CHAPTER 8

In Which There Are Five Nineteens

BACK TO SEATTLE.

RYAN. BEGINNING OF FOURTH PERIOD.

Angie McMillan burst out giggling. “Interrobang?” she said to Ryan d’Maughn in between giggles. “We haven’t said that since sixth grade!”

Ryan frowned. “Yeah. I don’t know. It felt right. Seriously though, what the fuck was that?”

Angie shrugged, then hiccuped. “Probably something to do with Megan and the augury, but I don’t know for sure. We’ll have to ask around after class.”

“Ask who now?” Ryan asked, raising one of his expressive, elegant eyebrows.

Angie shrugged again. “I dunno, Megan? Maybe she met Gramyre. The birds?”

“That was an… interesting… result if that’s the case,” Ryan said, and hiccuped. He wrinkled his nose at the hiccup, and said. “If she met Gramyre and caused that, there’s really something going on here.”

“The auguries didn’t tip you off?”

“Well, sure.”

Ryan hiccuped again. Then Angie hiccuped again. They hiccuped for a good chunk of the period. In between the augury and that, Ryan hardly even paid attention to who else was in the class.

MEGAN. BEGINNING OF FOURTH PERIOD.

“Whoa,” Chris said, staring at her wide eyed. His eyes were quite large like that, which didn’t help make them less noticeable. “That was—whoa.” Then he hiccuped.

“I don’t—What was—” Megan said. She tried a third time, and said, “I don’t know what that was, I have no idea. I’m so sorry.”

Despite this, she felt amazing, like she’d slept for 24 hours in the most comfortable bed in the world, and then… drank a luck potion or something. She didn’t even know. Except then she hiccuped, which was annoying.

“I mean, I don’t think you need to apologize,” Chris said. “I don’t see how that was your fault, and that wasn’t a bad whoa.” He regarded her for a long moment. “We should try to find out what happened, though. I mean, I have an idea, but...”

Megan immediately nodded. It wouldn’t do to have him think she’d intentionally enchanted him without consent. Then she processed that last sentence. “R-really? You have an idea? How?” She hiccuped again.

“Well…” Chris said, regarding her thoughtfully. “You know how I said I met your friend Angie? I experienced a corvid augury this morning. Two actually. First it was two magpies, for joy. Then it was three. For a girl.”

“Sacred fucks, really?” Megan exclaimed.

“Yup! And Angie also got auguried at the same time, and seemed to have an idea of what was going on, but she said I needed to talk to her friend, who would be hard to miss, and mention my birthday, which I didn’t even have to shoehorn into our conversation. She also said she had quite the morning and made a joke about me being Fae in a bad disguise.” He hiccuped several times as he spoke.

“Then, I met your boy Evan after second period, and he mentioned having quite a morning, made more or less the same joke about me being Fae in a bad disguise, and mentioned his friend Megan, who he thought would be hard to miss. And he ended up knowing Angie, and said they’d had the same morning.”

He smiled widely. “I figured you might be her when I heard Katie Kay yelling at you about being your best friend and mentioning your name, and saw that hair of yours. Angie said her friend would be hard to miss, and Evan said Megan was hard to miss, and Katie Kay got weird when my birthday came up at the Bakili’s welcoming party. That seemed like too much going on for it all to be a coincidence.” He gestured in the direction they needed to be going.

“Oh fuck, right,” Megan said, moderating her language some as she jolted to a walk, and immediately hiccuped. “Class.” She tried to take in that he’d gotten a corvid augury that was probably about her. And Angie had been there to explain it to him. “That’s wild.”

“Well, class, and I think we should run by the nurse’s office real quick,” he said, falling into pace with her. “See if they can call someone with magical talent in case they can figure out what just happened to us.” Their bell charms jingled as they walked.

Megan stared at him in surprise for a moment, then shook her head and said, “Oh, of course. Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Chris nodded several times. “So… our birthdays. I take it they weren’t a mystic phenomenon before this?”

“Not that I ever knew,” Megan said, with an emphatic shake of her head. “Just silly kid stuff, you know? But it worked out. I decided I needed to be friends with Angie in daycare, the year before preschool started, because she was also born on the nineteenth, and she’s still super important to me.” She paused.

