by Amie Gibbons
“We’ll call that Plan B,” Corey said. “We know where they were. Is there any way to track them from there?”
“Same spell we used before,” O’Shay said. “But there’s only so much it can do. It tells us the general area, but then it’s up to us to get close enough for the smaller, more delicate sensors to work.”
“There aren’t that many hotels here,” I said. “I say we walk down hallways with the trackers until they warm up.”
“That’s not efficient.”
“Do I look like I care about efficiency right now?”
O’Shay got in my face. “You look like you’re ready to burn the entire town to the ground to find your dad, which is why we’re not listening to you right now.”
“Get away from me.” I pushed him hard enough to knock him back on the bed and he smiled, tight and nasty.
“Keep it up, Evie.”
“Is that supposed to be a threat? Because yours need some work.”
“You could teach me. Your threats are downright terrifying.”
“Stop flirting,” Chet said.
“As I said,” O’Shay said slowly, straightening and wiggling his shoulders like he was getting his brain right side up too. “We need a plan.”
“Fine,” I snapped. “What do you suggest?”
“We need to find them. Since they were in that casino, they probably weren’t staying at the adjoining hotel, too much risk of exposure if the casino decided to come looking for them. They’re probably at the one next to it, where I was. We go there, and yes, walk up and down the halls looking for them with the beads. If they aren’t there, we’ll check the others.”
“Then why did you just say it wasn’t efficient!”
“Because it’s not, but I can’t think of anything better right now.”
I tossed my hands up.
“These places aren’t like Vegas, we should be able to do that fairly quickly,” Corey said. “Four floors? Maybe six in the bigger ones? Yeah, we go in teams again and walk down the halls. We’ll find them.”
# # #
“Well?” I asked as we met back in the lobby. None of us had obviously found anything because if we had, we would’ve called.
O’Shay shifted on his feet. “Since we’re here, they may have run. If they really have been trying this as a practice arena, they’re probably going to Vegas tomorrow. Maybe they already left.”
“Do the spell again then.”
He met my eyes, a smile inching onto his face. “I was just about to suggest that.”
Chet growled next to me and I rubbed his arm.
“I know,” I said. “It’s not ideal, but they’ve got my dad. If this is the only way to do this, I can live with dealing with his slimy water powers again.”
“His powers aren’t what I’m worried about sliming you,” Chet said, stomping away.
I took a deep breath and nodded at O’Shay. “We’ll go back to the hotel and do this again. Don’t pull anything.”
“Same to you, Ms. Jones.”
I made a face. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone from the Council actually cracked a joke.”
“Heaven forfend.”
# # #
O’Shay behaved himself during the spell. It wasn’t nearly as disturbing the second time. The intimacy had already been reached. It was like having sex. The second time was always better because it was easier to get to the necessary intimacy with the person since you’d already been there and you knew the person’s rhythms and desires better.
This time when the waves hit my shores, I ignored them and held onto the slimy little sucker just hard enough not to lose him.
If my friends and dad weren’t kidnapped, I’d be tempted to.
“They’re on the move,” O’Shay said when we came out of the spell. “Going south.”
“Towards Vegas,” Corey said.
“That’s the most reasonable assumption.”
“I guess we won’t be needing this room,” I said. “I’ll check us out. Corey, call Chet, get him back here. O’Shay, can you drive a stick?”
He looked at me. “No. Can anyone under forty?”
I scowled. “I can. And so can Chet and Corey. We’ll take shifts, get some sleep. The chairs in the first two rows lean back and one of us can lay in the backseat.”
“Chet and I can split it,” Corey said. “It’s not that long of a drive, you can sleep.”
“It’s six hours. No-”
“Evie, you and O’Shay are the witches. We come up against these guys, we can shoot, but that’s all we got. You need your strength because you have magic. We’re going to need you then. Let us do this now.”
“Oy vey, good point.”
# # #
“I’ve never been to Vegas,” Corey said with wide eyes as we walked into our hotel suite and dropped our bags. The lobby had him staring like a tourist and he hadn’t even seen the stream running through the place with gondolas taking people on rides, let alone the shops. The casino we could see as we checked in almost knocked him over.
“The city of sin,” I said, reaching for the bag cuddled in Chet’s arms as it started to wiggle. Grem could sleep for hours in a tiny bag or box but the second you made him get in one?
Yikes.
I unzipped the bag and Gremlin exploded out of it, scolding loudly as he jumped on the first bed, flopping down at the bottom and licking his paw.
“I came here on my twenty-first birthday and decided sin and good little Jewish girls don’t get along.”
“When have you ever been a good little Jewish girl?” Chet asked.
He’d calmed down over the night, but only three hours of sleep, if he did sleep when his turn driving was over, wasn’t doing great things to his anger.
The sun was barely rising over the buildings and Vegas was already up and going. The casinos were near deserted but the restaurants were doing roaring business with breakfast buffets.
“Hey, I was good once,” I said. “Well, I was better at pretending to be.”
Chet nodded and flopped on the bed. “I’ve got to ask, how are we going to find these guys in Vegas? Have you seen the size of the hotels and casinos here? And there are dozens of them.”
