Lady Renegades (14 page)

T
HERE'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.

The words that came out of her mouth made no sense to me.
I wasn't sure if they were Greek or just, you know,
magic,
but there was power in them, no matter how nonsensical they sounded. The hairs on my arms stood on end, and right next to me, I could feel Bee shiver.

Dante had gone still, his eyes so wide I could see the whites all the way around, and once again, an uncomfortable feeling slithered through me. I didn't like this, any of it, and whether the bigger problem was Blythe's magic or the kidnapping, I didn't know, but I definitely felt icked out.

But then Blythe stepped forward and stretched a hand out to me. “Come here.”

I moved closer, putting my hand in hers. Her palm was clammy, making me wonder if she was a little creeped out by what we were doing, too.

Bee shuffled back a bit as Blythe and I approached Dante, and when Blythe pressed her fingers to his temples, she gestured at me to do the same.

I stood there, fingers out, but not touching him yet. “What are we doing?” I asked, scratching the back of my calf with the opposite foot. “Some kind of Vulcan mind-meld thing?”

David would've been proud of me for making that reference, but Blythe just glared. “We're seeing if getting inside his head will work,” she said. “Whatever Alexander did to him, it wiped his memories and his powers. I want to know why and how, and I'm hoping the spell I just did will do that for us. Okay? Are we good now?”

“We're never good,” I muttered, but it was more from habit than actual irritation.

When I pressed my fingers to Dante's temple, the only thing I felt was his damp skin, his sweaty hair against my knuckles, and I opened my mouth to tell Blythe that this was stupid, that it wasn't working.

And then it was like everything suddenly . . . tunneled. My vision went dim except for two pinpricks of light, like I was looking through a telescope the wrong way. It wasn't anything like the time I'd seen David's vision or even when Alexander had made me see things during the Periasmos last year. This was something new, something that had me feeling as though I were standing on very shaky ground, my knees wobbly, my heart racing.

For what felt like ages, there was just that sense of being in a dark tunnel and seeing those little bits of light. I could hear voices, but they were muffled—muted, like people talking in another room. I couldn't hear the sounds of the cicadas and frogs, couldn't feel the brush of the tall grass against my legs, or the suffocating warmth of a Georgia summer night anymore. It was like I wasn't
anywhere,
and even if I'd wanted to pull my hand back from Dante's temple, I don't think I could have.

And then suddenly, the tiny dots of light got bigger, rushing toward me. Or maybe I was rushing toward
them.
It was hard to tell. All I knew was that the darkness faded away, replaced by a scene that seemed awfully familiar.

Alexander, sitting behind his desk, his golden hair burnished in the lamplight. He was wearing a dark suit with a deep-green tie, looking exactly like he had every time I'd ever seen him, and as he rose from the desk, I realized that the office he was in was
almost identical to the one he'd had in Pine Grove. That house had been magicked up, but it felt like what I was seeing was the real deal.

Because this was Dante's memory, we were seeing everything from his perspective. He was clearly sitting in front of the desk, wearing jeans, his fingers tapping nervously on one leg.

Leaning back, his hands folded in front of him, Alexander looked anything but anxious. He was as calm and collected as I remember, and the smile he shot Dante was clearly meant to be welcoming. But I saw the edge to it and remembered that, too. For all his good manners and elegant style, Alexander had been dangerous, and Dante clearly understood that. I could see him jiggling one leg as he reached into the front pouch of his hoodie, pulling out ragged sheets of paper.

“Ah, very good,” Alexander said, the words sounding slightly echoing and distorted, like he was talking underwater.

“It was easy to find,” Dante said, lifting his chin a bit. “She'd set some kind of alarm spell on the book, but not on the pages themselves. Took me like ten seconds to find it and lift it.”

“Sloppy,” Alexander murmured, his eyes traveling over the page in front of him. “How unlike Saylor.”

Feeling better now, Dante leaned back in his seat, crossing one ankle over the other. “That's some hard-core magic, though. Like, way outside my skill set. Probably outside Blythe's, even.”

“Yes, well, it was always more theoretical than practical, this spell,” Alexander said, but he didn't lift his eyes from the page, and I could swear his hand was trembling slightly.

“I'd hope so,” Dante said, pushing his hood from his head.
“The power and memory wipe is one thing, but that last bit?” With a low whistle, he shook his head. “Man, that's
dark.
And intense. I wouldn't even want to try it. Be like that story, right? The one with the people who wish for—”

Alexander lifted a hand, cutting him off. “Like I said, the spell was theoretical. Something I asked Saylor to work on before she vanished so precipitously. I'd never meant to actually test it.”

