Despite the disruption caused by nine hungry kids descending on a sugar feast, I did try to explain. "Miranda, I appreciate this, but before you agree to babysit, there are a few things you should know."
Miranda didn't comment. She had appropriated the baby from her terrified underling and was spooning applesauce into the child's face at an alarming rate. She let out a small purr of approval when the little girl failed to spit up.
"See, the thing is…" Jesse, who was already on his third cinnamon roll, shot me a sharp look. It clearly said, "Do not screw this up for us." I swallowed, but plowed on nonetheless. "The kids who end up as runaways in our world usually have…well, there are reasons."
"Like with us," she murmured, clearly not listening to me.
"Yes…sort of." The gargoyles had fled Faerie because of prejudice and escalating violence, both of which were certainly familiar to Tami's kids. But out of their usual element, the Fey were likely far less powerful than the Misfits. "Look, if you're going to help me shelter these kids, at least until I can figure something else out, you need to understand—"
I stopped because a sharp toe connected with my shin. I shot Jesse a look, but he was already out of his chair. "I gotta talk to you," he said pointedly.
I rubbed my leg and scowled. "Fine."
We ended up outside, sitting beside the loading ramp used to bring larger items into the kitchen's storerooms. A couple of gargoyles were down below, scattering bread crumbs on the asphalt, peering upward hopefully. "What're they doing?" Jesse asked.
I'd wondered about that, too, until I'd spent a little time in the kitchens. "Let's just say that baked goods are usually okay around here, but eating meat requires a certain sense of adventure."
He nodded, then remembered that he was supposed to be pissed at me. "What's the big deal? Are you trying to ruin this for us?"
It looked like Jesse was a proud graduate of Tami's course on the Best Defense. Unfortunately for him, so was I. "I am trying to be honest with Miranda about what she's letting herself in for. I think that's only fair, don't you?"
He jerked a thumb at the nearest gargoyle, which had a feline head that contrasted oddly with a lumpy, reptilian body. "You think we could hurt them?"
"I think the bunch I used to run with could."
One day in particular came to mind. A couple of drug dealers, who had set up shop in the bottom floor of our building, had decided they could do without additional squatters. They burst in one morning after Tami went to work. I'd been babysitting Lucy, an eleven-year-old empath, and Paolo, a twelve-year-old Were who had been abandoned by his pack. I never knew why, because he hardly spoke the whole time he was with us, which wasn't long. We found his mangled body a couple of weeks later, after he fled our protection in advance of the full moon. The Weres had been smart enough not to come in after him, and waited until he left. The dealers weren't so wise.
Not that they had a chance to find out what even a young Were can do. Lucy had been home with me for a reason. Most of the kids who ended up at Tami's magical halfway house held things together pretty well for a while. They tried to fit in and avoid calling attention to themselves while they figured out how things worked, so they wouldn't screw up and be sent away yet again. But something always set them off sooner or later, usually after they'd been there long enough to start to relax.
When they finally lowered their defenses, it all spilled out: rage at the condition that made them a pariah from birth, pain that the people they loved had turned on them, terror that any minute they'd be caught and dragged back to the special schools that were more like jails. They were supposed to stay there until they were certified safe, as no threat to the magical or non-magical communities. Most would never leave.
Tami had thought that the breakdowns were positive, letting the kids get it out of their systems and start to heal. Only none of them had previously involved an empath. Especially one who could not only read emotions, but could project and magnify them.
The other kids had fled, off to find somewhere, anywhere, else to be until it wore off. Tami had been frantic, needing to go to work as she was virtually our only income, but not daring to leave Lucy alone in that state. I'd volunteered to stay with her because she seemed to find being around me soothing. After a childhood monitoring my emotions at Tony's, I didn't project as much as most people. But that day, it hadn't made a difference.
I'd been watching the door with steadily mounting panic as wave after wave of emotion crashed into me, most of it too close to what I dealt with every day to be easily shrugged off. Paolo, who had stayed behind because he was trying to avoid leaving scent trails for his pack, had been almost literally climbing the walls. And we both had shields.
When they burst in, the dealers ran straight into the wall of pain Lucy had been building all afternoon. The feelings she'd suppressed since her family had dropped her off at her new "school," then driven away and never come back, had all spilled over. And her talent had magnified them a few hundred times. Instead of frightening us or whatever the men had planned, they ended up shooting each other to death in a fit of someone else's rage.
Jesse was watching me narrowly. "You think we're the monsters, don't you?"
I blinked at him. I'd almost forgotten he was there. I didn't let myself think about Tami's too often, and it felt odd to do it now. "I have a broader definition of normal than most people," I finally said. "But you know as well as I do that having you here could cause…some issues."
Jesse stuck his chin out. "Astrid's a null," he said sullenly.
"Astrid?"
"The girl with the kid."
"Ah." So that was why Françoise had gone to the far side of the stage to work her spell. Nulls exerted a dampening field on magic for a space around them. For the stronger, it could be up to a city block in size; for the weaker, it was much smaller. But even a low-level null would have interfered if she was close.
"That's how she got away, after she found out about the kid. They couldn't track her."
I nodded. Nulls weren't automatically incarcerated like some mages with malfunctioning magic, because they weren't considered a threat. But if Astrid had been discovered pregnant, a lot of pressure would have been put on her to terminate it, so as not to pass malfunctioning genes along. No wonder she'd run. And nulls were damn hard to find when they didn't want to be.
Tami was a low-level null herself, which had helped her to keep the Misfits safe and the chaos to a minimum, at least when she was at home. And her abilities ensured that any runaways she took in didn't have to worry about registering on a magical tracking spell. Which made it strange that, after so many years, the mages had caught up with her now.
"Okay. I'm relieved to hear that." And I was. Astrid's presence might help tone things down, but she couldn't be everywhere, and there were seven kids to watch besides the baby. I needed to know what I was taking on. "But we both know that not everyone here is a null."
Jesse kicked concrete with his heel and said nothing. "Jesse."
"I'm a fluke, okay?" he blurted, in the same tone someone might once have used to say "leper."
"That doesn't tell me much." «Fluke» is a catchall term for magical oddities dealing with what humans call luck. Not good luck, not bad luck, just…luck.
A famous example, even among norms, is the odd experience of the French writer Émile Deschamps. In 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fortgibu, at a Paris restaurant. Ten years later, he saw plum pudding on the menu of another establishment and tried to order some, only to have the waiter tell him that the last dish had just been served, to a customer who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Much later, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered plum pudding at a restaurant. He laughingly told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the cycle complete—and a moment later de Fortgibu showed up.