Absolutely Captivated

by Grayson, Kristine

  Zoe nodded.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Good.” He tucked the map under her other arm. “I hope I see you again, Zoe. If your quest doesn’t work, then I’m the one out a fortune in magic.”

  “It’ll work,” Zoe said, wanting to add that he would be out a fortune, but she would be dead. It seemed to her that she would be the one getting the short end of that deal.

  “I would wish you good luck,” Elmer said, “but the Faeries would steal the words and use them for their own nefarious purposes.”

  “Still,” Zoe said, “I appreciate the sentiment.”

  And she did. But she had feeling that what she was about to do would take more than luck. It would take skill and cunning and a great deal of strength.

  But she knew—just like Elmer knew—that the thing she needed the most of was the thing the Faeries hoarded like gold: a belief that fortune would smile on her in her time of need.

  Or in other words—

  Luck.

  Twenty-seven

  Travers paced around the room, careful not to bump into any tables or brush any curio cabinets. The more he walked and peered, the more he saw: little faces smiling back at him; men waving from art deco cigarette cases; women blowing him kisses from World War II recruitment posters.

  Now, it seemed, the curtain that Zoe had gone through had disappeared. And Travers couldn’t see the back door. He was in a room without exits or windows, filled with stuff he wasn’t allowed to touch, in a place that seemed outside reality.

  And he also discovered that his cell phone wasn’t working. Kyle couldn’t reach Travers if he wanted to.

  And Travers hated that. It didn’t matter how many mental tricks Zoe had taught his son, they didn’t compensate for modern wireless communication, done through the wonders of technology.

  Travers had just about reached the end of his tolerance. Only he didn’t know what to do when he really did reach the end of his tolerance. Would he try to call for Zoe? Or use a modification of one of the new spells she taught him?

  Then Zoe appeared in front of him. He almost walked into her, and nearly grabbed an end table to right himself, catching himself at the last minute.

  “Zoe?” he asked tentatively, not sure if she was a vision or not.

  “Yep,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “You didn’t come out of the curtain,” he said, feeling slightly disoriented.

  “Yes, I did.” She turned, saw that she was in the center of the room with no curtain in sight, and frowned. “At least, I thought I did.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?” Travers asked.

  She nodded, then extended her hand. On the palm was a very small, fragile piece of paper. Under her left arm, she carried a glowing plastic tube, and under her right, a Cubs baseball cap.

  “What’re those?” he asked.

  “The solutions to the case, I hope,” she said. “We need something to put this paper in, though. It has to stay flat.”

  “Conjure a book,” Travers said. He wasn’t about to suggest she take one of the books off the shelf he had seen in his pacing. Those books laughed at him—literally laughed—as he walked by. He didn’t like them at all, which was something he’d never felt about books before. “You can carry a book flat much more easily than a scrap of paper.”

  Zoe gave him a wide smile. “You’re brilliant,” she said, and snapped the fingers of her other hand.

  A thick volume appeared in Travers hands, surprising him. The book weighed as much as newborn baby.

  “Open it,” Zoe said.

  He did, to a middle page. The writing inside wasn’t English. Neither was the alphabet. He had no idea what language he was looking at.

  Zoe put the scrap of paper in the book. “That’s page 532,” she said. “Can you remember that for me?”

  “Easily,” he said, using a trick he’d used for memorizing since he was a kid. He made the number into an equation: 5=3+2. “I didn’t see the number on the page.”

  “Trust me, it was there.” Zoe sighed. She took the tube from under her arm, and then the cap from the other arm. “You ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, “because we have a lot to do this afternoon. We—”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?” Zoe leaned back, as if the word had too much force. “What do you mean no?”

  Travers looked over his shoulder. He felt like a million eyes were watching them. “Can we have this discussion outside?”

  Zoe sighed, and shook her head, but led the way through the maze of tables and cabinets to the door. Travers was amazed she found it. He couldn’t see it until they were only a few feet away.

  The door looked the same as it had when they entered, and he had no idea why he hadn’t been able to find it before. Except, of course, for the magical explanation. He wasn’t supposed to leave, so he couldn’t find the door.

  Travers swallowed his exasperation and followed Zoe outside. The day’s heat hit him like a wall. The sun was so bright he had to blink several times before he could see much more than white walls, white concrete, white clouds.

  Finally the pale blue of the sky came into focus, and then the black of the iron bars on the windows, and finally the red of Zoe’s car.

  She opened the small trunk, put her possessions in it, dithered over the book, and finally wedged it against the tire iron and the jack.

  “All right,” she said, closing the trunk with one hand. “What’s so important that we can’t finish the case?”

  “Kyle,” Travers said.

  Zoe stopped short, as if she hadn’t expected that answer. “Have you heard from him?”

  Travers shook his head, then realized he’d better check his cell phone now that he was out of that dungeon. He looked at the LED, saw that he hadn’t missed any calls, and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

  “Then why are we going to see him?” Zoe asked.

  “Because some weird, green-haired woman propositioned me in there,” Travers said, “and she knew way too much about my life and what’s going on for me to be comfortable. I’m going to check on Kyle. If people are approaching me, then they might be going after Kyle, too.”

