Hex Appeal

THE ARCANE ART OF MISDIRECTION by CARRIE VAUGHN

The cards had rules, but they could be made to lie.

The rules said that a player with a pile of chips that big was probably cheating. Not definitely—luck, unlike cards, didn’t follow any rules. The guy could just be lucky. But the prickling of the hairs on the back of Julie’s neck made her think otherwise.

He was middle-aged, aggressively nondescript. When he sat down at her table, Julie pegged him as a middle-management type from flyover country—cheap gray suit, unimaginative tie, chubby face, greasy hair clumsily combed over a bald spot. Now that she thought about it, his look was so clichéd, it might have been a disguise designed to make sure people dismissed him out of hand. Underestimated him.

She’d seen card-counting rings in action—groups of people who prowled the casino, scouted tables, signaled when a deck was hot, and sent in a big bettor to clean up. They could win a ridiculous amount of money in a short amount of time. Security kept tabs on most of the well-known rings and barred them from the casino. This guy was alone. He wasn’t signaling. No one else was lingering nearby.

He could still be counting cards. She’d dealt blackjack for five years now and could usually spot it. Players tapped a finger, or sometimes their lips moved. If they were that obvious, they probably weren’t winning anyway. The good ones knew to cut out before the casino noticed and ejected them. Even the best card counters lost some of the time. Counting cards didn’t beat the system, it was just an attempt to push the odds in your favor. This guy hadn’t lost a single hand of blackjack in forty minutes of play.

For the last ten minutes, the pit boss had been watching over Julie’s shoulder as she dealt. Her table was full, as others had drifted over, maybe hoping some of the guy’s luck would rub off on them. She slipped cards out of the shoe for her players, then herself. Most of them only had a chip or two—minimum bid was twenty-five. Not exactly high rolling, but enough to make Vegas’s middle-America audience sweat a little.

Two players stood. Three others hit; two of them busted. Dealer drew fifteen, then drew an eight—so she was out. Her chubby winner had a stack of chips on his square. Probably five hundred dollars. He hit on eighteen—and who in their right mind ever hit on eighteen? But he drew a three. Won, just like that. His expression never budged, like he expected to win. He merely glanced at the others when they offered him congratulations.

Julie slid over yet another stack of chips; the guy herded it together with his already impressive haul. Left the previous stack right where it was, and folded his hands to wait for the next deal. He seemed bored.

Blackjack wasn’t supposed to be boring.

She looked at Ryan, her pit boss, a slim man in his fifties who’d worked Vegas casinos his whole life. He’d seen it all, and he was on his radio. Good. Security could review the video and spot whatever this guy was doing. Palming cards, probably—though she couldn’t guess how he was managing it.

She was about to deal the next hand when the man in question looked at her, looked at Ryan, then scooped his chips up, putting stack after stack in his jacket pockets, then walked away from the table, wearing a small, satisfied grin.

He didn’t leave a tip. Even the losers left tips.

“Right. He’s gone, probably heading for the cashier. Thanks.” Ryan put his radio down.

“Well?” Julie asked.

“They can’t find anything to nail him with, but they’ll keep an eye on him,” Ryan said. He was frowning and seemed suddenly worn under the casino’s lights.

“He’s got to be doing something, if we could just spot it.”

“Never mind, Julie. Get back to your game.”

He was right. Not her problem.

Cards slipped under her fingers and across the felt like water. The remaining players won and lost at exactly the rate they should, and she collected more chips than she gave out. She could tell when her shift was close to ending by the ache that entered her lower back from standing. Just another half hour, and Ryan would close out her table, and she could leave. Run to the store, drag herself home, cobble together a meal that wouldn’t taste quite right because she was eating it at midnight, but that was dinnertime when she worked this shift. Take a shower, watch a half an hour of bad TV, and, finally, finally fall asleep. Wake up late in the morning and do it all again.

That was her life. As predictable as house odds.

There’s a short film, a test of sorts. The caption at the start asks you to watch the group of people throwing balls to one another and count the number of times the people wearing white pass the ball. You watch the film and concentrate very hard on the players wearing white. At the end, the film asks, how many times did people wearing white pass the ball? Then it asks, Did you see the gorilla?

Hardly anyone does.

Until they watch the film a second time, people refuse to believe a gorilla ever appeared at all. They completely fail to see the person in the gorilla suit walk slowly into the middle of the frame, among the ball-throwers, shake its fists, and walk back out.

This, Odysseus Grant knows, is a certain kind of magic.

Casinos use the same principles of misdirection. Free drinks keep people at the tables, where they will spend more than they ever would have on rum and Cokes. But they’re happy to get the free drinks, and so they stay and gamble.

They think they can beat the house at blackjack because they have a system. Let them think it. Let them believe in magic, just a little.

But when another variable enters the game—not luck, not chance, not skill, not subterfuge—it sends out ripples, tiny, subtle ripples that most people would never notice because they’re focused on their own world: tracking their cards, drinking free drinks, counting people in white shirts throwing balls. But sometimes, someone—like Odysseus Grant—notices. And he pulls up a chair at the table to watch.

The next night, it was a housewife in a floral-print dress, lumpy brown handbag, and overpermed hair. Another excruciating stereotype. Another impossible run of luck. Julie resisted an urge to glance at the cameras in their bubble housings overhead. She hoped they were getting this.

The woman was even following the same pattern—push a stack of chips forward, hit no matter how unlikely or counterintuitive, and win. She had five grand sitting in front of her.

