Lady Renegades

by Rachel Hawkins

  “Do not take that tone! Yes, Harper told me y’all’s little secret, but I’ve kept it, haven’t I?”

  Neither of them could argue with that, and Aunt Jewel turned back to me, those eyebrows still up. “What were you looking for, then?”

  I’d been really honest with Aunt Jewel, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that honest right now. After all, she’d worry if she knew about the attack tonight, and there was no need for that.

  “I thought David might have left some books behind that I could use,” I told her, and Aunt Jewel smacked my upper arm this time.

  “Hogwash,” she pronounced. “I know you, girl, and there is no way you’d risk arrest just to find some books.”

  Rubbing the spot on my arm, I glared at her. Okay, I tried to, but Aunt Jewel is a formidable lady. So it was more a quick hard stare before I went back to cowering a little bit.

  “She was looking for books, Aunt Jewel,” Bee insisted, coming to stand beside me. Like Ryan, she’d known The Aunts her whole life, too, and had basically been adopted by them. “We promise.”

  Aunt Jewel harrumphed at that, but looked at the three of us, standing there on David’s lawn, probably looking as exhausted as we felt. It wasn’t that late, but, man, had it been a night.

  “All three of you are going home now,” she said, and when I went to protest, she just shook her head. “No. Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow. You’re lucky I was able to convince that police officer that you were suffering the aftereffects of a traumatic breakup, Harper Jane.”

  That had been the most embarrassing part of this whole thing, having to look suitably ashamed while the police officer sized me up after Aunt Jewel’s explanation. I wasn’t sure if cops were allowed to gossip, but the last thing I wanted was people thinking I was losing it over David leaving. I was not the kind of girl who pined, for heaven’s sake.

  “Your aunt is right, Harper,” Ryan said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “We can come back tomorrow, hopefully a little more stealthily.”

  My skin felt too tight, my legs restless, but it wasn’t tied to my Paladin senses, I didn’t think. This was just my regular response to being told to wait or be patient. And besides, that girl was still out there, gunning for me. The sooner I got this worked out the better.

  But I couldn’t argue with Ryan, Bee, and Aunt Jewel, all three of whom were looking at me expectantly, clearly waiting for me to acquiesce.

  So in the end, I did.

  • • •

  I didn’t sleep well that night, which I figured was a natural side effect of having been attacked and nearly arrested. And clearly it showed on my face when I showed up downstairs the next morning, because my mom took one look at me and said she was calling the pool and telling them I was sick.

  I didn’t even try to argue.

  While she was on the phone, Dad came in, straightening his tie.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he said, ruffling my hair. Even though I’ll be eighteen in a few months, my dad perpetually treats me like a third-grader.

  On a morning like today, I was actually pretty okay with that.

  “Rough night?” he asked, and I sighed, poking at my bowl of cereal.

  “Something like that.”

  Dad filled his coffee mug, the one I’d painted for him at camp back when I actually was a third-grader. He almost always used it, even though the acrylic paint meant he had to rinse it out by hand instead of putting it in the dishwasher.

  “Still nothing from David?” he asked, and I bisected a Cheerio with my spoon.

  As far as my parents—and everyone else in town—knew, David had left to join his aunt Saylor in some other state, and that move meant we were done. I’d tried to make it seem like it was mutual, that neither of us wanted to do long distance, but clearly I had not succeeded.

  “He’s been in touch,” I said vaguely. Which wasn’t really a lie. I mean, that girl showing up proved he’d been thinking about me.

  Dad made a noncommittal sound and took a sip of coffee just as Mom breezed back into the kitchen.

  “They said Bee called in sick, too,” she told me, and I sat up a little straighter on my stool.

  “I wonder if there’s something going around,” Mom continued. She pressed a hand to my forehead, frowning. There were fine lines around her eyes, and she definitely seemed worried, but I had to admit that in the weeks since David had gone, Mom hadn’t seemed nearly as stressed.

