Shanna Swendson - Don't Hex with Texas

“I’m not saying he’s our wizard, but I think he may know who the wizard is and may be in league with him. He might not know that magic is involved. He may just be serving as the fence.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t see it. He can be a jerk, and I could totally see him as a con artist, but I can’t imagine him going that far.”

“So you still think Sherri is our key suspect?”

I sighed. “No, not really, unless her niceness today was all an act and they were doing a good cop/bad cop routine to get us off the trail. But why would they even think we might be on their trail? There’s no reason for them to know that either of us might be investigating magical activity.”

“Not unless they’ve been warned. Idris may have figured out I left New York and must be here.”

“You’re being paranoid. Dean just felt threatened by you. He’s always been the town golden boy, the best-looking guy who could have any girl he wanted. And now he’s having second thoughts about the girl he’s stuck with, people in town have grown immune to the charm and looks so they expect him to actually do something, and then you come along and show him up. You’re better looking than he is—

and don’t go blushing on me because that only makes you cuter. Yeah, believe it or not, you’re hot stuff. Then you go talking about having a doctorate from Yale and a high-powered-sounding job in New York. Sherri was practically drooling all over the table at what a catch you were, and then I went and questioned the goodies he’d gotten her to make her sweet for a little while and ruined that much.”

I sighed. “He had to tear you down to make himself look better.” When he didn’t respond, I added,

“You don’t know him like I do, and like you said, you don’t have any experience with brothers.”

He glanced over at me, looking a little sheepish. “I have Rod.”

“Yeah, and Dean and Rod are practically two peas in a pod, except Rod isn’t allergic to work and never tied himself to any of the bimbos he used to date.”

“Because I wouldn’t let him.”

“Rod feels threatened enough to hide behind an illusion. What do you think he might do if he felt really threatened, if he thought he might lose his standing with someone whose opinion mattered to him?”

“I’m not sure he’d go so far as to be that rude to a guest in his home, but I see your point. I’m sorry.”

“He does sound suspicious, I’ll admit, but I can’t imagine him going that far. If he’s involved at all, he’s just buying stuff cheap from the guy who did steal it, or from someone that guy sold it to. If worse comes to worst, we could try interrogating him about his sources, but I doubt he’d be too cooperative. I guess we’ll find out who it is soon enough, though. Another late night?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“This should be our last one. Our wizard won’t be able to resist hitting the bank. He’ll run into the wards, and then bang, we’ve got our guy. What could possibly go wrong?”

Of 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.”