Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (19 page)

“Move,” I said, switching tactics and speaking out loud, but the word emerged as a whisper. Beside me, Alec shuddered violently, and I wondered if he felt the wave of power—ancient but adolescent, angry but pure—that surged through the room as Jessica shifted in her chair, inadvertently throwing her head completely into shadow.

Like the evil-girl disciple that she was, Jessica didn't stop slinging cutesy insults until the very end, when without warning, every strand of hair on her head fell to the floor.

That haircut is just adorable … maybe next time you can just shave your head. Believe me, bald is beautiful, at least compared to that.
The taunt Jessica had thrown toward one of the I-Want-To-Be-Mrs.-Him girls from study hall echoed in my ears, as the quiet
shhh-shhh-shhh
of hair hitting the floor, lifeless and wispy, spread through the room. The rest of the class finally noticed what was going on, and then there was chaos.

Oh … my … gosh …

Is she … ?

Thank you, God, for this glorious …

What the … ?

Jessica's shrill scream distracted me from the barrage of my classmates' thoughts long enough that I managed to slam up some hard-core mental barriers. Beside me, Alec had gone completely white. I didn't blame him. Maybe he somehow knew the same thing I did.

Whatever Sidhe were doing this, they weren't done yet. Not by a long shot.

As the tittering and anxious mumbles all around me built to a low roar, the veins on Jessica's bald head began to bulge. They moved erratically back and forth, jumping all over her naked scalp in a rhythm reminiscent of the way evil sometimes moves in scary movies— jagged and staccato, like someone had edited out parts of the path the veins should have taken to get from point A to point B.

Jessica screamed like a banshee and clawed at her own head, French-manicured nails scraping against
skin. The girl next to her chimed in with a few screams of her own, even as she backed frantically away from her so-called friend.

I was petrified by the half-formed idea that Jessica's head might start spinning all the way around. Or worse, explode. Instead, her hair started growing back at high speed, bursting out from her scalp like a living creature. And that's when I realized it was. A living creature. Or, more correctly, creatures, plural.

Have I ever mentioned that I really, really hate snakes?

Apparently, the rest of the class felt the same way, because they didn't bother waiting on the final bell before rushing the door in a mad dash to exit first. The teacher, to his credit, didn't abandon ship with my fellow students. On the other hand, I wasn't about to give him too much credit, given that the second the snakes had appeared he'd fainted dead away.

Unconscious teacher. Panicking classmates running into the hallway. I needed to put an end to this, and I needed to do damage control. Unfortunately, I couldn't move. The snakes, hissing and writhing around Jessica's head, turning her into an unwilling high school Medusa, kept me frozen in place.

You have to do something,
I told myself sternly. I was one hundred percent sure that the snakes weren't earthly in origin. They were Otherworldly, and that made this my problem. Unfortunately, knowing that and attempting to give myself pep talks did absolutely nothing toward freeing up my bound-by-terror
muscles. Knowing that something had to be done, I opted for a course of action that didn't require moving.

Stop this!
I sent the order to the being or beings in the shadows, channeling every ounce of power my voice had carried in the Otherworld into those two words.

The reply came in a set of spine-chilling giggles.

Punish.

Punish.

And then,
Justice.

Justice?I
thought. Seriously? They thought this was justice? I thought of every pointed stare and whispered word and completely unsubtle giggle from girls who laughed at me and not with me, and still I couldn't wrap my mind around it.

Jessica had snakes on her head. Snakes. On her head.

“Make it stop,” Alec whispered beside me. I wanted, more than anything, to comply, even though he seemed to be talking to himself more than to me, his words a plea against the twisted horror of what we were witnessing. I felt for him and wondered what it would be like to watch this from the perspective of someone who couldn't see what I could, someone who saw the outcome but not the shadows. All he could do was watch and whisper. I was the one with powers. I was the one who could do something. I toyed with the idea of using my pyrokinesis to set the snakes on fire, but I wasn't sure how Jessica's head would fare with the flames. Thinking of my alarm clock that morning, I decided not to risk it.

