Chapter 27

I FELL BACK, more from the surprise than anything else, but was able to recover fast enough, shooting to my feet and whirling around, not surprised at all to be confronted by another teenage girl.

Behind the girl, Bee was rising to her feet again, and I saw her hands flex at her sides, but she wasn’t making any move to jump in. That told me all I needed to know about just how great Bee’s powers were doing right now.

Sighing, I crouched a little, holding out my hands in front of me. This was the third girl I’d had to take on in a few days; while I’d managed okay with the other two, I wondered if there might be a better tack to try with this one. “What’s your name?” I asked as we circled each other on the stamped-down grass underneath the tent. “I’m Harper Price.”

“I know that,” the girl all but snarled. Her hair was the kind of blond sometimes called—not very nicely in my opinion—“dishwater,” and she was wearing a T-shirt with some boy band on it. I looked at all their disturbingly smooth-skinned faces, and really hoped I won this fight.

Getting my butt handed to me by a girl wearing that shirt was too humiliating to contemplate.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said. It seemed pretty clear that we were totally gonna do this, whether we needed to or not. Still, I’d hoped to get more of a chance to chat before she sprang at me.

But, nope, I’d barely drawn a breath to talk to her again before she was already flying through the air, knocking me to the dry grass with a surprising amount of force for someone so slight.

I landed funny, my elbow whacking the ground hard and a very unladylike sound exploding from my lips. Irritation flared through me. I’d told myself I’d just neutralize her as fast as I could before questioning her about David, but now I was frustrated and in pain, so I punched out as hard as I could.

Except it wasn’t as hard as I could. It was as hard as the me from before could, sure, landing on the girl’s shoulder with enough impact to make her wince, but she didn’t stumble, and she certainly didn’t go flying back like she should have after a punch like that.

I blinked, looking at my hand as if it had betrayed me, and then the girl was on me again, hitting with the kind of force I usually wielded. Which hurt.

Weakness coursed through me the same way adrenaline and power used to, and I felt the same panicked helplessness I’d felt that night at the pool. Only this time, there was no resurgence of my power, no last-minute reprieve.

Bee was closer now, though, grabbing at the girl with both hands, and even though she didn’t have her Paladin powers, she was still a good head taller than the girl.

Not that it mattered. One well-placed punch, and Bee was falling back to the ground again, crying out, one hand flying to her cheekbone.

Anger flared through me. Rage, really, and I went to get up again. No one hurt Bee on my watch, no matter how weak I felt.

Except that rage was no match for Paladin strength. Another kick, some jabs to my back, and I was down again, my breath wheezing in and out.

This girl was kicking my butt, and there was nothing I could do other than cover my face with my hands, still trying to punch and kick—I wasn’t going out easy—but knowing that it was almost totally ineffectual.

I’m not sure what would have happened if Blythe hadn’t come into the tent. Or rather, I’m too sure of what would’ve happened and I didn’t want to think about it.

This time, when Blythe did her mind-wipe thing, I just lay there on the grass, trying to breathe, trying not to let my panic show on my face.

Trying not to let Blythe know that as far as powers went, I was now useless.

• • •

Blythe managed to get some ice from one of the soda vendors, and when she handed me a freezing bundle wrapped in a paper towel, I pressed it against my lip. “I am so tired of this,” I mumbled around the swelling. “Just, like, phenomenally over it at this point.”

“Same,” Bee said. There was a bruise purpling her cheekbone, and she was holding her own soaking-wet paper towel of ice to her face.

Blythe looked between us for a moment, then rested her eyes on me. “So you had another vision.” She nodded at Bee. “But she didn’t.”

Shaking my head, I closed my eyes briefly, my stomach still roiling. “It didn’t last long,” I replied, and Blythe snorted.

“Doesn’t matter how long it lasted. What matters is what you saw.”

I sighed and looked up at the hazy blue sky. “It was another cave,” I said, my voice flat. “But it was David, not Alaric, in there. He was . . . he was thinking about home.”

“A cave?” Blythe asked sharply, her brows drawing together. “So we’re too late?”

“Maybe not,” I said, even though I definitely wasn’t sure of that. “He didn’t seem . . . scary, I guess?”

“That has to mean we’re getting close again,” Bee offered. She was still crouched next to me, one hand on my knee, her skin going pink in the sun. “Going after Dante, we lost him for a bit, but now he’s back.”

“And still following in Alaric’s footsteps,” Blythe added. “If he’s already found a cave somewhere, started powering up . . .” Trailing off, she twisted the orange plastic bag in her hands. “It would’ve been better to catch him before all that. Easier.”

