Totally Spellbound (25 page)

Zoe just stared at her. Travers let
his arms drop. He sighed and leaned forward on the couch, then
shook his head.

“You can take the psychologist out of
her practice,” he said softly, “but you can’t take the practice out
of the psychologist.”

“I don’t think switching the cliché
really works,” Megan said, “but you made your point. And you’re
wrong. I wasn’t being intrusive. Those girls need help.”

“Those girls have more power than all
of us combined,” Zoe said quietly.

“Power means
nothing,” Megan said. “I’ve counseled teenagers who’ve had more
money
and
more
power than I have, but that still didn’t stop them from being
screwed up. These girls need a lot more than a pile of magic books
and some instructions on running the world. They need someone to
care for them."

“You said you’d do that?” Travers
asked slowly.

“I said we’d help them get out of that
job,” Megan said. They were still staring at her. She was glad she
couldn’t see Rob’s face. She already knew how he felt about this.
“I figured we can do it since we know where the real Fates
are.”

“She did get the Interims to agree to
step down if the real Fates come back,” Rob said, “but whether they
do that or not remains to be seen.”

“You think they won’t,”
Zoe said. It didn’t take a psychologist to infer that, considering
his tone.

Travers had his hands stuck through
his hair. He was still shaking his head. “You know, sometimes I
think I’m going to wake up and find myself in front of my computer,
doing Mrs. Jacobson’s taxes. And sometimes, I think I’d be happy
doing just that.”

Zoe gave him a sideways look. “Having
second thoughts?”

He grinned up at her. “Not after this
afternoon.”

It was Megan’s turn to moan out loud.
“Too much information.”

“It’s not even close to the
information you gave me earlier,” Travers said.

“I can give you more,” Megan
said.

“Enough!” Rob had a spectacular
bellow. It shook his body and Megan’s. “We have to resolve this.
Megan did make promises to the Interim Fates and, it seems, Kyle
has made promises to the Fates. We all will come to the attention
of Zeus sooner or later—he’s not as dumb as his daughters when it
comes to tracking magic—and so I suggest we do
something.”

“We’ve already done something,” Zoe
said. “It’s in your ballpark now, at least according to the
Fates.”

“What is?” Megan asked, not sure she
really wanted to know.

“This entire scheme—with your lovely,
added Zeusy fillip—can’t go any farther until the Fates have that
wheel. It’s the only way they can reclaim their magic without the
help of the Powers That Be,” Zoe said.

“They can’t ask the Powers That Be,”
Travers said to Megan, “because Zeus is one of those
Powers.”

Megan nodded. “I got that from Rob’s
paranoid reaction.”

Rob’s hand left her shoulder. “I’m not
paranoid. I’m just practical.”

“This from a man who tried to take on
the Fates,” Megan said.

“I was dumb,” he said, “and
lucky.”

She sighed. Then she turned to Zoe and
Travers. “Why can’t you guys get the wheel?”

“Because,” Zoe said, “the Fates took
us off the case.”

“So we’ll put you back on.”

Travers stood, put his arm around Zoe,
and pulled her close. “She nearly died in Faerie,” he said. “I’m
not letting her go back.”

“As if he has any say,” Zoe said. “But
I do agree with him. I’m not going back inside, even if the Fates
wanted me to.”

“So you’re going to send us?” Megan
asked.

“Actually,” Zoe said, “the Fates only
wanted Robin.”

Rob nodded. “So then it’s Robin
they’ll get.”

Rob’s kind of thievery wasn’t really
suited to a heist. He’d never done one. He’d started out as a
highwayman, and then had become a master con artist.

And he did continue along his old
lines. He still found ways to take from the rich and give to the
poor.

Only now, he made the rich
believe they were going to get a good return on that investment. Of
course, he never promised when that return would happen—or even if
it would happen. And he made certain that the rich knew they were
investors in high-risk businesses. Most of the time, that was all
he had to say.

The rest of the
time, he threatened to expose his investors who wanted to pull
out.
We’re building hospitals in the
poorest countries in the world,
he would
say.
Do you really want the press to hear
that you believe building hospitals isn’t a worthwhile
investment?

He had a dozen variations on that
theme, and it always, always brought compliance from his rich
investors. A few of the savvy ones never invested with him again,
but the rest had no idea what they were getting into.

Legal highway robbery.
When he’d come up with this at the turn of the last century (and
somehow managed to survive the U.S. stock market crash in ’29), he
had been proud of himself. It had gotten rid of the risk, at least
for him, and had enabled him to keep the haves from completely
breaking the backs of the have-nots.

But this—stealing something from
someone else, something physical—he hadn’t done that in more than a
hundred and fifty years.

“I suppose,” he said softly, “there’s
no way to get this wheel out of Faerie.”

He was thinking of some sort of
broad-daylight truck hijacking or a spinning-wheel snatch in the
middle of the Vegas strip.

But Zoe shook her head. She reached
into what passed for a pocket in her skin-tight leather pants, and
removed a piece of paper.

The paper glittered with
magic.

“I have a map of Faerie,” she
said.

He whistled.

“We have to be very careful with it,”
she said, “because it has its own magic. If we touch it too much,
someone’s going to know what we’re doing.”

“Gotcha.” He’d seen maps like that
before. Usually, he tried to stay away from them. It’d been
relatively easy, since he’d never been the kind of thief looking
for real treasure.

He’d always just wanted to equalize
the playing field between those with power and those
without.

Zoe held the map gingerly between her
thumb and forefinger as she walked into the dining room. Rob
followed her, cinching his robe tighter. He would rather have spent
the afternoon with Megan, but his conscience had gotten in the
way.

