Absolutely Captivated

by Grayson, Kristine

  He didn’t want to change. He liked himself. He liked Kyle. He even liked L.A.

  “Dad,” Kyle whispered, nodding toward the Fates.

  They were still staring at him, as if they expected him to say something.

  “I don’t care what you all want,” Travers said. “I’m my own man. I make my own choices. And if you’re trying to manipulate me into spending time with Zoe, then that’s the worst way of getting me to do it.”

  “Me, too,” Zoe said, crossing her arms.

  “Stubborn,” Lachesis said.

  “Usually that would be the basis of a relationship,” Atropos said. “Look how much they have in common.”

  It was clear that the Fates were no longer talking to Travers or Zoe. The Fates were talking to each other.

  “Strong personalities,” Clotho said.

  “Similar belief systems,” Lachesis said.

  “All lost,” Atropos said with a sigh.

  “Lost?” Kyle sat up, pushing away from his dad. “What do you mean lost?”

  “It’s clear,” Clotho said, “that the laws of romance are already breaking down.”

  “Zeus wants love out of the equation, and somehow those children of his, through their incompetence, are making that possible,” Lachesis said.

  “Otherwise, the two of you would fall into each other’s arms,” Atropos said.

  “Or maybe,” Zoe said, raising her chin slightly, “we’re not meant to have a relationship.”

  Travers felt his stomach twist. He didn’t want to be forced into a relationship with anyone; then again, Zoe was the first person who had interested him in a long time.

  That feeling couldn’t be wrong, could it? It couldn’t be magically applied, like paint to a wall, could it? Feelings had to come from the inside, didn’t they?

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Clotho said to Zoe.

  “Perhaps we made a mistake,” Lachesis said.

  “It could be us, after all,” Atropos said.

  “We’ve been without magic for so long now that we might be making errors that we’re unaware of,” Clotho said.

  Then all three Fates sighed.

  “Maybe we’re the only ones who want the world the way it was,” Lachesis said.

  “Now wait a minute,” Zoe said. “I met those Interim Fates. They’re a disaster.”

  “Then at least help us locate the wheel,” Atropos said.

  “And then you’ll take this problem to someone else?” Zoe asked.

  “We’ll take ourselves along with it,” Clotho said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

  Zoe glanced at Travers, and quickly looked away. Not before he saw something vulnerable in her eyes, something almost fearful.

  “Our lives would be our own again,” Travers said to her.

  “And you can make your own decisions,” Lachesis said.

  “About life,” Atropos said.

  “About love,” Clotho said.

  “About everything,” Lachesis said.

  Zoe let out a long breath. “All right,” she said. “That I’ll do.”

  “What about Dad?” Kyle asked, echoing Travers thought, one he had decided not to vocalize. He could’ve muzzled his kid, but instead, he just shook his head slightly.

  “He has many options,” Atropos said.

  “But we must warn you,” Clotho said.

  “Others will try to steal your magic, now that you’ve tapped it,” Lachesis said.

  “The drive across the west is particularly treacherous,” Atropos said.

  “There are many lost and lonely and starving mages,” Clotho said, “looking for any advantage they can get.”

  Travers bit his lower lip. The Fates looked at each other, as if they weren’t talking to him at all.

  “I worry most about the child,” Lachesis said.

  Travers’ arm tightened around Kyle. Kyle eased in closer.

  “This still feels like manipulation,” Travers said. “I’ve taken care of myself for years. I’m sure I’ll be fine on a trip back to Oregon, a trip I’ve taken dozens of times.”

  Zoe made a clicking sound behind her teeth, almost a tsk-tsk. Travers glanced at her. She gave him a sheepish shrug.

  “I’m afraid in this case the Fates are right,” she said.

  “In this case?” Atropos asked, sounding indignant.

  “There are mages who would steal your magic,” Zoe said as if Atropos hadn’t spoken.

  “But only now, only after I’ve met all of you.” Travers couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his tone. Kyle leaned in even closer. Travers wasn’t sure his son could hug him any tighter.

  “You’ve deliberately tapped your magic,” Zoe said. “It’s like taking a cover off a pool. Now it reflects the light, and everyone can sense it. Before, it wasn’t as obvious.”

  “So I’ll put the cover back on,” Travers said.

  “It’s not that simple,” Zoe said. “The analogy breaks down. It’s as if in taking the cover off, the cover has vanished and the pool will keep growing. You’re a magic attractor, so long as your powers remain untamed.”

  “I’m sure you’ve had trouble before,” Clotho said.

  “But you probably explained it away as some other circumstance,” Lachesis said.

  “Like those smoke rings,” Kyle whispered.

  Travers looked at his son in horror. They had to vacate a hotel near Redding on the way to Vivian’s wedding because the room they were staying in—and only that room—was filled with smoke rings. When Travers tried to explain it to the desk clerk, he had said it was as if an invisible person sat in the room, smoking a pipe and exhaling in little rings. The clerk had muttered something about the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, added a rather snide comment about everyone imagining hookah pipes—and pointed to the smoke rings that had followed Travers into the lobby.

