Elijah didn’t think his mom would chain him up in the basement. But he felt all Holly’s anger at her parents, and it put him on edge. His last ten hours of deep thought and recentering were gone with a snap of her fingers.
“Let’s examine this logically,” he said. “The only people we know can change minds are April and Nate, the weaker one. They changed my mind at the hotel.”
“And April changed my mind at my apartment.” Holly penciled glittering green in wide swaths across her eyelids, extending way out to the side, which made her impossibly long false eyelashes look even more exotic. “But in Glitterati, when you felt like somebody could control minds and I thought you were just crazy off your Mentafixol, that was for real.”
Elijah nodded. “It was.”
“April and Nate weren’t at Glitterati. None of those people from the SUV were there. I stayed at Glitterati for a long time after you left. It was crowded, but I know I got a glimpse of everybody.” She tossed the green pencil back into her purse and turned to him. “What exactly did you feel there?”
“The first time,” he said, “I was sitting next to Shane. We were talking about Kaylee. I thought he was going to walk over to your table to talk to Kaylee. He stood up, and then somebody said, ‘Change your mind,’ and he sat back down.”
She squinted at him. “Did it sound like Kaylee?”
“I don’t hear thoughts in the person’s voice. I figure out whose thoughts they are because they’re usually the person closest to me at the time. But in Glitterati, I assumed I was nuts, and I wanted that Mentafixol from you. I was distracted. The second time was harder to ignore. When Rob was about to hit me with a chair, there was this scream of ‘Change your mind!’ ”
Holly put her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. The pose was so casual and girl-next-door, he did a double take out the corner of his eye. The pose did not jive with the exotic eye makeup.
“But it wasn’t directed at me,” he went on. “It whizzed past my head like a bullet aimed at someone else.”
“Me?” Holly asked, pushing her wild hair off her face.
“See, I never thought it was directed at you,” Elijah said. “You weren’t even over there.”
Her carefully sculpted brows drew down, and the little line appeared between them. Elijah felt her dark wash of emotion. “Rob,” she said.
“It could have been aimed at Rob,” Elijah agreed. “He sure stopped in midswing with that chair.”
“Or it could have been coming from Rob, directed at someone else,” Holly said.
This didn’t seem right to Elijah. He’d sensed everything Rob felt during that fight. All of it was consistent with being a prick. “I don’t think so.”
“I’ll bet it was Kaylee,” Holly grumbled. “We know she’s involved anyway.”
“How long have you roomed with her?”
“A year, since Mr. Diamond hired her.”
“In that year, have you ever suddenly changed your mind for no good reason?”
“Never before those Goths did it to me,” Holly said. “Though I’ll admit, I can’t imagine what Kaylee would need to change my mind about. I’ve been convinced I have a mental illness. Out of fear, I’ve been a good little girl. And Kaylee and I have always gotten along great. The biggest argument we’ve had was over whether to paint the living room this dark, dramatic purple—”
“I can’t imagine whose idea that was,” Elijah broke in.
“—shut up, and I backed down in my usual dishrag fashion.”
“Maybe it was Shane,” Elijah mused. “Speaking of dishrags, I can’t believe I’ve been cooking for him and Rob. Assholes.”
“But what’s Shane done wrong?” she asked.
“I told him that I had MAD and that I needed a pill from you, and he went to Glitterati with me. Then I told him I needed to kidnap you and take you to Icarus to find a stash of Mentafixol, and he loaned me this car and that gun.” He nodded toward the glove compartment. “What kind of person would give a gun to his mentally ill friend who planned to kidnap a Las Vegas showgirl? Shane is involved in this. We should pay him a visit first.” In fact, the exit onto Flamingo, which would lead them past the Strip to UNLV, was coming in a couple of miles. Shane taught guitar lessons at UNLV on summer mornings. Elijah signaled to the trucks surrounding him and eased into the right lane.
“However involved he is,” Holly said, “he’s not in nearly as deep doo-doo as my parents. We need to find out what they know before we interrogate Kaylee. Shane is way down on the list.”
“On your list,” Elijah said.
Holly took a breath. He felt it in his chest. Her mind swirled with confusion about who was really responsible for hiding their power, her thoughts struggling as always under the heavy sodden blanket of her betrayal by her parents and Kaylee. “We could split up, then.”
“Split up!” Elijah could not believe this. He finally had Holly Starr and she wanted to break up with him already? “No way!”
“I don’t mean you and me split up,” she said, exasperated. “Why aren’t you reading my mind now? I mean you find Shane and I’ll have a talk with my parents, and we’ll meet up later.”
“Absolutely not.” Elijah felt only a little relieved that she wasn’t breaking up with him. He still had to keep her safe. He couldn’t do that if they went their separate ways. “We can talk to your parents, but not while your dad is in the middle of his impossible feat of whatever whatever. Right now, you’re going with me to see Shane.” He drove down the exit ramp and turned onto Flamingo. He piloted the car through the canyon created by the towering casinos crowding either side of the road, determined to make it to UNLV. He still didn’t feel comfortable driving, and with Holly bopping around inside his brain, he was liable to cause a wreck.
