Levitating Las Vegas

18




Holly had been a beautiful baby. By that time Lanie had already dyed her own hair blond. She said she looked more like a showgirl that way. Whoever heard of a brunette magician’s assistant? But Peter had liked Lanie’s hair brown, and when Holly was born with a mass of brown curls, it was like having the old Lanie back again in miniature. They took every Monday off from the show and had a picnic at Lake Mead. Lanie was afraid of keeping baby Holly out in the sun too long. She slathered Holly in sunscreen. Her excuse was that they had to think of Holly’s future career, and a career as a high-profile magician started with tight and supple skin. They couldn’t risk sun damage. Of course, Lanie wasn’t nearly as concerned about appearances as she let on. That was just for show, to keep up the casino act. Peter knew what the fuss was really about. She was overprotective of Holly, always thinking of the first baby she had lost.

But he was content to let Holly sit on the beach as long as she wanted. She was fascinated by the large-grained sand worn from the surrounding mountains, tiny rocks every color of the rainbow. She would scoop up a handful, examine it sticking to her fingers, and wash it off by waving her fat hand in the inch of water lapping at her baby toes. Strange that such sand, like a billion gemstones, could come from the dun-colored mountains. Strange that he’d likewise found Lanie among the monsters at the Res, a powerless farm girl drawn in by magic. He’d rescued her and built a beautiful life with her under Mr. Diamond’s protection and created this beautiful baby.

And now the Brown kid would be the death of Holly. He’d known it ever since the night Holly got her power and then this kid got his and stormed into Mr. Diamond’s office. The kid would have torn the place down if Peter hadn’t taken him out. Peter had never said this to Mr. Diamond or Jasmine Brown—though they’d probably read it from him anyway—but he’d always hoped this kid would do himself in like his f*cked-up father, before he got his paws on Holly.

“Thanks a lot.” Elijah’s face was stuck to the black leather seat of the limo. He pushed himself off with shaky forearms and sat up, head throbbing with Mr. Starr’s vitriol in his head. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Starr sat directly across from him, staring him down, eyes glittering like the sequins on his magician get-up, deliberately waking him with his hatred.

Next to him sat Kaylee typing furiously on a laptop. She glanced at Elijah. “You okay?”

“I’m perfect, Kaylee. Thanks for asking.”

She shut the laptop. The limo bumped into the back parking lot at Glitterati and parked across the spaces. She left one foot in the car and stepped outside onto the asphalt with the other high-heeled shoe, blocking Elijah’s way if he had chosen to escape, which of course he didn’t. He’d been thinking about it, but then he changed his mind. She looked back at Mr. Starr. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Who, me?” Mr. Starr asked with his hands up.

Mr. Starr watched Kaylee disappear inside the building, then turned back to Elijah, who met his steely gaze. But Elijah was beginning to think he should look away and kowtow. This was, after all, the man who had now twice caused Elijah to pass out in the blink of an eye. If Elijah and Holly were somehow able to get out of this mess and continue to date, he and Mr. Starr were going to have to talk about this before Mr. Starr caused Elijah permanent brain damage, maybe even short-circuited his mind-reading ability.

Elijah didn’t kowtow fast enough. Mr. Starr wielded his right hand as if he would smack Elijah with it, bandage and all.

And then he did smack Elijah—with his power, not his hand—a hard blow on the cheekbone that nearly turned Elijah’s head around, yet echoed tightly through the limo like a bitch slap.

“I told you to stay the f*ck away from my daughter!” Mr. Starr roared.

Elijah had wondered last week whether Mr. Starr’s threats still mattered seven years later. Now he had his answer.

“And I told you that’s bullshit,” Elijah said.

Mr. Starr gripped Elijah’s throat, pinning him against the seat. Elijah watched blackness seep into the edges of his vision.

The pressure lifted. He grabbed his throat protectively, panting.

Kaylee opened the limo door. She glared at Mr. Starr. “Play nice.”

“F*cker,” Mr. Starr said.

“We have to get past this,” Elijah said, voice gravelly. “We can’t do this in front of the kids every Thanksgiving.”

“Shut up!” Mr. Starr and Kaylee both told him.

The limo was off again. Kaylee opened her laptop. She had a headache of her own from changing minds. A drop of sweat tracked from her platinum-blond hairline down the side of her face.

“Working hard in there?” Elijah asked.

Kaylee pulled a DVD from her pocket. “The security cameras filmed Holly coming in. Marilyn Monroe thought she’d finally hit the jackpot. She had the TV tuned to the local news, hoping Holly made a spectacle of herself. Then Marilyn was going to sell the nudie preshow.”