  That was when he decided to leave. He had driven nearly fifty miles before he found another hotel to take them. By then the smoke rings were gone.

  The next morning he scanned the local news channels, expecting to hear about a hotel that had burned down near Redding, but nothing got reported. It didn’t make any California papers the following day, either, and Travers had chalked the whole thing up to an oddity, even though Kyle had told him that the smoke seemed evil.

  Travers shook his head. “This has been the most incredible day of my life,” he said.

  Zoe gave him a sympathetic smile. “Sadly, it won’t stay that way.”

  His gaze met hers and held it. This time she didn’t look away. The attraction still floated between them, but now he questioned what caused it—a real attraction or even more magic.

  And the questioning made him feel sad. He wanted the attraction to be real.

  She closed her eyes, her long, dark lashes brushing against the skin of her cheek. Then she sighed, as if she had made some kind of resolution. When she opened her eyes, they seemed slightly different—a little more determined maybe, or a little more resigned.

  “I can teach you a few survival skills,” she said. “I can get you started enough to make the trip to Oregon to be mentored.”

  Travers should have felt relieved, but he didn’t. He didn’t want survival skills. He had been speaking the truth when he said he wanted his life back.

  “How long will I have to stay in Oregon?” he asked the Fates.

  “Mentoring takes anywhere from two to five years,” Atropos said.

  “Depending on the student,” Clotho added.

  “And the level of ability,” Lachesis said.

  “In your case,” Atropos said, “two years should do.”

  “Two years?” Travers asked. “But I have a job, a business, a life in L.A.”

  “Then perhaps those children can find you a new mentor there,” Clotho said, sniffing as if the Interim Fates were in the room and hadn’t bathed in weeks.

  “Either way,” Zoe said, “I’ll get you enough control to go wherever you need to.”

  She spoke
softly, making it clear that she was only talking to him.

  “How long with that take?” Travers asked, knowing he sounded ungrateful.

  “A few weeks,” Zoe said. “Depending on my caseload, and how long it takes me to find this wheel.”

  “You’re taking our job?” Lachesis asked.

  “Against my better judgment,” Zoe said.

  “And she’s mentoring young Travers,” Atropos said in a stage whisper. “How much better could it get?”

  “I don’t know,” Travers said. “it would be kinda nice not to be mentored at all.”

  Kyle buried his face in Travers’ chest, as if he didn’t want to see the fallout from that comment. But Travers didn’t care. In the last week, his life had veered out of control, and it would never be the same again. He was smart enough to realize that.

  He also knew that some of his disappointment came from the interaction with Zoe. He did want to spend time with her, but not as a student with a teacher. He wanted to get to know the woman, to understand how she felt about life, not learn how she made the Fates disappear or how she convinced a guy who looked like an apple witch that the Fates hadn’t lost their magic.

  “I think we all wished we had the luxury of forgoing a mentor,” Zoe said, “but none of us do. I promise not to be hard on you.”

  Travers leaned back in surprise. “Hard on me?”

  “In the training,” Zoe said.

  “Like her mentor was with her,” Clotho said.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Kyle whispered from somewhere near Travers’ chest. “I believe in you.”

  Travers was glad someone did. Although he doubted Kyle would like this situation much when he really realized how much their life would change. Right now, Kyle probably saw this as a way out of summer school.

  But it was more than that. It was a whole new way of living, a way Travers wasn’t sure he would ever learn to like.

  Fifteen

  Zoe leaned her head against the ripped leather seat in the back of the cab. She was exhausted, but she knew better than to close her eyes. The ride from the Strip to her house would only take about ten minutes at this time of night. Normally, she would have walked, but her feet had ached for hours now, and even if she spelled her high heels into tennis shoes, the walk wouldn’t be any more pleasant.

  The cab headed east on Tropicana, past the UNLV campus. There, as Zoe gazed out the window, she saw people walking— summer school students heading to the library, going to their dorms. The University of Nevada-Las Vegas was a little oasis of normality in a town that didn’t believe in it. Students came here, and although they indulged in the Vegas nightlife, they didn’t really become part of it.

  They never saw beneath the city’s surface.

  Perhaps that was Zoe’s problem. She always saw beneath the surface.

  Zoe sighed. She still wasn’t sure how or when she had decided to take the Fates’ case. They said she would have to locate the wheel, and that was when she got the idea: she might be able to find it—maybe even take it—without venturing into Faerie herself.

  The cab turned north on Pecos Road, heading into the quiet neighborhood that Zoe had lived in since the mid-1970s. Her house was in a cul-de-sac off two other side roads. She had nearly an acre of property with tall trees and a lot of landscaping that had cost her a small fortune to put in. It also cost her a small fortune to maintain—Vegas was high desert, and keeping any kind of plant alive in this climate required a drip irrigation system, more water than the city wanted her to use, and the services of a gardener.

  She could afford it. She had lived pretty frugally most of her life, making sure she always had enough money to last her several years without work. The gardener felt like a major indulgence, one she couldn’t live without.

  The house was a two-story, modified adobe style split-level, about as trendy as she could have gotten back when she was buying. She had grown tired of her 1950s ranch with its 850 square feet, and thought she needed 4,000 square feet of privacy.

