Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (31 page)

Please do not say the word
lust
in reference to my cousin,
Zo returned. Out loud, she just repeated herself, her voice going high and squeaky. “Annabelle?”

Annabelle didn't reply. She ripped out her ponytail holder, threw her hair over her shoulder, and moved on to the next shell-shocked boy.

“Dios mío,”
the boy murmured as Annabelle lifted
him from his seat and slammed him against a wall, pressing her lips hard to his.

“My eyes,” Zo said, “they're burning.”

“Don't just stand there,” I told Zo. “Stop her.”

Sidhe.

The feeling of connection and familiarity didn't surprise me. Neither did the way the hairs on my arms were elevated with a charge from the presence of another Sidhe in the room. James might have fooled my senses, but Lyria either wasn't trying to mask herself, or her ability to cast a glamour didn't extend to hiding the mystical quality of her presence.

I grabbed for my necklace, expecting to see blue-green color permeating the air. Instead, all I saw was the reflection of one very angry teacher, who'd finally overcome his initial shock at Annabelle's lusty invasion of his classroom.

“You!” he yelled. “In the hallway! Now!”

Forget finding Lyria,
I thought. I needed to do damage control. Stat.

“You're imagining things,” I told the teacher, willing my words to become truth in his eyes. “There's nothing to see here.”

He blinked several times and then ran a hand through his hair. “Must be imagining things,” he said. “Nothing to see here.”

The students looked at him like he was crazy, and as Annabelle moved on to a boy with a girlfriend in the class, things started to get ugly. I had to extend the mind meld to everyone in the room, save for Annabelle, Zo, and myself.

“Nothing is happening here,” I said. “You won't remember any of this. You should go back to work.”

Soon they were all scribbling on worksheets, and I approached Annabelle.

A-belle,
I called out to her silently, hoping to break through whatever hold Lyria had on her.
It's me. You've got to stop this. You've got to fight it. You don't want to be doing this.

“Oh,” Annabelle said softly, “but she does. People think that just because she's the quiet one, just because she's shy, she doesn't have the same kind of feelings other girls do.”

“That's not true,” I said. “We love Annabelle—I mean, you.”

“But who does Annabelle get to love?” Annabelle asked. “Who does she get to date? Who does she get to kiss? Too shy to ask anyone out. Too quiet to draw attention to herself. She thinks she's not pretty, but she is, and she
loves
doing this.”

With those words, Annabelle sashayed up to the teacher and plunked herself down on his desk. She stretched out her long legs and leaned back on her elbows. “Hellllooooooooo, teacher,” she said.

Having a nubile young girl lying across his desk proved to be too much for the mind meld I had on the teacher. He stared at Annabelle, and, lasciviously, she ran her tongue over her lips.

And Zo thought her eyes were burning before.

Annabelle! Stop it.

“A-belle, I don't care what kind of mojo you're under, that's just wrong.” Zo, finally snapping out of
her stupor, ran over to her cousin and tried to yank her off the desk.

“Nothing to see here,” I said, reinforcing the hold I had on the rest of the class, lest they, like the teacher, break free.

Annabelle shrugged off Zo's grip, and when Zo, forceful and determined, reached for her a second time, Annabelle lashed out with her leg and managed to kick Zo clear across the room.

“Zo!” I couldn't believe Annabelle had just done that. In fact, given the fact that Zo had flown a good six or seven feet through the air, I was beginning to suspect that maybe
Annabelle
hadn't done anything at all, because the last time I checked, none of my friends had superstrength.

Are you okay?
I sent the question to Zo silently as I approached the teacher's desk, carefully keeping myself out of kicking range.

“Nope,” Zo said out loud. “I'm traumatized for life, and also, that hurt. Dang it, A-belle.”

