rather than running straight to meet with Maisy and Steve. He met them at the school, to avoid the kind of attention that showing up at their houses would bring from their parents. Of course, walking into a school and cornering a couple of the students could have brought its own problems, but Kevin was able to arrange a meeting to talk to the principal about possibly doing more teaching work there as a cover for what he actual y wanted. That meeting actual y went quite wel .
Apparently, the students had loved him, and the principal was wil ing to overlook his sudden disappearance as a result. It was enough to make Kevin wonder what life would have been like had he not been bitten. Would he have just settled into a job like this? Would he have been happy doing it?
Kevin pushed those thoughts from his mind. He needed to find his favorite two geeks. It was a long shot, trying to find out more from them, but with any luck, some nugget of valuable information would have lodged itself in one of their brains, disguised as a TV
or fantasy game reference. At the very least, both Maisy and Steve deserved to know what was going on with Briony. She was their friend too.
Since it was lunch, Kevin found them in the cafeteria, and sat down at their table. Both Steve and Maisy looked up in surprise to see him sitting there with them. Apparently, they hadn’t heard that he was in the school.
Maisy took the lead. “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here? Where’s Briony?”
Kevin reached out, snagging one of her
fries. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
“That sounds ominous,” Steve said.
Kevin shrugged. “I guess it depends on whether you cal disappearing through some sort of gate into another world ominous or not.”
“Another world?” Maisy just stared at him for a second or two, as though waiting for a punch line.
“You’re not joking, are you?”
Kevin shook his head. “I wish I were. Briony went through it after Mrs. Edge, along with a kid who can shift into a dragon.”
“And you just let that happen?” Maisy demanded.
“There was kind of a battle going on at the time,” Kevin pointed out. The excuse didn’t seem to cut much ice with Maisy. “Look, I’m doing my best to get her back.”
“What did the gate look like?” Steve asked.
Apparently, the disappearance of Briony was one thing, but the sudden appearance of gates to other worlds was something else entirely. “Are we talking Stargate here, or windows to another reality, or what?”
“Steve,” Maisy said warningly.
Steve looked across at her. “You can’t tel me that you’re not interested. Gates to other worlds? It sounds like any fantasy gamer’s dream.” He reached out towards Maisy’s fries, but she slapped his hand away. “You let Kevin steal some.”
“Yes, wel , he doesn’t have his own.” Maisy looked thoughtful for a moment. “Al right, I’l admit it.
The whole idea does sound pretty interesting.”
“Like something out of a game,” Steve insisted.
Maisy sighed. “Al right, like something out of a game. Only it isn’t. A game, I mean.”
Kevin nodded. He knew that it was Maisy he had to convince. With Maisy on board, Steve would probably do just about anything. “That’s why I’m here. I just don’t know enough about what’s going on, and I figured that, as regular gamers-”
“As geeks, you mean?” Maisy said.
“-you might at least have a vague idea about how things were supposed to go.”
Steve looked pleased by that, but Maisy looked a little more doubtful.
“I don’t know, Kevin,” she said. “Getting information from games isn’t going to be that accurate, is it? I mean, just look at how different vampires are.”
Kevin nodded. “I know, but there are some similarities, right? It’s al based on the original legends somewhere down the line. And that’s al I need. Any information is better than none right now, believe me.”
Maisy nodded, and ate a mouthful of her lunch.
“I guess so. So what exactly do you want to know?”
“What do you know about the fey?”
Maisy and Steve looked at one another. Maisy gestured with her fork as though trying to give shape to an idea. “That’s… kind of a big area, Kevin. These days, people use the word ‘fey’ to cover al kinds of things. Practical y everything out of Northern European and Celtic mythology, for a start. You’re going to have to narrow things down a little.”
“Wel ,” Kevin said. He wasn’t sure for