If he made it that far. The car was veering into the right lane, as if to turn onto the Strip, despite his effort to keep it straight. He steered it to the left with no effect. There was no noise of the tires against the pavement anymore, only the roar of the engine and the grinding beat of the radio. Holly was levitating the car and directing it where she wanted it to go.
“God damn it, Holly!”
She sat on her side of the car with her legs crossed primly, gazing at him in mock astonishment that he would use such language with her when she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Brakes screeched behind them, and a man’s voice cursed them with choicer words than Elijah’s. Holly’s head jerked around to look before she remembered she was levitating the car. That was the whole problem: she was pretending to drive without knowing how to drive, and when she had entered the right lane to turn onto the Strip, she hadn’t signaled.
“Put the car down, Holly,” Elijah yelled. “You think this is funny? You’re going to get us killed!”
She gently put the car down. Elijah felt the tires settle on the asphalt, and the engine’s roar grew louder as it echoed nearer the pavement.
But then she yelled right back at him, “Do not tell me you’re mad because you’re afraid for our safety. Bullshit. You’re mad because you’re losing control of me.”
“Lost, I would say,” Elijah bit out.
“Poor baby,” she cooed. Her soft voice had a hard edge of sarcasm. “I’m not nearly as much fun now that I can think for myself, right?”
He looked over at her in shock. He couldn’t have put it better himself. On top of the scary levitating, she could read his mind, too? Heart sinking into his stomach, he asked her, “Can you—”
“Of course not,” she said, waving his question away. “I just know what you’re thinking. You’re exactly like Rob.”
“I am not exactly like Rob,” he said. “I’ve listened to what Rob is thinking, and I’m not thinking what he’s thinking, believe me.” She would have been horrified if she’d seen what Elijah had seen in Rob’s mind. “And I was not thinking you’re not as much fun now. I wouldn’t put it that way.” Actually, he had been thinking something like this, but he definitely w
ould not have put it that way.
“You wouldn’t put it that way!” she exclaimed. “You mean you wouldn’t admit to thinking it at all. It’s tough not to have secrets in your own mind, isn’t it? Now you know how I feel.”
“Listen.” They were nearing the casino. He needed to keep going past it, off the Strip, and head toward UNLV to confront Shane. She would protest. He had to disarm this battle between them, because they had much more dangerous enemies than each other. He fought his way back to the protective attitude he’d had toward her before she woke up in the backseat. But even his olive branch came out sounding cantankerous. “This all started when you picked up the car in broad daylight, with potentially thousands of spectators.”
“I levitate cars very low to the ground so nobody will notice,” she said with a toss of her long hair, “and that is not what started this argument. You started it by acting like I wanted to break up with you, when all I wanted us to do was split up and go in opposite directions for a little bit, and you knew that because you can read my mind but you choose to pretend you can’t when it suits you, you manipulative Rob-like ass.” Mentally she removed her focus from him for the first time since she’d woken. Her gaze shifted outside the car, to the towering casinos and the crowded sidewalk. She considered stepping out of the car the next time he slowed at an intersection. He was scaring her.
He reached back and pressed the button sticking up to lock his door. He thought this would lock her door also and startle her. But only his own door locked. Right—this car was too old for power locks. He had so little experience with cars.
But Holly heard the thunk of his door locking, and she guessed what he’d tried to do. “Now that’s not funny.”
A red light caught him just then. He was afraid she really would step out of the car and escape into the concrete wilderness. So he grabbed her knee hard and pinned her to the seat with his eyes. “Let me put it to you this way. You know something about me that I don’t want other people to know, something that could be very dangerous for me. You cannot go flouncing off just because you can’t handle a little mind game.”
She met his gaze. “Let me put it to you this way.” And she thought about grabbing his throat with her power.
The light must have turned green, because horns sounded behind them and cars flowed around them. He froze, holding her gaze, afraid to move. She wasn’t touching him, even with her power, but knowing it had crossed her mind was enough to paralyze him.
She watched him, too. Her dark eyes were so big and beautiful, framed with impossible lashes and glittering green makeup. It was hard to believe she was thinking about hurting him. She didn’t want to do it but she would. Cross her again and she would. She swore she would.
She opened her door. Out of the corner of his eye, Elijah saw a car coming up behind them in that lane, about to take off the door and Holly with it. He reached out to grab her—
—but she saw it too, and stopped the other car dead. The driver cursed and turned the engine off and on. Leisurely Holly stood up in the street and reached back into Shane’s car for her purse. She slammed the door behind her.
“Where are you going?” Elijah called through the open window. It came out hoarse.
“Since you can read my mind, I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question.” She crossed in front of the car she’d halted and strode up the sidewalk, ignoring the horns honking and the catcalls.
The car she’d stopped zoomed ahead now, and the car behind him honked insistently. Elijah pulled forward into traffic. Holly had disappeared around a corner, back into the complex of vast casino buildings and flashing signs. He sat alone in the Pontiac, breathing exhaust. The driver of the car on his left was mentally tallying up all the money he’d lost at poker and racking his brain for an excuse to give his wife.
