“Because I’m underage!” he whined. “I can’t even get into the casino. I needed a disguise.”
“So you summoned demon doppelgangers?” 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, guard-like.
“Your luck ran out, buddy,” Julie said, glaring at him. She retrieved her phone from her pocket. It worked 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, she noticed, 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 coffee maker. 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 a half 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.