Her chest was so tight, she could hardly breathe. “We need to talk.” She led him by the hand to the bed. They sat facing each other. The curtains were still open a foot, and the afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, drawing a broad line between them.
“If you can read minds . . .” she reasoned slowly.
“Mm-hmm,” he prompted her.
“. . . but you think it’s a delusion caused by MAD . . .”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Are you ever right about what people are thinking? And if you’re right, how do you explain that?”
“Most of the time, I can’t tell whether I’m right or not,” he said. “Sometimes the person will say something or do something that lets me know I’m right. In those cases, I figure I’m really reading their body language or making an educated guess. I’m pretty good at that. I didn’t major in psychology for nothing. And my brain is interpreting that information as mind reading because I am mentally diseased.”
“Right,” Holly said. She wasn’t listening to him, though. She was thinking about her own magical power. She was thinking Elijah’s was hard to prove real, but hers wasn’t.
“Then do it,” he said.
Holly jumped. She watched him warily. “Do what?”
“Show me your power,” he said. His heart was full of dread. How awful, if she thought she was making the pillows sail through the air, and he could clearly see she wasn’t. He liked to picture her as a telekinetic force of womanhood, not a fragile and deluded beauty. But they needed closure. “Make something move.”
“My power isn’t as strong as it was when I was fourteen,” she apologized. “It’s stronger every hour, but not that strong.”
“Because you haven’t been off Mentafixol as long as I have,” Elijah said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
She focused on him. Without taking her eyes off him, she thought about the TV remote on the bedside table behind him. In her mind she fingered the switch.
The TV clicked off.
She thought about the light switch just inside the door in the bathroom.
The light extinguished.
She thought about the curtains.
They raked shut. Slivers of light careened around the room as the curtains swung, but slowly the fabric settled straight down, erasing the line of light between her and Elijah. The darkness was complete.
Elijah’s mind raced. He should do something. He should feel something. All he could feel was Holly. She was hyperaware of the pitch dark and her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. If she had magical power, that meant she wasn’t crazy. But if she wasn’t crazy, her parents had lied to her. Her whole life was built on a lie, and she had no life left.
“Stop.” He couldn’t see her at all in the dark, but he needed to touch her and stop her. He put his hand on what he thought was her bare knee.
Her thoughts did stop, or rather, rebooted, redirected. Now she was thinking about Elijah’s hot hand on her skin. Or Elijah was thinking this. Or they both were, their separate thoughts intertwining in his head until he couldn’t tell the difference.
He slid his hand off her knee and felt around on the bedside table next to him until he found the lamp. He switched it on. In the sudden light, she blinked long brown lashes at him. She had magical power, she was hot for him, and she was real.
“We have to make sure,” he said. “We have to know why. The candy store is open by now.” He stood and held out his hand to her. “Let’s go.”
She had to shower first.
“No, you don’t,” Elijah called from the bedroom. “We’re just going up the street to change our lives forever. No need to get fancy.”
Holly had no intention of getting fancy. She was in as big a hurry as he was. But now that she and Elijah had turned this corner, she felt more self-conscious. She wasn’t sure whether to be mortified that he’d heard her every lustful thought about him, or turned on. But as long as she was freshly showered and wore her false lashes, she could do anything. It wasn’t really her.
Though . . . she cupped her spangled boobs in her hands and turned to the side to examine herself in the mirror. This outfit might be a little much for Icarus. Or a little little. She would stand out, to say the least, and that might not be desirable while she and Elijah were hanging around the candy company, casing the joint. Maybe she should stop at one of the gift shops and buy herself whatever people wore up here. Dungarees. She wasn’t sure what dungarees were.
“I think you should wear what you’ve got,” Elijah called. “That way, if anything strange happens, we can shrug and explain that we’re from Vegas.” He opened the door and hung on the frame with his arms over his head, showing her those muscular triceps beneath his T-shirt sleeves. “I wish you could read my mind. You look so gorgeous exactly like that.”
She watched her bare cheeks redden in the mirror and her mouth widen into a grin. “You can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can’t take Vegas out of the girl.” She dug in her purse for her false eyelash glue.
He exhaled his impatience through his nose. Even with everything else spinning through her head, she was able to appreciate the beauty of this man hanging on the door frame. She swept on her cosmetics while he watched her darkly.
They cruised up the street in Shane’s car and parked in front of the candy company again. The difference this time was that the storefronts, the sidewalks, and even the streets were filled with pedestrians. Mounting the brick steps to the store, they passed someone going down, a gorilla wearing a metallic green leprechaun hat.
“Wait,” Holly said, spinning to follow the gorilla with her eyes. “I thought we left Vegas.” Now that she was about to discover the truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it.
Elijah could read her mind and wouldn’t let her stall. He took her hand and hauled her the rest of the way up the steps. He pulled her through the door of the store and didn’t let her go until they stood in front of the candy case, the café tables around them filled with more gorillas and cowgirls and a few pirates nibbling bonbons.
“What can I do ya for?” asked the portly, white-haired man in a plaid shirt and overalls who manned the old-fashioned metal cash register.
“We would like some Mentafixol,” Elijah said.
“And a half pound of those chocolate-covered seafoam candies,” Holly added.
“Mentafixol!” the candy man exclaimed. He shook open a small bag.
Holly was afraid he would say he’d never heard of the stuff, but Elijah flexed his hand down by his side, signaling her to wait.
“Nobody’s ever come in and asked for it before,” the man went on, scooping candies into the bag. Holly watched him carefully to make sure he was scooping from the seafoam tray and not the nut chew tray next to it.
She remembered their mission and prompted the man, “But you do make Mentafixol?”
