“Well, he’ll have to lock us all up then,” Daphne said in a determined voice.
“What do you mean by that? All of you . . . all of you didn’t figure out what I was up to, did you?”
“Of course we all figured it out,” she said, waving her hand and causing more pink sparks of magic to shoot out of her fingertips. “You’d have to be completely out of it not to realize you like to do things your own way, Gwen.”
I looked at her, then Oliver. “What did you guys do?” “Well,” Daphne said. “Oliver and I are going with you, obviously, to fight the Reapers. That’s why we were standing by waiting for you to swipe the candle, so we could hook up with you down here. Carson was watching outside the library, and he texted me to let me know when you were on your way. Alexei and Logan are busy running interference with Linus right now, keeping him busy at that Protectorate meeting in the
gym.”
One by one, she ticked our friends and what they were doing to help me off on her fingers.
“Logan really, really wanted to come,” Daphne said. “But he knew his dad would get super-suspicious the second he tried to leave the academy.”
“You wouldn’t believe how long it took us to convince him to stay behind,” Oliver added. “And the things he threatened to do to both of us if we didn’t bring you back alive.”
“When . . . did you guys decide to do all of this?” I
whispered.
Daphne waved her hand again. “Oh, we had a big powwow right after you had your freak-out in the infirmary, and we left you at your dorm. We divided everything up as best we could. Believe me, Carson’s gotten the worst of it, trailing you these past few days, wondering when you were finally going to steal the candle.”
I thought someone had been following me in the library last night. Poor Carson. I bet he’d panicked when I’d ditched him in the stacks. I closed my eyes. I thought I’d been so clever, pretending everything was fine, but my friends had known what I was up to all along— Logan had known what I was up to all along. I wondered if Linus had figured it out as well, but it was too late to turn back now.
“Okay,” I said, opening the back door and sliding inside. “If you two are so bound and determined to come with me, let’s go.”
Daphne got into the front passenger seat, and Oliver drove out of the lot.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “Where do the
Reapers want to meet to make the exchange?”
I handed Daphne my phone and the directions I’d looked up online. “Here. They want to meet here.”
She scrolled through the information and told Oliver to take the next right. The three of us rode in silence for several minutes. Using the edges of my sleeves, I pulled the candle out of my messenger bag and looked at it. Out here in the bright sunlight, it seemed even more unremarkable than before. Just a plain, white, wax candle, half-melted, with no other marks or distinguishing features on it.
Well, that was something I was about to change.
I pushed back the sleeves of my coat and sweater so that I could see the laurels hanging off the mistletoe bracelet around my wrist. The heart-shaped leaves caught the sunlight and reflected it back, wink-winkwinking at me like sly silver eyes. I’d been thinking about how to use them ever since Nickamedes had pointed out the information he’d found in that book.
From the passage he’d shown me, it sounded like the laurels just had to touch someone in order for their magic to kick in, and I was hoping they would work the same way if the leaves were touching—or even embedded in—an artifact that someone was trying to use.
So I drew in a breath and reached for one of the laurels. I’d never seen a way to take the leaves off the bracelet before, or even get the chain off my wrist, since there wasn’t any sort of clasp on it. But to my surprise, the leaf came off quite easily, as though I’d reached up and plucked it from a tree.
I stared at the leaf in the palm of my hand and concentrated, but I got the same cool, calm vibe off it that I always did. The goddess Eir had said the leaves could be used to heal or destroy, depending on the will of the person using them. So I closed my hand around the leaf, so tight that I felt one of the sharp edges cut into my palm and draw a drop of blood.
Kill, I thought. Kill, kill, kill Loki.
Then, I opened my palm and stared down. The leaf looked the same as before, and I had no way of knowing if my silent plea had had any effect on it at all. Only one way to find out.
So I took the leaf and pressed it into the candle, still careful not to touch the wax with my bare fingers. To my surprise, it melted into the wax seamlessly, until it looked like it had been a part of the artifact all along. In fact, the leaf had sunk so deeply into the candle that you could barely see the silver outline of it against the white wax. It gave me a little more hope that this might actually work.
“What are you doing?” Daphne asked, twisting around in the seat so she could see me.
“Hopefully, giving Loki exactly what he deserves,” I murmured back, plucking another laurel off my bracelet and pressing it into the wax.
I repeated the process over and over again, until the entire surface of the candle was covered with the laurels. I didn’t know how many leaves it would take to hurt Loki, much less kill him outright, but I was guessing it was more than just one, given how strong he still was.
I used all of the leaves on the bracelet except for one. I’d made a promise to myself to try to heal Nickamedes with the last one, and that’s what I was going to do.
I’d just finished putting the final laurel on the candle when Oliver slowed and stopped the SUV.
“What?” I asked, tensing up. “What’s wrong? Why did we stop?”
I looked through the windshield. Oliver had parked the SUV outside the entrance to a fancy subdivision, the sort of place where each house took up three acres and was then surrounded by five more acres of lawn and woods. Even from here, I could see the walls and gates that fronted each house in the neighborhood. Some of them even had small wooden guard shacks sitting by the gates, although the structures were all empty.
“I stopped because I know this place,” Oliver said, staring out the window.
“Oh yeah,” Daphne chimed in. “Although it looks a little different in the daylight than it did at night.”
“You guys have been here before?” I asked. “When?” They both glanced at each other, then at me. “Actually, we’re not the only ones who have been