Absolutely Captivated

by Grayson, Kristine

  “You want to know about Faerie,” she said.

  He nodded, and sat on the same couch, careful to keep a cushion between them.

  From the kitchen, he heard the banging of plates and his son’s giggle. So far as Travers could tell, Kyle wasn’t paying attention to this conversation.

  For some reason, Travers found that very important.

  “When we’re born,” Zoe said, still looking at her aching foot, “we’re all given a prophecy, all of us.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Mages,” Zoe said. “The Fates come up with the prophecies, and generally, you learn about it the first time you visit them, or from your mentor.”

  Which meant that Travers had a prophecy which he didn’t know about.

  “The prophecy supposedly comes from the air—the powers that are even greater than the Powers That Be, whoever that is—but I’m not so sure. Especially after today.”

  “Why?” Travers asked.

  Zoe set down her foot and dug her toes into the carpet. Then she pulled the shoe off her other foot and started to rub it. “Because of my prophecy.”

  “Which is?” Travers felt like he had to drag each word out of her. Was she that used to keeping secrets? Or were all mages like this?

  “My prophecy?” Zoe’s fingers worked the ball of her foot. “It’s about—”

  She stopped herself and looked at Travers, as if she could see through him. He felt like she was analyzing him, as if she were trying to figure out something about him.

  Then she shook her head. “I’m such a fool,” she said.

  “You don’t strike me as a fool,” he said.

  “It’s all manipulation,” she said. “I’ve known that for a long time. I’ve just never understood why until now. They’ve been setting me up.”

  “Setting you up for what?” Travers wasn’t quite following this conversation.

  “A trip into Faerie. They were promising me big rewards, a reward I’ve always wanted. And just to get me to risk my life for them. They must have known this was coming.” She rested her hand on the side of her foot, but kept looking down.

  Travers could sense how tired she was, and something else, something rather sad and defeated about her.

  “You think they knew that Zeus—” Travers still felt ridiculous talking about a Greek God as if he really existed, but he soldiered through it— “would try to toss them out of their positions? You think they could see that far into the future?”

  “Kyle can see into the future, can’t he?” Zoe asked, not answering Travers. She eased her hand off her foot, stretched her long leg, and arched her toes.

  Travers tried not to think about her smooth skin or the delicacy of her movements. “You’re asking me? The ultimate clueless man?”

  She leaned her head back as if she were waiting for Kyle to yell the answer from the kitchen. But, true to his word, he had left them alone.

  “If the Fates could really foresee the future like that,” Travers said, “why didn’t they try to stop Zeus from undermining them? Why did they give up their powers? Why did they put themselves at a disadvantage?”

  “Who knows? They’re not the most logical of women.” Zoe put her foot next to the other one, and rubbed her toes in the carpet.

  Travers had never seen a woman do that after removing high heels, but then, he hadn’t dated since his wife left, and she hadn’t been the high-heel type.

  “They’re very literal and pretty strange,” Travers said, “but they have been somewhat logical.”

  “You’re defending them?” Zoe asked.

  He felt as if he shouldn’t be, as if defending them was betraying her. “No,” he said, not really sure. “I just—what if they can only see partial futures? I mean, Kyle can only hear me when I ‘broadcast’ my thoughts, or so he says. Which means that he’s a partial psychic, not a full one. Maybe that’s how their prophecies work. Maybe they gave you that prophecy and didn’t realize they were tied into it.”

  Zoe shook her head. “It’s dangerous in Faerie.”

  “I’m assuming, since you call this place Faerie, they have magic too,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah.” She sighed. “There once were a number of different groups with magical abilities. Some of them went so deep underground that we no longer know about them. Some of them, from what I understand, were destroyed. And a few of us survived. The mages, we survived—and mostly were remembered through myths and legends. The Faeries were a particular group that actually managed to grow. They’ve been worrying the Powers That Be for at least five hundred years.”