“That's not A-belle,” I said. I'd thought that Lyria was using her abilities as an expath to manipulate Annabelle, but her display of supernatural strength had given me pause. I felt a Sidhe in this room, but I hadn't seen one in my mirror. And hadn't James said that Lyria was a master of the glamour? That meant she could make herself look like anyone at any time. And if that was the case, then maybe shirtless A-belle wasn't actually Annabelle at all.

Maybe it was Lyria. And really, what was the chance
of Annabelle actually wearing a hot pink bra? In my calculations, slim to none.

“Lyria,” I said. “Stop it.”

The Annabelle look-alike paused in her pursuit of the teacher. “But I like being human,” she said with a pout. “It's fun.”

I tried to reconcile the being in front of me with the quiet girl I'd seen in the Otherworld. Lyria was shy, apt to blush, and nearly silent. In many ways, she was A-belle's counterpart in that realm, so maybe it wasn't that surprising that she'd chosen my friend's form to wear in this one.

To confirm my suspicions, I grabbed the mirror charm off my chest and angled it toward “Annabelle's” face, expecting to see Lyria's.

I saw Annabelle, but instead of the sexy pout on her face in the real world, the Annabelle in the mirror looked shell-shocked, mortified, and dazed, all at once. I knew those expressions. They were Annabelle's, the real Annabelle's. But if the mirror showed me Annabelle, then that meant that Lyria wasn't wearing a glamour that made herself look like my friend.

It meant that Lyria was
in
my friend. And that Annabelle was, in fact, wearing a hot pink bra.

Annabelle's reflection disappeared from the mirror, and when I looked up, I realized that she'd bolted from the room.

“What is she, possessed?” Zo grumbled.

I took in her sarcastic words and then sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “She is.”

It was up to us to get Annabelle de-possessed, and quick.

I didn't even bother to tell Zo to follow me as I ran out after Annabelle, knowing that she'd be on my heels. By the time we got to the hallway, Annabelle was nowhere in sight. With our luck, Lyria was probably hooking up with all of the guys in AP calculus as we spoke.

“We need to find her,” I said, “and find a way to kick Lyria out of her body.”

At times like these, I really needed Annabelle to research the proper method for exorcising a Sidhe, but as she was indisposed at the moment, Zo and I were just going to have to do the best we could.

And that's when I remembered something that Annabelle's whacked-out sexcapades had completely made me forget.

Delia.

I'd wondered what the point of making Annabelle go boy crazy was. It wasn't life-threatening, even if it was freaky beyond all words. It didn't match up with the seriously malevolent quality of the attack on Jessica the day before or the things Eze and Drogan had threatened me with in the Otherworld. Something wasn't right here. But what if Lyria possessing Annabelle wasn't the point? What if it was a distraction?

Delia!
I screamed her name with my mind, hoping that my fashion-loving friend would respond. Instead, Zo took in a sharp breath behind me.

“Where's Queenie?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, searching for any hint of Delia, but I came up with a whole lot of nothing. “I don't know.”

“I do.”

James's voice took me by surprise. “I tried to warn you,” he said, “and I tried to stop it, but Xane is stronger than I am, and—”

“Xane?” I interrupted.

“He took her,” James said. “We have to get her back.”

“What do you mean he took her?” Zo demanded.

“He means that Xane takes after his father and that in the Unseelie Court, kidnapping is considered tantamount to wooing.”

I recognized the voice immediately, and it put me on guard.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Axia. Instinctively, I placed myself between the Seelie heir and Zo. Lyria had possessed Annabelle. Xane had pulled a Hades and taken Delia to the underworld. I would die before I'd let Eze's daughter get her hands on Zo.

“I brought her,” James said. “When Xane got Delia, I called Axia for help.”

“Help?” I repeated. “You expect me to believe you're here to help me? This whole thing was probably your mom's master plan!”

“I didn't know,” Axia said. “Not about this. My mother has ruled the Seelie Court for many of your millennia, and her methods can be ruthless.” She paused. “Someday, I will be a different kind of ruler.”

Right now that didn't do me a whole lot of good.

