Absolutely Captivated (5 page)

It was—in Kyle’s word—Fate, and
Travers didn’t want to tempt it.

If Kyle was right, and those women
needed to go on to Las Vegas, Travers would help them find the
right public transportation to get there. He was never going into
that city.

His life would change once he
did.

It was an irrational fear, he knew.
But everyone, even the most normal person on the planet, was
entitled to one irrational fear.

Entering Las Vegas was his.

And he clung to it, just like Kyle
clung to the illusion that he was psychic. Because it made him feel
safe.

Because it made him feel like he was
in control.

Even when he wasn’t.

It took nearly an hour for Kyle’s dad
to go to sleep.

Kyle lay in his bed closest to the
window, listening to the traffic zoom by on I-5. Headlights
constantly illuminated the flowered wallpaper, and the occasional
horn would startle him, even though he wasn’t asleep.

His dad had this big block about
magic. Aunt Viv had warned Kyle about that. Even as she told him
about her magic, and her discoveries in Portland this last year.
His new Uncle Dex, who was a dead-ringer for the 1940s comic book
Superman (which kinda fit, considering Aunt Viv used to say that
the original Superman was the handsomest guy on the planet), could
do all sorts of magical things. He just wasn’t willing
to.

Only Dad would never believe it. Dad
hated all this mystical talk. Somewhere along the way, Dad had
convinced himself that he was really practical and a non-believer
in anything that he couldn’t see—from God to magic to psychic
abilities.

But Dad had to have seen
the weird stuff at Aunt Viv’s wedding. Like the way all those
people popped into the hotel. Most of them arrived without luggage
(it had popped in, too) and without obvious
transportation.

After a day of suspicious arrivals,
Kyle had actually planted himself in the lobby, and watched person
after person appear on the front sidewalk out of nowhere. Not that
anyone else seemed to notice or even care.

Then the Wyrd Sisters had
shown up. That wasn’t their name, of course. Their names were
strange enough, though. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. They were
model-pretty and they did carry kittens with them everywhere, and
they glowed like they had magic, even though they
didn’t.

Aunt Viv and Uncle Dex had the first
argument of their marriage over those women. Aunt Viv said they
still needed protection, and Uncle Dex agreed, but said it wasn’t
his responsibility anymore, and then the Wyrd Sisters got involved
and said that they would get their protection from Zanthia in Los
Angeles, because she walked the mean streets.

The Wyrd Sisters were going to fly to
Los Angeles until they realized that meant on an airplane (what
else could it have meant? That had really intrigued Kyle), and then
they saw Dad, and said that he was perfect; they’d travel with
him.

Aunt Viv tried to talk them out of it,
saying that Dad was pretty straightforward and not real
imaginative, but they didn’t care, and then Aunt Viv told Uncle
Dex, who laughed and said he wasn’t responsible for the women
anymore, and that their instincts seemed to be good. Which was when
Aunt Viv started disagreeing with him, and Uncle Dex held up his
hands, not wanting to fight at the reception, and Kyle snuck off to
talk to Dad, who at that point didn’t know he was going to be stuck
in an SUV for two days with three of the strangest people he’d ever
met.

Kyle counted his dad’s soft snores.
When the count reached fifty, Kyle slid his covers back and eased
out of bed. Then he tiptoed across the floor until he reached the
door.

Kyle slowly brought his arm up to the
chain lock. Sound—or the lack of it—was really critical to sneaking
out of the room. He slid the chain across its little track, then
out of the track, catching the chain as it fell away. He set it
against the door, very gently, so that there was no sound at
all.

Then he turned the knob, and felt it
click rather than heard it. He pulled the door open slowly, and the
hinges creaked. Kyle bit his lower lip and looked at his dad. His
dad didn’t wake up.

Kyle slipped out of the door. He
pulled it closed, and stood for a moment on the concrete balcony
that overlooked the parking lot and, beyond it, the
interstate.

Lots of trucks went by. The parking
lot was full of cars and trucks and a few trailers. Kyle’s bare
feet were cold. In fact, his whole body was cold. He shivered,
rubbing his hands over his arms. His pajamas were a lot thinner
than his regular clothes. And it had gotten a lot colder out here
than it had been a little while before.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea
after all. Maybe he should’ve waited until morning to talk to the
Wyrd Sisters. But he wanted to give them the heads-up that their
advice hadn’t worked and that magic—or at least psychic
abilities—weren’t something they should even try to talk to his dad
about.

No sense in having Dad mad all the way
to L.A.

The concrete was scratchy. Kyle hopped
across it, using the iron railing as a brace.

He got to the next room,
only to discover a handwritten sign on the door.

K.

At the pool—

Kyle sighed, looked down
at his bare feet, then at the stairs several feet away. He’d be an
ice cube by the time he got to that pool.

But he sucked it up, and
walked—not hopped—to the stairway. The concrete there was smooth,
and the railing wobbly. He hurried down, his feet making a slapping
sound. The stairway turned toward the center of the complex, into a
little breezeway with a Coke machine, an ice machine, and a pay
phone. Just beyond it, in a fenced-off alcove, was the tiny,
square-shaped thing the manager called a pool.

He hobbled across the breezeway,
avoiding bits of glass and gravel, until he got to the open gate
door. As he got close, he could hear laughter floating across the
breeze.

“…
so much better than
being in that cave.” Clotho’s rich voice had a touch of laughter in
it. “I do like seeing the sun now and then.”

“It was better than a cave,” Lachesis
said. Kyle knew it was Lachesis, not because he recognized her
voice, but because these women always spoke in order: Clotho first,
Lachesis second, and Atropos last. In the three days Kyle had known
them, they hadn’t varied the pattern once.

