Levitating Las Vegas(55)
Author: Jennifer Echols

But Holly heard the thunk of his door locking, and she guessed what he’d tried to do. “Now that’s not funny.”

A red light caught him just then. He was afraid she really would step out of the car and escape into the concrete wilderness. So he grabbed her knee hard and pinned her to the seat with his eyes. “Let me put it to you this way. You know something about me that I don’t want other people to know, something that could be very dangerous for me. You cannot go flouncing off just because you can’t handle a little mind game.”

She met his gaze. “Let me put it to you this way.” And she thought about grabbing his throat with her power.

The light must have turned green, because horns sounded behind them and cars flowed around them. He froze, holding her gaze, afraid to move. She wasn’t touching him, even with her power, but knowing it had crossed her mind was enough to paralyze him.

She watched him, too. Her dark eyes were so big and beautiful, framed with impossible lashes and glittering green makeup. It was hard to believe she was thinking about hurting him. She didn’t want to do it but she would. Cross her again and she would. She swore she would.

She opened her door. Out of the corner of his eye, Elijah saw a car coming up behind them in that lane, about to take off the door and Holly with it. He reached out to grab her—

—but she saw it too, and stopped the other car dead. The driver cursed and turned the engine off and on. Leisurely Holly stood up in the street and reached back into Shane’s car for her purse. She slammed the door behind her.

“Where are you going?” Elijah called through the open window. It came out hoarse.

“Since you can read my mind, I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question.” She crossed in front of the car she’d halted and strode up the sidewalk, ignoring the horns honking and the catcalls.

The car she’d stopped zoomed ahead now, and the car behind him honked insistently. Elijah pulled forward into traffic. Holly had disappeared around a corner, back into the complex of vast casino buildings and flashing signs. He sat alone in the Pontiac, breathing exhaust. The driver of the car on his left was mentally tallying up all the money he’d lost at poker and racking his brain for an excuse to give his wife.

If it weren’t for the other driver’s thoughts in his head, reminding Elijah that he could read minds, he would have doubted the last thirty-six hours had happened at all.

14

Holly stomped up the sidewalk toward the casino a few blocks away. At first she was furious only with Elijah. But the farther she stomped, the angrier she got with herself for even thinking about using her power against him. In that moment in the car, she’d known he would control her completely if he could. Exactly like Rob. She’d been desperate to escape him, and she’d done what she had to do.

But as she increased the distance between them, her regrets grew. They both had magical powers, for God’s sake, and they didn’t know how to use them. They were under a lot of stress, and her feelings for him were so deep and intense and confused. But she did know one thing for certain. She was in this mess with him now because her parents had screwed up her life seven years ago.

As she walked, she passed a convenience store with summer for sale on the sidewalk out front: lawn chairs, wind chimes, big inflatable palm trees. Inside she bought one of each, giggling to herself about the evil plan she was hatching, and thankful she hadn’t come up with this idea while Elijah was close enough to read her mind. He would have tried to stop her. This spectacle would definitely blow her cover as the daughter of a fake levitator with no real power of her own.

With her purse over her shoulder, the chair under one arm, and the boxes with the wind chimes and palm tree under the other, she walked in her high heels to the service road that led between her casino and the one next door. At a drink stand on the corner, she set the boxes down, propped the chair against her leg, and bought a frozen lemonade in a tall plastic cup with a straw shaped like a roller coaster. Now she really didn’t have enough hands to carry all this, so she held the lemonade in one hand and the box of wind chimes under the other arm, and let the chair and the box with the palm tree float in the air behind her like balloons on strings. She didn’t care one bit about the attention she drew. She was, after all, headed to a magic show.

She passed only a few people on the sidewalk beside the casino’s front wing. But the second she rounded the corner and stepped onto the paved back lot, she felt the buzz of energy from the crowd gazing up at her dad. He stood on top of a pole a hundred feet in the air that he’d welded together and Holly had decorated with glittery paper. They’d done this themselves because her dad rarely wanted to call in the props team from the casino (which would have involved Elijah, she realized) for fear of giving away his secrets. Holly felt all the irony of this now that she knew her dad’s ultimate secret: his tricks weren’t tricks at all.

Time to open the curtains.

At the back, the crowd was sparse, but spectators crowded closer together the nearer she got to the makeshift plastic fence around the base of the pole. The crowd’s whispers preceded her by a few rows as they noticed the box and chair floating behind her, and they recognized her as the magician’s missing assistant. She must be part of the act! They parted for her in an inverted V. She was able to walk unobstructed all the way up to the fence. There she hooked the cup of lemonade in the air, too. With her hands she took the wind chime out of the box and handed it without ceremony to the nearest audience member to hold up for her. She could have held it up herself with her mind, but that might get complicated in a few minutes, when she got busy. She sat down in the lawn chair, crossing her legs.

With her mind she pulled the plastic palm tree out of its box. She certainly wasn’t going to sit there and blow it up with her mouth. That would smear her lipstick, and it would attract the attention of her mom, who was still busy making presentation motions near the base of the pole and hadn’t yet noticed her. She tested blowing air into the palm tree with her mind and found that it worked well: the leaf nearest the valve swelled a little. She inflated the tree the rest of the way in a few seconds—now the whole crowd murmured and pointed at her—and she set the tree down next to her chair. She reached for her cup floating in the air in front of her and sipped from the straw. She craved the sugar, but yuck!—artificial lemon flavor. It wouldn’t do to make a face, though. She was in show business. She returned the cup to the air and set her sights on her dad, seeming so precariously balanced, but in reality completely stable on top of the pole.