Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (9 page)

“A little,” I said. “Adea and Valgius tried to make it seem normal, like of course I'm going there and I'm going to meet others just like me, but at the same time, something about the things they said made it sound like there was more to it than that.” I paused, because up until then, I'd concentrated on what Adea and Valgius had told me, rather than the way they'd told me.

For a long time, Zo and I sat there, both of us quiet. I wasn't sure what she was thinking, and I didn't probe her mind to find out. Instead, I thought about what had been said in the Nexus and what had gone unsaid and about the fact that Morgan had definitely done some saying and unsaying of her own.

“I'd go with you if I could,” Zo said finally. Her words were sweet, but her tone was more disgruntled than anything else. She didn't like the idea of not being able to protect me from whatever the Reckoning entailed.

Come to think of it, I wasn't so fond of that idea myself.

“I'd take you with me if I could,” I said, and I
refused to say the rest of the sentence—
but I can't—
because it felt like admitting something awful that was true in more ways than one.

It was official: the world was conspiring to make me see everything as a metaphor for the end of high school.

“So what now?” I asked Zo, half-expecting her to have answers that had nothing to do with the next half hour and everything to do with the next few years.

“The way I see it, we have three options.” Zo was clearly in the mood to take charge, and I (a) knew better than to stand in the way of
any
of Zo's moods, and (b) didn't, in general, have any objection to following.

“Option one: We try to research the necklaces.” Zo made a face. Clearly, she realized that of the four of us, she and I were the least apt to do any kind of research on mystical jewelry. A-belle was research girl, and Delia was the fashion expert; the two of them would be all over this soon enough.

“Option two: We forget about the research and go for a trial-and-error kind of thing for using them.”

I considered that one for a moment, thinking about what the necklace had shown me earlier and wondering what I'd see if I probed things more.

“What's option three?” I asked, hating that I couldn't just jump on option two, which was quite obviously the best choice.

Zo picked up the charm on her necklace and held it out and away from her neck, assuming a fighting stance as she did. “I challenge you to a duel!” she said.

I held out my own necklace and grinned back at her. “I accept.”

The two of us launched ourselves into option three: using our necklaces in a twisted pendant sword fight, careful not to do any actual damage with the sharp edges.

Productive? Maybe not, but it was exactly what I needed.

As we circled each other, completely concentrated on the task at hand, I barely noticed that the shadows in the room seemed to move with us—even the ones that should have been standing still.

On some level, I must have seen the shadows when Zo and I were attempting to duel, but it wasn't until I laid down to sleep that the image—slithering, scattering, shifting—made its way into my conscious mind. The entire scene played against the backdrop of my eyelids, over and over again, the movement of the shadows so subtle that I wondered if it was real or if this was just another example of Things That Happen When Bailey Doesn't Get Enough Actual Shut-eye.

Given everything I had on my mind, I should have had trouble falling asleep, but I didn't. One second I was lying there thinking about shadows and Zo (and college, which was never far from my mind), and the next, I was out.

* * *

The Seal was cool under my back. I lay there for a long moment, my eyes closed, feeling as comfortable as I did in my own bed. More than anything else in the Nexus, the Seal was home.

“We are connected.”

Adea's voice broke into my thoughts, and I flashed back to my mom's “Bailey Marie” that morning. Adea wasn't big on middle names. She preferred eerie lectures. At least this time, I knew what she was talking about.

Sort of.

“The three of us are part of one whole, and the Seal represents that whole. It was forged out of man, out of Sidhe, that we might connect the two. In a time when the worlds were separating, our birth brought them closer together, that this Seal and the balance it represents might hold the worlds, separate but entwined, the powers from one rejuvenating the other.”

“Four score and seven years ago …”

For some reason, my mind decided that it would be productive to imagine Adea delivering the Gettysburg Address, rather than actually trying to connect her words to my earlier ponderings about the role I played in connecting the worlds.

“… our fathers brought forth on this continent …”

Sigh. I was hopeless—either my subconscious didn't want me probing the issue of connectivity, or it had the attention span of a kindergartener.

“You are very young.” Valgius's voice was deep and held just enough of a hint of disapproval that I wondered if either of them could see past my shields to my wandering thoughts. The first time I'd come to this place, I'd been an
open book, but over months—now years—my power had grown, and they'd become less and less able to use theirs on me.

“I'll be eighteen in a couple of months,” I said. With a little huff that made me sound closer to the mental age of my subconscious, I finally opened my eyes, which I'd resisted doing in an attempt to stay snuggled down on the Seal for as long as possible, safe and sound and waiting for mortal souls to flood my body with knowledge, power, and the desire to weave.

“Eighteen.” Adea's voice held a great deal of amusement. “Sometimes I forget you live in their years, Bailey.” She paused, and I could sense her debating whether or not to say more. “You might not always.”

“Then whose years would I live in?”

Adea and Val remained suspiciously quiet. Like I wasn't hesitant enough about this Reckoning thing already.

“Come,” Val said finally.

I looked around me at the Nexus, the place that Zo and I had agreed was “pretty.” I was clearly outdoors, but the space gave the impression of being enclosed. The grass underneath my feet was lush and just barely damp, always touched by a morning dew no matter what time I came here. “Where are we going?” I asked.

