Absolutely Captivated

by Grayson, Kristine

  Gaylord didn’t seem to notice. He was staring straight ahead. “They switched it.”

  “Switched what?” Travers asked.

  “The entrance.”

  Travers let a small breath.

  “They probably did it because of the light.”

  His fault, then. He had no idea if he should trust Gaylord on this. It was Zoe’s life on the line. Or Zoe’s self. Travers didn’t exactly understand the prophecy, but he knew something awful could happen to her.

  Which was why he was here, instead of in his hotel room with Kyle, hoping someone else would take care of this—or that Zoe would survive.

  Gaylord’s fingers dug into Travers’ skin. “You’ve got to turn around.”

  Travers shot him a quick look. Gaylord had come to him. The Fates believed that Gaylord was right; they believed that Travers’ magic had found Zoe and that she was in trouble.

  Travers swung the wheel and made a U-turn in the middle of Tropicana. A car zoomed by, its horn blaring. Gaylord squealed and buried his head.

  “Where are we going?” Travers shouted.

  “The Mirage,” Gaylord said.

  “Faeries don’t own the Mirage,” Travers said. Even he knew that.

  “No, they don’t, but the sidewalk out front by the volcano is sometimes an emergency entrance until a better one opens up.”

  “By the volcano?” Travers had seen the volcano. It was an amazing sight. “Why there?”

  “Because no one looks down there.” Gaylord made it sound like Travers was stupid.

  “You mean we could’ve gone there in the first place?” Travers asked.

  “No,” Gaylord said. “The emergency entrances only open up when the regular entrances close down. You’ve got to hurry. The next new one could be in the Hoover Dam for all we know.”

  Travers turned north on Maryland Parkway, then east on Flamingo Road. The empty streets continued. He drove so fast that the SUV bounced over several ruts in the road, making him feel as if he were flying.

  Gaylord had given up looking long ago.

  When they finally arrived at the Mirage, Travers tossed his keys at a valet, barely remembered to take the ticket and let Gaylord pay the tip. Travers ran toward the volcano, which was dark. A sign with eruption schedules was posted near the viewing area.

  “Where?” Travers asked Gaylord.

  Gaylord was stuffing a bulging wallet in the back pocket of his jeans. “I could get in trouble for this,” he muttered.

  “Where?” Travers asked again.

  “There.” Gaylord pointed at a scuffed spot on the sidewalk. “It’s behind the concrete.”

  “Lead on,” Travers said.

  “Are you kidding? I can’t bring a civilian into Faerie.”

  “Then how am I going to get her?” Travers asked.

  “She’s going for the wheel,” Gaylord said. “Just—close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and think of the wheel.”

  “This isn’t a movie,” Travers said.

  Gaylord blinked at him. “I didn’t say it was.”

  “The Fat—um, my friends said I can’t use mage magic in Faerie,” Travers said. “It’s like a beacon.”

  “Crap,” Gaylord said. “I forgot.”

  He rubbed his chin, then reached for the concrete himself. He pulled the piece back as if it weighed nothing, revealing a dark and forbidding hole in the ground.

  “Okay,” Gaylord said. “You’ve got to trust me.”

  He reached up with his forefingers and touched Travers’ ears. They stretched, aching as they did so, the sound like pulling rubber. Travers blinked, but before he could move away, Gaylord touched his eyebrows. They stretched, too, only no sound accompanied them. Just an ache.

  “What’re you doing?” Travers asked.

  “Giving you a disguise,” Gaylord said. “No one’ll notice. They’re probably focused on the outsider right now.”

  “Zoe,” Travers said.

  “You got it. Hurry,” Gaylord said. “And don’t call attention to yourself.”

  “Do I get out the way I got in?” Travers asked.

  “Yeah, if it’s still here,” Gaylord said. “Otherwise, I’ll be waiting for you at the closest entrance.”

  Travers didn’t like the sound of that. He looked over his shoulder, saw only a few drunken tourists on the sidewalk, staggering toward a different casino.

  He grabbed the edges of the hole and swung his legs inside. He got a sense that this was his very last chance to change his mind, his last chance to go back to Kyle and forget that any of this had happened.

  But Travers couldn’t forget it, and he couldn’t leave Zoe alone. Gaylord’s words had chilled him.

  They were focused on the outsider.

  Focused on Zoe.

  And she was down there, all alone.

  Forty-one

  The glow caught her attention, held her, kept her moving forward, past games like she’d never seen. Clowns making balloon animals that actually mooed, whinnied, and ran off; more Faeries grabbing lights out of the sky, and turning them into little winged creatures; a baseball floating above the entire area, like a floating camera.

  Zoe hurried. The ground throbbed under her feet, as if she got close to some kind of large machine, something that pulsed and vibrated and kept everything alive. She could hear as well as feel it: the pulse was subsonic and somehow circular.

  She knew she was right. She was near the Circle.

  The signs had vanished. The farther forward she went the more the Faeries vanished.

  Yet she felt like she was not alone. Even though it was hard to hear over that subsonic noise, she thought she heard rustling behind her, but every time she turned, she saw nothing.

