Levitating Las Vegas

Now Holly herself was surrounded by more of the black-suited goons. Several of them put out their hands to grab her. She created a force field around herself. They couldn’t reach through it. She clopped forward to the tall metal pole, walking as one unit with the goons. Her dad sat with his back against it, cradling his hand in his lap, his face red. Her mom knelt in front of him.

“Dad,” Holly said breathlessly. “I’m so sorry.”

Her dad wrinkled his brow and squeezed his eyes shut, as if he was in so much pain that he couldn’t speak.

Her mom spoke for him. “It’s a little late now! You haven’t learned a thing out gallivanting with Elijah Brown. Until you do, shut that power down!”

“I wouldn’t have gallivanted with Elijah Brown,” Holly said indignantly, “if you’d told me what was going on. Or if you’d told me anything in the past seven years!”

Holly’s mom straightened and whirled to face her. “We didn’t tell you because you would have acted exactly like this!”

Holly felt her heart in her throat. She’d been so angry at her parents, but what if she really was the one to blame? Would she have hurt her dad if they’d allowed her to have power when she was fourteen? Would she have hurt him on purpose?

Her mom didn’t care enough anymore to wait while Holly worked out this conundrum in her head. Disheveled now with her tiara hanging off one side of her bouffant hairdo, she bent in front of Holly’s dad again. “Here comes the limo, sweetie,” she said softly. Her sequined booty rose as she helped him stand.

Holly reached out with her power and gave her dad an additional very gentle boost underneath. He stood instantly and glared at her. He and her mom made their feeble way past the pole, away from the casino.

“Where are you going?” Holly cried, half apologetic, half exasperated.

“To the hospital, unless you know someone with magical powers of healing,” her mom spat as if this were a ridiculous idea. Magical powers, ha! The casino’s black limo sped across the asphalt and screeched to a halt in front of them. Holly’s parents slipped into the backseat. Almost as an afterthought, Holly’s mom leaned out the door and called, “Come with us.”

Holly wanted to. Even if her dad did glare at her, she wanted to sit beside him while the doctor examined his hand. But she still didn’t trust her parents. They might drug her or worse, especially now that she’d hurt her dad.

As a test, she considered easing the limo onto its side, just as she’d tumbled the SUV around the parking lot in Icarus the night before. Her mom’s earnest gaze didn’t change. She wasn’t a mind reader.

Then Holly said, “No, I’m not going with you.” She waited, but she didn’t suddenly decide going with her parents was a good idea. Her mom wasn’t a mind changer, either.

“Come on, sweetie,” her mom said almost kindly, but unable to disguise the edge in her voice. “Your father is in pain. We’ve got to go and we can’t leave you here.”

“I’ll go into the casino and talk to Mr. Diamond,” Holly said. The casino was clearly behind this conspiracy. If her parents were out of commission for the moment, she should go straight to the source.

Her mom nodded vigorously. “Yes. Go see Mr. Diamond. He’ll explain everything.” A goon stepped in front of Holly and shut the limo door.

Holly watched the limo speed across the pavement, clunk down the curb into the street, and disappear into traffic on the Strip. The usual noise of Vegas at 11 a.m. settled around her: cars swishing by on the side street, the casino’s enormous air conditioners grinding behind her. The normalcy of the sounds belied the fact that she was surrounded by six black-suited goons who were staring at her, kept at a careful distance by her power, waiting for her next move.

She turned on her high heel and crossed the pavement, toward the casino. She snatched up her purse as she passed her lawn chair, marveling that no one had stolen it—but maybe even pickpockets understood it wasn’t wise to steal from a girl who could inflate plastic palm trees with her mind and break her dad’s hand. She clopped all the way inside the casino and down the corridor to the employee elevator. The portrait of Mr. Diamond stared at her inside. The goons crowded in around her. Too late she realized she should have stopped them from coming with her. Telekinetic power took practice.

“Forty, please,” she said to the goon nearest the elevator buttons. She felt the elevator jerk into movement upward. She turned to the goon on her left. He stared at her, his face not a foot from hers. She mustered the most evil expression in her repertoire, which, granted, probably wasn’t all that threatening. He stared blandly back at her. He was probably reading her mind.