  “Worrying why?” Travers asked.

  “Because they seem to get more powerful, and that’s not good.”

  Travers shook his head. “Not good—for you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “For us. We don’t work on accumulating power for the most part. We work on love.”

  “Huh?” Whatever he had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “What do you mean, ‘love’?”

  Her body went rigid for a brief moment, but she didn’t move. It was as if he had caught her saying something wrong. She waited so long to respond that he got the sense she was trying to make up an answer instead of giving him the truth.

  “We’re—um—all about romantic love,” she said. “Except for those of our number who go evil, the rest of us work for the betterment of anyone who can fall in love.”

  That wasn’t all of it, he knew, but she obviously wasn’t ready to tell him the rest. “And the Faeries?”

  “They’re all about power,’ she said. “They don’t even believe in love.”

  “Do you believe in power?”

  She nodded, keeping her head down. “Maybe more than I believe in love,” she said.

  Those words hung between them for a moment. He thought about it: he wasn’t sure he believed in romantic love, either. What he had felt for Cheryl had been teenage infatuation and lust. If he had felt love for her, a psychologist friend had once told him, then he would have hated her for leaving.

  All Travers had felt was relief.

  Still, he believed in love itself. He would do anything for his son. Anything at all. Even accept three strange women, drive them to Las Vegas, and give up a week of his life.

  “I don’t understand,” Travers said, “if you’re equally magical, what can they do to you, these Faeries?”

  Zoe raised her head, bit her lower lip, and released it. It was almost as if she wasn’t planning to tell him, and then changed her mind.

  “It’s against our rules to steal someone else’s magic,” she said.

  “Steal it?” Travers asked. “How can you do that?”

  She waved a hand, as if it weren’t important. “You have to be really talented to do it. It’s forbidden for us. You get one of the worst punishments ever. But it’s not forbidden for Faeries. It’s part of how they live. There’s only one hitch.”

  “And that is?”

  “They can’t steal magic in the outside world. They can only steal it inside of Faerie.”

  Travers blinked, then frowned.

  “All those stories you hear about Faeries,” Zoe said, “the ones about changelings, and about people eating food that sucks them into a magic land, and about Faerie circles—they come from this. People who just came into their magic, people who weren’t sure what they had, people like Kyle who had a lot of power, but it wasn’t developed or hadn’t reached its maturity, they got trapped by the Faeries and had their powers stolen. The Faeries grew stronger which is, I think, how they’ve managed to survive for so long.”

  Travers swallowed. He felt suddenly quite nervous. “And Faerie is near here?”

  “Don’t worry,” Zoe said. “They won’t mess with you or Kyle. Not while I’m here.”

  He hadn’t even thought of himself. He had only been thinking of Kyle.

  “How can you know that?” Travers asked.

  Zoe smiled at him. “I know where all the entrances to Faerie are in Vegas, and you two w
on’t get near them.”

  “Can’t they just—spell—us there?” Travers asked, wondering if he used the right words.

  “They haven’t done anything like that in centuries,” Zoe said. “They haven’t had to. Small talents like yours don’t interest them and they would rather wait until Kyle has come into his full power.”

  “But you’re different,” Travers said, beginning to understand.

  “According to the prophecy,” Zoe said, obviously choosing her words carefully, “I’ll lose myself there. All I am is my magic. Without it, there’s no Zoe Sinclair.”

  Travers doubted that, but he didn’t know enough to reassure her. “Then you’ll have to say no to the Fates.”

  She nodded. “I’ve come to that conclusion, too.”

  “Is there someone you can recommend to them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly what they want me to do,” she said.

  “They mentioned stealing something.” He had felt very uncomfortable about that.

  “I don’t steal,” she said. “I find. That’s different.”

  “And yet,” Travers said, “we have a dog here.”

  “He’s not stolen.” Her lips thinned. “He wanted to come. He makes his own choices.”