“I know you don't trust us,” James said. “I know you don't trust me, but if you're going to get Delia back and if you don't want Lyria inside of Annabelle's body forever, you're going to need our help.”

“I know my sister,” Axia said. “She doesn't mean to do you harm. This is just very … liberating for her. She's never been in the mortal realm before. She's never been human, and until today … well, she'd never kissed a boy.”

Somehow, I found that one hard to believe.

“So you're saying she turned my cousin into a kissing ho because she's too shy to kiss anybody herself?” Zo was not amused.

“I can stop her,” Axia said. “She'll listen to me.”

“You're not going anywhere near A-belle,” Zo said through gritted teeth. “Not without me.”

“She's right,” James said. “Axia, take Zo with you, and the two of you stop Lyria. Bailey and I will go after Delia and Xane.” James and Axia exchanged a look, and something else passed between them. “Hurry,” James continued. “If Xane makes it back to the Unseelie Court, it's going to take all of us to free her.”

Axia nodded and then turned to Zo, on the verge of issuing some orders herself.

“Why would you help me?” I blurted out.

“Because you're Sidhe,” Axia said. “You're one of us, and where we come from, that's supposed to mean something.”

James didn't respond, but the look on his face gave
me the impression that he had his own answer, one that I couldn't bear to hear.

I didn't want to accept their help. I didn't want to go along with their plan, because for all I knew, it was another trap. The Sidhe were tricksters, masters at manipulating others to get their own way. Still, I didn't have much of a choice. One of my best friends had just been kidnapped to the Otherworld; another one was currently possessed by a horny fairy. Whether I liked it or not, I was officially in over my head, and I needed backup, stat.

It wasn't until after Axia and Zo took off down the hallway that I processed the fact that this plan entailed me being alone with James, but I didn't have the time or the space in my mind to complain about it. This was Delia, and some things were more important than the way my heart wrenched when James took hold of my hands.

“What are you doing?” I asked, jerking them out of his grasp. I didn't trust him. I couldn't, and I didn't want to. For all I knew, this was part of some master plan.

“We need to cross over,” James said. “We can't take the chance that we'll get separated. We don't have much time, and neither one of us is a match for Xane on our own.”

I didn't tell him that I had no idea how one went
about crossing from the mortal realm to the Other-world at will. As a general rule, the only surefire way I knew of to get from one world to another involved losing consciousness.

“Today is the equinox,” James said, in the kind of voice that someone would use to talk a puppy out from underneath a car, “and because of your presence in this world, the barrier is even thinner than it normally would be on such a day. We could use the bridge I showed you to cross over, but on Mabon, we shouldn't have to. Especially you.”

It occurred to me for the first time that the bridge I'd visited with “Alec” on our first and only date was probably the means through which James had traveled between the worlds during his stint as a spy. I hated thinking of what sitting on that bridge had been like, hated wondering how much of what “Alec” had told me was true.

He'd said he had sisters. He hadn't sounded all that happy about it. Was he referring to Kiste and Cyna?

“So do we go to the bridge, or are you going to trust me now?” James asked, holding out his hands.

Trust him? No way. Still, Delia was in trouble, and every second I waited here was a second that Delia was alone with Drogan's son.

“Let's go,” I said. “Here. Now. Whatever. Just tell me what to do.”

James seemed to accept that. Gently, he took my hands. “Think about the Otherworld. Think about the rivers, and how the blood of that place flows in
your veins. Think about the mountains and the caverns, the colors that you could never find on this side. Think about light so bright that it would blind mortal eyes. Think about dark prisms full of colors. Think about the feeling you get in your gut when we're all together.”

His words were soft and rhythmic, and something about the way he strung the sentences together hypnotized me. As he spoke, I felt my anger and my fear melting away until all that was left was my desire to be a part of that world. I wanted to hate feeling this way, but nothing in my mind could overcome the strength of that connection, and as I lost myself in it and in James's melodic voice, I could feel my earthly form blur, and suddenly, we were elsewhere.