Levitating Las Vegas (19 page)

Holly tried to follow his advice, but the car was too heavy, her head hurt too much, the mountain was too big, the tunnel was too dark.

“Holly,” Elijah said.

She fumbled on the dashboard in front of her and turned on the windshield wipers.

“Holly,” Elijah said.

If only she could find the button for the headlights . . . but she couldn’t turn it on with her mind if she didn’t even know where it was. By the time the car emerged from the tunnel, she’d fallen so far into panic that getting out from under the mountain didn’t get her out from under the horrible crushing sensation, and Elijah was yelling, “HOLLY, YOU HAVE GOT TO PULL THE FUCK OVER.”

With a gasp she cast around for the nearest spot on the shoulder wide enough to hold the car without it tipping over the edge. She sped the car forward to the parking lot of the scenic overlook and abruptly dropped it. It bounced once on its tires, jolting them both on the seats.

Elijah escaped out the passenger door and ran up the dusty path, all the way to the overlook, as far away from her as he could get without falling into the canyon. He sat on the boulder where they’d talked before, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands hanging slack—but he never looked down. He didn’t seem to be watching Holly, either. He focused over her shoulder, on the tunnel, waiting for the SUV.

Holly knew how he felt. Even relief was no longer a relief. With her mind she reached into the ignition and turned off the idling engine. She cranked down the window and called, “Are you okay?”

He nodded. His voice sounded small in the vast night as he asked, “Are you?”

“Now I am.” Or was she? She should stay diligent like Elijah and turn around to face the tunnel, but she felt like she’d been steamrollered. She could hardly keep her eyes open.

“Stretch out in the backseat, and I’ll drive home,” Elijah called. “I can deal better when you’re asleep anyway. And try to have sweet dreams this time. No more zombies doing ballet.”

Holly laughed. Zombies doing ballet—she didn’t remember dreaming something so ridiculous, but it did sound vaguely familiar. Then she heard the first part of what he’d said. “Home?”

“I want to stay ahead of them,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll attack us again until they’ve regrouped, but I want to know they’re behind us, not ahead. Something tells me we should get back to Vegas before they do.”

Obediently she crawled into the backseat and stretched out. Lying down felt delicious. But she wished she were lying in the hotel bed instead, and she were not beat, and they were not pursued by mind-controlling Goths who shopped at the thrift store. She wanted the time alone with Elijah that they’d promised each other in the restaurant.

He opened the door and knelt beside her. “We’ll get it.” He kissed her forehead.

She raised her chin, wanting more. But he was looking out the back window, watching the tunnel. Then she heard him cranking down the driver’s-side window.

“It will be windy tonight with the windows down,” she protested sleepily. “Cold.”

“I need the white noise,” he said. “To drown out your thoughts.”

She snuggled against the seat back for warmth. Then he was leaning close over her, tucking warm fabric around her. His T-shirt. She inhaled the smell of him. She recognized his spicy scent from when she’d whispered with him in ninth-grade English class. His mind-reading ability had been unleashed in the past week, which made him seem sometimes like a different person. But he smelled the same as always.

Elijah took a few last slow, relaxing breaths of Las Vegas interstate air, steeling himself for what was coming. He heard Holly finally stirring in the backseat, and he felt her waking up.

Having her asleep had done wonders for his mind-set. He’d gone almost back to normal. He’d been able to have complete thoughts about their situation.

He wasn’t sure anymore what exactly had transpired between him and Holly’s dad in Mr. Diamond’s office that night so long ago. He doubted he’d really given Mr. Starr that black eye—especially if Mr. Starr was a levitator like Holly. He knew he hadn’t imagined Mr. Starr’s virtual hand around his throat. That had been too real.

Now there would be another confrontation. Holly had passed from Mr. Starr’s hands to Elijah’s. He had a responsibility to take care of her and keep her safe. He’d failed miserably at that in Icarus—
she
had come to
his
rescue. He wouldn’t fail her again.

