He still couldn’t see the guys anywhere.
The Fates swam over to him.
“I think we have to go,” Kyle said. “Those guys are here.”
“Really?” Clotho asked, turning. “Where?”
Lachesis and Atropos turned, too, as if they couldn’t contain themselves.
“I’m serious. Those guys are scaring me,” Kyle said. “They’re stalking us.”
“We’ll be fine,” Lachesis said, and dunked under the water. Atropos followed. Clotho gave him a wicked grin and sank beneath the surface, too.
Kyle clenched his fists, feeling as helpless as he ever had in his life. He wondered if he should send one of those screaming messages that Zoe taught him about this morning.
He didn’t know if this was the right kind of emergency. He sure didn’t want to cry wolf or anything.
Kyle scanned the entire crowd, turning round and round and round, looking at faces and ears and Speedos, wondering if the guys had just vanished.
After a full 360 search, Kyle didn’t see them. Maybe he was imagining the whole thing. Maybe those guys weren’t anybody.
Or maybe he was getting a weird kind of future vision—something that hadn’t happened yet, but might.
Kyle went back to the shade and grabbed Atropos’ chocolate shake, which was pretty melted. He started to drink it as he stared into the pool.
What he would do was simple: if he saw the guys again, he’d let out one of those mental screams. And then he’d get the Fates out of here as fast as possible.
He was ready, even if they weren’t.
Twenty-two
The history of Faerie, as told by Zoe Sinclair, was short, dark, and surprisingly brutal. Travers found himself slumped in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, trying hard not to let the images she gave him form pictures in his head.
The Readers Digest Condensed version was, as best as he understood it, that the Faeries abandoned their woodsy, nature-vibe lifestyle sometime after Christianity made it into the British Isles, but sometime before industrialization. Most of the Faeries moved to America, where they thought they could live in peace and harmony, mingling with the natives. Then they realized that the natives had their own form of magic (one that Zoe refused to discuss—saying a third magical reality was more than Travers could bear. He figured he had the right to decide what he could bear and what he couldn’t, but he’d already irritated her once today, so he decided not to irritate her again).
A lot of the Faerie myths were true, just like a lot of the mage myths were true, but the truth was hidden in the storytelling.
“What does that mean for us?” Travers asked.
“It means we can’t trust them,” Zoe said. She was still leaning against the desk, still looking beautiful, and still enticing him, whether she was trying or not.
Travers kept his eyes on hers, so he wouldn’t look at those knees, which led to the thighs, which led to—
“I figured that much out on my own,” Travers said. “About not trusting them, that is. What I haven’t figured is how all this matters to our case.”
The “our” came out before he could stop it, but Zoe didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did notice, she didn’t mind.
“You know the story of Rip Van Winkle?” Zoe asked.
“Yeah,” Travers said.
“The story’s true,” Zoe said. “A lot of the stories you heard about that part of New England were true. The Faeries were trying to get rid of the Europeans who might recognize them. What do you think happened to Roanoke?”
“Huh?”
“The first colony, the one where all the colonists mysteriously vanished?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Travers said.
Zoe crossed her arms. She shook her head. “What do they do for education these days?”
“I studied math.”
“I studied everything.” She sighed. “Of course, there was a lot less of everything when I was young.”
She made herself sound ancient. It was her fourth mention of age. Clearly it bothered her, and he was going to see if he could change it.
“Anyway,” she said. “Rip van Winkle, the Headless Horsemen, all Faerie tricks to get rid of the colonists.”
“That worked,” Travers said.
Zoe smiled. “The Faeries have always underestimated mortals.”
“And mages haven’t?” Travers asked.
Zoe shrugged and stood. Her skirt fell across her knees, and Travers felt a stab of disappointment. Another opportunity lost. Not that he was going to take advantage of it.
“That’s the nice thing about focusing on love,” Zoe said. “You don’t worry about advantage or disadvantage. Your concern is with finding the perfect mate and happily ever after.”
“Then how come all of the mages I’ve met are single?” Travers asked.
Her expression fell for a brief moment. It was as if she couldn’t control the muscles on her face. And then she shrugged again, a slightly empty smile crossing her lips.
“You haven’t met very many of us,” she said and turned away.
She grabbed some papers off her desk, shuffled them, then stacked them. She sighed once, and said, “Faeries are tricksters. That’s what they did to old Rip Van Winkle. They tricked him out of twenty years of his life. What the story doesn’t tell you is that they raided his land and his business, taking items of magical power. He was a strong believer in many things, and the Faeries wanted those things. But he recognized them for what they were. And as punishment, they kept him in magic time for longer than they needed to. He lost everything. Wife, children, friends. Even his country.”
Her voice was soft.
“That’s what you’re afraid of?” Travers asked. “Afraid they’ll trick you out of everything?”
She shook her head. “They’ve become a lot more sophisticated now. They can take magic from you or even from me in the right circumstances—and if they have enough power.”
“You mentioned that yesterday.”
