoulder to the other as I scanned the crowd, looking for Abigail and Amanda’s twin blond heads.

A few months ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead here. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some fraternities worth hanging out with, but Sigma Kappa Nu was not one of them. These were, on the whole, big dumb party boys, and I was not into that. At all.

But back in October, I’d killed my history teacher with a shoe, and everything had changed.

It turned out I was a Paladin, a kind of superpowered warrior, charged with protecting the Oracle, aka David Stark, aka my new boyfriend. Being an Oracle meant that David could see the future, which obviously made him a pretty valuable commodity to a lot of people. And not good people, either. The Ephors were a group of men who had owned Oracles for years, using their visions to get ahead in the world. To predict the outcome of everything from wars to financial investments. Because David was a male Oracle, the Ephors had wanted to kill him—the only other male Oracle had been nowhere near as powerful as the traditional female ones, plus he’d become super unstable. But David had been rescued by his first Paladin, a guy named Christopher Hall, and by his Mage, Saylor Stark.