She Blinded Me With Science (3 page)

Sophie saw him when he was invisible.

That thought blasted through Kevyn's mind at unexpected moments.

Besides making the tips of his ears tingle--and no girl, Fae or Human, had ever done that
before--she saw him when he turned invisible. How could someone with so little Fae blood she
didn't even know she had Fae blood see through his magic?

He avoided the lounge, too civilized for the stunned, outraged and amused state of his
mind, and went to the bar next door to the hotel. Despite the darkness, half a dozen fans in
pointed ears followed and found him. He drank them under the table and stayed perfectly sober.
The girls tried to keep up. He used magic so they didn't get sick, but he left them woozy, so he
could show them that his points didn't come off his ears and they wouldn't remember.

Sophie saw him when he was invisible.

Just what kind of unconscious magic did she have, to let her do that? And why hadn't
anyone found her, made her a Changeling, and brought her back to the Enclaves?

That thought, when it finally hit his raging consciousness at 2:00 a.m., drove him from
the bar. He barely remembered to zap the bimbettes safely back to their rooms. He believed in
being a gentleman even if he didn't want to be an Advocate.

He needed to think, and Dougie was entertaining--unconsciously and horizontally--in
their room. Kevyn snapped his fingers to retrieve his swim trunks and walked down the stairs,
thirty flights, to the pool level. He had enjoyed that tranquil decade he spent in the Atlantis
Enclave, and being underwater helped him block out the whole world so he could think.

* * * *

The problem with having a nervous breakdown was that once Sophie got past the
I-did-not-see-that, it's-all-in-my-head, I'm-losing-my-mind stage, logic interfered. Along with her
pointed ears, Sophie's passion for common sense and logic had made her a natural to play a
Vulcan when her former Trek club indulged in role-playing games.

Logic
said to examine the situation just from what she had known and seen.
Fact
said she hadn't had enough rum-and-Coke and didn't do drugs and despite feeling
like a freak--which was her normal state--she wasn't under enough stress to hallucinate.
Fact
said that even though Kevyn went invisible and then came back semi-transparent, she hadn't
been hallucinating because:
One
, people walked around him like they didn't see him;
and
Two
, those prop weapons had flown out of their owners' hands and hit the wall and
people certainly reacted to that. Even though people acted like they hadn't seen who broke up the
ridiculous fight, Sophie
had
seen. Therefore,
logic
said Kevyn could turn
invisible--to everyone but her.

That ridiculous yet logical conclusion gained credence from Kevyn's reaction when she
mentioned what he did during the fight in the hall.

So
logic
said... Here logic failed her. Her uncomfortable talent for making
illogical deductions that turned out to be right kicked in here. Intuition--did she dare call it
psychic talent?--had been whispering in her ear for the last twenty minutes, once she got over the
shivering and whimpering and the silent screams inside her head.

Sophie rolled over and looked up at the shadowy ceiling of her hotel room. Despite the
fact that no lights were on, she could make out enough details not to need any lights at all.

Another irritating talent, like her ability to simply
know
things without any facts
to back them up. A talent she never mentioned to people, lest they think she was stranger than
she had already proven. Strange enough to have very visibly pointed ears.

"I have had it with the whole pointed ear problem," Sophie snarled as she sat up.

Six people this weekend had tweaked her ears, trying to figure out how she made them
look so real. They laughed and called her a great actress when she cried out in pain. They
doubled over in pain when she socked them good in the gut. And they had apologized and
hurried away with troubled expressions when she proved her ears were real.

Remembering those incidents suddenly turned up the volume of that whispering
voice.

Kevyn had pointed ears, too. He had changed out of his costume, and he had combed his
gorgeous, thick mane of hair over his ears, instead of taking off the tips.

Logic said either he was weird, he couldn't find the solvent to loosen the spirit gum
holding his ears in place, OR... His pointed ears were just as real and natural--if they could be
called natural--as her pointed ears were.