The doors slid open. The goons parted for her. Maybe it was a trap. Molten lava would rush down the hall at her! But that was ridiculous. Mr. Diamond’s office was at the end of the hall, and Kaylee would never allow molten lava around the big man. The penthouse was up here too. Kaylee would not allow lava near the penthouse if it was rented by celebrities.

Holly stepped off the elevator as if she had no misgivings, and she turned for Mr. Diamond’s office. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched the elevator doors sliding shut. No goons had stayed with her.

Kaylee walked out of her office next to Mr. Diamond’s, her business suit immaculate as usual, her golden hair shining like an angel’s in the sunlight streaming through the corridor windows. Kaylee’s expression was confident, her stride sure. Holly had met her match.

Bursting into Mr. Diamond’s office to confront him, which had been Holly’s imperative next step, suddenly seemed like the world’s worst idea.

“Oh, yeah?” Holly exclaimed. “Is that all you’ve got? Why didn’t you change my mind and stop me from breaking my dad’s hand?” Her voice started low with defiance and pitched into the shrillness of a little girl caught and guilty. She cringed.

“You’re not my only concern this morning.” Kaylee nodded to her office door, urging Holly inside.

Holly hesitated. There could still be lava. Or piranhas. Normally she would have sworn Kaylee would not do that to her. But the landmarks of Holly’s life had been shaken from their foundations, and her moral compass spun in the air in front of her.

“No tricks.” Kaylee pulled back her silk cuff. “Nothing up my sleeve.”

“Make me,” Holly said petulantly.

Kaylee huffed out her disapproval. “You asked for it.”

Instantly, going into Kaylee’s office seemed like a good idea. Holly skipped past Kaylee into the room, sat in the chair for guests in front of Kaylee’s desk, and crossed her legs primly. She knew Kaylee had changed her mind—she knew it—but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. A good idea was a good idea.

Kaylee closed the door behind them and rounded her desk. “As I was saying—”

With her power, Holly jerked open all of the blinds at once, exposing Kaylee to the dazzling late-morning sunlight.

Kaylee jumped and closed her eyes. “I hate levitators,” she grumbled. Then she opened her blue eyes and looked at Holly. “No offense.”

Holly shrugged. “None taken.”

Kaylee sat down and gestured to the bank of monitors mounted on the wall beside her desk, each displaying a feed from a different security camera. “Elijah’s mom just sensed an intruder, and some of our other mind readers felt it too. It’s the fifth time in the past couple of weeks. I was headed downstairs to stop you from trashing Peter’s show when I was called back to deal with this. And, of course”—she waved her hand out the window—“Elijah’s on the loose.” She pressed her lips together, barely suppressing a smile. “So, you spent the past two nights getting down and dirty with Elijah Brown?”

Holly felt her face light up, and she started to tell Kaylee she wished they’d gotten down and dirty. But then she remembered she’d threatened to hurt Elijah when they parted ways. That probably meant they’d broken up. And then she thought about what Kaylee had just said: Elijah is on the loose.

Like Elijah was a fugitive, and Kaylee intended to capture him.

The Kaylee she would have gushed to about her wild ride with Elijah was gone, replaced by the head of security at the casino, even more powerful and dangerous than Holly had imagined, leaning toward her across a wide and imposing desk. Holly couldn’t reveal anything she knew about Elijah and put him in danger.

“Not the whole two nights,” she fumbled.

“It’s okay.” Kaylee leaned back in her chair. “I understand completely. Elijah is hot. Last winter when we remodeled the bar next to the high-limit slots, we had to put up extra barriers around the construction site because women were staring at him rather than gambling. And, of course, he’s a mind reader. You’ve probably figured that out already.” She turned to watch one of the monitors.

Holly picked up every single object on Kaylee’s desk, every paper and pen, even the computer screen and keyboard, and moved them all with her mind until they crowded in the air just behind Kaylee’s head, seeming as insulted as Holly was that Kaylee didn’t give her full attention to this conversation. “What are you looking for?” Holly asked.