  Of course she hadn’t known about the Paladin thing, but I think she’d picked up on . . . something. Some Mom sense of hers had alerted her that I was going through stuff she couldn’t understand, and it had clearly taken a toll.

  “Maybe,” I told her now. “Or we’ve just gotten too much sun.”

  I tried to sound nonchalant, but I was worried about Bee and anxious to get to my phone and call her. Was she really sick, or had that girl paid her a visit?

  That thought had me on my feet, muttering something about going back to bed.

  When I got to my room, the light on my cell was blinking, and I checked it, relieved to see that I had two missed calls from Bee, as well as three texts, all asking where I was.

  So I wasn’t the only one on edge.

  I called her back, and she picked up on the first ring.

  “There you are.”

  “Sorry,” I said, sitting down on the edge of my bed, tucking my legs beneath me. “What’s wrong? Anything happen last night?”

  Bee blew out a long breath, and I could practically see her sitting in her own room, blond hair a mess around her head. Bee always had the worst case of bedhead.

  “No, but I didn’t sleep because I was so paranoid that girl might come back.”

  “Same,” I told her on a sigh.

  There was a long pause on her end of the phone, and then she said, almost tentatively, “You were right. About David, about us helping him and screwing everything up.”

  My fingers tightened around the phone. “You were doing what you thought was best,” I said, but the words were a little rote—I’d said them before, after all—and she knew it.

  “Still,” she said. “Ryan and I . . . Look, Harper, whatever you need us to do, we’ll do it.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was just a little past nine a.m., but I was hoping that would mean most everyone in David’s neighborhood was at work already.

  “Then meet me back at David’s in an hour.”

  Chapter 6

  “REMIND ME again what we’re actually looking for,” Bee said. She sat cross-legged on the floor of David’s room, her braid brushing the pages of the book she held in her lap.

  Sighing, I picked a book out of the stack in front of me. The title on the spine was barely legible, the gold leaf all but rubbed away from hundreds of hands over dozens of years, but since none of the other books seemed like what I was looking for—they all seemed too new—I figured I was better off starting with that one. We’d been here for nearly an hour already, and nothing was jumping out at me. Luckily, I’d been right about the neighborhood being fairly deserted, and we’d slipped in with no trouble—no one had bothered covering up the hole I’d made by the door—but I didn’t want to press my luck.

  “Anything that looks like a locating spell, or something that mentions finding an Oracle. How to track one.”

  “Oracle GPS,” Ryan muttered to himself, and I gave him a little smile.

  “Something like that.”

  David’s bedroom was dim, and even though he’d only been gone for a few weeks, it was already starting to have that musty, unused smell of locked-up rooms. Other than the books, everything was mostly in order, the bed made up, the desk clear, and looking at all of it, I could almost believe David would be back any minute now. He’d hardly taken anything with him, and I wondered for about the millionth time how he was getting by. Saylor had had pl
enty of money, but I wasn’t sure how David could’ve gotten his hands on any of it. Plus he wouldn’t be able to get motel rooms. Was he sleeping in his car, or camping out in the woods somewhere?

  Dire as everything was, that idea made me smile. David Stark, camping? I’d pay good money to see that. We’d taken a field trip to the nearby Boy Scout campgrounds in the sixth grade, and when they’d asked us to put up a tent, David had been hopeless. I still had a clear memory of him as a moving lump underneath a green nylon tarp, trying to get his poles stuck in the ground.

  “You okay?”

  I glanced up to see Bee watching me as she closed the book in her lap. “You had a weird look on your face,” she added, and I shook my head slightly, turning back to the book in front of me.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Just . . . thinking.”

  Bee’s eyes dropped a little lower, and I knew she was looking at the cut below my jaw. I touched it self-consciously. The cut had scabbed over in the night, and I was hoping that meant some of my super-healing powers were firing up again.

