Totally Spellbound (28 page)

“But she was dead before the Fates
lost their powers,” Travers said.

“Murdered, remember?” Megan said. “And
Viv and her new husband caught the murderer.”

“Fascinating,” Rob said. “So
technically, your aunt was involved in all this, but as a
catalyst.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Zoe
said.

“You know,” Travers said, “something
strikes me, though.”

They all turned toward him. He had
moved away from the table slightly, probably so that he wouldn’t be
staring at the map the entire time.

“You mentioned told Rob, Zoe, and
you’ve told me in the past that all the prophecies are about true
love.”

Zoe nodded.

“Would that apply to the prophecies
about the Fates as well?” Travers asked.

“True love for them?” Rob asked as if
the concept were as foreign as trees on the moon.

“Why not?” Travers asked. “They’re
part of the magical community, right?”

“But who made the prophecy for them?”
Zoe asked.

“Whoever were the Fates before them,”
Travers said. “Or maybe they made it for themselves.”

Megan saw where he was going. “Which
would explain why they were so willing to give up their magic. They
thought they were going to fulfill their destinies.”

Rob’s gaze met hers. His expression
was cool. He seemed very distant from her. But he
nodded.

“Do you think they’ll tell us about
it?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter if they do,” Zoe
said. “Prophecies are deliberately obtuse. We’ll understand it
after everything is done. No need to muddy the waters before we
finish this thing.”

“Before
I
finish this thing,” Rob
said, then sighed. “Although I’m not sure how. If this wheel powers
all of Faerie, then I don’t have the magical abilities to remove
it.”

“We need to figure out how to create a
Faerie-wide blackout,” Zoe said.

“Or not,” Travers said. “Look, when I
tried to get Zoe out of there, I used the wheel.”

Megan slid her hands behind her back.
Everyone else was so comfortable discussing fantastic things, and
she still felt like she had walked into the middle of a movie
set.

Only the hero was in love with her,
and she’d actually experienced the magic.

Rob took Travers’ arm and led him away
from the map. “Fold that thing up, Zoe. I think we’re done with it
for now.”

Megan understood what he
was doing; he was afraid that if the magic spilled off the map, it
would allow someone in Faerie to hear their plans.

Zoe nodded, grabbed the map, and
rolled it up like a poster. For a moment, the table rolled with it,
then Zoe slipped her fingers between the wood and the map, and the
table bounced back to its normal shape.

“You used the wheel?” Rob asked when
he and Travers reached the living room.

Travers nodded. He sat on the edge of
the couch. Rob sat on a nearby chair. Megan perched on the chair’s
arm. Rob put a hand on her leg, and the warmth of his skin through
the cloth of her pants reassured her somehow.

He wasn’t quite as distant as he
seemed.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough
power to get Zoe out of there,” Travers said. “Then I remembered
the Fates saying that they didn’t need the wheel after a few
centuries. All it did was augment their existing power, and they
learned how to do that on their own. So, I figured, I could use it
to augment my power. I reached out for it—mentally, if that makes
sense—”

“It does,” Rob said.

It didn’t, Megan thought, but she
didn’t say that. They didn’t need to explain more to
her.

“—
and drew power from it,
literally. My magic became stronger—I became stronger—and Zoe and I
got out.”

Rob nodded. “It still strikes me that
it’ll be hard to remove if it is the power center.”

“But what Travers is saying is that he
thinks you can use the power of the wheel to remove the wheel,” Zoe
said.

Megan was really frowning now. “Is it,
like, plugged into something? The power has to come from
somewhere.”

Travers waved his hand dismissively.
“In a scientific world, maybe.”

“I believe in a scientific world,”
Megan said in a small voice.

“So do I, most of the time,” Travers
said, “but not in a place like Faerie.”

“There is a science to
magic,” Rob said. “I’ve just never studied it. Power does come from
somewhere, just like electrical current. But walls aren’t imbued
with electricity. They’re wired, and the wires are attached to a
series of lines that are ultimately attached to a place where the
power is manufactured. Magic has a similar system, which I don’t
entirely understand—and that’s my own people’s system. Faerie may
use a completely different one.”

“The wheel has to be mobile,” Zoe
said. “The Faerie Kings stole it from the Fates. They had to do
that somehow.”

“Maybe we should ask the Fates how,”
Megan said.

Everyone looked at her as if she had
just suggested jumping off a cliff.

She shrugged. “They probably know more
about that wheel than we ever would.”

Rob sighed. “She has a
point.”

“I know she does,” Travers said. “But
I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to talk to them any more. It’s
confusing.”

Zoe gave him a fond smile. “They’re
not confusing. Just breathtaking sometimes.”

“And not in a good way,” Rob
added.

Megan nodded. “But last I remember,
John was cooking chili, and Kyle was watching anime, and the Fates
had told us…”

She stopped herself and
flushed.

Rob grinned at her. “They told us to
get a room. But you already had one.”

“Oh, not this again.” Travers stood
up. “Now I’m voting for a conversation with the Fates.”

He marched toward the front
door.

“Wow,” Zoe said softly to Megan. “You
really do know how to push his buttons.”

“Twenty-five years of practice,” Megan
said with pride.

Zoe shook her head. “Maybe I’ll have
to take lessons.”

“Naw,” Megan said. “I just irritate
him. You want to get under his skin in other ways.”

