Totally Spellbound (9 page)

“Great-Aunt Eugenia taught me,” Kyle
said.

“What?”

He brought his arms down and slid his
legs to one side, leaning hard on Megan.

“Great-Aunt Eugenia. She came to visit
when I was really little, and she showed me, inside my own head,
how to keep private if I had to.”

Megan blinked. Something
about this sounded familiar. She’d talked with Great-Aunt Eugenia
too about privacy. Great-Aunt Eugenia had been such an outrageous
woman, with her flowing clothes, her booming voice, and her strong
opinions, that Megan had never been sure whether the conversation
had happened or if she had only imagined it.

At that moment, the door to the suite
banged open.

The three women who called themselves
Fates poured into the room.

“We need a driver,” Clotho
said. She was wearing tight blue jeans, a pink blouse, and
high-heeled sandals. Her makeup was perfect, just light enough to
kiss her skin, and her hair seemed even blonder than it had the day
before. She resembled nothing more than a life-sized Barbie
doll.

“Quickly!” Lachesis said. The
cream-colored blouse she wore untucked over a pair of stone-washed
jeans gave her voluptuousness a studied air.

“We can’t miss this
opportunity!” said Atropos. Her tight black capri pants, white
blouse, and slippers made her seem like an exotic version of Mary
Tyler Moore from the
Dick Van Dyke
show.

“The front desk will get you a cab,”
Megan said. She wasn’t going to get sucked into these women’s
vortex. They’d had enough influence on her family.

“Aunt Megan. You got a car,” Kyle
said.

“And we wouldn’t all fit
in it,” Megan said. “It’s a Mini Cooper.”

“We can squeeze,” Clotho said. “We’ve
done such things before.”

“Please,” Lachesis said. “We only have
an hour.”

“They’ll get lost,” Kyle
said.

“No one gets lost in a cab,” Megan
said. “The driver always knows where he is.”

That wasn’t exactly true;
she’d had a driver in New York when she had been there for a
conference who hadn’t known where Brooklyn was. But that was
different. Vegas wasn’t that hard to learn.

“We’ll only be a phone call away if
you need help,” Megan added.

“We need help now,” Atropos
said.

“John Little says he’ll fit us in,”
Clotho said.

“He’s doing us a favor,” Lachesis
said.

“John Little.” They spoke the name as
if Megan should know it. “And I should care about this
why?”

“Because true love is at stake,”
Atropos said. “You should always care when love is at
stake.”

Kyle looked up at her. “Aunt Meg,
they’re not kidding.”

“I know,” Megan said. “But I don’t
have to share the delusion.”

“Please, they will get
lost. They’re pretty naïve about some things.” Kyle batted those
baby blues. Someday, some woman was going to get lost in those
eyes. “For me?”

Megan was already lost. She’d been
lost since she’d held him as a newborn, all red and wrinkly and
warm.

She sighed. “Is this how your dad got
roped in?”

Kyle grinned. “He didn’t
mind.”

“I remember him at Viv’s wedding,”
Megan said. “He minded.”

“Oh, thank you.” Clotho clapped her
hands together. “We really do need an escort at times.”

“Kyle tries, but he’s still a tad
young,” Lachesis said.

Megan stood. She smoothed her hair,
feeling very out of place next to these beautiful women. All her
insecurities were back, every last one of them. Was it part of the
stress she’d been feeling? Or the fact that she was leaving her
practice without knowing what she was going to do next?

“Anyone want to tell me where we’re
going?” she asked.

Atropos smiled widely. “To hire Robin
Hood,” she said brightly. “We need him to steal our
wheel.”

John Little skulked outside the main
doors of the building, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
It was hard for a man of his bulk to be inconspicuous: people
looked at him as they walked by almost as if they expected him to
mug them.

One of Rob’s many
corporations had owned the building—or the lot it stood on—since
the 1930s. Hotels had grown up around it, as had casinos, but most
were shabby now. A number of them had been rebuilt, remodeled, or
torn down, replaced with other hotels and casinos.

The transformation of this
neighborhood had been nothing short of miraculous. Of course, John
thought most of Vegas was miraculous. He was still used to England,
where some of the buildings he had visited in his youth (over 800
years ago) were still standing.

Vegas hadn’t been around
much more than a hundred years, and in that time, it had gone
through more transformation than London had in all of its
centuries.

He never told Rob that he
preferred Vegas. Rob liked London and the past. John still liked
the fast-moving future, and hoped he would never stop liking
it.