His conscience and his
concern about Zeus. Zeus’ punishments were legendary: this was a
man who had destroyed his own father, and who had taken true
heroes, like Hercules, and made them into slaves. He was the one
who had come up with the whole
Sisyphus-pushing-a-rock-uphill-for-eternity thing, and who had once
decided that mortals were so wicked, he had to flood the Earth to
rid the world of them. (Fortunately that hadn’t worked.)

And that was long before
Rob’s time. He’d tried hard not to pay attention to the things that
Zeus had done since. They were equally icky, but a lot more
covert.

Megan stayed at Rob’s side until they
reached Travers. Travers stood and glared at his sister.

“I don’t think this should be clothing
optional,” Travers said.

“You don’t want me to hear this,”
Megan said.

“It doesn’t concern you,” he
said.

“I’m involved, thanks to you and Kyle,
and now Rob. I’m staying.” She pushed past him.

Rob grinned at Travers. “She’s not
going to listen to you.”

Travers shook his head. “Doesn’t stop
me from trying,” he said softly. Then he gave Rob a sideways smile.
“You know, it’s hell being an older brother.”

“I can only imagine,” Rob said
truthfully.

Zoe spread the map over
the entire surface of the dining room table. Lights flickered and
spun, making the entire suite seem like it was part of a
casino.

“Hey,” she said, beckoning
them, “we’ve got a world to save here.”

“Or at least a spinning wheel,” Rob
said, then sighed. How had he gotten into this? Ah, yes. A
beautiful redhead, a silly promise, and some sort of buried
nobility.

“This is amazing.” Megan had bent over
the table. The colors from the map illuminated her face. She was
bathed in light.

“Don’t touch it,” Zoe said.

“It’s hard not to,” Megan
said.

“That’s part of the
magic,” Zoe said. “It’s a Faerie map. Usually only Faeries can have
it, and then only for a short period of time.”

“How’d you get it?” Rob asked as he
reached the table.

Zoe grinned at him. “I have strange
friends in low places.”

“Some of them quite helpful.” Travers
reached Zoe’s side. He squeezed her waist and pulled her close.
“Which reminds me. Has anyone heard from Gaylord since last
night?”

Zoe shook her head. “I’m sure he’ll
show up when we least expect him.”

“Gaylord?” Rob asked.

“A friend of Zoe’s,”
Travers said. “He’s a Faerie.”

“Man,” Megan said, “I’m not sure I can
get used to that word in its old-fashioned context. It makes me
bristle.”

“Faeries make mages bristle,” Zoe
said. “Historically, we don’t get along.”

“But you get along with them?” Rob
asked, feeling odd. He had never heard of such a thing.

Zoe shrugged. “People are people.
Magic people even more so.”

“Whatever that means,” Megan said
softly.

Rob slipped his arm around her and
hugged her to him, then moved her slightly. He didn’t want her to
have any chance of touching that map.

It had sunken into the
tabletop. The colors on the map constantly changed, moving and
floating around as if tracking moving objects. Some parts of the
map had runes on it; other parts were written in Old English, a
language he’d grown up with but never learned to read well. It made
his brain hurt. A few parts of the map had directions in Celtic,
and one or two other parts had something written in the Cyrillic
alphabet.

“This thing is pretending to be old,”
he said, “but it isn’t.”

“I have no idea about its age,” Zoe
said. “I bought it from a shaman a few days ago.”

“And left it in her car last night,”
Travers said. “I’m amazed no one stole it.”

“The car was parked outside a casino,”
Zoe said to Rob. “Everyone knew better.”

“Why?” Megan asked.

“Most of the casinos lead into
Faerie,” Rob said.

Megan frowned.

Poor thing. She had to learn about the
great wide world all at once. No wonder she was getting
confused.

“This map,” Zoe said, “shows Faerie as
it is at this minute. It constantly changes. The entrances, the
exits, the location of magical items.”

Rob nodded. He’d seen a
few other maps like this, but never one of Faerie.

“You need to look up from it,” Zoe
said to Megan. “You can lose yourself in it.”

Megan looked up slowly and blinked.
“Wow. I still see a reflection across my eyes.”

“This map is really
dangerous,” Zoe said. “I’m told that its power will only last a
month, but I’m not sure of that. I do believe the warnings I got,
though. They went like this: Don’t look at it too much, or you’ll
lose time. Don’t hold it too long, or you’ll end up at a place of
the map’s choosing. And don’t try to take magic from the map, or it
might kill you. Is that clear?”

Rob shivered. Faerie magic. The most
dangerous kind. “Very.”

“No,” Megan said. “How can a map do
all that?”

“At this stage, Meg,” Travers said,
“Just accept. Believe me, it makes things a lot easier.”

“And saves us all from pink
elephants,” Zoe muttered.

“What?” Megan asked.

Zoe grinned. “Your brother was very
hard to convince about magic. We had an incident with a pink
elephant.”

“And too many five-dollar
bills,” Travers said.

“After seeing you guys this
afternoon,” Megan said, “I’m not sure I want more
information.”

“I
know
I don’t,” Rob
said.

The map showed all sorts
of warrens and tunnels. It also showed a wide expanse marked
Faerie. Entrances were all over Las Vegas, with a few in
Mississippi, one in Connecticut, and a handful more in Atlantic
City. The rest were scattered across Europe. Past Italy and Spain,
the entrances to Faerie faded out. The Middle East, Africa, Asia,
Australia, and unsurprisingly, Greece had no entrances at
all.

He couldn’t commit the map
to memory though; every time he looked at it, something
changed.