Rebel Belle

Chapter 15

SHE SAID the actual word. Saylor Stark said the F-word.

From his place on the carpet, David started to stir. “What happened?” he muttered, trying to sit up. As soon as he did, he flinched, lowering his head back into his hands. “Did I have a stroke? Is that why I think you said what I think you just said?” he asked Saylor.

“You know,” I said, ignoring David. “You know what I am.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she walked into the kitchen. I heard the rattle of ice, then a cabinet opening and closing.

David still sat on the carpet, knees drawn up to his chest.

“Are you okay?” I asked, sliding out of my chair and onto my knees. The thick carpet scraped my skin as I edged forward.

“No,” he replied. “I feel like my head is about to explode.”

I moved a little closer to him. He looked so pale and wretched that I was tempted to smooth his hair back the way Saylor had. Instead, I fisted my hands in my skirt. “I know that was intense, but hey—your aunt knows what’s going on. That’s awesome, right? We can get some answers.”

David raised his head. His pupils were so huge his eyes looked almost black. “Actually, Pres,” he rasped out, “my aunt being in on this makes it a hell of a lot weirder.”

Saylor came back in, holding a small glass full of a dark amber liquid. She sat down at the table, threw back the drink, and then looked at the two of us again.

Then she got up and made another drink.

Once that one was down, she finally said, “I’m not really your aunt, David. If that makes things easier for you.”

David went very still, and for a moment, everything was so quiet, I could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.

Then she turned to me. “I thought it might be you. I knew that Christopher was gone, I . . . I felt him go. And then you and David both looked so shaken up yesterday that I wondered if maybe . . .” Sighing, she set her glass down. I stared at the perfectly set table, the silverware still in neat rows, napkins folded, and fought the urge to burst into hysterical giggles. Or tears.

Shutting my eyes, I tried to focus. “Christopher?”

David murmured, “Mr. Hall. That was his first name.” When I opened my eyes, David was still looking at the ground, arms encircling his knees.

Saylor tipped her head back. The light from the chandelier caught her earrings, sending scattered rainbows across the shiny surface of the dining room table. “What happened?”

I told her about the night of the Homecoming Dance as briefly as I could. When I was done, a single tear trickled out from under Saylor’s closed eyes. “It’s my fault,” she murmured. “I knew the wards needed to be stronger the closer we got, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it. And I hoped . . .” She opened her eyes then, focusing on David. “I hoped,” she said again, and then she was standing up.

I half expected her to go make another drink. Instead, she wandered to the window, hands braced on her lower back. “I’m guessing you two will want the whole story, then.”

David was still grayish, but when he rose to his feet, there was steel in his voice. “You think? If you’re not my aunt, then who the hell are you? Why do I live with you?”

Saylor took a deep breath. “Technically, I kidnapped you.”

I felt David jump at that, and wasn’t sure anything had ever been more painful than watching him try to think of some way to respond. “My parents?” he asked, his voice strangled.

“Dead,” Saylor replied, blunt. “Murdered by the same people who are after you now.”

She dropped her head, pinching her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “I’m messing this up. There’s so much to tell you, and I don’t even know where to start. Christopher would’ve been better at this, Christopher was—” Saylor broke off. “It doesn’t matter. The point is you’re an Oracle.”

“But that’s impossible,” I said. “Everything I read said that Oracles are always girls.”

Saylor whipped her head around to me. I think for a second, she’d forgotten I was there. “You’ve already started researching this?”

“A-a little,” I told her, standing up. “Dr. DuPont used the word Paladin, so I started there. Then when I talked to David, he mentioned his . . . his dreams, and we started putting things together.”

The look Saylor gave me was part pride, part appraisal. I’d seen it before at Cotillion practice. “Clever girl,” she said in a low voice. “Maybe you’ll be better at this than I thought.”

Then she heaved another sigh and came back to the table, bracing her hands on it. “But what you read was wrong. There can be male Oracles, although there’s only been one besides you, David. In the eighth century, there was one named Alaric, and—”

David gripped the back of a chair, his jaw set. “I don’t want a history lesson,” he ground out. “You’re telling me you’re not my aunt, my parents are dead, and I’m an Oracle. The eighth century doesn’t really mean shit to me right now.”

“David,” I said, tugging his jacket.

“It’s all right,” Saylor said, her eyes still on David. “You have every right to be upset. More than upset. But we are running out of time, and now that there are . . . ,” her gaze flicked to me, “unforeseen complications, I need you to listen. I need you to understand. I don’t need you to forgive me right now, but please. Hear me out.”

David paused, nearly vibrating with anger and energy. But eventually, he sat.

