David, the night of Cotillion, crossing the room to kiss me.
Alexander sat forward again, bracing his elbows on the desk and pressing his fingers together. “This seems to be another part of your training Miss Stark has neglected. You see the Oracle as a person. It’s high time you started seeing him as a vessel.”
“David is a lot more than his powers,” I argued, but Alexander was already shaking his head.
“He’s a boy, Miss Price,” he said, and while the word “boy” didn’t exactly drip with disdain, it didn’t sound much like a compliment either. “A boy with powers he hasn’t even begun to understand. Clearly they are greater than you understand. Are you saying that you’d rather David be your prom date than a being with the powers of gods in his veins?”
With a tsking sound, he fixed me with those green eyes. “You think we only want to use him, but his entire existence is an exercise in being useful, Miss Price. You’re meant to protect him from those who would wish to hurt him, not from himself. Not from who he is.”
I thought of what I’d seen in the Fun House tonight, remembering the blank look in David’s—no, not David’s, the Oracle’s—eyes in that vision. “Even if it means killing him?”
Alexander didn’t say anything for a long time, and I couldn’t make myself look up and meet his eyes. I had never been a coward, but after admitting that, I didn’t feel much like being the tough girl right now.
Finally, he said, “Is that what you saw tonight?”
I sat up a little in my chair. “What, you guys didn’t make me see that?”
Sighing, he leaned back. “We engineer the scenario, not the specific visions. This test was meant to be psychological in nature. You saw the things that you fear the most, not things that will necessarily come true. Being confronted with one’s worst nightmares is both a way of testing your mental fortitude and seeing where your heart lies. If one of your fears is David dying—”
“Not just him dying,” I broke in. “Me killing him.”
Alexander inclined his head slightly. “Even so. If that’s one of your fears, that seems to prove that you are the woman for this job.”
For a moment, I saw something flicker in Alexander’s eyes, but he looked back at his desk again before I could tell what it had been.
And then he said, “I know you care about the Oracle, Miss Price, but the more you deny what he truly is, the more hurt you’ll be in the end. It will be easier if you accept it now.”
His voice was tight, and he didn’t lift his head to look at me, but there was a note in his voice that almost sounded like sympathy.
Curious, I sat forward a little bit. “What was the last Oracle like?”
Alexander sniffed and dropped his pen in a little brass cup that held about five more pens. It clinked against the side as he said, “She was obedient and functional and performed her duties as was required.”
That was it, but I saw that flicker again, and how white his knuckles were as he laced his fingers on top of his desk.
“Did you know her?” I asked. “I mean, obviously you did, but, like, the actual her? Or was she always all Oracled up?”
Alexander kept his gaze on me, but I had the feeling he was almost looking through me. “Like most Oracles, there was a period early on where she was more human than Oracle, and, yes, I did know her during that time.”
I’d been so focused on keeping David away from the Ephors that I’d never spent much time wondering how they worked. They were the bad guys, and that had seemed like the only important thing to know. But now I wanted to know a lot more. “Where did y’all keep her?” I asked. “And when did you become an Ephor? Do you apply for it like a job? And that guy tonight, the one who talked to me. Was he an Ephor?” He cut me off with a brisk shake of his head.
“The gentleman tonight was one of your own townsfolk, temporarily magicked into service. As for the rest, my affairs are none of your concern. My point is this, Miss Price. David is an Oracle. He can never not be an Oracle. Perhaps your friendship has kept him more . . . average for the time being. But you’ll never be able to keep him from becoming what he is. A being whose sole purpose is to tell the future.”
I had the sleeves of my cardigan tugged over my hands, and I suddenly pushed them back with disgust. I was not going to be a sleeve-pulling weirdo. Sitting up straighter, I pushed my hair back over my shoulders and faced Alexander.
“I don’t want that, though,” I told him. “I want to protect David, not some freakish thing with glowing eyes who only speaks in riddles or prophecies.”
