Owen and I looked at each other. This wasn’t quite the reaction we’d been expecting. I’d thought he’d be lying in wait for us, ready to pounce if we didn’t get to him first. “You mean, in this room or here, in this town?” I asked.
“Here!” he sputtered.
“Well, I live here—I mean, I’m from here and my family is here,” I said, “and he’s here to stop your latest evil scheme. You didn’t know that?”
He reached over and closed his laptop, then pulled a pillow over his papers. “Why would I know that?”
“Because you’re here. Why else would you be here? This isn’t the kind of place people decide to visit on a whim because they want to get away from it all. I mean, what are the odds that you’d show up here, of all places?”
He gathered his wits about him a little more securely, drawing himself to his full height to tower over Owen and crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s none of your business.”
“Actually, considering you’ve been teaching my brother how to do magic, it is.” He looked truly blank, as though he had no idea what I was talking about. “Dean Chandler? The guy who called you in the middle of the night about some wards he ran into? I assume that’s why you’re here.”
The expression on his face was priceless. Dad would say he looked like he’d been pole-axed. He forgot about towering over Owen and sat down on the bed. “That’s your brother?”
“One of them. You didn’t notice that we have the same last name and we’re both from Texas?”
“You’re from Texas?”
I turned to Owen. “I thought that was tattooed on my forehead. Everyone in Manhattan knows I’m from Texas.”
“It’s not really a rare last name, either,” Idris mumbled. “I take it those wards he ran into were your work,” he said to Owen.
“Yes, those were mine, and they did their job of stopping him before he could make a really big mistake. I thought that’s why you were here, because you knew I was here.”
“No, I’m here because there’s no record of a wizard here, and my lessons haven’t gone up to wards yet. I was worried I might have competition or that someone was on to one of my students and might expose him.”
“Wait a second,” I said, “you came all the way here to this town that’s barely on the map and that most people in Texas haven’t even heard of, just because you thought there might be another wizard here who could step in and steal your students or expose them for doing magic?”
He got the kind of expression Dean used to get when he realized he needed to come up with a good explanation for something, fast. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t nearly as smooth as Dean. “Well, um, uh, from the sounds of things, my student was attracting attention, and um, if someone warded the bank, it meant someone with power knew something was going on.” He pulled a pillow into his lap and fiddled with it, then realized he’d removed the covering from his papers and moved it back. “I haven’t taught dueling yet, so I wasn’t sure my student would be able to take care of himself. He might have needed backup, and if a student got exposed, then it would ruin my operation.”
“Your attempt to build a magical army of your own, you mean,” Owen said. He didn’t look like he was enjoying Idris’s discomfort nearly as much as I was. He just looked tired and fed up.
Idris didn’t deny Owen’s assertion. “Yeah, if you want to put it that way. And, um, well, I was kind of looking for an excuse to get away from New York.”
“Evil scheming is very hard work,” I said in mock sympathy. “You need fresh country air to recharge yourself.”
“It is! It was fun at first, but man, these people I’m dealing with are intense. I thought it was great to get the funding, but wow, now they want reports and results, and stuff. It’s like if I don’t have every magical person in the world as customers, I’m doing something wrong, and now they want me to find even more magical people so we can grow the market and outnumber your customer base. Oh yeah, and they use phrases like ‘grow the market’ and ‘customer base,’ which is so not my scene. It was a total buzzkill.”
“That’s what happens when you go into business,” Owen said. “What did you expect?”
Idris acted like he hadn’t heard him. He was on a roll. “And then there’s this crazy broad who keeps meddling in my life. I can’t even look at a woman without her showing up to get in the way. It’s like someone cursed me. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had any action?”
