“Harper, remember what I said about the Paladins protecting Alaric from himself.”
As though I’d forgotten about that. “That’s not going to—”
“Hey,” David called, and Saylor and I both jumped. He was standing inside the back door, watching us. “Did I miss the sword show again?”
He said it jokingly, but somehow I knew he’d overheard us.
I hadn’t seen David since Saturday night, and I gave a small sigh of relief. Standing in Saylor’s backyard, wearing a sweater that was two sizes too big and jeans that were a size too small, he just looked like David. I wasn’t noticing his hair or his eyes or his hands. Whatever that had been between us had clearly been a fluke of the hug and the lamplight and him actually acting like a decent human being.
Still, when he said, “Pres, you wanna come upstairs and work on that thing with me?”
Saylor’s eyes narrowed a bit. “What thing?”
“Project for the newspaper,” I said. “Can’t let major supernatural happenings get in the way of journalism, right, David?”
“Yup,” he said with a little nod.
“I thought you weren’t on the paper, Harper,” Saylor said, sounding unconvinced.
“I’m not,” I told her, grabbing my coat from the back of a lawn chair. “But David and I are trying to work together more at school. You know, so no one gets suspicious of us hanging out.”
Saylor’s blue eyes moved from David to me and back again. “All right,” she said. “Don’t be too long. I still have a few more things to go over with you before we’re done for today, Harper.”
“Aye aye,” I replied, giving her a tiny salute.
David headed for the stairs, and I followed. We were about halfway up when he stopped and turned back to me, lifting his eyebrows. “‘Aye aye?’” he whispered, his mouth lifting in a crooked grin, and . . . oh.
Suddenly, the fluke felt a lot less fluke-y.
Hoping the light was dim enough to hide my blush, I muttered, “Shut up,” and pushed past him up the stairs.
Chapter 31
David’s room was a lot like I’d pictured. I mean, not like I’d ever spent a huge amount of time thinking about David Stark’s room, but if you’d ask me to describe it, I think I would’ve been pretty dead on. There was the totally sensible wooden-framed bed, complete with a blue comforter. There was a matching desk piled high with notebooks and computer stuff, and not much on the walls except for a few maps. I paused in front of one of them.
“Where is this?” I asked. It wasn’t a continent I recognized. David looked up from gathering a pile of laundry. “Oh. Um, that’s Middle Earth.”
I could’ve sworn he was blushing, but in the interest of working together, I decided not to give him a hard time about it. Instead, I nodded and moved over to the bookshelf. There was a corkboard posted above it with a few newspaper articles pinned to it, and three photographs. Two were nature shots—a tree that I thought was the oak in Forrest Park, and the pond behind Grove Academy—but one showed David sitting on a stool in front of a blue backdrop. There were three other kids in the photo. I recognized all of them from the newspaper staff. Chie, the pretty Asian girl I’d seen hanging around David, was leaning on his shoulder.
“Are you guys a thing?” I asked, tapping the picture. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about David’s social life. He’d always hung out with the same handful of kids in school, all the same kids that were on the newspaper staff now. And since David and I had basically declared ourselves mortal enemies in preschool, our circles didn’t overlap often. But I never saw him at school dances or at the movies or anything. I’d certainly never seen him with a girl. But Chie had looked weirded out about him holding my hair when I puked at Homecoming.
“Huh?” he asked, squinting at the picture. “Oh, no. We’re friends. That was . . . goofing off with the camera in newspaper.”
“I think she likes you,” I said. He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply, shoving his laundry basket into the closet.
Since that was a dead-end street, I crouched down in front of the bookcase. Like mine, it was overstuffed, but whereas I’d at least made an attempt at organizing titles, David had books shoved in every which way and stacked on top of one another.
There were a bunch of fantasy novels, and classics, as well as several biographies of journalists. I picked up a book about Ernie Pyle and started thumbing through it. “So you’re really into this whole newspaper guy thing.”
David pushed the closet door closed. “Yeah. I always thought that’s what I’d do for a living one day.”
I put the book back and turned to face him. “You still can.”
He snorted, leaning back against his footboard. “Yeah, I’ll be one heck of a journalist. I can predict the stories before they happen.”
I wanted to say something encouraging. Something like, “Hey, you still can! So what if you might be a supernaturally powered crazy dude!”
But even I couldn’t fake that much pep. “We’ll work it out,” I said.
David looked at me, and there was that expression again, the one he usually got right before he wrote a terrible article about me. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
I walked over to his desk and sat in the chair. “The only alternative is to sit here and whine about it, and I don’t think that’s going to accomplish much. Now. What is it you want to try?”
