Absolutely Captivated (28 page)

Instead, he called Megan and left a
message on her voice mail and another with her secretary. Megan
would return his call as soon as she was back in the office. By
then, he’d be out with Zoe, but at least he had made contact. Maybe
in a few days (or less!), Megan would be able to join him in Vegas;
maybe she could even take Kyle home. It wasn’t too late for him to
start those classes.

In the short term, however, Travers
had to count on Kyle’s ability to “project,” and the Fates’ good
sense, neither of which seemed exceedingly reliable. While the
Fates got dressed and while Travers was on the phone, Zoe taught
Kyle how to send his thoughts outward.

Kyle practiced on his
father. The scream was so loud, it felt like someone had blatted a
trumpet right next to his ear. Yet somehow Travers had known that
the sound was internal. Or maybe the resulting headache, which only
needed circles, stars, and little cheeping birdies going around his
head to complete it, convinced him.

Zoe saw Travers’ distress (or maybe
she saw the circles and stars and little cheeping birdies), and
touched his forehead. The headache had disappeared as magically as
it had arrived.

Then Zoe pronounced Kyle fit for
projecting. He would have to learn control, she said, and Travers
could second, third, and fourth that, but once Kyle had the
control, he would have a very subtle ability to project his
thoughts.

Which was just exactly what Travers
needed from a son about to head into puberty.

Travers didn’t object, though. He left
his son with three women who had taken forty-five minutes to put on
blue jeans, matching white blouses, and sandals. All three Fates
wore their hair down, and none of them were wearing any
makeup.

For the life of him, Travers had no
idea what had taken them so long to prepare for the day and he knew
he never, ever wanted to find out.

He and Zoe didn’t
even discuss it as they left the hotel. Zoe had questioned Travers’
judgment just once, when he gave Kyle enough money to get him and
the Fates lunch, dinner, and tickets to the
Star Trek Experience.
The Fates, it
turned out, were big
Star Trek
fans; while they were staying in Dexter’s coastal
hideaway, they saw every single episode of every single
show.

Travers also gave Kyle his cell phone,
along with Zoe’s number. With every base covered, Travers hoped
that nothing would go wrong.

Of course, with the Fates involved,
that was a pretty big hope.

This morning, Zoe was
driving. Her car was a racy red Jaguar convertible, which she used
with the top down. The car didn’t surprise Travers—somehow the Jag
suited Zoe—but the top-down part did. Even though it was only
eleven a.m., the temperature hovered around 110 degrees.
Air-conditioning wasn’t advised at this temperature—it was a
requirement.

And Zoe didn’t seem to
notice.

Travers would. His blond
hair would be blonder, which was actually a look most women liked.
Unless it was coupled with the beat-red sunburn on his scalp, along
with the tiny sweat blisters that he always got when he was in the
heat too much.

By the end of the day, he would look
like Lobster Man in a blond wig.

He hadn’t complained yet. He had used
the drive from the Strip to downtown to examine the car’s dash,
looking for signs of working air-conditioning.

He found two: a dial and a
lever, both of which were in the “off” position. The Jag was old
enough, and had been refurbished enough, to make the assumption
that the air-conditioning worked an iffy proposition.

He would wait until they
stopped before mentioning his delicate white skin. Zoe was going to
her office to look up a few last-minute details and then they were,
in her words, going door-to-door at the Faerie casinos.

Travers didn’t know if
“Faerie casinos” was the name of a chain, or if it was actually a
series of casinos owned by Faeries, or both. He was going to ask
about that, too, when they stopped. Traveling in a convertible,
even in the stop-and-go Vegas midday traffic, made conversation
nearly impossible.

This morning, Vegas looked as dingy
and grimy as its history. Even though a lot of the buildings
weren’t very old, they had a worn look that he recognized, one that
buildings got after only a few years in the desert.

The city also had an
unusual kind of sprawl. Los Angeles was divided into clear
neighborhoods with different types of architecture throughout. Yes,
it was strip mall heaven, and parts of L.A. looked no different
from other parts. But Vegas, off the freeways and on the side
roads, was a series of housing tracts. However, neighborhood to
neighborhood changed only by landscaping or by the year of the
housing development. Most were upscale, but the closer he got to
downtown, the older the housing developments got, and the more
dilapidated.

Gang tags started to appear on the
side of abandoned warehouses and on fences near gated
neighborhoods. Broken-down cars littered a few blocks, and most had
glass covering the streets.

Zoe didn’t seem to notice, or if she
did, she didn’t seem to care. She zoomed by with a confidence that
Travers would never feel in such a neighborhood.

The streets made him nervous, so he
studied her instead. The wind blew her hair back, revealing her
strong jaw and high cheekbones. Her neck was elegant and flawless,
and her lips were perfectly formed.

For the first time in his life,
Travers wished he had the freedom other men his age had. He wished
he could just pick up and go, just change his life, stay in Vegas a
while and get to know this woman without any cares in the
world.

But the moment he had that thought, he
got a shivery sense of worry about one of those cares. Travers
leaned his head back against the car seat and hoped that shivery
sense wasn’t Kyle attempting to send a message, just a father’s
worry about leaving his son with three slightly insane
women.

“He’ll be fine,” Zoe shouted over the
roar of the car as if she were the one who could read minds, not
Kyle.

She hadn’t even looked at him. Her
gaze was still on the road, her left arm braced above the wheel,
her right hand resting on the stick shift.

Travers felt his unease grow. “How’d
you know that’s what I was thinking?”

