Totally Spellbound (29 page)

“Or perhaps it is our future,” Atropos
said, and all three Fates giggled.

Travers rolled his eyes. Rob felt that
thread of irritation grow, but Megan looked at all three of them,
her head cocked.

“Do they remind you of someone?” she
whispered.

“Thank heavens, no,” he said, not
bothering to whisper back.

She gave him an exasperated look, then
folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Zoe.

Zoe raised her eyebrows at him. “This
is for your benefit, Rob. Are you going to pay
attention?”

“Did you have a school marm somewhere
in your background?” he asked, not liking the pointed way she asked
the question.

She shook her head. “We don’t have
‘marms’ in France.”

“France?” Megan whispered.

But Rob didn’t explain it to her. He
had first met Zoe in France nearly a century ago. She had just come
into her magic, and she was quite frightened of it.

“Watch,” Zoe said, and raised a closed
fist.

Then the suite faded. The
beeps of slot machines, followed by the soft roar of conversation,
snuck into the emptiness. Then the glare of artificial lighting,
mixed with flashing signs and too much neon.

A casino.

And not just any casino: a Faerie
casino. He recognized the language around him. It was Elvish, mixed
with medieval English and Gaelic—the Faerie’s version of their own
language.

Faeries played video games, stood next
to each other and had real conversations—not the kind they had when
they were worried about mages overhearing—and something glowed in
the distance.

Signs—in English—announced concerts,
comedy shows, and the amounts in progressive slots. So,
occasionally, the Faeries brought humans down here, probably to
pick them clean of their luck.

Rob shook his head. Megan had grabbed
his hand and was clinging to it tightly, as if she had never seen
anything like this.

And, of course, she hadn’t.

She was biting her lower lip, her eyes
as wide as a child’s.

The scene around them shifted as the
memory did—Zoe had gone toward that glow.

The floor throbbed beneath Rob’s feet,
almost as if he were in a big machine. Gradually, the Faeries
around him disappeared, although he could hear voices whispering.
He wanted to turn around, to face them, but he knew this was a
memory—and not his memory.

Zoe’s.

He couldn’t see the actual
Zoe through all the slot banks, video poker machines, and craps
tables. The slots didn’t have the usual cherries and sevens, but
instead listing of human traits—a way of betting on and
manipulating human lives.

“Why do they allow that?” Clotho
said.

Her voice was very distant.

Someone shushed her, and the illusion
rose again.

That whispering made his hair stand on
end.

Ahead of him, the machines parted,
showing a great pit. It was bathed in light, so much so that he
couldn’t see in front of it. He went forward and nearly tripped
down a flight of clear stairs.

They were lit from beneath. He glanced
up, saw himself sitting in the armchair, Megan still clinging to
his hand—and yet he was standing on the floor of the pit, all
alone.

He was actually inside Zoe’s
memory.

He wondered if the others were
too.

She had a powerful magic to do this.
He was impressed.

Then he focused on the scene before
him. His eyes had finally adjusted to the light.

The pit was round and seemed designed
for gaming. Blackjack tables stood next to craps tables, which were
near poker tables. A giant roulette wheel dominated the entire pit.
The wheel shot out red and black lights that didn’t seem to affect
the white light that glowed in the entire area.

Rob frowned and started toward the
wheel, only to be held into place. It was Zoe’s memory, not his;
Zoe’s magic, not his. He had to wait until she had gone forward—if
she had.

She hadn’t, but she had focused on the
wheel itself. And that was when he realized that it looked odd, not
like a classic roulette wheel at all. Beside it were three empty
chairs.

“They couldn’t hang around and wait to
see what was going on?” Lachesis asked, startling Rob.

“This is a memory, remember?” Atropos
said, and again someone shushed them.

Rob tuned everyone out and
stepped toward the wheel. This time, the magic/memory let him. The
wheel had spokes—no real roulette wheel did—and didn’t have
built-in slots for a ball. Those slots had been added onto the edge
as if they were an afterthought, and if he looked at them closely,
he thought he could see light through them, but he wasn’t
sure.

The base of the wheel was covered in
cloth, and then he realized that he was looking at it
wrong.

The base wasn’t covered in
cloth. That was the part of the spinning wheel where the unspun
material was before it was spun into threads. If he looked hard
enough, he would find the spindle, and the real base of the
wheel—the legs.

He tried to peer around
the wheel, but he couldn’t. The memory had frozen him in place.
Apparently Zoe hadn’t moved from here. He could only look, and not
touch, nor could he actually examine the real base or the chairs or
the platform on which the wheel rested.

He couldn’t see how to take it
out.

Still, he reached for the thing, and
it all vanished.

He had dropped Megan’s
hand, his own hand extended across the room as if he were a child,
reaching for something he couldn’t have.

Everyone was staring at
him.

He cleared his throat, brought his
hand down, and took Megan’s again. She covered it with her other
hand.

“Um,” he said, trying to think about
this entire mission, “where was that?”

“We can look on the map,” Zoe said.
“It’s supposed to show us where everything is in real
time.”

“No.” Rob blinked. His eyes still
ached from the bright light. “What I meant was…was that deep in
Faerie or near the surface? We seemed to be in a
casino.”

“We were,” Travers said, “but it’s
deep, and it’s not like those casinos on Boulder Highway that the
Faeries own. It’s an underground cavern, almost, a secret place
that took me a long time to get to.”

“I went through some kind of long
fall,” Zoe said.

“Me, too.”

That’s what Rob was afraid of. “Once
you landed, how far did you go?”

