Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (6 page)

“Satin scoop-neck top, preferably in blue,” I heard her whisper. “Pink Juicy sweatpants. Tiffany earrings.”

“What are you doing?” I asked her, stopping at a
red light that I would have run before I'd remembered my meeting.

“Nothing,” Delia said completely unconvincingly, and then she mumbled something else under her breath.

“What did you just say?” Zo asked.

Delia sighed.
“BabyblueLouisVuittonearmuffs,”
she said, rushing the words out so fast they blurred together.

“What?” Annabelle, Zo, and I repeated.

“I said ‘Baby blue Louis Vuitton earmuffs,’ ” Delia repeated, and I noticed that she was holding a straw wrapper in one hand and waving her other hand above it.

“Hate to break it to you, Dee,” Zo said, “but those aren't earmuffs.”

“Well, they aren't earmuffs
yet”
Delia admitted, “but you never know. I mean, they could be, if …”

“If these necklaces gave you guys back your powers,” I said, finally understanding why Delia had suddenly developed a tic that involved talking to the trash in my car. Sophomore year, her tattoo had given her the power to turn one object into another, just by concentrating on what she wanted it to be. Budding fashionista that she was, those three days had quite possibly been the best (and best-dressed) of Delia's life so far.

“It's not working,” Zo said. “Is it?”

The edges of my lips turned up at the wary tone in her voice. Transmogrification had allowed Delia to perform makeovers of fantastic proportions without so much as breaking a sweat. From Zo's perspective (and
mine, for that matter), this wasn't necessarily a good thing.

“It's not working,” Delia confirmed with a melodramatic sigh. “But hey, a girl can dream.”

“Nightmare,” Zo coughed into her hands.

“Fashion disaster,” Delia coughed back.

“And proud of it.” Zo ditched the coughing and spoke the words plainly.

Annabelle ignored the familiar squabbling altogether, talking over them. “You know, we may want to look into the traditional role that jewelry plays in a variety of ancient cultures. Taking into consideration the fact that the tattoos had their basis in languages throughout the world, there's a chance that Morgan has again molded her gifts after something from this world and that the answer to all of our questions lies in history, archaeology, mythology, or …”

Annabelle stopped to take a breath, and I stared at her in the rearview mirror. Forget what I said about Zo being the most single-minded. When it came to questions and answers, Annabelle, who'd been raised in academia and was pretty much an expert herself, definitely had the rest of us beat.

“I know that look,” Zo said, switching her attention from Delia to A-belle. “That look means trouble.”

“Trouble?” Annabelle asked, her tone way, way too innocent.

“Trouble,” Zo confirmed. “I know the way your twisted little mind works.” Her words took on an accusatory tone. “Admit it, the second you get back to school, you're going to start making graphs.”

I had no idea what exactly Annabelle would graph, given that the grand total of what we knew right now was not much, but I was pretty sure that Zo was right. Annabelle had Graph Face, and that meant that whatever Morgan had set in motion by giving us these necklaces had well and truly begun.

After all, it wasn't an adventure until A-belle broke out the graphs.

“So, Bailey, have you given any more thought to your future?”

There was only one right answer to that question. It wasn't “Why, no, Mr. McMann, I haven't,” and it wasn't “In the future, I hope not to be killed by fairies.”

“Sort of,” I said. Since the right answer was “yes,” Mr. McMann gave me an encouraging smile, hoping to prod me into saying what he wanted to hear.

“I know I'm going to college.” That much really wasn't up for debate. School and I got along pretty well (excepting study hall), and I definitely wasn't ready to brave the real world yet. Besides which, I was somewhat attached to my life, and if I'd even thought the words
no college
in my mother's presence, she would have killed me.

“That's good, Bailey. Very good!” Mr. McMann was all about the positive encouragement. I wasn't entirely convinced that he actually knew anything about the college application process, but the man definitely knew upbeat like the back of his own disturbingly hairy hands.

“So have you thought any more about where you'd like to go?” Mr. McMann asked in the chummiest of voices. “With your scores, you'll have
options.
” To punctuate his point, he pumped his fist victoriously in the air.

From the way he was acting, you would have thought I was headed for valedictorian, but the guidance counselor and I both knew that I had pretty good scores and pretty good grades, just like I had pretty good hair (minus the color) and a pretty good body (minus the cleavage, or lack thereof). I was smart, but compared to other smart people, I was average. I wasn't unfortunate-looking, but when it came to looks, I fell closer to cute than pretty. I wasn't all that athletic, I didn't do student council, and though most of my teachers liked me well enough, I didn't inspire fist pumping in anybody but Mr. McMann, and five years from now, even he probably wouldn't remember me.

Still, I had
options.
Of course, it would have been easier if I didn't, because if you only have one choice, you can't possibly make the wrong one.

“Bailey?” Mr. McMann prompted, goofy smile still fixed to his face.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “I guess I wouldn't mind going to school close by.”

When I'd pictured college, I'd always pictured Delia, Zo, Annabelle, and me hanging out in dorm rooms and eating pizza at midnight. The realistic part of me knew that college wasn't one giant sleepover, but when I tried to imagine something else, all I could see in my mind's eye was a giant white screen, glaringly blank.

“I guess I wouldn't mind going farther away either.” A new city could be fun. Or, you know, terrifying.

“Well, that's certainly a start,” Mr. McMann said. I stared at him incredulously. I'd officially narrowed it down to colleges that were either close or farther away. If that was a start, then I didn't want to know what absolute stagnation looked like.

In abject fear of another fist pump, I continued talking. “I'm not really sure what I want to major in.”