Mr. Starr used his power to lift the DVD from Kaylee’s fingers. He broke it with a ping into eight perfect pie-shaped pieces. “This is your fault,” he told Elijah.

Elijah ignored him. He turned to Kaylee. “You were at Glitterati that night. You’re the one who changed Rob’s mind when he was going to hit me. Why didn’t you stop Holly from giving me a pill? If you think I’m so bad for her, why didn’t you keep her away from me?”

Kaylee shrugged. “I don’t think you’re so bad for her, necessarily. I think you two could be great together, if you didn’t manipulate her like a mind reader, and if she didn’t attack you like a levitator, and if you both stayed out of the Res.”

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Mr. Starr grumbled.

“But the night at Glitterati,” Kaylee said, “it seemed easier to give you what you wanted, in a controlled environment.”

“That is, where you could control everybody’s mind if you had to,” Elijah said accusingly.

“That is, where I could keep Rob from kicking your ass.”

Elijah’s pride took over. Usually he wasn’t one to flaunt his musculature, but at some level he’d always been aware and a little turned on that he’d stolen his ex-roommate’s potential girlfriend. Besides, he’d just been slapped by Holly’s father. He said, “Rob’s not so tough.”

“Rob is a sheriff’s deputy,” Kaylee said matter-of-factly. “He’s always packing.”

“Maybe you should enlist his help, then,” Elijah said. “Are we the only ones in pursuit of Holly? This is seems awfully fly-by-night. Can’t you call for backup?”

“I have a small army of security at the casino, yes,” Kaylee said, typing on her keyboard again. “But I have only a handful of people who know about powers. They have low-level power themselves, or they’re married to people with power. Folks who won’t blab. And almost every one of them is lying unconscious on the floor of your house, thanks to Holly. That is one angry girl.”

“She’s scared,” Elijah said, throwing an accusing look at Mr. Starr.

“She should be,” Kaylee said, “if she’s headed where we think she’s headed. The Res is just beyond Hoover Dam.”

Elijah went cold. “Can’t you ask Mr. Diamond for help?” His voice cracked.

“Yeah.” Mr. Starr turned to Kaylee. “Can’t you ask Mr. Diamond for help? I think this finally rises to his level of interest, don’t you?”

“Mr. Diamond hasn’t been as involved lately,” Kaylee replied, typing.

Elijah sat back and rested against the seat, watching the Strip fall away and the barren mountains crawl closer. The limo wound up to Boulder City, where workers had lived in the 1930s while building the dam, and down through deep red canyons. Holly must have been terrified to propel Shane’s car underneath these canyon walls. Her power sent her into a panic when it encountered anything overhead too large for her to hold up.

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.

In the end, it was the wind that did her in. The wind and her lack of underwear. Another gust threatened to blow her micromini straight up. She yanked her skirt down, lost her balance, and fell. Her stomach left her. Above her around the guardrail, the crowd screamed.

She was still close to the dam. She could have used her power to prop herself up at any point. But if an imaginary wire was a stretch for the crowd to believe, an imaginary safety net would be worse. She let herself fall.

The wall of the concrete dam whizzed by her. More concrete structures and the turbulent water zoomed up at her. Logically she knew she should keep falling to the bottom and pull up at the very last second to make the stunt look like a real spill. She could claim later that the fall was real, and that her survival had been miraculous.

But she’d had full power only twenty-four hours. She didn’t quite trust it—not now that she had someone to live for. Heart beating wildly, she slowed herself in midair. Not enough to stop herself and rouse the suspicions of horrified onlookers, but enough to reassure her that she could protect herself when she neared the bottom.

An unseen force pushed her downward, speeding her up again. Saving herself did not seem like a good idea. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the briefest flash of Violet the levitator and Nate the mind changer standing on the concrete wall of the dam at river level. Then she smacked hard into the cold water.



Elijah clawed his way through the crowd so he could see Holly hit the river. She came up almost immediately and seemed to be swimming as the current swept her downstream. He let out a shaky sigh of relief.

Then he heard footsteps running behind him. All the pedestrians had pressed themselves against the guardrail to watch Holly. Rob had shoved his way back through the crowd and was dashing toward his sheriff’s deputy car, which was parked just across the street from Shane’s car and pointed in the right direction to chase Holly down the river.

“Kaylee!” Elijah grabbed her elbow. “We have to get Holly before Rob does!” Even as he shouted this, the siren on Rob’s car wailed. Traffic parted for him. The car disappeared over the hill.

Mr. Starr reached them, squinting against tears. “I think I saw two of them below the dam. One of them must be a mind changer, since they got through Homeland Security. They took off down the service road in an SUV. They probably have her already.” He wailed to Kaylee, “What am I going to tell Lanie?”

