Absolutely Captivated (2 page)

She could still hear
the words as if they were being spoken for the first time:
You shall find your true love near Faerie, if you
don’t lose yourself inside its ever-changing
walls
.

For the first few decades of her
magical life, she had sought out Faerie, trying to find an
entrance. She wanted to find her true love. She actually hoped that
she would.

In those early years, she found two
entrances to Faerie—and had two disastrous relationships while she
lived nearby. Finally, she gave up on finding her true love. She
wandered all over the world, settling in Los Angeles and becoming a
private detective.

In the end, though,
Faerie’s siren song lured her to Las Vegas, the center of the
Faerie universe. She loved it here, with its combination of glitz
and seediness. She loved the people who came through, the cases
that she got, and the mortals that she met. She even had a lot of
Faerie friends.

But she refused to go anywhere near
the entrance to Faerie, and tried hard to forget about the prophecy
that had once guided her entire existence.

So she didn’t answer Herschel’s
question directly. Instead, she said, “Why should I go to Faerie
when it comes to me with rumors?”

“I been hearing them all
over, doll,” Herschel said, sipping on his beer. “Sages, prophets,
the glamour-eyed. They are all talking about you.”

“Me?” Zoe felt unsettled. The people
Herschel mentioned were human with touches of magic, not part of
the magical universe at all (although some of them eventually would
become part of it). But these people saw corners of things, and it
did the magical well to pay attention to what these people
said.

“You, love,” Gaylord said. “Everyone’s
saying the magic is gathering around you. Your time has
come.”

Zoe’s mouth felt dry. “My time for
what?”

“For whatever your destiny is,”
Herschel said. “Magic doesn’t gather unless a destiny is about to
be fulfilled.”

“That’s Faerie belief,” Zoe said. “We
don’t believe that.”

Herschel shrugged. “We all dip into
the same magical well, Zo. Believe or don’t believe. We just
thought we’d warn you. Your prophecy is about to come
true.”

Gaylord stuck the straw he’d been
using as a hockey stick into his beer. Then he stirred the amber
liquid, ostensibly watching bubbles rise. But, Zoe could tell, he
was looking at her out of the corner of his black-and-blue
eye.

“It’s not a bad one, is it?” Gaylord
asked.

“What?” Zoe asked, a little too
quickly.

“Your prophecy. It’s not bad,
right?”

Depended on whether you looked at the
true love part or the warning part. But again, Zoe didn’t answer
him directly. Her prophecy was none of his business.

“All the mage prophecies are about
love,” Zoe said.

“Oh, yeah.” Herschel
giggled. His giggle wasn’t as infectious as Gaylord’s but it ran a
close second. “Hearts, flowers, happily ever after. Soulmates. All
sweetness and light, just like our Zoe here.”

“Don’t make fun,” Zoe said. “Some
people take this really seriously.”

The smile left Herschel’s
metal-covered face. “You one of them, Zo?”

She used to be. Before her heart got
broken, shattered, stomped on, and flattened.

“You know me,” Zoe said. “Give me an
Elvis Chapel, a bouquet of black hearts, and a million dollars, and
I’ll be happily married until the money’s gone.”

“I can give you a million dollars,
babe,” Herschel said.

Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Real money,
Hersch. Real money.”

“Liar.” Gaylord slurped the beer
through his straw. He’d done that as long as Zoe had known him, and
every time it creeped her out. Especially the sucking sound, as if
he were pulling hops off the bottom of the stein with his
lungs.

“I’m not lying,” Zoe said. “I hate
your money.”

“You’re lying about your dream, there,
Zo.” Gaylord stirred the beer with the soggy end of his straw. It
had teeth marks in it, pointy holes from Gaylord’s extra-sharp
canines. Or, as he liked to call them, his fangs.

“I am not,” Zoe said, clutching her
own beer stein tightly. Except for one sip, she hadn’t had any
beer. And now she didn’t want any more. But she held the stein in
front of her as if it were a shield.

