Shanna Swendson - Don't Hex with Texas

“How do you two know each other?”

“From work. And before you ask, we hadn’t been going out that long. We started dating a week or so before Christmas, and then I moved back here right after the new year, so things hadn’t gone very far.

We haven’t even begun discussing marriage plans, so get that out of your head. I spent Christmas with his parents, who were very nice. Is there anything else you wanted to know about him? The floor’s open for questions.”

Mom opened and closed her mouth, and I escaped before she could think of something else to ask.

I woke in the middle of the night to hear a tapping sound on my window. It persisted, so I crawled out of bed and pulled back the pink ruffled curtains to find Owen crouching on the porch roof. I opened the window and mumbled, “What is it?”

“Sam says our suspect is up to something.”

“And you couldn’t have knocked on my door from inside the house to tell me this?”

If it hadn’t been so dark out, I’m pretty sure I would have seen him turn bright red. The moonlight glinted off his glasses, making it hard to read his eyes. “I didn’t want your parents to catch me sneaking into your room.”

“But they’ll be okay with you crawling around on the roof, I’m sure.”

“You did tell me how to sneak out of that room.”

“Give me a second to put some clothes on, and I’ll be right out,” I said, a little less crabby now that I was fully awake. I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and redid my ponytail so it didn’t have so many scraggly bits hanging off it before I climbed out the window onto the roof. Owen kept to the outside of the porch roof as we made our way over to the tree. He dropped down first, then waited as if to catch me in case I slipped on my way down. As old a pro at this as I was, I didn’t need his help.

His car was parked far enough away from the house that the sound of the engine starting wouldn’t wake anyone up, and his rental car’s engine was much quieter than my truck’s. It took only a couple of minutes before we were downtown. He parked a block away from the square, and then we went on foot the rest of the way.

There wasn’t anyone dancing in robes under the moonlight on the square, but we could tell right away that someone had been there. The “whoop, whoop” of the security alarm at the jewelry store was the first clue. The front windows on most of the businesses on the square were missing. It looked like a lot of the goods inside were gone, too.

Sam joined us from his vantage point on top of the courthouse. “I only noticed him at the last place he knocked over,” Sam said. “He was pretty stealthy about the whole thing—may even have been veiling—so I didn’t spot him sooner. Sorry about that. And then when I tried to catch up with him, he vanished. Seems like he’s learned how to veil himself even from magical folk, but he can’t multitask and do serious veiling while working magic.”

“He’s not here now,” I said. “I don’t see anything.”

“He can’t have gone too far,” Owen said. He held his hands up and said something in a foreign language. I felt a surge of power, but saw nothing change.

“Hey!” Sam protested. “You’re blowing my cover. I thought the boss told you not to pull that stunt again.” I assumed that meant Owen had just removed every magical veiling in the area, including Sam’s. The last time Owen had done that, it created a real stir in midtown Manhattan and got him into a bit of trouble.

Owen waved a hand at Sam, restoring the veiling illusion. “This is the town square at midnight, not Times Square, so it’s not like there’s anyone to spot you. Now go see if you can find anything.”

Sirens sounded in the distance, probably responding to the jewelry store’s burglar alarm. “We’d better get away from here,” I said. “If someone sees us here, we’ll be the suspects.”

“They won’t see us.”

“Oh, right. Magic, invisibility, and all that.” Since I could see us, I didn’t feel great about standing in front of a burgled store with missing windows when I heard police sirens approaching. Owen didn’t seem at all bothered. He just stood there, scanning the sky for Sam.

The gargoyle returned a moment later. “I didn’t see anything. He must have gone to ground. Aerial surveillance isn’t foolproof, you know. You only have to crawl under something and poof, you’ve

vanished.”

A police car rounded the corner into the square. “Then I guess we’ll have to hunt on the ground,”

Owen said as he knelt and placed his hands flat on the ground. I felt another surge of magic coming up through the soles of my feet. The approaching police car slowed to the point it was almost motionless. Owen rose and said, “Split up and search the next couple of blocks.”

Sam tilted his head to one side. “Are you sure—” he started, but Owen cut him off.

“We’ll discuss it later. Go!”

I certainly wasn’t going to argue when he sounded like that. Even though I knew he could do nothing to me magically, he still sounded powerful and intimidating. I chose the side of the square where the grocery store was and ran to investigate the parking lot in back. Nothing was moving, and not just because it was the middle of the night in a small town that tended to be still and quiet at high noon.

Not even the things that usually moved were moving. A plastic grocery bag being tossed by the wind hung suspended motionless in midair. An alley cat stopped in mid-pounce, inches away from a paralyzed mouse. This was totally freaky, walking through a frozen landscape. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything human-sized and frozen, so I returned to the square.

Owen returned next. I could see his frustration in the set of his shoulders and the way he clenched his fists. “You didn’t find anything, did you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry. And what is all this, anyway?” I gestured around the motionless square.

He ducked his head in what looked a lot like embarrassment. That was a relief. At least he had the good grace to seem a little abashed by having done something so incredible. “It was a theory,” he said with a shrug. “It has to do with energy feedback and inertia manipulated magically.”

I was rescued from the Mr. Wizard—literally—explanation by Sam’s return. “Didn’t see a thing,” he reported. “That spell spread, what, three blocks? Our guy probably made it farther than that. So maybe you ought to set time right again before things get really odd.”

Owen knelt and put his hands on the ground again, and everything changed. When the evening breeze hit my face and I heard all the little night sounds that had been silent, I realized just how still things had been under the spell. The police siren came back as the car lurched forward and then stopped across a row of empty nose-in parking spots in front of the jewelry store. Owen gestured toward where we’d left his car, and we ran in that direction, Sam flying low behind us.

As soon as we were back at the car, Sam lit into Owen. “What in the blue blazes was that stunt supposed to be?” Owen opened his mouth to respond, but Sam cut him off with the wave of a wing.

“I don’t wanna know the theory. I just wanna know what you thought you were doing even going there. That’s not stuff you play with, even if you’re about the only one who could pull off something like that.”

Good. So I wasn’t the only one who was a little freaked out. And now I was even more freaked out because I’d never seen Sam that upset. As well as Sam knew the ins and outs of the magical world, if Sam was worried about what Owen had done, I knew I had reason to worry.

“It was a calculated risk,” Owen argued once Sam let him get a word in edgewise. “This is a nonmagical area, and there weren’t a lot of civilians around. The sooner we catch this guy, the lower our risk for exposure is. I know what I’m doing, and I thought it was worth a chance. Time is of the essence here, Sam.”