“I know you’re not going to like this,” I started, and she immediately shook her head, almost glaring at me.
“Harper, no,” she said firmly, but I reached out and wrapped my fingers around her biceps, making her look down into my face.
“This is something I have to do alone,” I told her. “You’ve come all this way with me, and I couldn’t have done any of it without you, you know that, but this—” Breaking off, I turned to look over my shoulder at the gaping mouth of limestone behind me. “This is on me.”
Bee blinked a few times, and her eyes were bright, her face pale. “You don’t have your powers anymore,” she said, and her voice trembled.
“Neither do you,” I reminded her, giving her arms a squeeze. “And I can’t risk you getting hurt. Not again.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop feeling guilty for what had happened to Bee the night of Cotillion, and while I knew I could never make it up to her, this at least let me feel like I was trying. I remembered the way Blythe’s eyes had shone as she’d talked about “redeeming” herself, and while she and I might have really different ideas about what redemption meant, I understood why it was so important to her.
“I’ve screwed up a lot of things,” I told Bee now. “I’ve lied and I’ve hurt people I’ve cared about, and I’ve made some less-than-stellar decisions about, like, everything, basically. But this?” I nodded back toward the cave. “This I can do. This I have to do. And I need you to wait out here.”
Despite that rousing speech, I could tell Bee still wanted to argue. But then, I would’ve argued, too. That’s what best friends do.
But then she looked past me up at the wall of stone, and took a deep breath. “I hate this,” she said. “Like, more than I hate snakes or humidity or AP Calculus.” And then she looked back down, our eyes meeting. “But if this is what you have to do, it’s what you have to do.”
My throat felt tight as I reached down and took her hands, squeezing them. “Best squire ever,” I said, and she tried to laugh, but the sound was kind of choked, and then she was hugging me hard.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
“Fifteen,” I countered, and she rolled her eyes.
“Fine, fifteen, but any longer than that, and I’m coming after you.”
Nodding, I turned back to the mouth of the cave. The air wafting out was cool, and goose bumps rose up on my arms. I reached over my shoulder, my fingers finding the hilt of the sword, still wrapped in its towel, and I took some comfort from the weight of it.
I gave one last look to Bee, who gave me a tight smile, and then, taking another deep breath, I stepped forward.
The rock was slick underneath my feet. Tennis shoes were not exactly the best footwear for this kind of thing, I thought, and I felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in my throat. Man, it seemed like a lot of this Paladin business came down to the right shoes.
Almost a year ago, I’d lain on the floor of the school bathroom, my pink heel clutched in my hands, waiting for someone to kill me. He hadn’t. I had killed him. I had won.
If I killed David today, it wouldn’t feel the slightest bit like winning.
The cave I found myself standing in wasn’t nearly as big as I’d thought it would be, and I took a moment getting my bearings and really wishing I’d gotten a rabies vaccine before I’d left for this trip. While the ceiling of the cave was lost to the darkness, I couldn’t help but envision roughly a million bats overhead, and it made me shudder.
But then I realized that, while I could feel David nearby, I sure couldn’t see him, and the cave seriously didn’t seem to be all that huge, so where—
And then I saw it: another little opening in the back of the cave, so small that I thought I might have to hold my breath to squeeze through.
David, I reminded myself again, which, seriously, was starting to feel like another kind of mantra. Like, if I could just keep repeating his name, picturing his face, I could get through this thing.
I took my pack off, knowing it would make it harder to squeeze through, wondering how David had managed to get himself in there. He wasn’t a big guy, but he still had to be wider through the shoulders than I was, and I eyed the crack in the rock speculatively.
My pack made a loud clank as it hit the rock floor, and I pulled the sword out of it, moving forward.
Luckily, the passage wasn’t as narrow as I’d thought, and once I got inside, I moved through fairly easily, the sword clutched in my hands, pressed tight against my body. For a second, I had a vision of those old tombs of knights you sometimes see, their swords laid out along their torsos, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.
If being a Paladin had taught me anything, it was that you could never really prepare for everything. I could think about it, of course, and I had, a lot, over the course of this trip. There had been nights lying in motel beds, staring at popcorn ceilings, and wondering what I would do when I finally saw David again.
Blythe hadn’t lied when she’d said that I’d known it might come to killing him. Of course I had, no matter how many times I tried not to think of it. For the past six months, I’d gotten so good at telling myself that I could handle everything, that the worst would never happen.
It seemed like I’d been wrong every time.
As I made my way through that narrow tunnel, taking deep breaths, my palms sweaty around the sword, I reminded myself that I had no idea what I was about to come face-to-face with. That for all I knew, I was minutes away from having to drive a sword through the heart of the boy I loved.
So, yeah, I was prepared for a lot of things when the passageway finally opened up into a wider space.
Prepared for anything but what I saw: David, standing there in plaid pants and a black sweater. Light was pouring in from a hole high in the ceiling, and it made his sandy hair look gold.