“Oh, yeah, we make it.” The man placed the bag on a scale. “It’s the only pill we make. We manufacture it in small batches on special order for one clinic in Las Vegas that treats a very rare condition called MAD, which stands for mental addled dysphoria.”
“Mental adolescent dysfunction,” Holly and Elijah said together. They were careful not to look at each other, and Holly hoped the candy man hadn’t noticed their enthusiasm.
“Why do you make it up here?” Holly asked. “You’re a long way from Vegas. Is the clinic that asks for it trying to keep it a secret?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the man. “We’re just convenient. We have the altitude necessary for the chemical reaction. We have the molybdenum. Did you know that the town of Icarus was founded in the nineteenth century as a molybdenum mining camp?” He leaned forward, bushy white brows high, and shook the bag at Holly.
She took the bag from him and popped a candy into her mouth.
“All of us in town work as molybdenum miners when you tourists go home,” the man said. “Here in the shop, we make the molybdenum cores of Mentafixol. Then we just dump them into the coating drum for a hard candy shell and a nice paraffin polish.”
Holly glanced over at Elijah for direction. He watched the candy man with an intense look in his green eyes—an expression Holly had come to recognize over the past day without even knowing she was recognizing it, his mind-reading expression. “Don’t you think it’s kind of unusual for a candy company to be asked to make a prescription drug?” he asked. “Don’t you ever get inspected by the FDA?”
“I have had that thought.” The man pointed at Elijah. “I don’t want you to think I haven’t. I’ve even called the clinic to ask them about it. And every time I do, they send somebody all the way up here to discuss it with me right away. Lately it’s been a little blond girl. Something in the way she describes it to me makes so much sense that I change my mind about complaining.”
Elijah nodded like it was all becoming clear. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “We’re here for the parade.”
“I can see that,” the candy man said, eyeing Holly. “You were with the gorillas.”
“Yes,” Holly lied, cheering him with a flourish of the piece of candy in her fingers. She put it in her mouth.
“But while we’re here,” Elijah said, “we wanted to check on the Mentafixol. We have friends at the clinic, and the clinic has run out of medicine.”
“You don’t say!” the man said. “Let me go look at that ticket.” He turned and moved to the shelves behind him.
Elijah leaned down to Holly and whispered, “The blonde is Kaylee.”
“The blonde is . . .” Holly repeated with her mouth full, not understanding. Then, slowly, she understood. Kaylee was the “little blond girl” who kept the candy company from asking too many questions about Mentafixol. The chocolate turned to sand in Holly’s mouth. She swallowed the dry mouthful. “How do you know?”
“I can see her in his mind.” Elijah straightened and resumed his intense look as the man returned to the register.
“Yep, the clinic asked us to halt shipment,” the man said. “And I can’t give you any. It has to go through the clinic. But you know who else in Vegas would have some?”
“Who?” Elijah asked in a tone that told Holly he already knew.
“That blonde,” the man said. “She always takes boxes and boxes back with her, plus we make her a few big horse pills and even some injectables out of the same stuff. God knows what she does with those. You want me to dig up her card?”
Elijah squinted at the man. Now Holly did wish she could read Elijah’s mind, because she had no idea what the next step in his plan was. If he’d been fishing for a way to get the man to fork over some Mentafixol, he’d run out of options.
She concentrated on the box that the man had turned to stare at on the shelves behind the counter a moment before. She thought about sliding it out from the boxes around it.
It moved into midair.
Elijah blinked. “You’ve been so helpful,” he said quickly to the man. “Let me pay you for”—he cut his eyes sideways at Holly’s bag of candy—“that.”
Holly floated the box of Mentafixol up to the ceiling.
As the man bent to peer at the cash register, Elijah widened his eyes at Holly, then gestured with his head at the crowded café tables, warning her to cut out the levitation or they would get caught.
Holly didn’t understand how anybody who happened to see what she was doing could possibly link her with a floating box of pharmaceuticals. She shrugged. “I’m a magician.”
Elijah paid, and Holly took him by the hand. She led him across the shop, then opened the door by backing him against it. “Thank you for the candy,” she whispered. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. Electricity shot through her, but for once she wasn’t fully vested in the attentions of Elijah. She let her lips linger on his while she coaxed the box a few feet downward, under the doorjamb, and outdoors. Then she rubbed the tip of her nose against Elijah’s and pulled him free of the shop, down the sidewalk, to Shane’s car, with the neat white box floating in the air in front of them all the way.
12
Elijah started the Catalina with an erk and meant to speed away from the candy store before the old man dashed after them and snatched his Mentafixol back. But Elijah hadn’t driven ten feet before he had to brake hard for a group of men hiking down the street. They weren’t in costume for the parade but were decked out in Western wear like real cowboys. They might actually have been molybdenum miners.
“They put us on Mentafixol to keep us from using our power,” Holly murmured, one pink fingernail tracing patterns on the box on the seat between them.
“Apparently,” Elijah said. He was trying to get his brain around the situation himself. He could read minds. It was real. After twenty-one years as a fatherless nobody, he had more power than he knew what to do with.
The concept just wouldn’t sink in. He had no room in his head for his own thoughts because Holly’s black anger pushed them out.
“And they told us we were crazy so we’d take the Mentafixol.” Her words came faster and faster to keep up with the darkness swirling in her mind. “That’s what my dad meant when he said he’d reveal all the secrets of his magic act to me after his impossible feat of physical stamina tomorrow. He knew I was coming off Mentafixol. The secret is that there’s no trick to it. He has power just like me. That’s how he levitates with no wires. And he’s only number four on the list of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas? Seems like he could pull out all the stops and at least make it to number two.”