Absolutely Captivated (43 page)

“Real money,” Gaylord whispered. He
looked at Herschel. “We could get outta this town, live a quiet
life, be our own men.”

Herschel rolled his eyes. “We wouldn’t
live through the day.”

He grabbed the edge of the map and
rolled it up. Then he shoved it at Zoe.

“It’s a death sentence,” he said. “The
wheel belongs to the Faerie Kings and they’re very possessive of
it. They have plans for it. They think they can use it to absorb
all magic systems into our own. And they might be
right.”

“We can’t do it,” Gaylord said. “We’d
have our power taken away.”

“No one’s even seen the wheel, Zo,”
Herschel said. “They guard it that jealously.”

He was lying. She had never had such a
clear sense of a falsehood from these two before.

“I thought we were friends,” she said.
“I thought I could ask you for help and you’d at least consider
it.”

Herschel grabbed his helmet and
jacket. He stood. He hadn’t even finished his beer.

“We’ve been flirting with the mage
system for a while,” he said. “We like the idea of love and
friendship and all those happy, happy thoughts. It’s kinda fun, in
a hobby sort of way. But we never put ourselves out for other
people. Not without real gain—and frankly, real money isn’t gain
enough. I like you, Zo, but I’m not going to take risks for
you.”

He stuck the helmet on his head, slung
the jacket over his arm, and stomped out of the bar.

Gaylord didn’t move. He was still
staring at the tabletop as if he could still see the
map.

“This is bad stuff, Zo,” he whispered,
“and Herschel’s scared. He didn’t mean all of that.”

But he had. That time, Zoe
had no sense that Herschel was lying. There was a coldness in the
center of him, one she had always sensed, but assumed it was just
the Faerie way. She never thought he would revert to it when things
got difficult.

“Is it true,” Zoe asked, her voice
barely above a whisper, “the whole world becoming like
Faerie?”

Gaylord tugged on his shirt collar, as
if he were trying to rip the sleeves even farther. He shrugged.
“There’s been talk. But there’s always talk. You know how slowly
these things can go.”

Tricks, coldness, no real
affection. It had always been said that Faeries had no heart—that
they didn’t know how to love.

“Even mortals?” Zoe asked.

“Well, we never really
cared about mortals before,” Gaylord said. “But there’s a rift in
the power-stream and the Fates aren’t taking care of things. So
someone’s going to have to step in. Instead of love as the highest
possibility that mortals can achieve, we’ll come up with something
else. It’ll be a lot more fun than eternal commitment
anyway.”

“All love would go away?” Zoe
asked.

Gaylord shrugged. “Who needs
it?”

He glanced at the door. Herschel was
standing there, staring at him.

“I’ve said too much,” Gaylord
whispered. “I like you, Zo. I wish I’d been born a mage, I really
do. But you can’t control destiny, right?”

He reached across the table and
touched her arm lightly.

“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?
Faerie really isn’t safe. Especially for you.”

Then he gave her a sheepish smile,
slid out of the booth, and walked away. When he approached the
door, Herschel started to yell at him. The door closed on them,
Herschel’s voice reverberating in the hall.

Zoe leaned back in the booth. Her eyes
still saw spots from the neon glow of the map.

No more love. The Fates
had left a vacuum that the Interim Fates didn’t even understand,
let alone knew how to fill. And the Faeries would step
in.

They would change
everything.

The world wasn’t perfect—there were
hundreds of millions of mortals who had no love or didn’t take the
chances they were given—but at least those mortals had a
chance.

And what would happen to other
relationships? Not romantic love, but the wonderful bond like the
one she’d seen with Travers and Kyle. Would they suddenly hate each
other?

What kind of place would this world
be?

Certainly not one she wanted to live
in.

Zoe grabbed the map and unrolled it on
the tabletop again. Faeries were tricksters. She had to remember
that. And Herschel was lying to her.

The red dot still showed, right in the
center of Faerie. The dot had been in the center of Faerie, even
when Faerie changed its shape from circular to
rectangular.

She would wager that the wheel was in
there, and easy to find.

The prophecy was right: she had met
her true love near Faerie. It wasn’t just Travers, although she
would give almost anything to have him feel about her the way she
felt about him. It was what Travers had given her: a way to see
this world, a way to understand it, knowing how much she valued
life as it was, not as it would be if the Faerie Kings had their
way.

She hated prophecies and fixed
destinies. They made life seem like it had no choices.

But she could walk away right now,
turn her back on everything, and continue for the next thousand
years as if nothing were wrong.

Or she could take a chance on not
living through the night, and going to Faerie. Maybe she’d find a
wheel and maybe she’d take it back.

For Travers and Kyle, and the world
that she loved.

The motorcycle started up,
sending a plume of black smoke toward Gaylord. He hovered near the
Dumpster, trying to ignore the stench of beer and vomit. The air
was cooler than it had been when he arrived; the sun had gone down
and so had the temperature, by about 15 degrees.

“Gaylord,” Herschel said. “We’re
leaving.”

“You go,” Gaylord said. “I hate that
infernal machine.”

He rubbed his arms,
wishing for the muscles back. If he rode on that machine, he’d have
to conjure a jacket, too. Even though it was still in the 90s, it
felt cold in comparison to the heat of the day.

Herschel looked like an expert on that
bike. His legs were spread, one foot on some gadget or another, the
other foot braced against the street. His hands hovered over the
handlebar squeezy-thingies, as if he knew what he was
doing.

“Technology is the wave of the
future,” he said.

