Absolutely Captivated (23 page)

“About love,” Clotho said.

“About everything,” Lachesis
said.

Zoe let out a long breath. “All
right,” she said. “That I’ll do.”

“What about Dad?” Kyle asked, echoing
Travers thought, one he had decided not to vocalize. He could’ve
muzzled his kid, but instead, he just shook his head
slightly.

“He has many options,” Atropos
said.

“But we must warn you,” Clotho
said.

“Others will try to steal your magic,
now that you’ve tapped it,” Lachesis said.

“The drive across the west is
particularly treacherous,” Atropos said.

“There are many lost and lonely and
starving mages,” Clotho said, “looking for any advantage they can
get.”

Travers bit his lower lip. The Fates
looked at each other, as if they weren’t talking to him at
all.

“I worry most about the child,”
Lachesis said.

Travers’ arm tightened around Kyle.
Kyle eased in closer.

“This still feels like manipulation,”
Travers said. “I’ve taken care of myself for years. I’m sure I’ll
be fine on a trip back to Oregon, a trip I’ve taken dozens of
times.”

Zoe made a clicking
sound behind her teeth, almost a
tsk-tsk
. Travers glanced at her. She
gave him a sheepish shrug.

“I’m afraid in this case the Fates are
right,” she said.

“In this case?” Atropos asked,
sounding indignant.

“There are mages who would steal your
magic,” Zoe said as if Atropos hadn’t spoken.

“But only now, only after I’ve met all
of you.” Travers couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his tone. Kyle
leaned in even closer. Travers wasn’t sure his son could hug him
any tighter.

“You’ve deliberately tapped your
magic,” Zoe said. “It’s like taking a cover off a pool. Now it
reflects the light, and everyone can sense it. Before, it wasn’t as
obvious.”

“So I’ll put the cover back on,”
Travers said.

“It’s not that simple,” Zoe said. “The
analogy breaks down. It’s as if in taking the cover off, the cover
has vanished and the pool will keep growing. You’re a magic
attractor, so long as your powers remain untamed.”

“I’m sure you’ve had trouble before,”
Clotho said.

“But you probably explained it away as
some other circumstance,” Lachesis said.

“Like those smoke rings,” Kyle
whispered.

Travers looked at
his son in horror. They had to vacate a hotel near Redding on the
way to Vivian’s wedding because the room they were staying in—and
only that room—was filled with smoke rings. When Travers tried to
explain it to the desk clerk, he had said it was as if an invisible
person sat in the room, smoking a pipe and exhaling in little
rings. The clerk had muttered something about the Caterpillar
in
Alice in Wonderland
, added a rather snide comment about everyone imagining
hookah pipes—and pointed to the smoke rings that had followed
Travers into the lobby.

That was when he decided to leave. He
had driven nearly fifty miles before he found another hotel to take
them. By then the smoke rings were gone.

The next morning he
scanned the local news channels, expecting to hear about a hotel
that had burned down near Redding, but nothing got reported. It
didn’t make any California papers the following day, either, and
Travers
had
chalked the whole thing up to an oddity, even though Kyle had
told him that the smoke seemed evil.

Travers shook his head. “This has been
the most incredible day of my life,” he said.

Zoe gave him a sympathetic smile.
“Sadly, it won’t stay that way.”

His gaze met hers and held it. This
time she didn’t look away. The attraction still floated between
them, but now he questioned what caused it—a real attraction or
even more magic.

And the questioning made him feel sad.
He wanted the attraction to be real.

She closed her eyes, her
long, dark lashes brushing against the skin of her cheek. Then she
sighed, as if she had made some kind of resolution. When she opened
her eyes, they seemed slightly different—a little more determined
maybe, or a little more resigned.

“I can teach you a few survival
skills,” she said. “I can get you started enough to make the trip
to Oregon to be mentored.”

Travers should have felt relieved, but
he didn’t. He didn’t want survival skills. He had been speaking the
truth when he said he wanted his life back.

“How long will I have to stay in
Oregon?” he asked the Fates.

“Mentoring takes anywhere from two to
five years,” Atropos said.

“Depending on the student,” Clotho
added.

“And the level of ability,” Lachesis
said.

“In your case,” Atropos said, “two
years should do.”

“Two
years
?” Travers asked.
“But I have a job, a business, a life in L.A.”

“Then perhaps those children can find
you a new mentor there,” Clotho said, sniffing as if the Interim
Fates were in the room and hadn’t bathed in weeks.

“Either way,” Zoe said, “I’ll get you
enough control to go wherever you need to.”

She spoke softly, making it clear that
she was only talking to him.

“How long with that take?” Travers
asked, knowing he sounded ungrateful.

“A few weeks,” Zoe said. “Depending on
my caseload, and how long it takes me to find this
wheel.”

“You’re taking our job?” Lachesis
asked.

“Against my better judgment,” Zoe
said.

“And she’s mentoring young Travers,”
Atropos said in a stage whisper. “How much better could it
get?”

“I don’t know,” Travers said. “it
would be kinda nice not to be mentored at all.”

Kyle buried his face in Travers’
chest, as if he didn’t want to see the fallout from that comment.
But Travers didn’t care. In the last week, his life had veered out
of control, and it would never be the same again. He was smart
enough to realize that.

He also knew that some of his
disappointment came from the interaction with Zoe. He did want to
spend time with her, but not as a student with a teacher. He wanted
to get to know the woman, to understand how she felt about life,
not learn how she made the Fates disappear or how she convinced a
guy who looked like an apple witch that the Fates hadn’t lost their
magic.

