Absolutely Captivated

by Grayson, Kristine

  “I’d already heard the rumor,” Zoe said. “I just need to know if the wheel is in Faerie, and if so, where. I already did a location spell.”

  She pointed at a red dot that was constantly moving across the three-dimensional surface of the map.

  “I just want visual confirmation,” Zoe said. “I don’t trust magic on magical items.”

  “Location spells don’t work in Faerie.” Herschel’s tone was so flat that Zoe was convinced he was lying to her.

  “They focus on the first magical item,” Gaylord said. He had let his hand fall to his lap, his fingers clenched. “And you know, we have a lot of magical items.”

  She had been afraid of that. Which was why she called them.

  “Look,” she said, “all I’m asking you to do—and it would be for real money, not Faerie money—is go into Faerie, and look for the wheel—”

  “I thought you couldn’t be bought, Zo,” Herschel said. “I thought there were ethics. Didn’t you lecture us about ethics all those times?”

  “Only about Faerie money,” she said, trying to remember if she ever said that some things were more valuable than money. Maybe. She might have had too much beer, though.

  “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.

  Thirty-five

  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-varoomed 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.

  Thirty-six

  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.

  “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.”

  Thirty-seven

  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.