But he didn’t do it. He pushed her hand away, more roughly than he originally meant to, because it was so hard to do it at all. “I’m not married,” he said. “That’s the point.” And then he walked away. Which wasn’t all that easy. He needed to reach a hand inside his crotch to readjust himself, and couldn’t really do that in a crowded corridor.

Instead he ducked into an empty classroom and, not caring whether she followed him and found an empty room, gated himself to the spot on the hill where he and his friends regularly met.

And there they were.

“Well, hello,” said Laurette. “Where were you all day?”

“And what’s her name?” asked Sin.

“Whose name?” asked Xena.

Sin just rolled her eyes, looking at his bulging jeans, and laughed. Xena looked, too, and laughed.

Danny sat down at once. “You guys are twisted,” he said.

“Name,” said Sin. “Say who, or we’ll cut it off.”

“I was walking through the halls at school,” said Danny.

“Always a dangerous place,” said Hal, who clearly had no idea what they were talking about.

“When I ran into Nicki Lieder,” said Danny.

“Apparently very slowly,” said Sin.

“The coach’s daughter?” said Wheeler. “What about her?”

“She’s kind of a nothing person,” said Hal. “She never seems connected to anything.”

“She was at the point of death when she suddenly got better,” said Laurette. “Maybe it takes a while to rejoin the world.”

“She’s all for joining Danny, apparently,” said Sin.

He closed his eyes. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.” And, to forestall Sin’s inevitable lurid assumptions, he told them what had happened. And what it meant. War.

Everyone in the Families understood that Danny had made all the gates that anyone had used; everyone knew that if they offended him, Danny could gate anyone to anywhere.

That had always been true of any war that involved gatemages. “We’re like kickers in football,” Danny said to his friends. “We wear the uniform, but we’re not really part of the team. We play a completely different game.”

“Just beware of roughing the kicker,” said Hal.

“Do you even know what ‘roughing the kicker’ means?” asked Laurette.

“Just because I look like a goal post doesn’t mean I don’t understand the game,” said Hal.

Pat was the one who moved the discussion to a practical level. “How can you even think about high school when you know that the whole world is about to change?”

“I can’t,” said Danny. “But it’s the only thing I can think of to do. If I go to the Family, they’ll be all about how I can move the enemy mages all over the place, which I’m not going to do.”

“Why not?” asked Sin. “I mean, they’re your family.”