The neighborhood was growing steadily worse—dilapidated buildings, more broken-down cars, boys huddled in doorways making the kinds of deals that Travers didn’t want to think about.
He didn’t understand Zoe. She drove a Jaguar—a classic—and yet, she kept her office in a neighborhood this bad. Was the neighborhood because of the class of clients a private investigator got? Or was it camouflage, away from the “mortals,” as she and the Fates called normal people?
Or was it something else, a chance to emulate the private detectives from the books and movies, the ones who talked tough, and played even tougher, and fell in love with tough dames, if only for a chapter or two?
Zoe rounded a corner, and Travers recognized the sun-washed frame of her office. She bounced over a rut in the driveway, heading into the back, and under a carport that looked like it had been added onto the building decades after the building’s initial construction.
Zoe shut off the engine, got out, and ran her hands through her hair. It fell, shiny, smooth, and neatly combed, against her face. Then she raised her eyebrows at Travers.
“Aren’t you getting out?”
“Shouldn’t you put up the roof?” he asked.
“Why?” she asked. “It’s protected here.”
“From sunlight,” he said. “But not from the neighborhood itself. I’ve led a pretty quiet life and I know how to hot-wire a car this old.”
“You do?” Her grin grew. “You have hidden talents, Mr. Kinneally.”
She had meant that as a joke, but it hit home. He did have hidden talents, hidden even from himself.
He sighed and got out of the car. Although he was in the shade, his skin felt hot and he knew that he had burned.
“It’s your car,” he said.
“And my office.” She raised a hand. “Watch and learn.”
She held the hand over the center of the car, then clenched her hand into a fist. After a moment, she released the fist, spreading her fingers wide.
The car wavered like a heat mirage. It got an almost silvery glow, and then it winked out—just like the Fates had the night before.
“You made it disappear?” Travers reached down, and touched hot metal. He brought his fingers back. They’d been burned.
“I didn’t make it disappear,” Zoe said. “I just made it invisible.”
“Oh,” he said, because he didn’t know how to respond. “I thought you weren’t supposed to use magic for personal gain.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m using it to prevent personal loss.”
She crossed her arms, and tilted her head slightly. She still stood near the driver’s side of the car, although that wasn’t immediately obvious, since the car was impossible to see.
“Aren’t we going to go in?” Travers asked, a little worried about walking to her side of the car. He couldn’t remember how long the vehicle was, not exactly, anyway, and he didn’t want to bash into the side of the car, making himself look like a complete dork.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how to make things invisible?” Zoe said.
It hadn’t crossed his mind. He blinked, looked at the non-existent car (well, that wasn’t true. It did exist. It just didn’t seem to exist. Even though he could feel the heat radiating from its body, and hear the engine ticking in the shade), and frowned.
“I thought you said I have a small magic,” he said, knowing it sounded lame. But he really hadn’t associated himself with that trick she had just done.
“This is small magic,” Zoe said. “It’s barely above a parlor trick.”
Travers touched the car’s warm metal. As he did, he looked down. The tip of his finger had disappeared.
Somehow that felt like more than a parlor trick.
“I don’t want you to practice on my car.” Zoe looked around the small parking area behind the office. Except for the carport, and the invisible car inside of it, there wasn’t a lot surrounding them. A ratty fence, a few garbage cans, some dying plants. Not much else.
Travers let out a small breath. Maybe she wouldn’t have him do anything, after all. At least, not out here.
“Let’s try that.” Zoe pointed at the nearest garbage can.
“And what exactly are we trying to do?” Travers asked.
“You’ll make it invisible,” Zoe said. “Right down to its shadow.”
Travers frowned. The shadow was short, since the sun was getting close to its zenith, but still visible. He was beginning to understand the level of detail magic took—he would never have thought of the shadow if Zoe hadn’t mentioned it—but a shadow with nothing to cast it was suspicious.
“Am I just supposed to try thinking ‘invisible!’ or—”
“Don’t!” Zoe held up her hand, then lowered it slowly. “Crap.”
“What?” Travers asked.
Zoe shook her head. “You’re too quick.”
“No one’s ever accused me of that before.” Then he flushed, wishing he could take the sentence back. That was what passed for banter in high school, not among adults. Of course, high school was the last time he had wooed a woman, and look how well that turned out.
Zoe put her hands on her hips. “Just look at yourself.”
Travers looked down—and his heart nearly stopped when he saw nothing but pavement. Not even a shadow.
Not even a shoe print.
He wasn’t sure whether he should be impressed with his own first-timer’s skill or if he should be frightened that he had done something wrong.
So he felt both emotions at once, letting them mix and blend, one emotion dominating the other for half a second, then the other taking over.
“Now what do I do?” he asked. Then he frowned. “You can hear me, right?”
“I can hear you.” Zoe sighed. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
“Turning me back?’ he asked, not trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“Teaching you. There are subtleties involved that I’ve never bothered to think about.” Zoe sighed again, as if the burden she had undertaken was much too great.
Travers could feel his face flush—and it wasn’t just from the sunburn. “Can I turn back or not?”
