“This all has to do with those strange young men loitering downtown, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “And we’ll be getting rid of them soon enough.”
“Good. They have terrible manners.” She stood and said, “Then I suppose I’ll see you all this evening. You’re outnumbered, so you need me. I’ll have Teddy pick me up. I don’t like to drive after dark. Be sure to eat a good dinner.” And then she was gone before any of us could object.
“Now we see where Katie gets it,” Rod observed dryly.
I whirled on him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, would you let yourself be left out of this?”
“Not on your life.”
“I rest my case. How much help might she be?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t know she was magical until a couple of days ago. I just thought she was crazy.”
“She’s got a pretty vast knowledge of folklore and folk magic,” Owen said. “She’s also got a few good protective charms and healing abilities.” I remembered all the nasty herb teas she’d made me drink when I was sick as a child, and now I knew why her miracle cures never worked on me. She must have figured my immunity out, for she gave up on the teas after a few tries.
“It would seem that our magical assets include myself, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Gwaltney, and now Mrs.
Callahan, as well as Sam,” Merlin said.
“We also have Dean on the inside,” Owen added.
“And then Miss Chandler as an immune.”
“Plus my brother Teddy, who’s also immune.”
Merlin raised an eyebrow and said to Owen, “Now I see what you mean about an interesting family tree. And then we have whatever local creatures deign to show up. That’s against how many of them?”
“About two dozen to start with, but a few of them left this morning,” Dean reported.
“Mr. Idris is the only fully qualified wizard of the lot?” Merlin asked.
“As far as I can tell,” Dean replied. “Not that I’m an expert, but the whole group seems to be students.”
“Ah, then it looks as though the odds are in our favor. Shall we convene at the park half an hour before sunset?”
I finally managed to herd the magical cabal out of my office so I could get some work done and so the work of the store could continue. I couldn’t imagine explaining to my dad why I was holed up in my office with a group of strangers during peak operating hours. Owen let out a huge whoosh of breath when they were all gone. “I guess I’m not fired,” he said.
“Yeah, but the question is, will you have to stay after school when this is over?”
“Oh, this is definitely not the last I’ll hear of this. How much trouble I’m in will depend on how things go tonight.”
When I’d finished my work early that afternoon, I said to Owen, “Ready to go bait the hook?”
He sighed heavily. “We might as well.”
“Having second thoughts?”
“Of course, but I can’t think of anything else that would be as effective. I’m sure I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, but we don’t want you wearing yourself out before tonight. I’m worried about you.”
“You are?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Of course I am. Why do you think I’m here in the first place?”
“Saving me from myself, I know.” He sounded almost dejected.
I patted him on the arm. “I mean that in a good way. Do you think I’d have willingly left New York and come back here for just anyone?” That earned me the slightest hint of a smile and an incredibly cute blush.
I’d parked my truck behind the store in the loading area so it wouldn’t be as visible to anyone driving by. As we pulled out onto the road, Owen said, “Let’s go by the square. See if any of them are there.”
There weren’t nearly as many of the visitors wandering the square this afternoon, just a couple of groups. “Drive slowly by them,” he said. Then he turned his face to the truck’s window so he was fully visible.
One of the men in the group did a double take as I drove past, then he got the attention of the others and pointed. “Speed up now,” Owen directed. I gunned the truck to drive away as the group of wannabe wizards took off running after us. I was almost out of their reach when I reached a stoplight that had just turned red. The tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. It was an intersection with a major highway, so I wasn’t about to try running that light.
The band of wizards had almost reached the truck, and my necklace buzzed to the point that it was painful. “They’re using magic,” I said.
“I know. I’m deflecting it.”
Then they veered off to the side, and I let myself relax. Maybe they’d given up. But then a car roared around the corner of the square, heading toward us.
“Oh great, now they’ve got a car,” I said, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel in worry and impatience. “I can’t run the light.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Well, in about fifteen seconds they’re going to rear-end us unless we find another way to get out of here.”
Just then, the light turned green. A car on the other road screeched to a stop, and the car following rear-ended it. I winced, but this was no time to stop and play good Samaritan. I floored the truck and made the turn onto the main road as fast as I could without losing control, since the old truck didn’t turn on a dime. Then I made the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror. They were still behind us, having squeaked through the light just as it abruptly turned red, skipping the entire yellow stage.
Something told me the light wasn’t exactly on its normal cycle.
My truck could barely get up to highway speed, while they were driving a new sports car. That meant I wasn’t going to be able to outrun them in a typical high-speed car chase. I did, however, have other advantages. I’d grown up in this town and knew its streets like the back of my hand. I turned sharply onto a side street, then made another quick turn. They roared past down the first street, and I turned again, cutting across the neighborhood and back to one of the main cross streets.
“I think someone else is following us,” Owen said in the freakishly calm voice he got in tense situations. I was impressed with the way he didn’t try to apply nonexistent brakes on his side of the cab when I made those fast turns. You’d have thought he was in car chases every day.
