“Harper, no,” she said firmly, but I reached out and wrapped my fingers around her biceps, making her look down into my face.
“This is something I have to do alone,” I told her. “You’ve come all this way with me, and I couldn’t have done any of it without you, you know that, but this—” Breaking off, I turned to look over my shoulder at the gaping mouth of limestone behind me. “This is on me.”
Bee blinked a few times, and her eyes were bright, her face pale. “You don’t have your powers anymore,” she said, and her voice trembled.
“Neither do you,” I reminded her, giving her arms a squeeze. “And I can’t risk you getting hurt. Not again.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop feeling guilty for what had happened to Bee the night of Cotillion, and while I knew I could never make it up to her, this at least let me feel like I was trying. I remembered the way Blythe’s eyes had shone as she’d talked about “redeeming” herself, and while she and I might have really different ideas about what redemption meant, I understood why it was so important to her.
“I’ve screwed up a lot of things,” I told Bee now. “I’ve lied and I’ve hurt people I’ve cared about, and I’ve made some less-than-stellar decisions about, like, everything, basically. But this?” I nodded back toward the cave. “This I can do. This I have to do. And I need you to wait out here.”
Despite that rousing speech, I could tell Bee still wanted to argue. But then, I would’ve argued, too. That’s what best friends do.
But then she looked past me up at the wall of stone, and took a deep breath. “I hate this,” she said. “Like, more than I hate snakes or humidity or AP Calculus.” And then she looked back down, our eyes meeting. “But if this is what you have to do, it’s what you have to do.”
My throat felt tight as I reached down and took her hands, squeezing them. “Best squire ever,” I said, and she tried to laugh, but the sound was kind of choked, and then she was hugging me hard.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
“Fifteen,” I countered, and she rolled her eyes.
“Fine, fifteen, but any longer than that, and I’m coming after you.”
Nodding, I turned back to the mouth of the cave. The air wafting out was cool, and goose bumps rose up on my arms. I reached over my shoulder, my fingers finding the hilt of the sword, still wrapped in its towel, and I took some comfort from the weight of it.
I gave one last look to Bee, who gave me a tight smile, and then, taking another deep breath, I stepped forward.
The rock was slick underneath my feet. Tennis shoes were not exactly the best footwear for this kind of thing, I thought, and I felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in my throat. Man, it seemed like a lot of this Paladin business came down to the right shoes.
Almost a year ago, I’d lain on the floor of the school bathroom, my pink heel clutched in my hands, waiting for someone to kill me. He hadn’t. I had killed him. I had won.
If I killed David today, it wouldn’t feel the slightest bit like winning.
The cave I found myself standing in wasn’t nearly as big as I’d thought it would be, and I took a moment getting my bearings and really wishing I’d gotten a rabies vaccine before I’d left for this trip. While the ceiling of the cave was lost to the darkness, I couldn’t help but envision roughly a million bats overhead, and it made me shudder.
But then I realized that, while I could feel David nearby, I sure couldn’t see him, and the cave seriously didn’t seem to be all that huge, so where—
And then I saw it: another little opening in the back of the cave, so small that I thought I might have to hold my breath to squeeze through.
David, I reminded myself again, which, seriously, was starting to feel like another kind of mantra. Like, if I could just keep repeating his name, picturing his face, I could get through this thing.
I took my pack off, knowing it would make it harder to squeeze through, wondering how David had managed to get himself in there. He wasn’t a big guy, but he still had to be wider through the shoulders than I was, and I eyed the crack in the rock speculatively.
My pack made a loud clank as it hit the rock floor, and I pulled the sword out of it, moving forward.
Luckily, the passage wasn’t as narrow as I’d thought, and once I got inside, I moved through fairly easily, the sword clutched in my hands, pressed tight against my body. For a second, I had a vision of those old tombs of knights you sometimes see, their swords laid out along their torsos, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.