I couldn't begin to imagine what the Otherworld would be like, any more than I could describe the Nexus when I wasn't there. At that second, the Nexus seemed so simple and clear in my mind: the Seal, the grass, the morning sun, and flowers, lots of them, so large and
colorful that they seemed to belong more to prehistoric Earth than the world where I spent my days.

Maybe that was what Adea meant about time passing differently here. Sidhe lived so long that most humans considered them immortal, and their world, just offset from the mortal plane, hadn't aged the way ours had.

Neither of my companions answered my question about where we were headed. They took it as rhetorical, since I vaguely knew the answer before I'd asked the question. Instead, Adea issued an order, her tone light, but impossible to disobey.

“Take our hands.” Her voice sounded the way that honey looked dripping off a spoon: light and golden, thick and flowing.

Knowing I didn't have a choice, I lifted my hands and slowly took one of theirs in each of mine.

Birth. Life. Death.

Our hands warmed until they were so hot that I expected my fingers to melt. It hurt, but not as much as it should have, and in a strange way, the pain felt good. Right. Familiar.

Birth. Life. Death.

We were three, and as we stood there, memories washed over me. Memories that weren't mine, but weren't theirs either. Memories of what it meant to be born, to live, and to die. Memories of the Earth itself, memories of this place. Memories of the Seal, forged by human and Sidhe.

And something older than all of that. Older than the Nexus. Older than Adea and Valgius and the blood in my veins.

“Do you feel them?” Adea asked me. “Do you feel their call?”

Each night I came here and, as I wove, became one with the mortal realm. This time, the connection stretched out in a different direction, and their voices—unspoken, but somehow musical—echoed in my mind.

Sidhe. Sidhe. Sidhe.

In that moment, we stopped being the three Fates. We stopped being Birth and Life and Death, and our connection to the world I lived in faded away, drowned out by something bigger, something that came from so far inside of me that I was half-afraid that it would turn me inside out trying to reach the surface.

Sidhe. Sidhe. Sidhe.

“This is their call,” Valgius said. “Can you answer it, Bailey?”

I had to. I had to answer it or it would kill me, but I didn't know how.

“Shhhhhhhhh.” Adea's comforting murmur made me realize that I was emitting a pained, low-pitched whine.

“Remember, Bailey,” she said. “That's all you have to do. Just remember what it was like before we were three, when we were simply one with our world and the others like us. Remember what it was like to be Sidhe.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, as much in fear of this moment as anything else, and as I stood there, their hands in mine, I remembered, and then I knew.

Feral beauty. Unforgivable power. Everlasting light.

That was what it meant to be Sidhe.

I felt the change even with my eyes closed and knew
that we were suddenly and inexplicably elsewhere, as distant from the Seal as the Nexus was from the mortal realm. The air was crisp and cool, but my body warmed itself from the inside out, until the combination of the two was near divine in its perfection, like stepping out of the pool on a warm summer day, body covered with water and the sun shining down on me. Every inch of my flesh was alive with contrasting sensations, and I was overcome with the thought that until this moment, my body had been little more than skin I was forced to wear.

“Welcome home, Bailey.”

For the first time, Adea's voice didn't strike me as musical or powerful; the echo of her thousands of years didn't hurt my ears or fill me with awe. Without even opening my eyes, I knew that voices such as hers belonged here, and when I spoke, the sound came from a place inside of me that I hadn't known existed. “Where are we?”

I couldn't bear to open my eyes for fear that seeing this place would somehow tarnish the beauty I felt in it.

“Faerie. Olympus. Avalon. The Beyond. This is a place of many names.”

Those words were familiar, and whatever part of me was still human remembered that I'd given this place a name of my own—the Otherworld—but standing there, eyes closed, the true name echoed through the recesses of my mind, two words melded into one.

Sidhe. Home.

I opened my eyes.

At first, all I saw was colors, each so rich and distinct from the others that my memory of the mortal world
melted away, as gray as Dorothy's Kansas in comparison to Oz. Slowly, the colors became shapes: rolling hills and lush vegetation and a perpetual sunrise or sunset—I couldn't tell which—painting the sky in shades of pink and purple and orange. Somehow, I knew that this place was unchanging, that even in the darkness of night, if there was such a thing, the colors would be there, as rich in black as they were in golden white light.

It took me a moment to realize that the light wasn't coming from whatever passed for this world's sun. Instead, it radiated from our skin. I looked down at my hands, wondering at their unearthly glow.

If Delia could see me now,
I thought,
she'd want to strap me on a chain and wear me around her neck.

The thought was fuzzy, and the contrast between it and the strength of my impressions of this place—so lyrical that they should have felt alien in my head—reminded me that this was the one place my friends could never follow.

“Are you ready?” Adea's voice came out as barely more than a whisper, and it was unclear whether she was speaking to me, Valgius, or herself. There was something urgent in her tone, some frenetic need to do something, be somewhere.

“I'm ready.” My answer should have surprised me, but it didn't. There comes a point when something is so true that whether or not it was expected simply doesn't matter.

Adea laughed then, and the sound was visible in the air around us, the way warm breath is on a cold winter day. Her joy at being here, at being Sidhe, hung in the air, the exact color as the horizon of the Otherworld sky. She
ran then, straight forward, into the vast landscape before us, and I found myself immediately on her heels, tearing through the land with speed that should have been impossible. The world around us settled back into a blur of colors as we ran, and I savored each sensation: each time my bare feet hit the ground, each flower that reached out to caress me, welcoming me as one with the land.