Alexander took a deep breath, nostrils flaring slightly. The music was off now, the scent of tea still heavy in the air.
Looking in my eyes, he smiled, the first genuine smile I think I’d ever seen from him. But it was sad, and his voice was low when he said, “Miss Price, they are one and the same.”
Chapter 24
“HARPER!”
Sara’s sharp tone snapped me out of my thoughts, and when I blinked at her, she made a sweeping gesture with one hand.
“It’s your turn to walk.” Clipboard propped on her hip, bright fuchsia lips clenched, Sara did not seem like my biggest fan at the moment, and I shook myself slightly, stepping forward and completing the circuit around the stage as quickly as I could.
Which was apparently not what Sara wanted, since her lips somehow got even thinner. She twirled her glossy dark hair and said, “It’s not a race, Harper. And this is Miss Pine Grove, not Cotillion. You can remove the broom handle from your backside. Walk lightly. Float.” She demonstrated, but whatever she was doing looked a lot more like prancing than walking. Still, I nodded and murmured something about doing better next time.
But that only made Sara glare and announce that the pageant was practically here. “There are hardly any next times left, Harper!” she all but shrieked, and I had a sudden, satisfying vision of using my Paladin powers to boot her perky little butt all the way to the back of the auditorium.
Taking a deep breath¸ I closed my eyes and tried to stop the orgy of violence currently unfolding in my mind. It wasn’t Sara’s fault that I currently hated everything. The night at the fair was a week ago, but the vision of slitting David’s throat still had me rattled. Alexander had said that the second trial was about facing my worst fears, that what I saw there wouldn’t necessarily come true, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Especially when I thought of what David had once told me—that he’d had a dream of the two of us fighting. That we weren’t angry but sad. And on top of that, I could still see Saylor’s worried expression when she’d told me that David could one day become a danger to himself as well as to everyone else.
So, yeah, I had a lot on my mind, and almost none of it revolved around making Sara Plumley happy with my walk. Plus, I still had one more trial left to go, and with the way the previous two had gone, I was pretty much expecting this last one to make my house blow up or something. It seemed like with every trial, I was losing a little bit more and, if I were honest, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing this for. Being David’s Paladin didn’t seem so great when he wasn’t even David anymore.
“Are you listening to me, Harper?” Sara asked, and this time, I thought of clobbering her with my baton.
“Yes, ma’am!” I called as brightly as I could, taking immense satisfaction from the way her brows drew close together. The “ma’am” implied “old,” which was clearly not okay with Sara, but it was also polite, which meant there was nothing she could do about it.
Honestly, not enough people know how to use good manners as a weapon.
But that thought wiped the smile from my face. If only good manners would be an effective weapon in whatever it was Alexander had coming next. After the fire, I’d been prepared for all the trials to be like that, dangerous and destructive. But then the Fun House had been a psychological thing, and, for my money, that had almost been worse. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over not only the vision of David, but also seeing my mom
screaming.
Seeing Bee with a sword thrust through her stomach.
That’s what would happen to her, I reminded myself, if I didn’t get through whatever this last trial was. Maybe not any time in the near future, but as I’d learned, being a Paladin was a dangerous business. I had to pass the Peirasmos, not just for me, but for Bee.
But thinking of Bee reminded me that I hadn’t seen her in a while. I’d driven her to pageant rehearsal, but I hadn’t seen her in at least fifteen minutes. That was weird. Like me, she’d decided to stick with the baton twirling, and Sara always made us go last. She had a pretty rigorous schedule for talent practice: singers first, then musicians, then the “athletic talents,” like dance or, yes, baton twirling. Jill Wyatt was playing the accordion right now, and she was the last of the musicians to go (although calling what Jill did “music” was charitable). We’d be up soon, but Bee was nowhere in sight.
I made my way off the stage, nearly bumping into Amanda as I did. “Sorry,” I said, and she shrugged it off.