One other player sat at the table, and he seemed not to notice the spectacle beside him. He was in his thirties, craggy-looking, crinkles around his eyes, a serious frown pulling at his lips. He wore a white tuxedo shirt without jacket or bow tie, which meant he was probably a local, someone who worked the tourist trade on the Strip. Maybe a bartender or a limo driver? He did look familiar, now that she thought about it, but Julie couldn’t place where she might have seen him. He seemed to be killing time, making minimum bets, playing conservatively. Every now and then, he’d make a big bet, a hundred or two hundred, but his instincts were terrible, and he never won. His stack of chips, not large to begin with, was dwindling. When he finally ran out, Julie would be sorry to see him go because she’d be alone with the strange housewife.

The woman kept winning.

Julie signaled to Ryan, who got on the phone with security. They watched but, once again, couldn’t find anything. Unless she was spotted palming cards, the woman wasn’t breaking any rules. Obviously, some kind of ring was going on. Two unlikely players winning in exactly the same pattern—security would record their pictures, watch for them, and might bar them from the casino. But if the ring sent a different person in every time, security would never be able to catch them, or even figure out how they were doing it.

None of it made sense.

The man in the tuxedo shirt reached into his pocket, maybe fumbling for cash or extra chips. Whatever he drew out was small enough to cup in his fist. He brought his hand to his face, uncurled his fingers, and blew across his palm, toward the woman sitting next to him.

She vanished, only for a heartbeat, flickering in and out of sight like the image on a staticky TV. Julie figured she’d blinked or that something was wrong with her eyes. She was working too hard, getting too tired, something. But the woman—she stared hard at the stone-faced man, then scooped her chips into her oversized handbag, rushing so that a few fell on the floor around her, and she didn’t even notice. Hugging the bag to her chest, she fled.

Still no tip, unless you counted what she’d dropped.

The man rose to follow her. Julie reached across the table and grabbed his arm.

“What just happened?” she demanded.

The man regarded her with icy blue eyes. “You saw that?” His tone was curious, scientific almost.

“It’s my table; of course I saw it,” she said.

“And you see everything that goes on here?”

“I’m good at my job.”

“The cameras won’t even pick up what I did,” he said, nodding to the ceiling.

“What you did? Then it did happen.”

“You’d be better off if you pretended it didn’t.”

“I know what I saw.”

“Sometimes eyes are better than cameras,” he said, turning a faint smile.

“Is everything all right?” Ryan stood by Julie, who still had her hand on the man’s arm.

She didn’t know how to answer that and blinked dumbly at him. Finally, she pulled her arm away.

“Your dealer is just being attentive,” the man said. “One of the other players seemed to have a moment of panic. Very strange.”

Like he hadn’t had a hand in it.

Ryan said, “Why don’t you take a break, Julie? Get something to eat, come back in an hour.”

She didn’t need a break. She wanted to flush the last ten minutes out of her mind. If she kept working, she might be able to manage, but Ryan’s tone didn’t invite argument.

“Yeah, okay,” she murmured, feeling vague.

Meanwhile, the man in the white shirt was walking away, along the casino’s carpeted main thoroughfare, following the woman.

Rushing now, Julie cleaned up her table, signed out with Ryan, and ran after the man.

“You, wait a minute!”

He turned. She expected him to argue, to express some kind of frustration, but he remained calm, mildly inquisitive. As if he’d never had a strong emotion in his life. She hardly knew what to say to that immovable expression.

She pointed. “You spotted it—you saw she was cheating.”

“Yes.” He kept walking—marching, rather—determinedly. Like a hunter stalking a trail before it went cold. Julie followed, dodging a bachelorette party—a horde of twentysomething women in skintight minidresses and overteased hair—that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The man slipped out of their way.

“How?” she said, scrambling to keep close to him.

“I was counting cards and losing. I know how to count—I don’t lose.”

“You were—” She shook the thought away. “No, I mean how was she doing it? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t spot any palmed cards, no props or gadgets—”

“He’s changing the cards as they come out of the shoe,” he said.

“What? That’s impossible.”

“Mostly impossible,” he said.

“The cards were normal, they felt normal. I’d have been able to tell if something was wrong with them.”

“No, you wouldn’t, because there was nothing inherently wrong with the cards. You could take every card in that stack, examine them all, sort them, count them, and they’d all be there, exactly the right number in exactly the number of suits they ought to be. You’d never spot what had changed because he’s altering the basic reality of them. Swapping a four for a six, a king for a two, depending on what he needs to make blackjack.”

She didn’t understand, to the point where she couldn’t even frame the question to express her lack of understanding. No wonder the cameras couldn’t spot it.

“You keep saying he, but that was a woman—”

“And the same person who was there yesterday. He’s a magician.”

The strange man looked as if he had just played a trick, or pushed back the curtain, or produced a coin from her ear. Julie suddenly remembered where she’d seen him before: in a photo on a poster outside the casino’s smaller theater. The magic show. “You’re Odysseus Grant.”

“Hello, Julie,” he said. He’d seen the name tag on her uniform vest. Nothing magical about it.

“But you’re a magician,” she said.

“There are different kinds of magic.”

“You’re not talking about pulling rabbits out of hats, are you?”

“Not like that, no.”

They were moving against the flow of a crowd; a show at one of the theaters must have just let out. Grant moved smoothly through the traffic; Julie seemed to bang elbows with every single person she encountered.

They left the wide and sparkling cavern of the casino area and entered the smaller, cozier hallway that led to the hotel wing. The ceilings were lower here, and plastic ficus plants decorated the corners. Grant stopped at the elevators and pressed the button.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You really should take a break, like your pit boss said.”

