Levitating Las Vegas (27 page)

So she’d just hiked herself over the concrete guardrail—careful not to expose her naked nether regions—and started walking as if she had a tightrope. She hoped it would never enter anyone’s mind that it wasn’t really an illusion. She was just a young upstart magician striking out on her own, trying to upstage her father as number four on the guidebooks’ lists of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas. She was about to make it to—woo-hoo—number three.

The hot wind gusted hard against her, making her teeter on the edge of nothing, and causing the crowd pressed against the guardrail to gasp—including Elijah, Kaylee, and her dad, with a bandaged hand. She couldn’t let them distract her now. She peered down at the blue water churning white so far below her at the base of the dam. She wished again for a real cable she could have extended across the canyon downstream. In its absence, she had to stay closer to the dam than she liked in order to give her power something within range to cling to. The wind howled against the concrete wall.

In the end, it was the wind that did her in. The wind and her lack of underwear. Another gust threatened to blow her micromini straight up. She yanked her skirt down, lost her balance, and fell. Her stomach left her. Above her around the guardrail, the crowd screamed.

She was still close to the dam. She could have used her power to prop herself up at any point. But if an imaginary wire was a stretch for the crowd to believe, an imaginary safety net would be worse. She let herself fall.

The wall of the concrete dam whizzed by her. More concrete structures and the turbulent water zoomed up at her. Logically she knew she should keep falling to the bottom and pull up at the very last second to make the stunt look like a real spill. She could claim later that the fall was real, and that her survival had been miraculous.

But she’d had full power only twenty-four hours. She didn’t quite trust it—not now that she had someone to live for. Heart beating wildly, she slowed herself in midair. Not enough to stop herself and rouse the suspicions of horrified onlookers, but enough to reassure her that she could protect herself when she neared the bottom.

An unseen force pushed her downward, speeding her up again. Saving herself did not seem like a good idea. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the briefest flash of Violet the levitator and Nate the mind changer standing on the concrete wall of the dam at river level. Then she smacked hard into the cold water.

Elijah clawed his way through the crowd so he could see Holly hit the river. She came up almost immediately and seemed to be swimming as the current swept her downstream. He let out a shaky sigh of relief.

Then he heard footsteps running behind him. All the pedestrians had pressed themselves against the guardrail to watch Holly. Rob had shoved his way back through the crowd and was dashing toward his sheriff’s deputy car, which was parked just across the street from Shane’s car and pointed in the right direction to chase Holly down the river.

“Kaylee!” Elijah grabbed her elbow. “We have to get Holly before Rob does!” Even as he shouted this, the siren on Rob’s car wailed. Traffic parted for him. The car disappeared over the hill.

Mr. Starr reached them, squinting against tears. “I think I saw two of them below the dam. One of them must be a mind changer, since they got through Homeland Security. They took off down the service road in an SUV. They probably have her already.” He wailed to Kaylee, “What am I going to tell Lanie?”

Kaylee reached up to put her hand on his shoulder. “Tell her we did our best.”

“What?” Elijah barked. “You’re going to let them have her?”

“Yes,” Kaylee said with a tone and a look that told him to keep his voice down. “As I said, we’re shorthanded, and there’s nothing the three of us can do against the Res.”

“But—” Elijah stopped short. He changed his mind about arguing with Kaylee. He
knew
Kaylee had done this to him, but he couldn’t struggle out from under that shroud.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she told both of them. “Maybe we can figure out a way to get her out of there sooner rather than later, but we can’t go barreling in there now. They’ll take us all. We have to regroup and think about this. We need to wean more teenagers off Mentafixol to help us. That’s a week each, if their parents even allow it after they hear what happened to Holly.”

Kaylee turned to Mr. Starr. “Go back in the limo. Lanie is good at thinking up cover stories. Have her make up something to say to the local news about Holly. You suspect she’s alive, she just disappeared like a good magician’s daughter, and you have every confidence she’ll reappear. Something that will dissuade the police from dragging the Colorado for her body. Something that doesn’t incriminate you but piques the public’s interest in your act and the casino. This is no time to melt into a puddle. We need to keep the casino going and the show going and the money coming in. The Res is making a push, and we need all the resources we can get to fight them. Okay?” She pulled Mr. Starr closer and whispered something Elijah didn’t catch, but the feeling behind it was reassurance. False reassurance.

Elijah watched the two of them. They didn’t touch each other in a romantic way, but they did pat each other’s shoulders as they talked, and they stood very close. It was his psychology training rather than his mind-reading ability that told him Kaylee and Mr. Starr were related somehow, even though they looked nothing alike.

They walked together to the limo, Mr. Starr’s cape billowing behind him, sequins twinkling in the setting sunlight like the last remnants of his vanished daughter. Kaylee leaned through the door of the limo to retrieve her laptop case. As the limo departed, she returned to Elijah.

“Do you have Shane’s keys?” she asked.

He nodded. He resisted following her, then changed his mind. He slipped behind the wheel of Shane’s Catalina, which Holly had “driven” there. He cranked the engine with a roar and pulled into traffic.

“When you reach the highway, go south.” Kaylee nodded at the far side of the canyon. “Across the bridge.”

“There’s nothing over there but Arizona,” Elijah protested.

“We don’t want to take the same route back to Vegas as Peter,” she said, “in case the Res has any surprises left for us. Peter and I shouldn’t be in the same place. He would need to take over the casino if something happened to me. God help us all.” Her words ended in a mutter. She opened her laptop on her knees like the discussion was over.

“What about Mr. Diamond?” Elijah asked.

Ignoring Elijah’s question, she explained, “We’ll drive down to Bullhead City, cross the river there, and come back up to Vegas.”

