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“Sure. I recommend the brownie Blizzard.”
We were watching the girl behind the counter make our ice cream treats when Dean came in. Every female head in the place turned to watch him. I usually didn’t notice it, since he was my brother, but he was almost as good-looking as Owen. “Why, if it isn’t my baby sister,” he said, grabbing me in a one-armed hug and kissing the top of my head. “Looks like you escaped for the evening. And this must be that boyfriend I’ve heard so much about. Hi, I’m Dean, the middle brother.”
I wormed my way out of his grasp and introduced them.
Dean held out his hand for Owen to shake. “Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. We may torture you some to make sure you’re good enough for our little Katie, but it’s just a formality. It’s rare enough for her to get a guy that we don’t want to risk scaring him off—unless he needs to be scared off.”
“Dean!” I protested, elbowing him in the ribs.
“Just kidding, Kitty-Kat. You know I love you. Say, are you two here for dinner?” I suspected Dean was really angling for an invitation to join us for dinner that would result in someone else paying for his meal.
“Sorry, brother of mine, but we just ate. And now we’re on our way out, since it looks like our Blizzards are ready. But don’t worry, Mom is planning to kill the fatted calf and throw a huge shindig tomorrow to celebrate the fact that I have a live one on the hook, so you can grill Owen then.”
Owen handed me one of the cups of ice cream that had just been put on the counter for us. “It was nice meeting you, Dean,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll talk later.” Once we’d strolled out of the parking lot and were heading down the sidewalk to the park, he said, “I get the feeling he’s not as nice as he seems. You really tensed up around him.”
“Wow, you are good. Actually, he’s not bad. He just tries to slide by on charm rather than bothering to develop any other skills. He makes Rod look like a rank amateur. We got along fine growing up, but I think his wife has been a bad influence on him. He might have made something of himself if she hadn’t been so much like him.”
“His wife was Sherri, right? The blonde in the tight clothes?”
“Hey, you may not need that chart, after all.”
“I’d still like it before the big family dinner—names and relationships annotated.”
“Okay, I’ll get to work on it. Now, what was it you wanted to see down by the creek?”
“The sense of magic is stronger here.”
“Really? So we’re not entirely empty of magic?”
“No place is entirely empty of magic. There’s just more magic in some places than in others. In this area, the magic is concentrated in a few spots, including areas around running water. The power comes from the earth rather than from the atmosphere, so it’s highly localized and more difficult to draw upon.” At the creek bank he bent over the water, holding a hand out with his eyes halfway closed. He dipped his hand into the water and let it flow around him for a while, then stood up, shaking the water from his hand. Then he went over to a nearby tree and put a hand against it.
I ate my ice cream as I watched him. “Is there something I could help you find?” I asked him after a while when he seemed to have forgotten I was there. It looked like he’d gone back to being distant.
Or maybe he was focusing on work, I reminded myself. After all, he hadn’t come just to see me.
“Did you ever see anything unusual around here?”
“I’ve told you, I saw nothing to do with magic until I came to New York. Was there something in particular I should have seen?”
He continued looking around, nudging clumps of grass with his foot and poking into bushes. “Any unfamiliar creatures? Or were there any local stories about seeing something odd down here at night?”
“Creatures? You mean like fairies and stuff?”
“Not quite like you’ve seen before. These would be wilder. There may be a few isolated species in the area.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen any, and I used to play down here all the time.”
“Did you ever come down here after dark or during twilight?”
“No. It was a big make-out spot back in my school days, which left me out, and now I hear it’s where kids go to drink and use drugs.”
“Then you wouldn’t have seen anything.”
“I guess it would explain all of my grandmother’s talk about the wee folk. It also says something about how she must have spent her youth if she was here to see them. Go, Granny!”
He looked around some more, and I wondered if I should have been helping, but he hadn’t responded to my offer of help, so I left him to it since I had no clue what he hoped to see. “They may not be here anymore,” he said at last. “The drinkers and drug users might have driven them away. They’d have been drawn by the auras of the lovers, but the drinkers have a more negative energy.”
“What good would it do to find these creatures?”