“No, I want to know what’s going on.”

“Because a cheater is ripping off your employer?”

“No, because he’s ripping off me.” She crossed her arms. “You said it’s the same person who’s been doing this, but I couldn’t spot him. How did you spot him?”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. How would you even know what to look for? There’s no such thing as magic, after all.”

“Well. Something’s going on.”

“Indeed. You really should let me handle this—”

“I want to help.”

The doors slid open, and Julie started to step through them, until Grant grabbed her arm so hard she gasped. When he pulled back, she saw why: The elevator doors had opened on an empty shaft, an ominous black tunnel with twisting cable running down the middle. She’d have just stepped into that pit without thinking.

She fell back and clung to Grant’s arm until her heart sank from her throat.

“He knows we’re on to him,” Grant said. “Are you sure you want to help?”

“I didn’t see it. I didn’t even look.”

“You expected the car to be there. Why should you have to look?”

She would never, ever take a blind step again. Always, she would creep slowly around corners and tread lightly on the ground before her. “Just like no one expects a housewife or a businessman from the Midwest to cheat at table games in Vegas.”

“Just so.”

The elevator doors slid shut, and the hum of the cables, the ding of the lights, returned to normal. Normal—and what did that mean again?

“Maybe we should take the stairs,” Julie murmured.

“Not a bad idea,” Grant answered, looking on her with an amused glint in his eye that she thought was totally out of place, given that she’d almost died.

Down another hallway and around a corner, they reached the door to the emergency stairs. The resort didn’t bother putting any frills into the stairwell, which most of its patrons would never see: The tower was made of echoing concrete, the railings were steel, the stairs had nonskid treads underfoot. The stairs seemed to wind upward forever.

“How do you even know where he is? If he knows you’re looking for him, he’s probably out of town by now.”

“We were never following him. He’s never left his room.”

“Then who was at my table?”

“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

It was going to be a long, long climb.

Grant led, and Julie was happy to let him do so. At every exit door, he stopped, held before it a device that looked like an old-fashioned pocket watch, with a brass casing and a lumpy knob and ring protruding. After regarding the watch a moment, he’d stuff it back in his trouser pocket and continue on.

She guessed he was in his thirties, but now she wasn’t sure—he seemed both young and old. He moved with energy, striding up the stairs without pause, without a hitch in his breath. But he also moved with consideration, with purpose, without a wasted motion. She’d never seen his show and thought now that she might. He’d do all the old magic tricks, the cards and rings and disappearing-box trick, maybe even pull a rabbit from a hat, and his every motion would be precise and enthralling. And it would all be tricks, she reminded herself.

After three flights, she hauled herself up by the railing, huffing for air. If Grant was frustrated at the pauses she made on each landing, he didn’t let on. He just studied his watch a little longer.

Finally, on about the fifth or sixth floor, he consulted his watch and lifted an eyebrow. Then he opened the door. Julie braced for danger—after the empty elevator shaft, anything could happen: explosions blasting in their faces, ax-wielding murderer waiting for them, Mafioso gunfight—but nothing happened.

“Shall we?” Grant said, gesturing through the doorway as if they were entering a fancy restaurant.

She wasn’t sure she really wanted to go, but she did. Leaning in, she looked both ways, up and down the hallway, then stepped gingerly on the carpet, thinking it might turn to quicksand and swallow her. It didn’t. Grant slipped in behind her and closed the door.

This wing of the hotel had been refurbished in the last few years and still looked newish. The carpet was thick, the soft recessed lighting on the russet walls was luxurious and inviting. In a few more years, the décor would start to look worn, and the earth tones and geometric patterns would look dated. Vegas wore out things the way it wore out people. For now, though, it was all very impressive.

They lingered by the emergency door; Grant seemed to expect something to happen. Consulting his watch again, he turned it to the left and right, considering. She craned her neck, trying to get a better look at it. It didn’t seem to have numbers on its face.

“What’s that thing do?” she asked.

“It points,” he said.

Of course it did.

He moved down the hallway to the right, glancing at the watch, then at doorways. At the end of the hall, he stopped and nodded, then made a motion with his hands.

“More magic?” she said, moving beside him.

“No. Lockpick.” He held up a flat plastic key card. “Universal code.”

“Oh my God, if the resort knew you were doing this—and I’m right here with you. I could lose my job—”

“They’ll never find out.”

She glanced to the end of the hallway, to the glass bubble in the ceiling where the security camera was planted.

“Are you sure about that? Am I supposed to just trust you?”

His lips turned a wry smile. “I did warn you that you probably ought to stay out of this. It’s not too late.”

“What, and take the elevator back down? I don’t think so.”

“There you go—you trust me more than the elevator.”

She crossed her arms and sighed. “I’m not sure I agree with that logic.”

“It isn’t logic,” he said. “It’s instinct. Yours are good, you should listen to them.”

She considered—any other dealer, any sane dealer, would have left the whole problem to Ryan and security. Catching cheaters once they left the table was above her pay grade, as they said. But she wanted to know. The same prickling at her neck that told her something was wrong with yesterday’s businessman and today’s housewife also told her that Odysseus Grant had answers.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“Keep a lookout.”

He slipped the card in the lock, and the door popped open. She wouldn’t have been surprised if an unassuming guest wrapped in a bath towel screamed a protest, but the room was unoccupied. After a moment, Grant entered and began exploring.

