Page 41 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Everyone's heart." He nods towards the counter without looking. "The cook's is running fast. The waitress has a murmur, and I don't think anyone's ever told her." He cuts a neat square of pancake and doesn't eat it. "I bussed tables at a place like this the summer before my gift came. I was terrible at it. I dropped a whole tray of mugs on my first morning, and the owner made me sweep it up and then gave me a waffle anyway."

I didn't know that. I realize I don't know anything about Ren before he was fifteen, and I've never thought to ask.

"Then it came, and I couldn't sit in a room full of people without hearing every one of them. I never went back." He finally eats the square of pancake. "I liked that job. I liked being the guy who carried the plates."

"You still carry the plates," I tell him. "You carry everyone's."

He smiles down at his coffee. Then he goes still, and the smile goes with it.

"Don't turn around," he says, very low. "Dowling just sat down at the counter."

I know the name from Brittany: Professor Dowling, Sanguis, the man who can't look at a cut. He taught Ren too.

In the glass of the pie case I can see him, a soft man in a cardigan in the middle of July, unfolding a newspaper with his back to us. As far as he knows, Ren was severed at the gates and went off somewhere to die. My heart starts hammering so hard I'm sure the whole diner can hear it, never mind Ren.

Ren reaches across the table and lays two fingers on the inside of my wrist, over my pulse. His magic is slow out here, a long way off the lines, and I can feel him wait for it. Then it comes, and under his fingers my heart eases down, steady and even, until I can breathe again.

"He's reading the sports page," Ren murmurs. "He won't look up until he's finished his eggs. Eat your pancakes."

So I eat my pancakes while a Nyxhaven professor reads about baseball with his back to me, and Ren keeps his fingers on my wrist the whole time. When Dowling finally pays and the bell over the door jingles behind him, I put my forehead down on the table next to my plate.

"I said no one from Nyxhaven eats out here," Ren says. "I was wrong. I'm sorry."

"You were mostly right."

On the drive home we roll the windows down, and the air smells of cut hay and hot asphalt. I put my feet up on the dashboard of Brittany's car, which she'd kill me for.

"When this is over," I tell him, "you're coming home with me. My dad makes pancakes in the shape of states, and he won't let you eat one until you name the capital."

"I'd fail."

"Ma would feed you anyway. She feeds everyone who fails."

He doesn't say anything for a while. Then he says, "I'd like that," in his quiet voice, and this time I can tell he believes me.

The peaches are Felix's fault.

He takes me out at the end of July, over the north wall in broad daylight with a piece of Callum's shadow tucked into his own shadow in case we need it. Callum calls it reckless. Felix says the odds are wonderful, and when I ask him what they are, he admits he has no idea.

The farm stand is a plywood shed at the end of a gravel drive past the edge of town, with a hand-painted sign that says PEACHES in letters that get smaller towards the end, because whoever painted it ran out of board. A woman in a straw hat runs it from a lawn chair, with a cash box on her knees and a ball game on the radio.

We have almost no money between us, since being expelled doesn't pay. Felix doesn't let that slow him down. He admires her tomatoes. He asks about the score and has strong opinions about the shortstop. He tells her she reminds him of his grandmother, and by the end of the inning she's filling a whole basket with peaches and waving away the crumpled bills he holds out.

"You come back, honey," she tells him. "Bring her with you."

We eat the first ones on a bench behind the shed in the shade of a walnut tree, with the juice running down our wrists, and that's where we are when a black sedan pulls into the drive. The man who gets out is wearing khakis and a polo shirt, but he has a stylus clipped in his shirt pocket like a pen, and he walks like a warden, straight down the middle of the drive.

I stop chewing. Felix doesn't reach for the shadow. He doesn't even look up. He turns a card over on his knee, and over by the sedan the car alarm goes off, whooping.

The warden swears and goes back to stab at his keys. The alarm stops, then starts again. In the end he gives up on the sweet corn and drives off with it still going.

"They can't feel anything we pull up out of the lines," Felix says, and takes another bite of peach. "It's my favorite thing about being dead."

When the peaches are gone, he wipes his hands on his jeans and shuffles. "My grandmother taught me this one when I was fourteen. She was at Nyxhaven in the seventies, and she said every Tumult kid ought to know one trick with a little chaos in it, so they'd remember magic was supposed to be fun." He holds the deck out to me. "Think of a card. Don't tell me."

I think of the jack of diamonds.

He cuts the deck and fans the cards out on the bench between us, and the jack isn't there. He frowns and goes through the fan again, slower.