“That’s the tough part,” Zoe
said.

“Everything changes down there,”
Travers said. “The entire place works on a mathematical system—do
you know what fractals are?”

“Not a clue,” Rob said.

Travers sighed. “No one does. Am I
that weird?”

“You’re that weird, Dad,” Kyle
said.

Travers grinned at him,
then looked back at Rob. “It works on a pattern that has a
mathematical base. Like slots, only more complex. It works without
some overall mind adjusting the pattern all the time. But you have
to be able to see it.”

“Math has never been my strong suit,”
Rob said, wondering how this applied.

“That’s a problem,” Travers said.
“Because if you can see the patterns, you can go directly to the
heart of Faerie. Otherwise, you’ll get lost, and you might not come
out for years.”

“À la Rip Van Winkle,”
John said. Rob started. He hadn’t realized John was behind him. “I
always wondered how that guy could lose so much time
bowling.”

“The games weren’t as sophisticated
then,” Zoe said.

“All right, let’s assume I
can see the patterns —” which Rob doubted he could, but for the
sake of argument, he’d assume it “—then how far is the wheel from
the entrance?”

“It didn’t take me long to get there,”
Travers said, “but I was hurrying. I thought Zoe would
die.”

She gave him a fond smile.

“Time estimate?” Rob asked.

“I don’t have any,” Travers said. “I’m
not sure time exists down there.”

“It exists,” Clotho said, “but it’s
Faerie Mountain Time.”

“Which is better,” Lachesis said,
“than Faerie Midnight Time.”

“Although you’re better off,” Atropos
said, “with Faerie Solstice Time.”

“Okay,” Rob said, suppressing another
sigh. “I get it. We have no way of measuring how far the wheel is
from any exit, which, I have to admit, makes it impossible to make
a plan. Add that to the fact that thing looks too big for one man
to carry—”

“That’s the effect of the magic,”
Clotho said.

“Really, I could carry it,” Lachesis
said.

“Anyone of us could,” Atropos
said.

“When you had your magic,” Rob
said.

All three Fates shook their heads in
unison.

“Even without,” Clotho
said.

“It’s made of the lightest wood,”
Lachesis said.

“It’s designed so that even a child
can carry it,” Atropos said.

“A real child or one of those, y’know,
magical kids?” Kyle asked. He was sitting on the floor, one hand on
the obese dachshund’s back. The dog was looking into the kitchen,
tail wagging. Apparently the creature hadn’t forgotten about the
food on the counter.

Neither had Rob. His stomach was
growling.

“A real child,” Clotho said, sounding
somewhat indignant. “Magic did develop over time, you
know.”

Rob didn’t even know that. He just
assumed it came into being when the Earth came into being. Of
course, history—like math—wasn’t his strong suit, unless he’d lived
through it.

“If I don’t know how hard it is to
remove,” he said, “and I don’t know how long it’ll take me to carry
the thing out of the casino, and I don’t know if I can even lift
it, then I can’t plan this heist.”

“I think heist is the wrong word,”
Clotho said.

“We weren’t thinking of anything
armed,” Lachesis said.

“You watch too many movies,” Atropos
said.

He hardly watched any movies, except
late at night, and often on pay-per-view or Turner Classic Movies.
He usually fell asleep in the middle of whatever he was watching,
so the plots really didn’t stick with him.

But he knew better than to contradict
the Fates.

“I have to get it out of there
somehow,” he said, “and my magic isn’t enough to take on the entire
Faerie Kingdom. My theft skills weren’t really skills. They were
bullying and thuggery, and always with a political aim. I’m not
really the man for this.”

“Oh, you’re precisely the man,” Clotho
said.

“If only you’d stop denying it,”
Lachesis added.

“After all, this is political,”
Atropos said.

“Because of Zeus?” Rob
asked.

All three Fates shook their heads
again. He was getting an image of those bobble-head dolls that were
sold in stores all over Vegas, and he wasn’t sure he could keep a
straight face about it.

“Because of the Faerie Kings,” Clotho
said.

“The initial rivalry was between magic
systems,” Lachesis said.

“What’s it between now?” Megan
asked.

Rob glanced at her. She seemed
involved in the conversation and not out of her depth like she had
before. If anything, the vision of the wheel seemed to calm
her.

It had simply convinced him he had no
idea what he was doing.

“We do have to deal with Zeus, that’s
true,” Atropos said.

“He will destroy everything we’ve
worked for,” Clotho said.

“He doesn’t believe in true love,”
Lachesis said.

“And if you were married to Hera,
would you believe in it?” Atropos asked.

Clotho waved a hand. “Of course, that
relationship is not our fault.”

“We would never allow a man to marry
his sister,” Lachesis said.

“His sister?” Megan sounded
appalled.

Travers put his hand over his face.
And Kyle wrinkled his nose.

Apparently, some parts of Greek
mythology were left out of modern schooling. Among the ancient gods
and goddesses there was a lot of what would be called incest now,
which Rob found just as disgusting as he had when he first heard of
it, however many centuries ago.

“The Titans arranged that marriage,”
Atropos said, “for reasons we’ll never understand.”

“And then put Hera in charge of
married women which,” Clotho said, holding up a single finger as if
she were giving a lecture, “we never would have done.”

“The woman is supremely unhappy,”
Lachesis said. “Her husband is the most unfaithful creature ever
created, and she blames it all on the women he gets involved
with.”

“Which,” Atropos added, “is why so
many married women are bitchy, in my opinion.”