David’s blue eyes widened. “Harper?” he mumbled around a mouthful of sandwich.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, pushing my shoulders back.
He swallowed and stood up, dusting his hands on his pants. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but before he could, he suddenly winced, pressing his fingers against his temple.
I immediately took a step forward. “What’s wrong?”
David blinked a couple of times, fingers moving against his forehead. “Headache. I’ve had one for like a week now. Probably spending too much time in front of the computer.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a tiny packet of aspirin. As he tore it open with his teeth, he glanced over at me. “Anyway, that’s why I’m here. Lunchroom was too loud. So what are you doing out here, Pres? Why aren’t you eating lunch with your court?”
Darn it, why hadn’t I thought up a reason to be out here in case I bumped into anyone?
But then the perfect excuse came to me. I looked down and scraped the dirt with my boot heel. “I just couldn’t deal with all the questions about that article you wrote. I was embarrassed.”
David watched me for a long moment and I studied him right back. I wanted to see something, anything, that would make David Stark look like someone who needed to be protected by supernatural bodyguards, but he seemed to be a normal high school boy, albeit one with truly terrible fashion sense. Today he was wearing worn-out corduroys with a bright green T-shirt and a too-small navy blazer.
Who are you? I thought. What the heck is so important about David Freaking Stark?
He laughed, startling me. I was so used to David scowling that it was kind of weird to see so many of his teeth. “God, you’re the worst liar I have ever seen,” he said. “First the whole stage fright thing, now this ‘I was embarrassed’ act . . .”
“I was embarrassed!” I shouted back, but he just kept on laughing. I picked up a small rock and tossed it at him, but it came to a skidding stop six inches from him, and dropped back to the ground. Luckily, David was so caught up in laughing at me that he didn’t notice. I’d known it wasn’t actually going to hit him, but still, it felt good just to throw something. Then I remembered my Professor Giles X could be watching me right now, and probably wouldn’t approve of me slinging rocks at the guy I was clearly supposed to protect.
“I just don’t see why the eff that’s so funny,” I muttered, just in case that person was listening. At least they’d know I’d had just cause.
David’s laughter trailed off and he looked at me with genuine curiosity. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” I tucked an errant strand of hair back into my headband.
“Say ‘eff’ or ‘G. D.’ Why not say the actual words?”
I heaved a sigh and glanced toward the woods. If my Professor Giles X was out there, there was no chance he was coming now. So much for alone time.
I turned back to David. “I just don’t think it’s . . . necessary to use those words in polite company when there are so many perfectly good euphemisms.”
David stared at me. “Dear God, what planet are you from?”
I threw up my hands. “Forget it, okay? I wouldn’t expect you to understand anyway. Just like you don’t understand why the Grove is important to me, or why I might not want my personal issues blasted all over your stupid newspaper, or why I might have wanted to eat lunch by myself for once.”
Oh God, I was doing it again, that shouty, kind of scary thing I seemed to do whenever I had to talk to David for more than five minutes. I needed to go. This idea had obviously been a bust, and there was still plenty of lunch left to hang out with Ryan.
Speaking of whom . . . I pulled my phone out of my bag and saw that, sure enough, Ryan had sent me a text message five minutes earlier. “Where R U?” Then another one from three minutes ago. “R U OK?”
“I gotta go,” I said, but David caught my arm before I got very far.
This close, I could see the faint blond stubble on his chin, and when he opened his mouth, I noticed the tiniest chip in his front tooth. “Harper, look, I just want to say . . . earlier today, that whole thing with . . . what I called you, and—”
“No problem,” I said, waving my hand, my eyes still on my cell phone as it started blaring “Sexy Back,” Ryan’s ringtone (he had picked it himself). I didn’t really want to answer it when I’d be seeing him in just a few minutes. Plus I didn’t want to lie to him in front of David, giving him even more ammo against me. I could just hear him. “Why did you lie to your boyfriend about where you were? Why are you really out here? Did you by any chance murder Dr. DuPont?”
Okay, so that last one was a long shot, but I was not in the mood to deal.