“Hon, you can have black hearts and
Elvis, if you really want that. I’m not disputing that part. I’m
disputing the money part. You’ve got enough to last you and with a
snap of your fingers, you can conjure more.” He stirred hard enough
to make more bubbles rise.

Herschel tugged at a diamond pierced
into the side of his nose, then realized what he was doing,
stopped, and wiped his hand on his leather pants.

Gaylord continued, “You’re an
idealist, Zo. It’s clear in all you do. You hide it, you pretend
you’re a cynical as they come, but you like the mortals and you
like helping them, and you’re not in it for the money.”

Zoe gripped her beer stein tighter.
She didn’t think Gaylord was smart enough to see through her—not
that it was hard. Anyone looking at her actions would know that she
wasn’t as cynical as she pretended to be.

She just hadn’t thought anyone else
was paying attention.

“So I betcha you believe in all this
true love hogwash, and are secretly hoping some Prince Charming’ll
knock you off your feet and ride off into the sunset with
you.”

“Talk about mixed metaphors,” Herschel
muttered.

“And such a lovely image,
too,” Zoe said.

“So,” Gaylord said, undeterred by the
criticism, “if the magic is gathering, your Prince Charming is on
the horizon.”

Zoe set her beer stein down. “First of
all, I don’t believe in Prince Charmings. I don’t believe in Prince
anythings, having met several of them, and realizing that just
because they’re royalty doesn’t mean their ears don’t stick
out.”

“Hey!” Herschel put his
hands over his severely pierced, jeweled, and pointed
ears.

“She was referring to the British
royalty, bud,” Gaylord said.

Zoe pretended she hadn’t heard the
interchange. “Secondly, I don’t believe in Charming. Charming means
liar. Charming means a man who’ll do anything to get what he wants.
Thirdly—”

“We get it,” Gaylord said. “You’re not
into this love thing. Which is why we warned you.”

“Actually,” Herschel said, “we warned
you because gathering magic isn’t always a good thing. Just because
your destiny lurks doesn’t mean that you’ll get it. I mean, each
prophecy has a dark side. Right? Ours do, anyway. Things can go
good or they can go bad. Same with yours, right?”

“I didn’t know you had prophecies,”
Zoe said with surprise.

“Um.” Herschel looked at Gaylord, who
looked back. They had equal expressions of panic on their handsome
faces. “We don’t.”

“That’s right,” Gaylord said. “We
don’t. Of course not. Why would we befriend a mage if we had
prophecies?”

Herschel kicked him under the table.
Zoe saw Herschel’s leg move, and heard the thud as his steel-toed
boot connected with Gaylord’s knee.

Zoe pushed her stein into
the center of the table, and leaned forward. She felt cold. “You
befriended me because of a prophecy?” she asked.

“No,” they said in unison. Herschel
actually shook his head repeatedly, a clear sign that he was
lying.

“Why would we do that?” Gaylord
asked.

“You tell me,” Zoe said.

They looked at each other again,
wide-eyed, guilty looks.

“You may as well,” Zoe said. “You
aren’t doing a good job of covering up. All I have to do is go to
one of the seedy casinos on the Boulder Highway and ask around.
They’ll tell me who gets prophecies, and then I’ll tell them who
spilled the—”

“All right!” Herschel said holding up
his hands as if she were robbing him. “All right.”

Gaylord watched him in stunned
fascination. Or maybe it was fear. Zoe couldn’t really tell, not at
this angle and in the dim light.

“We have prophecies,” Herschel said,
“and they’re not individual like yours. They all have to do with
power, and right now, you’re the power center, Zo.”

Whatever she had expected
him to say, it wasn’t that. “Me?” she asked, not trying to cover
her surprise.

He nodded. “I mean, we’ve always
known, me and Gaylord, that you’d have something to do with the
power shift in Faerie, but we didn’t know how, especially after we
got to know you—”

“And like you,” Gaylord added, as if
he were afraid she would be mad.