Julie stayed by the door, glancing back and forth, up and down the hallway as he had requested. She kept expecting guys from security to come pounding down the hallway. But she also had to consider: Grant wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t have a way to keep it secret. She couldn’t even imagine how he was fooling the cameras. The cameras won’t even pick up what I did, he’d said. Did the casino’s security department even know what they had working under their noses?

She looked back in the room to check his progress. “You expected that watch, that whatever it is, to lead you right to the guy, did you?”

“Yes, it should have,” Grant said, sounding curious rather than frustrated. “Ah, there we are.” He opened the top bureau drawer.

“What?” She craned forward to see.

Using a handkerchief, he reached into the drawer and picked up a small object. Resting on the cloth was a twenty-five-dollar chip bound with twine to the burned-down stub of a red candle. The item evoked a feeling of dread in her; it made her imagine an artifact from some long-extinct civilization that practiced human sacrifice. Whatever this thing was, no good could ever come of it.

“A decoy,” Grant said. “Rather clever, really.”

“Look, I can call security, have them check the cameras, look for anyone suspicious—they’ll know who’s been in this room.”

“No. You’ve seen how he’s disguising himself; he’s a master of illusion. Mundane security has no idea what they’re looking for. I’ll find him.” He broke the decoy, tearing at the twine, crumbling the candle, throwing the pieces away. Even broken, the pieces made her shiver.

Then they were back in the hallway. Grant again consulted his watch, but they reached the end of the hallway without finding his quarry.

They could be at this all day.

“Maybe we should try knocking on doors. You’ll be able to spot the guy if he answers.”

“That’s probably not a good idea. Especially if he knows we’re coming.”

“How long until you give up?” she said, checking her phone to get the time. The thing had gone dead, out of power. Of course it had. And Grant’s watch didn’t tell time.

“Never,” he murmured, returning to the emergency stairs.

She started to follow him when her eye caught on an incongruity, because the afternoon had been filled with them. A service cart was parked outside a room about halfway down the hallway. Dishes of a picked-over meal littered the white linen tablecloth, along with an empty bottle of wine and two used wineglasses. Nothing unusual at all about seeing such a thing outside a room in a hotel. Except she was absolutely sure it had not been there before.

“Hey—wait a minute,” she said, approaching the cart slowly. The emergency-stair door had already shut, though, and he was gone. She went after him, hauling open the door.

Which opened into a hallway, just like the one she’d left.

Vertigo made her vision go sideways a moment, and she thought she might faint. Shutting the door quickly, she leaned against it and tried to catch her breath. She’d started gasping for air. This was stupid—it was just a door. She’d imagined it. Her mind was playing tricks, and Grant was right, she should have stayed back in the casino.

No, she was a sensible woman, and she trusted her eyes. She opened the door again, and this time when she saw the second, identical—impossible—hallway through it, she stayed calm, and kept her breathing steady.

Stepping gently, she went through the door, careful to hold it open, giving her an escape route. Her feet touched carpet instead of concrete. She looked back and forth—same hallway. Or maybe not—the room-service cart wasn’t here.

“Odysseus?” she called, feeling silly using the name. His stage name, probably, but he hadn’t given her another one to call him. His real name was probably something plain, like Joe or Frank. On second thought, considering the watch, the universal lockpick, his talk of spells, his weird knowledge—Odysseus might very well be his real name.

“Odysseus Grant?” she repeated. No answer. Behind one of the doors, muted laughter echoed from a television.

She retreated to the original hallway and let the door close. Here, the same TV buzzing with the same noise, obnoxious canned laughter on some sitcom. She could believe she hadn’t ever left, that she hadn’t opened the door and seen another hallway rather than the stairs that should have been there. This was some kind of optical illusion. A trick done with mirrors.

The room-service cart was gone.

She ran down the hall to where it had been, felt around the spot where she was sure she had seen it—nothing. She continued on to the opposite end of the hallway, past the elevators that she didn’t dare try, to the other set of emergency stairs. Holding her breath, she opened the door—and found herself staring into another hallway, identical to the one she was standing in. When she ran to the opposite end of that corridor, and tried the other door there, she found the same thing—another hallway, with the same numbers outside the rooms, the same inane voices from the television.

Bait. The room-service cart had been bait, used to distract her, to draw her back after Grant had already left. And now she was trapped.

Casinos, especially the big ones on the Strip, are built to be mazes. From the middle of the casino, you can’t readily find the exit. Sure, the place is as big as a few football fields lined up, the walkways are all wide and sweeping to facilitate ease of movement. The fire codes mean the casino can’t actually lock you in. But when you’re surrounded by ringing slot machines and video poker and a million blinking lights, when the lack of windows means that if you didn’t have your watch or phone you’d have no way to tell the time, when the dealer at the blackjack table will keep dealing cards and taking your chips as the hours slip by—you leave by an act of will, not because the way out is readily apparent.

More than that, though, the resort is its own world. Worlds within worlds. You enter and never have to leave. Hotel, restaurants, shopping, gaming, shows, spas, all right here. You can even get married if you want, in a nice little chapel, tastefully decorated in soft colors and pews of warm mahogany, nothing like those tawdry places outside. You can get a package deal: wedding, room for the weekend, and a limo to the airport. The resort makes it easy for you to come and spend your money. It’s a maze, and as long as your credit card stays good, they don’t much care whether you ever get out.

That, too, was a certain kind of magic.

Grant climbed two flights of stairs, the single hand on his pocket watch giving no indication that anything untoward lay beyond the door at each landing, before he noticed that the earnest blackjack dealer was no longer with him.

