Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

“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.”