She wasn’t sure if she was
mad or not. She’d always known her friendship with two Faeries was
unusual, but she’d prided herself on her open-mindedness. She
figured they had prided themselves on theirs as well.

“—
and after we found out
that you didn’t ever want to go into Faerie. We just figured, you
know, that you’d hold the key to the entire regime
change.”

“Regime change?” Zoe asked.

Herschel shrugged. “It’s not as bad as
it sounds, not really. The Kings’ve been in power for a long time
now, and they’re getting real stale. Not to mention power-hungry.
So we figured if the power floats around you, then we’re safe near
you. If you know what I mean.”

Zoe didn’t know what he meant. “I
thought you said this had to do with my prophecy.”

“Well, technically, it does and it
doesn’t.” Gaylord grabbed her beer and shoved his straw into it.
Zoe grimaced. He stirred the beer, ignoring her
reaction.

“Magic gathers whenever a destiny is
about to be met,” Herschel said.

“It doesn’t matter whose destiny.”
Gaylord was studying the swirling straw. “It could be yours, it
could be Faerie’s, it could be someone else’s.”

“So you didn’t really want to warn me
at all.” Zoe folded her hands together, mostly so that she couldn’t
shake these little men like she wanted to. “You came here to find
out what I knew.”

Herschel set his empty beer stein next
to Gaylord’s, then moved them to the edge of the table, probably
hoping the bar’s lone cocktail waitress would see them and
interrupt the conversation.

“Well, you know,” Herschel said, “we
figured if we mentioned the rumor, then you might just enlighten
us.”

“You’ve done that before,” Gaylord
said as he kept stirring.

Zoe grabbed the straw, and pulled it
out of her beer. She moved the dripping thing into Gaylord’s stein,
and pulled hers back in front of her.

She didn’t want to drink from it—not
anymore, especially not after the straw incident—but she felt like
she needed it as her shield again.

“I’ve told you things I shouldn’t
have?” Zoe asked.

“You know, when you’ve asked us for
information,” Herschel said. “We’ve traded.”

Apparently they traded a
little more than she knew. She used to go to them for any
information that had to do with Faerie-owned casinos—and there were
a lot of them in Vegas, mostly on the outskirts. Ancient, seedy
casinos, with long-enchanted customers who sat in front of slot
machines and pulled and pulled and pulled until they got carpal
tunnel or died.

“You guys have been using me,” Zoe
said.

“No more than you’ve been using us,”
Herschel said.

“It’s not like that,” Gaylord said,
almost at the same time. “We like you, Zo.”

The thing of it was, she
knew Gaylord was telling the truth. For all the times they had
traded information, there were other times where they’d simply sat
around a non-Faerie-owned bar, like this one, and talked. They
liked her stories, and she liked theirs. They had all lived long
lives, and they loved to share parts of the past.

She wasn’t as angry as she should have
been. She never fully trusted them anyway, and she doubted they
fully trusted her.

And they had called her here to do her
a favor.

Zoe sighed. “What should I be looking
out for?”

Gaylord and Herschel exchanged glances
again. Those looks were beginning to make her nervous.

“Anything unusual,” Herschel
said.

“More unusual than usual,” Gaylord
said.

“More unusual than usual how?” Zoe
asked.

“Like power stuff or love stuff might
be a tip you’re in difficult waters,” Herschel said.

“Or stuff that isn’t quite what it
seems,” Gaylord said.

“Like you guys.” Zoe couldn’t resist
jabbing at them.

“No!” Herschel said.

“Yes!” Gaylord said at the same
time.

“Okay, maybe a little like us,”
Herschel said. “But not right now. You’ve known us, like,
forever.”

“At least since you’ve moved to
Vegas,” Gaylord said.

“But we’re talking about in the next
few days,” Herschel said. “Watch out for strange stuff.”