But that was the only gold thing about him. There was no light in his eyes, nothing but the normal blue irises behind his glasses, and when he smiled at me, the sword slipped from my suddenly numb fingers.
“Hi, Pres.”
Chapter 33
I SWEAR I could still hear a faint echo from where the sword had clattered to the ground, but over that, there was the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears and a slight, broken sob coming from my lips.
He was here. He was here and he was fine. Just the David I had known, and my own relief carried me forward until I was right in front of him, my arms around his neck before I could let myself think.
“You’re okay,” I said, breathing him in. He smelled familiar, like soap and the ink from the printers in the newspaper room.
It was weird, I thought, burying my face in his neck, that after all that time, that smell should still cling to him, that he would be wearing clothes much more suited for the winter than a southern summer, and even as I hugged him tight to me, I knew.
I knew.
“Easy there.” He laughed against my temple even as he hugged me back. “You’re going to wrinkle my sweet sweater.”
I laughed, the sound watery because tears were already choking me. “Couldn’t make it any worse.”
He pulled back then, his hand coming up to cup my face. “I missed you,” he told me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t real—I wasn’t sure how he was doing it, or if it was even him doing this particular trick—but just for a moment, I didn’t care.
“I missed you, too,” I told him, and then I was on my tiptoes, pressing my mouth to his.
His kiss was as familiar as that soap smell that clung to him, and I tightened my hands on his shoulders, thinking back to that first night he’d kissed me at Cotillion.
He had kissed me then because we’d thought one or both of us might die that night, and this kiss had some of that same desperation. If this was just an illusion, it was a good one, and I’d take it.
When w
e parted, David looked down at me, smiling fondly, his thumb running across my lower lip. “This seems like a time for egregious felicitations,” he said, and I sucked in a breath. It was an old joke between us, using the words we’d each missed in spelling bees growing up, and one that made me think, just for a minute, that maybe I was wrong about him not really being him. He looked like David and smelled like David, and now he was making jokes like David. In that moment, I suddenly wanted him to be David so badly that it hurt.
That was the worst part. Admitting that after all of this, after trying to find him and stop whatever Oracle-induced craziness he had going on, what I’d really wanted was to see him again. It felt like such a hard thing to admit for some reason, that it had been the girl in me driving this whole thing on, not the Paladin.
Raising my head to look at David, I studied his face. It was a face I’d seen every day of my life, seemed like, and one I couldn’t bear to think of not seeing again.
“I wish we hadn’t wasted all that time hating each other,” I told him, and he laughed again. It was his laugh, his eyes, his freckles scattered across his nose, even if it wasn’t really him.
“I never hated you,” he said softly, and I smiled even as my heart broke. If this wasn’t the real David, was there some part of him still in this? Was he somehow projecting the him he’d been? I kind of hoped so.
“Oh, I totally hated you,” I told him. “Didn’t fake that a bit.”
He made a sort of huffing, disdainful sound that I had heard a thousand times, and I wondered if I’d ever hear it again after today.
Then David tilted his chin down, and for a second, I thought he was going to kiss me again. I definitely wanted him to.
But instead, he looked into my eyes and murmured, “Leave me here, Harper.”
“Is this even the real you?” I asked, and he sighed again, the corners of his mouth quirking down quickly. Another familiar expression that made my chest hurt.
“Does it matter?” he asked, and I stepped back, my head starting to clear. It had been nice to believe in this for a little while, but I couldn’t keep pretending, no matter how much I wanted to. This was just another distraction, and while I didn’t know how he was doing it, I knew I couldn’t give in anymore.
“Yes,” I said, and now there was a good two feet of space between us. “Because I can’t just walk out of here and pretend I said good-bye to the real you, when actual you is still in here.”
A crease appeared between David’s brows. “Harper, isn’t it better to remember me this way?” he asked, and look, I wanted to say yes. I wanted to kiss him one more time and not have to confront whatever scary things might be waiting for me in this cave.
But that wasn’t who I was, not as a Paladin, not as a person.
“I can’t,” I told him now, and his frown deepened. It seemed like he was shimmering for a second, and I suddenly realized I could see the rock wall of the cave behind him. Through him.
“This is all that’s left of me, Harper,” he said, but his voice was faint. “What’s waiting for you farther on . . . that’s not me anymore.”
My eyes stung with unshed tears. I believed him, that this . . . vision or whatever it was of him was the last, dying remnants of the real David, saying good-bye. Maybe because he loved me, maybe because he didn’t want me stopping the Oracle.
Knowing David, it was probably a little bit of both.
“I can’t,” I said again. And then, firmer, “I won’t.”
With that, I bent to pick up my fallen sword, and then I stepped forward, moving through him as he faded from sight completely.
Head held high, I walked out of the open cave space and toward a narrow fissure in the back wall of the cave. The farther I went, the brighter the passageway got, and for a moment, I wondered if there was a hole in the ceiling, opening up to the sky, like it had in the other chamber. But then I realized that, no, the light wasn’t coming from above, but from out in front of me. And it wasn’t the soft yellow glow of the sun, but the bright, unnatural gold I’d seen spilling out of David’s eyes over and over again. I remembered the way he’d looked in the grips of a vision and tried to tell myself I was prepared for whatever it was I was going to see when I reached the end of this path.