“Stop,” Alec said again, and this time, his whisper seemed to be the magic word. The snakes disappeared. The shadows quivered and became just shadows once more, and the voices in my head returned only long enough to issue one final warning.

Stay away from him, or next time, we'll be punishing you.

The bell did ring then, but I barely heard it over Jessica's continued shrieking. When the snakes disappeared, they'd left her bald again, and I had a feeling she wouldn't stop screaming for a very, very long time.

“Let's get out of here,” Alec said.

I looked back toward Jessica and considered approaching her, trying to comfort her in some way, but decided against it. Instead, I sent a soothing psychic command in her direction.
Stop screaming. You're okay. You won't remember what happened. You feel safe. You're okay.
I repeated those sentiments a few times, and then Jessica stopped screaming, letting me know that my mind-control powers were—if anything—stronger than ever.

At this rate,
I thought,
I'd better hope that they're
really
strong.

Making Jessica forget what happened wasn't enough. Real damage control would involve mind melding everyone in my class—and everyone they'd told about what happened.

“Bailey, let's go,” Alec said again.

I sighed, and started my massive memory-rewriting
attempt with him. I didn't try to hear his thoughts and tried to keep mine out of his head as best I could, but I sent the compulsion to forget toward him. His mind felt cold to my mind's psychic touch, like a wet wall, slippery and slick. For a second, I wondered if my attempts had failed, but then Alec screwed up his forehead and asked, “What's going on? Did the bell ring? Where did everyone else go? And what happened to
him
?”

Following Alec's gaze, I turned toward the teacher, who'd just recovered consciousness. I couldn't help but marvel at the convenient timing of that one—he passed out at the first sign of trouble and woke up just as I started cleaning it up.

“He got sleepy,” I said, answering Alec's question with what was, quite possibly, the worst cover story of all time. Then I went to work on my teacher's memory. Compared to Alec, he was a snap.

“Is class over?” Alec asked again.

I nodded, feeling more than a little guilty for messing with his memory and more than a little headachy, because I really wasn't accustomed to using this particular power to this degree.

“Class is over,” I told Alec, content that at least he, Jessica, and the physics teacher wouldn't remember what had gone on in this classroom. “Let's get out of here.” I really didn't want to be around when Jessica rediscovered that she was bald. I also didn't want Alec to look at Jessica—half because he'd probably give away the game by asking me what had happened to her hair,
and half because I didn't want to have to make up an answer to that question just yet.

Luckily, Alec and I managed to make a quick exit, and he didn't so much as glance at Jessica. When we stepped into the hallway, I half-expected Alec to ask me what had just happened in there, even though he gave every appearance of not having even the smallest clue that anything
had
happened. Some small, niggling part of me just kept whispering that—altered memories aside—maybe I should be the one asking him questions. Looking at Alec, I couldn't believe that he was somehow at the center of anything, but the voices in my head had warned me to stay away from him. He'd known what my tattoo meant. He was important.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and I realized he was shaking, just a little.

I nodded. “I'm fine,” I said. “Are you okay?” I paused, measuring his response as if I expected it to tell me everything I needed to know.

“If you're okay, I'm okay,” he said. “I think” He looked so utterly confused as to why he might not be okay, and whether or not there was a reason why he might feel mildly disturbed that I felt a smidgen of guilt. Playing with people's minds wasn't something I enjoyed doing. My own guilt, along with the hesitance in Alec's voice, and the way he looked at me, made me push down any questions lurking in the corners of my mind about whether or not he knew more than he was letting on. He just wasn't the kind of guy who hid things: not his own nervousness, not that whether or
not I was okay was important to him, not the fact that he'd known what my tattoo meant. His whispers in the room had been just that: whispers. The two of us stood in the hallway, looking at each other, and I felt a second twist of guilt somewhere in my abdomen. After what had just happened in physics class, I had no right to be standing here, thinking about how he was kind of adorable, when something Otherworldly had just attacked one of the most popular girls in my grade in a very personal and sinister way.

