Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (23 page)

Delia was so absorbed in her “research” that she didn't even hear me.

After ten more minutes of failing to fall asleep, I sat up. “I hate to say this, guys, but I think I need to go home.”

It hadn't been dark for more than an hour, and I was in a room with my three best friends, all of whom could make it past my mental shields with very little effort. Me falling asleep just wasn't going to happen here, as comfy as Zo's bed was.

“That's probably a good idea,” Annabelle said, handing Zo a stack of things to color code.

“Do you know if our necklaces are silver or white gold?” Delia asked. I was pretty sure the question was aimed at me, but it might have been to the room as a whole.

“No idea,” I said.

“Silver is fairly common in fairy myths,” Annabelle said. “It's thought to have mystical powers that repel members of the Otherworld.” She paused. “Then again, golden objects play significant roles in several Greek and Roman myths, such as those involving Phaëthon and the Argonauts, respectively.”

“Allow me to translate on A-belle's behalf,” Zo volunteered helpfully. “She has no idea.”

A-belle threw another highlighter at Zo, but didn't look up from her work.

“Leaving now,” I told them.

“Bye, Bay!” Delia and Zo chorused, taking me back
to when we were little and saying goodbye that way cracked the two of them up. Annabelle murmured her own goodbye, and then I left. As I walked down the stairs and let myself out Zo's front door, I kind of wished one of them had walked me out, or that they'd seemed sadder to see me go.

They're leaving you in little ways already.

I breathed through the remembered words, willing them to leave me alone. Why did I keep dwelling on this? I knew that somebody was messing with me, knew that I shouldn't take it seriously, but my brain was conspiring against me.

Sidhe. Home.

This memory contrasted sharply with the taunting words I knew would haunt me for weeks. That one hurt. This one felt peaceful. It felt right. The two sides of my mind warred with each other, one telling me that everything I loved on this earth was falling apart, and the other reminding me that there was another world.

A perfect world.

“Argh!” I grunted my frustration as I shut the door behind me, pushing back the desire to slam it. Why was it that every time I felt even the slightest twinge of sadness in this world, the Otherworld was there in my thoughts, waiting with promises of something greater? I loved my life. I didn't want another one.

Not even when I felt like maybe Delia, Annabelle, and Zo meant more to me than I did to any of them.

Not true, not true, not true.
It was my mantra, but
even as I chanted silently, other words played over and over again in my mind.

We've missed you.

This time, I didn't push down the memory, and the words James had spoken to me the night before eased their way into my head.

We've always known you. All Sidhe know all others: We're born with the knowledge of those who came before us and those who will go after. It's obvious when someone is missing, when our world is unwhole.

Maybe it was petty and paranoid and a million other bad things that start with a
p,
but part of me couldn't keep from wondering why it was that Sidhe I'd never even met longed for me, but my three best friends in the world didn't even have the decency to dread life after high school and the end of an era. Of course, if it hadn't been for some of the Sidhe messing with my mind, I might not have felt that way. I knew that.

Or at least, I wanted to know that.

I just kept telling myself that the whole reason for my early bedtime was Otherworldly sinisterness. Anna-belle had said that the otherness of myths was sometimes dark and sometimes twisted, and my serpent-happy “friends” from physics class had proved that. It seemed wrong that I couldn't shake the feeling of belonging that came every time I thought of the Otherworld, even when evidence suggested that maybe it was one place where I shouldn't want to belong.

I opened my own front door and made it halfway to the stairs when my mom poked her head in the
entryway. “How was your day?” She pounced on the opportunity to ask questions.

“It was good,” I said, trying for a relatively benign and noncommittal answer. I didn't want to get caught up in any kind of extended conversation, so I made the executive decision not to tell her about my date with Alec.

“You're home early.” My mom pursed her lips, a domestic detective fishing for a clue. “The Fab Four not hanging out today?”

“No,” I said, “they are. I just wasn't feeling very well.”

I should have had the presence of mind not to utter such a thing in front of my mother, who immediately attempted to gauge my temperature using the back of her hand.

“You don't feel warm,” she said.

Playing sick had never been my strong suit.

“Is something wrong?” my mom asked. “You girls didn't have a fight, did you?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I just need to go lie down.”

And then, I did a horrible thing. I closed my eyes and allowed the heat trapped deep inside of me to trickle out to the rest of my body. Not enough to start a fire—I'd learned that lesson the hard way this morning—but just enough to raise my body temperature a few degrees.

“Are you sure I don't have a fever?” I asked, trying to sound pathetic.

My mom rolled her eyes heavenward, so sure was she of her temperature-reading capabilities, but to
placate me, she placed her hand on my forehead again and frowned.

“You do feel a bit warm,” she said, sounding puzzled. “Why don't you run up and change into your pajamas, and I'll bring you some chicken noodle soup and a Sprite.”

I'd used my powers on my mom. I was officially going to a very bad place. Just not literally, I hoped, or at the very least, not soon.

Despite the nagging guilt at mojoing my mom, I couldn't help but feel a tiny bit proud of my ingenuity when, fifteen minutes later, I finished my soup and closed my eyes. I'd come up with a valid excuse for going to bed when it was barely dark outside, and I'd made it fly with my mom without putting a mind meld on her. That was a definite improvement over my past efforts at parental subterfuge.

Without my friends nearby, I didn't have to worry about others' thoughts in my head. Unfortunately, my own were enough to keep anyone awake at night. My mind bounced back and forth, from the extraordinary to the mundane, from the image of bald Jessica to Alec smiling to Delia presiding over our Geek Watch proceedings with typical flair. Images of my meeting with Mr. McMann mingled with my recollections of the Otherworld landscape. I thought of James, and that made me think of Alec again, and thinking of the two of them made me think of Kane, which made me think of Alexandra Atkins, which led me right back to Jessica, the snakes, and the voices in my head.

