Absolutely Captivated (29 page)

“You’ll have to do it,” Zoe said.
“It’s the only way you’ll learn.”

“Learn what?” Travers
asked.

“Two things,” Zoe said. “How to
reverse a miscued spell and how to avoid undisciplined
thinking.”

Travers’ spine stiffened. He’d never
been an undisciplined thinker in his life.

Yet, he stood here, beside an
invisible Jaguar, in a town he had never wanted to visit, as clear
to the world as a sheet of newly cleaned glass.

He wisely refrained from saying
anything.

“Okay,” Zoe said. “Here’s what you do.
You say, ‘Reverse!’ and as you do, you think exactly what you were
thinking when you changed.”

He didn’t know what
he had been thinking. He didn’t even feel that little
poof
he had felt the day
before as the magic had worked.

“Um,” he said, “what if I don’t know
what I was thinking?”

Maybe he
was
an undisciplined
thinker. Maybe he just hadn’t realized it until
now.

“Oh for heavens’ sake.” Zoe walked
toward him, stopped, and put out a hand. She was feeling for the
back of the car, just like he would have had to do. Suddenly he
didn’t feel quite as stupid as he had a moment earlier. “You’ll
remember. Just think about what we were talking about.”

“We were talking about invisibility,”
Travers said.

“We were talking about how to spell
the garbage can, and you felt the need to make some witty
comment.”

“I didn’t feel the need,” Travers
said. “I was just asking a question. It was a logical question,
actually, given the circumstances. I mean, I’ve never done stuff
like this before, so how would I know what I’m doing? I’ve never
even seen stuff like this before yesterday, so I’m really out of my
depth.”

“We can argue that last point later,”
Zoe said. “The one about yesterday, not the one about being out of
your depth. It’s pretty clear that you’re out of your
depth.”

“Thanks,” Travers said.

“So,” Zoe said, her hands down
slightly. She hadn’t moved any farther, and apparently, she hadn’t
touched the car. “Are you going to try to reverse the
spell?”

“Oh, yeah.” Travers
bit his lower lip. Say “reverse” and think of England. He felt
a
poof
and he was
standing on a bridge, overlooking a slow-moving and sludgy river.
It was dark, and the lights below him came from ships. A city
spread before him—obviously not Las Vegas.

Even the air smelled different. Raw,
damp, and filled with humidity.

England.

Travers swore, said, “Reverse!” and
thought of England. Seriously thought of England, instead of a
silly pun, like he had done before.

Another
little
poof
went
through him, and then he blinked in the sunlight.

He was standing behind Zoe now, near
the garbage cans. She was still facing the carport, and she was
talking.

“Travers,” she said. “We don’t have
all day. This was just supposed to be the first lesson.”

And he’d performed it. Really well,
only he didn’t tell her that. He didn’t even want to tell her
that.

The trip to England (was that really
London Bridge?) was his own little secret.

He snuck toward the carport, his feet
crunching slightly on the gravel.

Zoe turned, her expression sharp.
“Who’s there?”

Travers held his breath as he walked.
He tried to make as few sounds as possible, but each echoed as if
it were the only sound in the world.

“What’s going on?” Zoe asked, still
looking around. She wasn’t looking at him, though, so she didn’t
know where he was. Maybe she couldn’t hear the drumbeat of his
heart as he moved. “Travers?”

He had to touch the car to go around
it. His fingers found the metal, cooling in the shade of the
carport, and traced their way to the front. He had to squeeze
through the small space between a beam and the car, then move to
the other side, as if nothing happened.

“Travers?” Zoe asked again, her voice
rising.

“Just say ‘reverse’?” he asked, as if
he had been in the same spot the whole time.

She whirled, looking visibly startled.
She glanced over her shoulder once, as if she thought someone might
be behind her, and then said, “And think about what you had thought
before. That’s the important part. Undisciplined
thought—”

“Is dangerous,” Travers said. “I’m
beginning to figure that out.”

Zoe kept looking around as if she
sensed someone else’s presence. But Travers couldn’t think about
her or England. He had to think about invisibility and wondering
how to achieve it.

He kept that thought at the forefront
of his brain as he said, “Reverse!”

For a moment, he thought everything
stayed the same. Zoe was staring just past him, and he felt no
different.

Then he looked down, saw
his narrow feet in their sandals, saw his pants, his hands—which
looked fine—his arms, which were sunburned, and the rest of
him.

He wanted to pat himself to see if he
was all there, but he had always been all there, just not visible
to anyone else, not even himself.

Zoe frowned. Her hands hadn’t left her
hips. “What happened to you?”

He blinked, looked down, didn’t know
what she was referring to. He didn’t even want to speculate about
it—didn’t want to think about the possible things that could have
gone wrong, in case he would now make them go wrong.

He wondered if he was covered with
some kind of obviously English patina—a bit of rain, a touch of
dew, maybe a little bit of malt vinegar from a passing
fish-and-chips truck.

“I—um.” He looked down at himself
again, unwilling to admit that he had made not one, but two
mistakes. “I—what are you talking about?”

“You’re all red.” She sounded
annoyed.

Travers looked at his arms and
grinned. “I’m sunburned.”

“From being invisible?”

“From riding in your car.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “No one can get
sunburned that fast.”

“I can get sunburned in ten minutes on
a cloudy day,” Travers said. “Just ask Kyle.”

“I’m not going back to the Strip to
confer with your son,” Zoe said. “You thought something and it
turned you red.”