  The fact that she was all by herself in this section of Faerie was beginning to unnerve her. Everything was unnerving her. What would she do, exactly, when she found the wheel? Use her magic to get it out of here? Send it to the Fates?

  Steal it, like she said she wouldn’t?

  She wasn’t sure. She hoped she would figure it out when she got there.

  She hurried forward, and nearly tripped down a flight of stairs. The stairs were clear, lit from below, and nearly blinding.

  In fact, the entire floor that she now stood on was a blaze of light. It took a moment for her eyesight to adjust. Then she realized she was in the middle of a round pit.

  This pit seemed to be built for gambling. Large tables with dice stood on one section of the floor. Another section seemed dedicated to blackjack, and yet another to poker. A giant roulette wheel dominated the entire area. The wheel shot out lights of red and black that somehow didn’t reflect on the all-light floor.

  The sound of the giant ball, spinning and ticking in the various holes, filled the room.

  Zoe couldn’t see anyone else. Then she looked down, and realized that the light had paled her out as well. To anyone whose eyesight hadn’t completely adjusted, she would look like a white wall of nothing—maybe even like part of the floor.

  Her mouth was dry. She didn’t know where to go from here.

  And then she looked up at the roulette wheel.

  It was huge. Beside it were three chairs, which almost looked like thrones. The chairs were empty. The wheel seemed to be playing itself, and the lights from the red and black sides flared upward, not down.

  Zoe followed the lights, and couldn’t see where they led.

  But as she looked down, she realized that the wheel looked odd for a roulette wheel. For one thing, it had spokes in the middle, spokes that had been layered over and covered with cloth, but visible all the same. The holes in the wheel weren’t carved in its wooden sides, but made special and attached underneath the round part, like they were added later.

  And there was more to the wheel—some sort of contraption on which it sat. If she mentally tilted the contraption on its side….

  …she had a spinning wheel, with a place for the operator to sit as she created her cloth.


  Zoe’s breath caught. Somehow she had expected to find the wheel in the collectibles area. She had also thought the wheel would be a lot smaller, not the dominant thing in what seemed like the main part of the casino.

  If she took this—if she figured out how to take this—she would be noticed. She wasn’t even sure how to get it free without interrupting all of the power to Faerie.

  For as far as she could tell, the throbbing, pulsating noise that dominated this area came from the wheel itself.

  Zoe took a step toward the wheel, and hoped she would figure out what to do next.

  Forty-two

  Travers let go of the edges of the entrance to Faerie and fell, straight down, into the hole. He fell for what seemed like forever, and the air around him grew fetid, smelling of earth and mold and damp.

  His hair streamed above him, and he knew he was going downward at a furious clip.

  He just hoped the landing would be soft.

  Then he heard voices, smelled cigarettes, and saw lights. And suddenly he sprawled on top of a silk net, one that had clearly been placed beneath the entrance just recently.

  He bounced twice on the net, as if it were a trampoline, and then two women—with ears as pointed as Gaylord’s and hair as dark—helped him down.

  They smiled at him, then reached up to touch his hair. “Experimenting with the mortals, were you?” someone asked.

  Travers made himself grin. Apparently there weren’t blond Faeries. Gaylord had forgotten about Travers’ hair.

  And about his height. He was nearly a foot taller than everyone in the room.

  Travers made his grin widen. “They like ’em tall and blond these days,” he said, and the Faerie folk around him laughed.

  Most of them were eating—he seemed to land near a buffet of some kind—but he didn’t recognize the food. Still, the smells were marvelous, like a mixture of fresh-baked cake and roast beef and a potato dish his grandmother used to make when he was a boy.

  Travers’ stomach growled. Then he remembered all the stories he’d heard about Faeries, how if they got you to eat something, you were trapped by them forever.

  Maybe food was one way they made a person lose time. Drink had to be another. Hadn’t Rip Van Winkle had a drink of ale with the Faeries during the famous bowling match that lasted an entire decade?

  Travers now wished he’d been paying attention when they’d taught literature in all of his classes.

  He smoothed his hair back, and looked beyond the room. He saw two images: an image made of light that showed various parts of a casino, and a shadowy image, more box-like, like hallways or the mysterious tunnels he’d always heard about that existed behind Disneyland.

  He felt slightly lightheaded, like he always did before he played the lottery, and he recognized the shadow-vision as the same thing.

  Travers had always convinced himself that he had somehow stumbled on the formula behind random number calculations—that his brain was as swift as a computer and could see the patterns that no one else’s could see—but now he knew differently. Maybe he did see the patterns or maybe his magic allowed him an advantage with calculations, but he also had an ability to see things that weren’t quite there—or weren’t there yet—like the winning numbers on a lottery ticket.

  Then the entire room shifted ever so slightly, and the casino spaces filled the shadowy spaces. He felt an odd sense of confirmation that went with his dizziness, and then he saw the shadowy spaces again.

  The realization that hit him made him almost as dizzy as the movement of the room—which, he noted, almost no one else seemed to sense. Faerie wasn’t constantly changing, not in an illogical way, anyhow. It was a giant fractal, and it created new patterns as it shifted, following some kind of preprogrammed equation deep within its bowels.