I thought of my bleeding finger and of the pendant
I wore around my neck even now. I thought of blue-green color seeping into my world, touching everything and leaving nothing unmarked until every last bit of normality had been sapped from my life. I thought of physics and friction and what it felt like to be caught in the middle of two force vectors, competing with each other for the right to tell you what to do.

I thought of my friends and Drogan and Eze and the way the vampire girls had slid their hands up and down James's body, eyeing me possessively all the while.

And then, for a split second, there was nothing, and in that single moment of peace, my breathing evened out and consciousness ebbed slowly away.

This time, I woke up facedown, my nose smushed up against the Seal in a position that was neither comfortable nor flattering. I pushed myself to a sitting position and pulled my legs in close to my body.

“You're here early,” Adea commented, her tone that very distinct kind of neutral that says “I know you, and I know you're up to something.”

“I have questions. I need answers.” I didn't beat around the bush. “What can you guys tell me about what happened at school today?”

The two of them exchanged a glance, and I didn't like the look of it. At all. They knew something, but they weren't telling. I hated being kept out of the Otherworldly loop.

“Your powers have matured even more than we had realized,” Valgius said. It took me a second to get that he was referring to the giant memory-rewriting fest I'd gone on that afternoon.

“What else can you tell me?” I said. “I don't want to hear about my powers. I want to hear about what happened, who did it, and how.”

“There's nothing we can say that we haven't told you already,” Adea said softly.

“There are limits to what may be said, rules that govern the sway we hold over your choices.”

I hadn't heard Valgius sound that serious since the fight with Alecca.

I
knew
Morgan showing up wasn't a good thing. And if that hadn't tipped me off, the thing with the snakes might have.

“She interferes,” Adea said.

“Who does?” I asked, but I had a pretty good feeling that she was referring to Morgan and not snakes and that she'd somehow read my mind. How had she managed that one? I wondered. It had been a long time since my thoughts were transparent to the other Fates.

“Sometimes you shield your thoughts,” Adea said, answering my unasked question instead of the one I'd voiced. “Sometimes you broadcast them. It's a very human trait, Bailey.”

She reeks of mortali—

I didn't let myself finish that thought. All I reeked of right now was a need for answers. And I was going to get them.

“What does she interfere with?” I asked. I knew instinctively that I shouldn't say Morgan's name in this place. I wasn't sure why, but right now that particular why didn't matter, and for once, I heeded the little red flags in my head and played it cautious.

“She interferes with the Reckoning,” Valgius said.

“What
is
a Reckoning?” I said. “And don't just tell me it's my introduction to the others. I met them last night, and I don't feel Reckoned.”

Adea chose her words carefully. “For most Sidhe, the Reckoning is a time of acceptance; a time when they come before the court they've chosen and pledge their allegiance to our way.”

“It's a transition into adulthood,” Valgius said. “It is a choice.”

“What kind of choice?” I asked suspiciously. Adea and Valgius were silent. “Let me guess: You can't tell me, because there are limits to what you're allowed to say and telling me would break the rules.”

I chose my next question carefully.

“Whose rules are we playing by here?”

“To be Sidhe means to be connected. Even as separated as this place is from Home, we are connected. To the Others. To the land. To the courts.”

Another nonanswer. Yay. I tried to wade my way through to their meaning. “The Others, the land, and the courts.” The first part was simple enough. “The Others” referred to the other Sidhe, a number of whom I'd met the day before and some of whom had made my head their second home. “The land” meant the Otherworld itself, which
pulled at my soul even now, calling me Home. “The courts,” however, was what I zeroed in on.

Seelie and Unseelie.

Light and Dark.

Eze and Drogan. They were too old and too powerful to be the young-sounding ones who'd threatened me that afternoon, but that didn't mean that they weren't behind it.

“There's something going on here,” I said. “And they won't let you tell me what.” I refused to say Eze's or Drogan's name, because I hadn't and couldn't say Morgan's.

“Some of what will happen is their doing,” Adea said, keeping her words as vague as mine had been, “and some of what will happen is not. The Reckoning represents a decision. For most Sidhe, that decision involves the court to which they pledge. Light and dark, male and female, hot and cold: all things in the Otherworld exist in balance, and the Reckoning serves that balance as much as either court.”

I wasn't exactly comforted by the fact that they were throwing around the b-word. Balance (or lack thereof) was what had allowed Alecca to gather enough strength to try to end the world two years ago. Balance was the purpose of the Seal, and once upon a time, Morgan had told me that I was a balance unto myself.

And—though I couldn't remember exactly what they'd said before—I was about ninety percent sure that the spell Adea and Valgius had used to call me to the Seal the day before had somehow involved balance.

Was that what Adea meant when she said that they'd
already told me all that they could? If so, I seriously needed to pay better attention the next time someone used mystical chanting to pull me out of study hall.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

Adea and Valgius looked at each other and then they spoke as one. “Be careful.” Their warning was so soft that I had to strain to make out the words, yet the combined effect of their voices was powerful enough to make me take a step backward.

I had to remind myself that I wasn't afraid of them. The three of us had a bond that went back centuries longer than I'd even been alive. We were the Fates, as connected to one another as birth, life, and death themselves.

And yet … they had secrets, things that they couldn't or wouldn't tell me. Things that I needed to know.

“When are we going?” I asked. I didn't have to specify where.

“Later,” Adea said. “They aren't expecting us until long after your nightfall. You have time, Bailey.”

Time for what?

“Time for answers,” Valgius said. He held out a hand and I took it, allowing him to help me to my feet.

“Time for answers,” I repeated, hoping that I'd find something in the words themselves. No such luck. “And where might those answers be?”