Absolutely Captivated (45 page)

“I don’t get it,” Gaylord
said. “You could’ve just asked me to prove that she’s going off to
Faerie.”

“But you’re the one who told me,”
Travers said.

“So?” Gaylord said.

“I heard that Faeries were
tricksters,” Travers said. “How could I believe that you’d tell me
true?”

“Not all Faeries are
tricksters,” Atropos said. “Some are very nice people.”

“Some are even great people,” Clotho
said.

“Some are even greater than people,”
Lachesis said.

Gaylord was staring at them. “You
know, you ladies look familiar. What did you say your names
were?”

All three Fates stiffened,
as if they’d been caught being bad. “You know,” Atropos said to
Travers, “you can try Gaylord’s method. Your magic isn’t settled
yet. You might achieve a Faerie spell with great ease.”

“And it does make more sense to follow
light than to get into the thick of things,” Clotho
said.

“Although I do believe this boy is
telling you true,” Lachesis said. “He’s always had a mage-like
heart.”

“What?” Gaylord said. “I could take
that as an insult, you know.”

Travers was shaking. He didn’t want to
lose track of Zoe in all of this bickering.

“Okay,” he said to Gaylord, “walk me
through this.”

“He can’t,” Atropos said. “If he so
much as touches you, the spell becomes his, not yours.”

“You have a good memory, Travers,”
Clotho said. “Just do what he told you.”

Travers thought of Zoe, made a fist,
and opened it quickly, snapping his fingers as he did so. A ray of
light beamed across the room, drilled a hole through the wall, and
traveled across Las Vegas. The light veered south, down the Boulder
Highway, to a group of seedy looking casinos.

“Stop it!” Gaylord said. “Stop it
now!”

“You’d better stop it,” Lachesis said.
“He’s exactly right.”

But Travers didn’t know how to stop
it. The light traveled inside the casino, to the kitchen, and into
an ice machine. Travers got a sense of Zoe, and then Gaylord hit
his hand.

The light vanished.

“Idiot!” Gaylord said.
“You never do mage magic in a Faerie building.”

“Now they’ll change the doorway,”
Atropos said.

“And they might catch Zoe,” Clotho
said.

“We have to do something,” Lachesis
said. “And quickly.”

Zoe landed with a thud on a carpeted
floor. The tube that had deposited her disappeared as quickly as it
opened up.

She found herself in the middle of a
casino, only one unlike any she’d ever seen.

The lights were brighter,
the noise louder, and the people weren’t mortal at all. They were
all Faerie, and they all seemed to be having an excellent
time.

She didn’t recognize the
games, either. Most of them resembled slot machines, but the
display panels had actual places on them. It looked like the
Faeries were betting on real people’s lives, on their next actions,
on their personal choices.

There were also historical
reenactment machines for Faeries who wanted to bet on the path of
alternate histories (even though they really couldn’t change the
past—that instruction was on top of the machine in big bold
letters: anyone who monkeyed with the past would be put to
death).

And large signs with pointing fingers
showed the way to various other parts of the casino—the theater,
the comedy club, the bar, the restaurant, and, what seemed to be
the biggest draw, the collectible pit.

Zoe had no idea where to
start.

She was dizzy and sore and very tired.
She could feel the energy all around her, and it unnerved her. The
magic she felt clearly came from a different place than her
own.

She stood, rubbed her
backside, and wondered if she should ask directions. More and more
Faeries were looking at her. Her heart was pounding hard, and she
was trying not to think of the prophecy, of losing herself in
here.

She was more afraid of getting lost.
She couldn’t see the signs anymore. They seemed to have shifted, to
have moved in different directions.

The slot machines had grown taller,
and she felt like Alice in Wonderland. She needed a potion that
would make her larger, so she could see over the slots.

But she didn’t dare do magic in here.
Her kind of magic would call attention to itself, and she was
horribly outnumbered. She had to find all of this on her
own.

She came to a fork
in the bank of slot machines. A new sign, looking like it had been
made from sticks, had arrows pointing in all different directions,
including up. The instructions told her about various portions of
the casino, and then one said quite simply:
The Circle.

The Circle. The Faerie Circle. Where
the Great Rulers used to sit and rule the Great Race of Faerie.
Where the Faerie Kings overthrew the Great Rulers and started their
own customs and traditions.

Where, possibly, the wheel might
be.

She tried not to feel too
excited about this. The arrow wasn’t that clear. It seemed to point
past a bank of slots that guided the careers of old Rock ’n Roll
stars, but when she looked at the arrow again, it seemed to point
toward a sign advertising Vaudeville Night at the Comedy
Club.

Some of the names on the
sign were vaguely familiar, and she hoped the first two ideas that
popped into her head were wrong. She didn’t want to see that the
old vaudeville stars had been lured down here to perform nearly a
century ago, when vaudeville was dying, and they were still doing
that or that a lot of Faeries were vaudeville stars and hadn’t
given it up.

Zoe glanced at the Circle arrow again,
and it was gone.

She had to think. Either
the wheel was in the direction of the Rock ’n Roll slots or it was
near the vaudeville performers.

Or it was directly in front of her,
and someone was trying to trick her.

Of course they were trying to trick
her. She was in Faerie.

She took a deep breath and
headed straight forward, down an aisle of video poker machines that
when she looked at them, she realized weren’t video poker at all.
They had the names of credit card companies on the top, and the
names of credit card holders on the side, and the Faeries set the
going interest rate. Every time a consumer paid with plastic the
Faerie in front of the machine got a small payoff.

