Moving away from the settee, Blythe stepped behind Bee. “Well, if I can’t have an Oracle, at least I’ll have a Paladin.”
Before I could think, she had an arm around Bee’s waist. Blythe was so tiny, she barely came up to Bee’s shoulder blades. Sticking her head out from behind Bee, Blythe winked at me.
“I think I like this one best,” she said and then, almost instantly, they both vanished.
Chapter 41
“Bee!” I cried, staring at the spot where she and Blythe had been. Behind me, David put a hand on my shoulder.
“Pres,” he said softly, but I shook him off, leaping to my feet. “No! They can’t be—she can’t be—”
But they were. She was. My best friend was gone, and I had no
idea where Blythe might have taken her. Greece? To the other Ephors? David reached up, brushing the tears off my cheeks, and I let myself lean into him for a moment. His eyes were still too bright to look directly into, so I focused on his hair, the places where it stood up in peaks and tufts. “If I’d known she’d take Bee, I would’ve gone with her,” he said, sounding like himself again.
I held onto his jacket tighter, the material wrinkling under my fingers. But as I held onto him, I could only be happy that at least David was still here. At least I still had him.
“Whoa,” Amanda said, glancing out the door. “What happened?”
David and I walked out on to the landing, the other girls trailing us. Downstairs, the main room was covered in bodies. “Are they dead?” Mary Beth asked, but I shook my head.
“They were being mind-controlled. Now that Blythe is gone, it’s over. Everyone will wake up in a few hours with fuzzy brains and . . . probably a lot of bruises.”
We made our way downstairs, stepping over people as we went. It wasn’t until were halfway downstairs that David asked, “Where’s my Aunt Saylor?”
“She’s in the kitchen,” I said, speeding up. “She was hurt, but she said she had a potion to heal it, so hopefully she’s okay now.”
I moved for the kitchen, but David caught my arm “Harper, there’s no such thing as a healing potion.”
“What?” I looked up from my skirt. There was a huge splash of red across the front that, thanks to the fruity smell rising up from it, I was pretty sure was punch. My hair was falling in my eyes, and when I went to push it back, I saw another splash of red on the back of my hand. That was definitely blood.
The light was beginning to dim from his eyes, but they were still more gold than blue. “She told me that healing is the one thing Mages can’t control. Minds, sure, protection, yeah, but healing the human body is way beyond them.”
My heart thudded painfully as his hand grabbed my arm tighter. “How bad was she?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I opened the kitchen door.
Saylor was slumped against the cabinets, her eyes closed, her face surprisingly peaceful. Brandon still lay on the floor in front of her, the knife he’d killed her with a few inches from his foot.
And kneeling next to her, shaking and holding one of her hands, was Ryan.
When he saw us standing there, he looked back and forth, his eyes wild. “I . . . I decided to come back because I wanted to see you do Cotillion,” he told me. “But when I got here, the place was shaking, and I thought there was an earthquake. I c-came through the back door, and I found her. Brandon—”
Ryan’s throat worked convulsively, and I went to him as David knelt down on the other side of Saylor. “I never told her,” David said, his voice flat. “I never said thank you for everything she did.”
“She knew,” I told him, gently prying Ryan’s hand from Saylor’s. “And she loved you.”
“I . . .” He shook his head, and tears splashed onto his black pants. “I should have told her. And she shouldn’t have died like this. Alone.”
At that, Ryan looked up. “She didn’t. I was with her.”
His mouth worked again and his hand, still in mine, was ice cold. “That’s the thing. I was sitting here with her, and she—she said she hated to do this, and she knew how complicated this would make things for everyone, and then she . . . she . . .”
“She kissed you,” I said, not sure if I should laugh or cry.
“Kind of,” Ryan agreed. “More like she blew something in me, and I got really cold, and suddenly, I felt like I could . . . I don’t know, do stuff. Weird stuff. And I really wanted to find the two of you.” He nodded at me and David.
David raised his tear-streaked face to mine. “I feel like now would be a good time to use the F-word.”
We spent the next few hours trying to repair some of the damage to Magnolia House. People left in uncomfortable positions were gently moved to the floor. I found my aunts and was relieved to see that with the exception of a scrape on Aunt May’s forehead, they were pretty much unharmed.
Finally, I found Bee’s parents, slumped at the bottom of the staircase. I went back to Saylor’s body, getting the little tub of lip balm out and handing it to Ryan. “You have to put this on your fingers, and then—”
“And then I touch them,” he said in a dull voice. “Tell them that Bee is away at cheerleading camp. Be fuzzy on the details.”
“How did you know that?”
Ryan seemed to have aged ten years in the last half hour, but there was still a little bit of the sparkle I knew in his eyes as he shrugged and said, “I just know.”
That taken care of, we moved to the last task.
