In the silence that followed, I heard a car drive down the street and the distant hooting of an owl. “So you’re a witch?” David finally asked, the tips of his ears red.

Saylor smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from her pantsuit and gave a dismissive sniff. “That is an ugly word, David Stark. Mages don’t ride around on broomsticks or conjure up things. We use potions, minor spells to assist the Oracle and the Paladin in their work.”

“So there’s one Oracle,” I said, flinging a hand out toward David. “And now there’s one Paladin.” I pointed at myself. “How many Mages are there?”

“Two, usually,” Saylor answered, fiddling with the edge of a placemat. “The Ephors—those are the men who took charge of the Oracle—believed in keeping things traditional. Since there were two original Paladins, two original Mages, they’ve always tried to maintain that balance. You said the bathroom was spotless after the fight with Christopher and Dr. DuPont, right?”

When David and I both nodded, Saylor said, “That was alchemy.” Then she frowned. “Incredibly dangerous alchemy, though. That spell is a sort of temporal shift. It returns the setting to what it looked like before the trauma. Cara never would’ve tried something like that.”

When David and I both asked, “Who?” Saylor waved a hand. “The other Mage when I was with the Ephors. She was old then, though, and that was nearly twenty years ago. They must have someone new.”

David, who had been worrying at one of his fingernails, dropped his hand. “A temporal shift. Why doesn’t that make the people that got killed . . . undead?”

Saylor turned her glass over and over in her hand. “I told you, our powers are very limited. Control over the human body and soul . . . that’s very far beyond us. Fixing a gate or a broken section of tile in a bathroom is one thing. Erasing something as permanent as death is . . .” She broke off, pushing her glass away. “In any case, the main purpose of the Mage is to serve as a kind of . . . battery, I suppose, to the Oracle. That’s what happened tonight. When the three of us joined hands, you finally got the burst of power you needed.”

And we’d seen David’s vision, too. Except even now, it was fading from my mind, like trying to remember a dream. What had David said?

I glanced over at him and saw that he also appeared to be deep in thought. But before I could ask any more questions, Saylor stood up.