Don't Hex with Texas (13 page)

O
f course, saying that nothing can go wrong is almost as good as putting a curse on yourself to guarantee that
everything
will go wrong.

It started when we got back home. Mom was waiting for us in the kitchen. “Kathleen Elizabeth, how dare you be so rude to your own brother when you were a guest in his house!”

As I counted to ten before saying anything I might regret to my mother, I realized that Dean must have called ahead in a preemptive tattletale strike. “I? I was rude to
him
?” I sputtered.

Owen was far calmer, which meant he was still very, very angry. “He was the one who was rude, I’m afraid,” he said softly. “He accused me of being the thief who robbed all the stores in the town square the night I arrived here.”

That brought Mom up cold. Being rude to family was one thing, but you were never supposed to be rude to guests, particularly not the potentially-marriage-material-good-catch boyfriend of your still-single sister. She frowned at Owen, then turned back to me. “Of course Owen wasn’t the robber. He was here all night. But Dean said you’d accused
him
of being the robber.”

Okay, maybe I had, sort of, but in a very indirect way. “Mom, I didn’t accuse him of anything. I simply remarked on all the nice new things he and Sherri got recently. They’ve got a whole set of china like yours, and Sherri had a necklace and earrings that match her new bracelet, the one she was wearing last night. And then I said they were lucky they got them before the stores were robbed and all the good stuff was taken.” I took a breath and continued. “Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was his guilty conscience talking. If he didn’t have anything to feel guilty about, he wouldn’t have assumed I was accusing him, and then he wouldn’t have tried to shift the blame to Owen.”

It took her a while to process that information. In most families, the middle child is more or less forgotten, but Dean had always been Mom’s favorite, the one who could do no wrong. I wondered if it had something to do with how handsome he was. “Well, you’re making accusations against him now,” she said at last.

“No, I’m simply evaluating his behavior, and I did say that I knew he couldn’t really be the thief. I’d just prefer that he not invite me over and then attack my friend. If he had doubts about Owen, he could have talked to me privately.”

She sighed heavily. “I’m terribly sorry about that, Owen. Now, would you two like some dessert? I made a chocolate cake.”

I never passed up chocolate, and Owen was well aware of that, so we sat at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad and had chocolate cake with coffee. The atmosphere was still a little tense, but after a couple of slices of cake, Owen seemed to have settled down and I was no longer afraid of household objects blowing up. Now he just looked tired.

As Mom took the dishes away, she said, “I don’t know if Katie told you, but Sunday afternoons are usually pretty quiet around here. It’s a day of rest, and we all try to read and relax or nap. You’re free to do what you like, of course, but we prefer to keep things quiet for the afternoon.”

“I could use a nap,” Owen said. “I know it’s not a big time difference, but I think I’m a little jet-lagged, and I had to work a lot of extra hours to be able to take off to come down here.”

She smiled and patted him on the arm, as if trying to make up for the way Dean had treated him. “Then you have a good nap, and we’ll see you at dinner tonight. Sunday night is casual, so there’s no set timetable.”

At the top of the stairs, Owen pulled me into his room. “Let’s get ready for tonight first,” he said, shutting the door.

“You know what my parents are going to think about us being in here with the door closed.” I certainly knew what I was thinking about.

“You won’t be in here too long, and your hair won’t be at all messed up when you leave, so relax. She’s more likely to think we’re talking about how awful your brother is.” He pulled off his tie and sat on one of the beds. I sat next to him. “We need to come up with disguises for tonight.”

“Disguises?”

“You’re the one who lives here. You have family here. Do you really want to let anyone in town know that you or someone associated with you is involved with magic?”

“No, not really. What kind of disguise were you thinking of?”

“This is probably someone without much experience with magic and an image of magic formed from seeing too many movies. He’s been wearing a hooded robe to do his own work. We should probably go with that—dress in hooded robes of our own and act as though we’re superior wizards to put a good scare in him.”

“Act?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

He ignored me. “Any spell he tries to do to fight us off won’t affect you, and I’ll be able to deflect it from me. If we show him how inferior he is and exactly what he’s playing with, we may be able to scare him into stopping and then cooperating with us. I guess our problem is how we’ll come up with wizard-looking robes between now and tonight.”

“Not a problem.” I got off the bed and went to the chest of drawers that had been Teddy’s. “Teddy probably still has some of his
Star Wars
and Dungeons and Dragons costumes in here. He’s the nerd of the family, and the reason I can quote from anything with the word ‘star’ in the title.” I dug around in the bottom drawer and came out with a black hooded cloak with stars and moons on it. “I could have sworn his old Jedi outfit was still in here, but the wizard should work just as well, as long as you don’t mind glowing in the dark.” I tossed it to him.

“Of course, real wizards wear Armani,” he said with a grin and a raised eyebrow as he wrapped the cloak around himself, “but it’ll do. It looks very, um, magical. Now, what about you?”

“I should have a cloak that matches that one. Teddy made me go with him to a costume party and we dressed as a team.”

He took off his robe and I hung it in the closet so the wrinkles could fall out of it. “And now, I believe it’s naptime,” I said, “since we aren’t going to get any sleep again tonight. Do you need a book? My dad has a pretty extensive collection of spy and mystery novels.”

“I’ll probably be asleep before you’re back in your room,” he said with a yawn. “Bang on my door if I’m not stirring when everyone else is up and around.”

I knew I’d do no such thing. He looked like he’d been operating on a sleep deficit coming into this, and then he’d had sleepless nights on top of heavy magic use. I wanted him fully charged before we had to go out and trap our wizard.