“Someone needs to sneak something into her Slim-Fast before the pageant,” Amanda muttered, nodding toward Sara, and I snorted.
“Agreed.”
Like me, Amanda was dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, but tottering around on the heels she’d wear on the night of the pageant, and she nearly stumbled now as she went to cross one foot over the other.
I caught her elbow, steadying her, and she flashed me a quick grin. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Amanda and I were pretty much the same height in our heels, so she looked me in the eyes as she said, “It’s intensely weird that you’re doing this thing, you know. Me and Abi can’t figure it out.”
“Bee wanted to,” I told her as one of the girls from Lee High hustled past us to practice her walk onstage. “And as Bee go, so goeth my nation.”
That made Amanda smile, and she jerked her head toward the wings. “I hear you. I’m only here because Abi insisted.”
I was smiling as I glanced over to where Amanda had gestured, only to feel my smile freeze when I saw who Abi was talking to.
Spencer. The frat guy who would, according to David’s vision, one day ruin her life. But we’d stopped her from hooking up with him. Ryan had even wiped her memory so that she didn’t remember meeting him. So what the heck was he doing here?
“Who’s that guy?” I asked Amanda, and she gave an extravagant eye roll. “Oh my God, the love of my sister’s life, apparently. Everything is all Spencer all the time with Abi.”
My stomach churning, I watched as Abi leaned closer, letting one hand rest on Spencer’s chest. He was grinning down at her, tucking her hair behind her ear, and while he didn’t look quite as gross as he had the night of the party—not having roughly a twelve-pack of beer in your system will do that to a guy, I guess—I still was not a fan.
Neither was Amanda, if the way she looked at them was anything to go by.
What if you can’t change the future, Pres? What if you’re only delaying it a little while?
David’s words echoed in my head, making me clench my jaw. That couldn’t be true. If you couldn’t change the future, what was the point of being able to see it?
From the front of the auditorium, Sara called, “Harper!”
Amanda grimaced in sympathy. “Seriously, some kind of mood stabilizer, right in her caramel Slim-Fast,” she said. “It’s happening.”
Sighing, I headed back out onstage. Sara was indeed drinking a Slim-Fast, with a bright green bendy straw poking out of the top of the can. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked. “Go and see if you can find some crepe paper. Pink, preferably. In the closet by the stairs.”
I wanted to tell her to get her own darn crepe paper, but instead, I gave a forced smile and said, “Sure thing!”
The closet by the stairs was in the back of the rec center, down one of the hallways underneath the stage, and I rolled my eyes as I made my way down there, still holding my baton.
Of course there would be crepe paper. Streamers, probably. Before you knew it, Sara would have a balloon arch up, and then my humiliation would be complete. I almost hoped whatever was going to happen would happen before the pageant got started, so no one would have to see me in this stupid leotard, twirling a baton under freaking crepe-paper streamers.
The supply closet was next to the staircase, and I saw the door was slightly ajar. My mind was still full of crepe-paper streamers, balloon arches, and the looks of horror sure to be on The Aunts’ faces, when I tugged the door all the way open.
But the closet wasn’t empty. There were people in there. Two of them, and I rolled my eyes, wondering who the heck would pick a supply closet in the rec center for romanc—
And then I saw the girl’s blond hair, saw the tall auburn-haired boy kissing her, and realized what I was looking at. Who I was looking at.
Bee and Ryan.
Chapter 25
FOR A LONG MOMENT, it was like my brain refused to process what it was seeing. Bee. Ryan. Bee and Ryan, their mouths pressed together, Bee’s hands clutching his shirt at his waist, Ryan holding the back of her head. I mean, I saw all of that, but it was like I kept trying to tell myself I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. That she was, I don’t know, giving him mouth-to-mouth or something. That it wasn’t even Bee, but Mary Beth in a blond wig. That I had finally snapped and was having some kind of psychotic break.