Zoe gave him a quick glance and a
matching grin. “I would’ve been surprised if you
weren’t.”

He smiled in return, then leaned back
in his seat. The wind from the passing cars smelled of exhaust, and
felt like hot air, instead of cooler the way that driving in a
convertible should be.

The neighborhood was
growing steadily worse—dilapidated buildings, more broken-down
cars, boys huddled in doorways making the kinds of deals that
Travers didn’t want to think about.

He didn’t understand Zoe.
She drove a Jaguar—a classic—and yet, she kept her office in a
neighborhood this bad. Was the neighborhood because of the class of
clients a private investigator got? Or was it camouflage, away from
the “mortals,” as she and the Fates called normal
people?

Or was it something else, a chance to
emulate the private detectives from the books and movies, the ones
who talked tough, and played even tougher, and fell in love with
tough dames, if only for a chapter or two?

Zoe rounded a corner, and Travers
recognized the sun-washed frame of her office. She bounced over a
rut in the driveway, heading into the back, and under a carport
that looked like it had been added onto the building decades after
the building’s initial construction.

Zoe shut off the engine, got out, and
ran her hands through her hair. It fell, shiny, smooth, and neatly
combed, against her face. Then she raised her eyebrows at
Travers.

“Aren’t you getting out?”

“Shouldn’t you put up the roof?” he
asked.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s
protected here.”

“From sunlight,” he said.
“But not from the neighborhood itself. I’ve led a pretty quiet life
and I know how to hot-wire a car this old.”

“You do?” Her grin grew.
“You have hidden talents, Mr. Kinneally.”

She had meant that as a joke, but it
hit home. He did have hidden talents, hidden even from
himself.

He sighed and got out of the car.
Although he was in the shade, his skin felt hot and he knew that he
had burned.

“It’s your car,” he said.

“And my office.” She raised a hand.
“Watch and learn.”

She held the hand over the center of
the car, then clenched her hand into a fist. After a moment, she
released the fist, spreading her fingers wide.

The car wavered like a heat mirage. It
got an almost silvery glow, and then it winked out—just like the
Fates had the night before.

“You made it disappear?” Travers
reached down, and touched hot metal. He brought his fingers back.
They’d been burned.

“I didn’t make it disappear,” Zoe
said. “I just made it invisible.”

“Oh,” he said, because he didn’t know
how to respond. “I thought you weren’t supposed to use magic for
personal gain.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m using it to
prevent personal loss.”

She crossed her arms, and tilted her
head slightly. She still stood near the driver’s side of the car,
although that wasn’t immediately obvious, since the car was
impossible to see.

“Aren’t we going to go
in?” Travers asked, a little worried about walking to her side of
the car. He couldn’t remember how long the vehicle was, not
exactly, anyway, and he didn’t want to bash into the side of the
car, making himself look like a complete dork.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how to
make things invisible?” Zoe said.

It hadn’t crossed his mind. He
blinked, looked at the non-existent car (well, that wasn’t true. It
did exist. It just didn’t seem to exist. Even though he could feel
the heat radiating from its body, and hear the engine ticking in
the shade), and frowned.

“I thought you said I have
a small magic,” he said, knowing it sounded lame. But he really
hadn’t associated himself with that trick she had just
done.

“This
is
small magic,” Zoe
said. “It’s barely above a parlor trick.”

Travers touched the car’s warm metal.
As he did, he looked down. The tip of his finger had
disappeared.

Somehow that felt like more than a
parlor trick.

“I don’t want you to practice on my
car.” Zoe looked around the small parking area behind the office.
Except for the carport, and the invisible car inside of it, there
wasn’t a lot surrounding them. A ratty fence, a few garbage cans,
some dying plants. Not much else.

Travers let out a small
breath. Maybe she wouldn’t have him do anything, after all. At
least, not out here.

“Let’s try that.” Zoe pointed at the
nearest garbage can.

“And what exactly are we trying to
do?” Travers asked.

“You’ll make it invisible,” Zoe said.
“Right down to its shadow.”

Travers frowned. The shadow was short,
since the sun was getting close to its zenith, but still visible.
He was beginning to understand the level of detail magic took—he
would never have thought of the shadow if Zoe hadn’t mentioned
it—but a shadow with nothing to cast it was suspicious.

“Am I just supposed to try
thinking ‘invisible!’ or—”

“Don’t!” Zoe held up her hand, then
lowered it slowly. “Crap.”

“What?” Travers asked.

Zoe shook her head. “You’re too
quick.”

“No one’s ever accused me of that
before.” Then he flushed, wishing he could take the sentence back.
That was what passed for banter in high school, not among adults.
Of course, high school was the last time he had wooed a woman, and
look how well that turned out.

Zoe put her hands on her hips. “Just
look at yourself.”

Travers looked down—and his heart
nearly stopped when he saw nothing but pavement. Not even a
shadow.

Not even a shoe print.

He wasn’t sure whether he should be
impressed with his own first-timer’s skill or if he should be
frightened that he had done something wrong.

So he felt both emotions at once,
letting them mix and blend, one emotion dominating the other for
half a second, then the other taking over.

“Now what do I do?” he asked. Then he
frowned. “You can hear me, right?”

“I can hear you.” Zoe sighed. “This is
going to be harder than I thought.”

“Turning me back?’ he asked, not
trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

“Teaching you. There are subtleties
involved that I’ve never bothered to think about.” Zoe sighed
again, as if the burden she had undertaken was much too
great.

Travers could feel his
face flush—and it wasn’t just from the sunburn. “Can I turn back or
not?”