Absolutely Captivated (44 page)

“Zoe?” Gaylord said.

“Isn’t that who we’re talking about?”
Travers asked.

“I thought so.”
Gaylord looked confused. “At least, that’s who
I’m
talking about. You never
answered my question.”

“I hope I’m the one she loves,”
Travers said.

Gaylord crossed his arms. They were
bony and too thin and looked like they had no power at all. Yet
somehow he looked fierce. “Do you love her?”

Travers’ mouth had gone dry. “What’s
it to you?”

“If you don’t love her, I’ll leave,”
Gaylord said.

“Yes, I love her.” The words surprised
Travers. He had planned to say that he liked her, maybe even that
he was attracted to her. But this love thing caught him by
surprise.

And not by surprise. Because the
feeling was one he’d been trying to ignore for the last two days,
and having more and more trouble doing so.

Even Kyle had noticed.

“Good, because she needs you.” Gaylord
peered at Travers, as if he were trying to see through him. “You
have some magic, right?”

“Some,” Travers said.

“Then let’s go.”

Fang was still growling. Travers
wasn’t going anywhere with someone his dog didn’t like.

His dog. So many changes in the last
few days.

“Go where?” Travers asked.

“You have to stop her,” Gaylord
said.

“Stop her from doing what?” Travers
asked.

“Going into Faerie,” Gaylord
said.

Travers felt his shoulders relax. “She
wouldn’t do that,” he said. “She’s afraid of Faerie.”

“She got pushed today,” Gaylord said,
“and now she’s on a mission—which, if I had the courage, I would go
on, which might be why I mentioned it in the first place, but now I
regret it, and we could lose her, and I need your help.”

Travers didn’t follow any of that
except the “lose her” part, which made his stomach twist. “Help
with what?”

“The rescue,” Gaylord said. “I’d like
to figure out a way to do it without getting myself
killed.”

Zoe had always
thought that
Craps, Slots And Beer
was a stupid name for a casino, but that was all
the neon signs had ever said around the Faeries’ main casino on
Boulder Highway. She was certain there had once been an even larger
neon sign, but in all the years she had lived in Vegas, she had
never seen it.

The casino parking lot was
full, even though this place didn’t have specialties like a fake
Eiffel Tower or wondrous canals in the middle of a desert. The
Faerie casinos were no-thrill places, without anything that catered
to the clientele.

These places were designed to bilk
money from the patrons. No false hope here, no promises of easy
wealth. The people who came to these casinos had no illusions and
didn’t expect any. They came to gamble, and if they came away with
money, then they counted themselves mighty fortunate.

She always thought it odd
that people expected magic in places run by the non-magical, and in
places run by the magical, people didn’t expect magic at all. There
was some kind of weird truth-in-advertising to that: magic wasn’t
about great moments and special occasions; it was as mundane as
washing your hair, and as exciting as driving around the
corner.

She pulled open the heavy
double doors that led inside the casino, and immediately got
assaulted by fifty-some years’ worth of unventilated cigarette
smoke. The air had long since gone past silver—it was now a grayish
purple haze that probably had less oxygen in it than the average
exhaust pipe.

Zoe had been prepared, but she still
coughed as she stumbled over the rubber mat near the door. That mat
looked like it was as old as she was. So did the old man at the
corner slot machine—only he looked like he had aged for each decade
Zoe had been alive. She thought he had died and mummified there
until he moved, pulling down the one-armed bandit and licking his
dry lips in anticipation of a jackpot.

The woman beside him lit a
new cigarette with the old one, then stubbed the old one out in an
ashtray that hadn’t been emptied since the Depression. She didn’t
take her gaze off the slot machine before her, either.

In fact, all of the people
in the room seemed mesmerized by their slots. They probably were.
The Faeries sometimes used magic to addict gamblers to a particular
slot.

Zoe made herself
focus. She had left the map in her car—no sense calling attention
to herself—but she had memorized it, as best she could. She slipped
around the outside edges of the slots, listening to the
ka-chink! ka-chink!
of
coins falling into the metal drawers.

The craps tables weren’t
as full. In fact, only one had a full contingent of players. Most
of those players were elderly as well. The Faeries were going to
have to update their casinos at some point just to attract a
younger crowd.

But Zoe wasn’t going to
tell them that. Like most of the magical, the Faeries rarely
noticed how quickly mortal time passed. As far as the Faeries were
concerned, these places were probably considered new.

She hurried past the craps
tables, nearly running into a cigarette girl wearing a short skirt
and high heels and carrying a tray around her neck.

Zoe stopped and gawked.
She hadn’t seen an honest-to-goodness cigarette girl since 1970,
and certainly not one this beautiful, ever. Of course, the girl’s
raven-black hair was cut to hide her pointed ears, and her makeup
covered the excesses of her eyebrows, but it was still hard to hide
that other-worldly kind of beauty in common clothes.

The girl saw Zoe, smiled, and said,
“Cigar? Cigarillo? Cigarette?”

“Ah, um, no, thank you,” Zoe said,
feeling as if she’d stepped into a bad Bogart film. She hurried on,
past the restrooms to the bar.

Slot machines in the
corner, video poker on the table, and only hard liquor against the
walls. The cocktail waitresses, who cruised the aisles of the
casino just like the cigarette girl, wore the same skimpy costume,
but not all of them were Faerie. A few looked like regular mortals,
only a little too thin.

