"She's got magic," Harry whispered. He studied Bethany through the curtains while the emcee warmed up the audience for Alexi and Megan's last show of the night.
"Not... Well, you might be right." Megan frowned and adjusted her top hat. "I know she's not Fae. I would have sensed it the first time we met, even if it was just one ancestor, four generations back. But there is something about her that makes my fingertips tingle." She patted him on the back. "You're starting to fade."
"Oh? Sorry." Harry concentrated on his anti-invisibility spell, and turned back to watching Bethany Miller in her shadowy corner table. Did she really think that big, floppy hat and garish muumuu could hide her? There was something to be said for hiding in plain sight by dressing in loud, obnoxious clothes to trick people into ignoring her.
Harry turned his vision sideways, looking into the 'tweening spaces, those half-step areas between dimensions. It was a result of his long-term invisibility spell that had mutated over the years, moving him halfway into the next dimension.
A soft, rainbow-streaked corona shimmered around Bethany, marking her as someone who had been touched by magic for so long, it had become embedded in her essence. The colors didn't quite clash with her outfit, but it was enough to make his eyes ache after a while. Still, he kept watching. She fascinated him. He loved puzzles, and Bethany had just presented him with one.
"So, she wants to be invisible?"
"She wants to spend the holidays with her father without being mobbed every time she steps outside," Megan said. "She's a nice girl with a lot of natural talent, who got famous by having fun. She's not ready for the rat-race of stardom, and that makes her even more popular with everyone, especially when she refuses to change and act like a star. Kind of like a girl who isn't in Need is a whole lot more attractive," she added.
Harry blushed, and his concentration slipped so he felt himself fading out. Which was actually a good thing. He wasn't about to admit to anyone that he wished he knew the annoyance and terror of being the target of a woman in Need. None of the girls he had grown up with had targeted him when they went into Need. It was humiliating. Hera-Jane maintained that if he socialized more, so people realized he had grown up into something of a stud, he would be hunted. Harry was too busy with his experiments to take the time to find out. Although, this adventure would be an experiment, wouldn't it?
"She doesn't mind having a stranger around?"
"Funny, that's the same thing she said about you." Megan gave her top hat one more tiny adjustment, tilting it forward a fraction more.
"We're on, sweetheart." Alexi caught up with them, wrapped an arm around Megan's waist, and kissed her for luck as he did every night. A kiss that packed a lot of heat into a two-second liplock, so much that Harry actually burst out in sweat. The two then stepped out onto the stage amid thunderous applause.
Harry gulped, locked down his counter-spell so he wouldn't fade out at an inopportune moment, and headed for the side entrance. Time to meet his assignment.
He stepped into the supper club seating area and kept to the sidelines, trying not to block anyone's view as he meandered around the perimeter to the booth where Bethany waited. On stage, Alexi kept up the patter while Megan searched the audience for the first volunteer assistant. All the women watched Alexi, all the men watched Megan, and Harry felt slightly nauseous from the rising pheromones filling the atmosphere. Didn't these Humans have any self-control? Especially when it came to two entertainers who made it very clear they were married to each other?
He didn't see anything wrong with window-shopping, as it were, and appreciating what was on display. But Harry drew the line at pressing his face against the display window, salivating a waterfall, and plotting how to break the glass and steal what was inside.
"Bethany?" he murmured when he reached her table. Harry admired her self-control, so she didn't even flinch or look his way, betraying her disguise. He held up the half of Alexi's business card that served as his identification.
Bethany peered from under her floppy hat and slid her half of the card across the table toward him. She didn't take her fingertips off the card until he matched up his half to hers.
"Harry Morton," he said, and held out his hand. He flinched, repressing a little gasp, when Bethany's soft, slim, but strong little hand slid into his and something sparked, almost a buzz, between their fingers.
"Static electricity." She offered a crooked little smile and a whisper of laughter as she jerked her hand away.
"Uh. Yeah." Harry slid into the booth facing her while he gathered his thoughts. She had felt that? This fully Human girl had soaked up more magic than he had first guessed.
Fascinating.
