Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2) Read online

  “You okay?” Juliet said, looking worried.

  I summoned a smile. “I’m great. I had a drink at the bar on the way here, and I think it was just stronger than I anticipated. It’ll wear off.”

  She shot me a grin. “Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying Vegas.”

  Oh, yeah. I was having the best time.

  I don’t remember much of the walk to the car, because I was too focused on getting there with my radius contracted as much as possible. I had it down to about a foot around me, which was smaller than I’d ever managed before, but holding it there was straining my concentration to the breaking point. Normally my null abilities don’t tire me out at all—it doesn’t work like that—but the mental effort required to suppress my radius was like flexing a muscle and holding it that way. It made my brain tired.

  Laurel must have figured out what I was doing, because after a few minutes she sidled up to me and took my arm to keep me steady. She even managed to make it look like she needed me to help her stay balanced on her high heels. I couldn’t spare the concentration to form actual words, but I shot her a grateful smile. I didn’t even care if she was just kissing my ass so I’d help her with her friend.

  I was able to relax a little inside the SUV, since none of the people in the car were bothered by my radius. Sweat had broken out on my forehead, and Juliet shot me several concerned looks. I noticed Cliff glancing at me a couple of times in the rearview mirror, a slight question in his eyes. I smiled brightly and made an effort to join in the small talk during the short ride, though sometimes it felt like Bethany was deliberately steering the conversation toward things I knew nothing about. As soon as we got out, though, I had to clamp down on my radius, and Laurel took my arm again.

  After what felt like hours, we made it into the Bellagio, through the slot machine gauntlet, and into the theater, where Laurel asked if we could take the small elevator so she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs in heels. I shot her another grateful look, since our group would fill the elevator and I could relax for another moment.

  I felt plenty of vampires while we moved through the theater, but after we found our seats, I loosened my grip on my ability as slowly as I could, and was relieved to find that there were no vampires seated within my radius. I slumped with relief and looked around. I was at the end of a row, with Juliet on my left and Laurel on her other side, followed by Tara and Bethany. Our seats were perfect: the first row of the balcony, where I could easily see the whole thing, but wouldn’t be able to actually short out any of the performers’ magic, at least not without a huge effort on my part. Nothing would scream “playing it cool” like me accidentally forcing one of the vampires to turn human and fall to his death or something.

  There were another ten minutes before the actual start time, but on the front of the closed curtain, they were projecting a little movie, made with some kind of flat, papery animation. It took a moment for me to realize it was the basic story of Dracula. A man dressed in business clothes goes to a faraway land and meets a creepy old guy in a long black cloak. The cloaked guy tries to kill the businessman and then sails far away, to the businessman’s homeland. He meets a beautiful and coquettish blonde woman with several suitors—Lucy—and takes a shine to her. The foreigner—Dracula, of course—bites her neck, and she grows ill. Eventually she dies in bed.

  At that point, the suitors, along with another man dressed in strange clothes, probably Van Helsing, go to her grave site and find her alive. So to speak.

  In the novel they stake her, but in this version of the story events unfold just as Dashiell described: Van Helsing leaves Arthur Holmwood to destroy Lucy’s corpse, but he can’t do it. Instead, Arthur returns later and throws himself down on his knees in front of her. Lucy takes his hand, pulls him to his feet, and bites his neck.

  I knew that the novel went on quite a while after this, becoming a story about Jonathan Harker’s attempts to thwart Dracula, along with his young fiancée and the other suitors. (Harker and the Suitors should be the name of a goth band somewhere.) But the animated recap ended after Lucy bites Arthur, probably to make the point that this wasn’t Dracula’s story or Harker’s story. This was the Holmwoods’ tale, and them becoming vampires together was the happy ending.

  “Do you want a mint?” whispered a voice next to me. I jumped, and Juliet let out a surprised chuckle. She was holding out an open tin of Altoids. I took a mint.

  “You okay?” she asked. “You look a little out of it. Don’t tell me you’re scared of Dracula.”