“Caves aren’t that plush,” Atropos
said.

“What
ever
,”
Clotho said. “It’s just nice to see the stars.”

Kyle pushed the gate open and stepped
into the pool area. Lawn chairs that had once been white but were
now a kind of dingy gray surrounded the pool. An umbrella teetered
over a glass-topped table. Tiny hotel towels sat on the concrete
near the square pool.

“Come on in, Kyle,” Lachesis said.
“The water’s nice.”

All three women were swimming back and
forth in the tiny pool. And, Kyle blushed to realize, they weren’t
wearing anything. Or at least, it didn’t seem like they
were.

He immediately covered his
eyes.

“Oh, dear,” Atropos said. “This New
World puritanism is something I really do not
understand.”

“It’s pretty simple,” Clotho said. “It
comes down to upbringing. The children simply do not understand
that the body is a natural thing, that there is no shame involved
in nakedness and—”

“You could get arrested, you know,”
Kyle said as he pushed the gate open, careful to keep one hand over
his eyes.

“Really?” Lachesis asked. “How
delightfully medieval.”

Kyle stepped through the
gate.

“Where are you going, Kyle?” Atropos
asked.

“Back to the room.” He
stopped though. He was pretty angry. He didn’t realize it until
now. He had listened to these women this afternoon, when they told
him to have a heart-to-heart with his dad, and then they said he
could talk to them. And now that he wanted to, they were—well,
nude.

“I thought you wanted us to be
available for conversation,” Clotho said.

“I did,” Kyle snapped, his anger
finally coming out. “But I can’t talk to you like this.”

“Like what?” Lachesis
asked.

“When you’re—naked.” Just saying the
word made him blush even more. He was glad it was dark.

“Oh, child,” Atropos said. “We didn’t
mean to make you uncomfortable. We’ll get out.”

“No!” Kyle said, and sprinted toward
the stairs.

“With our clothes on.” Clotho’s voice
floated after him.

He stopped in front of the Coke
machine. It hummed. He swallowed hard, hoped his dad hadn’t heard
him yell, and said, “You will?”

“Certainly.” As Lachesis spoke, water
splashed. The women were getting out of the pool.

Kyle didn’t turn around.
He stared into the parking lot, and the passing trucks beyond,
wondering how these women got away with all the things they did.
They pretended they didn’t know money—Kyle had to explain the
difference between coins and cash to them at the Quickie Mart
outside of Salem; they seemed to know some things about the
culture, like HBO, but other things, like laws, eluded
them.

Dad simply said they were nuts, but
that was a blanket description which really didn’t get to the heart
of the problem. They might have been nuts, but they were nuts in a
really odd and consistent way.

“All right,” Atropos said. “We
are—what is your word?—decent.”

“Which, if you think about
it,” Clotho said, “goes right to the heart of the point. ‘Decent’
would only be used in this context if nakedness were somehow
indecent.”

“Which is why I made the point,”
Lachesis said.

Kyle turned around. Slowly
he let his hands drop from his eyes. The women, wrapped in big,
fluffy robes, were sitting in the ancient lounge chairs.

Lachesis was bent at the waist, drying
her red hair. She was built like a plus-sized model—his dad had
called her zaftig at the wedding and Aunt Viv had punched him—and
yet she looked the best in the robe.

Atropos had her robe wrapped around
her knees. She was as thin as Calista Flockheart, only prettier,
with black hair that fell to her shoulders. But the thinness
probably made her as cold as Kyle was. His feet felt like little
blocks of ice.

Clotho stood up. She was the blond,
and looked kinda like pictures of Kyle’s mom (whom he couldn’t
remember). Clotho pushed the gate open and held it for
him.

“We’re sorry,” Atropos
said. “If we had realized you would be uncomfortable, we wouldn’t
have gone swimming.”

“It’s not just me,” Kyle said as he
walked back to the pool. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you could
get arrested.”

“Why?” Clotho asked as she closed the
gate behind him.

“Because you’re in a public place. You
can’t be nude in public.”

“See?” Lachesis said. “It seems to me
that was a plot point in one of the movies we watched.”

“Probably several, but
Henri—” The women always insisted on calling Uncle Dex “Henri” for
reasons Kyle didn’t understand— “said that we shouldn’t learn
everything we know about modern culture from the
television.”

Atropos seemed puzzled by the
statement even though she was the one repeating it.

“You guys are really weird,” Kyle
said, as he sank into one of the lounge chairs.

“I thought you didn’t like that word,”
Clotho said.

“So I was right,” Kyle said. “You
could overhear us.”

“Just that part.” Lachesis sat up, the
towel wrapped turban-like around her hair. “Then we decided we’d
better come down here so you could have a private talk.”

“How did it go?” Atropos
asked.

Kyle shook his head. “Not good. That’s
what I came to tell you. My dad doesn’t believe in magic. He never
will, so stop trying to convince him, okay?”

“We never said
you
had
magic.”
Clotho sat down beside him. The plastic lounge chair squeaked under
her weight. “We said you would develop magic at
twenty-one.”

“And then you’d be exceedingly
powerful,” Lachesis said, “so you really should begin your training
now.”

“Well, my dad’s not going to pay for
any training.” Kyle couldn’t quite fight the feeling of
disappointment. “He thinks I’m just goofy, that there’s a logical
explanation for everything, and he doesn’t believe in predicting
the future.”

“What about
his
magic?” Atropos
asked.

“Shush,” Clotho said. “We’ve done
enough.”

Kyle shrugged. “My dad doesn’t have
magic.”

“Certainly he does,” Lachesis said.
“Or we wouldn’t be here.”

“I thought you needed a
ride to L.A.,” Kyle said.