  Almost as if Faerie were run by a giant computer that kept changing everything.

  Travers hadn’t moved since he got here, and the Faerie women had long since moved off. Maybe this was how people lost time in Faerie—they got thinking and they were so wrapped up in their own minds, they couldn’t unravel themselves.

  He still saw shadowy places, and as he watched them, he saw a lot of Faeries move along them, heading in a particular direction.

  What had Gaylord said? No one would notice Travers because they would be focused on the outsider.

  Focused on Zoe.

  But would they actually lead him to her?

  Somehow Travers didn’t think so.

  Still, he moved forward along the shadowy shapes, sensing that there was less to Faerie than met the eye. In fact, if he squinted, he saw that the shadowy shapes hid tubes—long, dark tubes that moved toward a central hub.

  He squinted further, let the pattern settle in his brain, and realized he was standing between two spokes of a wheel. The center of the wheel, the hub, the very middle, was straight before him. All he had to do was follow the tubes.

  It seemed so simple, but he had to keep squinting. Otherwise, he believed he was walking across carpet, into slot machines, going through walls.

  But the walls weren’t really there or they had just been there and were leaving or they were coming to that position in a moment. He was walking between the casino pattern, between the pieces of the fractal just before it rearranged, right to the very heart of the casino, of Faerie, which he could feel.

  It pulsed, just like a human heart.

  This place had life, and he hoped that the life wouldn’t sense him.

  At least, not until he found Zoe and made sure she was safe.

  Forty-three

  The wheel seemed to go forever. Its light dazzled Zoe’s eyes, and she could feel the power emanating from it. How had the Faeries harnessed it? How had they changed it from a small spinning wheel into this giant roulette wheel? And what was its purpose?

  She took another step closer and then felt air on the back of her neck. She turned ever so slightly, and saw a man behind her. He wasn’t as tall as she was, and his hair was dark. His eyes glittered.

  His hand came up and touched an area just outside her skin. She felt the touch tremble all the way through her.

  He was touching her aura, testing her magic with his own.

  Another man joined him, and then another and another, and suddenly Zoe was surrounded. She had heard about these situations before—magical theft situations, where a person’s magic could be taken, one tiny piece at a time. All the takers had to do was find a chink in the aura, a crack in the light that surrounded her, and they would be able to reach in and steal her magic.

  More and more Faeries joined the circle around her. She looked up. No one was above her, but she knew better than to use her magic now. Using it would open any gap, would reveal any problem in her aura, and the Faeries would use it.

  They would use it to destroy her.

  She was hemmed in. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t use her magic.

  But she had to find a way out. She had to get out and do something with the wheel.

  She was here to steal power, too, only she wanted all of it, and she wanted to return it to the Fates. She didn’t want these people to control her world.

  She didn’t want these people to change Travers or Kyle or anyone she loved.

  She had to fight.

  If she could only figure out how.

  Forty-four

  Then Travers saw her. Or more correctly, he saw a crowd gathering near the hub, surrounding someone—that someone just a slight bit taller than everyone else. Zoe’s dark hair looked different from the Faeries’ hair—it had a different texture, a glossiness, and Travers had a sense of her, even from this distance.

  She wasn’t scared, but she was close. She knew she was trapped, and she didn’t know how to break free.

  He wasn’t sure what to do, either. He just knew he had to do something quickly because if he didn’t, they would grab him, too.

  He ran down the center of the space between the spokes to the hub, and when he reached it
, he shoved his way through the growing crowd around Zoe.

  His height helped. His height and his strength, and probably his underlying panic.

  “Mine,” he said as he moved. “Back off. She’s mine. Mine.”

  And to his surprise, people did. They moved away, as if he were going to hurt them. Then they must have realized that he wasn’t, because they closed back in, trapping him just like they had trapped her.

  He kept pushing forward with great determination, certain he would get to her.

  And suddenly he was there, suddenly she was in his arms, and she was clinging to him, and she was scared, which scared him because Zoe wasn’t the type to be frightened easily.

  Everything shifted around him, and he suddenly saw the room as she saw it—a circular pit, with a roulette wheel in its center. The roulette wheel as the hub.

  The roulette wheel—the former spinning wheel of the Fates—was the heart of Faerie.

  Travers didn’t have a chance to figure out what that meant. He figured he had only one opportunity, and he would take it. He yanked Zoe through the crowd, heading toward the wheel instead of away from it.

  The Fates had said the wheel augmented their powers, and unless he missed his guess, it would augment his. And even though he didn’t know a lot about magic, he had transported himself once—twice, if you counted getting back, and by gum (was that a phrase?) he would do it again.

  Zoe clung to him, moving with him, saying something—although he couldn’t hear what with the pounding of the machine here and the murmur of Faerie voices, something about not letting her get away.

  Then Travers grabbed a corner of the wheel, and it spun him upward, away from the crowd. Zoe came with him, rolling with it, trapped in the red light, making her face look blood-covered.

  “We have to take it,” she was saying. “The wheel. They’re going to use it to destroy the world.”

  But Travers didn’t have enough magic to take the wheel, and he wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried, as integrated as it was into Faerie itself.