THERE WAS a pause. In it, I could hear the ticking of the little clock above Blythe’s desk, but nothing else. No sounds from downstairs, nothing from the parking lot outside. Finally, David took off his glasses and scrubbed a hand up and down his face. “I am so effing sick of that word,” he muttered, and I found myself nodding. “Destiny” was not my favorite word these days either.

“The Ephors wanted to kill David,” I told Blythe. “Because of his . . . boy parts and stuff.”

David lifted his head at that, and I think he mouthed, Really? at me, but I was watching Blythe.

She held my stare, grinning, and between the blood, her ridiculously young face, and the Lilly Pulitzer, it was more than a little unsettling. “So you’re not totally ignorant, then. Awesome. Yes, at first the Ephors thought that David’s ‘boy parts’ would make him a bad Oracle. After all, the only one they’d ever had didn’t exactly work out for them.”

“Alaric,” David said, polishing his glasses on the bottom of his shirt.

“The very same,” Blythe said with a little nod. “So you can imagine why they were very anti–boy Oracle for a while there. But”— Blythe’s smile went from slightly unhinged to smug, but still seriously unhinged—“that was before they found me.”

David still had his glasses dangling from his fingers, but at that, he put them back on and squinted at her. “What does that mean?”

“No offense or anything, but Saylor Stark has nothing on me as far as the alchemy game goes,” Blythe said, settling back into the chair. For the first time, I honestly believed she was seventeen. “I mean, Saylor can do a mind-control potion on what? One, two people at a time, max? I’ve got this whole freaking library under my thumb right now.” Smirking, she tried to cross her legs, but the way we’d tied her to the chair made that impossible. She settled for bringing her knees tighter together. “I got a job here as a volunteer, and every Friday, they do this big potluck thing. One potion in a batch of brownies, and bam. I have an office, an official e-mail account . . .”

My hand was starting to feel a little numb, so I loosened the cardigan around it. As I did, I saw Blythe’s gaze flick to her sweater, a tiny frown creasing her brow. “So that’s why no one came up here when we fought,” I said, getting it at last. “Alchemy.”

Tearing her eyes from her blood-soaked cardi, Blythe nodded. “I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“So what does your badass alchemy have to do with David?” I asked, looping the sweater around my hand again. Blythe grimaced.

“I liked that sweater,” she said, and while I could appreciate an attachment to clothes, I was quick to snark back, “I liked my hand.”