FATE

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  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.”

  Annabelle was spending the night at Zo's house. With a little luck and a lot of stealthy maneuvering, I could wake the two of them without Zo's dad knowing I was there at all. Once I made it in, it would be simple enough to get Delia over there. Together, the four of us would find a way to stop this. They wouldn't let the Sidhe blackmail me into leaving this realm. We'd taken down one Sidhe. Now we just had to find a way to outsmart the rest.

  Piece of cake.

  Unfortunately, my mom wasn't nearly as deep a sleeper as Zo's dad was, and the second I started walking down the stairs, she woke up and tiptoed into the hallway to check out the noise.

  “Bailey?” she said, her voice a whisper even though my dad, like Zo's, could have slept through a chain-saw massacre. “What are you doing up?”

  “I have to go to Zo's,” I said.

  My mother stared at me incredulously. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  Actually, no.

  “It's four-thirty in the morning. You're not going anywhere except back to bed.”

  “Actually,” I said softly, “I am.”

  “Bailey Marie, I don't know what you think you're doing, but …”

  I sighed and then bit the bullet. There was no way around it. I needed my friends, and I couldn't afford to get myself grounded in the middle of an apocalypse— or something close to it. It was wrong, and I felt like a horrible daughter, and I was sure the heavens themselves were going to smite me for it, but my chances of escaping the next twenty-four hours without being smote were looking pretty slim as it was.

  “You want me to go to Zo's,” I said, letting down my shields and allowing my will to bleed over to her mind.

  “I want you to go to Zo's,” my mom said, the intonation totally her own even though the words were mine.

  “You won't worry about this at all,” I continued. “You're not angry.”

  “You go on, sweetheart,” my
mom said. “I'll get right back to sleep.”

  “You won't freak out when you wake up in the morning and I'm not here,” I said, and then, because I felt like I had to do something to atone for mind melding my own mother, I added one last instruction. “You're going to sleep late and take a nice, long bath when you get up,” I said. “You don't need to worry about me, and you can have a day completely to yourself.”

  “You know,” my mother said, her voice contemplative, “I think I'm going to take a Me Day tomorrow. Sounds nice, doesn't it, Bailey?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, Mom. It does.”

  A moment later, she wandered back to bed, with no idea that I'd been in her mind, molding her thoughts into what I wanted them to be.

  “I am a bad, bad person,” I said as I walked to the front door. “Zo will be so proud.”

  As it turned out, Zo was a little too grumpy to be proud. When I let myself into her house using the key in the empty flowerpot and then made my way up to her bedroom to wake her, she was less than amused.

  “The world had better be ending,” she grumbled the second she realized that I was not, in fact, a dream. “Because if it's not, I'm going to kill you.”

  I didn't say a word in reply; I just looked at her.

  Zo narrowed her eyes. “Awww, man. The world is ending?”

  I shrugged. It wasn't like the Sidhe were out to destroy the world the way that Alecca had been. They were just out to use it and the mortals who lived here for a little fun.

  Lethal fun.

  How had James phrased it? The adults could do much, much worse … and some of them would enjoy it.

  “Maybe we should get A-belle,” Zo said. “This is more her deal than mine.”

  I nodded, and the two of us crept down the hallway and into the guest bedroom, which Annabelle used as her own whenever she spent the night. I reached out to touch A-belle's shoulder, but Zo stopped me.

  “No,” she said. “Let me.”

  Even in the midst of a crisis, Zo couldn't turn down an opportunity like this. She climbed onto the bed, put her face right next to Annabelle's, and then waited.

  “What if she doesn't wake up?” I asked as Zo inched closer, until her nose was almost touching her cousin's. Zo didn't reply, she just gave me a toothless smile that said “She will.”

  Annabelle's eyelids fluttered. She shifted in her sleep and then opened her eyes. When she saw Zo, directly on top of her and grinning like a madwoman, she opened her mouth to scream, but Zo muffled the scream with her hand.

  “My work here is done,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “We have a problem,” I told Annabelle. “A big one.”

  A-belle managed to regain her wits, and she glared at Zo. “Is my cousin altogether necessary for solving this problem?” Annabelle asked. “Because I really do think killing her would put me in a more problem-solving mood.”

  “I need you guys,” I said. “All of you guys. Speaking of which, we need to get Delia over here, stat.”

  Zo lit up like a kid on Christmas morning, and I was positive she was thinking of creative ways to wake Delia up, but we didn't have time for fun and games, so I concentrated on Delia and cast out my mind-voice, using all of my psychic power to penetrate her dreams.

  Delia, you need to wake up.

  But I'm wearing Chanel, Delia complained silently. I never get to wear Chanel.

  You need to wake up. I need you.

  Those words brought Delia back to consciousness, and I sent her a mental picture of the three of us sitting in the guest bedroom at Zo's, hoping she'd get the point and sneak over here ASAP. Delia's mother wasn't nearly as with it as mine was. She wouldn't miss her.

  “What's going on?” Annabelle asked, reluctantly abandoning all thoughts of killing Zo. “If it wasn't bad, you wouldn't be here. What did you find out?”

