Levitating Las Vegas (18 page)

He sat with his head in his hands, breathing hard. The light brown waves of his hair caught the sunlight and split it into a million colors, like the grains of sand on the canyon floor.

“Hey.” She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder.

Finally he jerked his head up. His face was stark white. “I called to you!” A tear escaped the corner of his eye. He brushed it away angrily.

“I’m sorry, really. I didn’t hear you.”

He put his hands on his knees as if he still needed support. He took a long, shuddering breath. “I can’t believe you’d scare me like that after everything we’ve been through together.” A cool breeze, whispering of evening, blew a wavy lock of hair across his forehead.

And in that moment, she realized he valued her as much as she valued him. He’d never come out and said it. His biggest show of friendship had been to kidnap her, which, though she knew he’d meant well, was kind of twisted. He could read her mind. He sensed how far she’d fallen for him. But she’d assumed her crush was one-sided. He must have forgotten that she couldn’t sense whether he felt the same way about her.

“Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “Are you blind?”

“Not anymore.” She surrounded him with her power and hugged him gently all over. When he sighed appreciatively, she increased the pressure of the massage and draped her arm around his shoulders, too.

He sniffled. “I feel ill.”

“You know what? I’ve had candy, but you haven’t had anything to eat for a whole day, have you?”

He shrugged.

“Eat the rest of the seafoam. And then— Can you drive? We’ll have dinner at that restaurant next to the hotel.” She squeezed him with her arm and her power.

He turned to look at her. Now his pupils dilated. His green eyes went black, and he bit his lip. She hadn’t imagined this at Glitterati. She wasn’t imagining it now.

But he didn’t kiss her this time. He growled, “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“I won’t,” she whispered.

“And when you’re playing around with your power, seeing what you can lift, do not experiment with your body over a deadly chasm.”

She laughed. “Okay.”

To her relief, he smiled. “But you definitely need a magic act of your own. And somewhere in it, you need to levitate in that pose with your hair in a circle around you. That was totally fucking cool.”

A man sat down right behind Elijah at the next table in the crowded restaurant, thinking very loudly about the overheated radiator in his truck. Holly couldn’t read Elijah’s mind—Elijah had to keep reminding himself of this—but she recognized the expression on his face. She stood and walked around the wagon wheel table to switch places with him and give him some distance from the other restaurant customers, for the third time in the hour they’d been eating.

He stood, too. When they passed each other, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of oleander in her hair.

Then he sat down in her chair and surveyed the crumbs on the plates. Some of the dishes originally had been hers, some his. They’d lost track.

“God, I feel better,” he said. “I’m glad you suggested this. If you hadn’t, I might have passed out eventually. It didn’t even register as hunger to me. I guess my head is full of other stuff.”

She sat down, too, and pushed away the plate with the crust of his second slice of pie. It moved only a millimeter with all the other plates in the way. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve had enough to eat.” She patted her flat bare stomach. “That would be the ultimate revenge on my mom, to show up in Vegas with a muffin top hanging over my bikini bottoms.”

He grinned. “You have a long way to go.”

She opened her mouth to say something about edamame. He never learned what she was going to tell him, because she looked sharply over her shoulder at a man their age sitting down at the table next to them. Whew—she’d thought for a second that it was Rob.

Her fear and then her relief shot through Elijah in quick succession. He leaned forward, gripping the edge of the wagon wheel. “What do you mean, Rob was stalking you?”

And then, as the scene flashed into her mind, he saw what Rob had done to her that night at Glitterati.

Elijah had wanted to hurt Rob several days before. He just hadn’t understood why, or trusted his own instincts. Now he knew he’d been right.

Her dark eyes widened. “Elijah. Don’t look like that.” She reached across the plates and put her hand on his hand. “Don’t do anything. Don’t go after him.”

“How could I leave that alone?” Elijah demanded.

“He’s a cop. You’ll just get yourself in trouble. Besides, Kaylee’s goons already beat him up.”

They sure had. They’d dumped him on Elijah’s doorstep. And Elijah had been zonked on Mentafixol and beer. He felt even more powerless with her soft hand on his hand, trying to comfort
him
for something that had happened to
her
. He sat back in his chair and slipped his hand out from under hers. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I let that happen.”

“You didn’t
let
it happen,” she insisted. “We weren’t together that night. You were just borrowing a Mentafixol pill. And even now, you’re not—” Realizing what she’d been about to say, her mouth snapped shut.

“What do you mean, I’m not your boyfriend?” he exclaimed in disbelief.

Her straight ballet posture sagged, though the green sequins on her bikini top still glittered ethereally amid the rustic Western decor of the restaurant. She leaned over the plates and said quietly, “I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it. You stopped yourself from saying it at the last second. You might as well have said it.”