“We have it narrowed down to the Strip, but that’s not saying much.” O’Shay and I did the spell again in the car when we were about half an hour out of town. “If you were going to go on a gambling spree, with a surefire winner, what would you do?”
“I’d spread it out,” Corey said. “Too much in one place and they’ll toss your ass out, but someone who wins big once and is like, ‘I won, I’m done,’ and leaves? Yeah, I’d buy that. So until someone connects the dots and realizes these guys were in five to ten casinos and won big at every one of them, they’ll get away scot-free.”
“Do casinos do that? Compare winners’ photos and stuff?” I asked.
“No idea. I could try calling up some cops here and see what they’re willing to tell a fellow cop.”
“Do it.”
“No,” O’Shay said. “We can’t call attention to ourselves. If you call the cops and tip them off, they may find these men before us.”
“Good,” Chet said. “They’re kidnappers. They need to go to jail.”
“And we’ll take care of it,” O’Shay said. “A human jail wouldn’t do much to them anyway. They’d escape and risk exposing us all.”
“I don’t get this obsession with hiding witches,” Corey said. “And I don’t care. I’ll call and say it’s professional curtesy.” He paused. “Actually, that would make them suspicious, even after checking my credentials.”
“Let’s assume they wouldn’t be matching winners on a regular basis between different casinos,” I said. “Unless something gave them reason to look into it. These guys might get put on some security system for the casinos to be on the lookout for, but people win big in Vegas all the time. If they spread it out, they’ll look like guys who got lucky and not much else.”
“
How much time do we have, do you think?” Chet asked.
“They’re going to have to study the roulette wheels for a while for Sean to calculate stuff, based on what Wolf said. I think they’ll gamble at one until Sean makes the calculations and then win big and leave. It’ll look less suspicious because they’ll be there for an hour or however long it takes, losing most of the time, maybe winning, betting bigger and bigger, probably getting drinks so it all looks real, and then have Sean tell them when they’re ready.”
“Video and earbuds?” O’Shay asked.
“No,” Corey and Chet said.
“The security would definitely pick that up,” Corey said. “You don’t realize how much casinos spend on security. Everything in a casino is meant to prevent theft and cheating. Everything from the chips and cards being specially marked to the design of the casinos. They’re meant to be mazes to keep people in.”
“I think that’s more for marketing,” I said. “People can’t get out so they keep gambling. It’s psychology so take it with a grain of salt, but that’s the point of them. Or one of them.”
“Means they’ll have to have him on the floor,” O’Shay said. “We can find him.”
“That’s a lot of casinos to hit,” I said. “Wendover was easy. Three main casinos with only so much square footage. You could fit all of those and their hotels into the casino in this one hotel. And we’ve got like twenty to look through.”
“Actually,” Chet said, holding up his smart phone, “there’s thirty-one on the Strip and another dozen in the immediate vicinity, but not technically on the Strip.”
“Forty-three,” I said, licking my lips. “That’s… not good. Can you find out what ones have high roller roulette wheels?”
“On it.” Chet went back to his phone, fingers flying with a ferocity usually reserved for crazy writers.
“So they got Sean and he wasn’t exactly cooperating,” I said. “Then Ashley shows up, probably runs up to him or something dramatic… because Ashley, and they realize they have some leverage. She lets it slip she’s with someone or something, and they ambush him in the bathroom?”
I shook my head. “This all seems a little too staged.”
“They didn’t happen to grab her while he was in the bathroom,” Corey said. “She shows up and they stay back, let her talk to Sean, maybe let him think he’s getting away, wait to see who she meets up with and grabs him then.”
“But they said they got Dad in a bathroom?”
“And you believed them?”
“Why would they lie… Huh, I shouldn’t assume murders and kidnappers are going to tell the truth as their first option, should I?”
“No, but they probably did have a reason for lying. They didn’t want you to know how they really got your dad. Means they have a trick up their sleeve.”
“Fantastic.”
“I can’t find a master list of high stakes roulette,” Chet said, holding the phone out for me to see. “But there is a list of the single zero wheels, which are better odds, so this website says there’s only a few and all of them are high stakes. Gives us someplace to start at least.”
“Sixteen on the list,” I said after counting. “And half of those have a hundred dollar minimum bets going on all the time.”
“Instead of?” Corey asked.
“Some on the list say there’s twenty five dollar ones with hundreds available on demand. I don’t think they’ll want to have to ask for one.”
“Nine.” O’Shay nodded slowly. “That gives us a place to start. I’ll make a fresh batch of the beads.”
“Why can’t we use the last ones?” Chet asked.
“Because they were calibrated for that specific area. We’re in a new one, we need new beads.”
I nodded. “You do that, but first, we need to get breakfast.”
# # #
“This is the best breakfast place on the Strip,” I said, leading the guys into the bustling buffet.
“How do you know?” Chet asked. “I thought you just came here for your twenty-first birthday?”
“No, I came here to party for my twenty-first birthday and decided not wanting to lose money, a sensitivity to smoke, and only ever drinking in moderation really are not what Vegas is about. I do come here every year with Dad for SHOT Show though.”
