The group appeared to stand quietly outside Mr. Diamond’s door, but Kaylee understood their strategy. Carter was listening to Mr. Diamond’s mind through the door. Because Mr. Diamond was so old, his power was too weak to detect danger at that distance. Carter nodded to Nate. Now Nate and April preemptively changed Mr. Diamond’s mind about defending himself or calling for help. Violet opened the door with her hand on the doorknob—she could have blown the door open with her mind, but this job was so easy, why bother?—and all four of them disappeared inside the office.
Kaylee couldn’t see them. But, staring at the video of the empty hallway, she knew Violet was crushing Mr. Diamond’s throat with her mind.
Kaylee’s heart beat faster until it burst and shattered into pieces, the shards piercing her chest. She grimaced against the pain and forced herself to watch the video of the hallway until Violet, Carter, April, and Nate walked out of the office. Violet shot the camera the bird.
Kaylee swallowed the lump in her throat. She’d told Mr. Diamond the casino was vulnerable. She’d told him they needed their powerful young people off Mentafixol to help protect the casino. “I guess I won that argument,” she said aloud. Her voice surprised her. She sounded like a child, but she felt a million years old. The casino was her sole responsibility now.
With a shaky sigh, wishing she were a levitator instead of a mind changer just this once so she wouldn’t have to disrespect Mr. Diamond’s body, she slipped her hand into his pocket and drew out a single key—his only key for which Kaylee didn’t already have a duplicate. She unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, reached inside, and placed the binder on the desktop. He’d scrawled on the label:
For Kaylee—in case I die. LOL! : )
He’d tried to keep up with changing technology for the sake of the casino. He even texted her sometimes in his approximation of online lingo, the big dork.
She squinted against her tears once again.
But only for a moment.
Leaning forward and tossing her blond hair out of her eyes, she flipped the binder open. Here were the instructions for how to wean people off Mentafixol when they were thirty years old, too weak for the Res to want and too mature to seek that kind of life. And here was the long list of teens and twenty-somethings the casino currently drugged. Some of these people she knew about already. At Mr. Diamond’s insistence, she’d played a part in putting a few of them on Mentafixol herself. Some of them were surprises to her. Mr. Diamond had shared this information with her on a need-to-know basis.
She scanned the list for people she could wean quickly. Preferably about her age, at the height of power. Preferably a levitator and a mind reader, possessing the powers she didn’t have. Without thought she dismissed Elijah Brown and Holly. Considered the rest of the list. Came back to Elijah and Holly.
No. Anybody but Holly. She had to protect Holly.
However, the other people on the list knew Kaylee only as the aloof head of casino security. When she took them off Mentafixol and approached them about joining the casino’s protective force, they might see her as a threat and run straight for the Res. Holly at least knew Kaylee as a roommate and best friend and was more likely to stand with her.
Plus, it would be simple to wean Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol. All the young people being drugged were told they were the only ones, and they received the pills from various places, so they wouldn’t compare notes and get suspicious. But Holly and Elijah both received the drug from the casino pharmacy. Kaylee could make a phone call and stop the shipment.
Mr. Diamond’s scribbled notes indicated the strong emotion that had brought on Holly’s and Elijah’s powers in the same night had to do with each other. Elijah had asked Holly out. Holly’s parents had wisely told her she couldn’t go. If Holly and Elijah had been allowed to date, they would have talked about MAD eventually, gotten suspicious, realized their powers were real, and stopped taking Mentafixol. They might have hurt each other accidentally, just as couples at the Res hurt each other on purpose.
But if that spark between them was still there now, Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol would be fiercely loyal to each other. That could make them even more useful to the casino.
Or, if they were captured, even more useful to the Res. The Res would absorb them into its society and turn them against the casino. Kaylee would be no match for them by herself.
At that thought, Kaylee paged frantically through the binder one last time, hoping a new alternative would appear. If she drafted Holly and Elijah to help her, she would be putting Holly in so much danger. And likely ruining any chance Holly might have had at a relatively normal life with a nice guy like Rob. Kaylee thought of Holly, so book smart yet ditsy, so witty in an off-key way that some people never got her jokes. She wanted to keep Holly innocent and happy in a world where shoes still mattered.
But if Kaylee did nothing, everyone would be in danger from the Res. Could she really pull this off?
She fought the urge to look to Mr. Diamond for guidance. His dark suit slumped beside her.
God help her, she’d have to pull this off.
Decision made. She’d call Peter Starr and convince him to give up his magician act to Holly in a few weeks, after she was Mentafixol-free. She’d let Jasmine Brown know what was going on and send her out of town so Elijah couldn’t read her thoughts about the Res while he was coming off the drug. If he could, he’d likely get curious and head straight there.
But first—she looked out the window behind her and gathered strength from the beauty of the glowing and dancing fountains of the Bellagio in the distance down the Strip—she needed to hide Mr. Diamond’s body.
3
“I majored in entertainment engineering and design at UNLV,” Holly explained, “because I’ve always known I would take over the family business someday. That’s why I started working as my dad’s assistant when I was fourteen. But I thought someday was in the distant future. Then last week, out of the blue, my dad informs me that he’s going to teach me everything he knows!”
“Really?” Rob asked, keeping his eyes on the road as he made a turn in his cop car.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I’m so excited! But it’s been a week since he suggested it, and he hasn’t said another word about it.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Rob asked, easing his cop car to a stop at a red light. He blinked himself out of his reverie.
Holly bit her lip in annoyance, tasted lipstick, and immediately ran her tongue across her teeth to scrub the lipstick off, like a well-trained showgirl. What exactly did Rob mean by what? What, he hadn’t heard her last sentence over the noise of night traffic, or what, he hadn’t been listening to anything she’d said since he picked her up? If they’d been together awhile, she would have ribbed him about this: You never listen to me. But she’d known him only a week, and she couldn’t hold his attention on this, their first date. They were in trouble already.