“Because you can
read my mind,
” she said through her teeth. “You can’t get mad at me for
thinking
something if I didn’t
say
it.”

He put his elbow on the wagon wheel and his chin in his hand, considering her. The big hair, exotic makeup, and revealing costume made her look older than she was. The pout on her lips and the little worry line between her brows made her look like his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend. Even now, she was confused about what he felt for her, and she searched his eyes for clues.

“That’s the whole problem,” he said, straightening in his cowhide chair. “Just like back at the cliff. I know how you feel about me. I forget you don’t know how I feel about you unless I tell you. And I haven’t been doing a good job of telling you.”

He stood and rounded the table again. The closer he got to the man sitting behind Holly, the louder he heard the man’s thoughts about his overheated truck. Elijah desperately wanted to tell the man to spring for a new one already. What did the man expect after twenty years and three hundred thousand miles?

But when Holly looked up at Elijah expectantly, false lashes fluttering slowly around her deep brown eyes, for the first time he could almost block out the thoughts of a man sitting three feet from him. Elijah knelt in front of Holly. He laced his fingers through her thick hair and kissed her.

The kiss started sweet. That’s how he felt about her, and that’s what he’d meant to show her. But when she made a small noise, he found himself kissing her harder on the mouth. This was nothing like their kiss at Glitterati. This was not sweet anymore. This was raw and real.

She wound a coil of gentle pressure around his chest, along his arms, and around his fingers in her hair. Her whole body tingled as she used her power. He felt her sensations and her racing pulse, and his too.

Finally she broke the kiss and pulled back, her breaths light and quick. “Somebody’s going to tell us we should get a room.”

He gave her an evil grin. “We
have
a room.” He reached beside her and slid the bill from the table. “I’ll pay this and we’ll go up.” Actually they would be visiting the gift shop next door first. He hoped that somewhere between the moccasins and bags of colorful tumbled rocks, the shop stocked condoms.

He moved slowly, listening to her mind, waiting for some sign that she’d rather not. But she wanted this. As he waited in line at the cash register and glanced backward, her mind and her dark eyes and her toes pointed together in her glittering shoes all told him that she wanted him, she’d wanted him all along, and none of her thoughts about him had been his imagination.

13

Sparkles circled Holly’s head and shoulders, the remnants of the rush she’d felt when she used her power to hold Elijah. She watched him cross the restaurant to pay their bill. He reached in the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet, his strong arm flexing with that small movement. She was astonished at her luck. She had a boyfriend who made the tiniest thing like taking out his wallet look sexy.

He glanced over his shoulder at her and grinned.

He could hear her thoughts.

She giggled to herself, giddy with anticipation and a little embarrassed that he heard. She gazed across the restaurant and out the windows to focus her attention there. Gorillas danced with cowgirls in the street. The parade and subsequent party didn’t seem particularly well planned. The road teeming with revelers wasn’t blocked off to traffic. A lone black SUV crept down the street toward the hotel with its headlights off. It never braked. It never honked. Without glancing toward it, the partiers magically parted in front of it like water before the prow of a boat.

Elijah walked out the front doors of the lobby. Sliding between two cars parked at the curb, he stepped into the street, where the SUV now idled, waiting for him.

Holly’s heart raced with panic.
What was he doing?

Just when she’d grown to trust him completely, even
he
had betrayed her. He’d lured her to Colorado, he’d led her to believe the whole conspiracy theory about Mentafixol, and he’d kissed her to make her think they were together, when he’d been in cahoots with someone else all along.

But as she watched, she realized he wasn’t walking steadily toward the SUV. He took a few steps, slowed, stopped. Then took a few more steps, like driftwood on a beach that moved only when nudged along by a wave.

A back door of the SUV opened. A man and a woman her age stepped out—the same two Goths who’d stared up at her from the parking lot of her apartment complex four nights before. The red-haired woman gestured to the interior of the SUV. Elijah got in. The guy closed Elijah inside.

Then, in a replay of that night at her apartment, both Goths walked along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. They raked their eyes across the windows, exchanged a few words, and stared again, pausing at each table on the other side of the glass. They were looking for her.

When this had happened before, they’d seen her right away. She’d wanted to alert Kaylee, and then, when they locked eyes with her, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. This time they didn’t find her. The front of the restaurant was bright, but the table where she sat next to the back wall was in shadow. They couldn’t see her.

They had to know where she was in order to control her mind.

Scooting back her chair and jumping up, she used her power to unhook her purse strap from the arm of the opposite chair and bring it sailing across the table to her. Sequins and rhinestones clicked together as she dashed down the line of tables and out the back entrance.