  “Weird, green-haired woman,” Zoe repeated, frowning, as if she were trying to place the description.

  “With bright green eyes,” Travers said. “I saw her in a mirror.”

  “Hmm,” Zoe said. “Could’ve been anyone from a nature sprite to a Faerie. Did she have pointed ears?”

  “I couldn’t see under all that hair,” Travers said, “which is beside the point, anyway. I want to check on Kyle.”

  “So call him,” Zoe said.

  “No,” Travers said. “We’re going back to the hotel. I want to see him for myself.”

  “He might not be there,” Zoe said.

  “Then I’ll find him.”

  Zoe studied Travers for a moment. A small smile played at her lips. It was a fond smile, as if she were proud of him for something, but for what, he didn’t know.

  “All right, then,” Zoe said. “We’ll check on Kyle. And afterwards, we’ll finish the tasks we have for the day.”

  If Kyle was all right. Travers had the uneasy sense that his son wasn’t all right, that something was wrong. But he also knew that if something was seriously wrong, Kyle would have contacted him.

  Provided he could.

  Travers got into the passenger side of the car. The leather seat was hot. Zoe turned on the air-conditioning even though she didn’t raise the roof of the car.

  Then she peeled out as if she were at the Indy 500 and someone had just waved the checkered flag.

  “Maybe you could—um—zap me to Kyle,” Travers said, wishing he knew the correct word for that travel-thing he had done.

  “Better not to call attention to the magic,” Zoe said. “I’ll ‘zap’ you if we run into bad traffic. Otherwise, we’re driving. Believe m
e, I’ll get us there fast.”

  Travers believed her. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to be along for the ride. His own driving was scary enough; Zoe’s in rush hour terrified him.

  Still, he clutched the seat and watched the road, wondering if his nerves about Kyle were just parental jitters because Travers had had a bad experience or if something was really wrong.

  Travers guessed he would find out soon enough.

  Twenty-eight

  Zoe had lied to Travers. She did use magic on their trip back to the hotel; she just didn’t “zap” them there. She wanted her car at the hotel for the mobility, in case Travers found some reason not to accompany her on the rest of the trip.

  What she did, in addition to driving as fast as she dared, was use a small spell she’d developed when she lived in Los Angeles in the days before the freeways had been built. When she wanted to get from place to place, she visualized the entire route, saw where the traffic was, and wove her way through it, using that special sight to help her.

  She knew her passenger was panicked—Travers held on to the armrest as if he were holding the door closed—and she had no idea what he saw. Probably near-misses all along the way, as she froze a car in place so that her car could squeeze between it and a nearby truck.

  She did that all the way from North Las Vegas to the Strip, the warm wind whistling in her hair, the feeling of freedom tremendous, and the glory of driving more than 70 miles an hour on streets made for 30 even better.

  Zoe tried to distract Travers from her driving by getting him to talk about the green-haired woman. He told Zoe the entire story, and she tensed when she heard that the woman offered to give Travers the spinning wheel.

  “Why didn’t you go for it?” Zoe asked.

  “Please,” Travers said, sounding just like Kyle. “A scam is a scam is a scam, no matter whether you’re trying for magic or money.”

  Zoe grinned then. She wondered if Travers knew how strong he was or how competent; he worried about a lot of things, but he seemed to handle everything thrown at him with great aplomb.

  She admired that. When she had just come into her magic—at a much older age than Travers was now—she was a lot more naïve. Of course, it was a different time, but still. She would probably have fallen for the green-haired woman’s scheme and regretted it for the rest of her life.

  Zoe wove her way through the Las Vegas Boulevard traffic, finally getting off the main drag and onto the back roads that took her to the hotel. In the midafternoon sunlight, it almost looked seedy, which was odd, considering that the hotels that used to be considered seedy—the ones with gambling—were the ones that looked glamorous now.

  As she drove into the hotel’s public parking ramp, she thought she saw three men loitering near the front door. They were wearing black leather despite the heat, and they had pointed ears. They also looked familiar.

  Her back tensed, and she would have reversed the car, only someone else was following her into the lot. She found a spot quickly, promising to meet Travers upstairs, and hurried down to the front.

  But the three men were gone.

  Zoe used her magical senses, trying to find a trail, but she saw nothing. Rather than relieve her, it made her even more suspicious.

  Were the Faeries coming after the Fates? And if so, why? Elmer had hinted there was more to the Faeries and Fates’ conflict that met the eye, and Zoe wondered if these three were part of it.

  She went in the front lobby of the hotel and asked the manager to alert Travers’ room should three men with pointed ears enter wearing black leather.

  It was a tribute to Vegas’s tolerance—and its reputation for any and all kinds of visitors—that the manager didn’t look at Zoe as if she were crazy. He merely nodded, smiled, and promised he would let his employees know.

  She didn’t feel as reassured as she wanted to. If the three men were Faeries, they would know how to slip past any mortals who were looking for them.

  The key was, however, that the Faeries wouldn’t know anyone was looking for them.

  Zoe might get lucky.

  At least, she hoped so.

