The Gifted

5 | Jeanine and the Audacity

The world census had percentages for everything—population, ethnicity, gender, genetics, disease, you name it, but they couldn't tell you about the Gifted. How many were there? Few, extremely few, but what percentage? What was the statistic? Those who ran the census never stopped and wondered hey, maybe there's a supernatural population—should we measure it? When it comes to terms of unbelievability, think of it like this: what are the odds you're going to meet someone who looks like you, talks like you, and has the same name as you? Slim—those were the same odds of two or more Gifted, who were rare enough to not have a statistic, meeting for longer than a passing-by moment.

So it was a bit of a miracle when two of them ended up at a 24/7 diner together in the middle of the night.

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Maya realized too late that the bottle she'd grabbed was honey and not maple syrup, and she watched it trickle all over her waffles with a wrinkled nose. It was too late to fix it, so may as well. He had both hands wrapped around a mug of black coffee and was staring out the window, the glass slick and blurry with rain. The cars in the parking lot—there were more of them than there should be at this time and with this weather, in her opinion—were little more than dark, bulky, shapeless figures, and the people resembled wiggling shadows rather than humans. One waiter and one waitress took orders, the lone cook called out completed dishes, and the two of them were completely silent. For all her hoping to finally find him, she'd never really figured out what to say. Shut up, please, seemed kind of rude now, considering he'd almost just died.

Maya put some waffle on her fork and waved it in front of his face. "Do you want any?" she asked. There'd been a lot of blood on the floor of the alley when they left—he really should eat something.

It took him a few seconds to look away from the window and shake his head.

Who drinks coffee at midnight? she thought. How are you going to sleep? Then she remembered that she was willingly eating breakfast food in the middle of the night with a stranger, thousands of miles from home, while a pile of ash that used to be a human was being washed away into the rain gutters. She was no one to judge.

"You came all the way from Colorado," he said finally, swirling the coffee around, "just to see me?"

Maya almost let a yes slip out when it hit her that she'd never told him anything. Even though she'd figured out that he was like her, able to do unnatural things, it still managed to catch her off guard. "You know that because you're like me."

"If by like you, you mean that I can do things most people can't, then yeah. I'm like you."

Maya thought of all those books lining her shelves in her room, the ones about witches and fairies and goddesses. When she'd first discovered her power, she'd honestly thought that an invitation from Hogwarts was on its way to her mailbox. She was a Muggle-born, just like her favorite character Hermione. She moved on to think she was a fairy, and then the daughter of a goddess (pretty please let it be Athena), and then she wondered if she was the only one in the world with this weird, special talent—a freak of nature.