Saylor closed her eyes briefly and then continued. “Unfortunately, Alaric was nowhere near as powerful as all of the women who came before him were. His visions were muddy, unclear. More what could be than what would be.”

“That seems . . . lame,” I said, going back to sit in my chair.

“That’s a word for it, yes,” Saylor replied. “And the problem is, you can’t have more than one Oracle at once. One has to die for another to be born.”

Dumbly, I nodded. “So if you get stuck with a dud Oracle—”

Saylor cut me off with a wave of her hand. “You have to kill it in order to bring forth the next one. But obviously Alaric wasn’t about to let himself be killed. Instead, he attempted a . . . well, a ritual on himself. One that would make his powers increase tenfold so that his visions would be clearer.”

“Did it work?” David’s hands were still wrapped tightly around the top of his chair, but his shoulders weren’t up around his ears anymore and some color had returned to his face.

Saylor patted at her hair, leaning back. “It did. But it worked too well. Alaric didn’t just improve his visions. He gained new powers. Alarmingly strong ones. At that time, Alaric . . . I suppose you could say he belonged to Charlemagne. And Charlemagne had set up a cadre of knights to protect Alaric that he called the Paladins. But until Alaric did his ritual, they were just ordinary men. After the ritual, Alaric was able to make them . . .” She trailed off, her eyes moving over me. “Well, you. Not just knights, but supernaturally gifted warriors, all of them loyal to Alaric to the point of death.”

I swallowed, not liking the sound of that.

Saylor sat forward in her chair a little, hands clenched in front of her. “But the ritual had an unintended side effect. That much power, it’s . . . it’s more than a human brain can handle. It more or less burned Alaric up from the inside, twisting him into something evil. Charlemagne eventually ordered him executed.”

“But he had a whole posse of bodyguards with superpowers,” David muttered, sinking into his chair.

Saylor nodded. “Exactly. Between Alaric’s powers and the dozens of Paladins guarding him, it took over a hundred men to kill the Oracle. An entire village was destroyed in the process, and there were only two Paladins left when it was all over.”

“So once Alaric was dead, what happened?” David asked. His mouth was still set in a hard line, but his eyes were curious.

“A group of powerful men met and decided that the Oracle should no longer belong to any one ruler. She—and they were only ever women after Alaric—should be kept safe somewhere, guarded. The two remaining Paladins volunteered for the task.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. I really wish I’d brought some paper and pens. This seemed like a situation where a chart could help. “So what are you then?”

The corners of her mouth turned up. “When Alaric took Charlemagne’s knights and turned them into Paladins, he also took Charlemagne’s two court magicians and gave them powers as well. Granted, they only got a fraction of the magic that Alaric possessed, but it was enough. They called themselves Mages. And that, Harper, is what I am.”

In the silence that followed, I heard a car drive down the street and the distant hooting of an owl. “So you’re a witch?” David finally asked, the tips of his ears red.

Saylor smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from her pantsuit and gave a dismissive sniff. “That is an ugly word, David Stark. Mages don’t ride around on broomsticks or conjure up things. We use potions, minor spells to assist the Oracle and the Paladin in their work.”

“So there’s one Oracle,” I said, flinging a hand out toward David. “And now there’s one Paladin.” I pointed at myself. “How many Mages are there?”

“Two, usually,” Saylor answered, fiddling with the edge of a placemat. “The Ephors—those are the men who took charge of the Oracle—believed in keeping things traditional. Since there were two original Paladins, two original Mages, they’ve always tried to maintain that balance. You said the bathroom was spotless after the fight with Christopher and Dr. DuPont, right?”

When David and I both nodded, Saylor said, “That was alchemy.” Then she frowned. “Incredibly dangerous alchemy, though. That spell is a sort of temporal shift. It returns the setting to what it looked like before the trauma. Cara never would’ve tried something like that.”

When David and I both asked, “Who?” Saylor waved a hand. “The other Mage when I was with the Ephors. She was old then, though, and that was nearly twenty years ago. They must have someone new.”

David, who had been worrying at one of his fingernails, dropped his hand. “A temporal shift. Why doesn’t that make the people that got killed . . . undead?”

Saylor turned her glass over and over in her hand. “I told you, our powers are very limited. Control over the human body and soul . . . that’s very far beyond us. Fixing a gate or a broken section of tile in a bathroom is one thing. Erasing something as permanent as death is . . .” She broke off, pushing her glass away. “In any case, the main purpose of the Mage is to serve as a kind of . . . battery, I suppose, to the Oracle. That’s what happened tonight. When the three of us joined hands, you finally got the burst of power you needed.”

