Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (24 page)

Adea gave me a look, the meaning of which was as mysterious to me as the workings of the average male mind. “Trust your instincts,” she said.

The last time I'd acted on my instincts in the Nexus, I'd ended up in the Otherworld and my most basic and
primal self hadn't wanted to leave. “Trust” was not something I should probably be applying to my instincts any time soon.

I waited, figuring that given enough time, Adea and Valgius would find another loophole and give me a nudge in the right direction, but instead the two of them went to work. Valgius walked toward the Seal and, as his eyes bore into it, light surged into his hands. Soon, he was holding a sphere so bright and pure that it made the fabric I worked with look gray and dingy by comparison. He took the light, molded and cajoled it, whispering words whose meaning I'd never been able to grasp. I couldn't even replicate the sounds in my mind and, no matter how hard I'd tried over the past two years, I'd never been able to carry any part of his whispered words with me back to the mortal realm.

As Valgius whispered and moved his hands back and forth over the light, a tiny string emerged, stretching out from the ball in a timid, elegant line until, after a moment, it broke free and flew back to the Seal.

Val's murmurings continued, but I turned my attention to Adea, who'd gathered a square of light from the Seal. It stood in the air before her, moving on its own, interconnected with thousands of others, and Adea, perfectly serene, began to sing. Her voice was low and melodic, and there was something hauntingly beautiful about the song. It was the last thing a mortal heard before the end, and I got the feeling that when a person had a near-death experience and they talked about the light at the end of the tunnel, what they were really talking about was this
moment, this song. It was too big for just one of the senses, too old for anyone, even Adea, to really understand its tune.

The light in her hands grew brighter as she sang. It expanded, stretching and fighting against the confines of its physical form until it broke free, splitting into thousands of pinpoints of light that twinkled and then disappeared.

Birth was a whisper. Death was a song. And all of a sudden, I knew what Adea meant by telling me to trust my instincts. The two of them couldn't give me answers, but there were some things beyond the control of the Other-world courts. What had happened at school today had been part of the mortal realm, part of human life.

And if it was part of life, that meant it was part of me. I might not have been able to conjure up cabana boys or control my own future, but there was one thing I could do to find answers.

I could weave.

I turned to the Seal, my body already beginning to move in tandem with Adea's song and Valgius's rhythmic, whispered words.

Life.

Life.

Life.

The souls of the world rushed into my body, and the force of it threw my head back. I couldn't breathe, but I didn't need to.

Life.

Life.

Life.

This was my oxygen. This was my purpose, my connection, my everything. I felt the souls of the world, felt them everywhere in every aspect of my being, and I couldn't stand still.

Life.

Life.

Life.

I had to weave. The web appeared before me, thousands of overlapping fabrics whose threads arched toward my fingertips. My fingers grappled with the fabric. Like a spider, I wove, my movements hardwired into my nature.

Life.

Life.

Wrong.

And there it was, a twinge of wrongness, fingernails on the chalkboard inside my mind. I forced myself to concentrate on that feeling, and the dance grew more frantic, my movements frenzied and unpredictable.

Wrong.

I couldn't stop to wonder at the wrongness or to force it into a more familiar form. All I could do was feel it and keep weaving.

Weave. Life. Wrong.

Wrong. Life. Weave.

My connection to the mortal realm lived on my skin and in it, but buried deeper in my being, there was something else, another connection, and as I worked my way through the wrongness, it separated into two feelings, one that danced along the surface of my body and one that burrowed deeper, like to like.

And then the fabric in front of me folded and changed, until I was looking at just one life, intertwined with thousands upon thousands of others. I stared at it, trying to find its rhythm, its reason for being here at this moment, demanding my attention more than the rest of the world's souls combined.

As I stared at it, my movements slowing, I saw the briefest flash of a pattern in the fabric, an image I knew as well as my own face.

My tattoo.

I continued weaving, each motion deliberate and slow, though I couldn't read meaning into the movements, no matter how hard I tried, and I watched as my life twisted and turned, as the threads that made up my past and my future unraveled and my fingers nimbly wove them back together.

Wrong.

The feeling surprised me, and as I turned it over in my mind and worked my hands over it in the flesh, the knowledge I'd been waiting for came to me. I felt my own life on my skin's surf ace and deep inside, and this time, the meaning of the wrongness was clear.

Mortal and Sidhe: two things that weren't supposed to mix. I'd realized earlier that the theory of liminality could be applied to me, as a person. I knew that I existed in between that which was human and that which was Sidhe. I just didn't know what that meant and, until this second, I hadn't realized how very wrong it seemed.

Almost as wrong as what had happened in my life that afternoon. The Otherworld and the mortal realm were
separated. The Sidhe were not meant to cross over to my world, and humans were not meant to cross into theirs, except at special times and special places. Annabelle was right. There were rules, and the rules were being broken, and something was allowing that to happen.

Something liminal.

Something wrong.

Me. My life. My destiny. I was human, and I wasn't. I was Sidhe, and I wasn't. I was both and neither, and as I wove, the words of the forgotten spell echoed as music in my mind.