The entrance to Faerie was somewhere
in here and, if her map was to be believed, the wheel wasn’t far
away. She had to be alert to prevent herself from losing time, and
she had to be cautious that she wouldn’t get lost.

But she figured she had the element of
surprise on her side. Herschel was more concerned about his
motorcycle; he wouldn’t mention her interest in the wheel to
anyone. And Gaylord had done his best to warn her away. He wouldn’t
turn her in now.

She hoped.

She tried not to look too obvious as
she rounded a corner and headed toward the buffet. The buffet
smelled like congealed beef broth and week-old cooked carrots. A
few patrons sat at the tables, stirring their food into mush. One
woman plucked radishes cut in the shape of flowers off the salad
bar, while she complained that there were no pickled
beets.

Zoe permitted herself one shudder for
terrible 1950s meals gone by, and then slipped through the kitchen
door, toward the back exit where the entrance to Faerie should
be.

She almost walked past it. There was a
large closet, housing all of the cleaning equipment for the
restaurant, and just beyond that, an ice machine that looked like
it hadn’t worked since Truman was president.

She touched the metal lid of the ice
machine, and found that it was hot. Then she closed her eyes ever
so slightly, saw the magical sparks that Gaylord and Herschel liked
to talk about, and knew she had found the entrance.

No one on the kitchen staff noticed
her. In fact, they hadn’t even seen her enter the room, which was
just as well. She made a slight invisibility shield around herself
as she lifted the lid on the ice machine.

It looked like an empty metal chest.
The bottom seemed solid enough. But she leaned over the edge and
tried to touch the metal, and found her hand slipping across
nothing.

She hoisted herself over the lip and
then slid into the chest, falling down a metal slide like she was
at a water park—only worse. She twisted and rolled and spun and the
world got very, very dark, and very, very cold.

She could hear
laughter and the
ka-chink!
ka-chink!
of slot machines grow louder and
louder, and then she realized that no one was speaking English.
They were all speaking Faerie.

Her heart nearly stopped. She had to
concentrate to keep breathing. She kept falling, feeling more and
more lightheaded, and knew that if she passed out, that would be
the end of everything.

She had to hold on, and she had to
stay awake, and she had to pay attention.

Because she would only get one chance
at this, and she had to do it right.

Somehow Travers managed to get most of
the story out of Gaylord, and it hadn’t taken all night. Apparently
a week with the Fates had been good for something.

What Travers couldn’t understand was
why Zoe had decided to go into Faerie at all. She hadn’t planned
to. She had been adamantly against it.

All Gaylord had said was that she saw
some profit in it.

Profit wasn’t a major motivation for
Zoe, so Travers wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. He actually
figured he needed the Fates’ help. They probably knew a spell or
two, which they could explain to him, that might show him where Zoe
was.

Or, worst case, prove to him that
Gaylord was lying.

Travers picked up the phone, dialed
the Fates’ room, and asked them to come to his. He had a hunch Zoe
wouldn’t approve of his methods, but he couldn’t think of anything
else to do.

The Fates arrived in record time, at
least for them. It only took them fifteen minutes from the phone
call to their knock on the door. During that time, Travers had to
prove to Gaylord that the refrigerator had no beer, and he had to
try to convince him that they didn’t have time to order any from
room service.

Fang never stopped growling, and
Travers made certain he never mentioned his precious son, asleep in
the next room.

Finally, Gaylord confessed that he
hadn’t seen either Harry Potter movie, so Travers ordered up the
movies again, not certain how long it would take the Fates to
arrive.

In the meantime, he paced and thought
and paced and thought, and actually wished he knew more about magic
than he did. He would be able to know what was going on with Zoe,
then, and he wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else.

When the Fates
knocked, he opened the door, put a finger to his lips, and
mouthed,
Don’t say who you
are
.

Clotho
mouthed,
Okay
,
but Travers wasn’t really sure she understood
him.

Then he introduced them to Gaylord as
three friends of his and Zoe’s.

“Zoe never mentioned any of you,”
Gaylord said, still staring at the television.

Travers shut off the TV.

“Hey!” Gaylord said. “That’s not very
fair. Now I’ll never know if the kid zaps his aunt and uncle into
oblivion.”

“Trust me,” Lachesis said, “that
odious pair shows up in every book.”

“At least through number
four,” Atropos said. “We haven’t read number five yet.”

Travers looked at
them in surprise. He had no idea they were Harry Potter fans. It
just went to show that every person on the planet
had
read a J.K. Rowling
novel. Every person, that is, except Gaylord.

“You can watch it later,” Travers said
to Gaylord. “I’ll even buy you a copy if your story holds
up.”

“Holds up?” He
gathered his knees against his chest. “What do you mean,
holds up
?”

“I can’t go running off to help Zoe
without confirmation,” Travers said.

“You have magic,” Gaylord said. “You
should’ve checked.”

Travers looked at the Fates. “I don’t
know the spell.”

Clotho tsk-tsked at him.
“Do a simple locate.”

“A what?” Travers asked.

“Make a fist,” Gaylord said, “then
snap up the fingers, and think of the person. You should get a
trail of light.”

“You Faeries do everything
backwards,” Lachesis said. “You think of the person first, then
snap your fingers, and then you’ll find yourself wherever that
person is.”

“Which isn’t a really good spell if
the person is in trouble,” Gaylord said. “Then suddenly you’re in
the middle of trouble and you’re of no use to them.”

He scooted to the edge of the couch,
and frowned at Travers.