Levitating Las Vegas

17




Elijah was checking the chicken in the oven when the hair on his arms stood up. He jerked backward, thinking he’d set himself on fire. Only then did he begin to sense Holly’s desperation and her hope that Shane’s car parked in the driveway meant Elijah was home.

He slammed the oven door shut, dashed across the kitchen, rounded the counter into the living room, leaped over the sofa, tripped, sprawled on the floor, picked himself up, and jerked open the front door just as she was raising her finger to ring the bell.

He registered only a fleeting glimpse of her, long hair tangled, green glittering eye makeup eerily smeared to her hairline, before he backed her against the stucco wall of the porch and kissed her.

Her mouth yielded for his. He dipped his tongue deep inside. Cradling the back of her head with one hand to protect her from the stucco, he put his other hand on her bare flat stomach. Her skin jumped under his touch. She moved her head to one side, trying to break the kiss. She needed to tell him everything that had happened to her at the casino, everything she’d found out from Kaylee—and it all came at him in a rush of images.

He didn’t want this information from Holly right now, no matter how important. He held her head more firmly and kissed her more deeply.

“Mm,” she groaned against his lips. She needed to tell him they were in danger. They needed to leave town right now. They could kiss later.

This time he broke the kiss and looked into her dark eyes full of worry and pain, framed by false lashes. “That just doesn’t make sense, Holly,” he said gently. “My mom wouldn’t let the casino lock me up.”

“I know what I know,” Holly breathed. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll figure it out later.” She grasped his hand on her belly and stepped toward the sidewalk, pulling him along—pushing him from behind with her power too, already so accustomed to having it that she only half realized she was using it.

“Holly,” he said with enough force that she stopped and looked back at him. “My mom said it wasn’t safe to leave.”

Holly gazed pleadingly up at him, her face drawn and waiflike under the heavy makeup and grime. She wanted to believe him. She needed him to know what to do, because she sure didn’t. But Kaylee had told her that mind readers would say anything to get their way.

He put both hands over her lips, then on her cheeks, then on either side of her jaw, framing her face. “You have to believe me.” He felt guilty for lying about lying, or at least for leaving out a pertinent piece of information—that his mom had said it wasn’t safe for Holly to leave, but that Elijah himself should book it. He wasn’t a manipulative ass of a mind reader if it was for Holly’s own good. Was he?

“I believe you.” She didn’t believe him, not completely. Everything else Kaylee had told her made too much sense for her description of mind readers to be inaccurate. But Holly desperately wanted to believe him. “We both have a lot of anger. That anger has to go somewhere. We can’t use it against each other. We’re too powerful for that, and we can do a lot of damage.”

“We already have.” He tilted her head forward, kissed her forehead, and looked into her eyes again. “I shouldn’t have done that to you, Holly. When you’re close to me like this, I know everything you think. I wish I could turn it off. I can’t. But I promise you I won’t make you feel that way again.”

She gave a small nod, her wide eyes never leaving his. She still wasn’t sure she should trust him, and she wasn’t sure she cared. He could betray her and use her, as long as he would touch her.

He pulled her by the hand through the open door, into the house.



A buzzer split the silence. Elijah dropped Holly’s hand and jogged through the living room. When she rounded the corner, she saw him pulling something out of the oven, and she smelled food. She skipped forward and ooohed her approval at the two places set at the kitchen table, the plates heaped with chicken casserole and roasted vegetables. As she watched, Elijah plucked rolls from the baking sheet he held with a towel and tossed a couple onto each plate.

“Dude.” She slid into a chair in front of one of the plates. Five minutes and one serving later, she came up for breath long enough to ask, “Do you have powers I don’t know about? Instant gourmet food? Oh, God.”

He rose, reached to the counter for the casserole dish, and spooned second helpings of chicken and vegetables onto her plate. “It’s been cooking for an hour. I couldn’t find you at the casino, and I hoped you might stop by here.”

