“Yes! And it just looked down and winked at you.” There was the slightest bit of hysterical edge in his voice.
Owen and I exchanged a look. We held eye contact for a while, having a silent conversation about what we should do next. Then with a deep sigh he said, “Sam, come on down and say hello to one of Katie’s other brothers.” To me he said, “He may be helpful in this.”
Sam raised his wings and let himself glide down to the barn floor in front of Teddy. “Hi, I’m Sam.
Glad to meet you. Your sister’s a great gal.”
Teddy took a step back, squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them, then opened them again and blinked a few times. I waited for him to scream, yell, run away, or otherwise freak out, but he just breathed,
“Whoa!” I should have known that a guy who’d spent his teens playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading fantasy novels would be more fascinated than upset by the revelation that magic might actually exist. After he’d verified and absorbed the fact that Sam was real, he asked, “Okay, so what is really going on here?”
Owen put down the magic booklets and stood up. “You saw Sam here sitting in the rafters, right?”
“Yeah. And I see him now. He talked to me.”
Owen nodded. “Okay.” He picked up a handkerchief, draped it across his left palm, then waved his right hand over it. “Now what do you see?”
“You’ve got a handkerchief draped across your hand.”
“Dean, what do you see?” Owen asked.
“You turned the handkerchief into a dove. That’s so cool! Can you teach me to do that? Maybe I could do magic shows, and then I could use it to make money instead of doing other stuff that you say I shouldn’t.”
Owen glared him into shutting up. Teddy laughed. “Boy, Dean, you’ve got some imagination. It’s just a handkerchief. He didn’t even fold it into a bird, like Katie tried to do with the napkins that one year for Thanksgiving when she read something in a magazine. Though, actually, this probably looks as much like a bird as Katie’s napkins did.”
“Shut up, Teddy,” I warned. “I’ve got stories on you, too.”
What Owen did next shut Teddy up far more effectively. He waved a hand over the handkerchief again, and this time it did turn into a bird. He held the bird for a long moment, giving everyone a chance to see that it really was a bird, and then with a gentle motion he sent it flying out of the barn.
Teddy gaped for a while, then he asked, “How’d you do that? I mean, I know it has something to do with having something up your sleeve, but you aren’t walking around with birds up your sleeve all the time, are you?”
“Teddy, you idiot, it’s magic,” Dean said. “And I guess it doesn’t work on you.” He turned to Owen for verification, “Does it? Was that what that first trick was about, you made it look like you’d changed it into a bird, but it was only an illusion and it didn’t work on him?”
“That does appear to be the case,” Owen said mildly.
I could no longer fight back the snit that had been building up in me since I found out that Dean was a wizard. “I do not believe this!” I shouted, throwing my hands in the air. “Is everyone in my family going to get caught up in this? I was supposed to be getting away from all that stuff when I came back here, and it was here surrounding me all this time. I’ve got one brother taking magical correspondence courses and another brother who’s immune to magic—not to mention Mom being able to see everything when she doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on, and goodness knows what’s up with Granny—and I am sick of trying to explain it all and make it make sense.”
Teddy, ever the peacemaker in the family, stepped toward me warily, like he might approach a mad dog. “Katie, honey, what’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on? And what’s this about magic?”
I turned to Owen with a plea in my eyes I hoped he could read. “You explain it this time. I’ve run out of variations on the ‘magic is real’ speech.” Before he could answer, I grabbed my purse and ran out of the barn to my truck. Owen was probably the best person to explain things to Teddy, anyway. They spoke the same language, and I was sure Teddy would ask for hours’ worth of scientific-style proofs.
By the time I got back, they’d probably be deep in discussions about theory. Owen and Teddy would be in hog heaven, and Dean would be bored out of his skull.
I wasn’t sure why this had me so upset. I liked magic and magical people, and I’d spent most of my life feeling like I was too normal. I just wasn’t quite ready to go all the way over the edge to where I no longer had any grip at all on the nonmagical world. My family was supposed to ground me, not be even weirder than my former working world had been. And, really, couldn’t I manage to be special in just one little way without being overshadowed by my big brothers?