Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (10 page)

And as we ran, the colors and the scene around us changed, until mountains grew under our feet, erupting out of the ground in purples and grays that were more silver than anything else. I kept running, and the growing mountains thrust us higher and higher toward the sky, into the clouds and a light, pearly mist that tasted sweet on my tongue.

And then, without warning and without planning to do so, I stopped running, knowing beyond any human understanding that we had arrived at our destination. I stood very still, my heart pumping viciously behind my rib cage, my hair in my face, and my brain suddenly aware that we were being watched. Big time.

I could only see a few dozen of them, but I could feel more, staring at me from great distances, from the tops of other mountains, from down in the lush green valleys, from underneath brilliant blue-green waters.

The entire Otherworld was looking at me and into me, and for the first time since I'd left the Seal, I felt horribly and utterly human.

When we were little, I was always the shy one, and Delia, who didn't have a shy bone in her body, and Zo, who wasn't exactly a cowering miss herself, had developed a
game that they called “everybody look at Bailey” to help me embrace my inner diva. The game went like this: once or twice a year, when we were in a big crowd of people, the two of them would meet eyes and then as loud as they could yell, “Everybody look at Bailey!” And everybody would look at me, and I would want to die until I remembered that they were standing there beside me, smiling at me like I was the type of person people
should
want to look at.

For a moment, the memory was clear in my mind, but as quickly as it had come, I lost it. Earth and mortals had no place here, even in memory, and every thought I might have had about my friends was quickly replaced with longing.

Need,
I thought, not knowing what it was I needed. Adea put her hand on my shoulder, and a pleasant shiver ran through my body at the physical contact.

Then, just as I was starting to regain my mind, or at least some semblance thereof, a woman stepped forward from the many beings who watched us. Her hair was the color of an opal, a pale pearly white that reflected pink as she moved. “Welcome, Bailey. We've been waiting for you …”

“For a very, very long time.” A man finished her sentence, and I searched for him, scanning the crowds of beings with two-toned hair, iridescent skin, and eyes every shade of blue. Finally, my gaze settled on a man who was in every way the woman's opposite. She was small; he was broad-shouldered and gave the impression of being even bigger than he actually was. Her skin was the color of caramel; his was the white of untouched snow. The rest of him—eyes, hair, and expression—was dark.

Beside me, Adea and Valgius inclined their heads. It took me a second to figure out that they were bowing.

Why hadn't anyone told me that I'd need to know how to bow?

“I am Eze,” the woman said, and I couldn't keep from thinking that her hair looked like it belonged more on a unicorn than on a woman, Sidhe or no. There was something mythical about just standing in her presence. “Queen of Light.”

That would explain the bowing. I glanced at the man who had spoken earlier, wondering if that made him the King.

“I rule the night,” he said, deigning to answer my unasked question. “I am Drogan, King of Darkness.”

If I'd been watching this scene in a movie, I probably would have thrown popcorn at the screen to protest the cheesy dialogue, but somehow their words carried a kind of depth I couldn't explain based on their meanings alone. The part of me that had recognized Morgan at the mall recognized the same thing in the two of them, something ancient and familiar, horrible and awesome, and I found that my body wanted to bow to them.

King of Darkness, Queen of Light.

“Leave us,” Eze said to those watching us, her words screaming
command,
even though she wasn't speaking all that loudly. For a moment, I thought I'd displeased her, but Eze smiled warmly at me, the expression at odds with the biting chill in her voice as she spoke to the others. “She is new to our world, and you will overwhelm her. Adea and Valgius, you may stay.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the
eyes all around me disappeared, their owners fading back into the mountains, until there were only a handful of sets left: Adea and Valgius, Drogan and Eze, and six others, who stepped forward, summoned by an order I couldn't hear or a lure I couldn't feel. A fire appeared in front of me, and I stared into it, wondering if the others were still watching.

And then, without warning, Eze was beside me, and the light from her skin was almost more than my eyes could bear, her hair flashing the palest of pinks as she moved. She reached a hand out and touched my face. “Poor child,” she said. “Lost for so long. How you must have longed for us, not knowing what it was that you were missing.” Her fingers trailed lightly over my skin. “How lonely you must have been, how scared in a world in which eternity means nothing.”

I wasn't lonely, I wanted to say. I've never been alone. But somehow, the mention of eternity brought to mind my realization from earlier that day that nothing lasts forever, and I couldn't push back the feeling that I'd been moving inexorably toward loneliness my whole life and just hadn't gotten there yet.

“You'll never be lonely here, Bailey.” Drogan's voice was heavy and deep, as much a contrast to Eze's as his appearance was to hers. “You'll never be alone.” He took my hand in his and began tracing his fingers across the back of it in light, deliberate movements.

“You are welcome here, Bailey.”

“You are home.”

The King and Queen spoke in tandem, and after
another eternity, Drogan let go of my hand and Eze drew hers back from my face. The two of them turned and walked slowly and imperiously away.

“Adea, Valgius, come,” Eze called over her shoulder.

“Yes,” Drogan said, his voice washing over me, the sound of it at once caressing and beating at my skin. “Do.”

There was something hard about the words. Something frightening.

“Let the young ones talk amongst themselves.”

Young ones? I tore my eyes away from the most royal of the Sidhe and turned toward the others I could feel in this space.

Oh,
I thought, taking in their appearances.
Young ones.