“Technology is already here,” Gaylord
said.

Herschel rolled his eyes, then pulled
his goggles over them. “Our future.”

“Not mine,” Gaylord said.

“Look, I want to go to the canyon.
It’ll be fun to drive there at night.” Herschel adjusted his
helmet. “Don’t you want to jump the Snake?”

“Not tonight,” Gaylord said. “I have a
headache.”

Herschel
varoom-varoom
ed the
machine. “You’re no fun anymore,” he said, and drove
off.

Gaylord stood in the alley
and watched as Herschel disappeared down a side street. Then he
felt his shoulders relax. Herschel wouldn’t approve of the
conversation Gaylord had had with Zoe, and Herschel certainly
wouldn’t approve of the things Gaylord was going to do
now.

He watched the front door
of O’Hasie’s, waiting for Zoe to exit. It took her a while. He
stretched a shield of invisibility over himself and squeezed into
her car, in the small space between the driver’s seat and the back
window.

She got in a moment later, tossed the
map on the seat beside her, and started the car. Gaylord was proud
of himself for not sitting on the passenger seat. He had been
afraid she was going to set the map down there.

She put the car in gear, and he hoped
that she would go back to this new man whose sparkles were all over
her. But she didn’t. She drove down Boulder Highway, and he knew
right away that was a bad move.

The Faerie casinos
clustered along the old stretch of Boulder Highway. The easiest
access to Faerie was through one of those casinos.

Gaylord cursed silently, then waved a
finger and floated out of the car. He was half a block away from
the car when he realized he should have stolen the map.

It was probably too late, anyway. Zoe
had a good memory.

He hovered over the highway through
two semis and a bus. Then he knew what to do.

He snapped his fingers just once, said
a location spell, and vanished.

They had just reached the
point in the second Harry Potter movie where Kenneth Branaugh’s
delightful, scene-stealing professor does a memory-loss spell that
backfires. Travers had his feet on the coffee table in the living
room of his suite, his head resting on the back of the couch and
his arm around Kyle.

Travers finally understood why his son
loved these movies and those books so much. He never realized that,
in some ways, Kyle saw Harry Potter as the story of his life, and
probably wished for a school like Hogwarts where he wouldn’t be
considered strange.

Travers was going to say something to
his son when he realized that Kyle was asleep. Bartholomew Fang had
passed out too, only his tail was twitching and so were his paws.
He was probably chasing lunch meat in his sleep.

Travers eased himself out of Kyle’s
grasp, and moved slowly so his son wouldn’t wake up. Then Travers
picked up Kyle, trying not to grunt at the boy’s weight.

Kyle weighed a lot more than he had
the last time Travers had done this. Travers hugged the boy to him,
and carried him into the bedroom. In five more years, Kyle would
probably be taller than he was. Surly, too. Teenagers usually
were.

Travers set Kyle on the bed, then
covered him up and turned out the light. Still, he hovered over the
boy for just a moment. He figured they only had another year or two
before the world of girls and adolescent angst would take his
little boy away from him. A year or two of closeness before the
inevitable separation.

Travers sighed and walked out of the
bedroom. He pulled the door closed. The music blared loudly on the
television set. He turned off the movie and wandered into the
kitchen for a late-night snack.

As he stepped into the small kitchen
area, a gust of wind hit him. The wind was warm and smelled faintly
of motorcycle exhaust.

Travers stepped back, only to find
Bartholomew Fang beside him, growling, famous teeth bared. Travers
couldn’t see what Fang did, but he wasn’t sure he wanted
to.

The wind died down, leaving his hair a
mess and grit in his eyes. He wiped the grit away with his
forefinger, then glanced at it. The grit looked like road
dust.

“Show yourself,” he said, wondering if
any of the training Zoe had given him earlier that day had
stuck.

He was trying to figure
out some spell she had given him, some parlor trick, as she called
them, that could be reversed and maybe make some invisible mage
reveal himself, when a slim, teenage boy stepped out from behind
the refrigerator.

The boy had long black hair, pointed
ears, and delicate features. He was almost pretty. He compensated
for his fragile looks by wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves
ripped off, black jeans, and black boots that looked one size too
large.

“You know Zoe?” the boy asked and as
he did, Travers realized that this wasn’t a boy. The voice belonged
to a man.

This had to be one of the
Faeries.

Was it one of the three who had
followed the Fates? Travers would have to wait to find
out.

Fang was still growling, but he hadn’t
moved from Travers’ side. Travers decided that Fang had the right
idea, and staying in one place was it.

“Who’re you?” Travers
asked.

“My name is Gaylord,” the boy said and
raised his pointed chin ever so slightly. He seemed to expect
Travers to know who he was.

“Gaylord what?” Travers
asked.

“What do you
mean
what
?”
Gaylord said.

“What’s your last name?” Travers
asked, a little amazed at himself. He’d been around the Fates for
so long that he could now meander his way through a silly
conversation like this one.

“Mortals need two names because
there’s so many of you. We only have one. I am Gaylord.”

“You said that,” Travers said. “And
you also mentioned Zoe.”

“You are the soulmate, right?” Gaylord
asked.

Travers’ stomach twisted. What was
this odd boy/man talking about?

“The one she loves? That is you,
correct? Because if it isn’t, then I need my spells adjusted,”
Gaylord said. “I asked the winds to bring me to the one that Zoe
loves.”

And they brought him here. Travers’
heart swelled, and he had to work to keep a goofy grin off his
face.

“Where is she?” he asked.