At that point Sophie made a conscious decision to find Kevyn, corner him, and find out
if he had weird ancestors, quirky talents and a strange, unreliable kind of luck that followed him
around.

"Do you believe in magic, Kevyn Whatever-your-name-is?" Sophie whispered as she
got up off the bed and stalked to the door.

She was halfway down the hall to the elevator when she realized she had left her
keycard and purse in her room. But no, just like a hundred times before, she turned to head back
and felt her purse sway against her hip and felt the stiffness of the keycard in her pocket.

What if,
she wondered for the thousandth time in her life,
I did forget them
but the fact that I needed them made them come?

That was something else she would have to ask Kevyn when she found him.

And she would find him. Because among all her other talents, Sophie was very good at
finding things. All she had to do was
want
to find them, and she did.

Sophie ended up at the pool at four in the morning by the simple logic of deducing
where the convention attendees wouldn't go. If Kevyn and his fellow actors wanted to avoid their
misguided, adoring fans, the pool was the logical place.

Logic
didn't warn her about finding Kevyn quietly sitting at the bottom of the
pool--the deep end--illuminated by green underwater lights, eyes closed and legs crossed and
looking totally relaxed. Bubbles streamed slowly up from his ears. Not his nostrils and lips,
which would have made sense, but his ears. He didn't turn blue, and the bubbles kept
coming.

"Real Fae can breathe underwater,"
Great-aunt Serena had told Sophie when
she was a child.
"They don't even need to conjure up gills for themselves. Magic provides
what they need before they can even think of it. Isn't that marvelous?"

Great-aunt Serena had incredible amounts of information about Fae. Sophie barely
remembered a fraction of it, mostly because she had been four when her mother had enough of
the whole weird relative problem and moved to the far side of the country. One thing Sophie did
remember was that Great-aunt Serena had been mortally insulted when she referred to the Fae as
fairies.

Logic latched onto the spectacle of Kevyn calmly sitting on the bottom of the pool, and
insisted one thing:

Kevyn is a Fae.

If Fae are real,
logic insisted,
then magic is real.
And maybe not so
psychosomatic as her thesis postulated.

Just like the miracle of finding the first coelacanth, Sophie knew she had to grab hold of
this lone, wild specimen of a real, live Fae. As in, capture him and get him out of circulation
before some research pirate like Jennifer Montcrief found him. Put him in a controlled
environment. Devise tests. Examine him until she learned everything she could. Gather data and
evidence until even the most skeptical member of the doctoral panel agreed with her conclusions.
Whatever those conclusions were.

First things first.
She fled down the hall, away from the pool area.
First I
have to catch him before I can examine him. And I don't think a butterfly net is going to
work.

She dreamed of The Book that night. Sophie couldn't remember when she first started
dreaming of The Book. She could never read the spine, and there were no headers on the
hand-written pages to tell her the name of the book. She had always thought of it in capital
letters--The Book--as if there were no other book to refer to.

The Book gave her answers, plain and simple. She had long since rationalized that when
she dreamed of The Book, she was actually accessing long-forgotten memories, to find the
answers she needed. Despite that modern psychological explanation, she was always excited
when she dreamed of The Book.

Whatever she dreamed she read in The Book worked. Perfectly. Without exception.

The Book hovered in the mist, the covers lost in shadows so she couldn't be sure
how thick it actually was. Huge, definitely. She dreamed she flipped through pages for hours,
glancing through the funny, scrawled handwriting in a language that wasn't anything she
recognized. Not even Russian or Arabic or others that didn't use the modern English
alphabet.

Finally, she came to a heading at the top of a page that seemed to indicate Fae
medical information followed.

"How do I capture Kevyn?" she asked The Book. "Will ordinary tranquilizers work
on him?"

Sophie hoped not, because she would have to get a dart gun and probably fill out
reams of paperwork to get permission to buy and use the gun and the expensive drug.

The right-hand page went blank and a single word,
INTOXICATE,
appeared on it.