All of the girls were gathered back in the bedroom. Their white dresses were streaked with sweat and punch and blood, but they were all yammering excitedly, a couple of them practicing flips and spin-kicks.
“You’re sure you can do this?” I asked David, and he nodded, flexing his fingers. A shower of golden light raced along the backs of them.
“Yeah. I hate to, though. I mean, for one thing, it would take some of the Paladin pressure off of you. For another, they just . . . they look really happy.”
They did look happy. Happier than they’d looked in all of the months prepping for Cotillion. But I couldn’t risk Blythe having ten girls—eleven, I thought, my heart aching for Bee—who were willing to fight and die for her.
One by one, David drew the power back from them, until his eyes were bright gold again and he was shaking. That done, Ryan moved down the line with the lip balm, erasing their memories of this night. When he got to Mary Beth, I saw the saw the way his finger didn’t so much smudge the balm on as caress her palm, and something in me eased. Maybe Mary Beth would be good for him. And—I glanced at David—hopefully, uncomplicated.
Eventually, they all lay slumped on the bedroom floor, and the three of us stood over them, watching.
“So are we done?” Ryan asked, and it was so close to the words he’d used breaking up with me that I wanted to laugh.
“We haven’t even really started,” David told him. “The three of us, we’re . . . connected. We will be forever, and—”
Ryan held up his hands. “Whoa, what do you mean forever?”
I was exhausted and heartsick and wrung out, and I wanted Saylor here so badly I ached. But she was gone. There was no one left to explain things, to offer guidance. We only had each other.
David reached out and squeezed my hand, and I saw Ryan’s gaze drop to it. “That was . . . fast,” he said, and David dropped my hand like it was on fire.
“It’s not like that,” he said, but I shook my head.
Taking David’s hand in mine, I held it tightly and faced Ryan. “Actually, it kind of is. And if the three of us are going to work together, Ryan needs to know that.”
Ryan looked between the two of us before heaving a sigh that seemed to come from his toes. “I can’t,” he finally said. “I can’t deal with any of this. Superpowers, and Brandon murdering old ladies, and the two of you, I . . .”
He pushed past us. I went to grab his arm, but David stopped me. “Let him go,” he said. “Give him time.”
I didn’t want to. Blythe and the Ephors had Bee, and we had to get her back somehow. We’d need all three of us, working together. But Saylor had let me go once. I had to do the same for Ryan.
The earthquake that hit Pine Grove the night of Cotillion was destined to be a legend. It almost destroyed Magnolia House, and nearly everyone there had some kind of injury, from scrapes, to bruises, to a couple of broken bones. Luckily, no one died. But the house would probably have to be torn down, and no one who was there that night had an especially clear memory of what happened. They all agreed the trauma had probably rattled them all.
Bee’s parents were glad Bee had decided to go to cheerleading camp instead of participating in Cotillion this year. No, they weren’t sure when she’d be back. Soon. They knew it was soon.
The Aunts mourned the loss of their mother’s punch bowl, damaged by falling plaster that night, and Aunt Martha blamed Aunt May for not putting it in a more secure location. Aunt Jewel only knew she never wanted to make punch for Cotillion again, but she didn’t know why.
And that Monday, I went to school like nothing had happened. I wasn’t surprised to find David in the newspaper room. No one else was in there, and I stood in the door for awhile, watching his back as he sat at the computer, typing. “I know you’re there, Pres,” he said at last.
Smiling, I leaned against the door jamb. “Could you sense me with your awesome new superpowers?”
He snorted, but didn’t turn around. “No, I could actually feel you staring at me.”
Wheeling around in his chair, he gave me a truly sad excuse of a grin. “No one’s stare is quite as piercing as yours.”
When I folded my arms and gave him a look, he sighed. “I knew you’d come. And not because I saw it. I mean, I did see it, but . . . ,” he trailed off, tugging at his hair.
I walked across the room and covered his hands with mine, gently pulling his loose from the top of his head. As I did, he watched me very carefully, and I felt that same fire, the one from the Cotillion, curl in my belly. We held each other’s gaze, our hands still tangled up as I stood in front of him.
“You know what’s awkward?” David asked, the corner of his mouth lifting.
“Our entire existences?”
Now the grin was real. “That,” he acknowledged. “And when you make a big, dramatic gesture because you think you’re going to die, and then you—”
“Don’t die,” I finished for him, and he nodded.
“Exactly. Not that I’m not one hundred percent psyched that we didn’t die, but . . .”
“I get it,” I told him. “So . . . that’s why you kissed me, then? Because you thought we might die?”
“More or less,” he said, dropping my hands and turning back to the computer. “It was a heat of the moment thing. I mean . . . you and me, as a couple? Could that even work?”
He typed for a few more seconds, and when I didn’t answer, he turned around. There was still the teeniest speck of gold in his eyes, but you had to look for it to know it was there. “Do you . . . Pres, do you want it to work?”