Levitating Las Vegas(53)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Resolving this, he almost enjoyed the rest of the long drive. When the sun came up, the wind was warm on his bare chest. He fished in the glove compartment, under the gun, and brought out Shane’s Wayfarers. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he decided he looked like an early astronaut, about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, cruising Cocoa Beach with a bikini-clad beauty dozing in the backseat. Several of the truck drivers he’d been traveling with since St. George seemed to think so too. When they passed Elijah or he passed them, they glanced down knowingly at Holly’s long bare legs and gave him a thumbs-up.

Just as the Pontiac drew even with the billboard championing Holly’s likeness on Interstate 15, she woke. She sat up slowly. In the rearview mirror, Elijah watched his T-shirt slide off her slender torso and into the floorboard. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned, spangled bikini top rising to meet a new day.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Elijah called over the wind and the radio.

“Mmph.” Long brown curls whipping around her head, she tumbled between the seats into the front.

“Hey,” Elijah protested. “We’re doing seventy. This is dangerous.”

“Don’t be silly. I have telekinetic power.” Her voice was muffled by the seat as she pitched over into the floorboard, sequined butt high in the air, legs flailing. The truck driver nearest them honked and waved frantically. Elijah acknowledged him by lifting one finger from the steering wheel.

Holly righted herself, wiped her hair out of her eyes, and glanced over at Elijah. He felt her examining his bare chest and approving. He grinned at her, wagged his eyebrows behind the Wayfarers, and took her hand.

And just for a moment, they were a brand-new couple returning from a wild road trip together, basking in the morning sun, and looking forward to the possibilities offered by the rest of their day in Vegas.

Then her hand slipped out of his. She brought her purse up off the floorboard, fished in it for cosmetics, and adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see herself as she applied them. Elijah understood that the heavy makeup went with the outfit, but he missed that bare-faced girl from the hotel room. Even now she wasn’t bare-faced, but with some of her makeup rubbed off through a night asleep in the backseat, she did resemble a high school girl about three hours into crashing a kegger.

“I guess our next step is to talk to our parents,” she said while holding her lips still to apply lipstick, so it came out more like, “I hess our neck hep i oo alk oo our arents.” He wouldn’t have understood her if this were all he had to go on, but he could read her mind too.

She glanced at her watch. “That will be interesting, because as we speak, my dad is performing an impossible feat of physical stamina.”

Elijah eyed her warily. “You’re not barging in on your parents’ act, are you? Something tells me we shouldn’t advertise our powers to the general public.”

“We have to barge into things, for our own safety.” She swept powder across her nose. “We know there are people around who can control our minds. The only way we can get around them is to surprise them. Otherwise our parents may very well chain us up in the basement.”

Elijah didn’t think his mom would chain him up in the basement. But he felt all Holly’s anger at her parents, and it put him on edge. His last ten hours of deep thought and recentering were gone with a snap of her fingers.

“Let’s examine this logically,” he said. “The only people we know can change minds are April and Nate, the weaker one. They changed my mind at the hotel.”

“And April changed my mind at my apartment.” Holly penciled glittering green in wide swaths across her eyelids, extending way out to the side, which made her impossibly long false eyelashes look even more exotic. “But in Glitterati, when you felt like somebody could control minds and I thought you were just crazy off your Mentafixol, that was for real.”

Elijah nodded. “It was.”

“April and Nate weren’t at Glitterati. None of those people from the SUV were there. I stayed at Glitterati for a long time after you left. It was crowded, but I know I got a glimpse of everybody.” She tossed the green pencil back into her purse and turned to him. “What exactly did you feel there?”

“The first time,” he said, “I was sitting next to Shane. We were talking about Kaylee. I thought he was going to walk over to your table to talk to Kaylee. He stood up, and then somebody said, ‘Change your mind,’ and he sat back down.”

She squinted at him. “Did it sound like Kaylee?”

“I don’t hear thoughts in the person’s voice. I figure out whose thoughts they are because they’re usually the person closest to me at the time. But in Glitterati, I assumed I was nuts, and I wanted that Mentafixol from you. I was distracted. The second time was harder to ignore. When Rob was about to hit me with a chair, there was this scream of ‘Change your mind!’ ”

Holly put her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. The pose was so casual and girl-next-door, he did a double take out the corner of his eye. The pose did not jive with the exotic eye makeup.

“But it wasn’t directed at me,” he went on. “It whizzed past my head like a bullet aimed at someone else.”

“Me?” Holly asked, pushing her wild hair off her face.

“See, I never thought it was directed at you,” Elijah said. “You weren’t even over there.”

Her carefully sculpted brows drew down, and the little line appeared between them. Elijah felt her dark wash of emotion. “Rob,” she said.

“It could have been aimed at Rob,” Elijah agreed. “He sure stopped in midswing with that chair.”

“Or it could have been coming from Rob, directed at someone else,” Holly said.

This didn’t seem right to Elijah. He’d sensed everything Rob felt during that fight. All of it was consistent with being a prick. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll bet it was Kaylee,” Holly grumbled. “We know she’s involved anyway.”

“How long have you roomed with her?”

“A year, since Mr. Diamond hired her.”

“In that year, have you ever suddenly changed your mind for no good reason?”

“Never before those Goths did it to me,” Holly said. “Though I’ll admit, I can’t imagine what Kaylee would need to change my mind about. I’ve been convinced I have a mental illness. Out of fear, I’ve been a good little girl. And Kaylee and I have always gotten along great. The biggest argument we’ve had was over whether to paint the living room this dark, dramatic purple—”