“I’m sorry, a sensitivity to smoke?” O’Shay asked. “Since when?”
“Tobacco smoke, obviously not the other kind.”
“Yeah. What’s SHOT Show?”
“Biggest weapons convention in the country. It’s where Dad picks up new clients.”
Corey looked between us. “What does your dad do?”
I grinned. “Dad’s an engineer, he’s been inventing parts for guns since he was a kid. He started getting patents on the stuff he invented, got investors, started making them in bulk and selling them.”
“Wait, wait, wait… the Jones Bolt? That was your dad?”
“Yeah! That’s one of his.”
“Awesome!”
“So you know the area?” Chet asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I’ll walk through casinos to get to the show and back, but I don’t do anything in them. Even just walking through, it was hard to keep track of the path to get you to the other side. Hitting the casino floors and walking around isn’t going to work,” I said. “The casinos are too big. This place is more of a maze than the casinos at Wendover could ever hope to be.”
“But we know they’ll be around the roulette wheels, why don’t we just stick to those?” Corey asked.
“We can, we will, but we’ll look suspicious real fast.” I glanced at O’Shay, he wouldn’t like this. “I could do a perception spell on all of us, let us hang around places, waiting for these guys to hit. We don’t need to find them, not if we can guarantee they’ll come to us.”
Corey snapped his fingers. “We narrow their options. Call up casinos, send them a picture of Sean and say he’s part of a gambling scam and to kick him out if he shows up. It’ll push them to go to one of the ones we’ll be waiting at.”
“What if it tips them off and they abort?” I asked.
“Then good?” Chet said, wrinkling his forehead at me. “That’s what we want.”
“No, we want our people back. If they’re no longer useful, they're disposable. Sean and Ashley at the very least have seen their faces. And my dad could turn them in to the Council if he wakes up while they have him.”
“How do we do this without tipping them off?” I asked. “Without making anyone else suspicious and deciding it’d be a good idea to hold them for the cops too?”
We looked at each other.
I tossed my hands up. “Oy vey, there has to be something.”
“Are there any kind of attraction spells or stuff to repel witches?” Chet asked. “Something subtle.”
O’Shay and I looked at each other.
“He’s brilliant,” O’Shay said, apparently forgetting he didn’t like Chet.
“I always thought so.” I grinned. “Charles Jonathan Lampart, you are an amazing man.”
He smiled too. “I agree, but why?”
“A protection potion,” I said. “Witches use protection potions to line the front doors of their businesses and homes to discourage thieves. It’s so subtle, humans don’t notice it, people looking to steal just happen to go elsewhere. But witches keep an eye out for it. If we put that on the front of all but a few of the big, likely casinos, they’ll sense it and know witches work there and it’ll be too big of a risk. They’ll go to the other casinos, where we’ll be waiting.”
“We still need to figure out how to capture them without alerting humans,” O’Shay said as he finished the last of the marbles.
The protection potion was taking me longer because we didn’t bring all the ingredients for it and I had to hit a grocery store for the last of the herbs.
Turns out finding a good grocery store in the middle of Vegas was harder than finding a good liquor store in Utah.
“I know,” I said, giving the pot a vigorous stir. The suite was great because it came with a few rooms and a full kitchen. Not something you saw a lot of in Vegas either.
We’d already decided we’d put the potion in front of all the high limit roulette places but Caesar’s and the Bellagio, and stake them out.
Why those two? Because we rolled on which ones so we’d stop arguing about floor layouts and escape routes and just get things moving, and those were the two we settled on that didn’t already have the protection spell over them and were next door to each other.
Apparently there were a lot of witches working in Vegas.
“Knockout spell or a potion, basically make them seem really drunk and haul them out? Like we’re taking drunk friends back to the room,” I said. “Like what they said they did to Dad.”
“It’s risky,” O’Shay said.
“Anything we do is going to be risky, but it’s Vegas. Odds are the gamblers will be focused on gambling.”
“The onlookers won’t be, and security sure as hell won’t either,” Chet said.
“And you can’t pull a perception spell on a camera,” I said. “Cameras don’t perceive, they just record.”
Corey jerked, head whipping up so fast it made me flinch in sympathy. “What if we didn’t have to take them down in the middle of the casino?”
“What were you thinking?”
He grinned.
# # #
“I hate waiting,” I whispered, shifting on my feet, trying to keep a smile and interested look on my face.
“I know,” Chet said, sipping his drink and putting a small bet on the table.
We split up, me and Chet at Caesar’s and Corey with O’Shay at the Bellagio. We hovered at the craps table just outside the partitioned high stakes area, Chet betting tiny amounts and not doing too bad. Soon as those guys got near us with Sean, our beads would warm.
Everything in me hoped they’d show up here first.
I wanted to take them down. They had my dad.
If he was still alive.
My heart seized. Of course he was! They wouldn’t kill him…
The woman next to Chet ended her turn and he took the dice, grinning big as he had during paintball. The man liked his competitive games apparently.