“You’ll have to do it,” Zoe said. “It’s the only way you’ll learn.”
“Learn what?” Travers asked.
“Two things,” Zoe said. “How to reverse a miscued spell and how to avoid undisciplined thinking.”
Travers’ spine stiffened. He’d never been an undisciplined thinker in his life.
Yet, he stood here, beside an invisible Jaguar, in a town he had never wanted to visit, as clear to the world as a sheet of newly cleaned glass.
He wisely refrained from saying anything.
“Okay,” Zoe said. “Here’s what you do. You say, ‘Reverse!’ and as you do, you think exactly what you were thinking when you changed.”
He didn’t know what he had been thinking. He didn’t even feel that little poof he had felt the day before as the magic had worked.
“Um,” he said, “what if I don’t know what I was thinking?”
Maybe he was an undisciplined thinker. Maybe he just hadn’t realized it until now.
“Oh for heavens’ sake.” Zoe walked toward him, stopped, and put out a hand. She was feeling for the back of the car, just like he would have had to do. Suddenly he didn’t feel quite as stupid as he had a moment earlier. “You’ll remember. Just think about what we were talking about.”
“We were talking about invisibility,” Travers said.
“We were talking about how to spell the garbage can, and you felt the need to make some witty comment.”
“I didn’t feel the need,” Travers said. “I was just asking a question. It was a logical question, actually, given the circumstances. I mean, I’ve never done stuff like this before, so how would I know what I’m doing? I’ve never even seen stuff like this before yesterday, so I’m really out of my depth.”
“We can argue that last point later,”
Zoe said. “The one about yesterday, not the one about being out of your depth. It’s pretty clear that you’re out of your depth.”
“Thanks,” Travers said.
“So,” Zoe said, her hands down slightly. She hadn’t moved any farther, and apparently, she hadn’t touched the car. “Are you going to try to reverse the spell?”
“Oh, yeah.” Travers bit his lower lip. Say “reverse” and think of England. He felt a poof and he was standing on a bridge, overlooking a slow-moving and sludgy river. It was dark, and the lights below him came from ships. A city spread before him—obviously not Las Vegas.
Even the air smelled different. Raw, damp, and filled with humidity.
England.
Travers swore, said, “Reverse!” and thought of England. Seriously thought of England, instead of a silly pun, like he had done before.
Another little poof went through him, and then he blinked in the sunlight.
He was standing behind Zoe now, near the garbage cans. She was still facing the carport, and she was talking.
“Travers,” she said. “We don’t have all day. This was just supposed to be the first lesson.”
And he’d performed it. Really well, only he didn’t tell her that. He didn’t even want to tell her that.
The trip to England (was that really London Bridge?) was his own little secret.
He snuck toward the carport, his feet crunching slightly on the gravel.
Zoe turned, her expression sharp. “Who’s there?”
Travers held his breath as he walked. He tried to make as few sounds as possible, but each echoed as if it were the only sound in the world.
“What’s going on?” Zoe asked, still looking around. She wasn’t looking at him, though, so she didn’t know where he was. Maybe she couldn’t hear the drumbeat of his heart as he moved. “Travers?”
He had to touch the car to go around it. His fingers found the metal, cooling in the shade of the carport, and traced their way to the front. He had to squeeze through the small space between a beam and the car, then move to the other side, as if nothing happened.
“Travers?” Zoe asked again, her voice rising.
“Just say ‘reverse’?” he asked, as if he had been in the same spot the whole time.
She whirled, looking visibly startled. She glanced over her shoulder once, as if she thought someone might be behind her, and then said, “And think about what you had thought before. That’s the important part. Undisciplined thought—”
“Is dangerous,” Travers said. “I’m beginning to figure that out.”
Zoe kept looking around as if she sensed someone else’s presence. But Travers couldn’t think about her or England. He had to think about invisibility and wondering how to achieve it.
He kept that thought at the forefront of his brain as he said, “Reverse!”
For a moment, he thought everything stayed the same. Zoe was staring just past him, and he felt no different.
Then he looked down, saw his narrow feet in their sandals, saw his pants, his hands—which looked fine—his arms, which were sunburned, and the rest of him.
He wanted to pat himself to see if he was all there, but he had always been all there, just not visible to anyone else, not even himself.
Zoe frowned. Her hands hadn’t left her hips. “What happened to you?”
He blinked, looked down, didn’t know what she was referring to. He didn’t even want to speculate about it—didn’t want to think about the possible things that could have gone wrong, in case he would now make them go wrong.
He wondered if he was covered with some kind of obviously English patina—a bit of rain, a touch of dew, maybe a little bit of malt vinegar from a passing fish-and-chips truck.
“I—um.” He looked down at himself again, unwilling to admit that he had made not one, but two mistakes. “I—what are you talking about?”
“You’re all red.” She sounded annoyed.
Travers looked at his arms and grinned. “I’m sunburned.”
“From being invisible?”
“From riding in your car.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “No one can get sunburned that fast.”
