Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (13 page)

Luckily, Delia spoke fluent Bailey and didn't need a translator. “Gotcha.” Without pause, she turned to Annabelle. “Any theories?”

Annabelle, being Annabelle, obliged. “Bailey said it herself: blood green. Our tattoos were made out of Sidhe blood.”

Delia made a face.

“Bailey is part Sidhe, so even though she bleeds red in this world, it makes sense that the mirror might show her blood as a different color. Maybe the mirror shows things the way they really are. Or … ooooohhhhh! Maybe it makes the unseen seen, or reflects intangible mystical properties as easily processed visual stimuli.”

I was overcome with two feelings. The first was double sided: Annabelle was a genius and I was an idiot (why hadn't
any
of those explanations occurred to me?); the second was a pang at the way Annabelle said
Sidhe.
She pronounced it correctly, but the word just didn't sound the same on her lips. Whenever Adea or Valgius or any of the others said it, they said it like it was the single most important word, the defining aspect of their being. It was their everything.

To Annabelle, it was just another word.

“I'll see what I can look up on magicked mirrors,” Annabelle continued, thinking out loud. “There must be some way to distinguish between the different nuances of possibilities here. Anything else you want me to look up?”

Delia opened her mouth.

“Anything else that doesn't involve fashion or boys,” Annabelle clarified. Delia closed her mouth. A-belle's eyes fixed on mine, and I was reminded of the fact that even without powers, Annabelle was mighty perceptive. “Anything about last night?”

I looked at my watch. First period started in less than two minutes, so I didn't have time to go into any details about the night before. I could hoard the memories in my mind for a while longer, probably until lunch, but because this was A-belle and I knew that not only would she find what I asked her to, she'd actually enjoy finding it, I gave her what I could.

“Anything you can get on Greek mythology would be good. I need info on all of the major players.” If I could figure out who James was supposed to be …

“She's thinking about hot fairy guy,” Delia announced.

“Am not.”

“Are too!” All three of them spoke at once.

“He's not hot. He's just … James.”

Zo wrinkled her forehead. “Adea, Valgius, and
James?
”

Zo's words managed to break through a dam in my mind, and more information came pouring out of my mouth as we walked. “Then there were these two girls who were, like, all over him. They kept stroking his arms like this.” I demonstrated on Delia.

“Kinky.”

Zo, Delia, and I turned to stare at A-belle, who looked sufficiently horrified.

“Yesterday it was psychic boobies, and today it's
kinky,” Zo commented. “You're kind of turning into a pervert, A-belle.”

The very idea was so patently ridiculous that I had to bite back a smile, which I only did for A-belle's sake, because her cheeks had turned bright, bright pink the second the word left her mouth.

Giving Zo a look that told her in no uncertain terms to stop teasing her cousin, I continued babbling. There were some things Delia and Zo just couldn't understand, and blushing was one of them. Of the four of us, Annabelle and I were probably the most alike, and babbling was my way of showing Shy Girl solidarity.

“And then there were these two girls named Axia and Lyria, and they're supposedly Artemis and Aphrodite, so anything you can find out about the two of them would be great. And Drogan is Hades, and his son is kind of full of himself, and Eze is totally Zeus.”

Not that Eze could be partially Zeus, but this fact seemed so noteworthy that I had to add the “totally” in there, just for good measure.

“You met Zeus,” Annabelle said, somewhat dazed.

“She has pink hair,” I replied solemnly.

“Pink hair?” Delia seemed to be torn between being horrified and intrigued.

“Zeus is a girl?” Zo was nothing if not skeptical, but Annabelle simply noted this information and tucked it away in her mental filing cabinet for future reference. “I'll see what I can dig up,” she said. “I'll also look up Morgan. She was Poseidon, right?”

I nodded, and thinking of Morgan made me bring
my hand to my necklace, even though I knew just how hazardous for the thumbs that could be.

“Light pink or dark pink hair?” Delia was still fixated on this point.

“Light. It was more white than pink, but sometimes, if light caught it the right way, you could make out the second color.”

“Kind of unicorny?”

Sometimes Delia and I were on the exact same page as well.

“Yeah,” I said, a smile creeping over my lips. “Kind of unicorny.”

“We're going to be late for first period,” Annabelle announced, and we picked up the pace. Some people wore watches. I didn't need one. I had an Annabelle instead. “Anything else I should look into?” she asked me.

I hesitated. Saying the words here seemed almost sacrilegious. I knew before I said it that it would sound wrong on my tongue, the same way that
Sidhe
did on Annabelle's. In the Otherworld, my voice was ancient, but here, I was seventeen, and it sometimes bordered on squeaky.

“The Otherworld,” I said. “That's what Zo and I decided to call the … you know … other world.” I paused, trying to work my way up to telling Annabelle the names Adea had mentioned when we'd first crossed over the night before.

Sidhe. Home.

The words weren't words so much as a memory of a feeling that I couldn't begin to articulate, so instead I
parted with the other, less personal—and less true— names.

“The Otherworld,” I repeated. “Also known as Faerie, Olympus, Avalon, and the Beyond.”

Sidhe. Home.

The feeling receded to the back of my head as I said the other names of the place that after only one night, I held very close to my heart.

A place where I would never be lonely.

A place for running and beauty and tasting clouds on your tongue.

“Faerie, Olympus, Avalon, and the Beyond,” Annabelle repeated. “You know, there are probably at least a dozen other names in cultures across the world that refer to the exact same thing. I'll do some digging online and see what I can pull up.”

A few minutes later, the four of us split up to go to our fourth hours. Delia left me with very firm instructions for mine: “Get a picture of your geek.”