  Twenty-nine

  Kyle rolled over on his bed in the drape-darkened bedroom. Fang tried to curl up next to Kyle, but Kyle was in too much pain. He had the air-conditioner on frostbite, but it wasn’t doing much for the heat radiating off his skin.

  He had forgotten how miserable sunburn could be, how he could stay hot even when he really wasn’t. The last time he had a sunburn was the time his dad had taken him to the emergency room, and the staff there had yelled at his dad.

  Kyle remembered some cool lotion on his skin, something to make him sleep, and not much else. He wished he could remember a few other things so he could get more comfortable.

  Part of his discomfort, though, was his stomach. He couldn’t lay on it because it was still too full. He wasn’t exactly queasy anymore, but he wasn’t exactly not-queasy, either. He was kinda bloated, like he might swell up and explode, which would hurt even more if his skin got tugged.

  Outside his bedroom, he could hear canned laughter from the television. The Fates had found him when he had come back from taking Fang out for his walk. They were worried about him, they said: he hadn’t acted like himself in the elevator; they thought maybe something was wrong; and they were sure that they could help.

  Kyle told them all he needed was a nap, but they didn’t believe him. Still, they let him go into his room and close the door, but they hovered outside of it, and he could sense their worry.

  He would have been better off if they had just gone back to their own room. He was too hot and queasy to think about those three men, and he didn’t want to deal with the Fates, either.

  So when the phone rang, the first thing Kyle felt was annoyance. If the Fates were real grown-ups, they would answer it. But of course, they weren’t. For a minute, he thought of letting the phone just ring, and then he realized that the call might be from his dad.

  Kyle rolled over on his stomach, regretted it as he did so, sat up, and picked up the receiver. He wanted to answer What? the way people did on television when they were annoyed, but he’d been raised well.

  He said, “Hello,” instead.

  “Kyle, baaby?” The voice belonged to his Aunt Megan. She had the most distinctive voice of any woman he’d ever known. It was deep, almost masculine, but it had this female quality that made all men notice when she spoke.

  “Aunt Megan,” Kyle said, and to his embarrassment, had to blink hard so that he wouldn’t burst into tears.

  “You all right, baby?” she asked. “You sound funny.”

  “I ate too much,” he said, which was true. He didn’t want to tell her about all the other strange stuff that was going on.

  “That happens when you go on vacation,” she said, apparently not noticing that anything else was wrong. “Is your dad there?”

  “Nope,” Kyle said.

  “You’re alone?” She sounded alarmed.

  “Oh, no,” Kyle said. “Some friends are here watching me.”

  Not that they were true friends of his, even though he liked them, and they weren’t technically watching. But he’d heard his Aunt Megan verbally beat up his dad before because his dad didn’t follow the prescribed child-rearing fads that Aunt Megan had learned about in school.

  “Well, your dad called me and it sounded urgent,” she said.

  “It is,” Kyle said. This was the answer to his prayers. A real grown-up, not a kid in an adult’s body like the Fates. “Dad has some business to do here, and he was wondering if he could pay for your trip if you would baby-sit me.”

  Kyle hated to use the word baby-sit, but he knew his dad would.

  “When?” Aunt Megan asked.

  “As soon as possible,” Kyle said.

  “Oh, he always does this to me,” she muttered, and Kyle knew she hadn’t meant him to hear that. “There’s no one else he can ask? Mom, maybe? Or Viv?”

  “Grandma and Gran
dpa say I’m too difficult, remember?” Kyle winced as he spoke those words. His grandparents really loved him, but he’d scared them from the time he was little and he could read their minds.

  “And Vivian’s on her honeymoon. I’m so ditzy I forgot.”

  Kyle could almost hear his Aunt Megan’s hand hit her forehead as she remembered. She always called herself ditzy but she wasn’t. She just thought a lot about a lot of things, and never really focused on the world around her.

  In that way, she had a lot in common with the Fates.

  “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll call back tonight—I’m assuming your dad’ll be back by then—and I’ll let you know if I can rearrange my schedule. Okay?”

  Kyle let out a sigh of relief. He tried not to make it too audible. “Okay,” he said.

  But she had already hung up. He slid back onto the pillows, which were clammy and too hot, and closed his eyes.

  He wished he hadn’t had so much ice cream.

  He wished he’d remembered his sunscreen.

  He wished his dad were here. He wished he was home, in his own bed. He wished he didn’t have anything more to wish for, as he finally drifted off to sleep.

  Thirty

  By the time Zoe made it to Travers’ hotel room, she could sense something was wrong. She hurried off the elevator to find Travers’ hotel room door open, the TV blaring the Fox News theme to the entire hallway.

  Zoe saw no one when she stepped inside. She closed the door, shut off the television, and finally noticed the Fates, huddling in front of Kyle’s bedroom door.

  “What’s going on?” Zoe asked.

  Clotho gave Zoe a mournful look. Lachesis sighed, and Atropos leaned her head against the wall.

  Their reluctance to speak alarmed Zoe even more. She pushed her way past them and into the bedroom.

  The overhead light was on, and so was a lamp beside the bed. The room was so cold it made the Arctic seem like a balmy summer vacation spot.