Kaylee glanced over at Holly and jumped again, startled by the computer screen so close to her face. She leaned around it to say, “Somebody I know. Look, Holly, mind readers are dangerous. It’s not just that they read your mind. They use what they find in your mind to manipulate you. As long as they know what you want, they can be your perfect employee or your perfect friend or your perfect boyfriend, until you trust them with your life. And then they can do whatever they want with you.”

When Kaylee had started describing Holly’s experience with Elijah, Holly’s heart sank. But by the time Kaylee stopped, Holly had regained a little hope. “He didn’t try to be a perfect anything,” she said self-righteously. “He did the opposite of what I wanted.”

“To get a rise out of you, so he could feel you using your power.” Kaylee nodded. “He hasn’t been able to read minds long enough. He hasn’t learned to be subtle. Either way, he made you very angry, and you escaped from his grip the only way you knew how. What did you do to him, Holly? Did you break his hand, like you broke your father’s?”

“No!” Holly shouted, beginning to panic.

Kaylee held her fingers to her porcelain neck. “Did you press his carotid artery until he passed out? That’s your dad’s favorite trick. Did you force all the air out of his lungs until he thought he would suffocate?”

Holly’s jaw dropped, and along with it everything she’d been levitating next to Kaylee. Pencils clattered on the desktop. Kaylee jerked her rolling chair toward the bank of camera monitors just in time to avoid being hit by the computer screen, which tumbled across the rich Oriental carpet and fell on its face.

Kaylee never took her eyes off Holly. “You did something to get away from him. That’s why you’re here right now, and he’s not.”

She said this with such vehemence that Holly wondered whether Kaylee had some very personal experience with mind readers.

And then Kaylee said, “Your parents were right to keep you two apart when you were fourteen.”

Holly picked up the computer screen with her mind and slammed it against the far wall. It left a lighter-colored mark in the dark wood paneling and fell to the carpet in a jumble of electronics. “Were they right to drug us, too?” Holly demanded. “What the hell is Mentafixol, anyway? If it’s just a sedative, why go to the trouble of having it made in the mountains and shipped here?”

Adding to Holly’s frustration, Kaylee didn’t react to the smashed computer. She turned back to the bank of camera monitors. “Mentafixol isn’t a sedative,” she said. “All the powers we know about are caused by genetic variations in the brain. Mentafixol contains molybdenum, which is necessary for brain function but slows some processes at high doses.”

Holly put her hands in her hair. “You’ve been slowing down my brain on purpose?”

“Yes, but high molybdenum levels are protective against cancer and impotency, so look on the bright side.”

Holly sank back into her chair with a sigh. “Why’d you just cut off the pill like that, rather than being honest with us? You could have saved us fourteen hundred miles and a whole lot of gas.”

“It works best this way,” Kaylee said. “People are horrified at the loss of the drug, and they hide their powers. Two days later, after the drug has cleared their system, we call them in to speak with Mr. Diamond. He explains the situation and offers them jobs. They’re so relieved to find out they’re not insane, they forget they’ve been drugged since they were teenagers. They immediately accept and come to work for the casino.”

Holly rubbed her aching head. “Unless they don’t take no for an answer from the casino pharmacy and go on a wild goose chase for Mentafixol.”

“Elijah inherited power from both parents,” Kaylee said. “He’s awfully strong. We should have predicted he would fly off the handle like that. But if we’d seen it coming, I’m not sure we would have done anything differently.” She rolled her chair closer to her desk and spread out her hands toward Holly, seeming earnest for the first time.

“What would the alternative be?” Kaylee asked. “We could lock him up while he came off the drug, which would make him angrier and more resistant. The thinking is that if you get arrested, you’ll be that much more grateful to us for bailing you out, so you’ll be more compliant when we ask you to join us. Certainly more compliant that you would have been if we’d locked you up in a room. And if you got in any real trouble with the law, surely the rest of us combining our power could get you out of it. I can’t tell you how many lawsuits against the casino I’ve gotten dismissed just by sitting in the courtroom and toying with the judge. We only hope you don’t kill anybody while you’re out on your field trip. Especially each other.”