I looked at David, not even trying to hide my irritation as “Sexy Back” finally stopped. “It’s fine, okay? I shouldn’t have said that stuff about the school board and your aunt. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
My phone started ringing again. Ryan must’ve been really worried. “Now, I really have to go.”
But David wasn’t letting go so easily, not of the subject and not of my arm.
“Fine, but what was up with you not hitting me? It didn’t look like you didn’t want to, it looked like you couldn’t.”
Great, so he had noticed that. “David, look, we can talk about this later, but my boyfriend is looking for me, and I have to go—”
“Harper?”
Oh, shoot. I turned just as Ryan rounded the corner. He was holding his cell phone in one hand, a look of total confusion on his face.
“Ryan,” I said, trying to make myself smile. I guess I thought if I just smiled a lot, Ryan wouldn’t think there was anything unusual about me arguing behind the chapel with David.
But Ryan wasn’t even looking at me. He was glaring at David, towering over him by at least four inches. “What the hell is going on?”
David dropped his hand. “Nothing, man,” he said to Ryan. “We were just talking about the paper. That’s it.”
Ryan was looking between us, an unfamiliar expression on his face. It took me a second to realize that he was angry. More than angry, really. He was furious. And Ryan never lost his temper.
“Why can’t you just leave her alone?” he asked David. Ryan’s jaw was clenched, and I’d never seen his hazel eyes look that cold. “I mean, other than being better than you in every class, what has Harper ever done to you?”
David must have been as weirded out by Angry Ryan as I was, because for once, he didn’t have a smartass response. His skin went a little pale, and I could see the whites around his blue eyes. “Look, I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve been a dick, but I swear to God, I wasn’t bothering her. I was sitting here first, and she just—”
“Save it,” Ryan said, holding up a hand. “Whatever your little war on Harper is about, it’s over. I don’t want you to write one more damn word about her. I don’t want you to talk to her. I don’t even want you to look at her.”
I knew that Ryan was trying to protect me, and maybe I should’ve been thrilled to watch my boyfriend go all alpha male for me, but instead I felt . . . irritated. “Ryan, I told you I could handle this.”
“But you haven’t,” he fired back, his voice unnaturally loud in the quiet behind the church. The breeze had died down, and there wasn’t even the rustle of leaves. It was hard to believe that only a few hundred feet away, kids were eating lunch, talking, laughing. “This guy is a jerk, and you’ve just taken it for years. I get that you’re sucking up to his aunt, and that you want to be nice to people, Harper, but damn. You don’t have to be a doormat.”
“I’m not sucking up!” I said, just as David moved forward, saying, “Take it easy, Ryan—”
And then everything exploded.
Ryan, sweet Ryan, who had never purposely hurt anyone, shot a hand out to push David away, and suddenly, it was like a screen dropped in front of my eyes. I could see Ryan’s hand hit David’s chest, saw David stumble back as his glasses flew off.
I saw his head hit the edge of the stone steps of the chapel, blood erupting from underneath his sandy hair. I saw his blue eyes roll up until all I could see were the whites.
Then the vision vanished.
I was moving before I even really knew it, just like with Dr. DuPont. My hand shot out and caught Ryan’s wrist, his hand just inches from David’s chest. I yanked Ryan’s arm down as my knee came up, catching him in the stomach. While he was bent over from that, I leaned down and put my shoulder into his chest and, still holding his arm, flipped him over my back. All six feet three inches, two hundred pounds of him.
He landed on his back. As he landed, I straightened up and put my foot on his throat, pressing down slightly. My fingers were tight around his wrist, and some inner knowledge told me that if I pulled up and twisted in a certain way, I’d break it, along with a few bones in his hand.
And if David hadn’t shouted my name, I probably would have.
It was like waking up from a dream. I looked down and saw Ryan’s wide, panicked eyes, my boot against his neck. I saw the shocked look on David’s face.
“What the hell?” Ryan squeaked, and I immediately dropped his arm, stumbling a few steps back.
