Absolutely Captivated (3 page)

“Realize it’s part of a prophecy,”
Gaylord said.

“Whose?” Zoe asked.

“If we knew, we wouldn’t be so
cryptic,” Herschel said. “We’re not privileged, Zo. You know
that.”

Zoe felt her head beginning to spin.
She hated dealing with magic. It had been a burden her entire life,
and now, it seemed, the burden was going to get worse.

“Oh, and watch out for the blond guy,”
Herschel said.

“What blond guy?” Zoe
asked.

“The one with the kid,” Gaylord
said.

“I know a lot of blond guys with
kids,” Zoe said.

“The new one,” Herschel
said.

“The new kid?” Zoe asked.

“The new blond guy. He’ll be tall
and—

“Really good-looking,” Gaylord said
with a wink.

“—
and he’s got this really
powerful kid who hasn’t come into his magic yet,” Herschel
said.

A shiver ran down Zoe’s back. “Why
should I watch out for him?” she asked.

Herschel and Gaylord exchanged yet
another glance. And this one was filled with worry.

“Because,” Gaylord said, “he’s going
to get you to go into Faerie, and you’ll get trapped in the
Circle.”

“The Circle?” Zoe asked.

Herschel waved his hands, as if to say
that an explanation of the Circle wasn’t important.

“Stay away from the Circle, Zo,” he
said. He was more serious than she had ever seen him. “Everyone who
gets trapped by the Circle dies.”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” Zoe says,
“I’m immortal.”

Gaylord shook his head.
“Not in Faerie, you’re not.”

“Just like we aren’t in Mount
Olympics,” Herschel said.

“Olympus,” Zoe said, absently. Was
that what her prophecy had meant? Trapped by narrow walls of a
Faerie Circle? For eternity?

But they had said “died,” not
“trapped.”

“What should I do?” she
asked.

“How should we know?” Herschel asked.
“We just came to let you know that the magic had gathered. We did
that.”

He slid out of the booth, tossed a few
bills onto the table, and looked at Gaylord.

“C’mon, Gaylord,” Herschel said.
“We’ve done enough.”

And then he walked out of the bar. No
one seemed to see him go—one of the many magicks that the Faeries
always used to great advantage.

Gaylord was trapped in the booth by
Zoe. He put a hand on hers. His skin was warm and dry. She wasn’t
sure she’d ever touched anyone from Faerie before.

“Zoe,” he said, “do what you always
do. What we’re taught about prophecies is that you can’t fight
them. You just have to be yourself. The ending is determined not by
the Kings or some divine energy, but by your uniqueness, and how
you’ve developed it over time.”

“Great,” Zoe said. She hadn’t done so
very well over her time. If she had, she wouldn’t be living in a
seedy town that had more glitz than it should have and more magic
per square acre than any other place on the planet.

Gaylord squeezed her hand. “You’ll do
fine,” he said, and vanished.

She let out a small sigh
and leaned back. No one else in the bar saw him disappear—and if
they had, they wouldn’t remember it. The Faerie often used mind
trickery forbidden to mages.

She wished she had someone
she could turn to. Her mentor had moved on a long time ago. They
hadn’t been in touch in more than a hundred years.

Zoe had very few magical friends. Most
of them were scattered across the globe. She supposed she could
call or just pop in on them, the way that Gaylord was popping in on
someone right now, but she wasn’t sure they knew any more than she
did.

And she knew better than to go to the
Fates. Those three women, in charge of prophecy and magical
justice, would just talk in circles, never letting her know what to
do. They relished their superior place in the scheme of things, and
weren’t about to sacrifice it to give someone like her
advice.

She was on her own, the magic was
gathering, and she had no idea what she was going to do.

At that moment, the blond guy with the
powerful kid was in a motel one step below Motel Six in Ashland,
Oregon, wondering how his older sister always managed to talk him
into something he would never normally do.

The blond guy’s name was
Travers Kinneally. He was a Certified Public Accountant who owned
his own firm, handling investments and financial advice for a group
of very well-to-do and well-connected people in Los Angeles, all of
whom would be quite appalled if they knew he was sprawled on a
double bed with his clothes and shoes on, hands behind his head
because the two paper-thin pillows the motel provided didn’t give
him enough support, staring at a TV that was bolted to the
dresser.

His son, Kyle, was lying on the other
bed in the exact same position, except that his shoes were off, and
his Superman socks glowed kryptonite green in the
half-light.

Normally, Kyle was
not allowed to be up this late, so he was treating the
Tonight Show
as if it
were a filthy movie broadcast on Pay-Per-View. Every time Jay Leno
cracked a remotely risqué joke, Kyle looked sideways at his father,
either hoping that Travers wouldn’t notice or that he wouldn’t shut
the television off.

Kyle was precocious for an
eleven-year-old, but he was also naïve, something Travers wanted to
maintain as long as possible. The other children at Kyle’s private
school seemed to know everything there was to know about sex and
drugs and even rock n’ roll, but Kyle didn’t seem to
care.

He lived for his comic books and his
computer and his books, just like Travers’ sister Vivian used to
do. She had turned out pretty darned good, except for her strange
friends and somewhat mysterious new husband.

Travers and Kyle had been in Portland
attending Vivian’s wedding when this entire odyssey got started.
And Travers had been feeling so good, so magnanimous, that he had
agreed to Vivian’s outrageous proposition.

At the time, it had seemed like the
brotherly thing to do.

“Dad,” Kyle whispered, “do you think
they can hear us?”