And then he suddenly smiled again, looking up at Dante and saying, “But no time like the present, hmm?”

He said some words then, nothing I understood, and the scene in front of me started to shake. I wasn't sure if the room itself had shaken when this happened, or if Dante's memories, locked away in some faraway corner of his mind, were just becoming unstable.

Either way, everything fell apart. There was a sound like wind wailing in my ears, and suddenly we were being thrust away again, hurtling backward, until I felt hot, muggy air again and the scratch of grass on my legs, and I was once again standing in a field, my hand falling away from Dante's head.

Next to me, Bee had a hand on my shoulder, her face creased with worry. “Are you all right?” she asked, and I nodded, even though I definitely wasn't sure about that.

I looked over to see if Blythe was all right, but her eyes were fixed on Dante, and when I turned my head, I saw why.

He was still staring sightlessly ahead, his chest rising and falling rapidly, but now a trickle of blood was slipping from his nose.

“What's going on?” I asked Blythe, and she shook her head frantically, paging through Saylor's journal.

“I . . . I think the spell was too strong. Or maybe Alexander added some kind of, I don't know, like, booby trap to it.” Her voice was thin, higher than usual, and her fingers moved over the pages of the journal so quickly that death by paper cut seemed like a real hazard.

“You did a spell on him without knowing what it would do?” Bee asked, stepping forward and slightly out of the headlights' glare. She'd pulled her hair into a messy bun, and she was looking at Blythe with her eyebrows raised. “Isn't that what you gave us so much crap for?”

Blythe's head shot up. “The kind of magic we're dealing with is
dangerous,
” she spit out. “I'm sorry it's not a freaking chemistry problem with
formulas
or whatever, but it's not, and—”

“And the two of you need to stop fighting and figure out what we're going to do,” I finished, crouching down at Dante's side. His pulse was strong underneath my fingers, even though he was still breathing fast. Still, in the bright glow of my headlights, his pupils were so wide that there was hardly any iris showing.

“Should we call nine-one-one?” I asked, wondering what we would even say to a dispatcher. “‘Hi, we did magic on this guy in a field and now he seems catatonic, please assist'?”

But then Dante's head suddenly whipped in my direction, his hand flying out. The ground rumbled and a wave of power shot out from his fingertips, strong enough to knock me backward, making my teeth clack together hard.

“The hell?” Bee squawked, but I was already on my feet, reaching for Dante.

Another wave hit, no real specific spell, just magic, lots of it, powerful enough to make all the hair on my arms stand up and to start a ringing in my ears.

“He's not supposed to have powers!” I yelled, but that seemed kind of ridiculous to say when he lifted his hand again, sending out another bolt that had Bee stumbling against the hood of the car.

Blythe was still looking through the journal even as she had one hand out, sending blasts of power. But they just seemed to roll off Dante, who was already rising to his feet and raising his hand again.

Blythe cried out as the journal flew from her hands, and I was so freaked out from taking a walk through Dante's mind that I wasn't sure if my powers were up to the challenge of taking on a Mage Gone Wild.

But I was certainly willing to give it a shot.

As I moved forward, something caught my elbow, and I turned to see Bee next to me. Apparently her stumble against the car had given her an idea.

When I got my first car, my dad had given me a toolbox for the trunk. It was pink (and both the hammer and the screwdriver inside had flowers on their handles), which I'd appreciated, but it was also heavy as all get out. As she held it out to me, and as I closed my fingers around the handle, I flashed Bee a smile. “Thanks, Squire.”

“Thought there might be something in there that would help!” she said quickly, already moving back.

And maybe there was, but then Dante was turning his gaze back to me, and I realized I wasn't going to have time to rifle through the box for the handiest tool.

Instead, I hefted the entire thing, power flowing through my muscles, and swung.

Hard.

“I
MEAN, AT
most,
there's, like, a thirty percent chance I killed him.”

We were speeding down the interstate toward Atlanta, the car thick with tension. I'd let Bee drive, and now I twisted from my spot in the passenger seat to look at Blythe in the back.

“He was out when we left, but he was still breathing. And we called nine-one-one. I'm sure he's fine.”

I really hoped he was fine. Aunt Jewel had had a hard enough time with the break-in at David's. On the run for murder? I wasn't sure she could forgive that.