"I think Alexi insisted on all this cloak and dagger just for the fun of it," she said, as the audience applauded the first illusion of the evening. She grinned as she said it, which made an inexplicable world of difference for Harry. If she had scowled or showed reluctance in any way, he didn't know what he would have thought of her.
"Yep, that's my favorite cousin." He rested his elbows on the table, and yanked them off a second later when she flinched back from him. Megan had warned him about aggressive behavior, no matter how innocent. Even elbows on the table, leaning in close to her, could be seen as a threat. Just how badly burned was this poor kid?
"You look like him." Bethany offered an awkward little smile.
"You think so?" He glanced at Alexi, who stepped back and held up the silk purse on a pole, so Megan could demonstrate there was nothing in it.
Real magic made things so much easier for magicians, Harry mused, but for some reason Alexi and Megan insisted on practicing sleight of hand, doing it the way full Humans did. He supposed it was all in the challenge, maybe the knowledge that they had accomplished something, instead of just snapping their fingers to have whatever they wanted.
Of course, the way his magic had been reacting lately, he was having a hard time snapping his fingers.
"He has more glitz, but there's a strong resemblance. Of course, combing your hair back like that and dressing so casual, that makes people kind of pass over you. So, you're really good at this invisibility thing?"
"Umm... What exactly did they tell you about me?"
"Oh, I figured out the whole not-quite-Human thing a while ago. I just never confronted them with it." Bethany blushed and looked at her fingers, which she kept twining and untwining, folded together on the table in front of her.
Harry felt something drop inside his chest, and warmth steal over him. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to take the paparazzi and the other jerks who had been harassing Bethany, stealing her privacy, and send them to the Dungeon Dimensions for a couple hundred years. Nobody he knew blushed. The simple little reaction made her seem small and delicate and vulnerable.
Which she was anything but. He had seen her first movie, the tough chick who turned her world upside down to save it, who devised bombs and weapons from nothing for the sake of protecting innocents. Harry wondered if he would have fallen in love with her right that moment, if he had known anything about the real girl behind the makeup and costume. Even with someone else's words in her mouth, there was something similar about the Bethany sitting before him now and the girl on the screen. Which was ridiculous, but Harry didn't care.
"So, say something." Her smile went crooked and she blushed even darker.
"You're pretty calm about it. A lot of people would probably be freaking out, faced with the fact of a lot of other dimensions of reality, side-by-side with the one they know. I've always wondered what the CIA and FBI and all those foreign intelligence agencies and governments would do, if they knew about the Fae realms. If they'd maybe try to bomb us out of existence, or prosecute us as illegal aliens or whatever."
"So, who was here first? Fae or Humans?"
Harry sat for five seconds with his mouth hanging open, stumped by that question. That was definitely something for the Ether Lexicon. For all he knew, that was part of the no-need-to-know information the Lexicon sometimes stubbornly refused to divulge. Then he laughed. Bethany blushed darker, but she grinned and leaned over the table a little more and laughed with him.
How come girls like her don't exist in the Enclaves?
* * * *
"So, what do you think?" Megan said as she stepped into the lounging part of her and Alexi's dressing room backstage.
Alexi and Harry had gone to get their car and bring it to the backstage entrance, for a quick getaway. Megan had confided in Bethany that she thought Harry was cute, so excited about riding in a real, Human-made car.
"I like him. How does his wife feel about him spending the holidays with me and my Dad?"
"No wife." Megan shrugged and slipped into her clogs before sitting down on the other end of the couch. "Which is a total injustice. It just makes me sick, thinking about the few girls who are friends with Harry, but can't see past his science experiments and all his research work, to the really great guy under the brainy persona."
"What kind of science experiments?" Bethany imagined Harry doing a Nutty Professor routine, his lab coat smeared with stains, maybe scorched in places. That didn't turn her off at all. How long had it been since she let herself feel anything but mild social friendship with a man?
Maybe the fact that he didn't ask for her autograph, didn't ogle her figure, had a lot to do with the attraction. Because yes, she admitted there was a strong attraction between them, from the moment that zap of static electricity made the hair stand up on her scalp and sent a lovely, hot shiver down her back.
