Totally Spellbound

by Kristine Grayson

  “What’s going on here?” John asked.

  Clotho slipped her arm through his. It startled him. He had never been touched by a Fate before.

  “We need Robin to do us a small favor,” she said.

  “A teensy-tiny favor,” Lachesis said, moving a little too close.

  “An itty-bitty favor,” Atropos said, flanking him on the other side.

  John was surrounded, and he didn’t want to be. He was too polite—damn his chivalric upbringing—to shove women aside, much as he wanted too.

  Besides, these three terrified him more than almost anyone else he had ever met.

  “I don’t think Rob is in a favorable mood,” John said.

  “Nonetheless,” Clotho said.

  “We do need to see him,” Lachesis said.

  “Then why not pop in and visit him yourselves?” John asked.

  Atropos sighed. “It’s so very complicated.”

  “Take us to him, would you, John?” Clotho asked, and now he wanted to sigh. But he didn’t.

  Instead, he did what they asked—and hoped he would survive the consequences.

  Ten

  The Mini Cooper caught his attention.

  Rob stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back. He had felt the weird little car before he had seen it, drawn to the window as if he were going to see a party.

  And then the car had slowed and disappeared under an awning as it pulled up to the curb. For a brief moment—an hallucinatory moment—Rob thought he had seen that gorgeous woman from the night before, but of course he hadn’t.

  That was the effect of thinking about her all night and talking to John about her all day.

  Rob moved away from the window and sat in his chair, unable to look at the stock prices continually changing on his computer screen or to think about anything that had to do with work. Even after eight hundred years, thinking about another woman felt like he was betraying Marian.

  Maybe John was right. Maybe Rob was clinging too hard to the past. He certainly couldn’t change it.

  Imagine what the Fates would do to him if he tried.

  At that moment, his door burst open. John hurried in and tried to shove the door closed behind him. A slender female arm flailed against the wall, as if its owner were trying to force the door open.

  “Um, Rob,” John said, his face turning red from the effort of holding the door closed. “It’s not my fault.”

  Rob frowned. He hadn’t seen John like this in decades. His face was flushed and sweat covered, his eyes wild, and his shirt drenched. He’d lost his suit coat somewhere, and he looked almost feral.

  “Should I call security?” Rob asked.

  “No!” John sounded panicked. “I just want you to assure me that you won’t blame me when—”

  The door shoved open the rest of the way, and women piled into Rob’s office. But Rob wasn’t looking at them. In the middle of the reception area stood a small boy, and next to him was that woman.

  The beauty.

  He stood and started toward her. She hadn’t noticed him. Instead, she was holding the boy’s shoulders as if she were keeping him from something, and she was watching the scene before her with something like horror.

  Then the door slammed closed.

  “Really,” John said again, “I’m sorry.”

  And with that, he pulled the door open, let himself out, and slammed the door shut again.

  Rob blinked twice, trying to figure out what had happened. He had been looking at the beauty (was she real?) and then the door slammed, John left, and three women stood before him.

  Three very familiar women.

  Three very powerful women.

  The Fates.

  Rob had vowed he would never see them again.

  “Get the hell out of my office!” he snapped.

  “Robin,” Clotho said, “just hear us out.”

  She did seem unusually tiny—he remembered these women as being larger than the mountains themselves—and she looked a little too ordinary in her pink blouse and tight blue jeans.

  “The circumstances of our visit are quite unusual,” Lachesis said.

  She was a redhead. He had known that, but he hadn’t focused on it, not really. And she was a well-proportioned redhead who knew how to dress. That cream-colored blouse did wonders for her figure.

  But she wasn’t the redhead he was looking for. That redhead had been outside the office.

  Hadn’t she?

  “We want you to listen before you jump to any conclusions,” Atropos said.

  She seemed tiny, too, and a lot more exotic than he remembered, with the heavy dark eyebrows and black-black hair that was rare in this part of America.

  “I don’t want any of you in here,” he said. “I want you out this minute. I don’t care what you do to me. You can imprison me for the rest of my life, just get the hell out of my face.”

  “We know you’re angry,” Clotho said. “But—”

  “Anger doesn’t begin to cover it.” He couldn’t remain in the same room with these women. He pushed past them, afraid he was going to be turned into a toad as he did, and grabbed the door.

  Someone was holding it closed.

  Damn Little John.

  “We asked him to spell the door,” Lachesis said.

  “We knew you’d be difficult,” Atropos said.

  “We know you’ve never understood our position on the mortality of mortals,” Clotho said.

  “Or on the necessity of death,” Lachesis said.

  “But we believe we can overcome that little difference,” Atropos said.

  “And make an agreement that suits us all,” Clotho said.

  Rob focused on them again, mostly because he had no choice. “Little difference?” he asked. “Little difference? You let the only woman I’ve ever loved die.”

  “We didn’t let anything,” Lachesis said. “We just had to stop you from making a horrible mistake.”

