Levitating Las Vegas(79)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“You think I’m sleeping with Kaylee?” he yelled at her, voice breaking. “After everything we’ve been through together, you’ve just gotten here and your new boyfriend makes you come and then convinces you to beat the f**k out of me?”

“I’m sorry!” she cried. “They made me. They changed my mind. Like they made you kiss Violet just now.”

She waited for him to acknowledge that kissing Violet had not been his choice. He wanted to acknowledge this, then changed his mind.

She started to panic. Either Rob had been right and she’d never had Elijah, or she was about to lose him because of something she’d done. She had no idea which. “You don’t understand—”

“I understand everything,” he spat at her. “I can read your mind, remember? I heard every filthy thing you wanted to do to Rob when he was standing between your legs in the kitchen.”

“Elijah!” She reached for him. “That was—”

“I told you not to touch me.” He stalked back to the house. Through her eyes he saw himself retreating toward the lights, limping a little. As the distance grew between them, her despair faded. He wanted to turn and run back to her and tell her he hadn’t meant any of it. Nate still controlled him from the shadows, willing him forward into the house.

Violet met him at the door. “Elijah! You’re white as a sheet. You’re shaking! Rob, they made him sick.”

Rob stood behind the kitchen island, eating a slice of cake. “Aw,” he said between bites, never looking up from his plate.

“I need a minute,” Elijah whispered to Violet. He focused on his nausea. He had to get to the bathroom.

“Sure.” She pointed through the den, toward the hallway where Kaylee had disappeared. He caught a flash of real concern for him from Violet, some vestige of the girl she used to be, before she shook her head to clear it.

Rob caught the flash too. He looked up from his cake.

Elijah rushed through the den, ignoring the questions in the minds of the couples making out there. He thought only of nausea. In the hallway he could hear Kaylee shrieking, “Isaac, please! Just let her go and I swear I’ll stay!” Her terror redoubled his nausea. He found the bathroom in the hall, closed and locked the door behind him, flicked on the light, and rushed to the far end where it would be hardest for them to read him.

Then he let go of the feigned nausea he’d drawn over his thoughts like camouflage. He had better let go of it if he was going to choke this horse pill down. He drew the huge pill out of his pocket and ran water in the sink to wash it down with. Out of the corner of his eye he noted dainty guest towels monogrammed with cursive Rs, as if this were a designer show house.

He cupped his hand under the faucet. The water gushed out of his hand and foamed around the drain like the Colorado churning at the bottom of Hoover Dam.

He glanced up at his reflection, his eyes looking unnaturally green against the green T-shirt Kaylee had picked out for him, his eyebrow split open and oozing blood from Holly’s blow. He didn’t want to let go of his power. But he’d brought Kaylee here, and the Res had caught her. He’d failed to protect Holly, and the Res had caught her too. He had gotten them into this, and he had to get them out. Disrupting the Res’s plans by removing his power from the equation was the only way he knew how.

Elijah wasn’t sure why his dad had taken his own life, but he wanted to believe his dad had done it to save his mom. Elijah didn’t have to do that to save Holly. But he was willing. And he would definitely give up the one thing in his life that had ever made him feel alive.

The pill was sweet. He tried to swallow quickly, before the Res got wise to him and knocked on the door. The pill was too big. It stuck in his throat. For a second he wondered whether Kaylee had been pulling one over on him, a joke to see if she could make him give up his own power, the sort of Res mind game that she herself had warned him about. Just when his involuntary reflexes took over and he was hacking it up, it went down.

The bathroom door opened. Rob looked up from toying with the key in the lock, and his face fell. “What did you do?” he shouted at Elijah. “What do you mean, ‘I win’?”

“I win,” Elijah repeated out loud. Rob was about to lunge across the room at him, so Elijah lunged first.

They hit the hall wall with a thud and a crack of Rob’s skull against the sheetrock. It hurt, Elijah read with satisfaction—and with pain, because when Rob hurt, Elijah felt it too.

But now Rob had leverage against the wall. He shoved Elijah away from him. While Elijah was off balance, Rob socked him in the eyebrow, exactly where Holly had hit him earlier—on purpose for maximum effect. Rob read that older pain.

Now the couples in the den crowded the hallway entrance to watch. Elijah expected any second to change his mind and let Rob beat the shit out of him. But apparently he and Rob were putting on too good a show. The frequent fights at the Res were left to run their natural course—until the very end.

Elijah turned to the shadowy face of Carter, who had thought this. “The very end?”

Rob punched Elijah in the ribs. Elijah doubled over with pain. Rob elbowed Elijah in the back of the head, just where Shane had hit him. Elijah reeled into the kitchen, sprawled on the marble tile floor, and slid to a stop in front of the broken pantry door.

Rob was running through the den toward him, bent on kicking him while he was down. Elijah reached through the broken door and pulled out a broom.

“Did I ever tell you lacrosse is for pussies?” Rob asked, rearing back with one foot in his cop-issue military boot.

Elijah timed his swing exactly as Rob’s foot was about to reach him. Even Elijah was surprised when the broom handle broke over Rob’s shin with the force of his blow. Dangermouse was angry.

With a groan, Rob fell to the floor and rolled back and forth, face red, gripping his shin. Elijah jumped up and slid a large white box from the island.

“Wait, that’s cake,” Holly called. She was sitting on the counter again. Nate lounged beside her in his cowboy hat, controlling her mind.

Elijah slammed the box down on Rob. It burst and harmlessly tossed white icing onto Rob’s uniform. Elijah glanced around the kitchen countertops for something else to throw. A paper towel holder. A ceramic cookie jar.

Holly hadn’t gotten the memo that spectators with power didn’t interfere in these fights. She lifted a large kitchen knife sticky with icing from the marble-topped island and floated it to Rob, who grabbed it as he stood. He ran for Elijah.