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Teddy might have seen everything, but he didn’t know Idris and wouldn’t know that Owen might be in trouble.

I was about to yell for help when someone else called out, “Yoo hoo! There you are!” It was an all-too-familiar voice. I cringed reflexively when I turned to see a fairy godmother hovering nearby and shaking her wand at Idris. “You didn’t think you could escape from me, did you?” she scolded. It was Ethelinda, who’d nearly driven me batty while she tried to be my fairy godmother. Now she was working on behalf of Idris’s sometime girlfriend, but it didn’t look like she’d changed much since I’d last seen her. She’d made an attempt at Western wear, with a Dale Evans outfit on top of layers of other mismatched clothes and a tattered cowboy hat on her head with her tarnished tiara clinging precariously to it.Advertisement

Idris reacted more violently to seeing her than he had to any magic Owen had thrown at him. “You!

What are you doing here?” he shouted, backing away from her with a look of panic in his eyes.

She tittered at him. “Why, keeping an eye on you, of course. A business trip is no excuse for being unfaithful to your one true love.”

“I wasn’t being unfaithful! I was just talking.” His voice went up in pitch, practically whining.

She shook her head sadly. “That’s how it usually starts. Just talking.” Then she noticed me. “Katie!

And Owen, too. It’s good to see you’re still together. That was one of my better triumphs.” She waved her wand in the general direction of our joined hands.

She’d actually done us some good by coming on the scene, for a change. Idris might have been veiling us from our reinforcements, but he wasn’t able to hide her, and Merlin, Granny, and Teddy all joined us to see what was going on. Rod stayed by the park entrance, watching the prisoners. The conquered students who’d managed to pick themselves up from the ground but who hadn’t yet been officially captured also came toward us, staggering and reeling from exhaustion even as they were drawn by curiosity. Dean was among them, looking a little fresher but acting as tired as the others.

The ground swarmed with pixies, who came to check Ethelinda out and stayed to torment Idris. They untied his shoes and stuffed pebbles in them, then tugged down his socks and stretched out the elastic so they sagged around his ankles. He danced frantically, trying to get rid of them. Acorns and twigs came flying from the trees behind us, hitting Idris with frightening accuracy. Owen released my hand and nudged me away, freeing both hands to get back into the fight while Idris was distracted.

Our human allies reached us then. Teddy couldn’t do much, and Granny just waved her cane and her sprite jar, but Merlin knew what he was doing. Idris did a fairly impressive imitation of a whirling dervish as he spun and leapt, trying to counter spells coming at him from both Owen and Merlin at once, along with all the little threats from the pixies at his feet. His necklace may have amplified his power, but it didn’t give him the ability to handle multiple threats at the same time.

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I was engrossed in watching the fight when someone grabbed me. “Oh, come on,” I started to protest before my captor put a hand over my mouth. I tried biting, but couldn’t catch anything other than my own lip with my teeth. Then I tried stepping on his feet, but that wasn’t very effective when I was wearing sneakers.

“Back down, or she gets it!” my captor called out. I couldn’t see who it was, but guessed it had to be one of Idris’s students, and probably one of the honor-roll members at that, since he seemed to have figured out that magic didn’t work on me. Instead, he used brute force. The feeling of something cold and sharp against my neck told me he was using normal weapons, too. I quit struggling so I didn’t accidentally slit my own throat.

The fight came to a screeching halt. The look of devastation on Owen’s face when he saw my predicament brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d put him in this position again.

Ethelinda was the first person to react audibly. “Oh my! I can’t bear to look!” she cried out before vanishing. Gee, thanks a lot, I thought. Some good she was.

Idris laughed, sounding almost hysterical. “Wow, you’re in a spot, aren’t you?” he taunted Owen. “If you want to catch me, it means watching your girlfriend die a horrible death at the hands of…who are you, again?” he asked the student holding me.

“McCreary, sir,” my captor said.

“McCreary. Good man. You pass.” Idris returned his attention to Owen. “If you make any kind of move toward capturing me, the girl gets it—” he mimed a slice across the throat “—from McCreary here. But if you save your girlfriend, you have to let me go, and you’ll know you’ve lost again.” pqdm.com