Absolutely Captivated (18 page)

“Everything work out at the desk?”
Travers asked.

She nodded. “You’re getting off-season
rates, with a corporate discount and complimentary breakfast. It
was the best they could do.”

By Travers’ quick math, that meant she
had saved him nearly five hundred dollars over seven days. And she
was apologizing.

“Sounds good to me,” he
said.

“Is it room service?” Kyle
asked.

Zoe bent down to pat Bartholomew Fang.
The dog wiggled his entire body in excitement, looking like a brown
balloon animal that was about to explode.

“I have a hunch the complimentary
breakfast is in the buffet,” Travers said to his son.

Kyle frowned at him, obviously
expecting Zoe to answer. But Zoe seemed preoccupied.

She stood and gave Travers a distant
smile. He didn’t like the distance. That connection he had felt to
her earlier, when she had finally given in and asked the Fates to
give her a coherent argument, was gone.

He missed it.

“I suppose we should round up the
Fates,” she said.

He didn’t want to round up
the Fates. He was tired of those three women. Their constant
conversation, their ability to find the heart of a matter and
expose it, their strange way of viewing the world, made them seem
like forty women instead of three.

Before he saw them, he wanted to talk
to Zoe Sinclair, see if he really liked her. Even though there had
been that connection in her office, he wasn’t sure if it had been
because they were both stressed and pushing against similar things
(read: the Fates) or if they truly had something in
common.

And he wanted to see past her beauty,
to see if the woman behind it was someone he would enjoy as much as
parts of him seemed to think he would.

He certainly hoped he wasn’t
broadcasting his thoughts this time, but Kyle wasn’t complaining.
He also didn’t seem to be blushing. Instead, he had bent down,
picked up Bartholomew Fang, and held him so that Zoe could keep
petting him.

“Don’t you think?” she asked
Travers.

For a moment, he thought he had lost
the thread of the conversation. Then he realized that he had been
silent too long and she had simply reminded him that she had asked
him to go with her to get the Fates.

“Before we go,” Travers said, “I need
to apologize.”

“For what?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “For
what?”

Travers gave his son his best parental
this-is-none-of-your-business look, one that was always guaranteed
to work. Of course, now Travers wondered if the look worked because
he had the glare down pat or if he broadcast his thoughts when he
had that expression on his face.

“Both, Dad,” Kyle muttered.

Zoe looked back and forth between
them. She seemed to know what was going on.

“Well, then,” Travers said, “catch the
hint.”

Kyle sighed and carried Bartholomew
Fang into the suite’s kitchen. The dog’s tail started pinwheeling
when he realized where they were going.

“Apologize for what?” Zoe asked
softly.

“How harsh I was in your office,”
Travers said. “I shouldn’t have threatened to abandon the Fates.
It’s pretty clear that they can’t survive on their own.”

Zoe shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sure
they can survive just fine.”

“They don’t even understand money,”
Travers said. “They thought three dollars would buy them a bus
ticket.”

“And they would learn fairly quickly
that it can’t.” Zoe sighed. “They’re older and smarter than both of
us. They’d learn how to survive.”

“I’m just sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t
fair to you.”

She looked at him
then—really focused those brown-and-gold eyes on him, and he had to
concentrate not to get lost in them. “It seems to me that no one
was fair to
you
,”
she said. “No one’s bothered to explain anything to you. About
them, about Kyle. About yourself.”

He felt his cheeks warm more. “I’m
sure they’ve tried.”

“A lot of us refuse to believe when we
learn about magic,” Zoe said. “That doesn’t mean your mentor should
have given up.”

“I don’t even know who this mysterious
mentor was,” Travers said, “so it really doesn’t
matter.”

She put her hand on his arm. “All I’m
saying is that you don’t have to apologize to me. It’s been an
unusual day for you, and you’ve been under strain.”

That was an understatement. He felt
like he’d been through an emotional wringer—and he wasn’t an
emotional man.

“It just looks like you’re
under a strain, too,” he said.

She gave him that look again. Each
time she did, she tilted her head sideways, as if she could see him
clearer through the corners of her eyes. Her black hair fell
against her cheek like a caress.

“I’m fine,” she said, obviously
lying.

He decided to try again. “What’s wrong
with the place they want you to go?”

She sighed, and looked at one of the
couches. “Mind if I sit?”

“Be my guest.” Travers swept a hand
around the room as if he had decorated it himself.

Not that he would have. There were
three couches—which was one too many for the size—and only one easy
chair. The end tables were scuffed, and the art was badly done
photographs of Vegas at night. The vases, filled with fresh
flowers, were plastic, and the see-through table in the kitchen was
made of plastic instead of glass.

Zoe sat on the nearest
couch, pulled off a high-heeled shoe, and rubbed her delicate foot.
Travers thought of offering to help her, but had a hunch she’d
balk.

“You want to know about Faerie,” she
said.

He nodded, and sat on the same couch,
careful to keep a cushion between them.

From the kitchen, he heard the banging
of plates and his son’s giggle. So far as Travers could tell, Kyle
wasn’t paying attention to this conversation.

For some reason, Travers found that
very important.

“When we’re born,” Zoe said, still
looking at her aching foot, “we’re all given a prophecy, all of
us.”

“Everyone?”

“Mages,” Zoe said. “The Fates come up
with the prophecies, and generally, you learn about it the first
time you visit them, or from your mentor.”

Which meant that Travers had a
prophecy which he didn’t know about.

“The prophecy supposedly comes from
the air—the powers that are even greater than the Powers That Be,
whoever that is—but I’m not so sure. Especially after
today.”

“Why?” Travers asked.

