Levitating Las Vegas(61)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Elijah was having trouble himself. The feel of the cards, the solid clicking of the chips, the scents of his mother’s perfume and lunch grilling in a restaurant nearby—all this took him back to his earliest memory. He was two years old, seated at the kitchen table in their apartment, eating a grilled cheese sandwich, watching cartoons on TV, and playing blackjack with his mother. He hadn’t been able to add, and he found the game repetitive and boring.

But this memory triggered his mother’s own memory, which flooded his mind with an explanation. She’d been practicing. She needed to read the minds of distracted customers while dealing a seamless game. She’d learned on Elijah, playing blackjack with him while tasting his sandwich through his toddler’s tongue and watching cartoons through his eyes.

She motioned to him to keep the game going.

As he split his pair and moved his money, he wondered why he suddenly felt he’d been punched in the stomach, like the throbbing pain in the back of his head wasn’t bad enough.

“It’s the smell,” she said almost as clearly as if her mouth had moved. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the restaurant. “You need to eat something. You’ve got four times the metabolism you had on Mentafixol. What’s the last thing you ate? Dinner last night in Colorado? Jeez, no wonder.” The house had beat both Elijah and the man in scrubs. She raked up the cards and chips. “Try it. Say something to me.”

Elijah intended to, but the room was full of distractions—sights, sounds, smells, and now the musings of the man in scrubs, who thought Elijah’s mother was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. Nearly every morning when he got off graveyard shift as a nurse at the hospital, he came here just so he could sit at her table and watch the way her long black hair caught in the buttons on her uniform.

She gathered her hair in a ponytail and smoothed it behind her shoulders. “All in a day’s work, honey,” she said silently to Elijah. “Go ahead.”

Elijah looked down at his cards without seeing them. He asked as clearly as he could, “Who, besides you?”

“Mr. Diamond is a mind-reader,” she said. “Then there’s Holly’s father, obviously. A levitator, but a lot weaker than her, because he’s a man and he’s older. And of course Kaylee. She’s a very strong mind changer at the height of her power, which is why she’s Mr. Diamond’s second-in-command. A lot of her security guards, but that’s just what I’ve learned from reading them. Mr. Diamond knows who everybody is because he approves all the hires, but he keeps that information to himself for everyone’s protection. We don’t have potlucks and socialize together on the weekend. It’s not safe.”

“Shane?” Elijah asked.

“I never heard that he was. But you’ll run into more people in Vegas with power, no doubt. Vegas attracts us because we can get jobs here. And because we tend to seek each other out, feed off each other’s energy.”

Elijah felt that energy now. He could hardly sense the cards between his fingers because of his skin tingling as he read his mom’s mind. Her own skin tingled with the same energy, and he felt that too—an endless feedback loop. If she’d come within fifteen feet of him before he left for Icarus, he would have sensed this instantly. That must be why she’d left town.

“Which reminds me,” she said inside his head. “How was your trip?”

He looked down at the new cards his mom had dealt him and went through the motions of doubling down. If he’d ever had girl troubles—which he hadn’t, because he’d steered clear of girls altogether—he wouldn’t have discussed them with his mom. This was different. This was Holly.

And the trouble between him and Holly boiled down to the very essence of who they were—though this wasn’t who they’d been last week, or even yesterday. Now his heart sped up at the thought of what he’d almost had with her, and what he’d thrown in the garbage. She’d scared him, but he’d forced her into it by scaring her first.

Now he worried about her. He wondered where she was. He’d hoped when he walked in the front door of the casino, he’d find her hovering above the high-limit slots, pouring Singapore Slings with no hands for everyone in the vast room.

His mom winced and put her finger to her temple. “That’s real complicated, hon, and I’m not that good a reader.” She nodded at his hand, reminding him to signal his bet. “I don’t know what you did to that girl, but I can imagine. Be more careful with her. Both of you are at the height of your powers and very dangerous to the rest of us. We’d planned to keep you on Mentafixol until you were thirty, but Kaylee took you off to help protect us from the Res.”

“The Res?” Elijah sat up straight on his stool. All his life when his mom had talked about the Res Res Res blah blah blah, she hadn’t meant a Native American reservation at all. Elijah and his mom weren’t Native American, either.

“No, we’re not Native American,” his mother said. “Why would you think that?”

“You have black hair.”

“I’m thirty-nine, Elijah. I dye it.”

His gaze shifted to her earrings. “You wear a lot of turquoise.”

“Well, yeah, you’ve got me there. I guess I do play it up. Tourists tip better if you have a little mystique about you.” She winked at the nurse, who smiled moonily back at her as she collected his cards and his bet.

“Reading minds wasn’t adequate?”

“It wouldn’t do me any good, dealing blackjack,” his mom pointed out. “The casino doesn’t want to cheat people, anyway. Our percent payback to customers is set by law. We could change the minds of the gaming commission, I suppose, but we make enough money without doing that, and we don’t want to get a bad rep with the gamblers. I’m just here to catch cheats and protect us all from troublemakers. Like the folks from the Res who just wandered through here, looking for you.”

Elijah leaned forward. “They want me?”

She shook her head, then realized what she’d done. She moved her head in a circle to pop her neck as if that’s what she’d intended all along, her hair zigzagging behind her shoulders with the motion. “A male mind reader—I doubt they’d be that stupid,” she said inside his brain. “A really powerful mind reader can get out from under a mind changer’s power if she lets up for even a second. That’s why a mind reader is always at the top of the heap at the Res. He wins the game of rock-paper-scissors.” She cocked her head to one side, considering him, turquoise earrings swinging. “No, they probably want you so they can get to Holly.”