Zoe grinned. “Truer words have never
been spoken.”

She followed Travers to the
door.

Rob stood, but Megan stayed seated.
She reached for his hand, and somehow missed.

“I wanted to say—”

“Later,” he said. “Let’s finish this
spinning wheel thing first.”

“But it worries you,” Megan said. She
could feel it, an amorphous concern, a sort of in-over-his-head
kind of anxiety.

“Of course I’m worried,” he said. “I
think they’re all asking the impossible.”

“But you’re going to try,” she
said.

He nodded. “I’ve always liked the
impossible,” he said, and headed out of the room.

The moment Rob entered the hallway, he
realized he had forgotten his socks and his shoes. But he wasn’t
about to go back for them.

He felt a low-key irritation at Megan,
one he didn’t want to thrash out with her at the moment. He’d never
been attracted to someone who settled before. That bothered him
more than he cared to think about.

The carpet in the hallway
was cold and slightly damp, probably from the air-conditioning. He
walked to the next suite over, and heard Kyle’s voice mixing with
his father’s, John’s, and the barking of that silly obese
dog.

Then the door beside him clicked
shut.

He didn’t want to look. Megan was
probably sitting inside her suite, trying to make sense of the
day.

Not that he blamed her. Everything had
changed for her, and he had made it worse, pressuring her into
something she apparently wasn’t ready for.

And he didn’t know how much of his own
emotion had bled over. How much he had coerced her—in an
inadvertent way—just because she could feel what he had been
feeling?

He would have to discuss that with her
when—if—he got out of Faerie with the wheel.

“Forget something?”

He started, and looked
beside him. There was Megan, holding his shoes, his socks stuffed
inside them. She looked charming, her own feet bare, her hands
clinging to his ridiculous, expensive, twenty-first century leather
shoes.

In spite of himself, he smiled at
her.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the shoes
from her.

“You know, those probably aren’t
world-conquering shoes,” she said softly.

“That’s not what the salesman said.”
Rob stepped inside the other suite. It smelled of chili—rich and
thick and enticing—and fresh baked bread.

Megan walked in with him. “The
salesman told you the shoes would help you conquer the
world?”

“The well-dressed man always controls
his environment,” Rob said in a modern, stuffy, upper-class British
accent. “Shoes make the man.”

“Really?” Megan said. “Because I’d
think that world-conquering shoes would be some kind of miracle
boots or tennies.”

“Never tried conquering the world in
tennies,” Rob said. “It might work.”

He pulled the door to the
suite closed. John was still in the kitchen, removing the bread
from the oven. The Fates were setting the table, going around it in
circles and placing settings down as if they were playing a game of
Duck, Duck, Goose.

Kyle was talking animatedly to his
father, and Zoe was petting that overweight dog.

The entire scene in front of him
should have made him calmer. Instead, it made him tense.

All of these people were counting on
him because of some historical misunderstanding of his skills. If
he could, he’d recommend some famous cat burglar, only he couldn’t
think of any.

Apparently, among his people, he was
the world’s greatest thief.

He sighed.

“You can do this,” Megan
said.

He glanced at her.

“You have done a lot of amazing stuff
in your life. I’m beginning to understand how this new world works.
If the Fates believe in you, then you have the ability to do
whatever they ask.”

Rob smiled. “You still don’t
understand all of it. Just because there are prophecies doesn’t
mean they’ll come true.”

“Good thing we don’t know what they
are, then,” Megan said.

He shook his head, went into the
living room, and set his shoes beside the chair. He had no real
desire to put them on yet.

Zoe saw him first. She patted the dog
one last time, then sat down on the couch. She nodded to a nearby
chair.

“We have to do some planning,” she
said in a loud voice.

“At dinner,” John said from the
kitchen.

“Some of it now,” Zoe said.

The Fates looked over at them, all
movements in unison. Rob hovered near the chair. He didn’t want to
sit down. He didn’t want to be comfortable here, not
yet.

He needed more information, and Megan
had been right: that information had to come from the
Fates.

“Before we have dinner,” Zoe said, “I
want to show you what the wheel looks like now.”

“You can’t do a magic spell into
Faerie,” Clotho said, leaving the dining room.

“It isn’t safe,” Lachesis
said.

“They’d know where to find you,”
Atropos said.

“They know where to find me now,” Zoe
said. “We’re all safe so long as we don’t threaten
them.”

“And they have no idea what we’re up
to,” Travers said. “At least, not yet.”

Not until Rob went into Faerie and
took the wheel, that is.

He sighed. Megan stood near the door.
Kyle looked nervous, which meant everyone in the room was
nervous.

“This can’t wait until I serve
dinner?” John asked.

No one answered him.

Zoe beckoned with her right hand.
“Gather round. You in particular, Rob. You need to see
this.”

The Fates set the remaining dishes
down and took over the couch. Rob found an armchair similar to the
one he’d been sitting in inside Megan’s suite. She came up beside
him, and he pulled her next to him.

She opted for the arm again, and not
his lap, like he’d hoped.

“I’m going to show you my memory,” Zoe
said with a pointed glare at the Fates, “not the actual wheel
itself. Because this is Faerie, they’ve probably moved
it—”

“They haven’t,” Clotho
said.

“How do you know?” Rob
asked.

Lachesis shrugged. “We are able to
stay in touch with parts of our past, even though our magic is
gone.”