Levitating Las Vegas Read online

  “Who, me?” Mr. Starr asked with his hands up.

  Mr. Starr watched Kaylee disappear inside the building, then turned back to Elijah, who met his steely gaze. But Elijah was beginning to think he should look away and kowtow. This was, after all, the man who had now twice caused Elijah to pass out in the blink of an eye. If Elijah and Holly were somehow able to get out of this mess and continue to date, he and Mr. Starr were going to have to talk about this before Mr. Starr caused Elijah permanent brain damage, maybe even short-circuited his mind-reading ability.

  Elijah didn’t kowtow fast enough. Mr. Starr wielded his right hand as if he would smack Elijah with it, bandage and all.

  And then he did smack Elijah—with his power, not his hand—a hard blow on the cheekbone that nearly turned Elijah’s head around, yet echoed tightly through the limo like a bitch slap.

  “I told you to stay the fuck away from my daughter!” Mr. Starr roared.

  Elijah had wondered last week whether Mr. Starr’s threats still mattered seven years later. Now he had his answer.

  “And I told you that’s bullshit,” Elijah said.

  Mr. Starr gripped Elijah’s throat, pinning him against the seat. Elijah watched blackness seep into the edges of his vision.

  The pressure lifted. He grabbed his throat protectively, panting.

  Kaylee opened the limo door. She glared at Mr. Starr. “Play nice.”

  “Fucker,” Mr. Starr said.

  “We have to get past this,” Elijah said, voice gravelly. “We can’t do this in front of the kids every Thanksgiving.”

  “Shut up!” Mr. Starr and Kaylee both told him.

  The limo was off again. Kaylee opened her laptop. She had a headache of her own from changing minds. A drop of sweat tracked from her platinum-blond hairline down the side of her face.

  “Working hard in there?” Elijah asked.

  Kaylee pulled a DVD from her pocket. “The security cameras filmed Holly coming in. Marilyn Monroe thought she’d finally hit the jackpot. She had the TV tuned to the local news, hoping Holly made a spectacle of herself. Then Marilyn was going to sell the nudie preshow.”

  Mr. Starr used his power to lift the DVD from Kaylee’s fingers. He broke it with a ping into eight perfect pie-shaped pieces. “This is your fault,” he told Elijah.

  Elijah ignored him. He turned to Kaylee. “You were at Glitterati that night. You’re the one who changed Rob’s mind when he was going to hit me. Why didn’t you stop Holly from giving me a pill? If you think I’m so bad for her, why didn’t you keep her away from me?”

  Kaylee shrugged. “I don’t think you’re so bad for her, necessarily. I think you two could be great together, if you didn’t manipulate her like a mind reader, and if she didn’t attack you like a levitator, and if you both stayed out of the Res.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs,” Mr. Starr grumbled.

  “But the night at Glitterati,” Kaylee said, “it seemed easier to give you what you wanted, in a controlled environment.”

  “That is, where you could control everybody’s mind if you had to,” Elijah said accusingly.

  “That is, where I could keep Rob from kicking your ass.”

  Elijah’s pride took over. Usually he wasn’t one to flaunt his musculature, but at some level he’d always been aware and a little turned on that he’d stolen his ex-roommate’s potential girlfriend. Besides, he’d just been slapped by Holly’s father. He said, “Rob’s not so tough.”

  “Rob is a sheriff’s deputy,” Kaylee said matter-of-factly. “He’s always packing.”

  “Maybe you should enlist his help, then,” Elijah said. “Are we the only ones in pursuit of Holly? This is seems awfully fly-by-night. Can’t you call for backup?”

  “I have a small army of security at the casino, yes,” Kaylee said, typing on her keyboard again. “But I have only a handful of people who know about powers. They have low-level power themselves, or they’re married to people with power. Folks who won’t blab. And almost every one of them is lying unconscious on the floor of your house, thanks to Holly. That is one angry girl.”

  “She’s scared,” Elijah said, throwing an accusing look at Mr. Starr.

  “She should be,” Kaylee said, “if she’s headed where we think she’s headed. The Res is just beyond Hoover Dam.”

  Elijah went cold. “Can’t you ask Mr. Diamond for help?” His voice cracked.

  “Yeah.” Mr. Starr turned to Kaylee. “Can’t you ask Mr. Diamond for help? I think this finally rises to his level of interest, don’t you?”

  “Mr. Diamond hasn’t been as involved lately,” Kaylee replied, typing.

  Elijah sat back and rested against the seat, watching the Strip fall away and the barren mountains crawl closer. The limo wound up to Boulder City, where workers had lived in the 1930s while building the dam, and down through deep red canyons. Holly must have been terrified to propel Shane’s car underneath these canyon walls. Her power sent her into a panic when it encountered anything overhead too large for her to hold up.