As Adea and Valgius disappeared with our lieges, I tried to remember the way I'd felt running through the Otherworld to get to this mountain, but I couldn't muster any kind of unadulterated emotion—let alone the kind of physical and mental grace I'd managed effortlessly before. I was Sidhe, I was home, and I was scared out of my freaking mind, because the only thing more intimidating than full-blown royal Sidhe were Otherworldly teenagers.

And as I stood there in front of the fire, six of them advanced on me at once.

I was a good friend, but I wasn't good at making friends. There was a big, big difference between the two, and other than Annabelle, I hadn't put my friend-making skills to the test since preschool. I hadn't needed to.

“Hello,” I said. My voice still had a certain amount of power to it, an age more in line with the memories I held of this place than the number of years I'd lived on Earth.

“Hello.” All six of them spoke at once, and the combined effect of their voices was paralyzing.

“You needn't be afraid,” one of the girls said.

“We won't harm you.” A second girl, nearly identical to the first, finished the sentence. Two other girls, who looked slightly older and slightly more like they were considering devouring me whole, said nothing, instead choosing to segregate themselves on the other side of the fire. They
whispered behind pale hands, and something about the pointed glances they were shooting my way reminded me of the popular girls at my high school.

Great,
I thought.
I'm a dorky Sidhe. Because being part of an ancient fairy race isn't difficult enough on its own.

The girls who had spoken to me met my eyes again, and there was something about the tilt of their pearly pink mouths that seemed vaguely familiar. Before I could quite sort out what it was, one of the two males stepped forward.

“I'm Xane,” he said, “heir to the Unseelie throne.”

Xane,
I thought.
Rhymes with Kane.
Like my ex, Xane held himself with a certain amount of confidence that I'd come to identify over time as arrogance, absolute certainty that whatever he wanted, he would be able to have. Including me.

“I am Axia.” One of the pearly-mouthed girls spoke again, and even though the expression on her face never changed, I couldn't shake the feeling that she was rolling her eyes at Xane's airs. “This is my sister, Lyria. Our mother is Eze.” Axia added that last bit almost hesitantly, as if she wasn't quite sure whether she wanted to claim her mother, let alone the throne, for herself.

For her part, Lyria said nothing and offered me a shy smile. I wondered how Eze had given birth to daughters like these.

“I take after my father,” Xane said, lifting the thought from my head with a smirk that made me wonder whether he was perceptive or able to get past my psychic shields. “Axia and Lyria are not so clearly begotten.”

“We will one day share the Seelie throne,” Axia said.

“If there's still a Seelie throne to share,” Xane scoffed.

Lyria frowned at him, but said nothing.

While the heirs argued among themselves, I turned the words I'd heard over and over in my head.
Seelie. Unseelie.
Light and dark, two parts of the same whole. I found that I didn't have to ask for definitions of these terms, the same way that I'd always known instinctively how to spell
Sidhe,
even though it wasn't written at all the way it was pronounced.

“They'll be at it for hours,” a voice whispered directly into my ear.

If I'd been in my world and not theirs, I would have jumped, but I was a different Bailey here, and I found that his presence didn't surprise me, that I'd known he was next to me, edging closer all the time.

“Drogan and Xane don't venture forth from their domain very often,” the voice continued, “and when they do, Xane makes it a point to argue with Eze's daughters the way Eze typically argues with his father.”

I turned to meet my whisperer's eyes. Like all of the Sidhe (except for me), his were blue, so light that there was barely any color in them at all. His hair was an odd combination of brown and red, the kind of hair color the sidekick on an afternoon television show might have. His skin glowed, but it made him look more sunburnt than ethereal. His features were even and perfect, but the myriad of expressions that danced across them as I surveyed him looked comfortingly commonplace.

“I'm James,” he said.

“James?” I asked. Adea, Valgius, Eze, Drogan, Axia, Lyria, Xane, and … James. Something about that seemed just a little off.

“Is there something wrong with my name?” James asked, the edges of his lips quirking upward as I tried to think of a diplomatic way to answer his question.

“There's nothing wrong with it,” I said, grateful for his cheerful disposition and the fact that in this incarnation my voice was incapable of squeaking. “It just seems kind of … human.”

James's face changed at the word
human,
almost as if I'd said a deliciously naughty word or made a dirty joke.

“It was my name first, you know, ” James said, his tone completely conversational. “It's not my fault that I may have allegedly crossed over to the mortal realm one solstice and told a pregnant woman my real name.” A look of faux innocence replaced the mischievous glint in his eyes as he continued. “It's certainly not my fault if aforementioned woman liked my name—allegedly, of course—so much that she used it for her firstborn son.”

I caught on, quicker than I might have if this conversation had been taking place on Earth. “And if the name spread across the world and became very popular for generations afterward?” I asked.

James shrugged, looking just the tiniest bit sheepish as he did. “That would not be my fault,” he said. “Allegedly.”

I should have been weirded out that I was talking to the first James, especially as that meant he was at least a few thousand years old, but something about him felt so wonderfully normal that I couldn't quite accept that fact,
and I chose to ignore it—and his reaction to the word
human
—entirely.

Unconsciously, my gaze flitted toward Xane and Eze's girls, as I wondered if all Sidhe would have the same reaction. I found the three of them still in a standoff, the girls silent and Xane pontificating enough for all three of them. On the other side of the fire, the cliquey girls were still whispering and snorting to themselves, content to pretend that I'd never dared to tread on this sacred place or their sacrosanct little social circle.