Travers started. His son was oddly
prescient at times. Travers hadn’t really been thinking about the
three strange women in the next room, but he was moving there.
After all, they were traveling with him and Kyle at the behest of
Vivian, who seemed to think that Travers wouldn’t mind some company
on the way to Los Angeles.

“Does it matter, Kyle?” Travers asked.
One of the pillows slipped from his grasp, and his head thudded
against the headboard—which, for some unknown reason, was made of
real, hard and painful wood.

“Dunno.” Kyle sat up, and wrapped his
pillow around his waist. His round glasses slid to the edge of his
nose, giving his face an owlish cast. “It’s just that….”

He shook his head, like he didn’t want
to finish the sentence. Kyle often didn’t like to discuss what was
on his mind, particularly with his father. He and Travers were
about as different as two people could get.

That was one reason
why Travers was sorry to see Vivian stay in Portland. She, at
least, could talk to Kyle. Travers usually found himself starting
sentences with
If you only listened
and
Maybe if you tried
to be like the other kids
, sentences his
youngest sister, Megan, a child psychologist, said were guaranteed
to alienate any child.

“It’s just
that
what
?”
Travers asked.

“Well, don’t you think they’re a
little weird?” Kyle turned to face him. Even though they’d been
driving all day, Kyle had somehow managed to get ink smudges on his
cheeks. The boy spent most of his time drawing his own comic books,
even though Travers wanted him to learn some outdoor activities,
maybe even join a league, although what kind of league, Travers
didn’t know. Kyle wasn’t the most coordinated kid in the world, and
most teams seemed to know that just by looking at him.

Then Travers realized what his son had
said to him. Kyle was calling someone “weird.” Kyle hated that
word, having had it thrown at him too many times.

Travers sat up.

“I thought you didn’t like to call
people weird,” Travers said, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.
Megan would have called that one of his manipulative
moments.

Let the boy be
himself, Travers,
Megan had said to him
during the wedding reception.
You try so
hard to have Kyle be the perfect L.A. kid that you fail to realize
how very special he is.

Travers did realize how
special Kyle was. Travers also saw how much pain being special
caused his son—through teasing, taunting, and general bullying.
Megan may have been quick with the advice, but she wasn’t the one
who had to clean Kyle up when he came home with his clothing torn
and his nose bloodied.

Travers wanted his son to have a
normal childhood, just not the normal childhood of a
nerd.

Now Kyle shrugged. He shoved his
glasses up his nose in a movement reminiscent of Vivian.

“Dunno,” he mumbled. “Just kinda
seemed like the right word.”

Then he lay back
down, put his hands behind his head, and stared at Jay Leno, who
was doing his usual Jay-walking segment at Universal City. Travers
had always thought Kyle would find this part of the
Tonight Show
appalling
and funny at the same time, but the boy wasn’t laughing. He was
watching, but he clearly wasn’t paying attention.

Travers suppressed a sigh. He had been
a single father since Kyle was six months old, when Kyle’s
nineteen-year-old mother had fled the tiny apartment filled with
dirty diapers, squalling baby, and sleepless husband.

I’m too young for
this, Trav
, Cheryl had said just before
she left.
I need to live a little before I
settle down.

Travers hadn’t even pretended to
understand. He was the same age. They had been high school
sweethearts, and they had always talked about spending the rest of
their lives together, having a passel of kids, and living the
American Dream.

Apparently, for Cheryl, the American
Dream didn’t include a happy baby who believed that nighttime was
for playing, an apartment without cable television, and a bathroom
that constantly looked like it was the center of a war zone. Not to
mention a skinny husband who couldn’t seem to get a better job than
bag boy at the nearby grocery store.

There wasn’t a lot of Cheryl in Kyle.
There wasn’t a lot of Travers either, except in the looks
department. Kyle was just as thin and gawky as Travers had been at
eleven.

Only Travers had turned his attention
to sports, become not just the best player on the basketball team,
but the resident statistician for all the sports at both his junior
high school and his high school. Travers had always loved numbers,
and they had always loved him.

Numbers, he liked to say, were the
only constant in his life.

Which wasn’t exactly true. He had his
family—his parents and his two sisters and Kyle—and he loved all of
them more than anything else.

This time, he sighed and got up,
crossing the narrow space between the two beds, and sitting down
next to Kyle.

“How come you think those women are
weird?” Travers asked quietly.

Kyle shrugged and continued to stare
at the TV. Travers could see the colors on the screen—the fleshy
tones of Leno’s skin, the green neon that seemed to dominate
Universal City, the blue of the jeans everyone wore—reflected in
Kyle’s glasses.

Travers grabbed the remote—or tried
to. It was bolted to the nightstand. Why would anyone bolt a remote
to a nightstand? Or, more importantly, why would anyone think an
old hotel remote was worth stealing?

He didn’t have time to ponder those
questions. Instead, he leaned toward the nightstand, looked at the
multi-colored buttons, and pushed the red one.

The television winked off.

“Hey!” Kyle said. “I was watching
that.”

“Tell me why you think they’re weird,”
Travers said.

Kyle glared at him, rolled over, and
hit the red button. The television winked back on, but instead of
Jay Leno, the picture showed the movie choices the hotel had
thoughtfully provided. A good fifty percent of them were labeled
Adult, and required going to another screen.

Kyle was about to press the channel
changer buttons when Travers caught his hand.

“We don’t need to watch any more,”
Travers said.

“I think they can hear us,” Kyle said.
“But if the TV’s on…”

He didn’t have to say any more.
Travers hit the button for the NBC affiliate, and left the volume
up.