“They must have called in backup,” I said, turning sharply onto another side street. And then I had to slam on the brakes as an old lady with a walker made her way slowly across the road to her mailbox.
The bad guys were right behind us and closing in fast.
As soon as the lady was more than halfway across the street, I swerved to the wrong side of the road to go around her and continue down the street. Owen turned in his seat, muttering something in a foreign language, and my necklace nearly jumped off my neck. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“A little diversion,” he said in his calm crisis tone.
I chanced a glance in the rearview mirror and saw the lady still standing at her mailbox. The car following us screeched to a halt, though, and one of the guys jumped out and ran to kneel in front of the car. The lady looked at him for a moment, then shrugged and made her way slowly back across the street. “Let me guess, they think they hit her,” I said.
“Maybe it’ll teach them a lesson about safe driving.”
I turned back onto the main highway, hoping we might be able to get home now without being followed. Unfortunately, one of the pursuing cars turned onto the highway from a different road and resumed the chase. Soon, the other car was right behind them, and then a third car joined in.
“Where’s Burt Reynolds when you need him?” I asked as I tried to think of something else to do. My repertoire of driving tricks was rather limited, especially in the old truck that could barely hit fifty and cornered like the Titanic.
“Rocky and Rollo would really come in handy ri
ght now,” he said, referring to the two crazy gargoyles who sometimes worked as drivers for MSI. They had a tag-team method of driving that could be alarming, especially in Manhattan traffic. “Brake!” he shouted. I laughed, remembering the crazy drive we’d once taken with them and the way they called signals out to each other. “No, I mean it, brake!” he said.
I slammed on the brakes without even looking at what he was talking about, then after we’d come to a stop I saw an enormous old Cadillac whip onto the road. It looked like a ghost vehicle with no one behind the wheel, until I noticed a pair of eyes peering through the steering wheel and a bubble of bluish-white hair sticking up from behind the wheel. “Oh great, we had to run into Mrs. Gray’s weekly grocery trip. They usually send out bulletins to clear the road while she’s on it. She doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of any other cars being on the road.” In spite of the speed at which she pulled out in front of us, she proceeded to drive at about twenty miles an hour, turn signal still blinking furiously. That meant our pursuers were right on us.
My necklace went nuts. If I hadn’t had the steering wheel in a death grip, I’d have pulled it off. I wasn’t sure what they were throwing at us, but I was glad it didn’t work on me. “Are you okay?” I asked Owen, who looked awfully pale.
“I’m fine. It’s easy enough to deflect. It seems like they’re trying to make me get out of the truck and go to them.”
“Too bad I can’t control all the door locks from here so I can keep you in the truck.”
“If I wanted to leave the truck, I’m not sure you’d be able to stop me. But don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”
I whipped a right turn down another side street, made a couple of blocks back the way we’d come, then turned back onto the highway in the opposite direction of the way we’d been going, behind the car that had been following us. I gave a friendly wave to Jason, the local police officer, who passed us going the other direction.
A second or two later, I heard a short burst of siren and looked back to see Jason pulling over the last car from the line of pursuers. “They made a U-turn right in front of a police officer,” Owen said with a grin. “Not very bright.”
While Jason had the one car pulled over, the other two cars made legal moves to get back behind us before I had a chance to turn off again. This town didn’t have nearly enough side streets, and they were spread too far apart.
“Another bright idea might really come in handy about now,” I said through gritted teeth as I tried to evade the rest of the apprentice wizards while sticking to the speed limit in a residential area where kids and dogs were likely to dart out into the street without warning. There was so little traffic on the side streets in our town that you could usually get through a whole game of stickball without interruption, as long as you weren’t playing during what passed for rush hour.
Owen got out his cell phone. “Sam? We could use some assistance. Are you up for scaring some wannabe wizards? Okay, great, and hurry.” He put the phone back into his pocket. “Sam will be here in a moment.”
Something occurred to me. “Where does Sam carry a cell phone?”
“He doesn’t. This isn’t your typical cell phone. It’s also a direct magical communication device.”
“Nifty.”
I was about to ask another question, but something dark swooped down out of the sky, zoomed over us, and then I heard brakes squealing behind us. I looked in the rearview mirror to see the car behind us turning around—in yet another illegal U-turn that, unfortunately, Jason wasn’t there to catch—and driving away rapidly with Sam in pursuit. “Gee, you’d think they’d never seen a gargoyle before,” I joked. “Now we just have one more, and we need to get rid of him before we can go home. We don’t want them finding our secret hideout.”
The final pursuer drove a little more cautiously. My necklace kept humming, telling me that they were still trying to use magic on us. “Do you think they can damage the truck?” I asked. “Was there enough in what you saw of the correspondence course for them to blow out a tire or something like that?”
“Don’t worry, I’m shielding the truck.” He sounded strained, and I glanced over to see that he was even paler and had beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. I didn’t think that was because of my driving.
“Do you have the energy for that?”
“Do we have much choice?”
“You could draw on me again.”
“Not while you’re driving.”
“Oh. Right. Give me a second. I may have an idea.”