Zoe shuddered, and then watched,
almost mesmerized, as the rates kept going up and up. She thought
she saw the name of someone she recognized, and that pulled her out
of the reverie.

She didn’t want to be here any longer
than necessary.

She had to remember why she was here:
it wasn’t for the Fates or for the money. It was for Travers and
Kyle and the bond between them. It was for love—especially true
love, which she might feel but never get to act on.

It was for the world as she knew it,
the world that she loved. The last thing she wanted was for these
tricksters to have control of the emotions of the people around
her. The good emotions.

It seemed that Faerie already had
control of some of the baser ones.

She hurried down the aisle toward a
glow that rose in the distance. So far, no one in Faerie seemed to
notice her.

She had no idea how long that luck
would hold.

Travers drove his SUV along East
Tropicana Boulevard, amazed at the speeds he could achieve in the
middle of the night. He felt like Zoe, driving well beyond the
speed limit. Only she always seemed invulnerable when she did it.
He felt like a kid whose father was going to catch him and punish
him.

Gaylord didn’t help. He
was crouched in the passenger seat, his hands over his eyes. He
claimed he hated combustion-engine vehicles. If he was going to go
more than three miles an hour, he’d do it with his own wings, thank
you.

But the Fates convinced him to go with
Travers, and they convinced Travers not to use too much magic in
arriving at the casino that currently housed Faerie. The Fates were
afraid that the entrance might shift, and then where would he
be?

He wasn’t sure what that meant, and he
wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. He only knew that for some
reason that he didn’t fully understand, Zoe had taken it upon
herself to go into Faerie. She went without warning anyone and she
went without backup, and he was afraid that her prophecy would come
true.

He was afraid she wouldn’t get
out.

Travers had to go around a pickup that
was crawling along the side of the road. That was the only traffic
he’d seen for at least a mile. Theoretically, Gaylord was mentally
trolling for cop cars, but Travers wasn’t sure Gaylord knew what a
cop car was. He seemed a lot more knowledgeable about modern
culture than the Fates until you pressed him, and then it became
clear that he only cared about the surface and not what was beneath
it.

Before he left, Travers
had called Megan and asked her to hurry, saying he would have to go
out on an emergency, and that three very strange friends of his
were baby-sitting Kyle.

Travers also made it clear
that he didn’t want these friends baby-sitting Kyle for long, so
when Megan arrived, she could take Travers’ bed. Travers left a key
for her at the front desk with more warnings about the Fates (get
them out of the room as fast as possible; try not to wake Kyle;
don’t answer most of Kyle’s questions—let Travers do that; and
remember that Kyle has been sick, just in case his conversation
sounds a bit…disjointed).

Travers didn’t know how to cover his
butt any other way. He had wanted to ease his sister into this
world slowly, maybe not expose her to it at all, and now he
wouldn’t be able to. She would have too many questions for him to
answer, and he had no idea how to do so.

His palms were sweating on the
steering wheel. The lights along the boulevard seemed bright. The
university looked alive and glowy, despite the late hour. The
Liberace Museum seemed to be the only place that wasn’t open—which
Liberace himself would probably have found strange.

Then Gaylord grabbed his
arm. The movement was so quick, and Gaylord’s grasp so fierce, that
Travers swerved, nearly lost control, and had to fight to get back
to his side of the road.

Fortunately Tropicana was still mostly
empty. One other SUV saw his maneuver, and honked as it went
by.

“What the hell?” Travers said. “You
never grab a driver.”

Gaylord didn’t seem to notice. He was
staring straight ahead. “They switched it.”

“Switched what?” Travers
asked.

“The entrance.”

Travers let a small breath.

“They probably did it because of the
light.”

His fault, then. He had no
idea if he should trust Gaylord on this. It was Zoe’s life on the
line. Or Zoe’s self. Travers didn’t exactly understand the
prophecy, but he knew something awful could happen to
her.

Which was why he was here, instead of
in his hotel room with Kyle, hoping someone else would take care of
this—or that Zoe would survive.

Gaylord’s fingers dug into Travers’
skin. “You’ve got to turn around.”

Travers shot him a quick look. Gaylord
had come to him. The Fates believed that Gaylord was right; they
believed that Travers’ magic had found Zoe and that she was in
trouble.

Travers swung the wheel and made a
U-turn in the middle of Tropicana. A car zoomed by, its horn
blaring. Gaylord squealed and buried his head.

“Where are we going?” Travers
shouted.

“The Mirage,” Gaylord said.

“Faeries don’t own the Mirage,”
Travers said. Even he knew that.

“No, they don’t, but the sidewalk out
front by the volcano is sometimes an emergency entrance until a
better one opens up.”

“By the volcano?” Travers had seen the
volcano. It was an amazing sight. “Why there?”

“Because no one looks down there.”
Gaylord made it sound like Travers was stupid.

“You mean we could’ve gone there in
the first place?” Travers asked.

“No,” Gaylord said. “The emergency
entrances only open up when the regular entrances close down.
You’ve got to hurry. The next new one could be in the Hoover Dam
for all we know.”

Travers turned north on Maryland
Parkway, then east on Flamingo Road. The empty streets continued.
He drove so fast that the SUV bounced over several ruts in the
road, making him feel as if he were flying.

Gaylord had given up looking long
ago.

When they finally arrived at the
Mirage, Travers tossed his keys at a valet, barely remembered to
take the ticket and let Gaylord pay the tip. Travers ran toward the
volcano, which was dark. A sign with eruption schedules was posted
near the viewing area.