As I scanned the crowd, Agent Sterling’s voice provided the sound track. “You’re an intelligent man,” she was telling Wesley, playing to his ego. “What do you think happened to Camille Holt?”
I finally saw Michael, leaning against the side of a camel-themed snack bar. A few feet away, the young boy and his father reached the front of the line. I looked for Dean and found him caught behind a massive crowd of forty-something women, trying to make his way through them to Michael.
“What do I think?” Wesley was saying over the audio feed. “I think that were I in your shoes, I’d be particularly interested in Tory Howard’s rather unique skill set.”
A few feet away from Michael, the young boy reached up for an ice-cream cone. He smiled up at his father. His father smiled back.
I breathed an internal sigh of relief. Dean finally made his way through the crowd and began to close in on Michael.
At that instant, two things happened. On the audio feed, Agent Briggs asked Thomas Wesley to clarify his comment about Tory’s skill set, and near the snack bar, the little boy stumbled and the ice cream fell from his cone and onto the ground.
The world fell into slow motion for me as the boy froze. The father made a grab for his son, his hand locking around the boy’s arm as he jerked him roughly to the side.
Michael exploded forward. One second, he was a foot or two away from Dean, and the next, he was ripping the father’s hand away from his son and throwing his body into a punch aimed at the man’s face.
“I’m surprised you don’t know.” Wesley’s voice broke through my horror. “Tory Howard is a decent magician, but her real talent is hypnosis.”
The man Michael attacked punched back. Michael went down. He didn’t stay down.
I leapt forward, but Lia was in front of me in a heartbeat. “Dean’s got this.”
I tried to step around her.
“Back off, Cassie,” Lia told me, her voice low, her face less than an inch from mine. “The last thing either of them needs is you caught in the middle of a brawl.” She wove an arm through mine. To outward appearances, we looked like the best of friends, but her grip was iron-tight. “Besides,” she added grimly, “someone has to do damage control.”
That was when I realized that the audio feed had cut away again. The balcony where Sterling, Briggs, and Thomas Wesley had been standing moments before was empty.
Dean had to physically restrain Michael, pulling our fellow Natural back roughly against his own body. Security was called. Michael barely managed to avoid an arrest.
To say that our supervisors weren’t pleased that we’d taken an unauthorized field trip would have been an understatement. To say that they were even less pleased with Michael’s brush with the law would have been the understatement of the century.
Judd met us in the lobby of the Majesty. I could tell from the way he was standing, his feet spread slightly wider than usual, his arms crossed over his chest, that he’d gotten a call from Sterling and Briggs.
Beside me, Michael winced. Not because of his swollen lip or the cut over his quickly blackening eye, but because he could tell, from the slight hints of strain in Judd’s face, exactly how much trouble we were in.
When we reached him, Judd turned without a word and started stalking toward the elevator. We followed on his heels. He didn’t say a word until the elevator doors had closed.
“You’re lucky that doesn’t need stitches,” Judd told Michael. I gathered from his tone that we were all somewhat less than lucky to be stuck on an elevator with a marine sniper who knew how to kill a grown man using nothing but his little finger.
“The audio feeds went out while Briggs and Sterling were questioning Thomas Wesley,” Lia said. “We were just trying to stay in range.”
I opened my mouth to confirm what Lia had said, but Judd stopped me. “Don’t,” he told me. “We’re in Vegas. You’re teenagers stuck in a hotel suite. If I were a betting man, I’d give myself excellent odds on guessing how this went down.”
“If you were a betting man,” Michael said lazily, “you’d be downstairs at the casino.”
Judd reached out and pulled the emergency stop button. The elevator jerked to a halt. He turned and leveled a very calm stare at Michael, never saying a word.
Seconds ticked by, verging on a minute.
“Sorry.” Michael addressed the apology more to the ceiling tiles than to Judd. “Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.”
I wondered if Michael was apologizing for the disrespect or for what he’d done at the pool.
“What do you think is going to happen,” Judd said softly, “when the man you hit and his family go home tonight?”
The question sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. Judd pushed the stop button back in and the elevator jolted back into motion. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Michael, because there was nothing—nothing—Judd could have said to devastate him more.