Blythe sank back farther into her seat. “He'll be fine,” she agreed, her voice dull. “His magic would've acted kind of like a buffer. You knocked him out, but that was about all the damage you could do. And you were only able to hurt him because you're a Paladin.”

“Good to know,” I said, turning back around.

Silence fell again.

It wasn't broken until Bee flipped the turn signal at our exit, and against the steady
tick-tick
of that, she finally asked, “So . . . what happened back there?”

I could hear rustling from the backseat as Blythe fidgeted around. “Spell got out of hand. I told you, magic's not something that's easy to control or predict. When I tried to unlock his memories, I . . . I must've unlocked his powers, too, but they were all out of whack and stuff.”

“Understatement,” I muttered, rubbing at the new scrape on my knee from where Dante had pushed me backward.

I tried to meet Blythe's eyes in the rearview mirror, but she was gazing at her lap, her expression troubled. Blythe wasn't used to failing, and while we'd gotten the information we needed—Alexander had Saylor's spell, a spell that could wipe power
and
memories, and the pages were probably in his office—the night still felt like a loss.

“It's fine,” I said to Blythe now. “You couldn't have known that would happen, and hey! Now we're
that much
closer to the spell we need, which means
that much
closer to stopping David.”

Blythe nodded, but didn't say anything, and after a while, I turned my eyes back to the dark roads in front of us.

• • •

If Saylor's house hadn't been what I expected, Alexander's office was actually much more in line with what I'd pictured—a high-rise that glittered in the darkness, its hundreds of windows reflecting the moon and streetlights.

Still, there was a weird feeling around the building as I parked the car in the attached deck. It felt . . . abandoned. Empty. And while I wasn't surprised there weren't other cars in the lot at this time of night—it was nearly three a.m.—I'd still thought there would be some janitors, a few lights on.
Something.

Everything was still and quiet as we followed Blythe across the parking lot to the front doors. They weren't locked—or else they just opened for Blythe—and we walked into a large lobby that was mostly empty.

“Is this place magicked or just abandoned?” I asked, and she looked over her shoulder at me as we moved toward the elevator.

“Six of one, half dozen of the other. There was magic over it to keep people out, but once the person who did the magic died, it started falling apart pretty quickly. Locals think it's just an abandoned high-rise.”

“And you're sure this isn't going to get us arrested?” Bee asked once the elevator doors were closed.

Blythe shook her head, drumming her fingers on the steel rail behind her, and Bee and I met each other's eyes behind her back. Whatever happened with Dante was still clearly weighing on Blythe's mind.

The doors opened, and the three of us stepped out into a deserted lobby, where there was an empty desk and a few chairs. The carpet underfoot felt almost damp, and there was a musty, unused smell to the place.

For a moment, Blythe stood there, looking around. And then she said, “It looks different.”

“When was the last time you were here?” I asked, and Blythe frowned. All three of us had changed in a rest-stop bathroom on the way here. We'd chosen to wear black for this little expedition (which was maybe a little drama queen of us, but it had felt appropriate for sneaking into an abandoned high-rise), and
Blythe's hair swung over her bare shoulders, her skin pale against her dark tank top.

“A few years ago,” she said. “When they interviewed me.”

She didn't even bother whispering, so I didn't worry about keeping my footsteps quiet as we walked through the lobby, heading for a long hallway of doors. A few of them were open, but when I glanced inside, I didn't see anything. No desks, no chairs. Just plain, square rooms, some with a window, others completely dark.

We stopped in front of a closed door at the end of the hall. The doorknob turned in Blythe's hand, but the door stuck slightly in the jamb, and she applied her shoulder to it. “This is where I met Dante.”

The door swung open, and I followed Blythe into the office, my heart thudding.

If the rest of the office had seemed generic, this one room was anything but. This was so clearly Alexander's space that I half expected to see him sitting behind the desk. The desk was the same heavy, wooden monstrosity he'd sat behind at the house outside of Pine Grove, and even the carpet on the floor looked the same, a pattern of heavy swirls on a crimson background.

It was clear no one had been in here in a while. Overhead was a broken skylight that had let in rain and leaves, and books had fallen off the tall bookcases, their pages warped with damp. How long had it been abandoned like this? And why had no one noticed?

“Told you things went to hell when Alexander died,” Blythe said, shining the beam of her flashlight up.

“But you can't tell from the outside,” I argued, and Blythe shrugged.

“Most of the magic went to hell. Not all of it.”

