Absolutely Captivated (37 page)

On it, a Cubs baseball cap, a glowing
tube, and a scrap of paper had appeared.

“Last chance to change your mind,
Zoe,” Elmer said.

“I won’t change it,” she said. “Tell
me how much all of this is.”

“Your detection services for a case of
my choosing at a time of my choosing,” he said.

“Any time within the next hundred
years,” Zoe added, not wanting to be indebted to him
forever.

“A thousand,” he said.

“Five hundred,” she said.

“Done,” he said, and she felt as if
she had given in too easily. Still, she didn’t complain.

Instead she looked at the items on the
table. He handed her the baseball cap.

“Your protection charm,” he said. “Be
careful with it. Once the magic has fled, the cap itself is worth a
great deal to baseball collectors. It’s old and
important.”

Zoe resisted the urge to
roll her eyes. Most of the items that the Faerie collected in their
totem search were sports-related. She never understood the power
that people gave their special teams, nor did she understand the
superstitious rituals that went with certain items.

Obviously, this cap had some of that
superstition believed into it, which made sense, considering it
belonged to one of the losingest and yet most popular teams in
baseball.

She tucked the cap under her arm,
knowing better than to put it on.

Then he handed her the scrap of paper.
It was small, barely the size of her palm, and the edges of it were
brown as if it had been rescued from a fire.

“Your spell,” Elmer said. “Keep it
flat. Do not read it aloud, and make sure you’ve closed your eyes
when you’ve thought the final word.”

“All right,” Zoe said, taking the
spell and letting it rest on her hand. The writing was old and
spidery and looked to be in medieval Latin.

“Finally,” Elmer said,
picking up the tube, “your map. It will serve you for exactly one
month. After that, its power will wane and it won’t be worth the
paper it’s superimposed upon. Don’t look at it too much, or you’ll
lose time. Don’t hold it too long, or you’ll end up at a place of
the map’s choosing. Don’t try to extract the magic from the map, or
it might kill you.”

Zoe nodded.

“Any questions?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Good.” He tucked the map under her
other arm. “I hope I see you again, Zoe. If your quest doesn’t
work, then I’m the one out a fortune in magic.”

“It’ll work,” Zoe said, wanting to add
that he would be out a fortune, but she would be dead. It seemed to
her that she would be the one getting the short end of that
deal.

“I would wish you good
luck,” Elmer said, “but the Faeries would steal the words and use
them for their own nefarious purposes.”

“Still,” Zoe said, “I appreciate the
sentiment.”

And she did. But she had feeling that
what she was about to do would take more than luck. It would take
skill and cunning and a great deal of strength.

But she knew—just like
Elmer knew—that the thing she needed the most of was the thing the
Faeries hoarded like gold: a belief that fortune would smile on her
in her time of need.

Or in other words—

Luck.

Travers paced around the room, careful
not to bump into any tables or brush any curio cabinets. The more
he walked and peered, the more he saw: little faces smiling back at
him; men waving from art deco cigarette cases; women blowing him
kisses from World War II recruitment posters.

Now, it seemed, the curtain that Zoe
had gone through had disappeared. And Travers couldn’t see the back
door. He was in a room without exits or windows, filled with stuff
he wasn’t allowed to touch, in a place that seemed outside
reality.

And he also discovered
that his cell phone wasn’t working. Kyle couldn’t reach Travers if
he wanted to.

And Travers hated that. It didn’t
matter how many mental tricks Zoe had taught his son, they didn’t
compensate for modern wireless communication, done through the
wonders of technology.

Travers had just about reached the end
of his tolerance. Only he didn’t know what to do when he really did
reach the end of his tolerance. Would he try to call for Zoe? Or
use a modification of one of the new spells she taught
him?

Then Zoe appeared in front of him. He
almost walked into her, and nearly grabbed an end table to right
himself, catching himself at the last minute.

“Zoe?” he asked tentatively, not sure
if she was a vision or not.

“Yep,” she said. “It’s me.”

“You didn’t come out of the curtain,”
he said, feeling slightly disoriented.

“Yes, I did.” She turned, saw that she
was in the center of the room with no curtain in sight, and
frowned. “At least, I thought I did.”

“Did you get what you wanted?” Travers
asked.

She nodded, then extended her hand. On
the palm was a very small, fragile piece of paper. Under her left
arm, she carried a glowing plastic tube, and under her right, a
Cubs baseball cap.

“What’re those?” he asked.

“The solutions to the case, I hope,”
she said. “We need something to put this paper in, though. It has
to stay flat.”

“Conjure a book,” Travers said. He
wasn’t about to suggest she take one of the books off the shelf he
had seen in his pacing. Those books laughed at him—literally
laughed—as he walked by. He didn’t like them at all, which was
something he’d never felt about books before. “You can carry a book
flat much more easily than a scrap of paper.”

Zoe gave him a wide smile. “You’re
brilliant,” she said, and snapped the fingers of her other
hand.

A thick volume appeared in Travers
hands, surprising him. The book weighed as much as newborn
baby.

“Open it,” Zoe said.

He did, to a middle page. The writing
inside wasn’t English. Neither was the alphabet. He had no idea
what language he was looking at.

Zoe put the scrap of paper in the
book. “That’s page 532,” she said. “Can you remember that for
me?”

“Easily,” he said, using a
trick he’d used for memorizing since he was a kid. He made the
number into an equation: 5=3+2. “I didn’t see the number on the
page.”

