Shanna Swendson - Don't Hex with Texas

Then one of the students saw Owen and yelled, “Hey, there he is!” Soon, we had all the students who weren’t currently entangled with a magical creature, running from an illusion, or in Sam’s strafing path after us. Owen sent a fireball into the crowd, dispersing them like a bunch of bowling pins hit by a well-placed ball. “Did you novices really think you could take me on?” he shouted. He sounded awfully intimidating, unless you knew he was a total sweetheart who was almost meek about doing magic, like he didn’t want to be noticed.

One of the student wizards sent his own fireball flying back at Owen. This ball was much smaller and dimmer than Owen’s had been, and it flickered in and out. Owen reached up and snagged it like he was catching a pop fly, then he held it hovering above his hand. As he held it, it grew bigger and brighter. Then with a flick of his wrist, he tossed it back at the wizard who’d formed it. “Nice try,”

Owen said as the fireball hit its target and the student fell over. When he hit the ground, a trio of pixies gleefully pounced.

While Owen fought, I looked around for any sign of Idris. I could imagine him being coward enough to make other people fight his battles, but I couldn’t imagine him not being there for the fight at all.

Then again, this was Idris we were talking about. He had the attention span of a gnat and could very well have been sidetracked by something shiny on the way from the courthouse square to the park. If a pretty girl had walked by, we might not see him for hours, so long as she wasn’t repelled by his body spray or by his personality. For all I knew, he was off at the Dairy Queen having a banana split and wouldn’t remember that there was a fight going on until he finished.

I felt a surge of magic coming toward me and whirled to see what it was just as Owen neatly deflected it. He was tiring now, breathing hard, with sweat-dampened hair clinging to his forehead. “Are you okay?” I asked him.

He nodded as he raised his hand and muttered something that sent a student wizard staggering away.

“I’m fine. I don’t think I’m tiring as much as these guys are.”

“Maybe you should have kept one of the necklaces.”

“No!” I was surprised at the vehemence of his response. “Dabbling in that level of darkness isn’t worth it.”

“You gave one to Dean. You weren’t going to risk letting him go over to the dark side, were you?”

“Dean isn’t me.” He pulled me out of the way of an oncoming attacker and then sent that attacker flying to land on his back, where the pixies immediately swarmed him. “The more power you have and the more power you’re able to tap into, the more dangerous dark magic is. It’s practically harmless for Dean. For me, it’s a line I don’t dare cross.”

Owen was quite possibly one of the nicest guys in the known universe, and he wasn’t particularly ambitious about power, so I had a hard time picturing him turning into the magical equivalent of Darth Vader. I had a feeling his foster parents had instilled a healthy fear into him as a preventative measure. Bad magic was dangerous enough that you didn’t want to rely on someone’s discernment, not when that someone was as powerful as Owen was.

Owen tugged at my sleeve. “I want you to walk through the middle of the fight. It’s all magic, so they can’t hurt you. I don’t think they know about immunes, so they won’t understand why they can’t affect you. Play it up. See if you can get Ted to do the same thing. They’ll think you’re the most powerful wizards ever. I want them to feel so outclassed that they’re afraid to come near magic again.”

Although I knew intellectually that all those flying fireballs and influence spells would have no effect on me, that didn’t mean walking out into them was my idea of fun. I took a deep breath, put on a serene expression, and headed into the middle of the action. It took a lot of self-control not to flinch at the things that came flying my way. Instead, I bestowed beatific smiles on the student wizards who waved their hands in my general direction. The expressions on their faces as spells passed harmlessly around me were priceless. I couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at me with that kind of awe.

That gave me the confidence to really play it up. Every so often I held out my own hand, as though I was deliberately deflecting something instead of just being unaffected. Once I even stopped and laid my hand on top of the head of a student who seemed to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me, to no avail. “Give it up,” I said sweetly to him. “Your pitiful magic can’t harm the likes of me.”

He went pale and fell to his knees.

Finally I reached Teddy, who stood near Granny. “What’s with the Our Lady of Perpetual Smugness routine?” he asked me.

“They don’t seem to know about people who are immune to magic, so Owen thought it would freak them out if they couldn’t affect me.”

“It seems to have worked.”

“Want to play?”

“I might as well. I don’t seem to be doing much otherwise. I’ve warned Merlin and Rod about a couple of things, but they’re way ahead of me. Hey, do you think anyone will write stories and songs one day about this epic fight of good against evil?”

“Not unless you feel like doing it. And it’s more like good against annoying, which is less epic.”

I hung out beside Granny while he stepped into the melee, and I soon saw how I must have looked.

He didn’t have quite the experience with magical immunity that I did, so it took him a while to stop flinching when it looked like something might hit him. Soon, though, he caught on to how protected he was, and then he started showing off with theatrical motions to supposedly deflect the magic. All those years as dungeon master had finally paid off for him. I would have bet he wished Dean hadn’t swiped his old Jedi cloak.

Rod and Granny continued to guard the exit. The terrified reactions of student wizards running back to the battle gave me the impression that Rod had cooked up some impressive illusions. Granny mostly swung her cane and shouted, and I was rather glad I couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying. I was sure they were curses of some kind, but whether they were the magical variety wasn’t quite clear in the chaos.

As absolute proof that Idris had left out a few crucial facts about magic, some of the students swarmed around Merlin. Compared to Owen’s spectacular showboating, Merlin didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. If you didn’t know he was the Merlin, you might have mistaken him for an ordinary old man and very likely our side’s weakest link. It would have been one of the dumbest mistakes you ever made.

Four of the student wizards closed in on us. “Hey, Grandpa,” one of them said. “Aren’t you going to join the fight, or are you just gonna stay here with Grandma and watch?”

“You really don’t want him to join in,” I muttered, too low for them to hear.

“I’m quite enjoying it as a spectator,” Merlin said cheerfully. “This is some of the best entertainment I’ve had in months, even better than the last movie I saw about that young Harry Potter.”

“I guess magic is one of those things that you lose with age, huh, Pops?” another one of the guys said.

I shook my head sadly. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought. They were such jerks that they didn’t deserve a proper warning. Merlin waved a careless hand and the whole group immediately turned into little white rabbits. Their noses twitched furiously in what had to be a panic. Granny didn’t help matters by saying, “My gran had an excellent recipe for rabbit stew. I haven’t had it in years.” She hefted her cane as if to club a couple of rabbits. The rabbits hopped away from the scary woman with the big stick, only to run into Owen’s wards, which sent them hopping back to cower and shiver in a circle.