Kaylee reached up to put her hand on his shoulder. “Tell her we did our best.”

“What?” Elijah barked. “You’re going to let them have her?”

“Yes,” Kaylee said with a tone and a look that told him to keep his voice down. “As I said, we’re shorthanded, and there’s nothing the three of us can do against the Res.”

“But—” Elijah stopped short. He changed his mind about arguing with Kaylee. He knew Kaylee had done this to him, but he couldn’t struggle out from under that shroud.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she told both of them. “Maybe we can figure out a way to get her out of there sooner rather than later, but we can’t go barreling in there now. They’ll take us all. We have to regroup and think about this. We need to wean more teenagers off Mentafixol to help us. That’s a week each, if their parents even allow it after they hear what happened to Holly.”

Kaylee turned to Mr. Starr. “Go back in the limo. Lanie is good at thinking up cover stories. Have her make up something to say to the local news about Holly. You suspect she’s alive, she just disappeared like a good magician’s daughter, and you have every confidence she’ll reappear. Something that will dissuade the police from dragging the Colorado for her body. Something that doesn’t incriminate you but piques the public’s interest in your act and the casino. This is no time to melt into a puddle. We need to keep the casino going and the show going and the money coming in. The Res is making a push, and we need all the resources we can get to fight them. Okay?” She pulled Mr. Starr closer and whispered something Elijah didn’t catch, but the feeling behind it was reassurance. False reassurance.

Elijah watched the two of them. They didn’t touch each other in a romantic way, but they did pat each other’s shoulders as they talked, and they stood very close. It was his psychology training rather than his mind-reading ability that told him Kaylee and Mr. Starr were related somehow, even though they looked nothing alike.

They walked together to the limo, Mr. Starr’s cape billowing behind him, sequins twinkling in the setting sunlight like the last remnants of his vanished daughter. Kaylee leaned through the door of the limo to retrieve her laptop case. As the limo departed, she returned to Elijah.

“Do you have Shane’s keys?” she asked.

He nodded. He resisted following her, then changed his mind. He slipped behind the wheel of Shane’s Catalina, which Holly had “driven” there. He cranked the engine with a roar and pulled into traffic.

“When you reach the highway, go south.” Kaylee nodded at the far side of the canyon. “Across the bridge.”

“There’s nothing over there but Arizona,” Elijah protested.

“We don’t want to take the same route back to Vegas as Peter,” she said, “in case the Res has any surprises left for us. Peter and I shouldn’t be in the same place. He would need to take over the casino if something happened to me. God help us all.” Her words ended in a mutter. She opened her laptop on her knees like the discussion was over.

“What about Mr. Diamond?” Elijah asked.

Ignoring Elijah’s question, she explained, “We’ll drive down to Bullhead City, cross the river there, and come back up to Vegas.”

“What? That will take three hours!” Elijah exclaimed.

Kaylee’s fingers tapped the keyboard. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, because we’re not going after her.”

Kaylee was right. Elijah had changed his mind about saving Holly. He pulled the car onto the access road, headed back toward Highway 93. Twilight descended on them, accelerated by the dirty canyon walls around them. He flicked the knob to turn on the headlights.

As the car climbed the canyon in endless switchbacks and finally crossed the bridge, Elijah calmed himself enough to think clearly. And that meant he could separate what he wanted to do, go after Holly, from what Kaylee made him think he wanted to do. He was still under her power. But he knew he was under her power. If he could coax her to lift her power just for a second, maybe he could get out from under it.

“Rob,” Elijah said.

Kaylee jumped, startled at his voice, and could have kicked herself for jumping. “Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“How could you miss it?” Elijah didn’t hide his exasperation with her.

“I’m a mind changer, not a mind reader,” she defended herself. “But he must be a mind reader.” She huffed out a sigh. “When I first met him a couple of weeks ago, I thought he was perfect for Holly. I really liked him. He said all the right things. Of course he’s a mind reader. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.” Darkness was falling fast, but she gazed out the window at the inky mountains as if there were still a view.

“My mom said people with power don’t drink,” Elijah said. “Rob is a lush.”

“A lot of us pretend to drink,” Kaylee said, “because it gives us an excuse for bad behavior. We have a hard time blending in with regular people.” She shook her head. “It all makes sense now. His first date with Holly, he brings her over to your house, right?”

“Right.”

“Then he acts all weird, makes lewd comments, shoots a hole in your ceiling, scares her so bad that she jumps out the bathroom window.”

“Right.”

“The next night, you ask her to meet you at Glitterati, and there’s Rob. You know what he did to her in the parking lot, right?”