He paused and called down, “Julie?” His voice echoed, and he received no response. He thought he’d been cautious enough. He looked around; the staircase had suddenly become sinister.

One of the notable characteristics of a very tall staircase like this one was that it all looked the same, minimalist and unwelcoming. This landing was exactly like the last, this flight of stairs like the first six he’d climbed up.

The number painted on the door at this landing was five. He turned around, descended a flight, looked at the door—which also read five. And the one below it. Climbing back up, he returned to where he’d stopped. Five again, or rather, still. Five and five and five. Somewhere between this floor and the last, his journey had become a loop. Which meant he was in trouble, and so was Julie.

There were still doorways, which meant there was still a way out.

Five was one of the mystic numbers—well, any number could be mystic to the right person under the right circumstances. Go to the casino and ask people what their lucky numbers were, and every number, up to a hundred and often beyond, would be represented. But five—it was a prime number, some cultures counted five elements, a pentagram had five points. It was the number of limbs to the human body, if you counted the head. A number of power, of binding.

What kind of power did it take to bend a stairwell, Escher-like, upon itself? This magician, who’d orchestrated all manner of tricks and traps, was drawing on an impressive source of it. And that’s why the culprit hadn’t fled—he’d built up a base of power here in the hotel, in order to initiate his scheme. He was counting on that power to protect him now.

When turning off a light without a switch, unplugging the lamp made so much more sense than breaking the lightbulb. Grant needed to find this magician.

He pocketed his watch and drew out a few tools he had brought with him: a white candle, a yard of red thread, and a book of matches.

Julie paced in front of the doorway. She thought it was the first one, the original one that she and Grant had come through, but she couldn’t be entirely sure. She’d gotten turned around.

How long before Grant noticed she was missing? What were the rules of hiking in the wilderness? Stay still, call for help, until someone finds you. She took out her phone again and shook it, as if that kind of desperate, sympathetic magic would work. It didn’t. Still dead. She’d be trapped here forever. She couldn’t even call 911 to come and rescue her. Her own fault, for getting involved in a mess she didn’t know anything about. She should never have followed Grant.

No, that hadn’t been a mistake. Her mistake had been panicking and running off half-cocked. This—none of this could be real. It went against all the laws of physics. So if it wasn’t real, what was it? An illusion. Maybe she couldn’t trust her eyes after all, at least not all the time.

She closed her eyes. Now she didn’t see anything. The TV had fallen silent. This smelled like a hotel hallway—lint, carpet cleaner. A place devoid of character. She stood before a door, and when she opened it, she’d step through to a concrete stairwell, where she’d walk straight down, back to the lobby and the casino, back to work, and she wouldn’t ask any more questions about magic.

Reaching out, she flailed a bit before finding the doorknob. Her hand closed on it, and turned. She pushed it opened and stepped through.

And felt concrete beneath her feet.

She opened her eyes, and was in the stairwell, standing right in front of Odysseus Grant. On the floor between them sat a votive candle and a length of red thread tied in a complicated pattern of knots. Grant held a match in one hand and the book it came from in the other, ready to light.

“How did you do that?” he asked, seeming genuinely startled. His wide eyes and suspicious frown were a little unnerving.

She glanced over her shoulder and back at him. “I closed my eyes. I figured none of it was real—so I just didn’t look.”

His expression softened into a smile. “Well done.” He crouched and quickly gathered up the items, shoving thread, candle, and matches into his pockets. “He’s protecting himself with a field of illusion. He must be right here—he must have been here the whole time.” He nodded past her to the hallway.

“How do you know?”

“Fifth floor. It should have been obvious,” he said.

“Obvious?” she said, nearly laughing. “Really?”

“Well, partially obvious.”

Which sounded like “sort of pregnant” to her. Before she could prod further, he urged her back into the hallway and let the door shut. It sounded a little like a death knell.

“Now, we just have to figure out what room he’s in. Is there a room 555 here?”

“On the other end, I think.”

“Excellent. He’s blown his cover.” Grant set off with long strides. Julie scurried to keep up.

At room 555, Grant tried his universal keycard, slipping it in and out of the slot. It didn’t work. “This’ll take a little more effort, I think. No matter.” He waved a hand over the keycard and tried again. And again. It still didn’t work.

A growl drew Julie’s attention to the other end of the hallway, back the way they’d come.

A creature huddled there, staring with eyes that glowed like hot iron. At first, she thought it was a dog. But it wasn’t. The thing was slate gray, hairless, with a stout head as big as its chest and no neck to speak of. Skin drooped in folds around its shoulders and limbs, and knobby growths covering its back gave it an armored look. Her mind went through a catalog of four-legged predators, searching for possibilities: hyena, lion, bear, badger on steroids, dragon.

Dragon?

The lips under its hooked bill seemed to curl in a smile.

She could barely squeak, “Odysseus?”

He glanced up from his work to where she pointed. Then he paused and took a longer look.

“It’s a good sign,” Grant said.

“How is that a good sign?” she hissed.

“A guardian like that means we’ve found him.”

That she couldn’t argue his logic didn’t mean he wasn’t still crazy.

“Can you distract it?” he said. “I’m almost through.”

“Distract it? How on Earth—”

“This magician works with illusions. That thing is there to frighten us off. But mostly likely it’s not even real. If you distract it, it’ll vanish.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“I imagine so.”

He didn’t sound as confident as she’d have liked.