The old wizard cloak was still in the bottom drawer of my bureau where I’d shoved it about ten years ago. I shook it out, tried it on, then hung it at the back of my closet. Who knew that some of Teddy’s nerdy oddities would turn out to be so useful?

I was surprised by how easily I fell asleep, even though I was still agitated from the disastrous lunch. My windows were on the eastern side of the house, so my room was in shadow when I woke up. Owen’s door was still closed, so I tiptoed down the stairs, which made their usual squeak of protest. I could understand my parents keeping it when they had teenagers in the house, but with all of us grown, it would have been nice if they’d finally had that fixed. Never mind that I was sneaking out far more often these days than I had when I’d been a teenager.

Owen came downstairs not five minutes later, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, faded jeans, and a T-shirt that almost perfectly matched his eye color. I could have sworn my mother drooled just the least bit. Goodness knows I was practically swooning. “Did you have a good nap?” I asked him.

“Very good, and you know, I could go right back to sleep now. I must have been tired.”

“Country air is good for you,” Mom said. “It gives you more restful sleep.” Then she proceeded to load the kitchen table with food for a “light” Sunday supper.

When we excused ourselves to go to bed ridiculously early, both of us tried to make it very obvious that we were going to separate rooms, lest we give the impression of being impatient honeymooners. Though, come to think of it, we’d barely given any indication that we were anything more than just friends. While my old-fashioned parents would probably be relieved to know that we weren’t sleeping together outside of wedlock, shouldn’t they have been concerned that we barely touched each other and didn’t act at all romantic? Our relationship confused me, and I was inside it. Anyone else should have been truly baffled if they were paying attention.

I dressed in black and coiled my hair at the nape of my neck before crawling into bed to get what sleep I could before we had to head off and play wizard. It seemed like I’d barely closed my eyes before Owen crawled through my window, his robe balled up under his arm. We got out his case, and he again got his pack full of supplies, to which he added both wizard robes. Then we were off, climbing off the porch roof, down the tree, and onto the ground.

This time, Owen parked behind the library on the other side of the bank, a place that was more sheltered than the Dairy Queen and on a different major road. Sam stood guard in front of the bank. “No sign of ’im yet, boss,” he reported.

“How are you for energy?” Owen asked.

“They’ve been having church services of some kind or another in this town from shortly after dawn until nearly sunset, and I’ve been basking on rooftops all day, so I’m fully charged.” He looked up at me and added, “Gargoyles get extra power when the church is having a service. All that worship really jolts up the juice. I could get to like it here, plenty of sunshine, lots of churches. Hey, boss, too bad you don’t got something you can plug into to recharge, other than tapping into the little lady here.” And then he gulped audibly and said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Sorry.”

“We’ll be hiding over there at the next building,” Owen said evenly, ignoring Sam’s last comment. “Signal us when you see something.”

Sam perched on the roof over the bank’s doorway, and Owen and I took refuge in the doorway of the chamber of commerce building next door to the bank. There, we couldn’t help but be close to each other because it was hard to crowd into a doorway recess with another person without touching. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted our rogue wizard to hurry and get there or to take his sweet time. The proximity was practically intoxicating, I was so acutely aware of Owen’s nearness. I was on the verge of suggesting that I wait in another doorway so I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything that might disrupt the fragile balance we had going between us when Sam called out, “I think he’s coming.”

The wizard I’d seen before rounded the corner from the square. He wore the same homemade-looking robes he’d been wearing the day I saw him, and I couldn’t spot anything that might identify him to me. The hood draped so low that his face was hidden in shadows, the sleeves covered his hands, and the robe dragged on the ground, completely covering his shoes. He carried a satchel that didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics—no recognizable marks, no logos, and definitely no monogrammed initials, which would have been really helpful.

The wizard hid in the doorway of the building directly across the street from the bank, took some things out of his satchel and spread them around, then took a small booklet out and flipped through it. Referring to the book every so often, he arranged the items in front of him. He lit a couple of candles, using matches instead of the wave of a hand the way Owen might have, and then I felt the tingle of magic building.

He repacked his bag, looked both ways up and down the street, darted across the street, and stood in front of the bank doorway. Raising his arms over his head, he chanted some words in hesitant Latin, and now I was sure it was a he because that was definitely a male voice. Then he stepped forward, and just as he was about to hit the wards, I felt another surge of magic from very close by. The wards flared up in bright light, and the wizard bounced off them, falling on his back on the sidewalk. I knew that wards were usually invisible, so Owen must have added the light show for effect. It would have been nice if we could have seen the junior wizard’s face to enjoy his reaction, but the hood hid him completely.

We’d just started to step off the doorstep to confront him when Sam gave another signal, this one silent. Headlights appeared, and a police car came slowly down the street. Owen immediately made the wards quit glowing, but it looked like the unusual light had attracted some attention, for the police car came to a stop in front of the bank. Our wizard crawled through the shadows to the side of the building, then took off running between buildings. I would have chased after him, but Owen gripped my arm.

“I can’t keep us hidden if we move very far,” he whispered.

We both held our breath as the police officer got out, swinging his flashlight back and forth. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing when the beam swept across us, but the cop didn’t seem to notice us. He leaned back into the car and got on the radio. “I thought I saw someone in front of the bank who ran off when I got here. I’m gonna check it out,” he said. The radio squawked, he paused to listen, then said, “Nah, I don’t think I need backup. Probably just some kid, but you never know, could be our mystery burglar.” He put the radio away, put his hand on his gun, and went in between the buildings, following the wizard’s path, but came back a moment later, empty-handed. He checked around the bank doorway, unaffected by the wards, then returned to his car.