Totally Spellbound (33 page)

“It would have to be powerful to do
that,” Megan said.

He nodded. “Yes, it would.”

Megan stood and stuck her hands in the
back pockets of her jeans. She paced around the living room,
wishing she had learned most of this stuff long ago. She couldn’t
help because she was so far behind on the information
scale.

“All right,” she said.
“You say that Faeries have no emotions. So I’m confused. Wouldn’t
that make me safer? Why am I in danger from them?”

“Because,” he said, “you are the
repository for many emotions. Emotion is much more powerful around
you. You’re like an enhancer. Faeries covet you.”

“Why?” she asked. “If they don’t have
it, how can I be of use to them?”

He leaned back in the chair. It was a
strange movement, not a relaxed one, but one that was supposed to
make him seem relaxed.

“Here’s what I know,” he
said. “I know of at least one empath in the past who got trapped in
Faerie. They magicked her somehow—enslaved her, the story goes—and
they would send her into the world to collect emotion so that she
could then distribute it to the Faeries.”

“Like luck,” Megan said.

“Hmm?” He blinked at her, obviously
confused.

“You said they collect luck. They
collect emotions too.”

“I guess,” Rob said.

“Do you personally know of this
empath? Or is this just a story?”

“All stories have a basis in reality,”
Rob said.

“I’m sure they do,” Megan said, not
being sure at all, “but if you’re just repeating something you
heard, then—”

“I’m not risking you!” he
snapped.

“I’m not yours to risk,” she snapped
back, and then gasped. The power behind those words had been his,
not hers. It had been his fear coming through as anger, being
reflected back at him through her.

Although she believed that
she controlled her own destiny.

“What I mean is,” she said, “should I
chose to risk my life, it’s my decision, not yours.”

“And I have to live with it,” he said,
once again deceptively calm.

She nodded.

He cursed, and she could feel real
distress behind the word.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Robin.”

He closed his eyes. “I said the same
thing to Marian. More than once.”

“And yet she was the one who died,”
Megan said.

“Oh,” he said quietly, “but I left her
first. And I did it by choice.”

Fear. Fear was an amazingly powerful
emotion, more powerful than love, if one let it be.

Rob shook his head, and closed his
eyes, so that he couldn’t see Megan. He had been so terrified of
losing Marian that he had left her first, going off to fight in the
Crusades, and then learning that no matter what he did, he couldn’t
shake how he felt about her.

Nor could he shake the
fear.

So he had gone home, only
to find that she was angry with him, and the relationship had
changed. They patched it up as best they could, but it was never
exactly the same.

And that had been his
fault.

“Robin?” Megan asked
gently.

He opened his eyes. She was studying
him.

“You know how I know you didn’t
manipulate me?” she asked.

He shook his head, wondering why she
was telling him this now.

“Because,” she said, “from
the first moment I saw you, I’ve loved you, too.”

He couldn’t respond at all—there were
no words—so he didn’t say anything.

“But what I’ve learned, in a life as a
closet empath—” and then she smiled, amused, apparently, at her own
choice of words— “is that even though emotions are powerful and can
overwhelm you, the only thing that’ll save you is hanging onto
yourself.”

He wasn’t sure he understood that. His
confusion must have shown on his face, for she crouched next to him
and took his hand.

“The only way
I
can love you,” she said
as gently as he’d ever heard her speak, “is for there to be an ‘I’
in the first place.”

She was right. He knew
that. He had given up everything for Marian after he had come back,
and it hadn’t made things better. They were all right, but they had
never achieved that passion and perfection of the early
years.

“You want to go to Faerie, don’t you?”
he asked.

“If I can distract them so that you
can steal the wheel, why not? It doesn’t sound like I’ll
die.”

“But you could get trapped there,” he
said.

She smiled at him. “I’m in love with
Robin Hood, and wasn’t it said of him that no walls could hold him?
No prison could keep him out?”

“Of me, yes,” he said. “But not of the
people around me.”

“Didn’t you rescue everyone who’d been
captured?” she asked.

“When I was young,” he
said.

“Did anyone get captured when you were
older?”

“No,” he said, “but I’d gone up
against mere mortals. Faeries are powerful.”

“And yet my newbie brother defeated
them,” Megan said.

“He escaped them,” Rob said. “That’s a
different thing.”

She shook her head. “It seems to me
escape is all we’re discussing. And I believe it’s completely
possible.”

She did believe it, he could see it in
her eyes. She believed it with all the naïveté of a new mage. And
yet, she had an argument.

And he was reacting out of
fear.

“Can I be part of your plan to get the
wheel?” she asked quietly.

His heart—his fearful, newly reopened
heart—trembled as he said, ever so softly, “Yes.”

It felt like the old days.
Rob was at the top of his game. John liked the plan. Everyone had a
part, even the kid.

John stood still while Zoe
put the finishing touches on his disguise. Apparently no one could
enter Faerie looking like a civilian—the Faeries would encircle
them, use their magic against them, and steal whatever luck they
had.

Invisibility spells didn’t
work either, because the Faeries could track them. Sometimes they
let mages with invisibility spells go very deep into Faerie before
trapping them there and making them lose years.

Some, Zoe said, lost their
lives.