Gods but he was so good looking—it was kinda distracting. So were the hiccups, which they both continued to have. Megan gave a shake of her head. She went on, “Sorry, spaced out a sec,” and here Chris gave her a questioning look, but she just continued, “Then we got real excited about Evan’s birthday when we learned it in kindergarten, because we needed a boy for games, and with Evan it became important for it to be a two month gap. For no reason. In fact, I kinda excluded a kid from our club once in second grade because he was born on September nineteenth and I needed it to be an even month.” She shrugged. “In my defense, Angie and Evan agreed with me. You think this had to do with our birthdays?”

“Well, I mean… it seems like a big coincidence otherwise, right? That I fall into this pattern, and that I got a corvid augury about a girl, and then this… whatever just happened, happened, as soon as we met?” Chris said as they reached the administration building and looked around inside. It appeared much the same as any of the other buildings inside, just with offices with large windows in the doors rather than small classroom windows.

“This way, I think,” Megan said.

Chris nodded, then said, “Anything about your morning you want to talk about? You mentioned it was kind of a shitshow.”

“No,” Megan said immediately. “I’d rather not right now, if it’s all the same.”

“Of course, no worries,” he said with a smile. “You guys can tell me when you’re ready. After school, perhaps?”

Megan blushed even more, and had to look away from his face to keep from exploding or walking into a wall. “Um, if they’re cool with it.”

“Well, we can find out at lunch,” Chris said with ease.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

They turned into the hall with the nurse’s office, and Megan said, “Don’t you want to make sure I haven’t bewitched or hexed you before you make promises like that?”

“Oh, not hexed, surely enchanted at most,” Chris said. “But I don’t really think that’s going to turn out to be the case. Angie didn’t strike me as being untruthful about the auguries, just a touch vague. And I think she was right to be, because I think she was being vague about the birthday thing, which would have legit sounded crazy even in the context of magpie auguries. And you don’t strike me as being less than totally confused about this.”

Megan touched the bell-charm-turned-bell around her neck as they reached the nurse’s office and said, “Absolutely.”

They both hiccuped.

EVAN. LUNCHTIME!

“Evan!”

Evan Cadell turned at the call, away from peering through the massive lunch room for anyone he knew.

“Oh, there you guys are,” he said, as he faced Angie and Ryan coming through the door. “I didn’t know if you were in here already.”

“No,” Angie said. “Tried to ask some birds about, you know, whatever that was, but no dice.”

Evan blinked. “Whatever what was?” He glanced at Ryan, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh,” Angie said.

Ryan grinned. “Did you sneeze when the bells rang at the start of last period? And get the hiccups?”

“What?” Evan said, giving Ryan a baffled look. Then he thought about it for a second. “No? Yes? I think I sneezed, but I did not get the hiccups.”

“Interesting. Something happened. Something mystical. I guess I’m not surprised you didn’t feel it as strongly as us.”

“Pretty sure Megan met Gramyre,” Angie said.

“R-really?” Evan said. “And something literally magical happened?”

“Are you that surprised?” Angie asked, giving him a look. “It was the subject of an augury.”

“Yeah. Um. That makes sense I guess. What the fuck?”

Angie and Ryan both shrugged.

“Anyway, I’ll bet five gobblers Chris shows up to lunch with Megan,” Ryan said.

Evan didn’t know whether he felt entirely thrilled with this development. If true, it felt a little bit like reality was helping Ryan to nag him about asking Chris to hunt. On the other hand, maybe there would actually be a chance of Gramyre taking him out hunting if Megan knew him and there was something magical going on. On the third hand, Evan sneezed. That’s not exactly convincing evidence of magic. Or that Megan had met Gramyre.

But magic was their expertise, not his.

“Well, if so, I’ll bring hunting up when I’m ready, Ryan, and not before,” Evan said. “If you’re right. Don’t rush me into it.”

“Fine,” Ryan said, rolling his eyes. “I’m sure it won’t be a big deal to him, but take all the time you need, you wimp.” Evan flipped him off.

Buzzing emerged from both Evan’s and Ryan’s pockets, and more faintly from Angie’s bag. “Speak of the lady,” Ryan said, sounding pleased with himself, as they pulled out their phones.

Evan stared for a moment at the name and code on his phone’s screen, a feeling almost of warmth spreading in his chest. They’d all gotten phones for the first time after… everything. It was the first text he’d ever gotten from Megan.

i have something to tell u guys, the text said. find a table with 5 or 6 seats

Evan wondered how she managed to get her lack of capitals past autocorrect.

“Here we go,” Ryan said, all but vibrating.

