Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (34 page)

Sidhe. Home.

As much as it pained me to do it, I turned away from the landscape and back to my friends. “We have to find a way down,” I said. Somehow, I doubted they could run it the way I could. “We need to go home.”

Sidhe. Home.

The land called to me, and I called back, sending thoughts to it the way I'd done for the girls a moment before.

I thought of A-belle, quiet and understated and wickedly wonderful in her own quiet and understated way.

Of Delia and the way her confidence allowed her to tame even the most obnoxious, pompous beast.

And then I thought of Zo, fierce and loyal, half sister, half friend.

I sent these images out to anyone and anything who would listen, completely oblivious to the fact that I may well have been alerting the others of our escape.

Friends,
I explained to the land and the mountain and everything that called me here.
Home.

“Bailey.” Axia spoke my name, but didn't say anything else. I wondered how long she'd been standing behind us and if I'd brought her here with the thoughts and images I'd just broadcast.

“I trusted you, you know,” I told her, not bothering to turn around. “You were supposed to keep them safe. You weren't supposed to bring them here.”

“What must be, must be,” Axia said softly. “You should know that better than anyone.”

There was something in her tone and in her words that was familiar, and I realized that the last time I'd talked to Morgan, she'd told me the same thing. I whirled around to meet Axia's eyes, wondering if it was in any way possible that my trust hadn't been misplaced, that maybe I wasn't the only one Morgan had given cryptic instructions.

“I'm supposed to prepare you,” Axia said. “For the Reckoning.” With those words, she lifted her hand and waved it at me, and my hair began intricately braiding itself.

“That,” Delia said, “is almost as cool as transmogrification.”

“Telekinesis?” Annabelle asked, a scholarly tone creeping into her voice.

Zo had a slightly different reaction. “Leave her alone,” she said, stalking straight up to Axia and placing herself between the two of us. “Don't touch her. Don't wave your hand at her. Don't do whatever it is you're doing to her hair. Leave her alone.”

“She's not hurting her,” a very small voice said from somewhere to my left.

“You!” Annabelle bit out. Apparently, at some point between the time I'd left her and the time she and Zo had been escorted to our mountain prison, she'd met
Lyria, and A-belle hadn't quite forgiven her for the kissing rampage.

“I'm s-s-sorry,” Lyria managed. She blushed, but instead of turning red, her cheeks began to exude light the exact same shade of pinkish white as her hair. Axia reached out to touch her sister, and Lyria managed to banish her Otherworldly blush. “I didn't mean you any harm. I was just supposed to cause a diversion. I … ummmm … I kind of got carried away.”

“Kind of?” Annabelle squeaked.

Lyria looked away. “It was my first kiss too.”

Something passed between the two of them, to the extent that I wondered if Lyria was speaking silently to my friend or if there was something else going on that just didn't include the rest of us.

After a moment, Annabelle nodded. I had no idea what she was nodding to, but I didn't get much of a chance to ponder, because as soon as Axia finished with my hair, Lyria tilted her head to the side, and as her eyes grew very blue, my clothes morphed, jeans and T-shirt melding together, the fabric changing to silk and growing into a simple light blue dress. As I watched, the dress molded itself to my body and intricately stitched patterns appeared on the torso.

“A Reckoning only happens once,” Axia explained, her voice completely devoid of emotion. “The dress is somewhat formal.”

“This Reckoning ain't happening,” Zo said flatly. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the mountain exploded under our feet, sending us soaring
even further upward, until the portion we'd been standing on became the apex.

Suddenly, we weren't alone.

Annabelle looked at her cousin. “I hate to say this, but evidence suggests you're mistaken.”

“Silence.” Eze's tone was pleasant enough, but there was so much power in her voice and in the way she held herself that there was no question in my mind or anyone else's that it was an order.

I glanced around, sure that Drogan was nearby, and he accommodated me by stepping out of the shadows. My glancing, however, told me that he wasn't the only one standing just out of sight. We were surrounded on all sides by Sidhe. Adea and Valgius, the Muses and Eros, James, Kiste, and Cyna. Xane stood next to his father, refusing to meet Delia's accusing glare, and Axia and Lyria stepped away from me to join their mother. Beyond the inner circle, there were dozens, if not hundreds of Sidhe, shining beings whose beauty should have made them stand out even more than they did.