“Right,” Elijah said, feeling sick.

“Every bit of that was a ploy to get a reaction from you and a reaction from her. That’s what mind readers do. They mess with people so that their minds start spinning, which unlocks their secrets. That way he could read you, learn about your relationship, and use it against both of you. I hate mind readers.” She shuddered and folded her arms as if the eighty-degree evening had made her cold.

Elijah nodded, but he could hardly see the road anymore. His mind was too full of Kaylee’s terror and the horrible explanation of what Rob had been up to. Rob had insulted Holly repeatedly, even attacked her in his mind, just to read where Elijah’s thoughts went in response. Undoubtedly he’d seen how strong Elijah’s feelings were for her.

Then Rob had attacked her physically. But Elijah didn’t agree with Kaylee that Rob had been trolling Holly for information at that point. He knew Elijah like the back of his hand after a week of living with him, and in attacking Holly, he’d upped the ante with Elijah. Now Rob must understand with the certainty of sunny weather in a Nevada summer that if he captured Holly, Elijah would come.

“But what is Rob doing this for?” Elijah asked.

“Isaac and I used to talk about his diabolical plans to take over the casino from Mr. Diamond.” Kaylee’s tone was sarcastic, but her fear of Isaac made Elijah grip the steering wheel harder. “He said nobody knows where powers come from. We’re all so terrified of being discovered and jailed or killed that we don’t dare investigate our origins with too much enthusiasm. But the families with powers who end up in Vegas are originally from all over the place, which suggests that there are a lot more of us scattered around the country, even the world.

“Isaac said if he watched the news carefully, he bet he could pick out the mind readers and mind changers and levitators. And those are just the powers we know about. There might be more. Whatever powers people had, these folks would try to blend into society, but sooner or later they’d get themselves in trouble in a spectacular way, and the event would get written up in the news.”

“And he could go recruit them?” Elijah asked.

“Exactly. Imagine how easy that would be, if Rob was isolated in Chicago without knowing anybody else with power, or even knowing that a group of us existed, and Isaac came to him and said, ‘I can do what you can do. You’re in trouble, but my friends and I can get you out. Come with me and we’ll be millionaires.’ ”

“But what kind of trouble?”

“That’s just it. When Holly first introduced me to Rob and said she wanted to go out with him, I researched him. He did graduate from high school and the police academy in Chicago, and he did work for a short time as a Chicago cop. He does work for the Clark County Sheriff, and he hasn’t gotten in any trouble that I could find.”

“Google ‘Chicago subway station bomb.’ ”

“Okay,” she said dubiously, her fingers flying across her laptop keyboard again. “You think he blew up a Chicago subway station?”

“I think he saved a Chicago subway station. The police caught the terrorist. The terrorist wouldn’t tell them where the bomb was. Rob read his mind.”

She whacked a key with finality. “Oh, shit, you’re right. See?” She turned the keyboard toward Elijah so he could view the screen, which was difficult while he was negotiating the winding road up the mountain. “No, wait.” Disgusted with herself all over again, she remembered that his brain registered whatever she was reading.

She scanned the online news article about a bomb that had been set by terrorists to go off during rush hour in a crowded downtown station. An unnamed police officer had saved countless commuters by locating the bomb at the last minute, as if by magic. At the time of publication, the police department had no coherent information about how the police officer had made this discovery.

“I’ll bet his bosses started to get suspicious,” Kaylee said out loud to Elijah. “They had no evidence to tie Rob to the terrorists, but he couldn’t tell them how he’d known where the bomb was. Just when they started to turn up the heat on him, Isaac appeared to save him from himself. Isaac and the rest of the Res banded together to help get Rob a job as a sheriff’s deputy down here, despite his being blackballed in Chicago. That was smart, because we all assumed he was a good guy until it was too late, and cops naturally have access to all sorts of information that the rest of us don’t.

“Then Isaac sent Rob into the casino to snoop. He heard us thinking about taking you and Holly off Mentafixol. He found ways to get close to both of you. He moved in with you, and he asked Holly out.”

Elijah set his jaw. “That won’t work anymore, though. He can only use our minds against us if we let him.”

“There is no ‘let’ at the Res,” Kaylee said. “Put you and Holly together at the Res, with those bullies egging you on, and you won’t stand a chance. I’ve seen that happen so many times there. Couples fall in love. Then they hurt each other. I mean physically and mentally and emotionally hurt each other as badly as a person can be hurt. That’s why we’re not going after her. I can’t risk losing both of you to the Res and making things worse for Holly there.”

“What are we going to do then, Kaylee?” Elijah shouted. “Why don’t you just hire some sharpshooters to go to the Res and pick these people off?”

