Magic Mansion by Jordan Price (best fiction books to read .txt) 📕

something to work with. You’re professionals. The less I have to coach you about timing, the sooner we can all go to bed.”

“Go ahead,” Iain told Kevin.

Kevin stared at the group of magicians waiting for their medals in the folding chairs—some of them wet, some of them fish-nibbled, all of them exhausted. Stared was probably the wrong word, Ricardo thought. More like he was gloating. I came in first. And you didn’t.

Jerk.

“The first magician I want on my team is…Fabian Swan.”

Fabian approached the podium, and Kazan placed the Red Team medal around his neck like some kind of hip-hop king granting a knighthood. Ricardo could relate to ambition; he’d been a competitive guy, back when he was skating. You couldn’t get very far without ambition. It wasn’t Kazan’s ambition that rubbed him wrong—it was the smugger-than-thou attitude.

He wanted Kazan to go down so badly he could taste it.

Monty said, “Sue, your first choice?”

Sue gazed out over the group, her hair in straggles, her mascara creeping, and a bright, triumphant smile shining through it all. She stared at Ricardo for a full two seconds, so excited she was fit to burst, before she finally announced, “Ricardo the Magnificent.”

Ricardo made sure to bow low to receive his Gold Team medal so Sue’s double-stick tape didn’t fail as she placed the ribbon around his neck. He might not have won the first event—but he did get picked first for his team. That mollified his newly-awakened ego. Somewhat.

“Pick Professor Topaz next,” he told her.

And then he saw Kevin Kazan was looking right at him. Kazan gave Ricardo a private smirk, gazed out over the magicians for an adequate pause, then announced, “My next pick is…Professor Topaz.”

Ricardo told himself to smile for the cameras, but his mouth simply would not comply. Kazan was lucky he didn’t treat him to a smack upside the head.

Sue squeezed Ricardo’s hand and whispered, “That’s okay, I just want to make sure I’ve got my girls with me.”

Ricardo squeezed back, hoping it wouldn’t be professional suicide to be known as “one of the girls.” He did his best to pretend it didn’t matter to him in the least when Kevin Kazan hung the Red Team medal around John’s neck.

_____

While everyone in the Mansion was an adult, and Marlene presumed they’d be able to handle sharing a dorm room with a member of the opposite sex, the network preferred to keep the kiddies separate, boys on one side of the invisible line and girls on the other. However, they’d also expected the gender ratio on the teams to be more or less equal. After all, if the last magician standing in Magic Mansion would be male, then any strategic player would load their team up with men first. And so the executive producers had fit the dorms with space to sleep three to four magicians each, just in case some unfortunate team ended up with more women than men.

They hadn’t planned on a girls versus boys situation.

Or mostly so, anyway. If they’d been divided cleanly down the middle, then it wouldn’t have been an issue. Both Red dorms would be all-male, and both Gold dorms would be all-female. But no. There was an odd man (or woman) out on each team. Jia Lee on the Red Team—probably because Kevin Kazan wanted to get down her pants, and Ricardo the Magnificent on the Gold Team. His teammates wouldn’t have thought twice about rooming with him, but come on. It was prime time. And someone somewhere in small town America would be shocked to learn the Gold Team considered Ricardo to be an honorary member of their tribe because he was g-a-y.

So Ricardo and Jia would get their own bedrooms, while Marlene racked her brain trying to come up with a way to score some bunk beds at two in the morning, since the other magicians would be crammed in five-deep.

Or would they? Maybe not for long.

She texted DOUBLE ELIMINATION? to the execs.

Within moments, she received the reply: DO IT.

_____

The grandfather clock in the mansion had just struck two by the time Iain led the magicians into the grand foyer. John felt the reverberation of the chimes hanging in the air that was sharp with the smell of anticipation and a new coat of paint. A fountain bubbled in the center of the room with blue lights making the chemical-laced water look much cleaner than it probably was, and the cracks in the plaster walls were hidden behind the boom operators.

Some of the magicians were clearly exhausted—either they were normally more diurnal, or the frenzied preparation for the show had drained their natural reserves. Ricardo, though, looked as if he had enough energy to go perform a set. And then go out for drinks.

And once the bars closed…maybe more.

When John was younger, he would have attributed Ricardo’s stamina to the lifestyle of a performer. But now he saw signs of strain in many of the younger performers who should have been able to pull a late night: squinty eyes, slightly red. A deepening of the faint lines around their mouths. A yawn when they thought no one was looking.

Not Ricardo, though. He looked…magnificent. Even with his water-tousled hair.

Especially with his water-tousled hair.

Casey had always been the same way, able to go without rest for as long as need be, as was John. Which led him to believe it had something to do with True magic rather than the ability to ignore exhaustion. In fact, he could probably look around and see if anyone else seemed raring to go…but that hardly seemed as important as picking up on Ricardo’s signals, which so far seemed positive beyond John’s wildest hopes.

Iain had the magicians gather around the fountain, then went off to the side to confer with his headset, one of the writers, and Monty. The larger camera rigs were currently unmanned, though two cameramen with handhelds circled the group. Perhaps that was as close as they would come to being alone for the rest of