“OMG. How cute are the two of you? I swear!”

Either I was in a complete daze or Delia was having a particularly good day when it came to stealth, because I didn't see her coming down the hallway until she was standing right next to me, sounding way perkier than usual. I recognized her tone of voice: it was the one she used for flirting with boys … or flirting with boys on my behalf.

“Hey, Delia,” I said, prepping myself to tell her that now might not be the best time to move on her Geek Watch plan. After what I'd seen, after what had happened to Jessica …

“So, Alec, are you free right now?” Delia didn't give me a chance to call the plan to a halt. She just proceeded, like the
Titanic
barreling toward an iceberg.

“Free?” Alec repeated. “Right now?”

I wondered what he was thinking, but held back.
Thou shalt not mind-read thy love interest
was the most important psychic commandment I'd come up with in the past few years, and I wasn't going to break it,
especially not with Alec, who was shy enough that poking around in his mind would feel like an incredible violation of his privacy. I'd messed with his head enough as it was—I wasn't going to make things worse by probing his thoughts for a clue about his feelings toward me, even though I really wanted to.

“You
are
free right now?” Delia asked, as if Alec had responded in the affirmative to her first question. “Good.” She clapped her hands together in a display of unholy glee. “Bailey's free right now too.” She shoved the two of us together. “You two crazy kids have fun.”

Delia,
I said psychically,
you don't understand. Something just happened. I have to take care of it.

My friend's response was immediate.
Jessica Moore. Bald. Snakes on her head. I got the memo.

I actually felt my jaw drop a little. In the past few minutes, the hallway around us had gone from eerily quiet in the wake of the snake incident to absolutely vibrating with varying degrees of hysteria. There was crying. Yelling. Lots of talking. I'd assumed that Delia hadn't heard about the snake incident— partly because it had just happened, but also because she wasn't reacting in the way I would have expected her to.

You know?
I asked.

Natch,
she replied.
I mean, hello, gossip mill, founding member, right here.

I tried to reconcile myself to the fact that Delia knew about the snakes but wasn't freaked out in the least. In a sick way, it made sense. Everyone had their
priorities. Snakes and the supernatural weren't Delia's. Right now, boys and my love life were.

Look, Bay, Annabelle's already on her way to Zo's house to work on figuring out who was behind the hair thing, and I'll put together a ‘bald is beautiful’ trend book or something tonight. We're all doing our part here. Yours is the cute boy—he might have information, remember?.

Bits and pieces of other people's thoughts made their way into my head with Delia's mental words, and I reminded myself that my part in all of this wasn't just pumping “the cute boy” for information. The snake news was spreading like wildfire, and I had to get a handle on things before it was too late—if it wasn't already.

Ignoring Delia and Alec, I took one deep breath and opened my mind to everything around me. I concentrated on a single image, a single thought—the snakes—and let the thoughts that matched up to that image come to me. It was everywhere. Everyone was thinking about it, everyone was talking about it.

Going into an altered state of being that resembled Fate Bailey so much it disturbed me, I pulled that thought toward me, applying so much mental pressure that I yanked it out of everyone else's mind and into my own. I let my mind venture farther and farther—outside of the school, miles away, searching for more, pulling thought after thought out of foreign minds and into my own. For one terrifying moment, all I could see or think about was snakes, but then, like the person I was in the
Nexus weaving life, I pulled the thought apart, into tiny, threadlike pieces, and it crumpled to dust.

All around me, the hallway went from an atypical, supercharged buzzing to a rather confused calm, and then the buzzing started up again, but this time it was regular gossip feeding the rumor mill.

“You okay?” Alec asked me. “You look kind of pale. Not that you don't look nice pale. I mean … not that I'm trying to say you look nice, but you do, and …”

Ah-dorable,
Delia told me silently.
Also, is it me or did everyone just stop talking about the snake thing?.