Five minutes and the second serving later, she wiped the corners of her mouth daintily with her napkin, as if the whole meal had been a polite enterprise. Not. “I was hungry.”

He offered her a basket with the few remaining rolls. “Sitting at the casino talking to my mom, it came over me all of a sudden, this terrible hunger. I thought I was going to pass out.”

“Really!” Holly said through a mouthful of bread.

“On the way here, I stopped at that café, the one where I kidnapped you?” he said casually.

“Uh-huh?” she said in the same tone.

“I ate two of those muffins you were lusting after.”

“Mmmmmmuffin,” she said. “I’ve never had one. Were they good?”

He looked apologetic, as if they had been very good and he was afraid to tell her.

She stuck out her bottom lip.

He reached behind him to the cabinet, brought out a bakery box, and solemnly slid it across the table to her.

She peeked inside. Two chocolate muffins. She grinned her gratitude at him. He smiled back. She peeled back the glittering paper and took a big bite of muffin. Mmmmm.

“We can’t know what the future holds for us,” he said. “But I hope yours is full of muffins.”

Holly held up one finger until she’d chewed and swallowed. “Kaylee warned me about mind readers. You know exactly what to say to make a girl fall in love with you.”

Almost as soon as it was out of her mouth, she realized what she’d said. She glanced up at him guiltily. He frowned at her.

They’d had a huge fight just that morning. Now their relationship was too good and too tentative to mess up with a clumsy statement like that. It was true—if he did tell her he loved her, how would she ever know whether he was sincere?—but she hadn’t meant to bring this up.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I know,” he responded with no expression in his voice.

Nervously she pulled at the muffin paper. Most girls probably would be put off their food by an awkward silence like this, or would pretend to be. Holly was not most girls. She was still hungry. She finished the first muffin and half-heartedly offered the second to Elijah. He shook his head no. She ate it in silence, then put the papers back in the bakery box and nipped up the crumbs with her fingers.

“Full?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I can ever be full,” she admitted. “Satisfied, for now.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s too bad.”

Was this innuendo? She didn’t have enough experience to know for certain, but she hoped for the best. She scraped back her chair, rounded the table to him, and slipped onto his lap. She ran her fingers back through his hair and—

“Oh God, how did you get this huge knot on the back of your head?” She touched it gingerly.

He winced. “That? My best friend pistol-whipped me.”

Holly nodded. “Your talk with Shane didn’t go well? And when you accused him of having magical powers, he thought you were crazy?”

“Basically,” Elijah said.

“Poor baby,” she cooed.

“It’s stopped bleeding,” he said. “The show must go on. Where were we?”

She gently kissed his hair. “Are we going to make out at the kitchen table, or is there a bedroom?”

The serious look he gave her sent chills along her arms.

He moved under her. She slipped off his lap and let him stand, then looked way up at him. It wasn’t often that he stood so close to her and she realized how tall he was.

He chuckled. “You make me feel like a million bucks, you know that?”

She let loose an embarrassed giggle. “Why? You knew you were tall.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know it was glorious.”

She snorted.

Shaking his head, he pulled her by the hand across the living room, into the hall, past the fateful bathroom. In his bedroom he closed the blinds against the midafternoon desert sun, plunging the room into shadow. The sunlight squeezing through at the edges of the windows backlit his wavy brown hair. He sat on the bed and kicked off his shoes. Then he patted the covers beside him.

She sat down and bent to take off her shoes.

“Could you leave those on?”

She paused. This request was kinky, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream.

“I plead the fifth.” But his voice was so kind that the kinky request began to seem almost sweet.

She let him ease her back onto the bed. Her eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and she couldn’t make out his expression at all as he leaned over and kissed her.

She cleared her mind. Because she didn’t want him to see the turmoil in it. And because she needed to enjoy this moment with him, which was all she knew she had.

He rubbed the tip of his nose against hers and rested his forehead on hers. “Don’t be scared, Holly,” he whispered. “The world is more open now, not more closed.”

