Levitating Las Vegas(37)
Author: Jennifer Echols

This was crazy—and not your run-of-the-mill mental adolescent dysfunction crazy, either, but Las Vegas, midnight interstate, telekinetic showgirl, mind-reading carpenter crazy. He wasn’t sure anymore how long he could withstand this hell he’d constructed for himself. The drive to Icarus was ten hours.

The gun made its biggest movement yet, its hilt clearing his jeans, spilling out of his pocket completely. As he felt this, he also sensed Holly seeing her chance. He put one hand down to grab for the gun, his reflexes slowed and his hand missing its target because his eyes were on the traffic and his head was too full of everything.

Fuck. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the blur of bright spangles and brown hair as she swept up the gun and pointed it at him, plastering her slim body against the passenger door, as far away from him as possible. “Pull over and let me out,” she gasped, big dark eyes hard under false lashes.

Shit, shit, shit. He was the shittiest kidnapper ever. But not that shitty. “I’m not going to let you out on the side of the interstate. Not while you’re wearing that. And the gun isn’t loaded.”

She didn’t believe him. He was telling her that to convince her to put the gun down. She leveled it at his ear. Her finger twitched on the trigger.

“Aim it away from me if you don’t know how to work it.” Keeping one hand on the wheel, he used the other to point the gun away from both of them and off the road, toward the tops of the palm trees peeking from behind the concrete barrier—but her hands were shaking, as was her mind, and his, so he turned his attention back to the traffic before he got completely disoriented.

“We’re going to Icarus, Colorado,” he told her. “That’s where they make Mentafixol. I can’t go through life crazy like this. My pills have gone missing for almost a week now, and nobody seems to be able or willing to do anything about it. I’m driving to Colorado to get some before I land in an institution. And I’m taking you with me, because without Mentafixol, tomorrow you’ll be just as crazy as I am now. I don’t want that to happen to you, Holly. I don’t want you to have to go through what I’m going through. I want to get medicine for you and for me. And at the very least, we can go crazy out of the state, where you’re less likely to sabotage your own publicity. You want to start your own magician act soon, right?”

“Is that all?” she shrieked. “Is that all you want from me?”

He glanced over at her. Her dark eyes were wild, and the Strip glowed through the window, shining in her curls. The enormous billboard advertising her dad’s magic act with her likeness crept up behind her and flashed past her shoulders.

She was relieved Elijah didn’t plan to kill her. She was touched that he said he wanted to save her. But she didn’t trust him. And there was something dark and ugly and twisted in her head too, something very unbecoming a pretty twenty-one-year-old innocent: disappointment. I’m driving to Colorado to get some echoed in her mind.

“Is that all you wanted?” she repeated.

He eyed her, careful not to let his glance dip to her cle**age. He honestly didn’t know what to say.

“Then why did you threaten me with a gun on a freaking public bus?” she demanded, shaking the gun for emphasis.

“It’s not loaded, but it’s not a toy. Put it in the glove compartment.”

She punched the button on the dashboard in front of her, dropped the gun out of sight behind the folded maps, blinked at the box of bullets, and slammed the glove compartment shut.

He cringed. Rob blowing a hole in the ceiling had left him gun-shy for a lifetime.

Then Holly turned back to Elijah expectantly and folded her arms across her br**sts again, showing him not her discomfort but her anger.

“I wanted you to come with me,” he said, “but I needed enough time to explain it to you. I knew I wouldn’t get the chance. I couldn’t risk people overhearing us in the casino or on the bus when we’ve got one foot in the loony bin already.”

“We?” she demanded. “That would be you. You’re the one who pointed a gun at me and kidnapped me. Do you realize you did something crazy to prevent yourself from being crazy?”

“The irony of this does not escape me.” Neither did the fact that he never would have attempted such a stunt if not for his imagined superpower.

His comment made his case. She recognized this Elijah as the one she’d bantered with on the bus, and she relaxed a little. “You really think they have our medicine up there?”

“We’ll know in ten hours. When’s the last time you went on a road trip to save your own sanity? It’ll be fun.”

She laughed and quickly pressed her lips together to quell it. Looking around the car, she asked, “Is Shane okay?”

Elijah nodded. “I didn’t steal his car. He knows where we’re going.” Then, because his stomach still rumbled sympathetically with hers, he reached behind his seat with one hand, fished around for the small cooler, and placed it on her bare thighs.

“What’s this?” she asked. “If it’s Shane’s head, I’m going to be really mad at you.”

“Dinner,” Elijah said.

She unzipped the top of the cooler. His mouth watered with hers, and his brain sensed the aromas of garlic and ginger as she opened the plastic container of Chinese food. Or maybe he actually smelled the food from across the car. He couldn’t tell his sensations and hers apart. She dug in with the plastic fork he’d brought. The flavors exploded in his mind.

“Where’d you get this?” she squealed her approval with her mouth full.

“I made it,” he said.

She drew an imaginary chart in her head and titled it Elijah. Under Pro she wrote Great cook and Funny and, after a pause, So hot. Under Con she scribbled, COMPLETE NUTCASE. She laughed at herself, both in her mind and in real life beside him in the car, a warm, husky sound through a savory mouthful.

She ate. He drove, the lights of Vegas melting back into the scrubby desert from which they’d sprung in the 1940s, the bare mountains in the distance outlined by starlight, and he listened to her thoughts. She would go with him to Icarus. He was right: Better that they both went off their rockers outside Vegas, where she was less likely to be recognized. She didn’t want to do something crazy and ruin her chances at her own magic act. By the time they made it back to town or called Kaylee to rescue them, surely the pharmacy would have their medicine, and these dark days would be over.