She tried to picture the thing just vanishing. It looked solid enough—it filled most of the hallway. It must have been six feet tall, crouching.

“And you’re absolutely sure it’s not real.” She reminded herself about the hallways, the room service cart. All she had to do was close her eyes.

“I’m reasonably sure.”

“That’s not absolutely.”

“Julie, trust me.” He was bent over the lock again, intent on his work.

The beast wasn’t real. All right. She just had to keep telling herself that. Against her better judgment, Julie stepped toward the creature.

“Here, kitty kitty—” Okay, that was stupid. “Um, hey! Over here!” She waved her hands over her head.

The beast’s red eyes narrowed; its muscles bunched.

“Remember, it’s an illusion. Don’t believe it.”

The thing hunched and dug in claws in preparation of a charge. The carpet shredded in curling fibers under its efforts. That sure looked real.

“I—I don’t think it’s an illusion. It’s drooling.”

“Julie, stand your ground.”

The monster launched, galloping toward her, limbs pumping, muscles trembling under horny skin. The floor shook under its pounding steps. What did the magician expect would happen? Was the creature supposed to pass through her like mist?

Julie closed her eyes and braced.

A weight like a runaway truck crashed into her, and she flew back and hit the floor, head cracking, breath gusting from her lungs. The great, slavering beast stood on her, kneading her uniform vest with questing claws. Its mouth opened wide, baring yellowing fangs as it hissed a breath that smelled like carrion. Somehow, she’d gotten her arms in front of her and held it off, barely. Her hands sank into the soft, gray flesh of its chest. Its chunky head strained forward. She punched at it, dug her fingernails into it, trying to find some sensitive spot that might at least make it hesitate. She scrabbled for its eyes, but it turned its head away, and its claws ripped into her vest.

She screamed.

Thunder cracked, and the creature leaped away from her, yelping. A second boom sounded, this time accompanied by a flash of light. Less like a lightning strike and more like some kind of explosion in reverse. She covered her head and curled up against the chaos of it. The air smelled of sulfur.

She waited a long time for the silence to settle, not convinced that calm had returned to the hallway. Her chest and shoulders were sore, bruised. She had to work to draw breath into complaining lungs. Finally, though, she could uncurl from the floor and look around.

A dark stain the size of a sedan streaked away from her across the carpet and walls, like soot and ashes from an old fireplace. The edges of it gave off thin fingers of smoke. Housekeeping was going to love this. The scent of burned meat seared into her nose.

Grant stood nearby, hands lifted in a gesture of having just thrown something. Grenade, maybe? Some arcane whatsit? It hardly mattered.

She closed her eyes, hoping once again that it was all an illusion and that it would go away. But she could smell charred flesh, a rotten taste in the back of her throat.

From nearby, Grant asked, “Are you all right?”

Leaning toward the wall, she threw up.

“Julie—”

“You said it was an illusion.”

“I had every—”

“I trusted you!” Her gut heaved again. Hugging herself, she slumped against the wall and waited for the world to stop spinning.

He stood calmly, expressionless, like this sort of thing happened to him every day. Maybe it did.

She could believe her eyes. Maybe that was why she didn’t dare open them again. Then it would all be real.

“Julie,” he said again, his voice far too calm. She wanted to shake him.

“You were right,” she said, her voice scratching past her raw throat and disbelief. “I should have stayed behind.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

When she looked up, the burned stain streaking across the hall and the puddle of vomit in front of her were still there, all too real. Grant appeared serene. Unmoved.

“Really?”

“You have a gift for seeing past the obvious. You were the kid who always figured out the magic tricks, weren’t you?”

She had to smile. For every rabbit pulled out of a hat, there was a table with a trapdoor nearby. You just had to know where to look.

“You are all right?” he asked, and she could believe that he was really concerned.

She had to think about it. The alternatives were going crazy or muddling through. She didn’t have time for the going-crazy part. “I will be.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said, reaching out to help her up. “I really wasn’t expecting that.”

She took his hand and lurched to her feet. “You do the distracting next time.” She didn’t like the way her voice was shaking. If she thought about it too much, she’d run, screaming. If Grant could stand his ground, she could, too. She was determined.

“I was so sure it was an illusion. The players at your table—they had to have been illusions.”

“The guy from yesterday was sweating.”

“Very good illusions, mind you. Nevertheless—”

She pointed at the soot stain. “That’s not an illusion. Those players weren’t illusions. Now, maybe they weren’t what they looked like, but they were something.”

His brow creased, making him look worried for the first time this whole escapade. “I have a bad feeling.”

He turned back to the door he’d been working on, reaching into both pockets for items. She swore he’d already pulled more out of those pockets than could possibly fit. Instead of more lockpicks or keycards or some fancy gizmo to fool the lock into opening, he held a string of four or five firecrackers. He tore a couple off the string, flattened them, and jammed them into the lock on the door.

Her eyes widened. “You can’t—”

“Maybe the direct approach this time?” He flicked his hand, and the previously unseen match in his fingers flared to life. He lowered the flame to the fuse sticking out of the lock.

Julie scrambled back from the door. Grant merely turned his back.

The black powder popped and flared; the noise seemed loud in the hallway, and Julie could imagine the dozens of calls to the hotel front desk about the commotion. So, security would be up here in a few minutes, and one way or another it would all be over. She’d lose her job, at the very least. She’d probably end up in jail. But she’d lost her chance to back out of this. Only thing to do was keep going.

Grant eased open the door. She crept up behind him, and they entered the room.