  Most of the rooms were closed off now, but she wasn’t willing to sell the house. She didn’t want to lose the yard, the landscaping, and the pool.

  The pool was her secret pride and joy. She had learned when she lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s that living in a desert climate without a pool was like living in Aspen without a pair of skis.

  She had expanded the pool thirty years ago, making it twenty-five meters long, with a small, concrete island in the center. There were bridges to that island, and a pavilion built in the middle, providing shade even in the middle of the day. She swam every morning, and often in the evenings, and on days when she had no work, she sat in the chaise longue and read, enjoying the warmth and the shade and the bits of privacy she had bought.

  It was not the life of an average detective. It certainly wasn’t the life she had imagined for herself when she had come to Vegas. And it was light years from the Hammett/Chandler ideal of a grungy apartment with a disillusioned detective who only spent as much time in the room as she needed to sleep off the previous night’s drunk.

  She had lived that way for a few years, and while it played well in fiction, in practice it left her muzzy-headed, lonely, and dissatisfied. Somewhere along the way, she realized that her office could be sparse and noir, but her home had to be comfortable, maybe even spectacular, or her life wasn’t worth living.

  The cab pulled up in front of the arch-shaped garage door. A hedgerow going off in either direction hid the rest of the house from view except for the solar lamps she had installed last year, illuminating the base of the adobe through the cactus garden.

  “You gonna be okay, miss?” the driver asked through the window, before he requested his fee.

  Zoe blinked and sat up, wondering for a moment if she had fallen asleep. But she hadn’t. She had paid attention to the entire drive.

  Then she realized that he thought she was a tourist, coming to visit a local, and something about her home made it seem like her visit would be an uncomfortable one.

  She smiled at the man, grateful for his concern—that was the thing about Vegas that no one mentioned; the locals still acted as if it were a small town—and unzipped the top of her purse, looking for her wallet.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I live here.”

  He raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t believe her, but he didn’t say anything more. She gave him his fee plus a healthy tip, and let herself out into the warm desert night.

  The temperature had dropped twenty degrees, making it in the low nineties, which wasn’t so bad, considering. The temperature might actually dip into the eighties before dawn.

  She could remember when Vegas summer nights got truly cool—no asphalt and car exhaust and haze to hold in the day’s heat. But that seemed like a long time ago.

  Everything seemed like a long time ago.

  She was feeling old tonight, perhaps because she was attracted to a much younger man.

  Zoe smiled at herself, and threaded her way through the hedgerow to the front door. The plants were damp—her gardener clearly had misted them against city regulations. She didn’t have the heart to reprimand him.

  She unlocked her front door, shut off the security system, and took a deep lungful of air-conditioned cold. She left the house at a consistent 75 degrees in the summer, which felt positively frigid on days like today, and didn’t waste nearly as much electricity as the old days, when summer air-conditioning temperatures were a standard 60 or below.

  She kicked off her painful shoes and walked barefoot across the shag carpet. The entry was the most spectacular part of her house.

  Designed for faculty parties, the house had a number of features that made it the perfect home for the UNLV basketball coach or provost. Not too far from the university, but fancy enough to impress all those alums.

  But the builder had forgotten that university salaries, even in the cash-rich UNLV basketball program, weren’t the same as, say, mobsters’ salaries, and the house had rem
ained empty until Zoe bought it, three years later.

  Still, she loved the weird opulence. In this, the entry and great room, the ceiling was high enough for Kobe Bryant to stand on Shaquille O’Neal’s shoulders and barely brush the painted wood. A minibar stood to the left of the door, but there was nothing mini about it. Made of rich, dark wood, the bar looked more like it had been stolen from the front of a church than a place for people to enjoy drinks.

  And then there was the fireplace. It stood directly across from the door, and was lined in marble. The fireplace was large enough for three witches and a caldron to stand inside it—or three Fates and a cooking pot, at least.

  Zoe shook her head. She wasn’t going to get the Fates out of her mind as quickly as she had hoped. She glanced at the grand piano, which was the final finishing touch in this front room, and knew that playing wouldn’t relax her tonight.

  Nothing would, not even that hot bath and book she had promised herself earlier.

  She reset the alarm and walked through the great room to the kitchen. She had remodeled the kitchen ten years ago, but it was still small compared to the rest of the house. She didn’t mind. She liked cozy, and she didn’t cook enough to make an elaborate kitchen worthwhile.

  She pulled open the fridge, got out a fat-free strawberry yogurt drink, and sipped on it while she turned on the radio. Soft jazz with a ’40s edge, making her think of the days just after the war, when L.A. was still a small town, and she was thinking of moving away from it, thinking that she’d find less corruption somewhere else.

  And, she had to admit, she was getting away from yet another failed relationship, this one with a bookie she’d met while on the job. Odd that after she had broken up with a bookie, she had moved to a town that made its living off gambling.

  She had thought she had a lot in common with the bookie—a taste for low life, but no urge to live it; an understanding of the way the world worked, or didn’t; and a willingness to put up with the seamier sides of a town that seemed composed of seamy sides.