Totally Spellbound (10 page)

At that moment, his door burst open.
John hurried in and tried to shove the door closed behind him. A
slender female arm flailed against the wall, as if its owner were
trying to force the door open.

“Um, Rob,” John said, his face turning
red from the effort of holding the door closed. “It’s not my
fault.”

Rob frowned. He hadn’t
seen John like this in decades. His face was flushed and sweat
covered, his eyes wild, and his shirt drenched. He’d lost his suit
coat somewhere, and he looked almost feral.

“Should I call security?” Rob
asked.

“No!” John sounded
panicked. “I just want you to assure me that you won’t blame me
when—”

The door shoved open the
rest of the way, and women piled into Rob’s office. But Rob wasn’t
looking at them. In the middle of the reception area stood a small
boy, and next to him was that woman.

The beauty.

He stood and started
toward her. She hadn’t noticed him. Instead, she was holding the
boy’s shoulders as if she were keeping him from something, and she
was watching the scene before her with something like
horror.

Then the door slammed
closed.

“Really,” John said again, “I’m
sorry.”

And with that, he pulled the door
open, let himself out, and slammed the door shut again.

Rob blinked twice, trying to figure
out what had happened. He had been looking at the beauty (was she
real?) and then the door slammed, John left, and three women stood
before him.

Three very familiar women.

Three very powerful women.

The Fates.

Rob had vowed he would never see them
again.

“Get the hell out of my office!” he
snapped.

“Robin,” Clotho said, “just hear us
out.”

She did seem unusually tiny—he
remembered these women as being larger than the mountains
themselves—and she looked a little too ordinary in her pink blouse
and tight blue jeans.

“The circumstances of our
visit are quite unusual,” Lachesis said.

She was a redhead. He had
known that, but he hadn’t focused on it, not really. And she was a
well-proportioned redhead who knew how to dress. That cream-colored
blouse did wonders for her figure.

But she wasn’t the redhead he was
looking for. That redhead had been outside the office.

Hadn’t she?

“We want you to listen before you jump
to any conclusions,” Atropos said.

She seemed tiny, too, and
a lot more exotic than he remembered, with the heavy dark eyebrows
and black-black hair that was rare in this part of
America.

“I don’t want any of you in here,” he
said. “I want you out this minute. I don’t care what you do to me.
You can imprison me for the rest of my life, just get the hell out
of my face.”

“We know you’re angry,” Clotho said.
“But—”

“Anger doesn’t begin to cover it.” He
couldn’t remain in the same room with these women. He pushed past
them, afraid he was going to be turned into a toad as he did, and
grabbed the door.

Someone was holding it
closed.

Damn Little John.

“We asked him to spell the door,”
Lachesis said.

“We knew you’d be difficult,” Atropos
said.

“We know you’ve never understood our
position on the mortality of mortals,” Clotho said.

“Or on the necessity of death,”
Lachesis said.

“But we believe we can overcome that
little difference,” Atropos said.

“And make an agreement that suits us
all,” Clotho said.

Rob focused on them
again, mostly because he had no choice. “Little difference?” he
asked. “
Little
difference? You let the only woman I’ve ever loved
die.”

“We didn’t let anything,” Lachesis
said. “We just had to stop you from making a horrible
mistake.”

“Horrible mistake.” His hands
clenched. “I’ve seen so much death over the years, and I’ve never
understood it. We have the power to reverse it, and you always get
in the way.”

“If we still had magic, then we’d show
you why this is necessary,” Atropos said. “We’ve learned a lot in
the past few months.”

“Months?” he repeated.

“Yes. We learned about how difficult
it is to understand things you’ve never experienced,” Clotho
said.

“I’ve experience more death than I
ever wanted to,” Rob said.

“That’s not what we mean,” Lachesis
said. “We mean a lack of death. It’s happened before. Everything
gets out of whack.”

“In fact,” Atropos said, “if I
remember right, you lived through one of the back-in-whack moments.
That plague?”

“The Black Plague?” His head was
spinning. He was so angry. He hadn’t been this angry in
centuries.

“Yes. Too many mortals
surreptitiously saved by mages, and then what did what did we have?
Necrotic tissue that had to escape somewhere, creating
pustules…”

He didn’t need this discussion. He
didn’t need these three creepy, controlling women in his office,
ruining his day. And no matter what John said, it was his
fault.

John knew how Rob felt about these
three.

“…
hideous boils,” Lachesis
was saying. “…which wasn’t as bad as the first time. The first
time, an entire city was destroyed just to maintain the
balance.”

“That wasn’t the first time,” Atropos
said. “The first time was before our time.”

Rob focused back into the
conversation. Really focused. And frowned.

The Fates were disagreeing with each
other. They never did that. They always finished each other’s
sentences.

What had Atropos
said earlier?
If we still had
magic
…

“You don’t have magic anymore?” he
asked, interrupting an argument of Biblical proportions.

“That’s why we’re here,” Clotho
said.

“We need your help,” Lachesis
said.

“Everything we care about is at
stake,” Atropos said.

“How very ironic,” Rob said. “I
remember having the same discussion with you eight hundred years
ago.”

The women bit their lower lips in
unison. Their eyes grew wide.

“And let me tell you what you told me.
I’m not going to help you. I don’t care what’s at
stake.”

