Levitating Las Vegas(64)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Holly didn’t say a word. She was a beautiful, disheveled, very angry showgirl at the center of Kaylee’s junkyard of an office, staring Kaylee down, trying to get out from under Kaylee’s spell and out the office door.

But she wouldn’t. At least Kaylee was confident in her own power. No matter what, she still had that.

She slipped out the door and closed and locked it behind her—not that this would stop Holly in the unlikely event she was able to escape Kaylee’s command. In that case, nothing would stop her. Kaylee simply didn’t want a hapless guard going in. He would be in trouble.

She emerged from the employee elevator onto the casino floor. The room reeked of smoke, but the air vents high overhead roared with double their usual force. All the doors had been thrown open to the bright summer day, with dealers stationed at them to prevent gamblers from coming in. Construction crews stood on ladders, removing the singed drapes, and janitors used industrial vacuum cleaners to suck up the water standing on the carpet. All was as it should be, if this were a normal casino, with normal employees, and normal arsonists. She pointed at Jasmine by the door, crooked her finger at her, and met her beside the barred cashier windows.

“There were four of them,” Jasmine reported. “I’ve sensed them here before. April, a mind changer, bright red hair like the young girls color it nowadays. Carter was a mind reader, Nate was a mind changer, and then there was a levitator. I didn’t catch her name because she was distracted, setting fire to the curtains.”

“Violet,” Kaylee said.

“You’ve met them,” Jasmine said, a statement rather than a question, because she could read Kaylee’s mind. “They were definitely from the Res and feeling like they need revenge for whatever happened up in your office.”

Jasmine had told Kaylee nothing she didn’t already know, but Kaylee touched Jasmine’s elbow. “Great job. I’m so glad to have you down here.”

Jasmine’s proud smile was fleeting. The corners of her mouth sank into disappointment. “Tell me another. I’m too weak to be any help.”

“Not true.” Most of Kaylee’s staff couldn’t read minds, or do anything out of the ordinary besides take out a target at two hundred yards. “The Res wants Elijah and Holly. I’m trying to figure out what their plan might be, and I was hoping you could give me some insight.”

“Why are you asking me?” Jasmine snapped. “Isn’t Isaac in charge out there now? You were his girlfriend. I’ve never met him.”

“No,” Kaylee said, holding fast to her patience, “but you knew somebody like him. You knew Elijah’s father.”

It was a gamble to bring up Elijah’s dad to Jasmine, but Kaylee desperately needed this information. The gamble didn’t pay off. Instead of opening up, Jasmine closed down. She crossed her arms. “Why aren’t you asking Mr. Diamond?”

“Mr. Diamond is otherwise engaged,” Kaylee said.

“With something more important than Elijah?”

The afterlife? “Yes, absolutely.” Kaylee left it at that, both verbally and mentally, reinforcing the wall in her mind between what she let Jasmine see and what she couldn’t tell anyone.

Jasmine put one fingertip to her temple. She was giving herself a headache trying to read Kaylee. Finally she said, “If you want my help, why are you blocking me so hard? What is it you don’t want me to know?”

A movement in the corner of Kaylee’s eye caught her attention. She and Jasmine turned to watch a ladder topple over and clatter to the ground, leaving a man hanging from the blackened draperies while his coworkers scrambled underneath to catch him. So much for the casino running like a well-oiled machine.

Impatiently she turned back to Jasmine. “The Res is after your son. Are you going to help me or not?”

Jasmine huffed out a sigh. “Here’s my theory. Isaac’s decided he wants more than the Res. Maybe he wants the casino. Elijah’s father had that thought, but lots of young people were protecting the casino then, and Mr. Diamond wasn’t putting the kids on Mentafixol. We’ve all gotten old and weak, and Isaac knows it. He sent some scouts in to read our weaknesses. I’m surprised he didn’t assassinate a few people to scare us and make us cower.”

Kaylee blocked Jasmine very hard. She couldn’t think about Mr. Diamond.

“You and Mr. Diamond thought you were strengthening us when you took Elijah and Holly off Mentafixol, but you played right into Isaac’s hand. He must have people reading you, me, Peter, any of the guards. He knew which kids were about to come into their power, and now the Res wants them before they’re loyal to us.”

This was very, very, very bad. Kaylee thought this and simultaneously tried to block the thought from Jasmine. The only way to survive the Res was to stop caring about people. But if Elijah and Holly were in love, there was no telling what an experienced mind reader could coerce them into doing for him by threatening one of them and then the other. She had to keep Holly out of there.

“Ms. Michaels?” called a security guard who’d stepped inside the casino doors. “You’d better come see this.”

What now? Kaylee thought, and Jasmine offered a bitter laugh of agreement. They both hurried through the burned casino air, past the tangle of employees blocking the doors, and into the fresh hot breeze and bright sunlight outside. The security guard pointed down the block. They jogged toward the cross street, where another security guard pointed them around the corner of the massive building. There on the sidewalk that continued back to the paved space where Peter had performed his impossible feat of physical stamina that morning, another crowd had gathered, pointing up at the fortieth floor.

A dark, jagged shape in the otherwise mirrored surface of the casino marked the place where Holly had broken Kaylee’s office window. Just below this, Holly descended slowly, holding herself up with her power but pantomiming a difficult and heart-pounding struggle down a flimsy white rope.

“Oh my God,” Kaylee exclaimed, losing her cool, “is that Kleenex she’s supposed to be climbing down? And she’s carrying her purse. I have got to talk to her about presentation.”

“What’d you do,” Jasmine asked, “change her mind about following you out the door of your office? Too specific.”

Kaylee glared at Jasmine.

Jasmine winked at Kaylee. “You want me to help you collect her?”

Kaylee glanced around at the sidewalk clogged with pedestrians in the early afternoon. Everyone who passed this corner looked down the alley, saw the crowd forming under Holly, and headed in that direction.