  All the while, Elijah monitored Kaylee’s mind, planning his escape. He would grab Holly at the dam and run away with her, somewhere neither the casino nor the Res could find them—Mexico, Europe, an island paradise. Elijah had saved a lot of money working at the casino. He hadn’t spent it all on college. Unfortunately, it was in the casino credit union, where Kaylee could erase it. But that didn’t matter. He and Holly would make more by setting her up in her own show as a magician.

  He only needed to wiggle out of Kaylee’s grip. She had changed his mind about trying this. But he knew she had changed his mind, and that was half the battle. If she let up for just a second, he was free. Provided Mr. Starr let him go, too.

  There was definitely a way out of this. There had to be.

  Finally the limo rumbled around the last curve and emerged from the crevice blasted out of the solid red rock. Elijah was riding backward, so he slid to one end of the seat and turned around to see the top of the bright dam appear out the tinted windows.

  He knew Hoover Dam was big, but it was hard to gain perspective on exactly how huge it was until he saw something familiar against it for comparison. Holly, for instance, hovering in front of the vast expanse of concrete, her shining hair whipping around her shoulders in the wind, her sequined silver minidress glinting in the setting sun.

  “She is going to be the death of the casino,” Kaylee breathed. “She’s not walking a wire! She’s not even pretending she doesn’t really have power!”

  “She must have run out of Kleenex,” Elijah said.

  “Nice form,” her dad said. “All those ballet lessons Lanie made her take are finally paying off.”

  “Is her power strong enough to fight these winds?” Elijah asked. “She may have grabbed a dress from Glitterati, but I seriously doubt she’s wearing underwear.”

  Kaylee and Mr. Starr looked at him uneasily.

  The limo rolled to a stop at the side of the road nearest Holly. They couldn’t have gone any farther if they’d tried. Holly had parked Shane’s car half blocking the right lane. Traffic edged around it on the narrow road—or stopped completely, staring at the beautiful girl walking in midair. Tourists lined the guardrails along the near side and the top of the dam. They pointed at her and snapped pictures.

  “At least she’s not carrying her purse this time.” Kaylee told Mr. Starr, “You look a bit conspicuous, Peter, but I’ll change the crowd’s mind about asking you for an autograph.” She turned to Elijah. “The Res may have beat us here. They’ll try to take her. As we walk through the crowd, tell me if you see any of the people who ambushed you in Icarus. Or anybody else you know.”

  Elijah didn’t understand what she meant, and he couldn’t get clarification by reading her mind. Flashing through her head in quick succession were the faces of his boss and all his coworkers in construction at the casino. “What do you mean, anybody else I know? Why?”

  “The Res knew you were going to Icarus,” Kaylee sa
id. “They knew you were coming back. If they’re here now, they had a good idea Holly would be here. There’s someone on the inside, listening to your minds. I just haven’t figured out yet who it is. Maybe one person who knows both you and Holly.”

  “Shane,” Elijah said.

  “Sligh?” Kaylee’s blond brows arched. Elijah felt a whirl of emotion in his chest, Kaylee’s anticipation of seeing Shane again, before she cut it off and shut Elijah out. “Not Shane,” she said in a businesslike manner, as if Shane were only an employee. “I’d know if it were Shane.” She and Mr. Starr opened their doors on opposite sides of the limo and started to step out.

  “Wait,” Elijah said.

  They stopped and watched him expectantly.

  “Since saving Holly is our ultimate goal, wouldn’t both of you work more efficiently if you let go of me?”

  “No,” they said together. They got out of the limo. Elijah stubbornly stayed put, then changed his mind. He slammed the door and followed Kaylee closely through the crowd. Her slender shoulders in a black suit stood out among the tourists in T-shirts and tank tops, on vacation at one of the man-made wonders of the world, thrilled to have stumbled upon a real-life Vegas spectacle they could tell their friends about back home. Keeping one eye on Holly still taking dainty steps in midair, Elijah listened to the thoughts of the crowd, all he could gather, until he gave himself a massive headache. But he didn’t hear anything about the Res.

  And then, as he and Kaylee and Mr. Starr rounded the corner in the sidewalk and stepped onto the dam itself, parallel with Holly’s course across the canyon, Elijah said, “There.”

  “I see her,” Kaylee said, gesturing to April, tiny on the far end of the dam, her red hair glowing. “If she wants to help the Res out, she has to be sneakier than that. Step one would be to dye that damned hair. And look, there’s Carter beside her. Don’t go any closer or April will change our minds.”

  “I didn’t mean them,” Elijah said. He nodded toward the muscular uniformed sheriff’s deputy sauntering along the guardrail, moving the crowd aside as he walked so he could get the choice view, keeping perfect pace with Holly. “I meant Rob.”

  Holly had no choice but to move forward now, placing one high heel in front of the other as gracefully as possible as she hovered hundreds of feet above the Colorado River. But she wished she’d planned this illusion more carefully. She’d forgotten how the canyon walls loomed overhead on the winding road just before the dam. She’d barely kept Shane’s car afloat while quelling her own panic until she got past that seemingly interminable section. She’d been beat when she arrived here, only to realize she had nothing to pretend to walk across.

  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.