"Intoxicate him how?" She almost laughed. The idea of challenging Kevyn to a
drinking match sounded like fun. She could drink anyone under the table and not get a
buzz.

ALCOHOL WILL NOT WORK. HUMAN PSYCHEDELIC AND
HALLUCINOGENIC DRUGS WILL NOT WORK. FAE INTOXICANTS ARE NOT
AVAILABLE TO YOU.

NOT YET ANYWAY.

She stared at those last three words and a chill of warning went down her back.
That itching shiver prickled right where she had always imagined she would have wings, if she
was a flying Fae.

Great-
a
unt Serena had lectured her on the stupidity and impracticality of
wings. How could she get a decent dress on over wings, for instance? Fae magic made wings a
showy accessory, not something useful in daily life at all.

"Okay," she asked The Book, as she fought off another shiver that threatened to
knock her off her feet and possibly right out of the dream. "What Human things can I use to
intoxicate him?"

DIET CHERRY COLA AND DARK CHOCOLATE.

"Nooo!"

Sophie sat up, yanked out of her dream, and clapped both hands over her mouth to stifle
the sound. She shivered and huddled in her bed, and slowly became aware that daylight streamed
through the gap in the curtains. She turned around and looked at the clock. Eleven. The
convention was in full swing. She had missed two panel discussions she wanted to take notes
on.

Gradually, the horror that had made her flee her dream crept up on her. In the daylight
that penetrated the curtains, the terror and loathing she felt didn't seem so bad.

In fact, it was a pretty ridiculous thing.

Dark chocolate gave her a clear-headed buzz. It was her social drug of choice. Sophie
rationed it, saving the gourmet dark chocolate bars for celebrations of the highest magnitude, and
using the generic, grocery store variety dark chocolate for medicinal purposes. And she never
shared it with anyone.

The thought of breaking into her stash or even running out to a grocery store to buy dark
chocolate and watch it go down Kevyn's throat in the name of scientific research was
blasphemy.

Diet cherry cola made her loopy. She thought it was just an adverse reaction to
aspartame and the so-called natural and artificial flavorings, and avoided all diet sodas.

She used diet cherry cola when she wanted to stop thinking or just relax. She allowed
herself one can, rationed out over an evening curled up in bed with a new book, when she wanted
to celebrate some milestone in her academic career.

Just imagining how two or three cans of diet cherry cola would affect Kevyn made her
giddy. Would he get amorous, like some guys when they had one too many glasses of wine?
Would he be sloppy and fall asleep on the table? Or be nasty?

The Book told her to intoxicate him, so she could capture him, so that had to mean he
got sloppy and sleepy.

"Down girl," she whispered, as she imagined Kevyn sleeping with his head in her lap.
Sophie fanned her face and made a dash for the bathroom for some cold water.

When the pale pink crystal beads in Kevyn's charm bracelet chimed softly, he nearly
teleported to his favorite spot on the moon. Those beads hadn't gone off in twenty-eight years,
since the last time someone had set their sights on him, physically, intellectually and magically,
to hunt him down.

Enclave Hunters, here at the convention? How had they found him?

It didn't really matter how, he supposed. What mattered was escaping them. Figuring out
how they caught up with him could wait until later. When he figured out how to prevent it
happening again. There was no way in any of the twenty dimensions of reality that he was going
to let his family drag him home and make him study to be an Advocate.

The troupe did four acts every day. The third act was right after the dinner break, in the
main ballroom, on stage instead of out in a hallway, wherever they could find room. Kevyn felt
the thick flow of energy that came from someone concentrating on him. This wasn't like the buzz
that tickled and itched, when bimbettes mentally undressed him. This had a touch of magic in it.
Kevyn fumbled his lines three times before he could grasp that stream of energy with his mental
hand and follow it back to the source.

Sophie?

Kevyn did forget his lines then, and Dougie whacked him across the back of his head
with the barrel of his pseudo-lazer rifle, earning laughter from the audience. Kevyn had a hard
time not laughing along with them.