“So mote it be.” I whispered the words, and as I did, the pull of the soul fabric finally let go of my body and it was my own again.

I couldn't pretend to understand everything that had happened while I was weaving, but I did manage to hold on to two things. The first was that the wrongness I'd felt in the world's web mirrored the wrongness I saw in myself. This afternoon, one or more Sidhe had crossed into the mortal realm, disrupting the pattern I wove, but the break in the pattern had been there before.

It existed in me.

I was mortal, and I was Sidhe. Once upon a time, I'd been a balance unto myself, but now, for whatever reason, that had changed. Maybe it was because I'd been to the Otherworld. Maybe it had to do with just how much my powers had grown over the past two years. Or maybe it was because senior year had thrown me off balance as a person and that had worked its way into my mystical makeup. Maybe I'd become a double liminality: half human, half Sidhe; half child, half adult. My whole life was one giant transition state, and I wasn't, by any meaning of the word, balanced.

Repeating the words of the spell over and over again in my mind, I fought my way to the connection between what I'd felt in myself and what I'd felt in the rest of the world.

Blood in my veins,

The barrier holds.

If balance wavers,

The bridge unfolds.

Somewhere there was a bridge that connected the Otherworld and the mortal realm, and because of me, because of my imbalance and the forty million transitions in my
life and mind, that bridge was open for business. The rules to crossing over were changing. It was becoming easier. Shadows, doorways, bridges … what was next?.

I could only hope that by the time I woke up tomorrow morning, Annabelle would be able to tell me who was taking advantage of these new rules, and that I'd figure out how to stop them.

Beside me, Adea stopped singing and Valgius whispered his last life into being.

“It's time,” Adea said. “Are you ready?”

Ready to see the others again? Ready for the beauty and the power and the feeling of being exactly where I belonged?

Ready for Reckoning, Part Deux?

I was and I wasn't, and it didn't matter either way. I stepped forward and took their hands in mine, and as heat surged between us, I allowed myself to Remember.

Feral beauty. Unforgivable power. Everlasting light.

That was what it meant to be Sidhe.

I was running, and it felt so good that I couldn't remember despising every lap I'd ever been forced to run in gym. I was fast and the world around me little more than a blur, but with each step I took, my heightened senses picked up on every sound, every color, every smell. I might as well have been blind and deaf in the mortal realm for the vast-ness of the differences between my perceptions there and here.

We ran through rivers.

Ran through forests.

Ran through colors.

Ran through sound.

We ran up mountains, but this time they did not grow beneath our feet and we did not stop when we reached their summit. The three of us kept running and I closed
my eyes, savoring the feeling of the moment: the taste of the air, the way my body burned hot and cold at the same time.

I didn't want to stop running, ever. I didn't want to see the Others and wonder whose hit list I was on. I didn't want to go home. I just wanted to run and hear and taste and see and smell forever.

There were more rivers and more mountains, more cliffs that posed no threat to us as we leapt off. There were beaches and oceans, and I didn't stop even once to wonder at the way my feet beat against the water's surface.

And then we hit land, and things grew darker. The trees grew bigger, their bark like onyx and their leaves the darkest shade of green. The air became thicker, the taste closer to dark chocolate than cotton candy, and the earth beneath our feet gave way. The land tore itself apart so that we could fall and, even with nothing to stand on, still we ran.

And then we were there.

“Welcome, Bailey.”

It was hard to pay attention to my surroundings in the presence of a voice that embodied everything I should have been looking at: endless caverns made of black diamonds, darkness tinged with every color of the rainbow.

“Where am I?” I asked.

Drogan stepped forward from the glittering shadows. “Welcome to the Unseelie Court,” he said.

“This place may not suit you as well as the mountains,” Eze said, shining as much in the darkness as she did in her own terrain, her pink hair standing out in
sharp contrast to the deep richness of the black all around her. “But it does have its charm.”

“We'll leave it to Bailey to decide which side of our world suits her better,” Drogan said. “You are Sidhe, child, and until this moment, until you stood here in this place, you had but scratched the surface of what that means.”

He said
surface
with just the slightest twist of his lips. The day before, on the mountaintop, the two of them had presented a united front, but today, I could sense the undercurrents of tension between them. Maybe it was because of the things Adea and Valgius had told me, because I knew that the Reckoning meant choosing between Seelie and Unseelie, the mountain and the depths.

“You'll make no choices tonight,” Eze said. “Do not worry about such things, Bailey. These decisions often make themselves. We only ask that you stay here for a while. Make yourself comfortable. Talk with the other younglings. Your Reckoning will be here soon enough.”

Drogan flashed me a kind and blindingly white smile that scared the crap out of me, and then the “adults” excused themselves and left me alone with the next generation of Sidhe once again.

Only this time, I knew that somebody here had it out for me and that whoever it was had taken full advantage of the changing rules governing the separation between this world and the one I had, at one point in time, considered my own.

“Heya, Bailey,” James said, waving to punctuate his words. “How's it going?”