Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (27 page)

“The power comes through me,” I repeated. “Of course. I'm your connection to the mortal realm. I weave life, it fuels your power. That's how the story goes, isn't it? But I'm not like Alecca. I don't live in the Nexus. I'm human—”

“Part human,” Xane corrected. “And not even that for long.”

Axia gave him a sharp look, and he shut his mouth.

“You guys want me to pledge so that I'll be trapped here. No, not even here—you want me with the Seal, all the time, because the more I'm there, the more power I feed into your land.”

“It's your land, too, Bailey,” Axia said. “There are those of us who believe that the Old Ones were mistaken in separating the Three from the rest of us. You would be welcome in the Otherworld, whenever you wished to come.”

In her own way, she was trying to be nice. Considering her mother was probably the mastermind behind this whole setup, I wasn't sure I could expect much more from her. But James … I'd thought he was my friend. I'd thought he was interested. For a split second, I may have even been ridiculous enough to think on some subconscious level that he was my soul mate.

I was an idiot. Boys like James …
Sidhe
like James weren't interested in half-mortal girls like me.

It didn't matter how right this felt. It didn't matter how beautiful darkness was here, or how much I longed to stand in the Otherworldly light. The running, the connection, the intense sense of belonging and the fact that this place ran in my blood—none of it mattered.

I didn't belong here.

No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Why hadn't I seen that before?

“I won't stay,” I said. “I won't choose. You can't make me.”

“Can't we?”

The voice sounded something like Axia's, but older, cooler, and I didn't allow myself to turn around, because the last thing I wanted to do right now was face down Eze.

“You have some power, Bailey, but here, you are not as powerful as you believe. There are rules, and you will abide by them. This is our land, Drogan's and mine. We rule here, and you will choose.”

I didn't want to listen to her words. Instead, I told myself a story, one that Annabelle had told me. After the Olympians had defeated the Titans, the three brothers had
divided the world between them. Zeus got the heavens. Hades got the underworld. Poseidon got the seas.

Drogan and Eze weren't the only ones who ruled here. I may not have been as powerful as the two of them were, but Morgan was. She could help me. She had to.

“You dare think her name in our presence?” Drogan asked. “She is a traitor to her kind. She betrays us by living among them. She travels freely through their waters and ours as if they were one.”

Clearly, that was the Sidhe equivalent of blasphemy. Or maybe, given what James had told me about the difficulty that most Sidhe had crossing over most of the time, it was something to be coveted.

“She cannot help you now, Bailey,” Eze said, her voice gentle and kind again. I wished it weren't. She was scarier this way. I would have rather she glared at me than smile.

“You think us villains, but we're not, Bailey. We're just trying to save you—-from yourself and from what that world would do to you. You would grow old there. You would die there. And what would happen to the world then? You spin their lives. What will happen when you stop?”

I'd never thought of my own death before, not in any kind of concrete way. Even in the moments when I'd absentmindedly wondered who would come to my funeral, I hadn't thought about what my dying would really mean. I was the Third Fate. What would happen to the world when I died? Even if I lived to be a hundred, eventually I'd die.

Who would be Life then?

The guilt trip hit me like a cement truck, and Drogan, sensing weakness, picked up where his sister had left off. “You see the wisdom in my sister's words, but soon you'll convince yourself that that may be a risk worth taking, that you won't die for years, that perhaps your immortal blood will sustain you or that you may pass it on to the children you will someday bear.”

I had to wonder why he was talking me out of my guilt as easily as Eze had talked me into it.

“But there are other things that staying in the mortal realm would do, Bailey. Things that will happen to your world if you insist on staying there.” Drogan smiled, his white teeth nearly reflective in their brightness. “There is a balance to be maintained. You know better than anyone how delicate that balance can be.”

I'd felt the imbalance in the world's web and I'd traced it back to myself, back to my mixed blood. Suddenly, everything I'd discovered earlier in the night, everything I'd wondered before crossing over, came back to me. There was some magic in this place, some dampening charm that left my mind fuzzy and made it hard for me to concentrate on these thoughts, but looking at Drogan, it became all too clear.

They'd tried to tempt me here.

Eze had added guilt to the mix.

And now we were dealing with blackmail.

“What happened in school today,” I said. “That was you.”

James had told me that crossing over was ordinarily very difficult for Sidhe. There were days when they could
cross, and Morgan obviously didn't have trouble with it, but there were limits, limits that were in place for good reason. Because when something happened to lift the limits and Sidhe could cross over at will, things got messy.

Especially if things getting messy was the point.

“For a short period of time, your own balance—half human, half Sidhe—was enough to set things right,” Eze said, her voice kinder and more horrible than ever. “But that time has passed. Now the greater balance is at stake. There have always been Three, who live in between the worlds. Now there are two in the Otherworld and one in yours.” She paused and then laid it out for me. “As long as you live in the mortal realm, the gateway between realms will remain open.”

I'd thought it myself, before I'd come to the Other-world and forgot why I was here, I was liminal. I was in transition. I was off balance, and that had very real consequences.

“And as long as that gate remains open,” Drogan said delicately, “we have no way of ensuring that others of our kind don't use your world to … play.”

No way of ensuring, my butt. They'd probably
ordered
the others to attack Jessica. That was a demonstration. They were showing me what could happen, what they could do. That was the whole point, wasn't it? They'd found a way to use the imbalance to suit their whims. As long as I lived in the mortal world, they'd be free to mess with it, and until I agreed to stay here, they wouldn't stop.

