I raised my eyebrows. “Probably. Why?”
He shrugged, sheepish. “I thought you and I might try something. Something prophecy-related,” he quickly added.
“Right, of course,” I said, like it hadn’t even occurred to me he could be talking about anything else.
“Awesome,” he said. “So Monday.”
“Monday,” I repeated, and just when I was afraid we were going to stand there echoing each other all night, David finally gave a little wave and got in his car.
As he drove off, I started walking back to the theater, my head so full it ached. So much for a normal Saturday night.
The idea of searching a crowded theater for Ryan was more than I wanted to deal with, so once I got back to the Royale Cinema, I took a seat on one of the padded benches in the lobby and waited. I thought about Ryan sitting in the dark, maybe next to Mary Beth, and tried to summon up some kind of righteous indignation. Here I was, trying to keep this entire town safe, trying to save my own freaking life, and my boyfriend was sitting in the movies with another girl.
But righteous indignation wouldn’t come. Neither would devastated betrayal or hurt disbelief. Mostly, I wanted the movie to be over so I could go home and wash the crab bisque out of my hair.
Finally, the doors opened and people began spilling out into the lobby. Ryan was there, but there was no sign of Mary Beth. His eyes roamed until they found me. Crossing the room in long strides, Ryan looked a little relieved, but also fairly irritated.
“There you are,” he said, standing in front of me. “I texted and called you like a hundred times.”
Rising to my feet, I fished my phone out of my pocket. Sure enough, I had about a dozen missed calls. I’d forgotten that I’d put the phone on silent.
“Have you been here this whole time?” Ryan continued, folding his arms over his broad chest.
“No,” I said, but before I could get any further, Ryan frowned.
“Why do you smell like an aquarium? And what are you wearing?”
Oh, crap. I’d forgotten to give David back his jacket. “Someone spilled soup on me,” I said, which, hey, was pretty close to the truth. “So that’s why I didn’t want to go in. Because of the smell.”
“And the jacket?” he asked. “Did you knock down a random professor and steal it?” He was smiling a little now. I’m sure the sight of me, bedraggled and covered in soup, was amusing.
And then his smile faded. “I’ve seen that jacket,” he said slowly, eyes moving over me. “That’s . . . David Stark has a jacket just like that. I remember the stupid elbow patches.”
Ugh. Why hadn’t I given the damn coat back? “Yeah,” I said lightly. “He was the one who spilled the soup on me.”
Ryan’s expression was stony. “So you ran out of the place looking for some girl, and then you found David Stark, but he spilled soup on you in the middle of Pine Grove Square, and gave you a jacket?”
“Yeah,” I said on a nervous laugh. “Pretty much. Weird night, huh?”
Heaving a sigh, Ryan glanced behind him. “Weird. Sure.”
We hardly said anything on the drive home, and when he pulled in my driveway, Ryan didn’t even shut off the car. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and all I could do was nod and tell myself he wasn’t kissing me goodnight because I smelled like a Red Lobster.
When I walked through the front door, it was 9:45. Mom and Dad were exactly where I’d left them, although Dad was now asleep, his head tilted back, softly snoring. Mom sat up as I closed the door. “You’re early.”
“Movie wasn’t very long,” I said.
Mom clearly had more to say, but I jogged up the stairs before she had a chance. I’d desperately wanted a shower, but once I was in my room, the idea of getting undressed was exhausting to me, so I just slumped down on my bed, bisque, tweed, and all.
It had been one week since I’d sat at Miss Annemarie’s and told Saylor Stark that I could be a Paladin and a regular girl. That nothing had to change.
“Nothing does,” I muttered to myself. So tonight had been bad. And odd. And, I thought, remembering sitting across from David in the lamplight of the tea room, unsettling.
But it was one night. And we only had two more weeks of this left before Cotillion.
I could do this. I would do this.
I drifted into sleep, David’s jacket still wrapped around me.
Chapter 30
“Again,” Saylor said, her tone of voice exactly the same as it was during Cotillion practice. But this time, instead of walking down a flight of stairs in heels, I was practicing sword fighting. Also in heels.
To tell the truth, whacking things with a sword felt really good today. Ryan hadn’t called on Sunday, and then at lunch, Amanda and Abigail had been talking about The Promise and how good it was. “I still can’t believe you missed it to see something called Hard Fists,” Abi had said to Mary Beth.
Mary Beth had darted a glance at me as Amanda elbowed her twin, and I pretended to ignore all of them. I also ignored the stab of guilt that pierced my chest when I saw David in the halls. I had not almost kissed him, I reminded myself. He had almost kissed me, and if he had, I would have pushed him away and made all sorts of shocked sounds, and not kissed him back, even a little bit. I was positive of that.
Then, when I got to Saylor’s, I’d been treated to a lecture on how possibly chasing Blythe had been foolish and irresponsible. So yes. Smacking things with sharp metal felt good. Or it had for the first hour at least.