  “Dracula’s not real,” I said absently. Then I realized that she was staring at me, so I pulled together a wan smile. “Sorry, I was just . . . thinking about work.”

  Juliet still looked a little puzzled, but before she could say anything else, the lights switched off and the curtain began to open.

  The stage was an enormous semicircle—no, nearly a full circle, going deep behind the curtain. At the far end of the stage there was an almost life-size wooden ship, battered and blackened from an imaginary wreck. The edge of the stage was rounded, and the surface had been painted here and there with thick, glossy red lacquer to resemble heavy puddles of blood. Charming. There was no orchestra section—music and lights were obviously being run from booths on either side of the heavy curtain—and the first row of seats seemed shockingly close to the stage itself.

  The stage was completely empty, and then thwick—a spotlight snapped on, and suddenly a woman was standing in the center of the stage. Her skirts were still swaying a little from the movement. It was vampire speed, I knew, but the audience just saw another Las Vegas trick. They gasped and applauded. The woman, a small blonde in an immaculate Victorian gown, smiled at the applause for a moment, then held up a hand. The crowd went silent, staring at her. Her long hair tumbled down her shoulders in thick, shining curls. Even at this distance, she was exquisite, like a human doll.

  “Good evening, my darlings,” she said. “Welcome to Demeter. My name is Lucy, and I’m sure you know my story.” She gave a coquettish smile, eerily similar to the animated version from the preamble, which wasn’t an accident. She held her hands folded behind her back, a girlish, demure gesture that just happened to push her breasts out. Lucy made a show of looking down at herself.

  “Of course, this is how I am always depicted, isn’t it? In the films, the stage shows, the copycat novels.” Her smile turned wry. “If, that is, I am not written out entirely or turned into a vapid whore.” She sighed, one hand reaching up to play with a perfect corkscrew of blonde hair. “But this Lucy is only a facade. A perfect, useless representation with no thoughts, no agency.”

  The hand at her hair ripped viciously downward, faster than I could follow the movement. Suddenly Lucy was standing there in a skintight black sheath dress, holding up the ripped-away Victorian garb in one hand. There was a chunk of blonde wig attached to it, and when I squinted I could see that her real hair was cut in a sleek bob, angled so the points just brushed her shoulders on either side. Black high heels, at least six inches tall, were strapped to her feet. “I am not a story,” she said, in a voice so fervent it was hypnotic. “Not a doll, not a prize. Not anymore. I am vampire.”

  Nerves churned my stomach. Dashiell was definitely not going to like this, but couldn’t it be pretty much written off? Sure, she was telling the truth, but no one would think it was anything but a trick. Right?

  Lucy began to move, prowling soundlessly around the stage in her obscenely high heels. Hell, just moving around in those shoes looked supernatural to me. I would have fallen and broken my jaw for sure. “Tonight I will show you otherworldly feats of hypnotism, agility, and speed.” She paused, still in the center of the stage, only a few feet from the lacquer blood. She made a show of looking around the cavernous empty space. “But first, my darlings, first. I must show you the truth. Show you”—her lip curled, and her voice took on a terrible power—“what we are.”

  She raised her bare, pale arms into a V, and four additional spotl
ights snapped on behind her, two on either side. From my angle in the balcony I could see the openings in the stage ceiling, where four men stood waiting in identical black slacks and ribbed tank tops that showed off arms corded with muscle. Before my brain could even guess at what would happen, they all dove from their perches. They spun through the air like Olympic divers, twisting and somersaulting before landing on the stage, each in a perfect crouch.

  There was a moment of suspended silence as every single member of the audience realized the same thing: There were no safety harnesses. No nets, no ropes of any kind. As one, the four men held up their hands and turned in a slow circle, showing that they had no protective gear. The man closest to Lucy stepped forward to put his arm around her waist, claiming her. Arthur Holmwood. Together, the two of them thrust their free entwined hands in the air, and the audience exploded into applause. And I felt my stomach drop through the floor of the balcony.

  Okay, yeah. Dashiell was going to be pissed.