Elijah had parked in the lot behind the restaurant and the hotel, on the opposite side of the building from the Goths. She’d already hit the trunk of Shane’s car, unable to stop her momentum in her showgirl shoes, when she realized Elijah had the keys.

“Fuck!” she wailed, slapping the trunk. Her hand left a clean print in the red dust coating the golden metal.

Which gave her an idea. With her mind she felt her way through the pistons inside the lock and turned the whole mechanism to the right. She jumped back, half-surprised, when the trunk popped open.

She closed the trunk. Now she worked on the door lock, popped that open, and slid behind the wheel. The ignition worked the same way. She pressed one shoe on what she assumed was the gas pedal. The engine revved higher than she thought it was supposed to, yet the car didn’t budge. Oh, she had to put it in gear first. Reverse gear. She moved the stick shift into the
R
position and stepped on the gas again. The engine roared and the car stayed put. She had no clue how to drive.

“Stupid parents, stupid Mentafixol!” she cried. In frustration she slammed both fists on the steering wheel and used her mind to shove the car backward.

To her astonishment, this worked. Her stomach lurched as the car skidded back a few feet. The tires squealed, dragging against the asphalt. Her skin tingled.

“All right, then.” She picked the whole car up—just an inch off the ground was all she needed—and backed it carefully out of the parking space. When she’d cleared the cars on either side, she moved the car forward, slowly at first, faster as she realized she was able to control such a huge object. Her eyes watered at the force of the headache she was giving herself, but she couldn’t let those Goths have Elijah.

She planned to speed the Pontiac around the corner of the building and onto the road through town, hoping to catch up with the SUV and force the Goths to release Elijah somehow. But a flash of light glinting on glass and metal signaled that the SUV was rounding the corner of the building. She should have known the Goths wouldn’t escape down the road with Elijah and be done with it. They wanted her too.

She considered ducking, so the Goths couldn’t lock on to her and control her mind. But before she could move, the SUV came out of its turn, and the windshield cleared the white glint of streetlights. A young man in a cowboy hat was behind the wheel. A dark-skinned woman stared at Holly from the passenger side. The man hit the gas, and the SUV leaped toward her.

Instinctively she backed the car across the lot along the length of the hotel, away from the SUV. And she realized that if she was able to do this, either the Goths
wanted
her to do it, or they weren’t able to control her mind after all. Maybe, like her, they could use their power only within a certain range? That would explain why the man gunned the engine again, gaining on her, trying to catch up with her.

She stopped their SUV and firmly held it in place.

After backing up Shane’s car a few more yards, she set it down. Her head throbbed. She found it difficult to concentrate on too many things at once.

The man and woman in the front seat of the SUV talked to each other, then turned around to talk to the people in the back. She had to save Elijah before they figured out how to beat her at this game. Still holding the SUV in place, she opened the back door on the side where Elijah had entered and lifted him out.

She’d experienced some strange things in the past twenty-four hours. But nothing had brought home to her how different her life would be from now on like the sight of Elijah floating through the air toward her, toes an inch from the ground, backlit by the streetlights over the hotel parking lot, while he gestured and mouthed something to her that she couldn’t understand.

She stopped him beside the passenger door of Shane’s car, expecting him to open the door himself. He didn’t. He was shouting through the window at her. Afraid to lean across the seat and open the door physically in case the Goths made a move while she wasn’t looking, she lifted the handle and pushed the door open with her mind. Sparkles swirled around and through her, but multitasking was giving her a migraine.

“—changed my mind!” Elijah was shouting. As she set him down on the seat and closed the door behind him, his voice boomed inside the enclosed space of the car. “Holly, I changed my mind about staying with you. I need to go with them.”

“Shut up!” Holly shouted through her headache. For fear he’d open the door and run back to the SUV again before she could stop him, she pressed against his chest, keeping him in the seat. Still she held the SUV, but now she wasn’t sure what to do. She couldn’t drive away for fear the Goths would follow her and overtake her and come within range to control her mind like they had poisoned Elijah’s. Her hands were full, or at least her brain was. While she remained unsure, the Goths conferred with each other, plotting their next move.

“Holly, let me go. I have to go.”

“Shhh, baby, hold on.” She reached across the seat to rub his thigh. With her mind she rocked the SUV onto two wheels and considered flipping it on its side. It was boxy, and the effort hurt her head. She set it down and started over. Rocking it backward seemed easier. It tipped onto its curving hatchback and rolled until it teetered on its rounded roof. Because she was angry at the Goths for brainwashing Elijah, she gave the SUV a push on one bumper, sending it spinning.

Then she turned Shane’s car in a one-eighty and raced toward the opposite side of the parking lot. Luckily there was an opening in the fence, leading to an alley between the backs of buildings on one side and the towering mountain on the other.

