The girl cried out again, and I fumbled at the wall. What the heck was going on?
But before my fingers could hit the light switch, there was a movement off to my right, and someone shoved past me and out into the night. When I’d been fighting as a Paladin, I couldn’t stop fighting until someone was dead. How could she have just taken off like that?
The lights flared into life, and when I turned around, Bee was standing near me, breathing hard. The terry-cloth cover-up she’d thrown on over her bathing suit was ripped at the neck, nearly hanging off one shoulder, but other than that, she looked okay.
From the way she was staring at me, I guessed I looked a lot less okay.
Raising one shaking hand to my head, I felt my hair. “Did she tear any out?” I asked, a sudden image of myself half scalped coming to mind.
Bee shook her head. “No. It’s a mess, but I think it’s all there.”
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.