Don't Hex with Texas

That desire grew even stronger when I looked through the windows into the restaurant and saw Sherri and Dean yelling at each other, having yet another one of their very public fights. “Uh-oh,” I said.



“You may have to move into the other guest room tonight, unless Dean doesn’t mind using Frank’s old room.”



“Why?”



“He and his wife are at it again. They do this all the time. They have a big fight, then she kicks him out. A few days later they make up and start all over again. I guess it works for them, but it sounds like hell to me.”



We got home and chatted a little with Mom and Dad, then Owen called it a night. I stayed downstairs to get the interrogation over with. Mom barely waited until he was at the top of the stairs before she started in on me. “Why didn’t you say anything about him?” she demanded.



“Well, the last guy I dated didn’t stick around too long, so I didn’t want to say anything this time before I knew for sure where we stood. His visit here was a complete surprise.” Pretty much all of that was the truth, more or less.



“But to come all this way, just to see you! He must really like you. Or is there something else going on?” She elbowed Dad. “What do you think, Frank?”



Dad moved his attention briefly from the television. “He seems like a nice enough kid. But maybe you should wait awhile before booking the church. Don’t want to get ahead of yourself.” Then he went back to watching people sift through crime scene evidence.



“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.