  I kept my focus on the books in front of me for nearly an hour but was starting to lose faith. Saylor had had a ton of books on Oracle lore, but it was mostly history and stuff. Nothing about which spells to use should your Oracle go rogue, then disappear.

  “No wonder this always went to crap for them,” I said, tossing aside a book in a way that would’ve made David scowl if he’d been here to see it. “They never have anything useful. And the prophecies are like that, too. ‘Oooh, when the black swan squawks at midnight, the stone will roll away.’”

  Ryan blinked at me. “Whoa, did David ever say something like that?”

  Rolling my eyes, I stood up, dusting off the backs of my legs. “I may have been exaggerating, but only slightly.”

  “I remember,” Ryan said. “That night at the golf course, what was it he said to you? Something about choosing?”

  I ignored that, pretending to be absorbed in scanning the bookshelves again. That word—“choose”—was a constant thrumming in my head. Over and over again, it seemed like people were telling me that’s what I’d have to do when it came to David. I thought in the end, I had chosen him, but it was pretty clear he hadn’t chosen me.

  And now he was sending people after me.

  “Still don’t really get what the point of having an Oracle is if he can’t give prophecies that make any sense,” Ryan commented.

  “Well, yeah,” I replied, my fingers trailing over the spines of the books. “That was kind of the whole issue. The Ephors didn’t just want to kill David because male Oracles go crazy—they also suck at having visions. The male Oracles don’t see what will happen, just everything that might happen.”

  I pulled a book from the shelf, upsetting a little Lord of the Rings figure that had been propped on top of it. There was an uncomfortable silence for a long moment, and then Bee cleared her throat. “I thought his visions had always been pretty clear.”

  “They were,” I told her. “Once Blythe did the spell on him, it seemed like things were coming in clearer.”

  “Seemed?” Ryan asked, glancing over. His auburn hair had gotten longer over the summer and was falling over his forehead. “He didn’t tell you?”

  Ah yes, another embarrassing part of my whole Paladin experience. I’d been dating the Oracle, but he’d never really told me the truth about the things he’d see in his visions. Maybe they scared him.

  Now I just shrugged at Ryan. “My job was to keep him safe, not interpret his visions,” I said, and Ryan’s eyes widened a little bit.

  “I wasn’t talking about Paladin you,” he clarified. “I meant, like, girlfriend you.”

  And that had always been the issue, hadn’t it? I’d never known which person to be, and being both at the same time never really worked.

  “Maybe David needed some kind of interpreter,” Bee suggested, getting back on the subject of David’s prophecies, which I appreciated. “Or a—oh!” Her finger came down on one page with a thump. “This . . . might be something.”

  “What is it?” I asked, and she looked up at me, her brown eyes bright.

  “It’s kind of a mess,” she said. “Like, some of it is in English, some of it in Greek, I think, but I see the word ‘summoning.’”

  I crossed the room to look down at the page she was pointing to. It’s true, the words were a jumble, which was something I’d seen in a lot of the books Saylor had collected. Like someone had attempted a translation, but in a kind of half-baked way either because some things just couldn’t be translated, or because the person had been in a hurry, copying things off scrolls or whatever. But this one also had an illustration with two guys in robes standing on a cliff top, a small pile of random things—what looked like a robe, a clay bowl, and what I was pretty sure was an empty turtle shell—gathered on the ground in front of them.

  “Why do they have all that stuff?” Ryan asked, leaning over Bee’s shoulder and tapping the pile in front of the robed guys.

  “Maybe those were things that belonged to the Oracle?” I suggested. “That would make sense if you were trying to summon one, right? Using things connected to him? Or her, I guess.”

  Glancing around David’s room, I said, “Grab something. Anything easy to carry.”

  Ryan’s hand came down on my wrist, not hard, but firm, definitive. “Hold up. We don’t even know this is the right ritual,” he said, and then nodded back at the book. “It doesn’t even say ‘Oracle.’”