“What I didn’t mention yesterday is that the Faeries have stockpiled magical items all over the United States. There are places in this country where they keep the most important items.” Zoe ran a hand through her hair. The hair tangled, then fell against her cheeks.
Travers wanted to smooth it out, but he didn’t touch her. Not after that earlier encounter.
“The Faeries use those items to maintain their powers and also to maintain what they call Faerie—their mystical home.”
“Like your Mount Olympus.”
She gave him a sideways glance. “Look at your map, sweetie. Mount Olympus exists.”
“But no one ever saw Greek gods living there,” Travers said.
Zoe raised her eyebrows at him, then shook her head slightly. “Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece. The top is always hidden behind a layer of clouds. And there’s a reason for that.”
“Yeah,” Travers said. “At a certain level in the atmosphere—”
“No,” Zoe said. “It’s magic. There is a palace on top of that mountain and the Powers that Be live there. The Muses live on the mountainside and manage to keep their homes invisible most of the time, and the judicial courts, it is said, float among the clouds.”
“You don’t know where they are?” Travers couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm from his voice.
“No one does.” Zoe set the papers down. “You’ve seen how people are reacting to the Fates lacking their powers. Imagine if people knew where the Fates lived and worked. America didn’t invent going postal, you know. You just named it.”
“So the Faeries didn’t have a mountain,” Travers said.
“They could have, I suppose.” Zoe tapped her computer keyboard, bent over it, and the printer snapped to life. “I mean, they were in Europe, after all. But early on, Faeries lived in tribes, and they were pretty hostile to each other.”
The printer beeped twice and then began spitting out paper.
“But the
Faeries chose to create their hideaway out of thin air, and they’ve continued that practice in the States. They have several, and they’re all interconnected. Magical totems keep the things going. If you can imagine that Faerie itself is like an oven, and the totems provide the electricity to keep the thing running, then you have an idea of what we’re talking about.”
She took the papers out of the printer, and rolled them in one hand. Then she shut the printer off.
“Okay,” Travers said. “So there are thousands of magical items.”
“Millions,” Zoe said. “Maybe billions. So many that only a few can keep track of them. But, thanks to the Internet, and all those internal Faerie conflicts, we actually have a chance of figuring out where some items are stored.”
“Internal conflicts?”
She waved her hand, dismissing that. “As I said, they’re tribal. These conflicts have existed since the first ear got pointed. Don’t even try to follow it all.”
“I don’t see how it relates to the Internet.”
“Faerie eBay,” she said with a grin.
“Faerie what?”
“eBay,” she said. “Except that it’s not really eBay, since that’s a trademarked name and a real business. But Faeries do steal and then trade magical items, always looking for the better totem. Some of those items actually are on eBay—original rabbits’ feet from the 1930s, wishing-well pennies, things like that, only with descriptions that make them appealing only to Faeries in the know.”
Travers shook his head. The secret worlds had secret worlds, which probably had more secret worlds. And they all seemed to have secret passwords and understandings and ways of doing business.
No wonder Zoe didn’t want to tell him about any other magical systems.
“So we go on eBay and look for a spinning wheel?” Travers asked.
“Tried that late last night,” Zoe said. “I found a lot of spinning wheels, but none old enough and none with the right description. So I had to follow a few digital trails. I managed to locate Faerie eBay. Its domain changes from week to week, and finding it is always a trick.”
“Of course,” Travers muttered.
“But I found it and a few other sites, and managed to discern that the wheel hasn’t been on the market.”
“Recently?”
“Ever,” Zoe said. “So whoever originally stole it still has it.”
“Okay.” Travers’ headache from the day before was returning. Was there a maximum amount of information the brain could handle? He didn’t know, but if he had to guess, he was beginning to think he had reached it. “There was no Internet several thousand years ago, so that means the trail’s a dead end.”
“Ah, Travers,” Zoe said, slapping the rolled papers against her hand. “You’ve forgotten the whole point of this discussion.”
“There was a point?” he asked, then realized he had said that out loud.
But Zoe didn’t seem to notice. “There was. Myths, legends, slipping into the mortal consciousness. I looked up fairy tales and local legends, starting in Greece and working my way outward.”
“Legends about spinning wheels?”
Zoe nodded. “There are more than you would think.”
“I’m surprised there’s even one,” Travers said.
Zoe sighed. “You have to start paying attention. The Fates told you the first one. It was about them.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, although he wasn’t sure he remembered a fairy tale. He remembered them saying they had a spinning wheel, and that was all.
“Anyway, I traced the wheel to the dominant tribe of Faeries, the ones that lived in the British Isles for so long. That’s good luck for us.”
“It is?” Travers asked.
Zoe nodded. “It means that the wheel is somewhere in North America. When the tribe came over, it wasn’t going to leave its most powerful possessions behind.”
“‘Somewhere in North America’ is a big space,” Travers said.
“But here’s the great thing about Faerie,” Zoe said. “The rules of time and space don’t exactly apply.”
Travers rubbed the bridge of his nose. That headache was growing worse. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that like Rip Van Winkle, if you go into Faerie and aren’t careful, you’ll lose years in the space of minutes.”
