Witch World Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the road. I loved how so many of the hotels had adopted exotic themes. The sidewalks were jammed, with most of the people laughing and carrying on. The smell of booze was all-pervasive.
    The night air was hotter than at home, in the high nineties.I knew it would take all night for the temperature to drop another ten degrees. Then the sun would rise and another scorcher would begin. As we walked, our thirst quickly returned. We had barely reached the Tropicana when Alex pulled me inside.
    “This is an old hotel but it has class,” she said. “Plus they have low minimums. We should be able to find a five-buck table.”
    “How about a dollar table?”
    “Sure. Hop on down to Mississippi and catch a steamboat on the river.”
    It being a Friday night, the place was jammed. We didn’t have our choice of blackjack tables. Indeed, it took a long wait before we found a table that could seat us both. Fortunately, they barely looked at our IDs.
    We ordered drinks before trading our cash for chips: four large Cuba libres—the name translates as “free Cuba,” in English—Coke, rum, and lime. The table drinks were supposed to be watered down but these babies packed a punch. I had barely finished my first when I began having trouble counting to twenty-one.
    The minimum was five bucks, the maximum ten thousand. Alex and I each bought a hundred bucks’ worth of five-dollar chips and prayed we didn’t lose it all in the first twenty minutes, which I had done before. I was not a total novice—I had played the game before in Las Vegas with my mom and knew the basic rules. Of course, when I had played with her, I’d had to dress up and wear plenty of makeup so I looked older.
    To start, we relied on Alex’s card. The hardest thing for me was when to split and when to double down. The card made it simple. It had three color-coded columns. If the dealer is showing this, and you have that, then do this . . .
    We were at the table maybe half an hour, and I was down fifty bucks and Alex was ahead a hundred, when a guy showed up. He caught my eye instantly. It wasn’t just because he was handsome. Las Vegas had no shortage of beautiful men.
    Nor was it the fact that he set down a fat roll of hundreds and asked for thirty thousand in chips. Again, the town was loaded with high rollers. It was more his calm expression, his quiet confidence, that drew me in. As he casually stacked his chips and lit a cigarette, he looked neither happy nor sad. He was just there to win.
    A man a few seats over—he was a truck driver out of Chicago, and he had hit on me and Alex the second we had sat down—called to the new guy. “Hey, dude, can’t you read? This is a no-smoking table.”
    The guy stared at him with large, steady eyes. They were blue, but so close to black they looked as if they had never seen the sun. “No,” he said, and blew smoke in the man’s face.
    Trucky got annoyed. “No what?”
    “I can’t read.”
    “Listen, put out the cigarette or find another table.”
    “Go find your own table.”
    Trucky stood. “Looking for a fight, bud?”
    The guy smiled easily, still calm and cool. He was six-two, muscular, probably in his mid-twenties. He could have been a cop, someone who worked in a dangerous field. He had that kind of vibe. Although he looked at ease, I had the feeling Las Vegas was not home. He had closely cropped blond hair and a slight accent I couldn’t place.
    Facing the dealer, I was on the far left. Alex was to my right and the new guy was next, followed by Trucky and a young Japanese couple who could not stop staring at the newcomer’s mountain of chips.
    I hoped the threat didn’t scare him off. I doubted it would. From the moment I saw him, I felt I knew him, like he was a piece of my past I could no longer remember clearly. I wanted him to stay.
    “Not afraid of one,” he told Trucky.
    Trucky went to snap at him, then suddenly seemed allergic to our newcomer’s stare. He lowered his head and