Page 10 of More Than Meets the Eye

“Hey, old man. Did they even have electric grills back in the 1700s? Or did you just roast your dinosaurs over an open fire?”

“Smart alec,” he said, his green eyes, so like my own, sparkling. “Mostly, we just burned pieces of the ark when Noah wasn’t looking.”

We were happily trading insults and discussing house maintenance— we needed a new hot water heater, stuff like that—when Mike, Ruby, and Shelley showed up ten minutes later.

Tess’s Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike raised her after her mom died and her dad ran off, so they were practically her parents. Ruby had always been kind and welcoming to me; Mike made a lot of “jokes” about tiger-skin rugs.

I hoped they were jokes.

We’d started getting along better for a while, taken a few steps back when Tess and I started living together, and were back on good footing now. He’d told me once that he’d never think anybody was good enough for Tess, but I came close.

It was high praise from a man I respected and admired as much as I had the uncle who’d raised me. Hopefully, this conversation wouldn’t set things back again.

I caught myself toying with the sapphire again and stopped. I was going to lose it if I didn’t stop fussing with it.

Ruby and Mike carried dishes inside, and Shelley skipped to us, her pug puppy Pickles in her arms.

“I taught her another trick, Grandpa Jed!”

Shelley was a recent addition to the family, after she’d been through a pretty rough and nearly fatal time after her mom died. She was only recently coming completely out of the sadness.

Pickles helped. I liked to think I did, too.

But now she had the normal ebullience of a ten-year-old girl, and she only spoke in exclamation points.

“Show us,” Jed said, after leaning down to get a hug. My great-great-three-hundred-year-great grandfather had been so happy to have a family to love again. We hadn’t talked through all the details, but I knew he’d lost loved ones to illnesses and injuries back in his day, so I was glad Shelley and Tess embraced him as a new grandfather with open arms.

Well, Shelley gave him the stink eye for a while after the Leroy situation, but we were well past that now.

Shelley pointed at Pickles, who instantly dropped onto her wiggly butt in a sit.

“Hover dog,” Shelley shouted, and Pickles leaped up into the air and floated in a circle around us, barking wildly the whole time.

I blinked.

Nope. Not a hallucination brought on by a cookie overdose. The pug was floatingthrough the airaround the three of us.

“Shelley?” Jed crouched, arms out and ready to catch the little dog. “What’s happening?”

“Pickles and me just watchedBack to the Future!”

I laughed. “That’s a great movie. Have you seen it, Jed?”

He shook his head, still mystified and alert for falling pug.

“It’s a classic. A kid goes back in time to save his parents from something. I don’t remember what. I fell asleep when Tess and I watched it. But the kid gets to ride a hoverboard in one of them.”

“One of them?”

“Yeah, he goes into the past and then the future, and I don’t know. It was just fun. And Tess wanted a hoverboard.” I remember trying to find a hoverboard for her with no luck. Even if I’d been able to find one, Tess had a minor tendency toward klutziness, so maybe not the best idea.

“But how are you making the dog fly?” Jed’s confused expression cleared when he looked at Shelley again. “Oh. Right.”

Shelley, the daughter of a witch, had pretty strong magical powers of her own. In fact, a friend of mine had told us we needed to get her some training soon, before she hurt herself or others.

Tess and I needed to get on with that.

Pickles, looking a little dizzy, barked again, and Shelley gently lowered her to the ground, where the pup wobbled for a few steps and then raced off to water the flowers by the porch.

---