Shanna Swendson - Don't Hex with Texas

Nita was sitting behind the front desk, reading a pastel-covered book with a stiletto-clad foot on the cover. She glanced up when the front door bell jingled, took one look at Owen, and her jaw dropped.

It seemed to take her a full minute to realize I was with Owen, and then she looked even more shocked. Owen, as usual, blushed furiously, which had the effect of making him even more adorable.

“Hi, Nita,” I said, wondering if I needed to do CPR or at least check for a pulse. “You’ve got to meet Owen, my friend from New York who’s here for a visit. Owen, Nita and I have been friends since fourth grade.”

Owen hit her with one of his heart-melting smiles and said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Huh? Uh, New York, yeah,” she stammered. Then she pulled herself together. “And you left New York? With him there? And you never told me about him?”

Owen’s blush deepened. “It’s a long story,” I explained. “I didn’t really want to talk much about it.”

Her eyes got even wider, then she narrowed them meaningfully at me. In other words, we would be talking later. Now recovered fully and back to her usual perky self, she asked Owen, “So, how long are you in town?”

“A few days.”

“Do you need a place to stay? We have vacancies. Lots of vacancies.”

“Mom already got him,” I said. “He’s in Dean and Teddy’s old room.”

“I’ll have to talk to her about competing with me, but I don’t blame you. We don’t have breakfast here. I’m still trying to convince my dad that we should turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

I looked over and saw that the window was back in place, the plastic gone. “Hey, you got the window fixed.”

“Yeah, Ramesh must have done it last night when he got bored enough—goodness knows the night shift gets boring. It was like that when I took over this morning.”

Owen wandered over to the window in question and placed a hand on the glass, as if out of idle curiosity. While he was occupied, Nita flipped up the desk gate to run into the lobby, grab me, and pull me off to the far corner. “Oh my God, Katie, he’s, like, gorgeous! Why didn’t you say anything?

I knew it was a broken heart! And now he’s come to get you! You’ll have to tell me everything when you get a chance.”

“Later,” I promised her. Then I raised my voice to a normal speaking level. “I guess we’d better move on. I’m showing Owen around the town today.”

“And hiding out from your mom, I bet,” Nita added. “How big a family dinner did she try to plan for tonight?”

“The works, but we scored a one-night reprieve.”

She smiled up at Owen and extended a hand to shake his. “It was very, very nice to meet you. Have fun!” As we left the lobby, I glanced over my shoulder to see her miming, “Call me!”

“Well?” I asked Owen once we were in the car.

“Magic,” he confirmed. “It was sloppy, oozing all over the place, but I think I recognized the remnants of the spell.”

“So if our guy isn’t actively, knowingly using bad magic, he’s at least trying to use magic to commit crimes. Why else would he have removed the motel window? He was probably trying to rob the place, but Nita almost caught him.”

“This could get ugly,” he muttered.

“Next stop should probably be the pharmacy,” I said. “There are a couple of possible suspects there, and that’s the place where Mom thought Gene was getting prescriptions for free. But I think that if anyone in that transaction was using magic or would use magic to shake people down for money, it was Lester, the pharmacist. He’s a mean old skinflint. Think Scrooge before the ghosts, only with less hair and with a stockpile of drugs.”

“Who’s your other suspect?”

“This one’s a stretch, but there’s a hippie chick who runs the card and gift part of the store. She’s someone I could totally see trying to explore magic. I could certainly imagine her wearing robes and dancing around the courthouse square. I’m just not sure I can imagine her doing anything mean or greedy. Though I guess she might have been collecting the money for charity. How does this work, anyway? Can you tell someone’s magical just from talking to them?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple unless I’ve been around them actively using magic. Right now, I’m getting a sense for things. Then I might know how to go about testing.”

I directed him to park on the square, and then we walked over to the pharmacy. A blast of incense hit us as we entered, and not far behind it was Rainbow, which I was pretty sure was not her real name.

“Greetings and blessings!” she trilled. “Is there anything I can help you find? I got a new shipment of healing aromatherapy candles that you might enjoy. There are some that balance your energy into harmony, and others that encourage the full bloom of love.”

Owen turned bright red again, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of the suggestion of encouraging the full bloom of love or because he was coughing and gasping for breath from the heavy, scented smoke in the air.

“No, thanks,” I said. “We just dropped in to get him some allergy medicine.” Then I dragged a still-coughing Owen back to the more sterile-smelling pharmacy part of the store.

Lester was around the pharmacy counter before we reached the first set of shelves, not so much because he wanted to offer great customer service, but because he was afraid we might be shoplifters.

Never mind that he’d known me almost since birth—the word “trust” wasn’t in Lester’s vocabulary.

“What do you need?” he demanded. If one of the chains moved to town or if someone else decided to open a pharmacy, as long as they had the basic customer-service skills of the Soup Nazi, Lester would be in huge trouble.

I grabbed a box of Benadryl off a nearby shelf. “Just getting some antihistamines for him. It’s his first time in Texas.” Owen coughed obligingly, and Lester glared at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Visiting Katie from New York,” Owen wheezed.

That was the wrong thing to say. Lester didn’t trust the townfolk he’d known his whole life, so he certainly didn’t trust a Yankee. He snatched the box from my hand and went back to the register to ring it up. Owen paid for the purchase before I could get my purse open, and the sight of money thawed Lester ever so slightly. “You in town long?” Lester asked.

“Just for a visit,” Owen said vaguely.

“If you need something stronger than that, I have some prescription antihistamines. You normally would need to see a doctor to get them, but I’m sure we could work a deal.”

Owen took a deep breath before we crossed through the gift part of the store and didn’t let it out until we were safely on the sidewalk. “Please don’t buy any of her aromatherapy,” he said as he gasped for air. “I’m not sure I could take it.”

“Her aromatherapy doesn’t exactly encourage the full bloom of romance in you, huh?”

“Well, there is some magic in it, but it’s not done right, so the effect on a magical person isn’t quite what’s intended.”

“You mean, that stuff is for real?”

“There’s a bit of a benign influence spell on the candle she was burning. You wouldn’t notice the effects, of course. On a normal person, it might promote a feeling of well-being. To a magical person it’s like…Well, it’s like being a person with perfect pitch and listening to a singer who’s just slightly off-key. Other people might find it perfectly pleasing, but someone with perfect pitch would be climbing the walls.”

“I guess she’s one of our suspects if she’s selling magical products.”

“Probably not. If she can tolerate it, she isn’t magical. It could be something the supplier has done, and she has no idea that magic’s involved. All she might know is that the candles make her feel good.