Rebel Belle (19 page)

David and I sat at the same table in the corner where The Aunts and my mom had had lunch last week. Miss Annemarie brought us a stack of napkins along with our tea, and we both did our best to blot the bisque from our clothes. As we did, I told David about Blythe.

Taking a sip of his tea, he mulled that over. “So you think she was following you just to, uh, mess with you?”
I dropped a sugar cube into my Earl Grey. “I guess. If she was even there. And it’s okay, you can say the F-word.”
To my surprise, David shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve kind of become fond of the euphemisms. The other day, I said ‘mother trucker’ when I dropped a book on my toe, and I have to admit, it was every bit as satisfying as the actual curse.”
“See? I told you there were acceptable alternatives.”
Raising his tea cup in a salute, David inclined his head. “You were right.” Then he widened his eyes in mock surprise. “Hey! Saying that didn’t even burn my tongue! We’re making progress, Pres.”
I tossed one of the crumpled up napkins at him. “Ha ha.”
He tossed the napkin back, but there was a smile playing around his lips.
I sipped my tea, feeling the warmth of it in my toes. The tea room was always so overstuffed and tacky during the day, but at night, it felt cozy. There were tiny lamps in the middle of all of the tables, and we were the only people in the place. Everything smelled pleasantly spicy—well, everything except me and David—and the atmosphere was almost . . .
No, I wasn’t going to say romantic. There was nothing romantic about Miss Annemarie’s Tea Room. Or David Stark for that matter.
“What?” David asked. He was frowning slightly, the dim light making shadows underneath his cheekbones. There was the lightest smattering of freckles along the bridge of his nose, and I wondered why I’d never noticed those before.
I looked at him, eyebrows raised. “You shook your head,” he said. “What were you saying no to?”
“Oh.” I took another sip of tea so that I wouldn’t have to answer right away. “I was thinking how crazy this night has been.”
Leaning back, David stretched his arms over his head. “Yeah, I was planning on
eating
crab bisque tonight, not being doused in it.”
“Oh, please. That jacket cost you what? Two bucks at Goodwill? I will never get the smell out of this sweater.”
David reached down and gripped the lapels of his jacket, straightening it. “Hey, I like this jacket.”
“That makes one of us,” I replied, tucking my hair behind my ears.
David and I had been snarking at each other since we learned how to talk, but tonight, our barbs seemed less pointed. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them affectionate or anything, but there was a definite lack of sting.
“We need to tell Saylor about tonight,” I told David.
He was turning his tea cup around in his hands, steam drifting up to fog his glasses. “I will, when I get home.”
Silence stretched between us. Not awkward, really, but heavy somehow. Laden with something I couldn’t name. “I’m sure he doesn’t like her,” David said.
“What?”
“Ryan,” he clarified before draining his cup. “You said you think he likes Mary Beth. I bet you’re wrong.”
“Oh, right. That.” Now that the moment had passed, I felt my cheeks flame at the memory of how I’d vomited up all of my feelings out there on the sidewalk. I should’ve just told him Blythe freaked me out. There was no need to drag my personal life into all of this.
“Don’t get me wrong, Mary Beth is . . . well, she’s not objectionable or anything, but she’s not . . .”
My hands were tight around the tea cup, the heat radiating on my palms. “She’s not what?”
David tugged at his lapels again before leaning back in his chair. “You.”
The lamplight shone on David’s glasses, but behind them, his eyes were very blue and intent, and then I suddenly couldn’t meet them anymore.
Thank God for Miss Annemarie who chose that moment to waddle over to the table, a plastic bag in hand. “Here you go, sweetie,” she told David, handing him the soup. “Try to be more careful with this batch. I’m closing up now, so this is your last chance.”
“Oh, r-right,” David said, fumbling slightly with the bag. “Thanks, Miss Annemarie.”
Our tea was gone, so we both got to our feet, thanking Miss Annemarie again. “Don’t mention it,” she said with a wave of her hand. “It’s nice to have young people in here at night for once. Most of the other kids, they all go somewhere fancy on their dates. Like Ruby Tuesday.”
I waited for David to insist we weren’t on a date, but he gave Miss Annemarie a little smile and a nod. I didn’t say anything either, and, as weird as it seems, it was like by letting Miss Annemarie think it was a date, it had somehow . . . become a date.
I shook my head again. Crazy thought. Stupid.
After the warmth of Miss Annemarie’s, the square seemed even colder. I shivered a little as the breeze made my still-damp sweater cling to my body.
“Here,” David said, handing me the takeout bag. “Hold this.”
I did, and he slipped out of his tweed, revealing an actually halfway decent button-down dress shirt underneath. He slid the coat over my shoulders before taking the bag back.
“Thanks,” I said, a little awkwardly. I never thought I would be grateful for the scent of crab bisque, but as I pulled the coat tighter around me, I was glad that was all I could smell. I felt weird enough as it was without adding nice boy smell to the mix.
David and I walked down the sidewalk, our arms a few inches apart.
“Do you want me to drive you home?” he asked as we passed the antique store.
“I should probably get back to the theater,” I said. “Ryan . . .”
I let that trail off, and David shoved his hands in his pockets. “Right. Ryan.”
We had reached David’s car by now, but both of us were sort of hovering beside it. “So,” he said.
“So.”
David rocked on his heels, frowning slightly. “Is it me, or are we being weird?”
I laughed, nerves making it sound high and thin. “We are being weird. Which is saying something for us.”
Grinning, David let his shoulders drop a little. “Okay, good. It’s only . . . I should’ve said something to Miss Annemarie about us not being on a date, but—”
“No,” I rushed into say, slipping my arms into his jacket. “That would’ve been awkward, too, and probably bad manners to correct her.”
“Right!” he said, a little too loud. “It would’ve made her feel bad, and we don’t want to do that. Not when she’s made me delicious soup. Twice.”
“Exactly,” I said, feeling like my voice was a little too loud, too.
His mouth lifted in a half-grin, revealing a flash of teeth and making me realize for the first time that David Stark had surprisingly nice cheekbones. “You actually look pretty good in tweed, Pres,” he joked, reaching out to straighten the lapel of my—his— jacket.
“No one looks good in tweed,” I insisted, going to push his hand away. But as I did, our skin touched, and the little pulse that  went through me had nothing to do with prophecies or magic.
David must have felt it too because his eyes suddenly dropped to my mouth. I saw him swallow.
Oh my God, David Stark wants to kiss me
.
In public. In the middle of the street.
I waited to be horrified by that thought, but for some reason, horror wasn’t coming. Neither was awkwardness or being freaked out or any of the other perfectly acceptable reactions to David Freaking Stark wanting to kiss me.
Instead, I felt myself swaying forward a little on the balls of my feet. But before anything profoundly stupid could happen, a car drove by, some country song blaring out the windows, and David and I stepped away from each other.
My heart was pounding, and I shoved my shaking hands into the pockets of the jacket. “Okay,” I said at last. “So I’m going to go back to the theater, and you go home and eat soup and talk to Saylor about Blythe, and I’ll see you Monday.”
David wrapped one hand around the back of his neck, rubbing the back of his head so that even the hair
there
stood up. “Monday,” he repeated, jangling his keys in his pocket. “And speaking of, do you think Bee could maybe sit out on training that day?”
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.

“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.

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.”
“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.