Getting superpowers was supposed to be a good thing. You helped people. You didn’t nearly twist your boyfriend’s hand off.
David was leaning down, helping Ryan to his feet, but all I could do was stand there, numb. That feeling I’d had when I was fighting Dr. DuPont, like I wasn’t even in control of my body. Then it had been cool. But this? So out of control that I’d hurt someone I loved? That was terrifying.
“Pres?” David asked hesitantly. Both he and Ryan stood there, waiting for me to say something. Dozens of excuses ran through my mind. New energy drink. New, high-tech cheerleading moves. But in the end, no words came out of my mouth, and I just did the easiest thing I could think of.
I ran.
From behind me, I heard someone call my name, but whether it was Ryan or David, I didn’t know.
Or care.
I didn’t stop to get my bag, which meant that I couldn’t drive home, but I knew I had to get out of there.
Stopping just outside the gates, I looked left, then right. The Grove was located in one of the town’s nicer neighborhoods, full of tree-lined streets and big houses. My own house was a good three miles away and to the left. So I turned to the right.
I had no idea where I was going, so I figured I’d keep walking until my mentor found me, or the cops came after me for assaulting Ryan.
A cool breeze ruffled my hair and blew my skirt against my legs as leaves skittered down the sidewalk. I didn’t realize that I’d started crying until the wind cooled the tears on my cheeks.
“It’ll be okay,” I mumbled out loud, adding talking to myself to the list of crazy things I’d done today. Not that I cared. “It’ll be okay,” I said again, louder this time, and the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that it really would be.
All right, so my superpowers had flipped out on me and nearly made me hurt Ryan. But he and David were the only people who had seen it. Ryan loved me. He’d forgive me as soon as I came up with a reason for what happened. Preferably one that didn’t sound completely insane.
And David . . .
If there had been any doubt in my mind that David Stark was involved in whatever was going on with me, it was gone now. I’d flipped Ryan to keep David safe. And something told me that if Ryan hadn’t been joking about kicking David’s ass earlier, I would have done that ninja thing on him then, too.
But why? That was the thing that didn’t make any sense. Okay, it was one of the many, many things about this that didn’t make any sense, but it was definitely the most pressing. The why would lead to the who and the how. And that meant I didn’t have time for this middle of the sidewalk pity party I was currently throwing. I had to get back to the Grove, and I had to talk to—
Suddenly, pain slammed into my chest, like someone punched me in the sternum. It was so intense that I gasped. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, leaving behind a heavy pressure that made me wonder if my lungs had been replaced with bricks.
I stood there, my hands clenched at my sides, sucking in deep breaths. I had felt this way before.
Right before Dr. DuPont burst through that bathroom door.
“Pres?”
The pain had crowded so much of my mind that I hadn’t heard David’s Dodge pull up alongside me, which meant I had been really out of it, because that thing had to have a hole in the muffler or something.
“Oh God, seriously?”
“Look, let me give you a ride home, okay? It isn’t safe for you to be walking here by yourself.”
The heavy feeling intensified. “Um, David, hate to break it to you,” I said, trying to sound normal even though my breathing was speeding up, “but this isn’t exactly a rough neighborhood. I think I can avoid getting raped and murdered on someone’s croquet lawn, okay?”
He leaned across the passenger seat and for the first time, I saw that he looked genuinely worried. Maybe even a little scared. “Harper—” he started to say.
I stepped down from the sidewalk, and leaned forward, my hands resting on the open passenger window. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s that car.” His eyes darted to his rearview mirror and I turned to look over my shoulder. About a hundred yards away, a black car with tinted windows idled at a stop sign. I figured the suffocating feeling in my chest had something to do with it, and that meant it was probably not filled with good guys.
“The car was outside the school when I left,” David said in a voice barely above a whisper, like the people in the car could hear us. “It’s been following you.”
Adrenaline started flooding through my system as I turned back to David and said, “Get out of here. Now. Drive—”
But before I could finish, the black car revved its engine with a roar that drowned out David’s crappy Dodge.
And then it was racing straight at us.