She choked on her words as she whispered back, “I can’t believe what they put us through for so long.”

The stubble on his chin whispered across her skin as he said hoarsely, “Seven years asleep has been worth it for these three days with you.”

He watched her for a second longer. No matter what happened, she would always remember him just like this: a mess of sandy brown hair, kind green eyes, straight nose in a shadowy face, his lips twisted into a quizzical bow.

They kissed for a long time in the darkness. Slowly his body melted and settled into hers, his tongue exploring deep inside her mouth, his knee tucked between her thighs, his chest rising and falling against hers as they breathed together.



She thought of undressing him. Surprised, he looked down and watched her long and perfect pink nails sliding down his faded T-shirt. She was so beautiful. He would never get used to her.

She rolled him onto his back and straddled him. Then she grabbed the hem of his T-shirt on either side, lifted it up, and smoothed her small hands up his bare chest. Just as in Shane’s car that morning, her admiration for his body would have embarrassed him except that it gave her pleasure and heated her blood. His blood heated with hers.

“Your turn,” he said, running his fingers underneath the cups of her bikini top. She shuddered at his touch. Slowly, seductively, she unhooked the top and pulled it off, exposing her perfect breasts. Then, without turning around, she tossed the top over her shoulder. It rang a small basketball goal in the corner of his room.

“Score!” he exclaimed.

“Only if you have a condom,” she deadpanned. She winked at him. The extra drama provided by her false eyelashes set his skin on fire.

“I do.” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked into her eyes, searching for a bead on whether she really wanted to do this. She gazed steadily back at him. She was sure. She was scared, but she was sure.

To prove it, she unbuttoned his jeans and pulled his waistband until he helped her take his jeans and boxers off. He tugged her bikini bottoms down her thighs. All their clothes discarded, she eased on top of him again and massaged his hard length first with her hand, then with her power.

“Oh my Lord,” he breathed. Every second he thought his euphoria was too good to withstand, and every second he felt even better.

She felt the same way. As he watched her in the dim light, her pupils dilated, her brown eyes turning black.

He twisted underneath her and leaned over to peer into the top drawer of his nightstand. Reaching in carefully—Shane’s Glock was in there too, loaded now—he pulled out a condom packet. As he tore it open, he explained, “I bought them when we stopped for gas in St. George. I had high hopes for this day, and things are finally looking up, despite the argument, and the head trauma, and the escape from the fortieth floor.”

She laughed nervously, watching him put the condom on. He tried to put her at ease and felt a little like a dentist making small talk over the sound of the drill. “Seriously, did you ring that goal on purpose?”

“If I said no, I wouldn’t be a very good magician,” she joked, but he hadn’t taken her mind off what was about to happen. She watched his hands. Her breath came light and fast.

Slowly he rolled on top of her. Even more slowly he slid into her. She wrapped him in her power. His body was ablaze with his power and hers, her arousal and his own.

He grabbed both her hands and set his forehead against hers as he stroked inside her. “They were right to keep us apart,” he whispered.

She giggled between gasps of pleasure. “If we’d figured this out, they wouldn’t have been able to keep me away from you.”

“No. And I would not have done my homework.”

His joke didn’t get the laugh from her that he’d wanted. Instead, she thought of the night seven years ago when he first asked her out, and her parents said no and took away her power. Her homework had been reading Romeo and Juliet. She was afraid her story with Elijah would end the same way.

“Baby, don’t go there,” he coaxed her, brushing her curls away from her face. “We’ll be okay. We have each other’s backs now. They won’t be able to tear us apart again.”

He braced himself above her and stroked her harder, trying to get her mind off everything but their bodies and their power. It didn’t work. She felt as euphoric as before, but she was thinking hard about their future together. If they did survive, she wondered what the sex would be like when they were older and their power began to fade. She bet it would still be excellent. Power was delicious, but she had wanted him before, when he was only smart and funny and kind, with his hair in his eyes.