Zoe set down her foot and dug her toes
into the carpet. Then she pulled the shoe off her other foot and
started to rub it. “Because of my prophecy.”

“Which is?” Travers felt like he had
to drag each word out of her. Was she that used to keeping secrets?
Or were all mages like this?

“My prophecy?” Zoe’s fingers worked
the ball of her foot. “It’s about—”

She stopped herself and
looked at Travers, as if she could see through him. He felt like
she was analyzing him, as if she were trying to figure out
something about him.

Then she shook her head. “I’m such a
fool,” she said.

“You don’t strike me as a fool,” he
said.

“It’s all manipulation,” she said.
“I’ve known that for a long time. I’ve just never understood why
until now. They’ve been setting me up.”

“Setting you up for what?” Travers
wasn’t quite following this conversation.

“A trip into Faerie. They were
promising me big rewards, a reward I’ve always wanted. And just to
get me to risk my life for them. They must have known this was
coming.” She rested her hand on the side of her foot, but kept
looking down.

Travers could sense how tired she was,
and something else, something rather sad and defeated about
her.

“You think they knew that Zeus—”
Travers still felt ridiculous talking about a Greek God as if he
really existed, but he soldiered through it— “would try to toss
them out of their positions? You think they could see that far into
the future?”

“Kyle can see into the future, can’t
he?” Zoe asked, not answering Travers. She eased her hand off her
foot, stretched her long leg, and arched her toes.

Travers tried not to think about her
smooth skin or the delicacy of her movements. “You’re asking me?
The ultimate clueless man?”

She leaned her head back as if she
were waiting for Kyle to yell the answer from the kitchen. But,
true to his word, he had left them alone.

“If the Fates could really foresee the
future like that,” Travers said, “why didn’t they try to stop Zeus
from undermining them? Why did they give up their powers? Why did
they put themselves at a disadvantage?”

“Who knows? They’re not the most
logical of women.” Zoe put her foot next to the other one, and
rubbed her toes in the carpet.

Travers had never seen a
woman do that after removing high heels, but then, he hadn’t dated
since his wife left, and she hadn’t been the high-heel
type.

“They’re very literal and pretty
strange,” Travers said, “but they have been somewhat
logical.”

“You’re defending them?” Zoe
asked.

He felt as if he shouldn’t be, as if
defending them was betraying her. “No,” he said, not really sure.
“I just—what if they can only see partial futures? I mean, Kyle can
only hear me when I ‘broadcast’ my thoughts, or so he says. Which
means that he’s a partial psychic, not a full one. Maybe that’s how
their prophecies work. Maybe they gave you that prophecy and didn’t
realize they were tied into it.”

Zoe shook her head. “It’s dangerous in
Faerie.”

“I’m assuming, since you call this
place Faerie, they have magic too,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” She sighed. “There once
were a number of different groups with magical abilities. Some of
them went so deep underground that we no longer know about them.
Some of them, from what I understand, were destroyed. And a few of
us survived. The mages, we survived—and mostly were remembered
through myths and legends. The Faeries were a particular group that
actually managed to grow. They’ve been worrying the Powers That Be
for at least five hundred years.”

“Worrying why?” Travers
asked.

“Because they seem to get more
powerful, and that’s not good.”

Travers shook his head. “Not good—for
you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “For us. We don’t
work on accumulating power for the most part. We work on
love.”

“Huh?” Whatever he had
expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “What do you mean,
‘love’?”

Her body went rigid for a brief
moment, but she didn’t move. It was as if he had caught her saying
something wrong. She waited so long to respond that he got the
sense she was trying to make up an answer instead of giving him the
truth.

“We’re—um—all about romantic love,”
she said. “Except for those of our number who go evil, the rest of
us work for the betterment of anyone who can fall in
love.”

That wasn’t all of it, he knew, but
she obviously wasn’t ready to tell him the rest. “And the
Faeries?”

“They’re all about power,’ she said.
“They don’t even believe in love.”

“Do you believe in power?”

She nodded, keeping her head down.
“Maybe more than I believe in love,” she said.

Those words hung between
them for a moment. He thought about it: he wasn’t sure he believed
in romantic love, either. What he had felt for Cheryl had been
teenage infatuation and lust. If he had felt love for her, a
psychologist friend had once told him, then he would have hated her
for leaving.

All Travers had felt was
relief.

Still, he believed in love itself. He
would do anything for his son. Anything at all. Even accept three
strange women, drive them to Las Vegas, and give up a week of his
life.

“I don’t understand,”
Travers said, “if you’re equally magical, what can they do to you,
these Faeries?”

Zoe raised her head, bit
her lower lip, and released it. It was almost as if she wasn’t
planning to tell him, and then changed her mind.

“It’s against our rules to steal
someone else’s magic,” she said.

“Steal it?” Travers asked. “How can
you do that?”

She waved a hand, as if it
weren’t important. “You have to be really talented to do it. It’s
forbidden for us. You get one of the worst punishments ever. But
it’s not forbidden for Faeries. It’s part of how they live. There’s
only one hitch.”

“And that is?”

“They can’t steal magic in the outside
world. They can only steal it inside of Faerie.”

Travers blinked, then
frowned.

“All those stories you
hear about Faeries,” Zoe said, “the ones about changelings, and
about people eating food that sucks them into a magic land, and
about Faerie circles—they come from this. People who just came into
their magic, people who weren’t sure what they had, people like
Kyle who had a lot of power, but it wasn’t developed or hadn’t
reached its maturity, they got trapped by the Faeries and had their
powers stolen. The Faeries grew stronger which is, I think, how
they’ve managed to survive for so long.”