“You don’t know for sure…” Evan said. “There’s a table,” he added. Not that far away, and it bordered the wall the entrance was in, which was great. Windows and nothing else behind them.

Evan began weaving through the cafeteria. It was a huge room, with a floor of lacquered tiles of some sort that absorbed more sound than you’d expect. The walls were lined with many stations, each serving a different kinds of food—despite this, the room wasn’t an olfactory cacophony, as each station had enchantments to keep its scents from spreading. Great lines snaked away from each station, but seemed to move quickly. The hall was filled with an excessive variety of tables and chairs—circular ones, square ones, oval ones, wooden ones, metal ones, plastic ones—as well as occasional geomantically placed wooden pillars providing structural support for the ceiling.

Evan headed toward a fairly heavy, roughly circular wooden table, with six simple chairs of red wood, which took up most of the space between a pillar near the wall and the wall itself. He felt the eyes of those who knew who they were.

They quickly settled in at the table, Ryan sitting with his back to the windows, Evan sitting on Ryan’s left, and Angie on his right, leaving the three of them more or less facing toward both the center of the cafeteria and the three empty seats. “Who’s going to stay while we get food?” Evan asked.

“We need to wait for Megan,” Ryan said.

Evan sighed. “Fine.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out that something was coming—a huge spike in the volume of the murmuring from tables nearest the main entrance drew their attention. “Now we’ll see,” Ryan said, sounding satisfied.

A moment later, Megan appeared out of the small entrance hall, her movements light and graceful and filled with a barely contained energy. She almost seemed to dance as she took a few steps forward and scanned the room.

Megan paused as she looked off to their left, and, following her gaze, Evan saw Lauren and some of her party at a larger rectangular table of some sort of stained and lacquered wood, flanked by similar benches, closer to the center of the room. Lauren and Nisha appeared to be giving the business to Katie Kay, who looked like a drought-stricken tree.

Megan shook her head, and resumed scanning the room, until her eyes landed on the three of them. Her face lit up like a full moon, and she pranced over to them. As she neared them, a faint chiming noise came with her.

“Guys, guys, you’ll never believe what happened!” she gushed as she stopped herself on the back of the chair next to Angie, half leaning over it before she totally halted her momentum, the bell around her neck gently ringing with high, crystalline notes. The murmuring in the room ratcheted up a notch as she joined them.

Evan was struck, watching her spring back upright with her hands on the back of the chair, by how much he’d missed her. It’d been so long, he’d just learned to live with the absence. Like he lived with the absence of his father, of his sister. But unlike them, she was right there, right now. She could be back in their lives, if things went right. Part of him couldn’t believe it. He’d missed her so much. Yet…

“You met Chris Gramyre and something mystical happened,” Angie and Ryan said more or less in unison.

Megan closed her eyes and bonked herself on the head with a fist. She probably didn’t even feel it through her hair. “Oh right. The auguries. But yeah! I did! He wants to hang out with us!”

Resentment washed through Evan. Here she was, just waltzing back into their lives, particularly on such a big day, and even though she’d said she understood if they didn’t want to be friends, she’d still approached the situation as though she expected things to work out. And right now she looked so happy and it wasn’t even about them—it was about some sort of mystic bullshit that happened with pretty boy Gramyre, where Evan sneezed.

Megan continued. “But, um. I think we shouldn’t talk about the… Um. You know.” She eyed Angie nervously, but slid into the chair anyway. “Until we’ve had a chance to—to work things out.”

“Oh, we weren’t going to talk about that now,” Angie said, matter-of-fact. “Not till after school at the earliest. Probably not until after school tomorrow, if I’m honest. I kinda want to just hang out after school today, and grill the fuck out of Chris right now.”

Megan blinked at her. Sounding amazed and delighted, she said, “That’d be awesome. The four, or, maybe, maybe five of us can hang—!”

Just then, the room got a lot louder as Chris Gramyre emerged from the entryway, a passel of people pouring in behind him. He stopped, somehow delicately deflecting a few people, as he started looking around the room. He seemed to spot the four of them almost immediately, and started their way.

He weaved his way through the room with an easy, confident elegance in his every moment. He waved or said something to many of the people he passed by. But that was only a fraction of the people he passed as he made his way through the tables between him and the four of them, and he didn’t take long to reach their table.

They all just kind of watched him as he did so. Something about him drew every eye in the room to him.