  “That we can tell,” I reminded him. “One of those Greek words could be it, and, I mean, come on, Ryan. Do you have any other ideas?”

  I knew he didn’t, and while I’d like to say I was a little nervous about running off half-cocked like this, the truth was, I was so excited that it might actually work that I didn’t have time to feel nervous or like this was a bad idea.

  Maybe I should have.

  Chapter 7

  WE’D DONE these kinds of rituals before, and they had almost always ended in total disaster. The last time we’d tried one, David had had a major Oracle freak-out that included his eyes going golden and his powers opening up cracks in the ground at the local golf course. So, yeah, we didn’t have the best track record with this kind of thing, but that wasn’t going to stop us this time.

  Although we had learned to go farther out of town now.

  We’d waited until night—this seemed like the kind of thing that worked best by moonlight—and picked a weed-choked field not too far past the city limits, and we’d picked it for a good reason. This is where the last Ephor, Alexander, had chosen to have his “headquarters,” a fancy house that, it turned out, he’d created solely with magic. The house had vanished when his powers failed, and Alexander died not too far from the spot where we all stood now. I’m not going to lie, being back here gave me a major case of the heebie-jeebies; but to my way of thinking, it made sense to attempt hard-core magic in a place where there had once been a lot of . . . well, hard-core magic. Bee and Ryan were both less than certain about all of it if the looks they kept trading were anything to go by.

  I choked back irritation at that. Okay, maybe I didn’t always have the greatest plans, but what was the harm in trying to stack the deck a little? Still, my eyes kept drifting to that spot where I’d watched Alexander’s eyes go blank, and I had to work hard not to shiver even in the sticky heat of the night. Also, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was a little . . . desperate. Like Aunt Jewel had said: Most girls have to be talked out of texting an ex, and here I was using freaking magic to summon back a dude who had, for all intents and purposes, dumped me.

  I thrust my shoulders back and took a deep breath. “So,” I said, holding the page I’d torn out of the book, “we all have items of David’s, right?”

  Ryan lifted the journal he’d taken from David’s desk, while Bee waggled the pen. I took the jump drive out of
my pocket, and we each threw our item onto the ground in front of us. In the distance I could hear a car go by, and overhead the moon was bright.

  “All right, now we all need to picture David in our minds, as clearly as we can.”

  Sighing, Ryan closed his eyes and shifted his weight. “I’m all for finding the guy,” he said, lifting one foot to scratch the opposite ankle with his toe, “if that’s what you really want, Harper, but I have to admit, standing in a field on a moonlit night picturing his face feels kinda weird.”

  Bee gave a little snort of laughter that she tried to cover with her hand, and I frowned at both of them. “Y’all. Focus.”

  When the three of us linked hands, I could feel the vague thrum of magic surging through us. It wasn’t strong, the way it was when we did it with David, but it was still there, and I took some comfort in that. So my powers were fading, or kind of on the fritz. At least they weren’t gone.

  But if your powers are fading, some evil voice in the back of my mind whispered, why are Bee’s and Ryan’s just as strong as ever?

  That wasn’t something I wanted to think about too hard, so I lowered my head, trying to ignore the dull ache still at the base of my scalp from where that girl had pulled my hair.

  David. I was focusing on David. I called him up in my mind as best as I could, trying not to remember how he’d looked those last few days—his skin grayish, his cheekbones too prominent, his eyes haunted—but how he used to look, back when we first fell into this thing.

  That David grinned at me in my mind’s eye, his blond hair sticking up in weird little tufts, his eyes blue behind his glasses. I thought of the freckles across the bridge of his nose, and the way he would lift just one corner of his mouth in a smile. I thought of the way he called me Pres, and how his hands would flex on my waist when we kissed.

  I thought of the night we’d gone out to the golf course to try to help David have a vision.

  Or, more accurately, I thought of what had happened after, when we’d gone back to David’s house.