I gazed beyond this peak and my keen Sidhe eyesight showed me others, standing on other mountains, watching from afar, lending their presence to this moment and this event.

“We have gathered. We are here. Tonight, we welcome home a daughter. With this ceremony, we honor her. We honor the blood she carries and the connection it shares with our own. We honor her as a child of this world, ready to become an adult. We come here to offer her our acceptance and to accept hers of our ways.”

I'd expected something that involved a little less honoring and a little more threatening, but still—as far as I'd been able to tell—nothing in Eze's words had been a question or a request. There simply wasn't an option to decline their ways or their honor, to tell Eze that while I'd never forswear this place, this land, these mountains, she could take
her
connection and shove it.

“She is Sidhe.” Drogan spoke the words. Apparently, his soliloquy was significantly shorter than Eze's.

“She is Sidhe.” Every person on the mountain, save for Delia, Annabelle, and Zo, repeated Drogan's words, and the effect was so massive that even though there was no echo, and the words died soon after they were spoken, the timbre and volume of the collective voices of the Sidhe in those short seconds was enough to make me wonder if the sound of it would ever stop ringing in my ears. It was as if my brain could not comprehend the vastness of the sound, so it parsed it in stages, dragging out the noise long after it was gone from the air.

“Bailey, you are welcome at the Seelie Court.” Eze took over speaking again. I opened my mouth to tell her exactly what she could do with her welcome, but no sound came out. I tried again, and she inclined her head slightly, as if to say “nuh-uh-uh,” before continuing with her formal invitation to join her court. “There is a lightness in you, a desire for things to be good and right and pure. You were made to stand in the sun, and if you swear fealty to the Court of Light, you need never fear darkness again.”

“Bailey, you are welcome at the Unseelie Court,”
Drogan said, and as he spoke, the scenery around us flickered and changed, until it appeared as though we were standing in the caverns deep in the Otherworldly earth. “You long for depth and truth and have learned to look past appearances. You have danced in our darkness and seen its beauty. You recognize cruelty and could not live in a world in which it is passed off as right. Swear your fealty to the Court of Darkness, and the secrets of the shadows will be yours.”

As he finished delivering his speech, the world around us righted itself, and we were standing on the mountain again.

Lame,
Zo opined silently.
Seriously, who's writing their dialogue?

I smiled, and Drogan took that as an indication that his words somehow resonated with me. If he'd opened his mind to it at all, he probably could have heard what Zo was silently saying, anyone here probably could have, but to them, my friends were little more than leverage, and they didn't bother opening their minds to the leverage's thoughts.

“Adea. Valgius.” Eze spoke their names, and the two of them stepped forward.

“You are our daughter,” Adea said. “Blood of our blood, heart of our hearts.”

“You are our child,” Valgius continued, his voice oddly stiff, as if these were words he didn't want to be saying in the least. “We welcome you to adulthood and bid you choose according to what your blood and your heart tell you.”

“Let the land counsel you,” Eze said.

“Let the mountains and the depths implore you,” Drogan added.

Let the waters guide you. Let them cleanse you of all influence and free from your mind the solution that you seek.

Morgan. She was here. She was part of this, and nobody knew it but me.

“Bailey of the Sidhe, this is your moment. This is your Reckoning. Choose wisely, child, for when the choice is made, you won't be one any longer, and the words you speak will bind you through eternity.” Eze and Drogan delivered that line together, and then there was silence.

If my words were binding, I had to think of a way to phrase them very, very carefully. I might only get one shot at this, and until I knew what to do, until the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, I wouldn't say anything or choose at all.

As seconds stretched into minutes, the silence became louder, more obtrusive, and even though I concentrated on keeping my mind clear, on following Morgan's dictate and reaching out for the lakes and rivers that ran through this world and into my own, I couldn't ignore the mounting tension all around me.

Finally, Eze inclined her head toward my friends, and instantly, they were surrounded by Sidhe, each of them caught in an uncompromising hold.