I rolled my eyes, but got the distinct feeling that my friend wouldn't be taking no for an answer.

“And remember, Bay,” Delia said, in the tone of someone imparting great and sought-after wisdom. “It's totally possible to have two crushes at once.”

I slid into my seat in study hall five seconds after the bell rang, but the proctor didn't notice. A certain amount of obliviousness was a necessity for anyone proctoring study hall, given that the job required them to continuously overlook the hordes of students not studying. As I knew from personal experience, this particular teacher didn't even notice when, for example, you passed out on your physics book. A just-barely-tardy wasn't going to rank much higher on the notice meter.

Feeling vaguely wicked for getting away with something that at least two of my teachers considered a cardinal sin, I pulled out one of my textbooks and offered my appreciation to the proctor by at least pretending to study. I flipped through the pages, looking at the pictures, and with each one, I traced my finger
over its surface, thinking how the contrast between photos taken in the seventies and the modern world was in some way similar to the differences between the Other-world and Earth. It wasn't just a difference in color, and it wasn't just a difference in sheer size. It was a difference so great that the two didn't even occupy the same number of spatial dimensions. The real world was 3-D; these pictures were trapped on the two-dimensional page.

If time was the fourth dimension, then the Other-world was 5-D. At least.

After a while, I got bored with the pictures, and I glanced around the room, looking for the mysterious Mr. Talbot-Olsen, he of the mussy hair and physics gallantry. Today, he was sitting beside me instead of behind, which meant that I only appeared mildly (as opposed to massively) sketchy trying to look at him without letting on that I was doing so. Like me, he was pretending to study, and he had a notebook out. I squinted, forgetting about subtlety in favor of potentially parsing out what he was writing. I'm not sure what I expected to see in his notebook, because it wasn't like he was likely to have conveniently spelled out the origin of his knowledge about ancient languages, and I doubted that he was sitting there daydreaming about me and doodling “Mr. Bailey Morgan” in the margins of his notebook.

Despite my best squinting efforts, though, I couldn't make much sense of his scribbles from this distance. His handwriting was pretty much as messy as his
hair. Thinking hair thoughts distracted me for a few seconds because I kind of wondered what it would be like to touch his, and then I thought about running my hands through it, and that led me to thinking about James and the vampiric redheads petting him the night before.

James or my mystery geek? James or Mystery Geek?

Delia had claimed it was possible to have two crushes at once, but I was skeptical. In the years before I'd dated Kane, my devotion to him had been absolute. I hadn't even indulged in celebrity crushes; I was just that focused on my dream boy. So the idea of developing not one but two new crushes was a little unfathom able, especially considering that one of the boys wasn't human and that the other one definitely knew things he shouldn't.

Before I could fall into a black hole of self-conscious daydreams, I snapped myself out of it and tried to approach the situation with a little more objectivity. I needed more information about this boy, and that required getting a better look at his notebook, which required leaning over ever so slightly, which I did, and then it required leaning over just a little bit more …

Whap.

I fell out of my chair.

Oh, the horror. The absolute never-ending horror— but at least it wasn't for nothing, because as I tumbled out of my chair, my head came just close enough to his desk to make out the words written at the top.

Alec Talbot-Olsen.

Okay,
I thought,
I have a name.
It wasn't much. A little Facebook sleuthing probably could have told me the same thing, with less humiliation and fewer bruises, but at least the throbbing in my knee provided me with an ache that wasn't in any way related to Otherworld withdrawal. And my geek had a name. Granted, he was looking at me kind of sideways, and my chances of fulfilling Delia's mandate and stealthily snapping a picture weren't looking too great, but I had bigger things to worry about. Like the fact that every single person in study hall, none of whom had noticed me passing out the day before, were now looking at me like I was the lead freak in a sideshow.

I felt a blush rising in my cheeks and tried to push it down. I couldn't afford to lose control of my emotions; I was already at my “one fire a day” limit. I scrambled to my feet and tried to pretend that the whole falling thing hadn't happened. I tried to think happy thoughts: puppies and kitties and cotton candy and unicorns … but thinking about unicorns made me think about Eze and her eerie-colored hair, and that led me back to the words I'd been trying not to think about for most of the morning.

She reeks of mortality.

I couldn't even survive in the mortal realm without almost concussing myself in a lame attempt to spy on a boy. How could I possibly expect to be a part of things in the Otherworld? It was beautiful. Perfect.

Home.

Okay,
I thought,
what is wrong with me?
I'd just taken a nosedive in front of twenty-five other kids, and all I could think about was my not-a-dream the night before. I'd spent seventeen years in this world and only one night in the Otherworld. How could I miss it when twenty-four hours ago, I hadn't known the first thing about it? My mental image of the world of the Sidhe had always been the Nexus. I'd never understood that compared to the real Otherworld, the Nexus was practically earthly. Human. Mortal.

She reeks of mortality.

As the words entered my mind again, it occurred to me that in my rush out the door that morning, I'd forgotten to put on deodorant. I squeezed my arms tight to my sides in a gesture meant to guard my armpits from the world—or possibly the world from my arm pits. Either way, as I sat there my paranoia escalated until I was absolutely positive that despite my not having so much as broken a sweat, mortality wasn't the only thing I reeked of.

“Are you … I mean … errrr … I guess …” Next to me, Alec tried to put together a coherent sentence. I figured he was probably trying to ask me if I was having some kind of armpit-clenching seizure, but when he finally got the words out, what he said was, “Are you cold?”

“Ummm … yes.” I'd go with that answer over pit paranoia any day.

Alec gave me a small, tentative smile and then he started unzipping his jacket. The zipper got stuck
halfway down, and as he battled with it, the meaning behind his actions finally sank in.