Then he clapped his hands together,
and used his magic to get out of the room.

Robin Hood. A big, bulky man with a
classically English face named John Little. In the middle of
downtown Las Vegas. With the Greek Fates and one psychic
child.

Megan wrapped her arms around Kyle’s
chest and held him against her. They stood in the reception area of
Chapeau Enterprises, whatever that was, and watched as the Fates
made fools of themselves trying to get into the door that Little
John or John Little or whatever he was called tried to keep
closed.

She was becoming more and more
convinced that the Fates belonged to some very bad Vegas lounge
act, and that John Little or Little John or whoever he was fronted
for some other organization, one that hired
entertainers.

Although for the life of
her, she couldn’t figure out how the Robin Hood of medieval legend
and the Greek Fates had hooked up in the first place.

The Fates managed to shove the door
open and get inside.

She held Kyle tighter. She
could feel him strain against her. He wanted to go in there too,
almost as if this concerned him.

It did not. None of it did.

He was a good boy, and she really
believed the psychic child bit, she really did.

But the existence of the real Robin
Hood and the Greek Fates was a bit too much for her.

Besides, what was Robin
Hood doing in a nice office building in Vegas? Planning to rob
every casino in sight? They were what passed for the rich these
days.

More likely, some wag had
decided to use the legend of Robin Hood to get the important parts
exactly backward. He was probably opening a casino that would rob
from the poor to give to the rich.

After all, slots were called one-armed
bandits.

She let out a small growl just as John
Little slipped outside the door. He rubbed his hands over the edges
of the door, and a light glowed around the frame.

Then he pulled away, put his face in
his hands, and muttered, “May God forgive me.”

“For what?” Megan asked.

He looked up as if he had forgotten
all about her. He blinked once, then sighed. “Rob really doesn’t
like those women.”

“I don’t blame him,” Megan
said.

“They’re nice.” Kyle sounded
defensive.

“I’m sure they are, kid,”
John Little said, “but they’ve been hellacious on Rob over the
years.”

Megan wasn’t sure Travers would
approve of the word “hellacious.” She wasn’t sure if he would
approve of them being here.

She wasn’t sure if he
would approve of this place with its myriad secretaries, blond
wood, and air of wealth.

“You want to tell me what’s going on
here?” she asked.

“You want to tell me how you got tied
up with the Fates?” The door shuddered slightly. John Little
glanced at it, then put his hands on his hips and looked at her.
“Is it because the kid—what is your name, son?”

“Kyle,” Kyle said about as sullenly as
a boy could say his own name.

“Young Kyle there has enough magic for
you, me, and the entire building combined—or he will when he comes
into it. What’re you now, youngling? Psychic?”

“Yeah.” Kyle leaned against
Megan.

She frowned. Was everyone in this city
crazy? Or had she gone into an alternate world when she saw that
man with the falcon last night?

Maybe she was dreaming and still
driving. Maybe she was dreaming about being psychic and hoping she
would wake up before she crashed into anything. Maybe she was about
to die—

“You’re awake, Aunt
Megan.” Kyle sounded tired. “And everybody knows about the magic
because everybody we’ve seen has a little bit. It’s because of the
Fates. If you just went to one of the casinos, no one’d be talking
about magic at all.”

Megan wasn’t sure she could get used
to Kyle repeating her thoughts out loud.

John Little frowned at Kyle, his mouth
slightly open. Then he looked up at Megan. “You’re new to all
this?”

She nodded wearily.

“And you’re ferrying the Fates
around?”

She was about to ask why that was a
problem, when the air around John Little shimmered. For a moment,
it looked like a heat mirage in the desert or like a pool of
particularly leaden water. And then the image coalesced into her
falconer.

Only he wasn’t wearing medieval
hunting clothes. He wore a bespoke suit that fit him so perfectly
it looked like he’d been sewn into it. The brown material matched
the brown of his eyes. Only his hair, which was still tied back
with a strip of leather, looked the same.

He was even more handsome up close—or
he would have been if he weren’t scowling worse than she’d ever
seen anyone scowl. He didn’t seem to see her at all. He whirled
slightly and pointed at John Little.

“You let them into my
office.”

“I had no choice.”

“They say they don’t have magic
anymore.”

“I had no choice.”

“I don’t want them around
me.”

Kyle cleared his throat.

The man turned, his cheeks slightly
ruddy—maybe from yelling at John Little—and his brown eyes widened.
He stared at Megan as if he’d seen her before.

As if he’d seen her before, and
remembered her vividly.

As if she were the only woman on the
entire planet.

The only person on the entire
planet.

“You,” he whispered.

“They really have
lost their magic,” Kyle said. “Honest. And that’s my Aunt Megan.
She
is
real.”

Megan felt her cheeks
flare so that their redness probably matched her hair. His cheeks
had gone pale in the few seconds he had stared at her.

“You really are real,” he
said.

“I just told you she was,” Kyle
said.

But the man didn’t seem to hear Kyle.
He took half a step toward her, and stopped.

“This
is the bubble woman?” John Little asked. “She’s
perfect.”

Megan felt her cheeks heat even more.
Bubble woman? What were they talking about?

Behind them, the door banged against
its frame but didn’t open. The man blinked, frowned, looked at her,
looked at the door, and then tilted his head.