“What? That will take three hours!” Elijah exclaimed.

Kaylee’s fingers tapped the keyboard. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, because we’re not going after her.”

Kaylee was right. Elijah had changed his mind about saving Holly. He pulled the car onto the access road, headed back toward Highway 93. Twilight descended on them, accelerated by the dirty canyon walls around them. He flicked the knob to turn on the headlights.

As the car climbed the canyon in endless switchbacks and finally crossed the bridge, Elijah calmed himself enough to think clearly. And that meant he could separate what he wanted to do, go after Holly, from what Kaylee made him think he wanted to do. He was still under her power. But he
knew
he was under her power. If he could coax her to lift her power just for a second, maybe he could get out from under it.

“Rob,” Elijah said.

Kaylee jumped, startled at his voice, and could have kicked herself for jumping. “Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“How could you miss it?” Elijah didn’t hide his exasperation with her.

“I’m a mind changer, not a mind reader,” she defended herself. “But he must be a mind reader.” She huffed out a sigh. “When I first met him a couple of weeks ago, I thought he was perfect for Holly. I really liked him. He said all the right things. Of
course
he’s a mind reader. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.” Darkness was falling fast, but she gazed out the window at the inky mountains as if there were still a view.

“My mom said people with power don’t drink,” Elijah said. “Rob is a lush.”

“A lot of us pretend to drink,” Kaylee said, “because it gives us an excuse for bad behavior. We have a hard time blending in with regular people.” She shook her head. “It all makes sense now. His first date with Holly, he brings her over to your house, right?”

“Right.”

“Then he acts all weird, makes lewd comments, shoots a hole in your ceiling, scares her so bad that she jumps out the bathroom window.”

“Right.”

“The next night, you ask her to meet you at Glitterati, and there’s Rob. You know what he did to her in the parking lot, right?”

“Right,” Elijah said, feeling sick.

“Every bit of that was a ploy to get a reaction from you and a reaction from her. That’s what mind readers do. They mess with people so that their minds start spinning, which unlocks their secrets. That way he could read you, learn about your relationship, and use it against both of you. I
hate
mind readers.” She shuddered and folded her arms as if the eighty-degree evening had made her cold.

Elijah nodded, but he could hardly see the road anymore. His mind was too full of Kaylee’s terror and the horrible explanation of what Rob had been up to. Rob had insulted Holly repeatedly, even attacked her in his mind, just to read where Elijah’s thoughts went in response. Undoubtedly he’d seen how strong Elijah’s feelings were for her.

Then Rob had attacked her physically. But Elijah didn’t agree with Kaylee that Rob had been trolling Holly for information at that point. He knew Elijah like the back of his hand after a week of living with him, and in attacking Holly, he’d upped the ante with Elijah. Now Rob must understand with the certainty of sunny weather in a Nevada summer that if he captured Holly, Elijah would come.

“But what is Rob doing this for?” Elijah asked.

“Isaac and I used to talk about his diabolical plans to take over the casino from Mr. Diamond.” Kaylee’s tone was sarcastic, but her fear of Isaac made Elijah grip the steering wheel harder. “He said nobody knows where powers come from. We’re all so terrified of being discovered and jailed or killed that we don’t dare investigate our origins with too much enthusiasm. But the families with powers who end up in Vegas are originally from all over the place, which suggests that there are a lot more of us scattered around the country, even the world.

“Isaac said if he watched the news carefully, he bet he could pick out the mind readers and mind changers and levitators. And those are just the powers we know about. There might be more. Whatever powers people had, these folks would try to blend into society, but sooner or later they’d get themselves in trouble in a spectacular way, and the event would get written up in the news.”

“And he could go recruit them?” Elijah asked.

“Exactly. Imagine how easy that would be, if Rob was isolated in Chicago without knowing anybody else with power, or even knowing that a group of us existed, and Isaac came to him and said, ‘I can do what you can do. You’re in trouble, but my friends and I can get you out. Come with me and we’ll be millionaires.’ ”

“But what kind of trouble?”

“That’s just it. When Holly first introduced me to Rob and said she wanted to go out with him, I researched him. He did graduate from high school and the police academy in Chicago, and he did work for a short time as a Chicago cop. He does work for the Clark County Sheriff, and he hasn’t gotten in any trouble that I could find.”

“Google ‘Chicago subway station bomb.’ ”

“Okay,” she said dubiously, her fingers flying across her laptop keyboard again. “You think he blew up a Chicago subway station?”

“I think he saved a Chicago subway station. The police caught the terrorist. The terrorist wouldn’t tell them where the bomb was. Rob read his mind.”

She whacked a key with finality. “Oh, shit, you’re right. See?” She turned the keyboard toward Elijah so he could view the screen, which was difficult while he was negotiating the winding road up the mountain. “No, wait.” Disgusted with herself all over again, she remembered that his brain registered whatever she was reading.

She scanned the online news article about a bomb that had been set by terrorists to go off during rush hour in a crowded downtown station. An unnamed police officer had saved countless commuters by locating the bomb at the last minute, as if by magic. At the time of publication, the police department had no coherent information about how the police officer had made this discovery.

“I’ll bet his bosses started to get suspicious,” Kaylee said out loud to Elijah. “They had no evidence to tie Rob to the terrorists, but he couldn’t tell them how he’d known where the bomb was. Just when they started to turn up the heat on him, Isaac appeared to save him from himself. Isaac and the rest of the Res banded together to help get Rob a job as a sheriff’s deputy down here, despite his being blackballed in Chicago. That was smart, because we all assumed he was a good guy until it was too late, and cops naturally have access to all sorts of information that the rest of us don’t.