  Chapter 10

  For the next ninety minutes, the Holmwoods—plus a cast of six more, by my count—showed off every vampire trick I could think of, and a few I hadn’t even known about. They ran and danced onstage at superhuman speeds. Arthur wheeled out a tank of water for one of those old-fashioned magician tricks, where someone unlocks themselves from chains underwater—only this time, the vampire extra inside the tank simply tore apart the chains and settled down on the bottom of the tank, pretending to be bored. He even began flipping through a waterlogged magazine, getting a laugh from the audience. Vampires do breathe, partly from habit, partly to keep blood pumping through their bodies, and partly so they can speak—but they can go a long time without if they want to. After a few minutes with the magazine, an assistant ran out and pushed the tank to one side, where it would remain until the end of the show, to prove the vampire inside didn’t need air.

  After that, Lucy and Arthur did a bit where Lucy came out with a bow and arrow, and Arthur put an apple on his head. He made jokes about how his wife had terrible aim, and at the last second she lowered the arrow, which flashed across the stage and buried itself in Arthur’s stomach. His white shirt instantly bloomed red. The audience screamed—beside me, Juliet practically jumped out of her chair—but Arthur simply tore out the arrow with a rueful grimace and tossed it aside. “See what I mean?” he called, mugging for the crowd. “Terrible shot.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lucy retorted. “It went right where I wanted it.”

  The audience applauded and chuckled, and after an elaborate bow, Arthur walked offstage to change his shirt.

  Before and after each of these bits, the vampires brought volunteers onstage—a short Asian man, a middle-aged white couple, a teen dressed in black clothes and black lipstick who looked downright worshipful when Arthur took her hand. Each human volunteer was then pressed to do something silly: the Asian man had to quack like a duck, the couple drenched their formalwear with buckets of water, and so on. Still, the audience members continued to raise their hands to volunteer. Next to me, Juliet nudged me and whispered, “Glad we didn’t sit any closer. Tara would have volunteered for sure.”

  I let out a quiet snort, leaning forward so I could see past Laurel to Tara. She was actually sitting on her hands, her eyes wide, like she was afraid she would be suddenly teleported down to the stage and forced to participate.

  I was keeping track of the number of volunteers, but it took me until the sixth one to wonder why they weren’t immediately taken back to their seats when the trick was finished. Instead, each one was led into the wings. With volunteer number seven, the vampire escort didn’t move quite as far offstage, and I watched as he took both her hands in his, looking into her eyes and whispering intently. Then something flashed from his hand to hers.

  They were pressing the volunteers again, but why? Was it just so they wouldn’t remember what had happened onstage? Or was something else going on? I decided I needed to find one of those humans.

  The show ended with the enormous ship moving slowly forward to the front of the stage. Lucy did a little introduction for it and then asked us if anyone in the audience worked in construction. No hands went up, and she let out a dainty giggle. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you quack,” she promised. “But surely someone here has some experience with . . . erections?” She batted her eyes theatrically, and the audience laughed. A couple of hands went up, and Lucy pointed at one. A lackey trotted out from the wings to guide the volunteer onstage. As they approached Lucy, I saw that he was a white guy in his early sixties, short and stocky, looking uncomfortable in his suit, though it fit perfectly well. Lucy smiled gaily and held her arm out to someone offstage. Light glinted in the air, and she was suddenly holding a silver microphone, which she handed to the older man.

  “Hello,” she said, in the same flirtatious tone she’d used all night. “Can you tell me your name, and where you work?”

  “I-I’m Stuart. Stu,” the man said nervously. “I’ve been a foreman at D&S Construction in Boise for thirty years.”

  “Wonderful,” Lucy purred. She snapped her fingers, and three vampires jogged out of the wings, each pushing a wooden pallet on wheels. They’d been loaded up with stacks of wood and five-gallon buckets. “Stu,” Lucy continued, “can you look at these materials and tell me if they’ve been tampered with?”

  “T-tampered with?”

  “Yes, my darling,” she said, unfazed. “Are they real? Or simply fake Vegas props?”