Resolving this, he almost enjoyed the rest of the long drive. When the sun came up, the wind was warm on his bare chest. He fished in the glove compartment, under the gun, and brought out Shane’s Wayfarers. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he decided he looked like an early astronaut, about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, cruising Cocoa Beach with a bikini-clad beauty dozing in the backseat. Several of the truck drivers he’d been traveling with since St. George seemed to think so too. When they passed Elijah or he passed them, they glanced down knowingly at Holly’s long bare legs and gave him a thumbs-up.

Just as the Pontiac drew even with the billboard championing Holly’s likeness on Interstate 15, she woke. She sat up slowly. In the rearview mirror, Elijah watched his T-shirt slide off her slender torso and into the floorboard. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned, spangled bikini top rising to meet a new day.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Elijah called over the wind and the radio.

“Mmph.” Long brown curls whipping around her head, she tumbled between the seats into the front.

“Hey,” Elijah protested. “We’re doing seventy. This is dangerous.”

“Don’t be silly. I have telekinetic power.” Her voice was muffled by the seat as she pitched over into the floorboard, sequined butt high in the air, legs flailing. The truck driver nearest them honked and waved frantically. Elijah acknowledged him by lifting one finger from the steering wheel.

Holly righted herself, wiped her hair out of her eyes, and glanced over at Elijah. He felt her examining his bare chest and approving. He grinned at her, wagged his eyebrows behind the Wayfarers, and took her hand.

And just for a moment, they were a brand-new couple returning from a wild road trip together, basking in the morning sun, and looking forward to the possibilities offered by the rest of their day in Vegas.

Then her hand slipped out of his. She brought her purse up off the floorboard, fished in it for cosmetics, and adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see herself as she applied them. Elijah understood that the heavy makeup went with the outfit, but he missed that bare-faced girl from the hotel room. Even now she wasn’t bare-faced, but with some of her makeup rubbed off through a night asleep in the backseat, she did resemble a high school girl about three hours into crashing a kegger.

“I guess our next step is to talk to our parents,” she said while holding her lips still to apply lipstick, so it came out more like, “I hess our neck hep i oo alk oo our arents.” He wouldn’t have understood her if this were all he had to go on, but he could read her mind too.

She glanced at her watch. “That will be interesting, because as we speak, my dad is performing an impossible feat of physical stamina.”

Elijah eyed her warily. “You’re not barging in on your parents’ act, are you? Something tells me we shouldn’t advertise our powers to the general public.”

“We have to barge into things, for our own safety.” She swept powder across her nose. “We know there are people around who can control our minds. The only way we can get around them is to surprise them. Otherwise our parents may very well chain us up in the basement.”

Elijah didn’t think his mom would chain him up in the basement. But he felt all Holly’s anger at her parents, and it put him on edge. His last ten hours of deep thought and recentering were gone with a snap of her fingers.

“Let’s examine this logically,” he said. “The only people we know can change minds are April and Nate, the weaker one. They changed my mind at the hotel.”

“And April changed my mind at my apartment.” Holly penciled glittering green in wide swaths across her eyelids, extending way out to the side, which made her impossibly long false eyelashes look even more exotic. “But in Glitterati, when you felt like somebody could control minds and I thought you were just crazy off your Mentafixol, that was for real.”

Elijah nodded. “It was.”

“April and Nate weren’t at Glitterati. None of those people from the SUV were there. I stayed at Glitterati for a long time after you left. It was crowded, but I know I got a glimpse of everybody.” She tossed the green pencil back into her purse and turned to him. “What exactly did you feel there?”

“The first time,” he said, “I was sitting next to Shane. We were talking about Kaylee. I thought he was going to walk over to your table to talk to Kaylee. He stood up, and then somebody said, ‘Change your mind,’ and he sat back down.”

She squinted at him. “Did it sound like Kaylee?”