“Oh, good,” Travers said.
“And if you enter Faerie in Las Vegas, you can go anywhere on the North American continent—provided there’s a Faerie portal leading out.”
“I can go anywhere on the continent now,” Travers said.
“In a matter of seconds,” Zoe said.
“Oh.” Travers frowned. “But I’d lose years.”
“No,” she said. “Distances aren’t as—distant—in Faerie. They’re only as long as you want them to be.”
He leaned forward in his chair, suddenly very uncomfortable. “It sounds like you want to go into Faerie now. What happened to ‘it could be the death of us,’ and all that danger stuff?”
She bit her lower lip, then seemed to catch herself. “I’m hoping we won’t have to go in. I’m hoping we can get someone to go for us. And it won’t take long, and we’ll be done with helping the Fates. They’ll become someone else’s problem.”
“I suppose you have someone in mind,” Travers said.
“Yes,” Zoe said, and her smile was radiant. “I certainly do.”
Twenty-three
Zoe knew her plan verged on crazy. But she also knew that if a person couldn’t trust her friends, she couldn’t trust anyone.
She was going to have to go to Herschel and Gaylord. But first, she wanted to double-check her information.
She wasn’t going to explain this part of the plan to Travers. He didn’t need to know that she had a bit more research to finish before sending anyone into Faerie. Zoe managed to get him out of her office by promising lunch. She didn’t tell him until they pulled up outside Rigo’s Tacos that lunch would be a fried pork burrito on the run.
To his credit, Travers didn’t complain. He just took a lot of extra napkins, and ate in silence.
Zoe sipped the take-out ice tea she’d gotten at Rigo’s and drove one-handed through the North Las Vegas traffic.
North Las Vegas was a different city than Vegas. North Las Vegas sprang up around the Air Force base, and never really took off the way Vegas proper did. But North Vegas had its own charm, and it felt like a real city, with truly ethnic neighborhoods and old buildings ripe for redevelopment, and urban renewal taking place in the Golden Triangle section.
Zoe wasn’t heading to the Triangle. She was driving to one of the old neighborhoods, filled with buildings that had become ramshackle in the desert sun. Bars on the windows, walls with gang tags, and broken-down cars huddling next to the curb made the area seem more dangerous than it was.
She could feel Travers tense beside her, and she didn’t care. She felt more at home in places like this than she did in the bright and shiny Strip. The Strip was for tourists. North Vegas was for locals.
She parked in an alley behind a row of single-story buildings made of a bad combination of wood and adobe. The original building, in the center, was made of real adobe, and had once been the only business on this road. Over the years, the other buildings sprang up around it, and Zoe could remember, in the late 1950s, when this block looked nice and clean, and the new buildings made the old building seem like it had been freshly built, too.
Now all of them tottered against each other like elderly friends heading into a buffet. Two buildings housed pawn shops, two others hosted liquor stores, and two more were closed.
The building in the center, the original, was shrouded, the windows impossible to see. Zoe didn’t care about that—the building housed one of those shops only a handful of people knew about, because only a handful of people needed to know.
Occasionally mortals—local and tourist—wandered into the shop and thought they’d come upon a curio store. Usually they ended up regretting their
stop; they picked up something cursed or too magical for them to understand, and no matter how many warnings the clerks gave them, the mortals bought the item anyway.
Zoe had no patience with those people, but she did try to protect them. That’s why she had never, in all her years in Vegas, brought anyone here before.
Today, she felt she had no choice.
No one else was parked in the alley, and the nearby roads were deserted. The afternoon sun bleached the area white, making the asphalt, the iron bars, even the once-pink walls of the buildings seem to glow with reflected light.
Travers’ skin wasn’t glowing this time, though. The potion she’d cobbled together worked as both healing lotion and sunscreen. He didn’t know that yet, either, but he would by the time they got back to the hotel.
He climbed out of the car. She walked to his side of the car and protected it—not with an invisibility spell (in this neighborhood that would be a neon “Steal Me” sign) but with the Club, which she carried in her trunk for just such an emergency.
Travers didn’t even ask her about that—why she would use a regular, man-made protection device in one neighborhood and a magical one in another.
That bothered her as well—shouldn’t he be more curious about this stuff?—and then she realized that he felt nervous in this alley, looking over his shoulder at the black spray paint shouting its affiliations on the side of a nearby Dumpster.
He was uneasy, and he was trying to pretend that he wasn’t. Zoe smiled. It had been clear from the moment she met him that he had led a sheltered life, even though it had been in Los Angeles.
The longer he stayed around her, the less sheltered it would become.
“Come on,” she said, and walked down the two concrete steps that led into the back door of the shop. She pulled the door open by the decorative iron bars that covered it, listening to the hinges squeal as she stepped into the darkness.
The transition from early afternoon sunlight to badly lit shop was always a difficult one. When she entered this place, she always felt as if she had to step through a dark cavern to get into the real store. It was almost the way a fade-out in a movie would feel.
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