“I love you, too.” He kissed her mouth and thrust into her until they both were high.



Afterward he knitted his fingers into her thick hair and kissed her again, a long and thorough kiss of appreciation. He trailed more kisses high across her cheekbone and toward her hairline, following the smear of glittering makeup.

“I’m so sorry about this morning,” she said huskily.

“Me too,” he said between kisses.

“Powers make everything so complicated. We always have to remember why we liked each other in the first place in high school.”

“Yeah.” He wound one of her long curls around his finger.

“I wish this hadn’t happened,” she said, “and we could just lie here, and do it, and talk about rock bands, and the casino, and our lame parents, and the awful food in the high school cafeteria.”

He laughed. The high school cafeteria food had been truly awful. But he didn’t understand the rest of what she was saying. “Really? You wish this hadn’t happened? You wish you didn’t have power?”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t want to go back to thinking I was crazy. Having power is definitely better than that. But the Res or the casino or both are about to pin us like insects on a board. I wish I could go back to fourteen and start over. You could ask me to the prom, and I could go, and I would never float up to my parents’ living room chandelier.” She shuddered as he moved one finger along her collarbone. “How about you? Wouldn’t you rather start over?”

He shook his head against the pillow. “I always felt like half a person. Now I feel whole. You deserve a whole man.”

Her brows went down. She believed he loved his power, but she didn’t believe the reason had anything to do with her.

Then she remembered he could read her mind. Her dark eyes widened. She had screwed up everything again.

“No, you didn’t,” he grumbled. “Come here.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her on top of him.

She nestled against him with her head on his hot chest, listening to his heart. She wanted them to stay just like this, but something was about to change. They’d freed themselves from the drug, they’d escaped from the casino, they’d found each other in all this—and it was too good to be true. It couldn’t possibly last. Kaylee would lock them both up. Apart. Holly squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears forming at the corners as she listened to his heart beating.

It sped up. He felt it, and he felt Holly feel it. “God, Holly,” he said through gritted teeth, “don’t think stuff like that.”

“Oh, Elijah, I’m so sorry.” She pictured glitter and fairies to counteract the voice of doom inside her head.

He laughed.

She rolled away from him. “I’ll go in the other room.”

“No.” He caught her hand and drew her back. “Stay with me.”

With one more apologetic look, she settled on the bed again. She lay on her side, one slender arm curved under her head. Elijah took her other hand and held it on his chest, rubbing her palm softly with his thumb. She didn’t have an arm left to hold him, so she used her power to wrap him in a physical sensation of being held, strong at first, fading by degrees as the static grew louder and she fell asleep.

Her lips were parted, her eyelids heavy under the dark false lashes and swirls of eye shadow in green and silver and black. She looked like she would open her eyes any second and perform feats to the delight and amazement of the crowd, not like she was warm and comfortable and totally gone in her boyfriend’s bed.

He watched her, really studied the heavily made showgirl compared with the fresh-scrubbed girl he knew was underneath, and felt possessive and glad he was one of the few people who ever saw her that way anymore, because she was his. His. She was safe in light sleep, in the calm before her dark and dangerous dreams, and he relaxed.



He woke in a panic. Eight people were coming for him and Holly. One of them was Kaylee. She thought they could handle Holly now that they knew what to expect. But mind readers were always volatile, and the security guards were terrified of Elijah.

The feeling was mutual. Elijah scrambled out from under Holly’s nude body and jerked open the bedside table drawer to grab Shane’s Glock.

Suddenly he changed his mind.

“Elijah, what is it?” Holly shrieked.

The bedroom door burst open and banged against the wall, off its hinges. One woman and five men in casino security uniforms reached for Holly, dragging her from Elijah while she screamed. Elijah’s muscles tensed to fight for her, but he changed his mind about that, too. He caught one last look at her face, eyes wide with black anger and fear, before the guards muscled her out of the room. He hadn’t made a single move to help her.

