“I know,” Jasmine wailed. “I just—”
“Look, you’re coming back in four days,” Kaylee said. “Elijah will be almost a week off Mentafixol at that point, and everything will be over.” Everything for him, at least. Holly would be only two days off Mentafixol. Kaylee had scheduled Holly’s withdrawal to coincide with Peter Starr’s impossible feat of physical stamina. She’d advertised his performance all over the city so he couldn’t change the date, to keep him occupied and out of the way. He was a weak levitator anyway, and his power had faded too much with age for him to be much help. Kaylee would follow Holly around town herself, bribing people Holly injured, changing the minds of everyone at the jail to bail Holly out. People coming off the drug were predictable in their unpredictability. They were understandably angry that they’d been robbed of their powers and told they were crazy since they were teenagers. The first people they went after were often their parents.
“I do trust you, honey. I do trust you,” Jasmine was repeating, as if trying to convince herself.
“Good,” Kaylee said. Across the floor, framed by the flashing lights of the machines, Shane Sligh slipped out of the Peacock Room. He was deep in conversation with the casino’s transvestite Marilyn Monroe impersonator—some heady theoretical conversation about music, Kaylee assumed from eavesdropping on Shane many times—but the instant he spotted Kaylee, his eyes locked with hers.
“Jasmine, minor security crisis, gotta go, okay? See you Monday.” Kaylee pocketed her phone and walked straight toward Shane.
His blue eyes lit up, which broke her heart every time. Shane, in costume for his dad’s Frank Sinatra band, was hard to take seriously at first glance. But his black tux fit him really well. His quick, dry wit and the knowing look in his eyes told her if any guy without power could empathize with what she’d been through, it would be him. That’s what made him so tempting, and that’s what made him trouble. She couldn’t afford to get tangled in a relationship right now, maybe not ever—for her sake, and for his.
As she came within range, he made one more comment to Marilyn Monroe. Then he turned back to Kaylee, beamed at her, and took one step toward her.
She threw as hard as she could at him, Asking Kaylee out is not a good idea, and watched him step back to the wall again. Exquisite prickles rushed across her skin. She’d changed Shane’s mind so many times in the year they’d both worked at the casino that she’d almost begun to look forward to the encounter. If she wasn’t careful, she’d associate the sight of him with the pleasure of her power, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Still power-walking across the crazy pattern in the carpet, she stole a glance back at him. He’d folded one arm across his tux and propped the other fist against his chin, hiding his mouth. But he leaned forward just enough that he could see her beyond Marilyn Monroe. He followed Kaylee with his eyes.
This time the prickles Kaylee felt didn’t come from her power at all.
Only four more nights, Holly assured herself. Tonight, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. She and her parents took Monday night off. Tuesday her dad would perform his impossible feat of physical stamina. And then he would tell her his secrets, surely. She had to get through only four more nights as a brainless sex object onstage in a spangled bikini.
Her mom took care of the complicated parts of the magic trick, like yanking the red velvet curtain closed behind herself and balling her body into the tiny compartment underneath the rolling box to make it look as if she’d disappeared. Holly’s dad did all the acting. He adopted a pained expression as if he were focusing on the box through the wisps of dry-ice smoke and willing Holly’s mom to disappear. Holly’s job was to stand smiling at the packed auditorium and make presentation motions with her fingers gracefully extended and her careful manicure on display. No concentration required.
Until a light flashed in her eyes. Cameras weren’t allowed in the auditorium because the flash was blinding from the dark audience. She stood paralyzed, staring at bright spots marching across her field of view. She knew better than to take a step across the slick wooden stage in her high-heeled sandals until her vision cleared.
The prerecorded music over the speakers swelled to a dramatic cl**ax, signaling that her dad had jerked open the curtain on the box to reveal—gasp—an empty space where her mom had been! This trick actually did cause Holly some anxiety. Her mom was getting older, and though she still rocked the stage in her own spangled bikini and high heels, her back had begun to bother her when she curled up in the bottom of the box, in a space so impossibly small that the audience believed she was gone. Flexible by comparison, Holly was the logical one to put herself through the most physically difficult part of the act.