“Nobody knows!” Mr. McMann was practically singing, but I didn't believe a word of his impromptu song. Delia wanted to major in business, with a minor in fashion design. Annabelle was going to double in classical languages and literature and archaeology. Zo, in the greatest irony of all time, was leaning toward nutrition.

Sure, Mr. M,
I thought.
Nobody knows.
He made college sound like one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time.

“Would you rather go to a big college or a small college?” Mr. McMann asked in a tone that would have
been more appropriate for saying “oohhhhh, ahhhhhh” than for the words he actually uttered.

“Medium-sized?”

“Now we're getting somewhere!”

Now I was just guessing.

We went back and forth like that for another ten minutes, and the entire time, I couldn't decide which freaked me out more, talking about my future with the one-man pep squad, or trying to prepare myself for whatever it was that had Morgan thinking that I'd need extra help. Absentmindedly, I played with the chain around my neck until my fingers came to the pendant. I toyed with it while Mr. McMann asked me how I felt about all-girls schools. I tried to phrase my answer diplomatically, and ran my thumb over the edges of the charm.

“I'm not sure about an all-girls sch—
yeeoowwww!”

Mr. McMann blinked several times, shocked at my outburst and momentarily speechless.

“Sorry,” I said. “My thumb.” It was bleeding, cut by the sharp edge of the pendant. I said a silent, sarcastic thanks to my Sidhe benefactress for giving me a necklace that could slice hairs and possibly cut through metal as well. It had sure done a number on my thumb.

“Oh,” Mr. McMann said, his voice working its way back to upbeat. “I have Band-Aids!”

I found it a little unsettling that he talked about Band-Aids with the same level of enthusiasm with which he considered my scholastic future. As he fished around in his desk for a bandage, I grabbed a tissue out
of a nearby box and pressed it to my thumb. I took a few seconds to glare down at the pendant, and even from this angle, the reflection in the small, circular mirror caught my eye.

The first thing I noticed was the color, a brilliant blue-green.

Sidhe blue. Blood green.

The words were a memory, an echo of something I'd heard and seen before. I knew this color, knew it as well as I knew that tattoo on my lower back. This was the color of Sidhe blood, the ink with which the symbol of Life had been laid into my skin.

I angled my head to get a better look at the mirror around my neck, and the image became clearer: the tissue, the thumb, the blue-green color spreading out from the point of contact between the two.

My blood,
I realized.
It's blue-green.

“Ah. Here you go, Bailey,” Mr. McMann said, offering me a dinosaur Band-Aid. I didn't spend a single second thinking about the fact that a forty-year-old man who dressed like an upscale lumberjack had dinosaur Band-Aids in his desk. I was too busy trying to hide my thumb from his guidance counselor eyes. With my luck, he'd take one look and then attempt to convince me that blue-green blood made me some kind of “underrepresented minority” in the college application process.

“Bailey?”

Carefully, I took the Band-Aid with my left hand, keeping my right under the desk and out of his view.

But when I looked down at my thumb again, my blood was red, making me wonder if there was such a thing as college-stress-induced hallucination. Fumbling clumsily with the wrapper, I finally managed to secure the bandage into place, and as I moved to throw the bloodied tissue away, I caught the barest glimpse of it in the mirror around my neck.

Blue-green.

Red in reality, blue-green in the mirror.

Okay,
I thought, relieved,
so that's a no go on the hallucination front.

“So, Bailey. About all-girls schools.” Mr. McMann cleared his throat. “Was that a no?”

Thankfully, that question brought an end to our meeting, and I was excused to go back to class. As I walked down the hallway, taking my time and feeling sorry for my throbbing thumb, I thought back over the past few hours.

A cryptic geek had accurately translated my tattoo.

Adea and Valgius had put in a rare daytime appearance to tell me that tonight was the beginning of my Reckoning.

Morgan had appeared out of nowhere to give me necklaces that she insisted my friends and I would need.

I'd cut myself on one of the aforementioned necklaces and discovered that my blood turned blue-green in the pendant's mirror.

And last, but certainly not least, my meeting with Mr. McMann had just confirmed what I'd long suspected: everybody except me had plans for next year, or
plans for making plans, or at least an idea of what they'd like those plans to be, whereas all I knew was that I didn't particularly want to go to an all-girls school.

Probably.

How was it that I could go two years without anything freaky happening (except fateing, which wasn't freaky so much as it just
was),
and then all of a sudden, boom—everything went completely nutters at the exact same time?

I made it back to class without an answer to my question, and as I slipped into my seat, all I could hope was that there weren't any more surprises out there, waiting to spring themselves on me at the last minute.

“Miss Morgan?”

The teacher said my name, and for one terrifying instant, I couldn't even remember what class I was in.

“Yes?” I said, my voice very small.

“Could you explain to us the definition of friction?”

Well, that solved one mystery. Clearly, I was in physics class, and clearly, whatever Sidhe beings fancied themselves the gods of irony were messing with me, because that was the exact piece of information I'd tried to study in study hall that morning.

Operative word:
tried.

“Friction is … ummmm …”

“Friction is the force generated when one object moves along another, generally defined by the equation f equals µmg, where
µ
is a friction coefficient,
m
is mass, andáis the force of gravity.”

I couldn't believe it! Somebody had actually come
to my rescue, and Annabelle wasn't even in this class. Though if she'd been here, she wouldn't have spoken out of turn anyway. At most, she would have metaphorically looked the other way while I probed her mind for a silent hint.

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot-Olsen, but I was asking Bailey.”

I could feel “Mr. Talbot-Olsen” (whose name did not seem to fit his voice at all) shrugging beside me, but I didn't look at him until the teacher turned her attention elsewhere.

“How is the equation for friction modified if you have an object moving along an incline?”