Levitating Las Vegas(72)
Author: Jennifer Echols

In the end, it was the wind that did her in. The wind and her lack of underwear. Another gust threatened to blow her micromini straight up. She yanked her skirt down, lost her balance, and fell. Her stomach left her. Above her around the guardrail, the crowd screamed.

She was still close to the dam. She could have used her power to prop herself up at any point. But if an imaginary wire was a stretch for the crowd to believe, an imaginary safety net would be worse. She let herself fall.

The wall of the concrete dam whizzed by her. More concrete structures and the turbulent water zoomed up at her. Logically she knew she should keep falling to the bottom and pull up at the very last second to make the stunt look like a real spill. She could claim later that the fall was real, and that her survival had been miraculous.

But she’d had full power only twenty-four hours. She didn’t quite trust it—not now that she had someone to live for. Heart beating wildly, she slowed herself in midair. Not enough to stop herself and rouse the suspicions of horrified onlookers, but enough to reassure her that she could protect herself when she neared the bottom.

An unseen force pushed her downward, speeding her up again. Saving herself did not seem like a good idea. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the briefest flash of Violet the levitator and Nate the mind changer standing on the concrete wall of the dam at river level. Then she smacked hard into the cold water.

Elijah clawed his way through the crowd so he could see Holly hit the river. She came up almost immediately and seemed to be swimming as the current swept her downstream. He let out a shaky sigh of relief.

Then he heard footsteps running behind him. All the pedestrians had pressed themselves against the guardrail to watch Holly. Rob had shoved his way back through the crowd and was dashing toward his sheriff’s deputy car, which was parked just across the street from Shane’s car and pointed in the right direction to chase Holly down the river.

“Kaylee!” Elijah grabbed her elbow. “We have to get Holly before Rob does!” Even as he shouted this, the siren on Rob’s car wailed. Traffic parted for him. The car disappeared over the hill.

Mr. Starr reached them, squinting against tears. “I think I saw two of them below the dam. One of them must be a mind changer, since they got through Homeland Security. They took off down the service road in an SUV. They probably have her already.” He wailed to Kaylee, “What am I going to tell Lanie?”

Kaylee reached up to put her hand on his shoulder. “Tell her we did our best.”

“What?” Elijah barked. “You’re going to let them have her?”

“Yes,” Kaylee said with a tone and a look that told him to keep his voice down. “As I said, we’re shorthanded, and there’s nothing the three of us can do against the Res.”

“But—” Elijah stopped short. He changed his mind about arguing with Kaylee. He knew Kaylee had done this to him, but he couldn’t struggle out from under that shroud.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she told both of them. “Maybe we can figure out a way to get her out of there sooner rather than later, but we can’t go barreling in there now. They’ll take us all. We have to regroup and think about this. We need to wean more teenagers off Mentafixol to help us. That’s a week each, if their parents even allow it after they hear what happened to Holly.”

Kaylee turned to Mr. Starr. “Go back in the limo. Lanie is good at thinking up cover stories. Have her make up something to say to the local news about Holly. You suspect she’s alive, she just disappeared like a good magician’s daughter, and you have every confidence she’ll reappear. Something that will dissuade the police from dragging the Colorado for her body. Something that doesn’t incriminate you but piques the public’s interest in your act and the casino. This is no time to melt into a puddle. We need to keep the casino going and the show going and the money coming in. The Res is making a push, and we need all the resources we can get to fight them. Okay?” She pulled Mr. Starr closer and whispered something Elijah didn’t catch, but the feeling behind it was reassurance. False reassurance.

Elijah watched the two of them. They didn’t touch each other in a romantic way, but they did pat each other’s shoulders as they talked, and they stood very close. It was his psychology training rather than his mind-reading ability that told him Kaylee and Mr. Starr were related somehow, even though they looked nothing alike.

They walked together to the limo, Mr. Starr’s cape billowing behind him, sequins twinkling in the setting sunlight like the last remnants of his vanished daughter. Kaylee leaned through the door of the limo to retrieve her laptop case. As the limo departed, she returned to Elijah.

“Do you have Shane’s keys?” she asked.

He nodded. He resisted following her, then changed his mind. He slipped behind the wheel of Shane’s Catalina, which Holly had “driven” there. He cranked the engine with a roar and pulled into traffic.

“When you reach the highway, go south.” Kaylee nodded at the far side of the canyon. “Across the bridge.”

“There’s nothing over there but Arizona,” Elijah protested.

“We don’t want to take the same route back to Vegas as Peter,” she said, “in case the Res has any surprises left for us. Peter and I shouldn’t be in the same place. He would need to take over the casino if something happened to me. God help us all.” Her words ended in a mutter. She opened her laptop on her knees like the discussion was over.

“What about Mr. Diamond?” Elijah asked.

Ignoring Elijah’s question, she explained, “We’ll drive down to Bullhead City, cross the river there, and come back up to Vegas.”

“What? That will take three hours!” Elijah exclaimed.

Kaylee’s fingers tapped the keyboard. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, because we’re not going after her.”

Kaylee was right. Elijah had changed his mind about saving Holly. He pulled the car onto the access road, headed back toward Highway 93. Twilight descended on them, accelerated by the dirty canyon walls around them. He flicked the knob to turn on the headlights.

As the car climbed the canyon in endless switchbacks and finally crossed the bridge, Elijah calmed himself enough to think clearly. And that meant he could separate what he wanted to do, go after Holly, from what Kaylee made him think he wanted to do. He was still under her power. But he knew he was under her power. If he could coax her to lift her power just for a second, maybe he could get out from under it.