Slamming the car door behind me, I hurried up his front steps, nearly tripping over a rocking chair on the porch. “I came as fast as I could,” I said, moving past him into the house. “What is it? Is it Alexander? Is it one of the trials?”

That’s what I’d thought when Ryan first called, and it had been the scenario I’d spun out in my head on the short drive over. But Ryan seemed okay, if shaken up, and now he shook his head at me, waving a hand toward the front door.

“Upstairs,” Ryan said, scrubbing a hand over his hair. “It’s MB.” Misery was etched in every line of his body, and my heart took a sudden plunge as I started up the staircase.

There was a part of me expecting to see Mary Beth lying on his floor with a scimitar through her stomach or something, so I was actually relieved to see her sitting on the edge of Ryan’s bed, seemingly completely okay, if a little... spacey.

“Hi, Mary Beth,” I said, already trying to formulate a reason for being at Ryan’s house. He’d called me to work on a school project?

But she didn’t reply. In fact, she didn’t even seem to hear me.

I shot a glance at Ryan over my shoulder. He was leaning against the doorjamb, nearly crying, his hazel eyes red.

Kneeling down at the edge of Ryan’s bed, I snapped my fingers in front of Mary Beth’s face. Her eyes slowly blinked once, then twice, but other than that, there was no sign that she’d heard me. Groaning, I turned back to Ryan. “What the heck did you do?”

The last time I’d seen Ryan this miserable was when he’d missed a free throw at a game against our rivals, the Webb Spiders. Now, like then, he was fidgeting, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. “I don’t know. She was still pissed about me ditching her at lunch, so I wanted to... fix it.”

“Ryan,” I groaned, and he held up both hands.

“I know, I know. Anyway, I used some of that lip balm stuff on her. That stuff Saylor had.”

Now that he mentioned it, there was a distinct rose scent wafting up from Mary Beth. “You kissed her with it on?” I was pretty sure my eyebrows were in my hairline, and when Ryan looked down at me, he scowled.

“Well, yeah. She’s my girlfriend. And that seemed the easiest way to... apply it.”

Still crouching in front of her, I studied her face. “Maybe she wasn’t meant to ingest it,” I mused. “How much did you put on?”