Totally Spellbound (34 page)

In fact, she said there was an
entrance to Faerie inside.

She also said Megan would have to work
hard to ignore it.

Megan was working hard to ignore a lot
of things, mostly the feeling that she probably should have
listened to Rob. He had been afraid for her because of abilities
she hadn’t completely understood. He had also been afraid for her
because she was getting in over her head.

And it wasn’t until she saw that
run-down casino with the ratty cars in its parking lot, that she
sensed he wasn’t overreacting.

Still, she had Kyle on her side. Kyle,
and Zoe, and the Fates. Apparently they had set up some kind of
command system. Zoe had enhanced Kyle’s mind-reading ability to
pick up any signal from Megan, although she had to be really
specific about it. They had given her instructions—all five of them
had (well, the Fates probably counted as one person in this case,
since their instructions were broken down into parts)—and had made
her repeat those instructions back to them.

She had even
practiced a little. Enough that Kyle frowned at her and said,
“I
heard
you, Aunt
Meg.”

A little bit of petty revenge for that
moment in Rob’s office, where Kyle had broadcast to her.

Still, she was very much
on her own, and she had been instructed not to panic when the
Faeries noticed her. The only time she really needed to call for
help was if they tried to take her to Faerie or if she felt
physically threatened.

Otherwise, she was to wait
until someone came to get her or until dawn, whichever was sooner.
No one had quite figured out how she would know when dawn was from
the inside of the Faerie casino, so they tried one small
trick.

They magicked her watch,
protecting it from the Faerie time manipulation. The Fates believed
the magic was too small for the Faeries to notice, and Zoe believed
Megan could explain it all by simply saying she had purchased the
watch at an odds ’n ends store in North Vegas. Apparently, a place
there did sell magical items to the non-magical. The Faeries often
stashed things there so that they could trace particular
marks.

Finally the hands on her
magicked watch showed 9 p.m. She started the car and drove out of
the parking lot, heading down the street to the Faerie
casino.

Her stomach clenched.

Zoe had tried to explain
this to her: that the Faeries had had casinos here since Vegas was
founded. Time was irrelevant to them (although the Fates argued
that it simply moved differently for them) so they didn’t notice
that their place was out of date.

Zoe actually believed that
the Faeries kept the casino out of date on purpose, to capture the
gambling addicts and the long-timers, not to attract tourists. The
Faeries were pure businessmen through and through, according to the
Fates, and maybe part of a mob, according to Zoe.

All Megan learned was that she had to
watch her own back.

With people who had more magic than
she could imagine, and had (according to Rob) no emotions at
all.

But if that were true, how
had one of them become friends with Zoe? Was she that inattentive
to the niceties of emotion? Was that why she’d been attracted to
Travers?

(Which wasn’t really fair on Megan’s
part. Travers had emotions—a lot of them—but he usually tamped them
down. Although he wasn’t doing that much this week.)

She made herself take
several deep breaths. She drove past several darkened
buildings—most of them closed- down casinos, getting ready for
demolition. Zoe had mentioned that this area was the next one up
for renovation, and Megan could see why.

This far out on the old highway to
Boulder City, ghosts of the past remained. Old eateries,
warehouses, and empty lots where important places once stood
brought back a time when this was one of the main drags of the
Vegas area.

Now it felt creepy and deserted, the
kind of place she wouldn’t go alone in her own town of L.A., let
alone here.

But she couldn’t abandon
the mission; she was the distraction. Although she wasn’t sure how
just walking into a casino, even one run by Faeries, would make a
big enough distraction so that the men could steal the spinning
wheel.

They all assured her it would
work.

So she was going to try
it, even though she was more nervous than she had ever been in her
life.

She pulled into the
parking lot of the casino. The
E
s on the
Craps, Slots and Beer
sign were
starting to go out. The neon crackled and faded in and out, sending
weird red light across this part of the parking
lot.

For the life of her, she couldn’t see
any other sign—not even one that used to say the name of the
casino. She had hoped to prove Zoe wrong about that, but there was
nothing.

Beer cans and old
cigarette wrappers littered the parking lot. The front page of
the
Las Vegas Sun
blew across the concrete, even though she didn’t feel much of
a wind.

The air smelled faintly of smoke and
stale beer. If it was this bad out here, how bad would it be
inside?

She hurried across the cracked
sidewalk and pulled open the double glass doors—no name on those
either. The place was just as dark inside as it was out. In fact,
the level of light seemed about the same—red and blue and yellow
neon, coming from slot machines so old they looked like they
belonged in a 1950s movie.

The air smelled so strongly of
cigarette smoke, she had a hunch it would take fifteen showers over
five days to get the stench off her skin just from this momentary
contact. Everyone inside the casino—all of whom looked “mortal” to
her—was smoking, from the elderly man who sat at the corner slot
machine to the woman beside him who had an oxygen tank on wheels
and breathing tubes in her nose.

Megan resisted the urge to
cough. So far, no one had noticed her. She had thought she’d be
rushed by Faeries. But she hadn’t seen a one.

Was that a bad sign?

She wished she had someone to
ask.

The low ceilings
held the smoke down and made the
ka-ching!
ka-ching!
of the coins falling into the
metal trays seem even louder. The slot machines here were truly one
armed bandits, with the lever that the gambler had to pull. A few
of the gamblers looked like they’d been attached to the machines in
1966 and were being kept alive by the same electricity that kept
the machines going.