  “Maybe what they want you to find does, too.”

  She sighed. “If it’s in Faerie, I’m not going.”

  Travers nodded. He hadn’t even wanted to come to Las Vegas, and there was no real life-or-death risk for him here. He could certainly understand her position.

  He stood, because if he didn’t, he would touch her, and he wasn’t ready for that. Not even a light, casual touch on the shoulder. He was still confused—about the Fates, about himself, about everything, and he needed time to think.

  He also needed food.

  “Let’s order in,” he said. “Make a quiet evening of it, and talk to the Fates in the morning.”

  The idea of ordering in was daring enough for him. He would not have suggested it if she hadn’t looked so comfortable on his couch.

  She stretched, then ran a hand through her hair. It fell back into place perfectly—just like his sister Vivian accused his hair of doing. He smiled. Something else he and Zoe had in common.

  “If I don’t confront the Fates tonight, I won’t sleep,” Zoe said. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Travers hid his disappointment behind a genial smile. “All right, then. Dinner out. Somewhere big and loud and filled with obnoxious tourists so that the Fates won’t embarrass us.”

  Zoe pushed herself off the couch. “That’s just about anywhere in this part of Vegas, although we’ll need a little quiet so the Fates can hear me when I say no.”

  Travers nodded. He slipped his hands in his pockets so that he wouldn’t extend one to her. He wasn’t ready to reveal his attraction—not yet.

  “You know this town better than we ever could,” he said. “You chose.”

  “Great,” Zoe muttered, reaching for the purse she had dropped beside the couch. “My choice of tourist traps. This day just keeps getting better and better.”

  Thirteen

  Zoe followed Travers and Kyle into the hallway, wishing she had not decided to wear heels that morning. Her feet ached, her calves ached, and this endless day promised to go on forever.

  Even planning dinner was proving difficult.

  First, Kyle wouldn’t leave the hotel room without Bartholomew. No amount of argument from Travers seemed to help. Kyle was worried that Bartholomew wouldn’t be able to handle even an evening alone in the hotel suite, and Zoe had the sense that Kyle was right. Good old Morton the Magnificent might try to take Bartholomew back (since who knew how the Interim Fates had left him in the familiar department) or Bartholomew, who was pretty high strung even for a dachshund, simply might use his meager powers to escape, perhaps claiming he was searching for food or his companions.

  After a bit of an argument, Travers let the dog come along.

  That limited their choice of eating establishments. Now Zoe would have to contend with tourist restaurants that allowed dogs inside. She doubted there would be any convincing anyone that Bartholomew was a seeing-eye dog. Worst case, she would have to use her magic to make him invisible, something she really didn’t want to do around the Fates.

  The hallway between the suites was long and wide, and it looked like every other hotel hallway in every other large Vegas hotel. Zoe couldn’t imagine coming to places like this to spend her vacation. She actually missed the old hotels and all their history—the Sands, with the blue-gray cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and the ghost of Sinatra in every room. She’d seen the infamous Rat Pack performances in Vegas—and she still felt privileged.

  Zoe glanced at Travers, who was walking with his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. Bartholomew didn’t mind being on his leash. He led the group, sniffing every corner, every doorway, as they made their way to the end of the hall.

  Travers was looking straight ahead, his expression unreadable. He got a distant look at times, and she wasn’t sure what caused it. She would feel close to him for a moment, and then that closeness would fade as if it never were, almost as if his entire personality had withdrawn from the room without his body going with it.

  She had no idea how he did that.

  But it made her nervous, and a little more comfortable with her decision not to tell him the entire truth about her prophecy. She didn’t want him to know that she was supposed to discover her true love near Faerie.

  They stopped in front of the door to 1435, the Fates’ suite. The hallway smelled faintly of garlic, a scent Zoe hadn’t really noticed until they stopped in front of the door. Travers knocked, and all four of them stood in front of the spyhole as if they were the perfect Norman Rockwell family, coming to the aunts’ house for a visit.