  The story came spewing out of my mouth. I couldn't even make myself wait for Delia to get there, and when she arrived five minutes later, I was just coming to the part where Eze and Drogan had finally laid all of their cards on the table. Delia didn't interrupt me. She just listened, and when I was finished, she looked to Annabelle for a summary.

  “Bailey being who and what she is and living here has thrown off the world's balance,” Annabelle said succinctly, in a tone that would have been more appropriate for discussing the quadratic equation than my future in this realm. “This imbalance has somehow caused the barrier between the realms to break down, allowing the Sidhe to travel freely into our world. They're the ones behind the chaos at school yesterday, and the King and Queen of the Sidhe told Bailey that the only way to keep it from happening again, the only way to keep it from getting worse and spreading to the whole world, is for her to leave it.” She nibbled on her bottom lip, deep in thought. “If we try to fit this in with what we were talking about yesterday, it seems like Bailey herself is liminal, and combined with an imbalance between the worlds, her presence on Earth increases the liminality of things around her.”

  “Bailey's not going anywhere.” Zo's voice was implacable, and just listening to it told me how much she wanted to punch something—or someone—right now.

  “Of course not,” Annabelle said. “There must be another solution. If there wasn't, Morgan never would have gotten involved. From what Bailey says, it seems like Morgan is key in all of this. She's the only one who has as much power as Drogan and Eze, and somehow, she's not subject to the barrier and the balance the way the others are. She dwells in our world, at least some of the time, but her presence doesn't seem to have the kind of adverse effect that Bailey's does.” Annabelle paused and then shot me an apologetic look. “No offense, Bay.”

  “None taken.” How could I take offense when everything she was saying was true? Morgan could somehow travel between worlds at no cost to the balance, and she wasn't even Liminal Girl. There was no doubt in my mind that Morgan had known what Drogan and Eze had planned for me, and that, just like last time, she'd armed me as best she could.

  “The necklaces,” I said. “They do more than just show us the true nature of things in the mirror. When I was … there …” I couldn't bear to say the name of that wonderfully horrible place out loud. “… James offered me something to drink, and I forgot and almost took it, but then I touched the necklace and it stopped me. It's like, in this world, it shows me the Otherworld, and in the Otherworld, it connects me to this one. It clears my thoughts.”

  But how was that supposed to help me find a solution that didn't involve me leaving the mortal realm forever and didn't involve the mortal realm being irrevocably changed until I caved?

  “I'm confused,” Delia said, wrinkling her forehead in deep thought. “Why is Bailey being here such a big deal?”

  Annabelle grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen from her bag and started drawing a diagram. “It's like osmosis,” she said.

  The three of us stared blankly at her.

  “Come on, you guys took chemistry,” Annabelle prompted. “In a solution, things move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration until they're equally distributed.” She drew a bunch of dots on the right side of the page and only a few on the left, and then scrawled in an arrow showing the direction of movement from the dot-heavy side to the side with barely any dots at all.

  “And this has to do with Bailey, how?” Delia was not shy about asking questions when she didn't understand something. Sometimes it made her seem ditzy, but the real idiots were the ones who pretended to understand, but didn't.

  Annabelle drew a line down the page. “Okay,” she said, “this is the mortal realm, and this is the Other-world.”

  “There's something in between,” I said. “The Nexus.”

  “Right,” Annabelle said. “That said, however, the in-between space is still in the Otherworld, right?”

  I nodded. It wasn't an earthly place, that was for sure.

  “So you've got three Fates,” Annabelle said, “and two of them are on one side of things, and one of them is on
the other. That's not balanced. Plus, Bailey's only half Sidhe, so there's basically a four-times-higher concentration of Sidhe Fates in the Otherworld than there is here.” Annabelle drew many, many more dots on the Otherworld side of the page. “And there are a ton of Sidhe on the other side, and just half of Bailey—and maybe Morgan—over here. That's a major imbalance, which is okay, so long as the barrier between the worlds is impermeable to Sidhe in most places, but once it's not …”

  “Our world becomes fairy central,” Delia said. “Gotcha.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “Me being in this world is what made the barrier permeable to begin with.” I felt weird using Annabelle's vocabulary, but it was a familiar kind of weird, the kind I was used to. “Is there any way to stop it? To keep them in their world? Because if they can cross over, they will. Eze and Drogan want me in the Otherworld. They want the power I can bring them, and they won't stop until they get it.”

  “Or until we make them,” Zo said darkly.

  “They're stronger than Alecca,” I said, even though I hadn't seen a real demonstration of that strength. “I know they are, and it took four of us, with powers, to beat her. So how do we take down all of the Sidhe?” I closed my eyes and left them that way for several seconds. “It's hopeless.”

  Zo grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me to her until her face was as close to mine as it had been to Annabelle's a few minutes earlier. “It's not hopeless. If those fairies think we're letting you go anywhere, they're out of their little Otherworldly minds.” Zo narrowed her eyes, and I got the feeling that she wouldn't hesitate to beat the crap out of me if I argued. “You got that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and hugging her hard. “I got it.”

  “We need a plan,” Annabelle said, not trying to spoil the moment, but unable to contain her thoughts. “And to make a plan, we need to know what we're up against. Bailey, you said that so far only the other young ones had crossed over?”