“I don’t see why I have to practice so much,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. It was a chilly day, but the sun still beat down on me, and I’d been getting quite a workout. The sword was heavy in my hand, and my muscles ached. Still, the dummy I’d been slicing looked a heck of a lot worse.
“Practice makes perfect, Miss Price,” Saylor trilled.
“I know that. Heck, I practically invented that. In fact, if I decided to do something so low-class as get a tattoo, it would probably be that. What I mean is—” I took another swing at the dummy—“is that I don’t have to practice this. You said that when Mr. Hall passed his powers on to me, he also passed on his knowledge. And the knowledge of every Paladin before him.”
I swung the sword in an arc over my head, going in to slice the dummy up under the ribs. “I don’t have to practice. I can . . . I don’t know, do this.”
Saylor gave a long suffering sigh and took another sip of sweet tea. “And all of that is true. But practice never hurt anyone. And while your brain knows all of these things, your body is still unused to them.” She nodded at the dummy. “Hence the practice. Now again.”
“Why swords anyway?” I asked even as I did what she said. Spinning, I hit the dummy in the neck, then pulled the sword out and dropped into a low spin, whacking the flat of the blade against its legs. “They’re not exactly the most convenient weapons. Shouldn’t I have—” I grunted as I brought the sword down with both hands—“a gun?”
Saylor poked at the ice in her glass with a bright pink straw. “Modernized weapons won’t work for Paladins.”
I swung around, sword making a slight zing in the air. “Like, we’re not supposed to use them or—”
“The original magic that created Paladins didn’t take things like guns, or grenades, or—or rocket launchers into account. Therefore, you can’t work with those nearly as well as you can with a sword.”
I took that in, turning the hilt of the sword over in my hands. “Okay. But a rocket launcher sounds a lot more useful than a sword.”
It took another fifteen minutes, and my thighs and calves had joined my shoulders in screaming, before Saylor said I could quit. I wanted to fling the sword to the ground and sink into a lawn chair next to her, but instead, I put the sword back in the house and wheeled the dummy back onto the patio.
When I did sit down, Saylor rewarded me with one of her rare grins. “Good girl.”
She handed me a bottle of water, and I gulped half of it down. “You’re doing well,” Saylor said as I drank. She frowned, her eyes narrowing behind her sunglasses. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it’ll be enough.”
I lowered the bottle. “What do you mean?”
“You’re learning quickly,” she acknowledged. “But what the Ephors are intending . . . I never thought I’d face something like that with an untrained Paladin at my side.”
“I didn’t exactly expect to spend my Cotillion battling the forces of evil, either,” I reminded her, and the frown deepened.
“I understand that, Harper. But . . .” She sighed. “As successful as you’ve been, to be honest, I have no idea how to . . . to train a Paladin. I never had to before. We all have our roles. David is the Oracle, I’m the Mage, and Christopher was the Paladin.”
“We’ll be okay,” I said, wondering how I managed to get the words out without choking. “We’ll get through Cotillion and then . . .” I trailed off.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about what came after Cotillion. Whatever this big prophecy was, it would be settled. But David would still be an Oracle (or dead). I would still be a Paladin (or dead). Right?
Saylor was watching me. “Harper, do you fully comprehend what being a Paladin means?”
I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “Right now, it means making sure crazy Blythe doesn’t kill David and inadvertently make a crater where our town used to be.”
“But do you understand what that means giving up?”
Now I really didn’t want to look at her. I got up out of the chair and started doing the stretches she’d shown me. “Once Cotillion is over, I won’t have to give up anything,” I said. “Blythe will be gone—dead—the spell won’t have worked, and I can get back to normal life.”
“Harper, this is your normal life now. No matter what happens at Cotillion, you are a Paladin, linked to me, linked to David. Forever. And that means that eventually, you’ll sacrifice everything,” Saylor said. She didn’t insist it. Didn’t say it with force, like she was trying to make me believe it. It was a fact.
I faltered, nearly losing my balance. Taking a deep breath, I moved into another stretch. “I don’t believe that,” I said. Overhead, the sun was so bright, the sky a steely blue.
Suddenly Saylor was standing in front of me. We were nearly the same height, so she was looking right into my eyes. “I don’t have a family,” she told me evenly. “Or a home. Even my name isn’t real. That’s what I gave up to keep David safe. Myself. It’s what Christopher gave up, too. And it’s what you’ll give up as well, whether you want to admit it or not. My every waking moment is dedicated to keeping that boy alive.”
My arm was very heavy as I lowered it. Everything in me felt heavy. “I don’t want that,” I said, hating how . . . petulant I sounded. But I couldn’t help it. “After Cotillion, what will he even need protecting from? The Ephors want to kill me, not him.”