David rubbed his hands up and down his thighs. “I want to try to have a prophecy.”
Confused, I sat up straighter. “Don’t we need Saylor for that? She’s your battery or whatever.”
David shook his head. “I don’t want her to know about this. And I think . . . I think just the two of us ought to be enough to get some kind of vision. It’s worth a shot, at least.”
I wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea. Some hint of what was coming could be helpful. But I still didn’t get why David was so set against telling Saylor.
He must’ve read that in my face because he sat on his bed, propping his elbows on his knees. “I know I have to trust Saylor again. Eventually. And I will.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I just nodded. “Okay. Let’s prophesize.”
Relief washed over David’s face. “Right.” He sat up, clasping his hands in front of him. “So where should we . . .”
I got out of the chair and attempted to sit as gracefully as I could on the floor. “Here,” I said, holding my hands out.
After a pause, David sat across from me, folding his long legs. But he didn’t take my hands. Instead, he stared at them like he’d never seen hands before. “It probably will only work with Saylor,” he said. “Surely you and I have held hands before. In PE, playing Red Rover or something. And nothing happened then.”
I thought back, trying to remember if I’d ever held hands with David Stark, but nothing came.
I opened and closed my hands at him. “Maybe we did, but that was before I got all superpowered, so it doesn’t matter. Now come on.”
Still, he sat there, hands clenched in his lap. “We hugged!” he exclaimed, lifting his head. “In your car, when we didn’t die, and the other night, with the soup. We hugged, and I didn’t have some crazy-ass vision.”
Neither had I. But I’d had a potential case of the butterflies I was trying very hard not to think of right now. And then I noticed the red flush creeping its way up David’s neck and wondered if he was trying to squelch the same thing. “That was just a hug, and we were both fully clothed.”
He shot me a weird look, and the flush on his neck got redder.
“I mean our—our skin didn’t touch,” I hurried on, and now, oh God, I was blushing, too. “So maybe this thing needs skin-onskin contact. Or hand-on-hand. Or . . .”
Frustrated, I reached out and grabbed his hands. “Please shut up and think future-y thoughts.”
“I wasn’t the one talking,” he reminded me, but before I could give any kind of comeback, I felt the low buzz of electricity start between our palms. It was nothing like that first night with him and Saylor, the power of it nearly blowing us out of our chairs. But it was there. Weak and full of static, like a TV channel that was trying to come through.
David closed his eyes and I did the same. Our hands were warm, and as David’s fingers tightened on mine, a picture began to form behind my eyelids. There was a flash of white, another of red, and I thought I could hear screams again, but they were so faint, I wasn’t sure. More red, and stairs. A bunch of greenery crumpled on the ground, and silver—
Suddenly, the picture was gone, and David wasn’t holding my hands. When I opened my eyes, I saw him standing across the room, next to his bookshelf.
“What is it?” I asked, rising to my feet.
Shaking his head, he turned back around, and his face wasn’t so much pale as it was gray. When he still wouldn’t answer, I grabbed his arm.
“Remember what you said to me about how I had to start saying ‘dead’? Well, you have to start saying things, too. Namely, important things, no matter how dumb you think they are.”
He turned to face me, and his mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “I saw you, in a white dress. You were lying on the steps, at Magnolia House, bleeding. And I . . . I saw you die.”
Chapter 32
I’d only thought I’d taken Cotillion practice seriously before. Now that I knew what the night was really about, I was nearly fanatical in getting everything right.
That Thursday afternoon, Saylor was MIA at Cotillion practice. She hadn’t said where she would be, only that she needed me to be in charge. So I walked up and down the stairs of Magnolia House and did my very best not to imagine myself lying dead on them. Like I’d told David that afternoon, Blythe and Saylor had both said that boy Oracles could see what could happen, not necessarily what would. Of course I could die the night of Cotillion. We’d always known that. But I wasn’t going to, because that night was going to go off perfectly, no matter how many times I had to correct the girls’ placement. Where they were standing was important since Saylor and I were trying to create an easy exit should stuff go badly.
But the third time I snapped, “Move three steps to your left, Mary Beth!” she whirled on me.
“Oh my God, Harper, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to pick on me just because I sat next to your boyfriend at a movie.”
It was almost like the air had been sucked out of the room. Or maybe that was from everyone trying not to gasp all at once. Ryan and I hadn’t talked about Mary Beth and the movies, or David and the jacket. I think both of us were willing that entire evening away. He’d come over a couple of evenings, and we’d sat in the entertainment room my dad had set up in the basement, watching movies and occasionally kissing, but things still felt fragile and awkward between us. Two more weeks, I kept reminding myself. Two more weeks, and all of this is over.