Elijah said, “I don’t want to go with you. I’ve changed my mi—”

“They’re controlling your mind, Elijah,” Holly burst out. “Get over it. I can’t do this by myself.”

He leaned away from her and peered into the side mirror. “She’s turning the SUV back upright.”

“
Who?
” Holly cried.

“The girl in the front seat. Violet. She’s a levitator like you.”

“Are they coming after us?” Holly sped the car faster, crossing her fingers that no gorillas chose that unfortunate moment to stumble into the alley.

“I can’t read them now,” Elijah said. “They’re out of range. But I don’t think so. Before we left, they were surprised at how strong you were. They had thought it would be easy to capture both of us. Now they just want to get home and report in and figure out what to do next.”

“Report in to who?” Holly exclaimed. “Where’s home?” She took one last glance in the rearview mirror, but the SUV wasn’t creeping down the alley behind them. She turned between two buildings to reach the main road.

He shook his head. “It was really strange. I could see some things about them, but I couldn’t read them as well as I read you. I can’t get in someone’s brain and root around wherever I want. I can read only what they’re thinking about at that second. With these people, I couldn’t even do that all the time. I only got bits and pieces if they were distracted. When you opened the door of the SUV, you surprised them, and I caught this rush of thoughts from all of them.”

Holly stopped the car with its bumper nosing into the main street. She and Elijah looked up the road toward the hotel, but they didn’t see the SUV. Happy gorillas and miners danced with each other under the stars. Holly and Elijah looked down the road. Empty. She moved the car into the street and turned in the empty direction, toward Vegas. Now that her adrenaline was draining away, the car felt heavier than before, and her head hurt worse.

“The girl with red hair—April—changed my mind,” Elijah said. “As soon as I saw the SUV through the doors of the restaurant, I knew they wanted to take me. I tried to run, and April talked—well,
thought—
me out of it.”

“She did the same thing to me,” Holly said. “She and the guy in the backseat were outside my apartment that night I let you have one of my pills. I wanted to wake Kaylee and warn her, but then it didn’t seem like a good idea.”

“Holly!” Elijah exclaimed. “Maybe you could have told me that four days ago.”

“It didn’t seem like a good idea!” At the risk of running the car over the cliff—and she wasn’t sure she could hold them up if that happened—she turned to him and laid her outrage flat for him to read. Yes, it sounded ridiculous that she’d let this girl control her mind, but how could he berate her when he’d just been complicit in his own abduction?

He watched her darkly for a moment. Then he rolled his shoulders, popped his neck, and settled against his headrest. “The guy in the backseat, Carter, is a mind reader. The guy driving, Nate, is like April—he can change minds—but his power is weaker than hers. When April changed your mind, did you think you could almost shake it,
almost
?”

“No. I didn’t even understand my mind was being controlled, until now.”

Elijah talked over the end of Holly’s sentence as if she hadn’t spoken. “I kept thinking I might shake it. I knew what April was doing. When she got distracted, I thought I could get out from under her. But Nate was right there to back her up.” He looked over at Holly and seemed to snap out of his musings. “Anyway, the levitator, Violet, was doing most of the work.”

“Why did she let me turn their car over?”

“You were holding the SUV away from you.” Elijah held his hand out to demonstrate, and she was amazed all over again that he
knew
this. “That was really smart of you. You have a longer range than she does. Violet does not like you.”

“And I have the warmest regards for Violet.” Holly had never so much as pulled a girl’s hair in the middle school bathroom for stealing her boyfriend, and now she faced a grudge match against a chick with magical power.

Elijah chuckled. “She was trying to keep me in the SUV, too, but you won that fight.”

“Good to know,” Holly said. “Maybe we’re not as bad off as I thought back there. Maybe I’m stronger than anybody else with this power.”

“They want to find out,” Elijah said.

The tunnel loomed just ahead. Holly dreaded moving the car through it. She sank under the pressure, berating herself that she’d felt so cocky about her power five seconds before.

“Can you please calm down?” Elijah growled.

“Calm down!” she shouted. “Weirdos find us in the middle of nowhere and try to kidnap you, and you want me to calm down?”

He took a breath before he said, “Exactly. I’m going through my feelings plus your feelings, and it’s a little overwhelming.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Holly snapped. “I just overturned a car with my head.”

“Fine.” He curled in the corner, as far as possible from Holly. He really did look green. He hugged himself. “Can you please calm down?” he repeated weakly.

Holly felt terrible. She’d never intended to make him sick. She tried to clear her mind—

—and then the world went black. The car had entered the tunnel. She had no idea how to turn on the headlights. The mountain overhead threatened to crush her.

“No, it won’t,” Elijah said quietly. “You can see the starlight at the end of the tunnel. Just look straight ahead.”