“I don’t think any part of this was ever going to be easy,” I muttered, my lip still stinging.

I hadn’t liked the way Blythe’s face clouded over when she thought about David already in a cave, doing whatever it was Alaric had done before he wiped out an entire town. I’d always known there was a clock ticking where David was concerned, but now it seemed a lot louder.

“Let’s go,” I said, rising to my feet, antsy. “We got what we came for, and the sooner we’re on the road, the better.”

Neither of them argued with me about that, and we made our way back toward the parking lot, the ice melting and dripping onto my chest.

We were almost to the exit but had to wind our way through more tables and tents. There was a whole table of weaponry, and even as I wondered why anyone would want any of this stuff unless they were deeply into Game of Thrones, I found myself stopping at the table, staring at the daggers and maces and steel-tipped arrows with something dangerously close to avarice. Becoming a Paladin had certainly given me a better appreciation for these kinds of things, either because I knew just how vital they were to the job, or because I had gotten some kind of passed-down weapons-lust along with all my Paladin powers.

My fingers trailed over the shiny silver hilt of one dagger, and then I moved on to a thin fencing blade, the metal basket decorated with what I guessed were fake jewels, but they were still pretty.

And then I saw the round metal handle sticking out of a box in the back. No, not a handle. A hilt.

Standing there in front of that tent, a bag of ice pressed to my swollen lip, I looked at the top of that sword and felt something thrum deep in my blood. I couldn’t even see the whole thing, but I knew that I needed that sword. More than I needed the Coral Shimmer lip gloss I loved, more than I needed the Homecoming Queen crown.

When I lifted a hand to point at it, I realized I was shaking a little, but that might have been from the adrenaline of the fight. Or it could have been something more, something . . . fated.

It wasn’t a long blade, nothing all that intimidating, really—other than the fact that it was used for stabbing people, I guess. More like the kind of short sword I’d seen in gladiator movies. And it felt good in my hand.

“How much for the sword?” I asked the guy behind the folding table.

“Um, Harper?” Bee asked. She stood on one side of me, arms held tight to her sides, and I was struck by how not-Bee-like she looked. The frantic pace, the crappy fast-food diet, the stress . . . the three of us now looked less like Cute Girls Headed to the Beach and a lot more like strung-out teenage runaways, albeit ones with decent tans. Anyone observing us would probably think we were only months away from our own Lifetime movie.

“What?” I asked Bee, my eyes still on the sword as the vendor in front of me in a University of Alabama T-shirt glanced over his shoulder.

“Oh,” he said, turning more fully toward the box. “Huh, that’s . . . You know, I gotta be honest with you, I haven’t seen that before.”

The alarm bells going off in my head seemed even louder now, and when he walked over and lifted the sword from the box, they were nearly deafening.

It wasn’t a fancy sword. There were no jewels on it, and the metal didn’t shimmer with unspoken magic or anything like that. It actually looked kind of dull, and while there were some deep grooves on the hilt, it was clearly nothing all that special. Still, everything inside me seemed to reach for it.

The guy hefted the sword, weighing it. “What’s a pretty thing like you want with a sword anyway?”

“She’s going to use it to castrate guys who ask stupid questions,” Blythe answered for me, her voice flat.

“What she said,” I told the guy, lifting my chin. His eyes fell to my swollen lip and the ice bag still clutched in my hand, dripping into the dirt.

Clearing his throat, he offered me the sword, handle first. “Fair enough. Since I have no idea where it came from or what it’s even made of, I’ll give you a discount.”

Whether he actually did give me a discount or not, I couldn’t say. It’s not like I’d ever priced swords or anything, and what he charged was enough to have me grimacing a little bit as I handed over the credit card Mom had given me for emergencies. (Which, okay, I knew she had meant for me to use it for food and shelter and stuff, but I think we can all agree that on this trip, a sword was a solid emergency supply.)

But once that sword was in my hand, I knew that I would have paid anything to own it. It felt right clutched against my palm, and I gave a few experimental strokes, earning me some worried looks from all those people who did just want crappy jewelry or a puppy or a cassette tape from 1988.

When we got back to the car, I grabbed an old backpack from the back of the trunk and a Grove Academy sweatshirt from beside the roadside kit my dad had given me last Christmas. Wrapping the blade gently in the shirt, I placed it in the backpack and wedged it carefully in the back of the trunk.

But even once the sword was tucked away, I stayed there by the open trunk, one hand still holding the lid open like I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop looking at it.

“Harper?” Bee asked. Blythe had already gone to sit in the backseat, so it was just the two of us out there, looking down into my trunk. “What do you need that sword for?”

I slammed the lid shut. “Just in case.”