Although John hadn’t heard of it. He
stood in the middle of the giant bathroom at the back of Travers’
suite. Travers sat on the edge of the bathtub watching the entire
procedure. Rob peered into the mirror, looking at his newly
blackened hair, his upswept eyebrows, high cheekbones, and
brand-new pointed ears.

“It looks weird,” he said. “They’ll
see right through it.”

“They didn’t see through
me,” Travers said. “But a Faerie actually did mine.”

He’d been done up to look
like a Faerie in order to rescue Zoe. She had put him right just
that morning, which he reminded her as they all headed toward the
bathroom.

“If we could find Gaylord,” Zoe said,
“then we’d use him. But I think he heard that I was rescued and
went off on his own again. He does that.”

“You’re doing fine,” John said through
clenched lips. It actually hurt to have her do this magic on him.
His face was stretching, and his bones creaking.

She had insisted on doing the magic
because she’d been around Faerie her whole life (apparently, from
what Travers said, her prophecy had been about Faerie), and because
she thought that John and Robin wouldn’t “go the
distance.”

She didn’t explain that,
but John knew what she meant. There was a certain delicacy to all
Faeries that he didn’t have—he was more the linebacker,
break-a-few-heads type—and for this to work, he had to willow-out a
little.

Zoe couldn’t change his mass, but she
was moving it around some. He was actually going to get taller and
thinner, which was initially what he wanted (that Atkins diet), but
not like this.

Apparently, there were no
fat Faeries. John tried to think of a counter example and couldn’t
come up with any.

Not that he was fat. He was large,
big-boned, and strong. Fat never figured into it.

Except when he stood on his own scale,
and realized how much weight he’d put on since he’d been a young
man.

Of course, food was more
widely available now than it had been in the twelfth
century.

“Don’t smile,” Zoe said, still working
on his cheekbones. This took a delicate magic, the kind that was
almost like sculpting.

Rob looked oddly like some of the
paintings made of him centuries ago. Put him in green and add a
feather in his cap, and he’d look a little like Errol Flynn—and
John hadn’t seen any resemblance before now.

“I’m still not sure I should go back
in,” Travers said forlornly. “I’d be happier if I stayed up
here.”

“I’m lousy at math,” Rob said, “and
John’s only slightly better.”

“Who does the books for your
corporations?” Travers asked.

“A series of accountants, who never
see all of the books. It’s a checks and balances thing,” Rob said,
“since I really can’t oversee it well.”

“Sounds like a major handicap,”
Travers said.

“I’ve coped for a long time.” He
shrugged, turned around, and rested his hands on the counter,
peering at John. “You look more like an oversized
leprechaun.”

“Faith and begorrah to you too,” John
grumped.

“Stop moving,” Zoe said. “I’m almost
done.”

“The three of us have to go in,” Rob
said. “I need you to get us to that wheel as quickly as possible.
John and I’ll get it out, but again, you have to lead.”

Travers sighed. “Leaving Zoe to guard
the Fates.”

“I’m not guarding anyone,” Zoe said.
“They’re going to help me monitor.”

“Which I don’t entirely understand,”
Travers said.

“Done.” Zoe took her hands off John’s
face. It still ached, but not as badly. He looked at himself in the
mirror. He looked a lot more like the Jolly Green Giant than an
oversized leprechaun, but he wasn’t sure that was an
improvement.

“You don’t have to understand,” he
said to Travers. “Rob’s in charge. He never tells us the entire
plan.”

“Great.” Travers muttered.

Zoe smiled fondly at him. “Come up
here,” she said and pointed to the chair that John was just
vacating.

John went and sat by Rob. “Aren’t we a
pair?” Rob asked. “I’d rather wear green and smear mud on my face
than do this.”

“It’s the same idea,” John said,
hearing his jaw crack as he spoke. This was going to be a painful
few hours.

“I suppose,” Rob said.

“It’s the team that worries me too,”
John said. “Zoe doesn’t have enough firepower if we all get
trapped.”

“But she has the Fates,” Rob said.
“They know some magic tricks that we don’t.”

“And don’t, at the moment, have the
skill to execute them.”

“It’ll work,” Rob said, but he looked
worried too, and John knew why. Megan had talked him into letting
her be involved. The Fates thought that was a good idea—that was
why, they said, the adventure was happening now, because of
Megan.

But Rob didn’t want to put her at
risk.

All of them would be at
some kind of risk. John wasn’t really sure what the Faeries could
do to him, besides steal some of his magic and make him lose a few
decades but he also knew he didn’t want to find out.

“Yeouch!” Travers said. “It didn’t
hurt when Gaylord did it.”

Zoe shrugged. “He’s had more practice,
I’m sure.”

“Smuggling people into Faerie? I don’t
think so.”

John rubbed his hands over his weirdly
shaped face. “How long do you think this’ll take us?” he asked Rob
softly.

“Too long,” Rob said. “That’s my
biggest worry—that it’ll take much too long.”

Megan sat nervously in her car,
staring at the luminous dial on her watch. Seconds sure took a long
time to pass when she tracked each and every one of
them.

She was three parking lots
away from her target, an unnamed casino on the Boulder Highway. She
had driven by the place just to make sure she was in the right
area, and, judging by the description Zoe had given her, she
was.

Apparently the
ancient casino with the neon sign that said
Craps, Slots and Beer
was the
Faeries’ main casino in Vegas. Megan found that hard to believe,
particularly with all the fancy casinos around, but Zoe
insisted.