Yet no one ever mentioned this possibility. Holly suspected her parents didn’t quite trust her. She was a beloved dog, generally sweet-natured, that had once bitten its master. If they put Holly in the box, one missed cue would ruin the trick, exposing her dad for the fraud he and all magicians really were. Everyone knew magicians were frauds, of course, but no one wanted to see it.
In fact, Holly currently was missing a cue, and she hadn’t even suffered a mental breakdown this time. She tried to blink the flashing spots away, unable to move on the stage. If she explained to her mom in the dressing room later that she’d been blinded and feared for her safety on high heels, her mom would one-up her with a story of a too-discerning crowd or a broken prop she’d faked her way through at some point in her many years as a Vegas magician’s assistant. Holly stayed where she was and made presentation hands in the general direction of the velvet box she assumed to be empty.
Holly waited a few seconds until her dad swept across the stage, cape billowing behind him. She couldn’t see the cape. She’d simply memorized the routine after endless rehearsals and performances. But now her vision had recovered to the point that she could step carefully to the box and twirl it on its casters, showing the crowd that indeed, her mom was gone in the front, her mom was gone in the back. The fact that her mom had stuffed herself underneath seemed so obvious to Holly. She could only assume that either the crowd honestly wanted to be fooled, or they were unable to complain about her dad’s hokey tricks because Holly didn’t pass around suggestion cards.
She’d just completed her second rotation with the box when the same flash blinded her, from the same place in the audience. Now she was supposed to take several steps away from the box so the spectators didn’t suspect her of engineering the trick through some mechanism on the box itself. Yet with one hand she clung to the side of the box and what was left of her sense of balance. With the other hand, she made the presentation gesture.
Her dad brushed past her, elbowing her to wake her up. Obediently Holly took a few shaky steps away from the box. Luckily, for the next minute, no tasks needed her concentration. She simply stood by and grinned blindly at the audience while her dad lit the box on fire. She painted it anew every afternoon with nitrocellulose, which produced an impressive flame, convincing the crowd that her mom couldn’t possibly survive unscathed if she were somehow hidden inside—her dad’s banal twist on an old standby in every magician’s arsenal.
Blinking through the spots before her eyes, Holly took the opportunity to scan the crowd for the source of the flash that had blinded her twice. She might not have as many years of experience in this business as her mom, but she had almost eight, and she knew the flash of a camera when she saw one. This had been no camera flash. The source was bigger. Wearing her pasted-on grin, she panned slowly across the seats, letting her eyes linger on the spot where she thought the flash had originated, even as her head moved away.
There it was again. She closed her eyes to avoid being blinded a third time, then opened one eye tentatively. Now the flash was dull enough that she could study it. It moved, almost as if it was meant to draw her attention. She panned her head in the other direction but kept her eyes on that mesmerizing light. The small rectangle moved up, down, then blinked brighter and dimmer. Someone was deliberately moving a mirror to reflect the spotlights into her eyes.
Elijah. Simultaneously she recognized him and was surprised she’d been able to pick him out seven rows back in the sea of faces dimly lit by the glow onstage. Her heart raced at the thought that he’d come to check on her. He didn’t think she was a dork for bailing out of his bathroom window. He was concerned for her safety after her run-in with his unbalanced roommate.
A lovely little fantasy about her dream carpenter, but untrue. More likely he’d gotten bored with whatever he was nailing and slipped into the audience to catch the end of her dad’s show. He’d blinded her with the mirror as a hello, not realizing how much damage he could have caused to her dad’s act. She forgave him. People who weren’t in showbiz had no idea how difficult it was to make magic look this easy. She resumed her slow head turn, grinning at everyone in the crowd.
Her attention snapped back to him as he held up one hand in a power fist. No—he turned his fist on its side and stuck out his thumb and first finger. Then he made an L. He was spelling to her in sign language, which they’d both learned in communications class their senior year in high school, before the teachers put a stop to it because students were spending whole periods signing to each other when the teachers made them turn their cell phones off. G-L-I-T-T-E-R-A-T-I, Elijah spelled, then the sign for midnight.
