“Did he say what it was about?” I asked, and David gave me that look from underneath his brows. There were still little pinpricks of light in his eyes, glowing brighter in the dim library, and I noticed he still had sunglasses hanging from the collar of his shirt.
“Pretty sure there’s only one thing it could be about, Pres. He has to know about last night.”
Again with the blushing. I knew David was referring to the vision at the golf course, but I remembered the way Alexander had looked at the two of us when he’d figured out what we were to each other. What if he wanted to talk about . . . the other thing that had happened yesterday?
The same idea had apparently occurred to David, because it was his turn to go pink, his eyes dropping to the floor. “I’ll meet you by your car after school?” he asked, and I nodded.
I could barely concentrate on anything else for the rest of the day, and when Bee found me as I made my way out to the parking lot after the last bell, she had to call my name more than once.
It was another beautiful sunny day, and Bee looked just as beautiful and sunny herself as she jogged toward me in a lime-green shirt and white jeans. “Hey,” she breathed when she caught up with me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said with a quick nod, even though I felt anything but. The weirdness between me and David, knowing that Alexander was waiting . . . It was a lot on my mind, almost too much for me to focus on the fact that things with me and Bee weren’t exactly the best right now. But then she reached out, laying a hand on my shoulder, and looked down into my face.
“Are we okay?”
Taking a deep breath, I shook my head. “Probably not?” And then I smiled, a little shakily. “But we will be.”
Now it was Bee’s turn to take a deep breath, but she smiled back at me, squeezing my shoulder. “Good. That’s . . . good.”
I wanted to stay and talk to her longer, but I could already see David standing by my car, so with a little wave at Bee, I made my way toward him.
• • •
“How?” It was the first thing Alexander had said to us when we walked in the door, and he seemed determined to repeat it now. We were in his office, but for once, he wasn’t sitting behind the desk. Instead, he was pacing, a hank of hair coming forward to fall over his forehead.
David and I stood on the rug like a couple of kids called to meet the principal, and I wondered why I felt so guilty. David could do whatever the heck he wanted with his visions, and while, yeah, it had gotten a little scary there for a second, it wasn’t like anyone had been hurt. Besides, he’d proven exactly how powerful he was, and that seemed like something we should actually be pretty pumped about.
“Was it from one of the books your Mage kept?” Alexander asked, almost frantic. His tie was loose, one cuff of his shirt unbuttoned where it peeked out from underneath his jacket sleeve. “A . . . a ritual or something that you found and decided to experiment with.”
“There wasn’t a book,” David told him, jamming his hands into his back pockets. “I just . . . I felt like if I tried, I could have a vision, and I did. It was cloudy and . . . I don’t know, murky. Like they used to be before Blythe did the ritual.”
Alexander stopped pacing, coming to stand in front of his desk with both hands braced on the edge. “But you did see something?”
David kept his hands in the pockets of his skinny jeans, his shoulders tight. After a moment, he nodded, and Alexander dropped his head with a deep sigh.
I’d never seen Alexander look anything besides 100 percent with-it and together, but now, he wiped a hand across his mouth, and I could swear he was shaking. There was also something about the way he was looking at David that I definitely did not like.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “Even with the ritual Blythe performed, there’s no way you should . . . No one has ever overcome the removal spell I did on you. Ever.”
Next to me, David gave a familiar shrug. “Well, I did.” He said it as a challenge, and as I watched, David pushed his shoulders back, meeting Alexander’s gaze head-on.
“What was it you saw?” Alexander asked, and David flexed his fingers. I was waiting for that answer myself, but if David wouldn’t tell me, I knew he wouldn’t tell Alexander. And sure enough, after a pause, he shook his head.
Alexander stood there, his hair still messy, his gaze fixed on David’s face, and while his expression didn’t change, it was like I could see the gears whirring in his head. I sometimes felt that with David, too, that I could sense all that was going on beneath the surface, and it was weird to have the same feeling watching Alexander.
Then he straightened up abruptly, fixing his tie and tugging at the unbuttoned cuff with a sniff. “The Peirasmos is cancelled,” he said in a tight voice, and I blinked, caught totally off guard.
“What?”
“There’s no need for it anymore,” Alexander continued, and when his eyes met mine, they were hard chips of pale green ice.
But I’d faced a lot of scarier things than one pissed-off snooty guy, so I met that cold gaze and asked, “Why? A few weeks ago, this was so important that if I didn’t do it, I’d die, and now you’re telling me, ‘oh, no big, totes cancelled, everyone go on your merry way!’”
Alexander stood ramrod straight, his fingers still on the cuff of his shirt. “I do not know what ‘totes’ means in this context, but I assure you, no one is ‘going on their merry way,’ Miss Price.”
With that, he crossed over to his desk, pulling open a drawer and yanking out an ancient-looking binder of some kind, the leather cracked and peeling. As he smacked it on top of his desk, he glanced up at the two of us.
“You may go now,” he said, lifting one long-fingered hand to more or less shoo us away.
I stayed right where I was, hands on my hips. “Um, I will not be shooed. What is going on here?”
“What is going on,” Alexander replied, bracing both hands on his desk to look up at me, “is that our Oracle is more powerful than I’d guessed, and now I have to rethink some things. Which I can do much better without you standing there yammering at me.”
I was pretty sure I’d never been accused of “yammering” in my life, and I was about to show Alexander what real yammering was, but David tugged my elbow, pulling me toward the door. “Let’s get out of here, Pres.”