Jax looked startled but covered it by acting as if this were a good thing. “If I’d known that, I would’ve pretended they were supposed to turn out like this.” He put a blackened disk on a bread roll and squirted ketchup and mustard all over it. “Before we eat,” he said, taking a more serious tone, “I have something to tell you. I’m not part of Riley’s clan. I don’t know why that matters, but I don’t want you to think I’m tricking you.”
“It’s okay. I trust you.” Even if Jax didn’t owe any loyalty to the Pendragons, Evangeline knew he didn’t mean her any harm. And speaking of Riley, she might as well ask. “Will he be back soon?” It made her anxious, just thinking he might show up. She didn’t know whether he would order her to get away from Jax and go back inside the house—or pull up a chair and join them.
Or which would be worse.
“Not before midnight,” Jax said, scraping salad onto her plate. “He’s on a date with Deidre. She’s—”
“The black-haired girl with all the guns and the flashy car,” Evangeline guessed.
“Oh, you’ve seen her. She—”
“What are you going to look at with your telescope?” Evangeline interrupted. She didn’t want to hear any more about where Pendragon was or who he was with. She got up and walked over to peer into the lens. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s not focused yet. I’m waiting for it to get darker. The sky is a weird color on Grunsday, and last week I thought the moon and stars looked strange.”
“What’s Grunsday?”
“A stupid name for today.” Jax waved at Evangeline’s plate. “Ta-da!”
Evangeline returned to the table and sat down for her first meal with another human being in five years. The burger turned out to be crusty on the outside and red and juicy on the inside. She devoured the entire thing and asked for another. Jax gaped at her. “You’re kidding.”
“It’s delicious,” Evangeline said with feeling. It was nothing like the leftovers in the back of the refrigerator and the canned goods she scavenged from Mrs. Unger’s cabinets. She never dared take much, and none of it was ever satisfying.
The sky darkened while they ate and talked about neutral things. She asked Jax about school, and he told her all about his classes and his dismal grades. She understood some of what he said, but she and her siblings had never been to a school, and as Jax talked, her attention wandered.
Adelina would be about Jax’s age now. Evangeline had no idea where the Taliesins had hidden her spitfire little sister, but she knew wherever Addie was, she was probably driving her guardians up the wall. Elliot would be twelve, and Evangeline hoped he was still as sweet and funny as he was when he was seven.
When Jax finished telling her about school, she dared to ask him a favor. “The next time you go to the library for Mrs. Unger . . .”
Jax grinned. “You mean for you.”
“Okay, for me. Can you get—” She paused, not wanting to give her thoughts away. “Can you get me books on local history and geography?” Photographs, names of places, a general feel for available means of transportation—that’s what she wanted.
She held her breath, thinking her request practically screamed escape plan, but Jax didn’t seem suspicious. He said, “Whatever you want,” and turned in his seat to look at the moon rising over the housetops. “It looks blurry. I know Grunsday is separated from the rest of time, but there are physical rules here, right?”
Evangeline shrugged. She knew from the books she read that Normals relied on science to tell them how the universe behaved. She just didn’t understand why they failed to notice science didn’t make any sense.
“Why are there no animals on Grunsday?” Jax asked.
“There are animals, just not a lot where we live. Insects and vermin, mostly.”
“You mean like rats?”
“Some rats—and other pests that go where you don’t want them to.” It wasn’t her place to teach him this, but if no one else had, she couldn’t see the harm in it. “The original Eighth-Day Spell included some portion of the animals on the British Isles. They didn’t want the Kin to starve, you see. I suppose descendants of those animals still live there, on the eighth day, but very few of them would’ve come to America by boat, as the Kin did. I wish—”
His eyes searched her face when she stopped talking. “What?”
She didn’t know why she wanted to confess something so personal. Maybe because it gave her a thrill to hand over a tiny piece of herself to someone else. “One of the things I’ve always wanted,” she said, “is to pet a cat. Or a dog. I don’t care which, although I’ve heard that cats purr.” She watched his mouth turn down and his forehead crumple, and she felt very foolish. “I didn’t say that so you’d feel sorry for me.”
“I’m not,” he answered. “I’m trying to think of a way to get you a cat.”
“You can’t.”
“We’ll see.” He stood. “Let’s set up the telescope.”
The telescope required a lot of dial turning and knob twiddling. Evangeline stayed out of his way. She sliced the cheesecake, which was as creamy and sweet as it looked. They ate off paper plates while taking turns viewing the moon through the lens.
“See! I told you,” Jax said excitedly. “Everything’s blurred. It looks like a picture taken from a moving car.”
Evangeline wouldn’t know anything about that, but she nodded as if she understood.
The stars didn’t satisfy Jax either. “There’s something wrong with their light,” he said. “They remind me of bulbs left on over Grunsday. Let’s try looking at a planet.”
Mars was a dot in the sky not very different from the stars, but it greatly agitated Jax. “It’s not red,” he kept saying. “It should be red. Everything in the sky is wrong.”
“So you’re saying even the stars aren’t as beautiful as they’re supposed to be on this day.” Evangeline drew back from the lens to find Jax looking at her with pity again and felt embarrassed for complaining. “Thank you for dinner and for letting me look through your telescope,” she said, trying to regain a little dignity. “I should go back inside.” It was late.
Jax held up a finger. “No, wait. Let me show you what the sky is supposed to look like.” He ran into the house and returned with a large book. “This is my science textbook. There are some pictures of galaxies and nebulas in here.”
They held the book together, leafing through the pages, and because it was dark, Jax grabbed a candle from the table and held it close. Evangeline was amazed by the brilliant colors of what looked like splashes of paint and fire. “Is this what you usually see in your telescope?”
“Well, not my telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope took these.”
She looked up from the book. “There are telescopes in space?”
“Yeah, and probes that take pictures—” The candlelight flared.
“Jax!” she yelled. He’d somehow managed to ignite the pages of his book. They jumped apart, and Jax dropped the book. Unfortunately, he also dropped the candle on top of it.
“Oh, crap!” Jax stomped on the fire with one foot. He smothered the flames, but one of the pages smoldered and smoked, so he grabbed a water glass from the table and poured that over the top, which ended the smoldering but further damaged the book. “My teacher’s going to kill me!” He looked up at her and laughed, apparently unconcerned about his imminent demise, and Evangeline laughed with him.
Until she felt the world lurch in a familiar way.