It was great to realize she was a normal woman after all, not a frightened, frigid little teasing twit, as that last studio-arranged date/mistake accused her of being. She was a normal woman who knew how to appreciate the finer things among the male of the species--no matter what species it was--and that was a wonderful realization, and a relief.
This was going to be a great Christmas.
She wondered if Harry knew about kissing under the mistletoe.
A knock on the door interrupted her daydream, just inches away from Harry taking her into his arms and dipping her into a kiss. Okay, so maybe that was an old-fashioned image of romance, and a lot of feminists would shriek in outrage that it was submissive and demeaning. What was wrong with encouraging a man to be the hunter, anyway?
Bethany had figured out that men were less likely to bolt, to feel themselves trapped, if they were the hunters. If they thought they had done all the work in capturing a girl's heart and attention, then they would keep working to hold onto her. Men loved challenges.
She just wished she didn't present quite so much of a challenge that every bozo and weirdo and hopeful alien abductee on the planet wanted to get close to her.
The door opened and her heart did a funny little skip when she saw Harry, and the way his gaze zeroed in on her all the way across the room.
"Ready?" He stepped into the room and held out a hand. "This might tingle a little."
"Kind of like a force field or tractor beam or something wrapping around a ship?" she offered.
Harry's eyes widened and his mouth dropped open a little, and that funny feeling in her stomach turned heavy and cold and squirmy. Had she turned him off already?
Then he grinned and took a step closer, still holding out his hand. That lovely zing climbed her arm when their hands touched. A buzzing sensation raced across her bare skin, muffled where her clothes covered her. It sank in so it sort of tickled and massaged somewhere between her skin and her bones.
"Wow." She flinched when her voice sounded a little off, not quite hollow.
"Good job," Megan said. "I have to concentrate to get past the deflection."
"Deflection?"
"I've done some testing. It's not quite invisibility, when other people are inside the field with me. Like the more people I gather up, the more it stretches and loses its strength," Harry explained as they headed out the door. He held onto her hand the entire time, and that was very nice. "I've run some experiments, and electronics seem less affected by the magic than eyes and other senses."
"So the security cameras can see us, and the guys in the control room, but people walking down the hall can't?" Bethany giggled. "What about when we talk?"
"Same with sounds. What I've found interesting is that digital cameras pick me up with minimal blurring, but old-fashioned cameras, with film to expose, don't see anything at all."
"It's like they postulated in some...oh, I can't remember the titles, but there were some books I read that claimed science and magic couldn't co-exist. Technology works against magic."
"Something like that," Megan said.
"How come you can hear us?" Bethany asked, as they stepped out the back entrance of the casino. She scanned the parking lot for paparazzi, gossip rag reporters and that lunatic who claimed that they had been lovers in four previous lives, so she had to marry him or else bring about the end of the world. No one waited, or at least no one popped out of hiding and came charging at them.
"Harry wants me to hear him."
"And she's family. When Megan broke the family curse on Alexi, it created a bond..." Harry sighed, offering her a lopsided grin that made him seem so very young. "It's a long story."
"We'll have plenty of time for talking later," Megan said, and looped her arm through Bethany's as a dark silver Lexus pulled up at the foot of the stairs and Alexi rolled down the window to wave at them. They hurried down the stairs, and got into the car much more easily than Bethany was used to doing lately. She liked being ignored far more than she had when she was in junior high.
"How are you going to include my Dad in the invisibility field?" she asked, when they were all in the car and heading for the house Alexi had rented for her on the edge of the city. "He's not going to be too good about holding hands all the time."
"Oh. Yeah." Harry blushed as he let go of her hand. Bethany almost grabbed hold of it again. "A lot of it is control and proximity. Once I've got the field anchored on both of you, we can be five yards apart before the protection is threatened."
"The stretching thing you mentioned, right?" She nodded, and was delighted with the pleased light in Harry's eyes, like her favorite teacher when she learned her lessons well. Bethany hoped there was a lot Harry could teach her in the three weeks they were together.