“I think we all wished we had the
luxury of forgoing a mentor,” Zoe said, “but none of us do. I
promise not to be hard on you.”

Travers leaned back in surprise. “Hard
on me?”

“In the training,” Zoe
said.

“Like her mentor was with her,” Clotho
said.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Kyle whispered from
somewhere near Travers’ chest. “I believe in you.”

Travers was glad someone did. Although
he doubted Kyle would like this situation much when he really
realized how much their life would change. Right now, Kyle probably
saw this as a way out of summer school.

But it was more than that. It was a
whole new way of living, a way Travers wasn’t sure he would ever
learn to like.

Zoe leaned her head against the ripped
leather seat in the back of the cab. She was exhausted, but she
knew better than to close her eyes. The ride from the Strip to her
house would only take about ten minutes at this time of night.
Normally, she would have walked, but her feet had ached for hours
now, and even if she spelled her high heels into tennis shoes, the
walk wouldn’t be any more pleasant.

The cab headed east on Tropicana, past
the UNLV campus. There, as Zoe gazed out the window, she saw people
walking— summer school students heading to the library, going to
their dorms. The University of Nevada-Las Vegas was a little oasis
of normality in a town that didn’t believe in it. Students came
here, and although they indulged in the Vegas nightlife, they
didn’t really become part of it.

They never saw beneath the city’s
surface.

Perhaps that was Zoe’s problem. She
always saw beneath the surface.

Zoe sighed. She still wasn’t sure how
or when she had decided to take the Fates’ case. They said she
would have to locate the wheel, and that was when she got the idea:
she might be able to find it—maybe even take it—without venturing
into Faerie herself.

The cab turned north on
Pecos Road, heading into the quiet neighborhood that Zoe had lived
in since the mid-1970s. Her house was in a cul-de-sac off two other
side roads. She had nearly an acre of property with tall trees and
a lot of landscaping that had cost her a small fortune to put in.
It also cost her a small fortune to maintain—Vegas was high desert,
and keeping any kind of plant alive in this climate required a drip
irrigation system, more water than the city wanted her to use, and
the services of a gardener.

She could afford it. She had lived
pretty frugally most of her life, making sure she always had enough
money to last her several years without work. The gardener felt
like a major indulgence, one she couldn’t live without.

The house was a two-story,
modified adobe style split-level, about as trendy as she could have
gotten back when she was buying. She had grown tired of her 1950s
ranch with its 850 square feet, and thought she needed 4,000 square
feet of privacy.

Most of the rooms were closed off now,
but she wasn’t willing to sell the house. She didn’t want to lose
the yard, the landscaping, and the pool.

The pool was her secret pride and joy.
She had learned when she lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s that
living in a desert climate without a pool was like living in Aspen
without a pair of skis.

She had expanded the pool
thirty years ago, making it twenty-five meters long, with a small,
concrete island in the center. There were bridges to that island,
and a pavilion built in the middle, providing shade even in the
middle of the day. She swam every morning, and often in the
evenings, and on days when she had no work, she sat in the chaise
longue and read, enjoying the warmth and the shade and the bits of
privacy she had bought.

It was not the life of an average
detective. It certainly wasn’t the life she had imagined for
herself when she had come to Vegas. And it was light years from the
Hammett/Chandler ideal of a grungy apartment with a disillusioned
detective who only spent as much time in the room as she needed to
sleep off the previous night’s drunk.

She had lived that way for
a few years, and while it played well in fiction, in practice it
left her muzzy-headed, lonely, and dissatisfied. Somewhere along
the way, she realized that her office could be sparse and noir, but
her home had to be comfortable, maybe even spectacular, or her life
wasn’t worth living.

The cab pulled up in front of the
arch-shaped garage door. A hedgerow going off in either direction
hid the rest of the house from view except for the solar lamps she
had installed last year, illuminating the base of the adobe through
the cactus garden.

“You gonna be okay, miss?” the driver
asked through the window, before he requested his fee.

Zoe blinked and sat up, wondering for
a moment if she had fallen asleep. But she hadn’t. She had paid
attention to the entire drive.

Then she realized that he thought she
was a tourist, coming to visit a local, and something about her
home made it seem like her visit would be an uncomfortable
one.

She smiled at the man, grateful for
his concern—that was the thing about Vegas that no one mentioned;
the locals still acted as if it were a small town—and unzipped the
top of her purse, looking for her wallet.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I live
here.”

He raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t
believe her, but he didn’t say anything more. She gave him his fee
plus a healthy tip, and let herself out into the warm desert
night.

The temperature had dropped twenty
degrees, making it in the low nineties, which wasn’t so bad,
considering. The temperature might actually dip into the eighties
before dawn.

She could remember when
Vegas summer nights got truly cool—no asphalt and car exhaust and
haze to hold in the day’s heat. But that seemed like a long time
ago.

Everything seemed like a long time
ago.

She was feeling old tonight, perhaps
because she was attracted to a much younger man.

Zoe smiled at herself, and threaded
her way through the hedgerow to the front door. The plants were
damp—her gardener clearly had misted them against city regulations.
She didn’t have the heart to reprimand him.

She unlocked her front door, shut off
the security system, and took a deep lungful of air-conditioned
cold. She left the house at a consistent 75 degrees in the summer,
which felt positively frigid on days like today, and didn’t waste
nearly as much electricity as the old days, when summer
air-conditioning temperatures were a standard 60 or
below.