“Trust me, it was there.” Zoe sighed.
She took the tube from under her arm, and then the cap from the
other arm. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good,” she said, “because we have a
lot to do this afternoon. We—”

“No,” he said.

“No?” Zoe leaned
back, as if the word had too much force. “What do you mean
no
?”

Travers looked over his shoulder. He
felt like a million eyes were watching them. “Can we have this
discussion outside?”

Zoe sighed, and shook her head, but
led the way through the maze of tables and cabinets to the door.
Travers was amazed she found it. He couldn’t see it until they were
only a few feet away.

The door looked the same
as it had when they entered, and he had no idea why he hadn’t been
able to find it before. Except, of course, for the magical
explanation. He wasn’t supposed to leave, so he couldn’t find the
door.

Travers swallowed his exasperation and
followed Zoe outside. The day’s heat hit him like a wall. The sun
was so bright he had to blink several times before he could see
much more than white walls, white concrete, white
clouds.

Finally the pale blue of the sky came
into focus, and then the black of the iron bars on the windows, and
finally the red of Zoe’s car.

She opened the small
trunk, put her possessions in it, dithered over the book, and
finally wedged it against the tire iron and the jack.

“All right,” she said, closing the
trunk with one hand. “What’s so important that we can’t finish the
case?”

“Kyle,” Travers said.

Zoe stopped short, as if she hadn’t
expected that answer. “Have you heard from him?”

Travers shook his head, then realized
he’d better check his cell phone now that he was out of that
dungeon. He looked at the LED, saw that he hadn’t missed any calls,
and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

“Then why are we going to see him?”
Zoe asked.

“Because some weird,
green-haired woman propositioned me in there,” Travers said, “and
she knew way too much about my life and what’s going on for me to
be comfortable. I’m going to check on Kyle. If people are
approaching me, then they might be going after Kyle,
too.”

“Weird, green-haired
woman,” Zoe repeated, frowning, as if she were trying to place the
description.

“With bright green eyes,” Travers
said. “I saw her in a mirror.”

“Hmm,” Zoe said. “Could’ve
been anyone from a nature sprite to a Faerie. Did she have pointed
ears?”

“I couldn’t see under all that hair,”
Travers said, “which is beside the point, anyway. I want to check
on Kyle.”

“So call him,” Zoe said.

“No,” Travers said. “We’re going back
to the hotel. I want to see him for myself.”

“He might not be there,” Zoe
said.

“Then I’ll find him.”

Zoe studied Travers for a moment. A
small smile played at her lips. It was a fond smile, as if she were
proud of him for something, but for what, he didn’t
know.

“All right, then,” Zoe said. “We’ll
check on Kyle. And afterwards, we’ll finish the tasks we have for
the day.”

If Kyle was all right. Travers had the
uneasy sense that his son wasn’t all right, that something was
wrong. But he also knew that if something was seriously wrong, Kyle
would have contacted him.

Provided he could.

Travers got into the
passenger side of the car. The leather seat was hot. Zoe turned on
the air-conditioning even though she didn’t raise the roof of the
car.

Then she peeled out as if she were at
the Indy 500 and someone had just waved the checkered
flag.

“Maybe you could—um—zap me to Kyle,”
Travers said, wishing he knew the correct word for that
travel-thing he had done.

“Better not to call attention to the
magic,” Zoe said. “I’ll ‘zap’ you if we run into bad traffic.
Otherwise, we’re driving. Believe me, I’ll get us there
fast.”

Travers believed her. He just wasn’t
sure he wanted to be along for the ride. His own driving was scary
enough; Zoe’s in rush hour terrified him.

Still, he clutched the seat and
watched the road, wondering if his nerves about Kyle were just
parental jitters because Travers had had a bad experience or if
something was really wrong.

Travers guessed he would find out soon
enough.

Zoe had lied to Travers. She did use
magic on their trip back to the hotel; she just didn’t “zap” them
there. She wanted her car at the hotel for the mobility, in case
Travers found some reason not to accompany her on the rest of the
trip.

What she did, in addition to driving
as fast as she dared, was use a small spell she’d developed when
she lived in Los Angeles in the days before the freeways had been
built. When she wanted to get from place to place, she visualized
the entire route, saw where the traffic was, and wove her way
through it, using that special sight to help her.

She knew her passenger was
panicked—Travers held on to the armrest as if he were holding the
door closed—and she had no idea what he saw. Probably near-misses
all along the way, as she froze a car in place so that her car
could squeeze between it and a nearby truck.

She did that all the way from North
Las Vegas to the Strip, the warm wind whistling in her hair, the
feeling of freedom tremendous, and the glory of driving more than
70 miles an hour on streets made for 30 even better.

Zoe tried to distract Travers from her
driving by getting him to talk about the green-haired woman. He
told Zoe the entire story, and she tensed when she heard that the
woman offered to give Travers the spinning wheel.

“Why didn’t you go for it?” Zoe
asked.

“Please,” Travers said, sounding just
like Kyle. “A scam is a scam is a scam, no matter whether you’re
trying for magic or money.”

Zoe grinned then. She wondered if
Travers knew how strong he was or how competent; he worried about a
lot of things, but he seemed to handle everything thrown at him
with great aplomb.

She admired that. When she had just
come into her magic—at a much older age than Travers was now—she
was a lot more naïve. Of course, it was a different time, but
still. She would probably have fallen for the green-haired woman’s
scheme and regretted it for the rest of her life.