Life here can be unpleasant for humans,
Eze said silently, unwilling to speak aloud.
It becomes too much for
them. The colors and sights and sounds of our world beat at their senses until they are dull, and the land will feed off of their life forces until they waste away, losing the will to breathe air whose taste they cannot comprehend.

Mortals cannot resist the thrall of our people.
Drogan added his mind-voice to Eze's.
Our voices will haunt them until they'd gladly claw off their own ears for the honor of hearing us speak again. They'll tear off their eyelids so that they can gaze upon our beauty unfettered by something as human as blinking. They will be bewitched and reduced to puppets, playthings, pets.

They will be used.
Both monarchs spoke at once.

Choose,
Eze told me.
We'll keep them here until you do. They'll fade, slowly at first, but within a year, they won't know or recognize you, and you won't be able to look at them.

Choose,
Drogan said.
Either you leave here tonight or they do, but you cannot have it both ways.

Water,
I thought.
Running water. Blue-green lakes, the river under my feet as I run across it.

Blood.

That was the thought the waters sent me, and the mountains and caverns and land echoed it in my mind.

Blood.
That was my connection to this place. Sidhe blood ran in my veins. Once upon a time, I'd spilled Alecca's, and through that, I'd come to take her place. Tattoos made of Sidhe blood had once given my friends temporary powers, and it was my blood through which my connection to this place ran.

My blood and the waters.

My blood and the land.

My blood and the mountains.

My blood and the depths.

Again and again, that was the answer pounded into my head. Everywhere I turned in the labyrinth of my mind, there it was.

Blood.

My blood was the reason there was an imbalance. What had Annabelle called it? Osmosis? Something about there being one Fate in my world, and two in the Nexus; one Sidhe on Earth and countless in the Other-world. I was half human and half Sidhe, and the only way to close the barrier, to be both at once instead of lingering in between, to be balanced instead of liminal, the only way to keep the balance between the worlds was to even things out.

Blood.

And that's when I knew.

Once I begin to speak, can they interrupt me? I
sent the question to Adea and Valgius, who didn't dare reply in mind-speak, but shook their heads. I'd suspected as much. This was a ceremony, and the Sidhe were all about the ritual.

Choose,
Drogan and Eze urged me, and so I did.

“I will make my choice,” I said. “I will pledge. I will be Reckoned.”

Eze nodded, and the Sidhe guarding my friends stepped back. My word was binding. I'd said I'd make my choice, and I would. I'd said I would pledge, and I would. This was my Reckoning, and I was ready.

“Delia. Annabelle. Zo.” I spoke my friends’ names with the same solemnity with which Eze and Drogan had delivered their speeches. All around me, eyebrows shot up at my words. Clearly, this wasn't what anyone had been expecting.

“You're my friends, my family, the other half of myself. For the past couple of months, I've been wondering what I was going to do without you next year, and I couldn't help but feel that without our friendship, our connection, I didn't know who I was.”

Zo opened her mouth—probably to tell me I was an idiot—but no words came out. They were as silent as I'd been before Eze and Drogan had yielded the floor to me, and it occurred to me that maybe right now I was the only one who actually could speak, King and Queen included.

“Earlier today, I was running through the Other-world, and I can't even describe the feeling. It's everything. You guys and me and this world and every sensation you could possibly imagine, blending together and crossing over to something new. And it occurred to me that I've spent all this time wondering where I belong and where I'm going to belong once we graduate, and I never once realized that it doesn't matter where I am. It doesn't matter where we go to college. It doesn't matter if we're on opposite coasts or in different worlds. You are in me. You are part of me. And my choice here, right now, is to be part of you.”

With those words, I reached for my necklace. For
the first time since Morgan had given it to me, I took it off and slowly, deliberately, I held up the pendant. Its dull, silver gleam wasn't anything compared to the skin of the other Sidhe, but every pair of eyes was locked onto it. I held up my left palm, and with my right hand, I angled the pendant toward it. Annabelle realized what I was doing, and her eyes grew very wide just before I pressed the razor-sharp edge of the pendant into my flesh and forced it to cut mercilessly through the length of my palm. As the razor moved, blue-green blood welled up on my hand.