“Mind wipe?” I asked and she nodded slowly, still staring at Dante’s face.
“Yeah, but . . . more than that, I think.”
Without warning, she lifted her hand, and a bolt of . . . something shot out of it, smacking Dante firmly in the chest and making him yelp as he stumbled back against the toilet stalls.
“The hell?” he gasped, and I was thinking something similar.
But Blythe shook her head. “Mind wipe or no, he’d still have his powers,” she said to me, even as Dante’s eyes went wide.
“What?” he asked, but she waved him off.
“It’s instinctual. He would have felt me charging up for that hit.”
“I didn’t feel you charging up for that hit,” I countered, and Dante slumped against graffiti reading, “ASHLEY <3s BO.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “What hit, what powers, wh—”
“Shut. Up,” Blythe said in clipped tones, never looking over at him.
“Maybe he forgot he could do magic?” I suggested. “And that’s the issue?”
But Blythe shook her head again. “No, that’s what you’re not getting here, Harper. It wouldn’t matter if he forgot he could do magic; he’d still be able to do magic.”
“But he can’t,” I said, looking back over at Dante, who was now pulling out his phone with trembling hands.
As he lifted it, Blythe reached over, smacking the phone from his hands, and he made a sound really close to a whimper. “You are not taking a picture of us, and we are not here to tell you you’re going to be a superhero,” she said. “You used to be, kind of, but clearly something got to you.”
“Alexander?” I suggested, and Blythe nodded, watching as Dante scrambled for his phone.
“I’m guessing so, yeah.”
“Which means . . .”
Heaving out a long breath, Blythe walked over to the bathroom door, unlocking it and letting Dante rush out of there. He nearly plowed right into Bee, who, it turned out, was the door rattler.
“What’s going on?” she asked, watching as Dante bolted into the crowd.
Hands on her hips, Blythe sighed as he took off, and then turned to me and Bee, her eyebrows raised. “Well?” she said, nodding after Dante. “Go get him.”
Chapter 23
THERE’S NO NEED in getting into what happened at “OW Y” after that. You really don’t need to hear about me and Bee chasing the dude through the crowd, or how I maybe tackled him right by the jukebox, regretting my decision to wear a skirt that night. And you certainly don’t need to hear about the various things the crowd shouted out, or how Bee and I ended up wrestling him out of the bar to cheers and clapping, and that before we got him in the car, I saw the flash of several phone cameras, and heard the words “Facebook” and “Twitter.”
The main thing is that we got Dante out of “OW Y” and into a field just on the outskirts of town. And to be honest, standing in tall grass with Dante sitting in front of us, squinting against my headlights—I’d left them on to illuminate whatever it was Blythe wanted to do—I thought of those tawdry true-crime books Aunt Martha always got at Walmart. Back at the bar, I’d been afraid of being a victim in a book like that.
Staring at Dante now, I kind of felt like I might actually be one of the bad guys in that kind of book.
Not that we’d hurt him or anything. Other than a little cut above his eyebrow where he’d hit it on the corner of the jukebox as he’d fallen, he wasn’t hurt, and he seemed to be more angry than scared.
“You’re totally going to cut out my kidney, aren’t you?” he asked, and I tried to look both intimidating and nonthreatening, crossing my arms over my chest while still giving a reassuring smile.
As a result, I probably just looked confused when I said, “We don’t want your kidney, trust.”
He glared up at me, his dark hair falling over his forehead. Even pissed off and freaked out, he was pretty cute, so if he and Blythe had had something going on, I definitely couldn’t blame her.
“Then what—” Dante started, but Blythe was already walking forward, Saylor’s journal open in her hands, the headlights lining her in a bright white glow.
“There’s nothing in here for reversing a spell this big,” she said, ignoring Dante, who sat with his hands fastened behind his back with some of the spare bungee cords I’d brought in case we needed to strap luggage to the roof of my car.
“But,” Blythe went on, her eyes moving over the pages, “I can try a . . . combination of things, maybe.”
She sounded less than sure, but when she lifted her head, her expression was determined, her pointed chin thrust forward.
Bee and I had done our job as Paladins, using our strength to manhandle Dante into the car and out here, so now it was Blythe’s turn to show what she could do.