“I can get sunburned in ten minutes on a cloudy day,” Travers said. “Just ask Kyle.”
“I’m not going back to the Strip to confer with your son,” Zoe said. “You thought something and it turned you red.”
“I thought I could handle the top down in your car for the short few miles it took to get here,” Travers said. “I thought wrong.”
“You should have said something,” Zoe said.
“I planned to,” Travers said, “and then we got here and everything got—”
He made himself pause. Maybe the use of metaphor was the problem. After all, he had disappeared when he metaphorically thought of another country, a pun on the way that Victorian women were told to suffer through sex. (Close your eyes, dear, and think of England.)
Maybe he would have to change the entire way he thought, the way he looked at the world, everything about his life—
“You look particularly glum,” Zoe said. “What’s the matter?”
“Besides the fact that I just did a spell by accident and I might be dying of heatstroke?” Travers asked. “Why, nothing’s the matter.”
Zoe raised her eyebrows at him. It was an attractive look, and one she used often. He longed to touch the side of them, feel how soft her skin was, and maybe kiss the corner of her eye.
“You want to try this garbage can spell or not?” she asked.
He didn’t. Not really. “Can we just go inside? I’d like some water and some sunscreen, and a relief from these temperatures.”
And not the relief he had gotten a few minutes ago.
Zoe shook her head, let her arms drop, and shoved her keys into her pocket. “Avoiding the lessons won’t teach you anything.”
“I learned about ‘reverse,’” Travers said. “That’s something.”
“And it doesn’t always work,” Zoe said. “Especially if you can’t remember the sequence or you stick a new sequence in the middle of it.”
Yeah, he got that one, too, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “How about I disappear your garbage can inside, where there’s air-conditioning?”
Zoe sighed. “All right, you can make tiny things invisible while I double-check my research. And then we have to get on the trail of that wheel.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to find it?” Travers asked, hoping that it would only take a few days. He wanted the Fates out of his hair as soon as possible. He’d really like it if it happened before his sister Megan arrived.
“I have no idea,” Zoe said. “With the way things are going this morning, it might take us centuries.”
“Centuries?” Travers’ voice shook. “I hope you’re exaggerating.”
Zoe headed toward the building’s back door. “I hope I am, too.”
Nineteen
Zoe stepped into the coolness of her office. At least, it was cool compared with the great outdoors, where the temperatures had to be heading toward 110. Sometimes she loved the summer heat, and sometimes she wondered why she suffered through it when she could easily go someplace cool, like the Pacific Northwest or the North of England.
Travers was only a few steps behind her. She could hear his soft footfall in the hallway. It sounded familiar—almost like the footsteps she had heard outside.
A shiver ran down her back. When he had gone invisible, and the car had been invisible, Zoe had been uneasy. Then, when she realized that someone was behind her, her unease grew. She hadn’t gotten a sense of evil, like she had when that mage showed up to take the Fates, but she had been surprised that someone else had gotten so close.
Perhaps he was just walking around, exploring his invisibility.
Or perhaps the newness of his magic, and his inexperience, had brought the wrong kind of mage to watch their lessons, someone who might target Travers in the future.
> Zoe would have to warn him again, but she didn’t know how. She wasn’t even sure if she believed him about the sunburn. She had been telling the truth when she had said that she had never seen anyone get sunburned that fast.
She flicked on her overhead office light. Chairs were scattered everywhere, and a few five-dollar bills still littered the floor. Right in front of her desk, a scrap of pink material caught on the edge of a chair.
The office smelled strongly of wet dog. She hadn’t gone into the bathroom to see the damage that Kyle had done, but she probably should have. She hadn’t thought it through—an eleven-year-old, a stubborn dog, a bath. It probably didn’t take prescience to know that the bathroom was a disaster.
Zoe sighed. She would never get to the case. And because of that, she’d never be free of the Fates. She was going to have them around until the end of time, rescuing them from angry mages, and trying to sort her way through their conversations.
She shivered again. That was not her idea of a good time.
“The air-conditioning isn’t on high enough to make a person shiver,” Travers said from behind her. “Is it?”
She turned, and found herself against him. His skin radiated heat. The burn looked painful, but he was smiling at her.
She liked that smile. It had a softness to it, a softness mixed with just enough humor to take the edge off his good looks. This morning, she was finally getting to see him as a person, not just as the best-looking man she had ever laid eyes on.
“The air-conditioning is on as high as it goes,” she said, not moving away from his chest. “The problem is that the entire system needs to be replaced, and the landlord won’t do it.”
“In Vegas,” Travers said, “that would seem to me to be a violation of landlord-tenant law.”
“Which varies from state to state and city to city,” Zoe said.
“Except for one provision,” Travers said. “The landlord has to make certain that living conditions don’t threaten the lives of the renters.”
Zoe felt the heat from his body run along her neck and up her cheeks. Or maybe she was blushing again. This time, it wasn’t from lewd thoughts; it was from the fact that she might be guilty of something that she hadn’t even been aware of.
Absolutely Captivated Page 20