I turned back onto the main highway, in the opposite direction from home. We passed the car Jason had pulled over, where he had all the car’s occupants spread-eagled against his police cruiser. As we went by the motel on our way out of the other side of town, I held my breath, hoping no more of the junior wizards noticed and joined in the chase, but nobody seemed to be hanging around the motel.
Now was the time to pray for a stroke of good fortune. If I was in a hurry, I never failed to run into a funeral procession or a slow-moving hay hauler on the two-lane road and either have to pull over for the procession or get stuck driving fifteen miles an hour with hay blowing into my face until I reached a safe passing zone. Now, for a change, I wanted to run into one of those things.
“Oh, glory hallelujah,” I breathed as we passed the small church on the outskirts of town. A funeral procession had formed, and the motorcycle officer escorting them was about to pull onto the highway to stop traffic. He waved me through with a grin, probably recognizing the truck as belonging to Dean. Then he pulled out onto the road and stopped our pursuer while the hearse, a limousine, and a whole line of cars made their slow, stately way onto the highway and to the cemetery a few miles away. “That should hold them a good ten minutes,” I said. It was enough time for me to circle back around the town on farm-to-market roads and get home safely.
Owen slumped in his seat, and my necklace went still. I glanced over at him, and he’d gone a grayish shade of pale. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I will be. It’s draining to sustain that kind of magic around here, even worse than I realized. It’s almost like there’s nothing there at all right now. I can recharge a bit before tonight, and I don’t think we’ll have to worry too much about all our would-be wizards having too much force. If they haven’t learned good control, they’ll be burned out with one or two spells. In fact, the ones who were using magic while following us will probably be useless tonight.”
The next time I glanced over at him, he was sound asleep, his head resting on the window. I tried to be careful about hitting bumps or taking turns too fast the rest of the way home.
I had to wake him up when I parked behind our house. He already looked a little better, but he was still pale. Mom noticed that the second he set foot in the kitchen. “Are you okay?” she asked, taking him by the arm.
“I think his allergies must be acting up,” I said. Fortunately, Mom didn’t question me.
“I’ll make you some soup,” she said. “I may even have some homemade chicken soup from last winter in the freezer. It won’t take too long to heat it up. You just sit right down. Katie, you get him some juice.”
She went off to dig around in the deep freeze in the laundry room, and I poured Owen a tall glass of orange juice. I figured he needed the sugar as much as he needed the vitamins. I noticed Granny’s bottle of potion hidden in the back of the refrigerator, and I added a splash or two of that to the juice.
The earlier dose she must have given him hadn’t killed him yet, and there was always the chance it might help. Soon, he was being stuffed with soup, cheese and crackers, fruit salad, and cake for dessert. By the time he insisted he couldn’t eat another bite, he looked much better. He still appeared tired, but his color was healthier. Mom didn’t argue with him at all when he said he wanted to lie down for a while.
I could have used a nap myself, but I hadn’t drained myself of power and I was afraid to have no one on the lookout
when we had gangs of rogue wizards out hunting for Owen. I shocked Mom by volunteering to do the dishes after lunch. It wasn’t because I was feeling particularly helpful, but rather because the kitchen window gave me a good view of the driveway.
While I washed, Mom fluttered around putting away the banquet’s worth of food she’d taken out in her efforts to feed Owen. “Are you sure he’s okay?” she asked. “Maybe he should see a doctor.”
“He’s fine. I just don’t think he’s sleeping well in a strange place, and then with the allergies on top of that it’s leaving him a little rundown. Not to mention he was overdue for a vacation, so he has a lot of rest to catch up on.”
“Well, I hate for him to get here, and then spend the whole time sick.”
“He hasn’t. He’s just been a little tired a couple of times. You can quit worrying about him.”
“Goodness knows, I have enough to worry about. Everyone’s acting so strange lately, even you. But I suppose love makes you act funny, doesn’t it?” she asked with a wink. “Speaking of which, I really think you ought to put in more effort. He’s a nice boy, and very good-looking. Maybe you should wear more lipstick and do your face up a bit. I have some samples.” When she wasn’t busy meddling in everyone else’s business and running the town through committees, she sold makeup through home parties and personal visits and never stopped trying to do makeovers on me.
“Mom, I’m fine the way I am. He likes the natural look. He’s said he doesn’t like women wearing a lot of makeup.” Well, I was sure he would, if someone asked him.
“Just a little maybe? The spring collection had some nice, natural-looking colors.”
“Mom!” I knew my voice had taken on an annoying teenage whine, so I tried again, this time sounding more like an adult, I hoped. “It’s not me. Really. I think it might scare him if I suddenly looked like a Miss America contestant.”
“Well, suit yourself. But you know, you haven’t had much success before, so it could be time to change your ways.” I couldn’t respond to that without getting angry, so I chose to ignore it. She was still muttering under her breath as she went back to clearing off the kitchen table. The ring of the telephone interrupted her muttering. She answered, then handed me the phone. “It’s Dean. He wants to talk to you. There must be something going on at the store.”
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