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“Whoa!” I should have known that a guy who’d spent his teens playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading fantasy novels would be more fascinated than upset by the revelation that magic might actually exist. After he’d verified and absorbed the fact that Sam was real, he asked, “Okay, so what is really going on here?”
Owen put down the magic booklets and stood up. “You saw Sam here sitting in the rafters, right?”
“Yeah. And I see him now. He talked to me.”
Owen nodded. “Okay.” He picked up a handkerchief, draped it across his left palm, then waved his right hand over it. “Now what do you see?”
“You’ve got a handkerchief draped across your hand.”
“Dean, what do you see?” Owen asked.
“You turned the handkerchief into a dove. That’s so cool! Can you teach me to do that? Maybe I could do magic shows, and then I could use it to make money instead of doing other stuff that you say I shouldn’t.”
Owen glared him into shutting up. Teddy laughed. “Boy, Dean, you’ve got some imagination. It’s just a handkerchief. He didn’t even fold it into a bird, like Katie tried to do with the napkins that one year for Thanksgiving when she read something in a magazine. Though, actually, this probably looks as much like a bird as Katie’s napkins did.”
“Shut up, Teddy,” I warned. “I’ve got stories on you, too.”
What Owen did next shut Teddy up far more effectively. He waved a hand over the handkerchief again, and this time it did turn into a bird. He held the bird for a long moment, giving everyone a chance to see that it really was a bird, and then with a gentle motion he sent it flying out of the barn.
Teddy gaped for a while, then he asked, “How’d you do that? I mean, I know it has something to do with having something up your sleeve, but you aren’t walking around with birds up your sleeve all the time, are you?”
“Teddy, you idiot, it’s magic,” Dean said. “And I guess it doesn’t work on you.” He turned to Owen for verification, “Does it? Was that what that first trick was about, you made it look like you’d changed it into a bird, but it was only an illusion and it didn’t work on him?”
“That does appear to be the case,” Owen said mildly.
I could no longer fight back the snit that had been building up in me since I found out that Dean was a wizard. “I do not believe this!” I shouted, throwing my hands in the air. “Is everyone in my family going to get caught up in this? I was supposed to be getting away from all that stuff when I came back here, and it was here surrounding me all this time. I’ve got one brother taking magical correspondence courses and another brother who’s immune to magic—not to mention Mom being able to see everything when she doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on, and goodness knows what’s up with Granny—and I am sick of trying to explain it all and make it make sense.”
Teddy, ever the peacemaker in the family, stepped toward me warily, like he might approach a mad dog. “Katie, honey, what’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on? And what’s this about magic?”
I turned to Owen with a plea in my eyes I hoped he could read. “You explain it this time. I’ve run out of variations on the ‘magic is real’ speech.” Before he could answer, I grabbed my purse and ran out of the barn to my truck. Owen was probably the best person to explain things to Teddy, anyway. They spoke the same language, and I was sure Teddy would ask for hours’ worth of scientific-style proofs.
By the time I got back, they’d probably be deep in discussions about theory. Owen and Teddy would be in hog heaven, and Dean would be bored out of his skull.
I wasn’t sure why this had me so upset. I liked magic and magical people, and I’d spent most of my life feeling like I was too normal. I just wasn’t quite ready to go all the way over the edge to where I no longer had any grip at all on the nonmagical world. My family was supposed to ground me, not be even weirder than my former working world had been. And, really, couldn’t I manage to be special in just one little way without being overshadowed by my big brothers?
I drove straight to the motel. Nita was one of the few people I felt I could talk to who still had absolutely nothing to do with the magical world. Of course, at the rate things in my life were going, I’d soon find out that she was from another planet or was Wonder Woman’s mild-mannered disguise.
“Ohmigod, what happened?” she gasped when I entered the motel lobby. Without waiting for me to answer, she said, “I’ll make tea.”
“Nothing happened. Why? Do I look that bad?” I asked as she raised the counter so I could join her behind the desk.
She put on the electric teakettle. “He broke up with you, didn’t he?” Her voice cracked with sympathetic tears. “Oh, Katie.”
I sidestepped her hug. “Broke up? We aren’t really together. We were barely together before I left New York, and I broke things off with him when I left.” I knew it was a different story from what I’d told my family, but I didn’t imagine her swapping stories with any of them, and in this case, something resembling the truth was my safest bet.
“Then, what is the problem? You came tearing in here like your tail was on fire, and you look ready to explode at any moment.” She poured water over teabags, then turned back to me, waving a spoon.
“Sit, and tell me everything.”
I did as she ordered, for fear she’d hit me with the spoon. It was funny how calming her hyper presence could be. There was a certain peace in her bubbly mania. Soon, she handed me a mug full of spiced tea sweetened with honey. “Now, you’d probably better start at the beginning,” she said as she took her own seat. “And don’t leave anything out. I’m already mad at you for not even mentioning the hot guy until he showed up in town.”
While I was still thinking of a way to explain what, exactly, it was that had me so upset, a car pulled into the motel driveway, making too fast a turn off the main road so that it fishtailed a little on the shoulder’s loose gravel. It then came to a screeching stop under the motel office’s canopy. When the driver got out of the car, I saw that he was tall and lanky, with clothes that fit so that he looked like he’d recently gone through an adolescent growth spurt. I knew exactly who he was. Phelan Idris, the rogue wizard who was giving us so much trouble, had come to town.
“Wow, a customer!” Nita said while I spilled my tea. “Nobody checks in on Mondays.”
I didn’t want him seeing me. Him not knowing that we knew he was here might give us the slightest advantage. “Oh, my tea!” I said, grabbing a handful of paper napkins from Nita’s desk and dropping to the ground behind the counter just before the door chime rang. I halfheartedly mopped up my spilled tea while I listened.
“Hi, and welcome to the Cobb Motel!” Nita said cheerfully. “How may I help you?”