  Zoe let a single shudder run through her. How deceiving appearances could be. A man, a woman, a boy who looked like the man, and an obese dog. What else could they be in this hotel in this part of Vegas except a family? A family of tourists.

  She would have thought so, looking at a surveillance tape. She was sure the security guard who was supposed to monitor the corridors through the cameras mounted on the wall thought the same thing.

  Finally the door swung open and Atropos appeared. Only she didn’t look like Atropos—or at least, not the Atropos of Greek myth, the one who carried the abhorréd shears and cut the thread of life to create death.

  This Atropos grinned at them. She had a streak of flour on one cheek, and more in her hair. Around her waist, an apron had absorbed even more flour, and there were flour tracks on the living room carpet.

  “Welcome! Welcome,” she said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  The garlic scent was even stronger now, accented by the smells of oregano and basil, along with the smell of bread dough. Travers looked at Zoe in surprise, as if she could explain the turn of events. She shrugged.

  Bartholomew yipped, and Kyle shushed him.

  “Come on in,” Clotho said from somewhere inside the suite.

  “We just came to get you for dinner,” Travers said slowly.

  “We’re having dinner here.” Lachesis’ voice sounded a little closer than Clotho’s, but not much.

  “We cooked,” Atropos said, pulling the door open as wide as it went.

  “Without magic?” Zoe asked, feeling apprehensive. After all, why would the Fates know how to cook? They had lived for centuries with everything provided for them, and few restrictions on their magic.

  “Of course without magic.” Clotho stood in the door to the kitchen, holding a wooden spoon as if it were a club. The spoon was dripping tomato paste onto the blue-and-white kitchen tile.

  “Come in!” Lachesis said again. She was setting the table in the dining area. The curtains were open, revealing a view of Las Vegas that Zoe only saw in brochures—the city spread before her like a sea of multi-colored Christmas lights.

  Bartholomew tugged Kyle inside, and Travers fo
llowed, moving hesitantly. He looked over his shoulder at Zoe, and she read his expression as if she had known him all her life.

  Is this what you want? he was asking her. He was going to give her a chance to escape if she needed it.

  But this was probably the best. If the Fates were angry at her for not taking their case, and they decided that she had failed the test; if they had lied about no longer having magic; if they had some kind of retribution planned, better to be inside a private room than in the Hard Rock Café, trying to shout over the music.

  Zoe nodded just a little at Travers, enough so that he noticed, not enough for anyone else too, and then she stepped inside. The smells were overpowering here, and she could no longer separate out individual odors.

  “What’re we having?” Kyle asked.

  “Everyone’s favorite,” Atropos said. “Pizza!”

  “You ordered pizza?” Travers asked, and there was relief in his voice.

  “Of course not.” Clotho sounded offended. She let the spoon drop, and more sauce dripped off.

  “We learned how to cook in the last few months,” Lachesis said.

  “It was quite intimidating at first,” Atropos said.

  “Henri Barou made us learn,” Clotho said.

  “He let us use his cave fortress,” Lachesis said, “but he wouldn’t supply fresh meals every day.”

  “Cave fortress?” Travers asked.

  But as he did, Kyle stepped forward, his eyes bright. “Henri Barou? That’s my Uncle Dex, right?”

  “Of course, child,” Atropos said.

  “He has a fortress of solitude? Just like in the comics?” Kyle sounded thrilled.

  Zoe’s breath caught. The Fates hated all mention of the comic books. Henri had told her that years ago.

  “It is quite the place,” Clotho said. “We had to stay there until we were safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Travers asked.

  “Eris was trying to destroy us,” Lachesis said.

  “We suspect that will be a common problem as people discover we’ve given up our magic,” Atropos said with a grin. It didn’t seem to bother her. She wiped her hands on her flour-covered apron, getting more flour on herself and on the floor.