  “Horrible mistake.” His hands clenched. “I’ve seen so much death over the years, and I’ve never understood it. We have the power to reverse it, and you always get in the way.”

  “If we still had magic, then we’d show you why this is necessary,” Atropos said. “We’ve learned a lot in the past few months.”

  “Months?” he repeated.

  “Yes. We learned about how difficult it is to understand things you’ve never experienced,” Clotho said.

  “I’ve experience more death than I ever wanted to,” Rob said.

  “That’s not what we mean,” Lachesis said. “We mean a lack of death. It’s happened before. Everything gets out of whack.”

  “In fact,” Atropos said, “if I remember right, you lived through one of the back-in-whack moments. That plague?”

  “The Black Plague?” His head was spinning. He was so angry. He hadn’t been this angry in centuries.

  “Yes. Too many mortals surreptitiously saved by mages, and then what did what did we have? Necrotic tissue that had to escape somewhere, creating pustules…”

  He didn’t need this discussion. He didn’t need these three creepy, controlling women in his office, ruining his day. And no matter what John said, it was his fault.

  John knew how Rob felt about these three.

  “…hideous boils,” Lachesis was saying. “…which wasn’t as bad as the first time. The first time, an entire city was destroyed just to maintain the balance.”

  “That wasn’t the first time,” Atropos said. “The first time was before our time.”

  Rob focused back into the conversation. Really focused. And frowned.

  The Fates were disagreeing with each other. They never did that. They always finished each other’s sentences.

  What had Atropos said earlier? If we still had magic…

  “You don’t have magic anymore?” he asked, interrupting an argument of Biblical proportions.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Clotho said.

  “We need your help,” Lache
sis said.

  “Everything we care about is at stake,” Atropos said.

  “How very ironic,” Rob said. “I remember having the same discussion with you eight hundred years ago.”

  The women bit their lower lips in unison. Their eyes grew wide.

  “And let me tell you what you told me. I’m not going to help you. I don’t care what’s at stake.”

  Then he clapped his hands together, and used his magic to get out of the room.

  Eleven

  Robin Hood. A big, bulky man with a classically English face named John Little. In the middle of downtown Las Vegas. With the Greek Fates and one psychic child.

  Megan wrapped her arms around Kyle’s chest and held him against her. They stood in the reception area of Chapeau Enterprises, whatever that was, and watched as the Fates made fools of themselves trying to get into the door that Little John or John Little or whatever he was called tried to keep closed.

  She was becoming more and more convinced that the Fates belonged to some very bad Vegas lounge act, and that John Little or Little John or whoever he was fronted for some other organization, one that hired entertainers.

  Although for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how the Robin Hood of medieval legend and the Greek Fates had hooked up in the first place.

  The Fates managed to shove the door open and get inside.

  She held Kyle tighter. She could feel him strain against her. He wanted to go in there too, almost as if this concerned him.

  It did not. None of it did.

  He was a good boy, and she really believed the psychic child bit, she really did.

  But the existence of the real Robin Hood and the Greek Fates was a bit too much for her.

  Besides, what was Robin Hood doing in a nice office building in Vegas? Planning to rob every casino in sight? They were what passed for the rich these days.

  More likely, some wag had decided to use the legend of Robin Hood to get the important parts exactly backward. He was probably opening a casino that would rob from the poor to give to the rich.

  After all, slots were called one-armed bandits.

  She let out a small growl just as John Little slipped outside the door. He rubbed his hands over the edges of the door, and a light glowed around the frame.

  Then he pulled away, put his face in his hands, and muttered, “May God forgive me.”

  “For what?” Megan asked.

  He looked up as if he had forgotten all about her. He blinked once, then sighed. “Rob really doesn’t like those women.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Megan said.

  “They’re nice.” Kyle sounded defensive.

  “I’m sure they are, kid,” John Little said, “but they’ve been hellacious on Rob over the years.”

  Megan wasn’t sure Travers would approve of the word “hellacious.” She wasn’t sure if he would approve of them being here.

  She wasn’t sure if he would approve of this place with its myriad secretaries, blond wood, and air of wealth.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on here?” she asked.

  “You want to tell me how you got tied up with the Fates?” The door shuddered slightly. John Little glanced at it, then put his hands on his hips and looked at her. “Is it because the kid—what is your name, son?”

  “Kyle,” Kyle said about as sullenly as a boy could say his own name.

  “Young Kyle there has enough magic for you, me, and the entire building combined—or he will when he comes into it. What’re you now, youngling? Psychic?”

  “Yeah.” Kyle leaned against Megan.

  She frowned. Was everyone in this city crazy? Or had she gone into an alternate world when she saw that man with the falcon last night?

  Maybe she was dreaming and still driving. Maybe she was dreaming about being psychic and hoping she would wake up before she crashed into anything. Maybe she was about to die—

  “You’re awake, Aunt Megan.” Kyle sounded tired. “And everybody knows about the magic because everybody we’ve seen has a little bit. It’s because of the Fates. If you just went to one of the casinos, no one’d be talking about magic at all.”

