Absolutely Captivated (46 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.