Levitating Las Vegas(71)
Author: Jennifer Echols

All the while, Elijah monitored Kaylee’s mind, planning his escape. He would grab Holly at the dam and run away with her, somewhere neither the casino nor the Res could find them—Mexico, Europe, an island paradise. Elijah had saved a lot of money working at the casino. He hadn’t spent it all on college. Unfortunately, it was in the casino credit union, where Kaylee could erase it. But that didn’t matter. He and Holly would make more by setting her up in her own show as a magician.

He only needed to wiggle out of Kaylee’s grip. She had changed his mind about trying this. But he knew she had changed his mind, and that was half the battle. If she let up for just a second, he was free. Provided Mr. Starr let him go, too.

There was definitely a way out of this. There had to be.

Finally the limo rumbled around the last curve and emerged from the crevice blasted out of the solid red rock. Elijah was riding backward, so he slid to one end of the seat and turned around to see the top of the bright dam appear out the tinted windows.

He knew Hoover Dam was big, but it was hard to gain perspective on exactly how huge it was until he saw something familiar against it for comparison. Holly, for instance, hovering in front of the vast expanse of concrete, her shining hair whipping around her shoulders in the wind, her sequined silver minidress glinting in the setting sun.

“She is going to be the death of the casino,” Kaylee breathed. “She’s not walking a wire! She’s not even pretending she doesn’t really have power!”

“She must have run out of Kleenex,” Elijah said.

“Nice form,” her dad said. “All those ballet lessons Lanie made her take are finally paying off.”

“Is her power strong enough to fight these winds?” Elijah asked. “She may have grabbed a dress from Glitterati, but I seriously doubt she’s wearing underwear.”

Kaylee and Mr. Starr looked at him uneasily.

The limo rolled to a stop at the side of the road nearest Holly. They couldn’t have gone any farther if they’d tried. Holly had parked Shane’s car half blocking the right lane. Traffic edged around it on the narrow road—or stopped completely, staring at the beautiful girl walking in midair. Tourists lined the guardrails along the near side and the top of the dam. They pointed at her and snapped pictures.

“At least she’s not carrying her purse this time.” Kaylee told Mr. Starr, “You look a bit conspicuous, Peter, but I’ll change the crowd’s mind about asking you for an autograph.” She turned to Elijah. “The Res may have beat us here. They’ll try to take her. As we walk through the crowd, tell me if you see any of the people who ambushed you in Icarus. Or anybody else you know.”

Elijah didn’t understand what she meant, and he couldn’t get clarification by reading her mind. Flashing through her head in quick succession were the faces of his boss and all his coworkers in construction at the casino. “What do you mean, anybody else I know? Why?”

“The Res knew you were going to Icarus,” Kaylee said. “They knew you were coming back. If they’re here now, they had a good idea Holly would be here. There’s someone on the inside, listening to your minds. I just haven’t figured out yet who it is. Maybe one person who knows both you and Holly.”

“Shane,” Elijah said.

“Sligh?” Kaylee’s blond brows arched. Elijah felt a whirl of emotion in his chest, Kaylee’s anticipation of seeing Shane again, before she cut it off and shut Elijah out. “Not Shane,” she said in a businesslike manner, as if Shane were only an employee. “I’d know if it were Shane.” She and Mr. Starr opened their doors on opposite sides of the limo and started to step out.

“Wait,” Elijah said.

They stopped and watched him expectantly.

“Since saving Holly is our ultimate goal, wouldn’t both of you work more efficiently if you let go of me?”

“No,” they said together. They got out of the limo. Elijah stubbornly stayed put, then changed his mind. He slammed the door and followed Kaylee closely through the crowd. Her slender shoulders in a black suit stood out among the tourists in T-shirts and tank tops, on vacation at one of the man-made wonders of the world, thrilled to have stumbled upon a real-life Vegas spectacle they could tell their friends about back home. Keeping one eye on Holly still taking dainty steps in midair, Elijah listened to the thoughts of the crowd, all he could gather, until he gave himself a massive headache. But he didn’t hear anything about the Res.

And then, as he and Kaylee and Mr. Starr rounded the corner in the sidewalk and stepped onto the dam itself, parallel with Holly’s course across the canyon, Elijah said, “There.”

“I see her,” Kaylee said, gesturing to April, tiny on the far end of the dam, her red hair glowing. “If she wants to help the Res out, she has to be sneakier than that. Step one would be to dye that damned hair. And look, there’s Carter beside her. Don’t go any closer or April will change our minds.”

“I didn’t mean them,” Elijah said. He nodded toward the muscular uniformed sheriff’s deputy sauntering along the guardrail, moving the crowd aside as he walked so he could get the choice view, keeping perfect pace with Holly. “I meant Rob.”

Holly had no choice but to move forward now, placing one high heel in front of the other as gracefully as possible as she hovered hundreds of feet above the Colorado River. But she wished she’d planned this illusion more carefully. She’d forgotten how the canyon walls loomed overhead on the winding road just before the dam. She’d barely kept Shane’s car afloat while quelling her own panic until she got past that seemingly interminable section. She’d been beat when she arrived here, only to realize she had nothing to pretend to walk across.

So she’d just hiked herself over the concrete guardrail—careful not to expose her naked nether regions—and started walking as if she had a tightrope. She hoped it would never enter anyone’s mind that it wasn’t really an illusion. She was just a young upstart magician striking out on her own, trying to upstage her father as number four on the guidebooks’ lists of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas. She was about to make it to—woo-hoo—number three.

The hot wind gusted hard against her, making her teeter on the edge of nothing, and causing the crowd pressed against the guardrail to gasp—including Elijah, Kaylee, and her dad, with a bandaged hand. She couldn’t let them distract her now. She peered down at the blue water churning white so far below her at the base of the dam. She wished again for a real cable she could have extended across the canyon downstream. In its absence, she had to stay closer to the dam than she liked in order to give her power something within range to cling to. The wind howled against the concrete wall.