I was wrong.
The narrow passage gave way to another, larger open chamber, so high the ceiling was lost in the gloom despite the light.
David—the real David—sat in the middle of this chamber. His clothes were ragged and dirty, with holes in his T-shirt and in the knees of his jeans. I had a feeling they were the same clothes he’d been wearing the night he left Pine Grove, and for some reason, that made me the saddest of all. What had he been through since that last night? What had happened to him?
“David,” I called, the name echoing around the cave, seeming to lodge in my heart as I said it.
Because it wasn’t David sitting in front of me. Despite the ragged clothes, the hair that still stuck up in weird tufts, the truly terrible footwear, the person in front of me wasn’t the boy I had loved. He was . . . a thing.
An Oracle.
And then his bright eyes turned to me, mouth opening.
For one heartbeat, stupid as it sounds, I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t as far gone as I’d thought, and he was going call me “Pres,” and things would be okay. That the illusion he’d created was close to the real thing.
Instead, he looked at me with those blinding eyes and intoned, “Paladin.”
Chapter 34
I SWALLOWED HARD, my mouth dry.
“You used to have a different name for me,” I said, my voice sounding thin and tight. “Do you remember that? You called me Pres.”
David—or the thing that had been David—didn’t move, didn’t even give any sense that he’d heard me.
Cold sweat was dripping down my back, but I made myself step a little closer. “Of course, I’m sure there were other things you called me that weren’t nearly as nice, but you usually didn’t say those to my face.”
“Where is the Mage?” David asked, the words echoing, and I bit back a sigh.
“Which one? Ryan or Blythe? We have two, you know, and it’s a total—”
David flung out one hand, a bolt of golden light shooting from his palm and cracking against the rock behind me. Tiny pebbles and dust flew, and I flinched away.
“That’s a new trick,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so shaky. “Where did you pick that up?”
“You know the Mage I’m speaking of,” David said, and I wondered if we’d spend these last moments like this, talking in circles around each other.
But then maybe these weren’t the last moments. Maybe there was a chance that I could actually find the David still inside him.
And if there wasn’t . . .
I shifted my grip on the sword. The metal was cold despite my sweaty palms, the little grooves on the hilt biting into my skin. That was good, though. The discomfort made me feel grounded and aware, the same way I’d always liked my ponytail just a little too tight at cheerleading practice. Minor pain kept you from focusing on major pain. In cheerleading, that had been the stretch and burn of muscles.
Now the pain was all in my heart.
“Blythe isn’t here,” I said to him. “We left her behind when we realized what she wanted to do to you. David, we’re here to help you.”
He tilted his head just a little to the left, like he was trying to hear something from a distance. “We?” he repeated.
“Bee and I. And Ryan, too, he . . . he helped us before we left. David, there are people who care about you, people who want to save you.”
A little smile twisted his mouth, but there was nothing David-like in it. “Save me? From what?”
I faltered, my sneakers skidding a little on the damp rock. “From . . . this. From hurting people, from not being
who you really are. David, there aren’t any more Ephors. There’s no one to use you or who wants to control you, and if we could find some way to help you get rid of your powers—”
Another bolt of light, another crack, and a showering of little rocks.
“This is who I am,” he intoned, the voice his and not his all at the same time. “This is what I am.”
I shook my head. “No. You’re a lot more than this, David, and you deserve an actual life.”
There was a low humming noise, and I wondered if it had been there the whole time. I could feel the hairs on my arms standing up, a chill slithering down my spine, and my hands tightened on the hilt of the sword.
“You saw this,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “I don’t know if you even remember it anymore, but that first day we met Blythe, you sat in my car and told me you used to have bad dreams about me.”
David didn’t move, didn’t give any sign of even hearing me. His eyes were nothing but glowing circles, and his whole body was lined in light. Still, I made myself keep going.
“You said we were fighting, but we weren’t angry. We were sad.”
Dropping one hand from the sword, I dashed at the tears on my face. “And you were right. I’m not angry. Not about any of it.”
“Then why are you holding a sword?”
David’s voice was still doing that echo thing, like there was more than one voice coming out of his mouth. I’d heard that before, of course. Whenever he had a vision, he tended to sound like that. But now, I wasn’t sure if it was the acoustics in the cave, or the power he’d developed, but it was like a chorus of voices now.
Still, that question . . . it hadn’t sounded like the Oracle. For all those voices making all that noise, there was a little edge, just the tiniest hint of snark, which sounded like David.
I tried not to let that make me too hopeful. So he sounded like himself. So there was still a part of him in there. I’d known that, right? It’s why he’d come here to hide himself, trying to stop this from happening. But I hadn’t been able to let that happen. I’d had to find him and see for myself, and now I was going to pay the price for that.