“I don’t mean it like that,” I said, coming to sit in the chair across from the desk. The music switched to something full of violins, the sound scratching over my frazzled nerves. “I mean that if he fully does the Oracle thing, he won’t be David anymore. The Oracle part of him might keep going forever, but the David part, the part I... care about. Know. That part will be gone, won’t it?”

Alexander lifted his hands in an elegant shrug. “That is part of it, I’m afraid.”

I shook my head. David might not have been my boyfriend anymore, but that didn’t mean that I was willing to let him get all super magicked up and then forget about him. All I could think of was David in fifth grade, his hair a lot blonder, but his scowl just as fierce when I’d beaten him in the spelling bee. David, one corner of his mouth lifting as he’d called me “Pres.” David, sitting too close to his laptop and leaning over it in a way that made my neck ache in sympathy as he worked on the school paper.

David, the night of Cotillion, crossing the room to kiss me.

Alexander sat forward again, bracing his elbows on the desk and pressing his fingers together. “This seems to be another part of your training Miss Stark has neglected. You see the Oracle as a person. It’s high time you started seeing him as a vessel.”

“David is a lot more than his powers,” I argued, but Alexander was already shaking his head.

“He’s a boy, Miss Price,” he said, and while the word “boy” didn’t exactly drip with disdain, it didn’t sound much like a compliment either. “A boy with powers he hasn’t even begun to understand. Clearly they are greater than you understand. Are you saying that you’d rather David be your prom date than a being with the powers of gods in his veins?”

With a tsking sound, he fixed me with those green eyes. “You think we only want to use him, but his entire existence is an exercise in being useful, Miss Price. You’re meant to protect him from those who would wish to hurt him, not from himself. Not from who he is.”

I thought of what I’d seen in the Fun House tonight, remembering the blank look in David’s—no, not David’s, the Oracle’s—eyes in that vision. “Even if it means killing him?”

Alexander didn’t say anything for a long time, and I couldn’t make myself look up and meet his eyes. I had never been a coward, but after admitting that, I didn’t feel much like being the tough girl right now.

Finally, he said, “Is that what you saw tonight?”

I sat up a little in my chair. “What, you guys didn’t make me see that?”