  Stu bobbed his head, handed her the microphone, and ambled over to the nearest pallet. He began running his hands over the supplies, knocking on the wood, digging through the buckets. His shoulders relaxed, and he looked comfortable for the first time since he’d stood up.

  Lucy waited patiently while Stu investigated all three pallets, each one loaded as high as Stu’s forehead. To keep the audience entertained, the vampire in the tank of water on the side of the stage began to stretch and yawn, pantomiming hunger and boredom. The crowd tittered.

  Finally, Stu returned and held out his hand for the microphone, looking more confident than before. “As far as I can tell,” he said seriously, “these are good quality, real materials.”

  “No fakes?” Lucy asked lightly.

  “No fakes.”

  “Thank you, Stu,” she said, kissing his cheek. The older man blushed, turning to walk away. “Wait just a moment, my darling,” Lucy said, and the old foreman turned around. “Would you mind doing one more tiny favor?”

  He gave her a guarded look. “Do I have to moon anyone?”

  Lucy threw back her head and laughed. “No, no.” She held up one leg, perfectly balanced on a single high heel, and rested her ankle on one of Stu’s folded arms. “Would you mind taking these off me?”

  Stu shifted a little, as though his pants had suddenly shrunk a couple of sizes. His big fingers fumbled at the straps on the shoe, while Lucy winked at the audience but didn’t wobble. When Stu was finally holding both of the stilettos, she said, “Thank you, my darling. Be a dear and hold those, won’t you?” Without waiting for his response, she turned to the audience, reaching one hand out toward the wings. Suddenly Arthur was there, holding her hand. No gasps this time—the audience had gotten used to vampire speed. “And now,” Arthur announced, “we present . . . the Demeter!”

  There was a flash of strobe lighting, and suddenly the pallets were moving, pushed by the five remaining vampire extras. They zipped back toward the ship, and the supplies began to fly off the top as the eight vampires began repairing the ship at their top speeds.

  It was like watching time-lapse photography. The ship started out rather decrepit-looking, like a starved, broken animal, but it began to fill out, expanding with new boards and sails, even some paint. It was astonishing, and although several minutes ticked by, I couldn’t look away.

  Finally, the vampires sped to either side of the stage in a line, holding out their arms to show off the ship. Lucy Holmwood made the construction forema
n go walk around on top, and his look of utter amazement couldn’t have been more convincing. The ship had been transformed, like magic. Actually, scratch that: it was magic. I glanced at Laurel, who was looking at me behind Juliet. She looked as troubled as I felt.

  What the hell were the Holmwoods doing?

  Chapter 11

  There was a standing ovation from the stunned crowd, and finally the lights came up. Juliet and her friends started collecting purses and jackets, turning toward me, since I was on the end.

  Tara was actually the first one to stand up, giving me a pleading look. “I really have to pee,” she said, embarrassed. I started moving us toward the balcony steps. “But wasn’t that amazing, you guys?” she continued. “How on earth did they do that with the ship? Or the guy in the tank?”

  “Vegas tricks,” Bethany said dismissively, looking to Laurel for confirmation.

  “Some of the best stage magicians in the world live in Vegas,” Laurel said, noncommittal.

  “I’m hungry,” Bethany announced. “Shall we hit the buffet here? Or we could go somewhere a little less expensive?” She gave me a pitying glance. I ignored her. I had no time for Bethany nonsense.

  “I could eat,” Tara said, one hand on her stomach bulge. “Ooh, after I pee.”

  “What did you think?” I said to Juliet. Her brow was a little furrowed. “It was incredible,” she answered, looking a little perplexed. “But I’m with Tara. How could they do that stuff?”

  It was mostly rhetorical, but I pretended to feel my phone buzz in my clutch. “Oh, hang on.” I pulled it out and looked at the screen. “Uh-oh. I’ve got to go, Jules. The manager of Dashiell’s new building wants to meet over drinks.”

  “Now?” she said, and the disappointment in her voice cut at me. “Isn’t it kind of late for business?”

  I shrugged. “Everything happens at night in Las Vegas.” I kissed her cheek. “See you in the morning, okay?”