“It is extremely difficult to get rid of a body,” Kaylee said. “Extremely difficult.”

Elijah got the distinct and unnerving impression that Kaylee had some experience with this.

“People start talking,” she said. “The Res doesn’t want to attract attention. And I don’t want bad PR. If customers are scared to come into our casino because they think it’s run by murderers or witches, we’ve all lost our ability to make a living in a safe environment.”

“I don’t care about that shit,” Elijah insisted. “We can’t leave her out there. That’s not an option. I can’t let Rob put his hands on her.”

“I guarantee you that is going to happen before we get back to Vegas,” Kaylee said.

Elijah felt like murder. “Consensually?” His voice broke.

Kaylee swallowed and took a long breath. “With mind changers thrown into the mix, it’s so hard to say where consent ends and force begins.”

“And you’re abandoning her to that because of PR?” Elijah demanded. “Why, Kaylee, why? What is so important about PR, more important than Holly?”

And suddenly it flashed into Kaylee’s mind, so it flashed into his. “You found Mr. Diamond dead, and you’re afraid the whole casino will fall apart without him.”

“Don’t you dare!” she shrieked. “Get out of my mind and don’t you dare tell anybody what you know. The casino can’t show weakness. The Res will take us over in a heartbeat!”

Elijah let Kaylee’s words pass over him like the dust over the Pontiac. He concentrated on her mind. The louder she shouted, and the more flustered she got, the more the blinds she’d pulled down over her thoughts inched upward.

“Just try me,” she dared him.

Elijah relaxed against the seat and let the headlight beams blur in front of him. He tugged at the blind. It didn’t budge. But it was still a millimeter up. He peeked underneath. He saw her struggling. She should let go and change his mind now. Change his mind about reading hers. That would protect her. But if she did that, she’d have to abandon the blind keeping him out, and in that moment he might see something he could use against her, such as—

“Holly is your half sister,” he said.

As her body jerked in astonishment, he stomped the brake and hauled the steering wheel to the right. The tires screamed in protest and a cloud of dust filled the car. He opened the door and dove out. The car was still moving. The heels of his hands hit sharp rocks and he tumbled into the dirt.

He got up and ran for his life and Holly’s. He knew he wouldn’t get far. He was wearing flip-flops, and the dark landscape was littered with scrub. He only hoped to stay far enough away from Kaylee that she couldn’t control him. But even that was futile. Before he’d gotten more than a few yards away, he changed his mind about running.

The headlights cut his legs in half and stretched his shadow all the way to the distant barren mountains. The car stopped beside him, engine rumbling. Kaylee left the driver’s seat and scooted back into the passenger side.

He put his hand on her door and leaned down to talk to her. “You’re scared to go back to the Res,” he said gently. “You would do anything to save Holly except go there yourself.”

She looked down at her hands. “No, you’re right.” She sniffled. “They’ll probably catch us both, but I couldn’t live with myself if I left her out there without even trying to save her. Let’s go.”

Elijah bounded around the car and slipped behind the wheel. He stomped the accelerator and sped back toward Holly.

Kaylee muttered, “I hate mind readers.” She took something out of the pocket of her suit jacket and handed it to him. “Here.”

He peered at the object in his palm and then the road and then the object by turns in the dim glow from the headlights and the stars. It appeared to be a jawbreaker covered in powdered diamonds, with TWO MILE HIGH CANDY CO. stamped on it.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “What’s this?”

“A very high dose of Mentafixol,” she said. “Take that and your power will be erased permanently.”

“Why are you giving it to me?” He tossed it back into her lap like a live grenade. Then he realized he’d rudely thrown it at her crotch, but damn. “Kaylee, don’t change my mind and make me take this pill. That’s morally wrong on so many levels. You can’t do that to me.”

She handed it back to him. “I’m not going to make you take it, Elijah. I want you to take it on your own. Your life and Holly’s will be hell from now on. The Res will sic you on each other and use you against your own parents, everybody at the casino. If you take this pill, they won’t be able to use you at all, and they won’t have nearly as much fun manipulating Holly.”

“Talk about hell!” he exclaimed. “Why would I want to live my life without power?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad before, was it?”

He looked over at her. He couldn’t see her face clearly in the night, but he could feel her thoughts. She knew the answer to his question. A wave of guilt washed over her, and she looked away.

He peered at the pill in his hand again. He rolled it along the lifeline in his palm. “It’s like a spy movie. You’re giving me arsenic in case I’m captured.”

“I’ve lived at the Res, Elijah. You haven’t.” For a split second, she opened up her mind to him and let him see what had happened to her. A split second of violation in the hot dark.