This was one of the hotel’s party suites—two bedrooms connected to a central living room that included a table, sofa, entertainment center, and wet bar. The furniture had all been pushed to the edges of the room, and the curtains were all drawn. Light came from the glow of a few dozen red pillar candles that had been lit throughout the room. Hundreds of dull shadows seemed to flicker in the corners. The smoke alarms had to have been disabled.

The place stank of burned vegetable matter, so many different flavors to it, Julie couldn’t pick out individual components. It might have been some kind of earthy incense.

A pattern had been drawn onto the floor in luminescent paint. A circle arced around a pentagram and dozens of symbols, Greek letters, zodiac signs, others that she didn’t recognize. It obviously meant something; she couldn’t guess what. Housekeeping was really not going to like this.

Two figures stood within the circle: a man, rather short and very thin, wearing a T-shirt and jeans; the other, a hulking, red-skinned being, thick with muscles. It had a snout like an eagle’s bill, sharp, reptilian eyes, and wings—sweeping, leathery—bat wings spread behind it like a sail.

Julie squeaked. Both figures looked at her. The bat-thing—another dragonlike gargoyle come to life—let out a scream, like the sound of tearing steel. Folding its wings close, it bowed its head as a column of smoke enveloped it.

Grant flipped the switch by the door. Light from the mundane incandescent bulbs overpowered the mystery-inducing candle glow. Julie and the guy in the circle squinted. By then, the column of smoke had cleared, and the creature had disappeared. An odor of burning wax and brimstone remained.

The guy, it turned out, was a kid. Just a kid, maybe fifteen, at that awkward stage of adolescence, his limbs too long for his body, acne spotting his cheeks.

“You’ve been summoning,” Grant said. “It wasn’t you working any of those spells, creating any of those illusions—you summoned creatures to do it for you. Very dangerous.” He clicked his tongue.

“It was working,” the kid said. He pointed at the empty space where the bat-thing had been. “Did you see what I managed to summon?”

He was in need of a haircut, was probably still too young to shave, and his clothes looked ripe. The room did, too, now that Julie had a chance to look around. Crumpled bags of fast food had accumulated in one corner, and an open suitcase had been dumped in another. The incense and candle smoke covered up a lot of dorm room smells.

On the bed lay the woman’s purse with several thousand dollars in casino chips spilled around it.

“I think you’re done here,” Grant said.

“Just who are you?” the kid said.

“Think of me as the police. Of a certain kind.”

The kid bolted for the door, but Julie blocked the way, grabbing his arm, then throwing herself into a tackle. He wasn’t getting away with this, not if she could help it.

She wasn’t very good at tackling, as it turned out. Her legs tangled with his, and they both crashed to the floor. He flailed, but her weight pinned him down. Somebody was going to take the blame for all this, and it wasn’t going to be her.

Finally, the kid went slack. “It was working,” he repeated.

“Why would you even try something like this?” she said. “Cheating’s bad enough, but … this?” She couldn’t say she understood anything in the room, the candles or paint or that gargoylish creature. But Grant didn’t like it, and that was enough for her.

“Because I’m underage!” he whined. “I can’t even get into the casino. I needed a disguise.”

“So you summoned demon doppelgängers?” Grant asked. Thoughtfully, he said, “That’s almost clever. Still—very dangerous.”

“Screw you!”

“Julie?” Grant said. “Now you can call security.” He pulled the kid out from under Julie and pushed him to the wall, where he sat slouching. Grant stood over him, arms crossed, guardlike.

“Your luck ran out, buddy,” Julie said, glaring at him. She retrieved her phone from her pocket. It was working now; go figure.

Grant said, “His luck ran out before he even started. Dozens of casinos on the Strip, and you picked mine, the one where you were most likely to get caught.”

“You’re just that stupid stage magician! Smoke and mirrors! What do you know about anything?” He slumped like a sack of old laundry.

Grant smiled, and the expression was almost wicked. The curled lip of a lion about to pounce. “To perform such summonings as you’ve done here, you must offer part of your own soul—as collateral, you might think of it. You probably think you’re strong enough, powerful enough, to protect that vulnerable bit of your soul, defending it against harm. You think you can control such monstrous underworld creatures and keep your own soul—your own self—safe and sound. But it doesn’t matter how protected you are, you will be marked. These creatures, any other demons you happen to meet, will know what you’ve done just by looking at you. That makes you a target. Now, and for the rest of your life. Actions have consequences. You’ll discover that soon enough.”

Julie imagined a world filled with demons, with bat-wing creatures and slavering dragons, all of them with consciousness, with a sense of mission: to attack their oppressors. She shivered.

Unblinking, the kid stared at Grant. He’d turned a frightening, pasty white, and his spine had gone rigid.

Grant just smiled, seemingly enjoying himself. “Do your research. Every good magician knows that.”

Julie called security, and while they were waiting, the demon-summoning kid tried to set off an old-fashioned smoke bomb to stage an escape, but Grant confiscated it as soon as the kid pulled it from his pocket.

Soon after, a pair of uniformed officers arrived at the room to handcuff the kid and take him into custody. “We’ll need you to come with us and give statements,” one of them said to Julie and Grant.

She panicked. “But I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, not really—we were just looking for the cheater at my blackjack table, and something wasn’t right, and Grant here showed up—”

Grant put a gentle hand on her arm, stopping her torrent of words. “We’ll help in any way we can,” he said.

She gave him a questioning look, but he didn’t explain.

The elevators seemed to be working just fine now, as they went with security to their offices downstairs.