He wanted her to meet him at the Glitterati dance club at midnight?
Canned trumpets blasted at her from all directions. Time for her mom to reappear! Holly pirouetted around the box and extended her arms toward it, as if this helped the trick somehow. Her dad ripped back the velvet curtain to reveal—wonder of wonders—her mom, wearing a different color bikini!
Holly felt the force of the audience’s cheer hit her in the center of her chest.
Smiling, she took the hand her dad offered her. With his other hand he assisted her mom down from the box, and the three of them stepped forward and bowed. Her dad, who had very limber fingers from many years’ experience as a charlatan, managed to pinch Holly’s pinkie. Hard.
He was right to reprimand her, she thought as she and her mom retrieved the levitation table from the wings and wheeled it center stage. She couldn’t let one random flirtation from her high school crush distract her from her duties. She wanted her own act as an illusionist. She needed to stay on her parents’ good side if she planned to use their tricks and their connections.
She caught the glittering gold hoops her mom threw her and passed them up and down her dad’s supine body as he slowly rose from the levitation table, into the air. The audience ooohed. Holly had no idea how her dad pulled this trick off. Usually levitation tables were powered by carefully hidden hydraulics. Holly couldn’t even see any wires on this one. Of all her dad’s illusions, this was his most impressive, and in her opinion almost made up for the fact that she’d bought the hula hoops at the dollar store and coated them with spray glitter left over from one of her middle school art projects. As soon as she’d cleared his head with the hoops, she assumed a pageant pose at the end of the table and held both hoops high in the air as if she’d truly done something special this time.
And then, free to examine the audience again, she looked for Elijah. She couldn’t help it. Parents and job and potential career be damned, Elijah Brown wanted her attention, and he had it. She squinted into the darkness for a sign language clarification of Glitterati at midnight and (she wished) Elijah’s love for her that had never died.
He was gone.
Elijah ducked out the stage door and hurried down the stairs, into the bowels of the casino. He was a legitimate employee now, with benefits the same as anybody else, and access to all the shows because his boss trusted him. He kept reassuring himself of this. The only reason he felt tonight as if he’d done something wrong was that he had MAD, he had no Mentafixol, and the two days it took the drug to cycle out of his system were over.
Insomnia didn’t help: he’d been up half the night with the same delusion from the night before that he was reading Rob’s mind and experiencing his dreams. Over and over Rob had rushed through a Chicago subway station to find a hidden bomb before it was too late. Elijah was exhausted.
Nodding to showgirls who called his name as they tiptoed past in their stilettos and feathers, he hurried down the corridor to the casino health clinic and approached the pharmacy counter. Good, a different clerk manned the register from the one who’d been there that morning when he’d checked fruitlessly.
Thirty-six hours off the drug at the time, he hadn’t gotten angry. Instead, he’d called Dr. Gray and listened to the message that the number had been disconnected. Then he’d flipped frantically through the phone book. Dr. Gray wasn’t listed. He’d peeked into the casino health center and asked for Dr. Gray. They’d never heard of him. Elijah had pressed the button on his cell to call his mom and get more information about the disappearing doctor who’d diagnosed him with MAD and prescribed Mentafixol in the first place seven years ago.
Elijah had hung up before the call went through. He was twenty-one years old, after all, and it was getting a bit pathetic for him to call his mom to figure out stuff like this for him. He was growing desperate, yes, but that was probably a symptom of MAD—a symptom he’d best hide before he landed in an insane asylum. Or got himself booted to the Res blah blah.
But that had been at thirty-six hours. Forty-eight hours off the drug now, he was angry. At his mom, at Dr. Gray, at the pharmacy, at the drug company that had neglected to send their shipment as usual. Angry that he’d been forced to drag Holly Starr into this. But if that shipment of Mentafixol didn’t come in before her own prescription ran out, she’d get dragged into it no matter what Elijah did.