Holly glanced back once and saw Rob in the corridor, struggling to follow them, face pinched with rage, and little Marilyn Monroe reaching up to shove his chest. The door swung closed, blocking the image out.
“Sorry, honey.” Diana took Holly by the shoulders to steady her. “If you’re going to start fights, you need to learn to duck and cover better than that.”
“Right.” Holly sighed with relief in the hot June night. The bass beat, distant and muffled, boomed against the cinder-block wall like a dragon pounding on the castle gate.
Diana and Cher and Elijah stood around her, panting, in the parking lot full of cars. Rob’s cop car occupied a dark corner next to the fence. Funny—last night she’d found it strange that he drove it when off duty and out of uniform instead of buying another car. Now that he’d stalked her at her apartment, then followed her to this club and attacked Elijah, it seemed less strange and more Loser.
“Holly,” Elijah called. He leaned with his shoulder against the wall of the building, breathing more laboriously every second. He shivered and crossed his arms.
“I’m beginning to see why Rob calls you Dangermouse,” she joked, stepping around Diana to meet Elijah at the wall.
Elijah gave her a lopsided grin. “I think it’s meant to be ironic. I’m not dangerous.” He certainly didn’t look dangerous anymore with his wavy hair falling into his vacant eyes. He seemed to space out before he completed his sentence.
“Are you okay?” Holly asked suspiciously. “You look sick. Did Rob hit you?” Holly hadn’t seen Rob land a punch, but it had all happened so fast, from conversation to kiss to attack in less than sixty seconds.
“No,” Elijah said weakly. “I had a beer, so—”
“You drank a beer before you took a pill? A real beer with alcohol?”
“I doubted I’d get a pill,” Elijah said sheepishly. “But without the pill I felt like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. I drank the beer to calm down. Holly, listen—”
“We’ve got to get you home before that pill hits your system with that beer.” Holly turned to get help from Diana and Cher. Even better, now Shane had come outside. He chatted with the transvestites, hands in the pockets of his jeans. She started to call to him.
Elijah grabbed her forearm, hard. “Listen to me,” he hissed.
She turned back to him in surprise.
His green eyes were wide in drunken earnest. “You’ve got to get out of here. Someone in Glitterati can control minds.”
“Really?” she breathed, heart breaking for him. When her parents suggested he was having an exacerbation, they hadn’t been kidding.
Elijah nodded, and his eyes lost focus again. “Usually I can tell whose thoughts I’m reading. This time Rob was about to hit me, so I couldn’t concentrate. But this powerful command flew right past my head and changed the decisions somebody made.” He splayed his hand and turned it in the air in front of him, as if changing another person’s decisions worked like unscrewing a lightbulb. “A mind-control thing.” He watched his hand curiously.
“Okay,” Holly chirped. “Thanks for letting me know.” Since he seemed absorbed in his own hand, she backed a few steps away. She turned to Shane, who gentlemanly flicked a chrome lighter to Cher’s cigarette while arguing with Diana over the relative merits of early Motown versus rockabilly. Holly cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Shane.”
Shane looked around at her. She was taken aback at how handsome he was, even without the early 1960s rock star tux. And she was baffled all over again that Kaylee didn’t go after him.
“Miss Starr.” He grinned. “We missed you when you left last night. Come over and jump out our bathroom window anytime.”
She made a face at him. “I didn’t know what to do about Rob. Something told me he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I didn’t want to drag you and Elijah into it.”
“That worked well,” Shane said.
She glanced briefly back at Elijah, who had given up examining his hand because now he needed it to hold himself up against the wall. “Can you get Elijah home? He’s not supposed to drink on Mentafixol, and he’s acting a little loco.” She circled her finger at her ear.
“He had one beer,” Shane protested. “What could one beer hurt?”
An enormous weight slammed into Holly’s back. She reeled and grabbed Shane to keep herself upright. Elijah had fallen on her.
“I’ve got him.” Cher hurried around them and pulled Elijah’s limp body off Holly. “Diana, give me a hand here. Shane, where’s your car?” Diana bustled over to take Elijah’s legs, and the two giant starlets hoisted him under their arms.
Holly followed the others around the side of the building to the muscle car she’d seen parked in the guys’ driveway. Then she bent over Elijah’s supine body in the backseat. His face was slack, as dead as she must have been that stupid night as a high school sophomore, when she drank a few sips of beer on top of Mentafixol, and anything could have happened to her.
“Getting in?” Shane asked from the driver’s seat. Red and orange lights from another nightclub flashed and reflected in the windshield as he waited for her answer.
Yes, Holly wanted to help Elijah home and take care of him. Kaylee wouldn’t want her to go on such an adventure alone, but maybe Holly could argue Kaylee into going with her, and this would throw Kaylee together with Shane.
There was no way, Holly decided. Her parents would find out and have a fit. If Elijah had wanted a relationship with her, if he’d shown any real interest in her at all, defying her parents and jeopardizing her career in magic might be worth it. As it was, all she had from him was a request for a pill and one crazy kiss, with an emphasis on crazy.
“How will you get him inside the house by yourself?” she asked uneasily. “And how will you handle Rob when he comes home?”
“I’m stronger than I look. There’s more to me than meets the eye.” Shane turned all the way around with his elbow on the back of the seat. He looked like an impatient young father scolding his children on their family road trip down Route 66. But then his eyes met hers, and his expression softened. “I’ve got him, Holly, really.”
She took one last wistful glance at Elijah, his arm limp across his chest in the rock band T-shirt. Poor Elijah.
Poor Holly.
Then she stepped back, closed the heavy door as gently as she could, and retreated to the sidewalk in front of the nightclub. The car started with a shout of unmuffled, eight-cylinder exuberance, backed out of the lot, and roared down the black street lined with glittering signs for other nightclubs, with other secret meetings and close encounters going down inside.