Crossing the room, she took my head in her hands, looking at my face. Then her eyes dropped lower, and her lips fell open a little bit. “Oh my God, she cut you.”

I thought there was a little sting on my neck, and I’d definitely felt the girl hold a knife there. But thinking I’d been cut and having actual confirmation of it were two different things.

Grimacing, I lifted a hand to my neck, and my fingers came away red. It was shallow, but still.

“We need to get out of here,” I told her, and Bee stepped back, glancing around the changing room.

“Should we try to go after her, or—”

There was no doubt in my mind that girl was long gone, and even if we did go after her, I’m not sure how much damage we could’ve done. I was trembling, Bee was clearly freaked out, and that girl had a lot of advantages over us.

Namely, that her Paladin strength was apparently working just fine.

“No,” I told Bee. “At least not now.”

We made our way out of the locker room, the pool quiet except for the occasional sizzle of a bug against the zappers. Bee locked the gate behind us before we walked into the parking lot.

“Do we need to go to the hospital?”

Every muscle in my body ached, and breathing hurt a lot more than it should have; but hospitals meant questions, and questions meant my parents, and my parents probably meant more questions and possibly the police.

So I shook my head, trying not to lean so heavily on Bee as she helped me out to the car. It was dark now, but the streetlights were bright, casting big, comforting pools of illumination on the asphalt as we wound our way through the parking lot. I tried to focus on the big moths battering themselves against the bulbs and not on how shaky and scared I felt. My limbs were tingling, something close to adrenaline moving through me, and I knew I was feeling my Paladin powers seeping back in. That was good. That helped me not feel like what I’d been for a second: a terrified, helpless girl at the mercy of someone I couldn’t see.

Someone who had gotten away.

Bee must have felt me shudder, because she stopped, pulling back to look at me. Her brown eyes were wide enough for me to see the whites almost all the way around her irises. “Harper—” she started, but I waved her off.

“I’m fine.”

I was basically the opposite of fine, and we both knew it.

“Was she just stronger than you, or is something wrong?” she asked, and I swallowed hard. Bee’s own powers seemed fine, and as much as I tried to pretend that mine hadn’t faded, she’d never had to practically hold me up before.

“She just surprised me is all,” I said now. “And it was like I never managed to get off the back foot, you know?”

Bee nodded, but she didn’t say anything. She just moved a little faster, and soon we were at her car, Bee gingerly helping me into the passenger seat. I was able to buckle my seat belt without wincing, so that felt like a minor victory, and it gave me the courage to sit up a little straighter. The sooner I convinced Bee I was okay, the sooner I would feel okay. Or at least that’s what I hoped.

She got into the driver’s seat, her keys jangling as she started the car, and I looked over at her. “Ryan,” I said. “We should go make sure he’s all right, let him know what happened.”

Nodding, Bee glanced in the rearview mirror. “I was thinking the same thing.” Her damp hair fell over her shoulders as she shot me another look. “So that was totally another Paladin.”

The pain was almost completely gone now, but I could still remember just how hard that girl had hit me, how fast she’d moved in the darkness. “She said she was, and yeah, it sure seemed she was telling the truth.” Grimacing, I rubbed my scalp where she’d pulled my hair.

Pine Grove sped by, a blur of trees and flowers and little shops that were closed for the night. I fished a hand-sanitizing wipe out of my purse to clean the wound on my neck—knew those things would come in handy working at the pool, but had to admit, this was not how I’d thought I’d be using them—and then leaned my head against the window, letting the cool glass soothe my scraped cheek. I knew I’d been right to hate that gross carpet in the changing rooms.

“If she was a Paladin—” Bee said, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

“David made her,” I finished, my head aching for a whole other reason now. “She told me so. She said . . .” I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish that sentence. But no, denying a hard thing didn’t make it not exist. So I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and said, “She said he sent her to kill me.”

To her credit, Bee didn’t swerve the car off the road or gasp or anything, but I did think she suddenly looked a lot paler. “Why?” was all she asked, and I leaned my head back against the seat.

“According to our new friend back there, David thinks I’ll kill him.”

That was the time I would have liked to have seen some shock, maybe wide eyes, but Bee just took that in, too, and I could tell she was thinking hard. It was there in that nervous drumming—something David had done, too, I remembered—and in the way she chewed at her lip.

“You said he saw that once, right? In a vision?”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah, he did. But his visions don’t always come true,” I reminded her. “Perils of male Oracle-dom. He sees not just what will happen, but what could happen.”

“That is so annoying,” Bee murmured, and I didn’t disagree. David had never actually believed that vision anyway. He’d told me so, plenty of times.

But Saylor had warned me once that boy Oracles were notoriously unstable. If David had ridden into crazy town, making other Paladins and thinking I was out to hurt him, what was he capable of? He’d almost blown up Pine Grove when he left, and now he’d turned some random girl into a freaking assassin.

“Is there anyone we can talk to?” she finally wondered aloud, turning into Ryan’s neighborhood. Like mine, it was lined with tall oak and magnolia trees, and there was a tasteful brick sign reading “Amber Ridge.”

“No,” I answered, watching the elegant homes slide by. “Trust me, I wish there were, but . . .”

It had been David’s “aunt” Saylor who’d first explained everything about Paladins and Oracles, who had trained me how to fight and told me what was expected of me. After she’d been killed, an Ephor—one of the people who controlled the Oracle—had come to town, and he’d told me a little more. But he was gone, too, died before my eyes, and with him had gone any chance of learning more. Alexander had been the last Ephor, which meant that we were completely out of adults who might be of any help.

Of course, after David left back in May, I hadn’t thought we’d need any more help. It seemed like my days of chasing danger were over. To be honest, I’d been a little relieved, even if David leaving had broken my heart.

“If he’s making Paladins,” I said slowly, “it’s because someone is making him do it. You know David would never do this on his own. Maybe Alexander was wrong and there are more Ephors. Maybe it’s Blythe! We haven’t seen her since Cotillion, and there’s no telling what she might be up to.” True, some of the stuff Alexander said had implied that Blythe was probably dead, but whatever. I was grasping at straws right now.