Free Absolutely Captivated by Kristine Grayson

abandon
us.”
    “I do not!” Travers said,
looking surprised. Then he shrugged again, and Zoe found that she
liked that boyish mannerism. “I mean, I do want to leave, but
you’re adults. You’re not my responsibility. Kyle is, and we have
to get home.”
    Zoe frowned. She looked from the man
to the boy. Kyle’s cheeks had reddened, and it seemed like he was
angry.
    “You promised, Dad,” Kyle
said
    “I promised you I would bring them
here,” Travers said. “I’ve done that.”
    “But you don’t know if she’s the right
Zoe Sinclair!” Kyle said.
    “What’s this about the right Zoe
Sinclair?” Zoe asked.
    “She is,” said the blond.
    Zoe shook her head. “Someone please
tell me what’s going on.”
    And again, she looked at
Travers.
    He held out his hands in a
helpless, who-knows gesture. “My sister, at her wedding, asked me
to drive these three women down to Los Angeles. I did that. Then it
turns out that they want to find a woman who used to work there
named Zoe Sinclair. My kindhearted son—”
    Kyle’s flush grew even
deeper.
    “— begged me to help them
find this woman, saying that these three ladies shouldn’t be on
their own. Kyle’s pretty astute for a kid his age, so I
agreed.”
    Zoe folded her hands on the desktop,
not wanting Travers to see how unnerved she was. These women had to
have something to do with the Fates. This was some sort of
complicated scam. Zoe wondered if the real Fates knew about
it—non-magical women doing a fairly excellent impersonation of the
most powerful beings in mage history (excepting the Powers that Be,
of course).
    Travers sighed and shook his head.
“Long story short, there hasn’t been a detective named Zoe Sinclair
in Los Angeles since—”
    “The 1950s,” Zoe said.
“You can stop pretending you don’t understand this now. You found
me. What do you all want?”
    Her voice was harsher than
she had intended but she was getting annoyed. She was finally able
to see past Travers’ beauty, which had stunned her for a while. She
hadn’t thought clearly.
    If she had, she would have realized
that the magical always knew other mages. And they knew about long
life spans and the way that the magical aged slowly.
    So Travers, for all his protestations,
knew that she was who she said she was. And the women, who should
have been magical and were not, did not, apparently, know that Zoe
could suss out their lack of magical abilities.
    The only real mystery here was Kyle.
The kid seemed sincere. But Zoe had seen a lot of Vegas scams built
on children. Children could be the absolute best at sincerity,
partly because they didn’t have to try as hard.
    “Excuse me?” Travers said. He looked
like she had thrown cold water on him. “You can’t be that Zoe
Sinclair.”
    “And why not?” Zoe asked.
    “Because you’re—what? Thirty? And to
be that woman, you’d have to be eighty, like I said.”
    “And you can stop playing
dumb, Mr. Kinneally,” Zoe said. “I’m not some wilting mortal woman
who is unwilling to admit her piddly age. I’m going to be
one-hundred-and-seventy-four in August, more than old enough to be
your Miss Sinclair from Los Angeles and from Vegas fifty years ago.
I’m not a grandmother, I never will be, and I’m not about to start
now.”
    He stared at her. She could have sworn
that the shock he was pretending to have was real. It felt real. It
resounded through her as if she were the one who was
shocked.
    “I’m not a fool, Ms. Sinclair,” he
said.
    “Good,” she snapped. “Then let’s get
down to business.”
    “I mean,” he said, as if
she hadn’t spoken, “no one lives one-hundred-and-seventy-four
years. I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but this isn’t
working.”
    “Me?” Zoe’s voice rose. “You’re the
one who comes marching in here, decides that I can’t be who I say I
am, pretends not to have magic when it’s clear you do, tries to
pass off three non-magical women as the Fates, and somehow