Security took the kid to a back room to wait for the Las Vegas police. Grant and Julie were stationed in a stark, functional waiting room, with plastic chairs and an ancient coffeemaker. They waited.

They only needed to look at the footage of her breaking into the rooms with Grant, and she’d be fired. She didn’t want to be fired—she liked her job. She was good at it, as she kept insisting. She caught cheaters—even when they were summoning demons.

Her foot tapped a rapid beat on the floor, and her hands clenched into fists, pressed against her legs.

“Everything will be fine,” Grant said, glancing sidelong at her. “I have a feeling the boy’ll be put off the whole idea of spell-casting moving forward. Now that he knows people are watching him. He probably thought he was the only magician in the world. Now he knows better.”

One could hope.

Now that he’d been caught, she didn’t really care about the kid. “You’ll be fired, too, you know, once they figure out what we did. You think you can find another gig after word gets out?”

“I won’t be fired. Neither will you,” he said.

They’d waited for over half an hour when the head of security came into the waiting room. Grant and Julie stood to meet him. The burly, middle-aged man in the off-the-rack suit—ex-cop, probably—was smiling.

“All right, you both can go now. We’ve got everything we need.”

Julie stared.

“Thank you,” Grant said, not missing a beat.

“No, thank you. We never would have caught that kid without your help.” Then he shook their hands. And let them go.

Julie followed Grant back to the casino lobby. Two hours had passed, for the entire adventure, which had felt like it lasted all day—all day and most of the night, too. It seemed impossible. It all seemed impossible.

Back at the casino, the noise and bustle—crystal chandeliers glittering, a thousand slot and video machines ringing and clanking, a group of people laughing—seemed otherworldly. Hands clasped behind his back, Grant regarded the patrons filing back and forth, the flashing lights, with an air of satisfaction, like he owned the place.

Julie asked, “What did you do to get him to let us go?”

“They saw exactly what they needed to see. They’ll be able to charge the kid with vandalism and destruction of property, and I’m betting if they check the video from the casino again, they’ll find evidence of cheating.”

“But we didn’t even talk to them.”

“I told you everything would be fine.”

She regarded him, his confident stance, the smug expression, and wondered how much of it was a front. How much of it was the picture he wanted people to see.

She crossed her arms. “So, the kind of magic you do—what kind of mark does it leave on your soul?”

His smile fell, just a notch. After a hesitation, he said, “The price is worth it, I think.”

If she were a little more forward, if she knew him better, she’d have hugged him—he looked like he needed it. He probably wasn’t the kind of guy who had a lot of friends. At the moment, he seemed as otherworldly as the bat-winged creature in that arcane circle.

She said, “It really happened, didn’t it? The thing with the hallway? The … the thing … and the other…” She moved her arms in a gesture of outstretched wings. “Not smoke and mirrors?”

“It really happened,” he said.

“How do you do that? Any of it?” she said.

“That,” he said, glancing away to hide a smile, “would take a very long time to explain.”

“I get off my second shift at eleven,” she said. “We could grab a drink.”

She really hadn’t expected him to say yes, and he didn’t. But he hesitated first. So that was something. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I don’t think I can.”

It was just as well. She tried to imagine her routine, with a guy like Odysseus Grant in the picture … and, well, there’d be no such thing as routine, would there? But she wasn’t sure she’d mind a drink, and a little adventure, every now and then.

“Well then. I’ll see you around,” she said.

“You can bet on it,” he said, and walked away, back to his theater.

Her break was long over, and she was late for the next half of her shift. She’d give Ryan an excuse—or maybe she could get Grant to make an excuse for her.

She walked softly, stepping carefully, through the casino, which had not yet returned to normal. The lights seemed dimmer, building shadows where there shouldn’t have been any. A woman in a cocktail dress and impossible high heels walked past her, and Julie swore she had glowing red eyes. She did a double take, staring after her, but only saw her back, not her eyes.

At one of the bars, a man laughed—and he had pointed teeth, fangs, where his cuspids should have been. The man sitting with him raised his glass to drink—his hands were clawed with long, black talons. Julie blinked, checked again—yes, the talons were still there. The man must have sensed her staring because he looked at her, caught her gaze—then smiled and raised his glass in a salute before turning back to his companion.

She quickly walked away, heart racing.

This wasn’t new, she realized. The demons had always been there, part of an underworld she had never seen because she simply hadn’t been looking. Until now.

And once seen, it couldn’t be unseen.

The blackjack dealer returned to the casino’s interior, moving slowly, thoughtfully—warily, Grant decided. The world must look so much different to her now. He didn’t know if she’d adjust.

He should have made her stay behind, right from the start. But no—he couldn’t have stopped her. By then, she’d already seen too much. He had a feeling he’d be hearing from her again, soon. She’d have questions. He would answer them as best he could.

On the other hand, he felt as if he had an ally in the place, now. Another person keeping an eye out for a certain kind of danger. Another person who knew what to look for. And that was a very odd feeling indeed.

Some believe that magic—real magic, not the tricks that entertainers played onstage—is a rare, exotic thing. Really, it isn’t, if you know what to look for.

Author’s Bio:

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk-radio advice show. Odysseus Grant is a recurring character in the series. The ninth installment, Kitty’s Big Trouble, was released in 2011. She also writes young adult novels (Voices of Dragons, Steel), contemporary fantasy (Discord’s Apple, After the Golden Age), and many short stories that can be found in various magazines and anthologies. She lives in Colorado and has too many hobbies. Learn more at www.carrievaughn.com.