Next to me, I could see the corners of Bee's mouth pulling down, and she wrapped her arms tightly around her body. “Is this where they brought you?” I asked her, keeping my voice low. It wasn't like I was afraid anyone would overhear. It was just that in this office, surrounded by Alexander's things, the sound of my voice was too loud in my ears.

Bee must have felt the same because she was basically whispering when she said, “I don't know. Maybe? It's . . .” Trailing off, she looked around. “It feels the same. I know that sounds dumb, but—”

“Not dumb,” I assured her, grimacing as something crunched under my feet. Could've been broken glass, could've been some rodent's or bird's skeleton. I definitely wasn't going to try to find out.

“You don't remember because they mostly kept you in a kind of stasis,” Blythe told us, her own footsteps crunching as she moved around the room. In the darkness, she was just a small, shadowy figure.

“Alexander didn't know what to do with you once I brought you back,” she continued. “I thought he'd want proof that what I'd done had worked. I'd done the ritual, David was juiced up,
and
he could make Paladins. But instead, he was just mad I hadn't brought the Oracle back.”

She turned to Bee then. “That's why your memories feel fuzzy.
You were kept upstairs”—she gestured with her flashlight—“for weeks before Alexander worked out that he might be able to use you to get to her.” The beam of light swung in my direction now.

“The Oracle was always the only thing that mattered to Alexander,” she said. “I was supposed to charge him up and then bring him back, and when I couldn't . . .”

The silence that followed those words was heavy. Finally, Blythe cleared her throat, turning away.

“Let's just say he didn't have any use for me after that.” She kept moving around the office. Bee and I might have been freaked, but Blythe clearly did not share our hesitation. Flashlight bobbing, she scanned the shelves and heavy wood desk near the farthest wall. “If the spell is here, it'll be in this room,” she said, her free hand smoothing back her hair. “This was it, the main place where he always was, doing . . . whatever. And he never liked me in here.”

There was something about the way she said that that made me turn around and look at her. As always, she'd pulled her hair up in a high ponytail, and she had her free hand propped on her hip. She seemed determined and fierce, but underneath all of that was something else. It was almost like . . .

“Blythe, does this place scare you?” I asked, and she didn't look over at me. Instead, she took a deep breath through her nose, and for a long moment, I thought she wasn't going to answer me at all.

And then she walked closer to the big desk and said, “Nothing scares me.”

She looked over at me, a dimple appearing in one cheek. It was a smile, but one I'd never seen from her before. Blythe's grins were usually of the “I am tiny and filled with magic and insane” variety, but this was almost rueful. “Still don't like this place, though,” she added. “Can't you feel it?”

“It's a creepy abandoned building,” I said, looking up and turning in a slow circle, taking in those endless ceilings and the jagged hole from the skylight. “All creepy abandoned buildings feel weird.”

“This is a
special
one, though,” Blythe said, walking around the desk to stare at the drawers. She reached for one, but it was clearly locked, and she rattled it harder, trying to break it by force before trying magic.

Or maybe she just felt like breaking something. I understood that.

I walked over, once again ignoring the little things going
crunch
underneath my tennis shoes, and nudged her aside. “This calls for my particular skill set,” I told her. I curled my fingers around the drawer's knob, and when I yanked, the wood gave with a satisfying
crack
.

But the satisfaction was short-lived, since the drawer was empty. Or at least that's how it looked to me. But Blythe reached in anyway, waving her hands in the empty space, eyes closed. “Like I said, most of the magic around this place faded when Alexander died,” she told me, “but there's still a little bit left. The really strong stuff hangs around even after the person who made it is gone.”

We stood there in the silence while Blythe waved her hands around, and I tried not to feel too frustrated when once again, she pulled out a book.

Bee, however, clearly had no problem saying what was on her mind. “Oh, yay,” she said, crossing one ankle in front of the other. “Another book probably filled with gibberish. Just what we need.”

I probably should have tried to play peacekeeper, but sometimes the joy of having a best friend around is having her say the things you can't.

“Any sign of those sheets Dante tore out?” I asked.

But Blythe was already leafing through the book, her eyes roaming over the pages. Unlike Saylor's book, this one was in decent shape, a slim, black day-planner kind of thing that made my office-supply-loving heart sing.

“Seriously, Blythe, do you see—”

Blythe suddenly stopped on a page that was absolutely covered in writing, so dense that you could barely see the white of the paper for all the black ink. And then she offered me the book.

I took it, wondering if I'd even understand what it was that had her so freaked, or if it would just be more Mage Stuff.

But this time, the words scrawled over the page weren't indecipherable.

And they made my stomach drop to my knees.