And we’d seen David’s vision, too. Except even now, it was fading from my mind, like trying to remember a dream. What had David said?

I glanced over at him and saw that he also appeared to be deep in thought. But before I could ask any more questions, Saylor stood up.

“Which leads us to now. And to you. Both of you. Eighteen years ago, we were living in Greece. That’s where the Ephors keep the Oracle, Paladin, and Mage. We’d had the same Oracle for . . . oh, years. Since before I was called. And when she died, she gave us one last prophecy. That the next Oracle born would be a boy. So they ordered Christopher to kill him. You,” she said to David.

I took a sip of my lemonade. The ice had melted, and it tasted bitter now, but my mouth was so dry I didn’t care.

“When an Oracle dies, she always gives the place and time where the new one will be born. Christopher and I were sent to get you.”

For the first time, shame washed over Saylor’s face. “Alchemy.” She fumbled in her pocket, bringing out a small blue jar of lip balm. “This is a salve. A potion that lets the Mage do minor mind-control spells. I compelled your mother to hand you to me. She did it with a smile.”

I thought the back of the chair might crack under David’s hands, but he didn’t say anything.

“We were halfway back to Greece when I realized I couldn’t do it,” Saylor continued, tears in her voice. “Christopher couldn’t, either. We’d made a vow to protect the Oracle, no matter what. And so we . . . we stole you.”

She stood up again, brushing at her slacks. “Mages don’t have particularly powerful magic, so we try to steal it whenever we can find it. Back in the 1800s, there was a witch who lived in this town. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, she threw up wards all over the place. Makes it hard for anyone to get in if they mean to do harm. So it seemed like the perfect hiding spot.”

Saylor busied herself with some of the knickknacks on the sideboard, picking up a porcelain shepherdess and putting it down beside a Swarovski hedgehog. “And of course, I made sure I got on every committee I could, the more excuse to put up extra protection symbols. I even put one on you,” she said, pointing to David’s arm. Startled, he pushed up the sleeve of his T-shirt, and sure enough, there was a tiny scar on his arm, almost like a birthmark, in that same shape of a figure eight on its side.

“But then,” Saylor said, “I guess you figured that out. Still, they worked. Oh, the first year, there was a man the Ephors sent who got through, but Christopher sorted that out, and I put up that ugly statue in the park. After that, there were no more incidents until recently.”

My brain actually ached. I didn’t know that was possible.

I rolled my neck, hoping that might help. “So why now, then? Why after nearly eighteen years are all your spells and wards not working?”

Saylor gave a rueful smile. “They were only ever a Band-Aid. The closer we get to Cotillion, the weaker they’ll become.”

David’s head shot up. “Cotillion?”

“Night of the swans,” I said, suddenly remembering. “That’s what you said when you had your little”— I waved my hand—“fit.”

“Vision,” Saylor corrected while David shrugged his shoulders, uncomfortable.

“What’s happening the night of Cotillion?” It was stupid, I know, but as soon as I said it, a weight seemed to settle in my chest. Cotillion. The night I’d been looking forward to for so long, and now even it was part of this insanity?

Saylor went to take another sip of her drink, but it was empty. I didn’t drink alcohol, but I felt her pain as she frowned at the ice cubes in her glass. I could use a drink, too. “Before the last Oracle died, she not only gave us the location of the new Oracle, she also named a specific night when the new Oracle would be tested. At the end of this test, the Oracle would either be the most powerful Oracle yet, or . . . or he would be dead.”

That word—dead—seemed to hang in the air around us. David dropped into a chair, his hands clutching the knees of his pants as he slumped forward.

Saylor reached out, to touch him, I think, but her hand only hovered a few inches in front of him before she drew it back. Clearing her throat, she continued, “So that’s why I took over Cotillion and moved it to that night.”

“Why not cancel it altogether?” I shifted in my seat. “Take David out of the country that night or something.”

But Saylor just shook her head. “Certain events, they’re like fixed points in time. Destined. This is one of them. David has to go through this test, whatever it is, and nothing can stop it. All we can do is . . . be prepared.”

“So what does all this mean?” I finally asked. My voice sounded dry and unused, and my mind was racing, trying to process all of this. Magic, and Greece, and stolen babies . . . it was like my life had suddenly turned into a really bad soap opera.

“It means that you’ve been given a sacred duty,” Saylor said. Her voice sounded different, and there was hardly a trace of Southern accent in it at all. “From this day forward, you will be tasked with protecting the Oracle at all costs. He’ll be your sole focus until the day you, like Christopher, have to lay down your life for him.”

Saylor reached for my hand, and I gave it to her without thinking. “So, Harper Jane Price. Are you ready to accept your destiny?”