Except he could do without the heat.
Sweat ran down his face the moment he left the air-conditioning. If
he’d known the women would be late, he would have brought out a
bottle of water.

He was waiting for the
Fates, and for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why they
hadn’t just popped in. He had been a bit stunned that they had
called him—who knew that those three women understood how to
operate a phone, let alone put it on conference call so that they
could continue their wacky one-two-three way of
speaking?

He had been a bit freaked
out when he had taken the call in his office, and he would have
thought it was all a hoax, except that no one could mimic those
voices or that bizarre way they talked.

They asked him for help, and he felt
that he owed them. He had bargained with them for Rob all those
years ago, and they had given in. They had never asked for anything
else in return.

Until now.

All they wanted, they had
said, was a meeting with Rob. They knew feelings were still sore
(their words), so they had come to John to have him set up the
meeting.

He hadn’t set up anything. He just
told them to get here pronto. Then he’d take them to
Rob.

But they hadn’t gotten here pronto.
Now it was half-past pronto, and they still hadn’t
arrived.

And he was getting really
nervous. Had they moved him aside so that they would have some kind
of weird access to Rob without John around? And if that was the
case, why hadn’t they simply popped Rob out of his office and taken
him to their rather stately abode near Mount Olympus?

John wiped the sweat off
his forehead and shifted his folded, lightweight suit coat to the
other arm. He was about to go back inside to page Rob and make sure
he was still in his office when a Mini Cooper pulled up to the
curb.

A beautiful redhead leaned out and
asked if this was the address of Chapeau Enterprises.

“Yeah,” John said, wondering if this
was part of the trick.

“Great. Can I park here?” she
asked.

He pointed to the parking garage
beneath a nearby building, and she waved merrily at him, thanking
him as she drove away. He squinted at the car. It was filled to
brimming, like a clown car. He saw too many heads for that tiny
interior.

Then the car disappeared into the
parking garage, and he focused his attention back on the
street.

Rob would want to know
where he had been and what he had been doing. John wasn’t sure he
wanted to fess up to talking to the Fates, let alone setting up an
appointment with them. He’d been Rob’s best friend, confidant, and
occasional head-knocker for centuries now, ever since they had met
near Sherwood Forest.

Those years had been defining ones:
they had lived an adventure, not realizing they had magical powers,
and they had lived by their principles, something they lost briefly
during the Crusades, and something Rob had struggled to maintain
ever since.

John liked the life they
were living now—they were operating on a grand scale compared with
the Forest—but he also knew that his friend was desperately
unhappy. The unhappiness had gotten worse over time as Rob had
realized how alone he was.

He had always believed that no one
could substitute for Marian, and John agreed. Marian had been an
original, just like all the other women John had met had been. But
Marian had been suited to Robin, and he hadn’t given any other
woman a chance.

Not in 800 years. Every hundred or so,
John tried to change Rob’s attitude.

So far he hadn’t been successful, but
that didn’t make him stop trying.

The redhead came out of the stairwell,
her arm around the shoulders of a young boy. The boy had
intelligent eyes and an air of magic around him that was so strong,
John felt it like a slap.

Kids shouldn’t have that much power.
It was wrong. It wasn’t the way the world worked—or at least the
world that John understood.

He was so focused on the kid that for
a moment, he didn’t see the three women trailing behind
them.

A blond, a brunette, and a redhead.
They looked so ordinary that at first he didn’t recognize them.
Then they grinned at each other, in unison, and he knew who they
were.

The Fates.

Only they looked like half of
themselves—all the power and energy that they’d always carried had
disappeared. They seemed almost…normal.

He shook that thought out of his head
as the other redhead—the one with the kid—came up to him. She was
built the way women should be built: sturdy, buxom, and broad, a
good handful for a man who was tired of the scrawny things that
passed themselves off as modern women.

The redhead said, “Sorry to bother you
again. Chapeau Enterprises is inside?”

Her voice was rich and
beautiful. This one had incredible life force, and the most
charming thing about her was that she didn’t know it.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s—”

And then the Fates surrounded him,
yammering all at once. The redhead stood back, looking amused. The
boy stayed in the middle of it all, and it wasn’t until the Fates
finished speaking (they were greeting John, which he was trying to
ignore), that the boy actually spoke:

“You know Robin Hood?”

He sounded like a star-struck fan.
John looked at the Fates in great surprise. Didn’t they know better
than to talk like that? No one was supposed to know mages’ real
identities. Even though Robin Hood was not Rob’s real name, it was
close enough to get everyone in trouble.

“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.

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.