And then he knew why. Kaylee stood in the doorway. She concentrated hard on willing Elijah away from Holly and away from the gun in the drawer. Their eyes met, and they stared each other down. Elijah knew if she lost her concentration on him for a fraction of a second, he would sense it, and he could reach for the drawer.

Mr. Starr, decked out in a sequined bodysuit and cape, his right hand in a cast, pushed his way past Kaylee into the room. Now Elijah sensed a wall between himself and the bedside table. There was no way he could get the gun now, with mind control and telekinesis against him. He sat paralyzed on the bed, hating himself, sensing the lust of the guards shoving Holly naked down the hall in front of them, her terror, all fading as they walked out of his range. His head throbbed.

“What the f*ck did you do to my daughter?” Mr. Starr screamed hoarsely at Elijah.

“What did I do to her?” Elijah repeated. He resented that Mr. Starr’s opinion of him had entered his mind. Elijah had raped his daughter, defiled his daughter, made her think she wanted it, because under normal circumstances his daughter would never have voluntarily spread her legs for this mind-reading f*ckup.

Carefully controlling his rage, Elijah cleared his throat. “At least I didn’t drug her for seven years.”

“You—” Mr. Starr began. In his fury, face bright red, he sputtered to a stop.

Suddenly Elijah decided to put some clothes on. Simultaneously he sensed that Kaylee was changing his mind, making him put his clothes on. Holly was God knew where by now with five strange men and she didn’t have any clothes on. That knowledge did nothing to diminish the urgency of Elijah’s task. Getting dressed was his number one priority. Without much concern that he was showing his naked ass to the people standing in the doorway, one of them his girlfriend’s father and the other his girlfriend’s roommate, he rolled off the bed and found his jeans on the floor. Then his T-shirt—no, he should go to his dresser and pull out the green one, because it made his eyes look prettier.

He turned around and glared at Kaylee for putting that idea in his head.

She shrugged and grinned at him in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

He pulled the shirt on and looked in his closet for shoes. He should put on running shoes but—no, the flip-flops would be better. What did he need to run away from these kind people for? Kaylee giggled in his mind.

With a sigh, which was all he could manage in protest under Kaylee’s power, he preceded them out of the room and walked down the hall, into the living room.

The six guards who’d taken Holly were draped backward across the chairs and sofa, unconscious.

“Oh God,” Kaylee murmured. “I never thought she could do something like this. Or would do something like this. Tia?” She bent over the female guard, whom Elijah knew as one of his mom’s dealers. “Did you read anything off Holly? Where is she going?”

“A nightclub,” the guard groaned. “That crazy tranny club. And then Hoover Dam.”

Elijah dashed to the open front doorway and stopped there—an invisible power blocked his way—but he arrived just in time to see Holly, naked save for her high heels, slam the door of Shane’s car. Uh-oh—Elijah’s fingers found Shane’s car keys in his jeans pocket. But Holly didn’t need keys. She lifted the car an inch into the air and sped down the street.

“You go, girl,” he whispered.

His hand flew to the sudden excruciating pain in his neck.

“Peter, for God’s sake, let him go,” he heard Kaylee saying as the hot Vegas afternoon in front of him faded to black. “We need him conscious to help us track Holly down. Let him go or I’ll make you.”

Elijah’s last sensation was of falling to the floor.



Holly muscled Shane’s car through the side streets of Vegas at maximum speed without breaking the law. It would not do to get pulled over—not when she was missing the car keys and was lifting and propelling the chassis with her mind. Not when she was nude. She wished her hair were longer by a foot or two so it would cover her completely, Lady Godiva–style.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the power to grow her own hair to fabulous lengths instantly, and she needed coverage. Her hands shook on the steering wheel, but she was trying very hard to think logically through what she was about to do. Kaylee had Elijah in custody by now, and she wanted Holly too. Holly would have liked to think Kaylee would let them out of captivity after she solved her bigger problems, as she’d said in her office. But who knew how long that would be? Another seven years?

