Levitating Las Vegas(50)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Finally she broke the kiss and pulled back, her breaths light and quick. “Somebody’s going to tell us we should get a room.”

He gave her an evil grin. “We have a room.” He reached beside her and slid the bill from the table. “I’ll pay this and we’ll go up.” Actually they would be visiting the gift shop next door first. He hoped that somewhere between the moccasins and bags of colorful tumbled rocks, the shop stocked condoms.

He moved slowly, listening to her mind, waiting for some sign that she’d rather not. But she wanted this. As he waited in line at the cash register and glanced backward, her mind and her dark eyes and her toes pointed together in her glittering shoes all told him that she wanted him, she’d wanted him all along, and none of her thoughts about him had been his imagination.

13

Sparkles circled Holly’s head and shoulders, the remnants of the rush she’d felt when she used her power to hold Elijah. She watched him cross the restaurant to pay their bill. He reached in the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet, his strong arm flexing with that small movement. She was astonished at her luck. She had a boyfriend who made the tiniest thing like taking out his wallet look sexy.

He glanced over his shoulder at her and grinned.

He could hear her thoughts.

She giggled to herself, giddy with anticipation and a little embarrassed that he heard. She gazed across the restaurant and out the windows to focus her attention there. Gorillas danced with cowgirls in the street. The parade and subsequent party didn’t seem particularly well planned. The road teeming with revelers wasn’t blocked off to traffic. A lone black SUV crept down the street toward the hotel with its headlights off. It never braked. It never honked. Without glancing toward it, the partiers magically parted in front of it like water before the prow of a boat.

Elijah walked out the front doors of the lobby. Sliding between two cars parked at the curb, he stepped into the street, where the SUV now idled, waiting for him.

Holly’s heart raced with panic. What was he doing?

Just when she’d grown to trust him completely, even he had betrayed her. He’d lured her to Colorado, he’d led her to believe the whole conspiracy theory about Mentafixol, and he’d kissed her to make her think they were together, when he’d been in cahoots with someone else all along.

But as she watched, she realized he wasn’t walking steadily toward the SUV. He took a few steps, slowed, stopped. Then took a few more steps, like driftwood on a beach that moved only when nudged along by a wave.

A back door of the SUV opened. A man and a woman her age stepped out—the same two Goths who’d stared up at her from the parking lot of her apartment complex four nights before. The red-haired woman gestured to the interior of the SUV. Elijah got in. The guy closed Elijah inside.

Then, in a replay of that night at her apartment, both Goths walked along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. They raked their eyes across the windows, exchanged a few words, and stared again, pausing at each table on the other side of the glass. They were looking for her.

When this had happened before, they’d seen her right away. She’d wanted to alert Kaylee, and then, when they locked eyes with her, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. This time they didn’t find her. The front of the restaurant was bright, but the table where she sat next to the back wall was in shadow. They couldn’t see her.

They had to know where she was in order to control her mind.

Scooting back her chair and jumping up, she used her power to unhook her purse strap from the arm of the opposite chair and bring it sailing across the table to her. Sequins and rhinestones clicked together as she dashed down the line of tables and out the back entrance.

Elijah had parked in the lot behind the restaurant and the hotel, on the opposite side of the building from the Goths. She’d already hit the trunk of Shane’s car, unable to stop her momentum in her showgirl shoes, when she realized Elijah had the keys.

“Fuck!” she wailed, slapping the trunk. Her hand left a clean print in the red dust coating the golden metal.

Which gave her an idea. With her mind she felt her way through the pistons inside the lock and turned the whole mechanism to the right. She jumped back, half-surprised, when the trunk popped open.

She closed the trunk. Now she worked on the door lock, popped that open, and slid behind the wheel. The ignition worked the same way. She pressed one shoe on what she assumed was the gas pedal. The engine revved higher than she thought it was supposed to, yet the car didn’t budge. Oh, she had to put it in gear first. Reverse gear. She moved the stick shift into the R position and stepped on the gas again. The engine roared and the car stayed put. She had no clue how to drive.

“Stupid parents, stupid Mentafixol!” she cried. In frustration she slammed both fists on the steering wheel and used her mind to shove the car backward.

To her astonishment, this worked. Her stomach lurched as the car skidded back a few feet. The tires squealed, dragging against the asphalt. Her skin tingled.

“All right, then.” She picked the whole car up—just an inch off the ground was all she needed—and backed it carefully out of the parking space. When she’d cleared the cars on either side, she moved the car forward, slowly at first, faster as she realized she was able to control such a huge object. Her eyes watered at the force of the headache she was giving herself, but she couldn’t let those Goths have Elijah.

She planned to speed the Pontiac around the corner of the building and onto the road through town, hoping to catch up with the SUV and force the Goths to release Elijah somehow. But a flash of light glinting on glass and metal signaled that the SUV was rounding the corner of the building. She should have known the Goths wouldn’t escape down the road with Elijah and be done with it. They wanted her too.

She considered ducking, so the Goths couldn’t lock on to her and control her mind. But before she could move, the SUV came out of its turn, and the windshield cleared the white glint of streetlights. A young man in a cowboy hat was behind the wheel. A dark-skinned woman stared at Holly from the passenger side. The man hit the gas, and the SUV leaped toward her.

Instinctively she backed the car across the lot along the length of the hotel, away from the SUV. And she realized that if she was able to do this, either the Goths wanted her to do it, or they weren’t able to control her mind after all. Maybe, like her, they could use their power only within a certain range? That would explain why the man gunned the engine again, gaining on her, trying to catch up with her.