“I don’t hear thoughts in the person’s voice. I figure out whose thoughts they are because they’re usually the person closest to me at the time. But in Glitterati, I assumed I was nuts, and I wanted that Mentafixol from you. I was distracted. The second time was harder to ignore. When Rob was about to hit me with a chair, there was this scream of ‘Change your mind!’ ”

Holly put her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. The pose was so casual and girl-next-door, he did a double take out the corner of his eye. The pose did not jive with the exotic eye makeup.

“But it wasn’t directed at me,” he went on. “It whizzed past my head like a bullet aimed at someone else.”

“Me?” Holly asked, pushing her wild hair off her face.

“See, I never thought it was directed at you,” Elijah said. “You weren’t even over there.”

Her carefully sculpted brows drew down, and the little line appeared between them. Elijah felt her dark wash of emotion. “Rob,” she said.

“It could have been aimed at Rob,” Elijah agreed. “He sure stopped in midswing with that chair.”

“Or it could have been
coming
from Rob, directed at someone else,” Holly said.

This didn’t seem right to Elijah. He’d sensed everything Rob felt during that fight. All of it was consistent with being a prick. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll bet it was Kaylee,” Holly grumbled. “We know she’s involved anyway.”

“How long have you roomed with her?”

“A year, since Mr. Diamond hired her.”

“In that year, have you ever suddenly changed your mind for no good reason?”

“Never before those Goths did it to me,” Holly said. “Though I’ll admit, I can’t imagine what Kaylee would need to change my mind about. I’ve been convinced I have a mental illness. Out of fear, I’ve been a good little girl. And Kaylee and I have always gotten along great. The biggest argument we’ve had was over whether to paint the living room this dark, dramatic purple—”

“I can’t imagine whose idea that was,” Elijah broke in.

“—shut up, and I backed down in my usual dishrag fashion.”

“Maybe it was Shane,” Elijah mused. “Speaking of dishrags, I can’t believe I’ve been cooking for him and Rob. Assholes.”

“But what’s Shane done wrong?” she asked.

“I told him that I had MAD and that I needed a pill from you, and he went to Glitterati with me. Then I told him I needed to kidnap you and take you to Icarus to find a stash of Mentafixol, and he loaned me this car and that gun.” He nodded toward the glove compartment. “What kind of person would give a gun to his mentally ill friend who planned to kidnap a Las Vegas showgirl? Shane is involved in this. We should pay him a visit first.” In fact, the exit onto Flamingo, which would lead them past the Strip to UNLV, was coming in a couple of miles. Shane taught guitar lessons at UNLV on summer mornings. Elijah signaled to the trucks surrounding him and eased into the right lane.

“However involved he is,” Holly said, “he’s not in nearly as deep doo-doo as my parents. We need to find out what they know before we interrogate Kaylee. Shane is way down on the list.”

“On
your
list,” Elijah said.

Holly took a breath. He felt it in his chest. Her mind swirled with confusion about who was really responsible for hiding their power, her thoughts struggling as always under the heavy sodden blanket of her betrayal by her parents and Kaylee. “We could split up, then.”

“Split up!” Elijah could not
believe
this. He
finally
had Holly Starr and she wanted to break up with him already? “No way!”

“I don’t mean you and me split up,” she said, exasperated. “Why aren’t you reading my mind
now
? I mean you find Shane and I’ll have a talk with my parents, and we’ll meet up later.”

“Absolutely not.” Elijah felt only a little relieved that she wasn’t breaking up with him. He still had to keep her safe. He couldn’t do that if they went their separate ways. “We can talk to your parents, but not while your dad is in the middle of his impossible feat of whatever whatever. Right now, you’re going with me to see Shane.” He drove down the exit ramp and turned onto Flamingo. He piloted the car through the canyon created by the towering casinos crowding either side of the road, determined to make it to UNLV. He still didn’t feel comfortable driving, and with Holly bopping around inside his brain, he was liable to cause a wreck.