Hell no.

So Holly was headed to Hoover Dam to stage her own impossible feat of physical stamina. Tourists would watch her. News crews would film her. The publicity would give her a platform. She would be in the public eye, the ultimate threat to the casino and the Res. She would report all of them and have them nabbed by a mysterious government agency, never to be seen again, if they didn’t leave her alone and let Elijah go.

If they’d feared she would overshadow her dad’s magic act at the casino when she was fourteen, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

But public relations in Vegas walked a fine line between X-rated and family friendly. Clips of her performance of derring-do would not be shown on the local TV news if she was naked.

She rounded the last residential block and set Shane’s car down in the back parking lot of Glitterati, just where Rob’s cop car had been that awful night. A few other cars told her some staff members were here to ready the club for opening. She crouched behind the wheel, eyes on the back door, working up her courage to streak. One, two, three.

She dashed across the asphalt in her high heels, the hot wind streaming cheekily across her bare buttocks. She jerked open the door, stepped inside, and slammed it behind her. In Vegas, jovial naked seemed less suspicious than skulking nakedly about. She called down the corridor and into the club, “Cher! Diana! Marilyn! It’s Holly Starr. I need a favor!”

“In here.”

Holly dove in the direction of the voice, through an open doorway. She almost backed out of the room again in alarm because she didn’t recognize Marilyn Monroe at first glance. He was hunched over a computer in the corner of the dressing room, only half done up. His makeup was finished and his hair was pasted back, but he hadn’t put his blond wig on, or his padded bra. He wore only boxers decorated with cat-eye sunglasses and lipsticks and stars from Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. But the most surprising thing of all was that when he spoke, he used his man voice. “Why, Miss Starr.”

“Hey,” Holly said, waving casually, keeping the other arm plastered over her nipples. “Whatcha doing?”

“I was just googling ‘perfect ten.’ ”

Holly felt her cheeks coloring. “Oh, ha-ha, you’re sweet.” She edged over to a costume rack against the wall. With one arm still pressed to her breasts, she raked through the hangers with her other hand. She pulled out a low-cut silver sequined minidress. “Would you mind terribly if I borrowed this? And I can’t promise I’ll return it completely intact, but if I don’t, I’ll pay you back, I swear.”

Marilyn waved her concerns away. “Oh, honey, don’t worry. It’s vintage, and the lining is ripped.”

“Thanks.” Holly turned her back—which didn’t really work for her modesty, she realized belatedly, because her bottom was also naked—and wriggled into the dress.

“The way we party around Vegas, I’ve heard of a lot of bad days after,” Marilyn called, “but this takes the cake.”

“Yeah, I’ve had better.” Holly skittered across the floor toward Marilyn and turned her back again. “Zip, please.”

Marilyn’s warm fingers pressed the edges of the dress together, zipped it up, and fumbled with the clasp at the neck. Holly relaxed a little under the familiar and friendly hands of a fellow showgirl.

“There. Beautiful.” Marilyn patted Holly’s ass. “How about some underwear?”

“Oh, no thanks,” Holly said.

Marilyn’s nostrils flared. “See, you people are all the same. Trannies are dirty, right? You could never borrow underwear from a tranny.”

“I would not borrow underwear from my own mother,” Holly said honestly. She leaned forward to kiss Marilyn’s cheek—possibly the last time she would touch another human being alive. She thought she could fake walking a tightrope across the canyon at Hoover Dam, but it would have been better if she’d had time to work up to this stunt. “Wish me luck.”

Marilyn’s voice softened at Holly’s touch. “Sure, hon. Where are you off to? Big performance?”

“Turn on the local news in about forty-five minutes.”

“Really?” Marilyn asked. “You’re going to flash Channel 13?”

“I sincerely hope not. Bye, and thanks!” Holly clopped out of Glitterati and toward Shane’s car, newly confident in her formfitting spangled dress, ready to put on a show.