Levitating Las Vegas Page 18

  “So, what are we saying?” He opened the box and took out one of four plastic bottles. He peeled the lid off the bottle and tipped the contents into his hand. Golden pills poured out and spilled over each other. He grabbed a handful and threw them full force off the cliff. They caught the setting sunlight as they fell, each one a potential shining moment of his high school and college years and Holly’s, thrown away under the heavy influence of a drug and their parents and the machinations of some mysterious power struggle at the casino that they didn’t understand. He watched the glinting pills bounce against the rocks and fall until they disappeared into the canyon below.

  He turned back to her. “Are we ready to get rid of all of these? Are we sure?”

  “I don’t want to live this way.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him, and now he wondered what she’d been thinking in the two minutes he’d sat beyond range of her. He’d stayed in the kitchen too long during a TV commercial break, and now he’d missed a major plot point in the show. He rose and shifted closer to her again, into her thoughts.

  With her mind she lifted the remaining three bottles out of the box. Even after her little displays over the past few hours, Elijah was amazed at the bottles shedding their tops in concert and pouring forth their pills of their own accord. Hundreds of golden pills united in a single stream and raced toward Holly’s head, where they formed a moving, shining halo over her hair.

  “But you know what?” she said. “Even if this were all an illusion, I don’t think I could go back.” She would rather die than go back, she thought as she leaned over the edge and looked down into the gorge, the halo of pills still shimmering above her.

  Elijah wasn’t sure he was reading her right. He moved even closer to her, trying to decipher her racing thoughts into one coherent line. She didn’t just mean she couldn’t go back to taking Mentafixol. She couldn’t go back to Vegas. Her parents had lied to her. Her friendship with Kaylee was a farce. The home she’d known was gone.

  She focused on the chasm in front of them. With her mind she measured the distance to the bottom. Calculated her weight—Elijah sensed that she held herself in her own hand, like measuring the heft of a rock before she threw it.

  “Don’t,” he murmured. He’d seen her manipulate small pills and bottles and a box in midair. That didn’t mean she was strong enough yet to levitate her own body.

  She stood.

  “Holly, don’t,” he said.

  She moved to the edge.

  “Don’t!”

  One second she was there, pointing her toes as if readying herself for her dismount from some Olympic gymnastics event, and then she stepped out, and then she was gone.

  “Holly!”

  His voice echoed around the rocks. He didn’t even realize he’d moved, but gradually he understood he must have rushed forward and tried to grab her in that last moment. His belly was hot on a sun-washed boulder. His arms stung from scrapes against the rocks. He still reached out for her, grasping at any chance he could still save her—never mind how he would avoid going over the cliff with her. She was gone. He couldn’t even see her in the deep, dry chasm. Oh, God, she couldn’t be gone?

  “Holly!” he shouted once more. Then he held his breath, wishing his God damned heart would stop beating in his ears so he could listen for her. He didn’t hear her scream or cry or thud below. She’d simply vanished.

  Lithe wisps of trees hung from the walls of the cliff. He imagined her catching a branch as she went down, saving herself. He could cling to hope. Even if she was still alive, she was too far away for him to read her mind. But he could run to Shane’s car and drive around the lip of the canyon until he found a road downward. He could make his way back to the place where she must have landed. He would call the police or whatever they had up here in the wilderness—Mounties—to help him.

  As he pulled back to run for the phone in his car, he realized just how precarious his position was. To follow the trajectory of her fall, he’d scrabbled way out on a precipice and down the gentle slope it made before its sheer drop. He was clinging to the cliff face, and one false move would send him plunging after her. She would never get help then, if she was still alive to need it. He clung tighter to the rocks under his hands, sliding carefully backward.

  Holly hovered inches above the sandy bottom of the canyon. Each grain of sand was a different color—red, orange, pink, white, yellow, even green and blue and purple—dislodged in the last million years from different strata in the vast mountains. The grains gleamed like jewels in the evening sun. A black ant clambered among them, oblivious to their beauty, headed somewhere important.

  And so Holly was glad she’d stopped herself at the last moment from hitting the canyon floor. Her parents had betrayed her, her best friend Kaylee had betrayed her, she’d been lied to and deprived of her real life for the past seven years. But here was this ant, navigating his own mountains on a gorgeous summer day, the longest day of the year. The world went on without Holly, and when she stepped outside her own personal hell and looked around, she knew the world was worth staying for, even if she was alone.

  She took a cleansing breath and assumed a tree position she’d learned in the college yoga class she’d signed up for on her own, to calm herself before the stress of the ballet class her mom insisted on. She placed her hands to her heart’s center, one leg folded up, the other pointed down. Even as she hovered in midair, she could just brush the surface of the sand with the toe of her shoe. She unfurled her hair in a semicircle around her head.

  She rose slowly through the canyon as if riding in a glass elevator, enjoying the view. The mountain changed from white to purple to pink as she lifted herself. The foliage clinging desperately to the rock walls changed species with the elevation. An eagle soared next to her, perhaps alarmed or confused by her presence but more likely going about her own business of being an eagle. That too was worth living for.

  And then she saw Elijah peering anxiously over the edge of the canyon where she’d jumped. His fingers were white with pressure on the red rocks.

  Her heart went out to him. “Oh, God, Elijah, I’m sorry.” She landed next to him on the tilted rock, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back from the edge to safety with her, onto the boulders where they’d sat before. “I didn’t even think about how it would look to you. I was thinking about myself.”

  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 betraye
d 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.