  Megan wasn’t sure she could get used to Kyle repeating her thoughts out loud.

  John Little frowned at Kyle, his mouth slightly open. Then he looked up at Megan. “You’re new to all this?”

  She nodded wearily.

  “And you’re ferrying the Fates around?”

  She was about to ask why that was a problem, when the air around John Little shimmered. For a moment, it looked like a heat mirage in the desert or like a pool of particularly leaden water. And then the image coalesced into her falconer.

  Only he wasn’t wearing medieval hunting clothes. He wore a bespoke suit that fit him so perfectly it looked like he’d been sewn into it. The brown material matched the brown of his eyes. Only his hair, which was still tied back with a strip of leather, looked the same.

  He was even more handsome up close—or he would have been if he weren’t scowling worse than she’d ever seen anyone scowl. He didn’t seem to see her at all. He whirled slightly and pointed at John Little.

  “You let them into my office.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “They say they don’t have magic anymore.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “I don’t want them around me.”

  Kyle cleared his throat.

  The man turned, his cheeks slightly ruddy—maybe from yelling at John Little—and his brown eyes widened. He stared at Megan as if he’d seen her before.

  As if he’d seen her before, and remembered her vividly.

  As if she were the only woman on the entire planet.

  The only person on the entire planet.

  “You,” he whispered.

  “They really have lost their magic,” Kyle said. “Honest. And that’s my Aunt Megan. She is real.”

  Megan felt her cheeks flare so that their redness probably matched her hair. His cheeks had gone pale in the few seconds he had stared at her.

  “You really are real,” he said.

  “I just told you she was,” Kyle said.

  But the man didn’t seem to hear Kyle. He took half a step toward her, and stopped.

  “This is the bubble woman?” John Little asked. “She’s perfect.”

  Megan felt her cheeks heat even more. Bubble woman? What were they talking about?

  Behind them, the door banged against its frame but didn’t open. The man blinked, frowned, looked at her, looked at the door, and then tilted his head.

  “You know the Fates?” he asked.

  “She brought them here,” John Little said.

  “Really?” the man said.

  “I asked her too.” Kyle sounded nervous. What was with this guy? How come he was upsetting her nephew?

  “You did?” the man asked. “Are her son?”

  “Nephew,” Kyle said. “I told you that. You have to start paying attention.”

  He sounded so much like a miniature Travers, that Megan let out a small laugh. Which seemed to break the spell she was under.

  “What is this all about?” she asked the man, just like she had asked John Little.

  “Betrayal,” the man said, “and the fulfillment of a debt.”

  Twelve

  Rob regretted those words the moment he said them. He didn’t know this woman. It didn’t matter that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen (and then he felt a momentary pang of guilt: Sorry, Marian). It didn’t matter that she left him feeling only 250 years old.

  All that mattered was getting the Fates out of his office and getting his life back in order.

  “They want you to settle a debt?” asked the World’s Most Beautiful Woman—whose name was, apparently, Megan. (A good, old-fashioned name for a woman of a type that should never have gone out of fashion.)

  “No,” he said. “They apparently didn’t realize I had a debt to settle with them.”

  �
��Because they betrayed you.”

  “Because they betrayed my wife!”

  Megan took a slight step backward, pulling the young boy with her. The boy looked like the movement choked him slightly, then she loosened her grip on him as if she had known that, too.

  “You can’t lust after my Aunt Megan if you have a wife.” The boy looked like a fierce warrior himself, albeit of the modern kind—most of his battles probably happened on computer rather than on the battlefield.

  “I don’t lust after…” Rob let his voice trail off when he saw Megan’s face. She had the kind of face that carried every emotion she felt, and at the moment, she felt disappointment. “I mean, I don’t have a wife. Anymore. She died.”

  “Oh,” the boy said, and he bowed his head. “I didn’t know.”

  The last three words he said with surprise. Apparently, he had never met anyone who could block a psychic, even though it was easy, particularly with a young one.

  Although maybe not as easy as it seemed. The boy had, after all, caught Rob’s attraction to that woman across the room.

  “They betrayed your wife?” Megan asked with that sexy, throaty voice of hers.

  His gaze met hers. She had such stunning green eyes—the color was as deep as a perfect emerald—but more than that, he could see deep inside her, as if he could see her very soul.

  He wanted to break eye contact, but couldn’t. He also couldn’t lie to her. He wanted her to know.

  So he settled on, “It’s a long story.”

  She gave him a small smile, as if she had heard that before, and knew it for the evasion it was.

  The door rattled again.

  “We have to do something about them,” John said. “You can’t just leave them in there, Rob.”

  “Have security escort them off the premises.”

  “Rob!” John’s entire face became the picture of shock. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “No,” he said, “and I don’t particularly care to.”

  “Zeus is making a power play.”

  “So?” Rob asked, then mentally kicked himself. He really didn’t want to know.