But no. No, that was my best friend and my ex-boyfriend, and they were full on making out in the supply closet at the rec center.
I guess the natural thing to do would have been to freak out and start yelling like I was gunning for a spot on a tacky talk show, or maybe to quietly close the door and pretend I’d never seen anything, but I didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, I just stood there in my stupid leotard, hand on the doorknob, and said, “Oh.”
They broke apart, Bee’s Salmon Fantasy lip gloss smudged on both her mouth and Ryan’s, and if I hadn’t been busy trying to keep my stomach from plummeting to my feet, I guess there would have been something funny about the way they both gawked at me with big eyes and equally shocked expressions.
“Damn,” Ryan muttered, while Bee nearly leapt out of his arms.
“Harper,” she said, but I shook my head. My face hurt, and I realized it was because I was giving them another one of those big fake smiles I hated.
“It’s fine,” I said quickly. “So super fine. I mean, we’ve been broken up”—I waved my hand between me and Ryan—“and you and Brandon are broken up, and Ryan and Mary Beth are broken up, and wow, there has been a lot of breaking up going on lately, I just realized that. I guess that’s the perils of trying to date in the middle of a supernatural crisis, right? Right. Anyway, I’ll let y’all get back to . . . that.”
I shut the door with shaking hands and turned away, walking back toward the auditorium, my baton clenched tightly in one hand. My eyes were stinging, and I almost bumped into a Styrofoam tree propped against the wall. Dimly, I heard the door open from behind me, and Bee called my name again.
I didn’t stop walking, but when she caught my elbow, it wasn’t like I could shake her off. I turned to see her watching me with big eyes. She’d wiped some of the gloss off her mouth, but there was still a faint salmon smudge on her chin.
“Harper, I am so sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said, her hand squeezing my arm.
“It’s fine,” I said, but voice was shaking, and Bee sighed, stepping a little closer.
“It’s not, I know it’s not. But I promise, it hasn’t been going on for very long.”
For some reason, it hadn’t even occurred to me that it had happened before at all. Like I’d thought the kiss I’d seen had been their first or something, which was stupid. If they had already reached the “sneaking around” stage of things, this had obviously been going on for a little while.
“How long?” I asked, and Bee’s brown eyes slid away from mine. My stomach was still rolling
, and I tried to tell myself it was the smell of the rec center, all furniture polish and industrial carpet cleaner, making me feel sick.
“The night at the fair,” she told me, and I remembered now that Ryan had dropped Bee off last.
“We were both kind of freaked out by everything that went down that night, and it . . .” Tears spilled over Bee’s lower lashes, and she scrubbed at them with the back of her hand. “It just happened. I didn’t mean for it to, and I swear to God, I never looked at Ryan like that while y’all were dating.”
The thing was, I believed her. Bee had always been loyal, the best best friend a girl could have. It wasn’t jealousy that was making me want to cry. Ryan and I were more than done, and while things with me and David were not all that simple right now, there was still no one else I’d rather be with. So it wasn’t the actual kissing bugging me, it was the secrecy of it all. Bee had always told me everything, but she’d been keeping this a secret from me. I got it, but I didn’t like it.
“If you want us not to see each other anymore, I’d totally understand,” Bee said, and then Ryan came up behind her, laying one hand on her shoulder.
“I wouldn’t,” he said, looking at me, but I was still staring at his fingers curled over her shoulder. Since the night of the fair, she’d said, but that had been just a week ago.
There was a lot of intimacy in the way Ryan’s hand lay there at the crook of her neck.
“Ryan,” Bee said, but he shook his head, a muscle working in his jaw.
“I was okay with Harper and David,” he said, “so Harper can be okay with me and you.”
“I am okay with you. Both of you,” I replied, but the words came out too fast. I thought of me asking David if we were okay, how quickly he’d answered me and how fake his answer had sounded. I guess I sounded every bit as fake, if the matching frowns on Bee’s and Ryan’s faces were anything to go by.