Megan kept walking. Her
breath was coming in short gasps, but she couldn’t tell if that was
from the smoke or from her nervousness. She was glad that Faeries
didn’t have empaths—someone like her would be able to sense her
fear from miles away.

She passed craps tables that were
mostly empty except for a croupier and two other employees all
watching one or two players. In a room to the side, ten people
played poker, and judging by the stack of chips that each had in
front of them, the game had been going on forever, with no end in
sight.

Megan swallowed, feeling nerves churn
her stomach. She followed her wounded nose to the buffet, where a
beef roast looked like it had been glued to the tray five weeks
before. Next to it, a congealed white gravy mound pretended to be
some kind of chicken, and beside that, pork so dried that it could
have served as shoe leather rounded out the “meat” portion of the
serving area.

Nonetheless, she took a
table as instructed. A greasy menu stuck into one of those metal
holders informed her that the buffet was $3.95, and All-U-Can-Eat
(which, judging by the food, would be exactly none). But she was
supposed to buy something and pick at it while she waited to
attract someone’s attention.

Two little old ladies with hair as
blue as the air sat two tables down, waving cigarettes as they
spoke to each other. A few more tables away, an elderly man ate
scrambled eggs covered in ketchup. The only person near Megan’s age
was an obese young man who hunched over a cup of coffee as if he
didn’t have a dime to his name.

She got up, grabbed a chipped white
plate off the stack, and proceeded to fill it up with beet salad,
tuna casserole, and old-fashioned macaroni and cheese, the only
things on the buffet that looked halfway agreeable.

The dessert section had
JELL-O filled with lime slices, which she believed was
indestructible, and chocolate pudding which she would have thought
was indestructible, until she saw the thick skins on the
surface.

Still, she took one JELL-O
and one pudding, poured a cup of coffee from the pot, and headed
back to her table. A keno runner (invisible, apparently) had left a
keno card next to her napkin, but other than that, Megan had seen
no sign of any other employees, who Zoe had assured her were all
Faeries.

Was Zoe wrong? Someone had mentioned
that things changed hourly in Faerie. Maybe they didn’t own this
place any more.

Megan slipped into her chair, looked
at the unappetizing food, and hoped Rob was all right.

She hadn’t been told exactly what his
part of the plan was—in case she was “compromised” (whatever that
meant [and she certainly didn’t want to speculate])—so she had no
idea what he was doing.

Except going for the wheel.

With the help of her
accountant brother and the big, sensitive man known as Little
John.

The fact that the main
entrance to Faerie was near the Mirage seemed appropriate to Rob.
Faeries probably liked the irony: they had to create a mirage to
hide the entrance.

What surprised him was how close the
entrance was to that fake volcano that pretended to spew lava every
half hour. The entrance was right near the volcano’s base, which
took some work getting to, because the Mirage’s security was pretty
tight.

Travers was surprised that the
entrance had been moved. Apparently, the night before, the entrance
had been several yards away in a concrete block of the
sidewalk.

But the Faeries were well
known for moving the entrance to their little hideaway, and since
they figured out that Zoe had been in Faerie uninvited, they
probably changed all the entrances.

This one was still surprisingly close
to where it had been before.

John had wanted to use an
invisibility spell to get them near the volcano’s base, but Rob
wouldn’t let him. Mage magic was like a beacon to the Faeries, and
using it this close could alert them to something going
on.

So Rob and his team did it the
old-fashioned way: they snuck behind tourists and guards, and
crawled part of the distance on their bellies.

It felt the good old days.

Rob loved that.

John lifted part of the fake lava rock
to reveal a hole the size of the door to Rob’s office. The entrance
to Faerie beckoned.

“If you’re going to back out,” Rob
whispered to the other two, “the time is now.”

John grinned at him, revealing
startling white teeth. Rob wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to his
friend looking like a troll on stilts. “I’m in.”

“I’m an old hand at this,” Travers
said, and Rob would have believed him if it weren’t for the tremor
in his voice.

“All right,” Rob said. “John first,
Travers second, and I’ll bring up the rear.”

John slipped into the door feet first
and waved as he disappeared. Travers took a deep breath, like a man
about to dive into an ocean, and then slide in behind
John.

Rob made sure no one was watching,
grabbed the edge of the fake lava rock, and pulled it closed as he
went through the door. There was a small slide that just
ended.

He found himself in
midair, free-falling in the darkness.

He couldn’t hear anything except his
own breathing.

Somehow this no longer seemed like a
good idea.

He resisted the urge to
make a fist, casting some light. He let himself fall, through air
that got progressively cooler. It smelled of earth and damp—oddly
enough, given this was the desert—and mold, and he worried suddenly
that he wasn’t falling down, he was falling over into some other
part of Faerie, some part nowhere near Las Vegas.

Then he heard
voices, all of them speaking Faerie, and the
cling-cling
of slot machines, and a
strange glow appeared at his feet. It took him a moment to realize
the glow was neon.

The air got drier and stank of
cigarettes.

Then he fell into the light, landing
on a silver net and tumbling off in the middle of a casino
floor.

John and Travers already
stood to one side, looking very nervous. They were both too tall to
be in Faerie—by nearly two feet—and Travers was blond.

A Faerie woman put her
hands on Travers’ chest. “Nice to see you again, big
boy.”