“I thought I could handle the top down
in your car for the short few miles it took to get here,” Travers
said. “I thought wrong.”

“You should have said something,” Zoe
said.

“I planned to,” Travers
said, “and then we got here and everything got—”

He made himself pause.
Maybe the use of metaphor was the problem. After all, he had
disappeared when he metaphorically thought of another country, a
pun on the way that Victorian women were told to suffer through
sex. (Close your eyes, dear, and think of England.)

Maybe he would have to
change the entire way he thought, the way he looked at the world,
everything about his life—

“You look particularly glum,” Zoe
said. “What’s the matter?”

“Besides the fact that I just did a
spell by accident and I might be dying of heatstroke?” Travers
asked. “Why, nothing’s the matter.”

Zoe raised her eyebrows at him. It was
an attractive look, and one she used often. He longed to touch the
side of them, feel how soft her skin was, and maybe kiss the corner
of her eye.

“You want to try this garbage can
spell or not?” she asked.

He didn’t. Not really. “Can we just go
inside? I’d like some water and some sunscreen, and a relief from
these temperatures.”

And not the relief he had gotten a few
minutes ago.

Zoe shook her head, let her arms drop,
and shoved her keys into her pocket. “Avoiding the lessons won’t
teach you anything.”

“I learned about ‘reverse,’” Travers
said. “That’s something.”

“And it doesn’t always work,” Zoe
said. “Especially if you can’t remember the sequence or you stick a
new sequence in the middle of it.”

Yeah, he got that one,
too, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “How about I disappear
your garbage can inside, where there’s
air-conditioning?”

Zoe sighed. “All right, you can make
tiny things invisible while I double-check my research. And then we
have to get on the trail of that wheel.”

“How long do you think it’ll take to
find it?” Travers asked, hoping that it would only take a few days.
He wanted the Fates out of his hair as soon as possible. He’d
really like it if it happened before his sister Megan
arrived.

“I have no idea,” Zoe said. “With the
way things are going this morning, it might take us
centuries.”

“Centuries?” Travers’ voice shook. “I
hope you’re exaggerating.”

Zoe headed toward the
building’s back door. “I hope I am, too.”

Zoe stepped into the coolness of her
office. At least, it was cool compared with the great outdoors,
where the temperatures had to be heading toward 110. Sometimes she
loved the summer heat, and sometimes she wondered why she suffered
through it when she could easily go someplace cool, like the
Pacific Northwest or the North of England.

Travers was only a few steps behind
her. She could hear his soft footfall in the hallway. It sounded
familiar—almost like the footsteps she had heard
outside.

A shiver ran down her back. When he
had gone invisible, and the car had been invisible, Zoe had been
uneasy. Then, when she realized that someone was behind her, her
unease grew. She hadn’t gotten a sense of evil, like she had when
that mage showed up to take the Fates, but she had been surprised
that someone else had gotten so close.

Perhaps he was just walking around,
exploring his invisibility.

Or perhaps the newness of his magic,
and his inexperience, had brought the wrong kind of mage to watch
their lessons, someone who might target Travers in the
future.

Zoe would have to warn him again, but
she didn’t know how. She wasn’t even sure if she believed him about
the sunburn. She had been telling the truth when she had said that
she had never seen anyone get sunburned that fast.

She flicked on her
overhead office light. Chairs were scattered everywhere, and a few
five-dollar bills still littered the floor. Right in front of her
desk, a scrap of pink material caught on the edge of a
chair.

The office smelled strongly of wet
dog. She hadn’t gone into the bathroom to see the damage that Kyle
had done, but she probably should have. She hadn’t thought it
through—an eleven-year-old, a stubborn dog, a bath. It probably
didn’t take prescience to know that the bathroom was a
disaster.

Zoe sighed. She would never get to the
case. And because of that, she’d never be free of the Fates. She
was going to have them around until the end of time, rescuing them
from angry mages, and trying to sort her way through their
conversations.

She shivered again. That was not her
idea of a good time.

“The air-conditioning isn’t on high
enough to make a person shiver,” Travers said from behind her. “Is
it?”

She turned, and found herself against
him. His skin radiated heat. The burn looked painful, but he was
smiling at her.

She liked that smile. It had a
softness to it, a softness mixed with just enough humor to take the
edge off his good looks. This morning, she was finally getting to
see him as a person, not just as the best-looking man she had ever
laid eyes on.

“The air-conditioning is on as high as
it goes,” she said, not moving away from his chest. “The problem is
that the entire system needs to be replaced, and the landlord won’t
do it.”

“In Vegas,” Travers said, “that would
seem to me to be a violation of landlord-tenant law.”

“Which varies from state
to state and city to city,” Zoe said.

“Except for one
provision,” Travers said. “The landlord has to make certain that
living conditions don’t threaten the lives of the
renters.”

Zoe felt the heat from his body run
along her neck and up her cheeks. Or maybe she was blushing again.
This time, it wasn’t from lewd thoughts; it was from the fact that
she might be guilty of something that she hadn’t even been aware
of.

“You okay?” Travers asked.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, and
stepped across the threshold.

The wet-dog smell was even stronger in
here. Part of the carpet squished under her feet, and for a moment,
Zoe thought that Bartholomew’s bladder problems had extended to
this dimension.

Then she realized that she hadn’t had
a towel in that bathroom—at least not one big enough for a
squirming, obese dachshund. The creature had waddled into her main
office, sat down, and proceeded to drip water on her terribly thin,
poorly maintained carpet.