Free Honest illusions(BookZZ.org) by Nora [Roberts Nora] Roberts

is.” Because she felt like pulling away from him, she rounded back. “So, I should know all about you, too. That’s the way it works.”
    “I haven’t said I’m staying yet. I got plans of my own.”
    “You’ll stay,” Roxanne said half to herself. “Daddy wants you to. And Lily. Daddy will teach you magic if you want to learn. Like he teaches me. Only I’ll be better.” Her lashes didn’t even flutter at his snort of derision. “I’m going to be the best.”
    “We’ll see about that,” he murmured as they wheeled into the sky. He turned his face to the wind. When he did, he almost believed that what he had done was nothing, nothing compared to what he could do.
    5
    Luke’s first impression of New Orleans was a jumbled whirl of sounds and scents. While Max, Lily and Roxanne bedded down in the trailer, he’d been curled in the cab of the truck, bored into patchy sleep by the sound of Mouse’s tuneless humming. They’d argued about the radio since Shreveport, but Mouse stood firm. He refused to have any noise that would interfere with the pleasure of listening to his engine.
    Now other sounds had begun to drift into Luke’s logy brain. Voices pitched high and shrieking laughter, the clashes of sax and drum and trumpet. As he floated awake, he thought they were back at the carnival. He could smell food, a spice on the air and the underlying reek of garbage gone ripe in the heat.
    Yawning, he opened his eyes and blinked out his open window.
    People, masses of people, streamed past in the streets. He saw a juggler who looked like Jesus tossing bright orange balls that glowed in the dark. An enormously fat woman in a flowered muumuu was doing a solo boogie to the backwash of Dixieland that poured through an open doorway. He smelled hot dogs.
    The circus is in town, he thought as he struggled to sit up.
    And he saw they had left the traveling carnival behind to join a more massive and more permanent one.
    “Where are we?”
    Mouse negotiated the truck and trailer through the narrow streets. “Home,” he said simply as he drove past Bourbon Street toward Chartres.
    Luke couldn’t have said why the word made him grin.
    He could still hear the music, but it was fainter now. There were fewer people walking along these quieter streets. Some were heading to the action, some away. In the flickering lights of the streetlamps, he
    caught glimpses of old brick buildings, of flower-drenched balconies, of cabs hurrying by with fares and of figures curled up to sleep in doorways.
    He didn’t see how anyone could sleep with the music, the smells, the unbelievable heat. His own fatigue had vanished, to be replaced by a clenching impatience with the way Mouse was creeping along.
    Luke wanted to get where they were going. Wherever it was.
    “Jesus, Mouse, you go any slower, we’ll be backing up.”
    “No hurry,” Mouse said, then stunned Luke by stopping completely in the middle of the street and getting out.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Luke scrambled out himself to see Mouse standing by an open iron gate.
    “You can’t leave that thing sitting in the middle of the road. You’ll bring the cops.”
    “Just refreshing my memory.” Mouse stood, stroking his chin. “Gotta back her in.”
    “Back what?” Luke’s eyes popped wide. He did a quick dance of disbelief toward the gate and back to the truck. “Back that thing in here?” Luke scanned the opening between two unforgiving brick walls, then turned to judge the width of the trailer. “No way in hell.”
    Mouse smiled. His eyes glowed like a sinner’s who’d just found religion. “You just stand out here, in case I need you.” He sauntered back to the truck.
    “Can’t be done,” Luke called after him.
    But Mouse was humming again as he began to maneuver the truck and trailer across the narrow street.
    “You’re going to hit. Jesus, Mouse.” Luke braced for the sound of scraping metal. His mouth dropped open when the big black trailer slid