If it weren’t for the other driver’s thoughts in his head, reminding Elijah that he could read minds, he would have doubted the last thirty-six hours had happened at all.
14
Holly stomped up the sidewalk toward the casino a few blocks away. At first she was furious only with Elijah. But the farther she stomped, the angrier she got with herself for even thinking about using her power against him. In that moment in the car, she’d known he would control her completely if he could. Exactly like Rob. She’d been desperate to escape him, and she’d done what she had to do.
But as she increased the distance between them, her regrets grew. They both had magical powers, for God’s sake, and they didn’t know how to use them. They were under a lot of stress, and her feelings for him were so deep and intense and confused. But she did know one thing for certain. She was in this mess with him now because her parents had screwed up her life seven years ago.
As she walked, she passed a convenience store with summer for sale on the sidewalk out front: lawn chairs, wind chimes, big inflatable palm trees. Inside she bought one of each, giggling to herself about the evil plan she was hatching, and thankful she hadn’t come up with this idea while Elijah was close enough to read her mind. He would have tried to stop her. This spectacle would definitely blow her cover as the daughter of a fake levitator with no real power of her own.
With her purse over her shoulder, the chair under one arm, and the boxes with the wind chimes and palm tree under the other, she walked in her high heels to the service road that led between her casino and the one next door. At a drink stand on the corner, she set the boxes down, propped the chair against her leg, and bought a frozen lemonade in a tall plastic cup with a straw shaped like a roller coaster. Now she really didn’t have enough hands to carry all this, so she held the lemonade in one hand and the box of wind chimes under the other arm, and let the chair and the box with the palm tree float in the air behind her like balloons on strings. She didn’t care one bit about the attention she drew. She was, after all, headed to a magic show.
She passed only a few people on the sidewalk beside the casino’s front wing. But the second she rounded the corner and stepped onto the paved back lot, she felt the buzz of energy from the crowd gazing up at her dad. He stood on top of a pole a hundred feet in the air that he’d welded together and Holly had decorated with glittery paper. They’d done this themselves because her dad rarely wanted to call in the props team from the casino (which would have involved Elijah, she realized) for fear of giving away his secrets. Holly felt all the irony of this now that she knew her dad’s ultimate secret: his tricks weren’t tricks at all.
Time to open the curtains.
At the back, the crowd was sparse, but spectators crowded closer together the nearer she got to the makeshift plastic fence around the base of the pole. The crowd’s whispers preceded her by a few rows as they noticed the box and chair floating behind her, and they recognized her as the magician’s missing assistant. She must be part of the act! They parted for her in an inverted V. She was able to walk unobstructed all the way up to the fence. There she hooked the cup of lemonade in the air, too. With her hands she took the wind chime out of the box and handed it without ceremony to the nearest audience member to hold up for her. She could have held it up herself with her mind, but that might get complicated in a few minutes, when she got busy. She sat down in the lawn chair, crossing her legs.
With her mind she pulled the plastic palm tree out of its box. She certainly wasn’t going to sit there and blow it up with her mouth. That would smear her lipstick, and it would attract the attention of her mom, who was still busy making presentation motions near the base of the pole and hadn’t yet noticed her. She tested blowing air into the palm tree with her mind and found that it worked well: the leaf nearest the valve swelled a little. She inflated the tree the rest of the way in a few seconds—now the whole crowd murmured and pointed at her—and she set the tree down next to her chair. She reached for her cup floating in the air in front of her and sipped from the straw. She craved the sugar, but yuck!—artificial lemon flavor. It wouldn’t do to make a face, though. She was in show business. She returned
the cup to the air and set her sights on her dad, seeming so precariously balanced, but in reality completely stable on top of the pole.
She poked him in the chest.
Her dad lifted one foot and spun his arms in the air. He looked like he was fighting to keep his balance. As if. The crowd gasped and a few women screamed. Holly waited. Her dad set his foot back down and returned to his former meditative state. The crowd hushed itself.
She shoved him.
He reeled backward and, for effect, threw himself off the back of the tiny platform. Women shrieked. Men groaned. He flailed his arms in the air and miraculously managed to catch the edge of the platform with one hand. Surprise! Holly was tempted to tell the horrified crowd the end of this story to put them out of their misery.
She peeled his pinkie off the platform, then his ring finger. He was holding on with his middle finger and his pointer. She wrapped these two fingers in a sparkling sensation to let him know he’d better get his juices flowing and do something about this situation. She braced for his retaliation, his kick to her gut that would send her flying against the outside wall of the casino, lawn chair and lemonade and all.
She was counterattacked the next second, but not by her dad. Her mom finally saw her and stomped around the far side of the pole, all the way up to the fence. “Holly Ann Stuckenschneider, you stop that this instant!” she cried.
“What for?” Holly casually lowered the lemonade to sip level. “He’s a magician. Let’s see him get himself out of this one.” She used her power to place the straw between her lips.
Her mom leaped over the fence in her high heels and grabbed Holly’s shoulders. She hissed in Holly’s ear, “Female levitators’ powers are much stronger than men’s. All levitators lose power as they get older. You’ll kill him!”
Her dad let go.