Maybe they were lying to me, maybe I could call their bluff …

“Bailey.” James whispered my name into the back of my neck. “What happened to that girl today was nothing compared with what it could have been. Drogan, Eze, the others of their generation … they can do much, much worse than any of us could or would.” He swallowed hard. “Some of them would enjoy it.”

This could not be happening.

As I was trying—desperately—to talk myself out of this, the Muses collectively decided that now would be the proper time to start singing again. Maybe they thought that if we could dance, we'd all just get along. But I wasn't going to get pulled into it. Not this time. I wasn't going to be seduced by the music. Or by James. I thought of Alec and tried to remember what a human crush felt like. What it felt like to have feelings for someone real. With what I'd been through tonight, who needed forever?

Pushing the thought out of my mind, I glanced from Lyria to Eros and back again, wondering which one of them was responsible for that.

“Children do love to play,” Eze said fondly. Then she met my gaze with her deadly blue eyes. “Imagine what would happen to your world if the adults began to cross over.”

She wasn't just threatening my school. She was threatening my entire world, and I most definitely and without question did not want to imagine anything.

“We'll expect your decision tomorrow night,” Eze said. “Seelie or Unseelie, the choice is yours.”

I caught the meaning of her words: that was the only choice that was mine. Beyond that, I was trapped.

“You could let the world—”

“—suffer, but that would be—”

“—so wrong.”

Kiste and Cyna appeared on either side of me, doing their creepy talking-in-turns thing. Kiste lightly stroked long fingernails over my skin, and one look at her eyes told me that she'd love nothing more than to use those nails as if they were talons and tear into me.

“Leave her alone,” James said. I tried not to be surprised that he was standing up for me, but I couldn't help myself. “She hasn't done anything wrong yet.”

“Do as he says,” Axia told the vampire twins sharply.

Eze raised a single eyebrow, and Axia met her eyes. “Do you disagree, Mother?”

Eze smiled. “No. Of course not. My daughter and James speak truly. Bailey has done nothing wrong, and you are forbidden from attacking your own kind.”

“She is—”

“—mortal.”

“She can be—”

“—punished.”

Punished.
The same word the synchronized voices in my head had used. Kiste and Cyna were the ones who'd attacked Jessica. It seemed so obvious now. There were two of them. They were Otherworldly Mean Girls. How could I not have figured them for the most likely suspects in a case that involved two sinister voices, threatening me and terrorizing my high school? I felt incredibly stupid. And then I realized that if Kiste and Cyna were the ones who had attacked Jessica, they were also the ones who had warned me to stay away from Alec …

“Now, now, girls,” Drogan said, smiling indulgently
at the girls, who I was absolutely positive would pledge themselves to the dark court when their day of Reckoning came. “Bailey might not remain mortal forever. And if she chooses to remain that way, she
will
be punished.”

Kiste and Cyna preened, and I swallowed hard, wondering what exactly they'd do to me (and, for that matter, why they were so obsessed with keeping me away from Alec).

“We must take our leave of you now.” Adea's voice was quiet but strong, and when I realized she was there, I wondered why she'd stayed silent so long. She was my ancestor, my Otherworldly mother. Why hadn't she stood up for me? Why hadn't she rescued me?

“Very well,” Eze said, and her tone was sharp enough to cut flesh. Adea did not visibly wince, but I could feel her doing so. Valgius laid his hand lightly on hers. In all things, the two of them were united, and he wasn't about to let her suffer by herself.

As the three of us took our leave of this place, I tried to push down the truth that just wouldn't leave me alone as we ran.

Adea and Valgius hadn't protected me because they couldn't. Nobody could. I was on my own, and no matter what I did, this was not going to end well.

When I woke up, it was still pitch black outside. I turned to look at my clock, but then realized I'd scorched it the day before.

“Doesn't matter,” I said softly. No matter what time it was, I wasn't going back to sleep. I needed to think. I needed to plan. I needed to find some way around the trap that had been laid for me. One thing was certain. I couldn't do it alone.

I slipped out of bed and threw on a white T-shirt and jeans. I had much bigger things to concern myself with than fashion. Say, for instance, the utter chaos that would soon engulf the world if I didn't agree to leave it.

And yet even with the threats the Sidhe rulers had made fresh in my mind, I couldn't help the pang of sadness, loneliness, and longing that hit me when I
consciously realized that I wasn't in the Otherworld anymore. Would it always feel like this? Like somebody had suctioned out the vast majority of my heart? Like my body was just a mask I had to wear on this plane because mortal eyes couldn't handle my true form?

Stop it,
I told myself silently.
This is your true form. You're human.

But that was the problem. I wasn't human, and I wasn't Sidhe. I was both of them, and I wasn't either of them. I was completely imbalanced, and if the world became a playground for beings who made Kiste and Cyna look like Girl Scouts, it was going to be my fault.

Trying to banish the thoughts, I pulled my hair into a ponytail and looped it through the tie again, leaving all but a few stray strands in a loose pseudo-bun. Delia would probably have a conniption when she saw it, but I just wanted my hair out of my face and out of my eyes. I didn't want to look at the dual color and think about what it meant.

“Okay,” I said in what I hoped was a firm voice. “No more thinking about what not to think about. I need a plan, I need help, and I know exactly where to go to get both.”