Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (15 page)

“Did you take a photo of your geek?” That was from Delia.

“No,” Annabelle said. “If Bailey's wanting to know if something weird happened in our first hours, that probably means something weird happened in hers.”

I knew I could count on Annabelle to pick up on that. She was Old Reliable
and
Miss Observant, and I loved her for it.

“Something did happen,” I said, and my mind went straight to the way Alec had smiled at me, even though I'd meant to express the eerier aspects of my study-hall experience.

“Well, don't leave us hanging, Bay,” Zo said as she
started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “And where do you guys want to go?” It occurred to me that if the rest of us didn't get our bids for lunch in soon, with Zo behind the wheel, we'd inevitably end up at Coney, a restaurant where everything came with a side of chili and two sides of cheese.

Annabelle intervened. “Let's go to Fifties,” she said decisively, and Delia and I groaned in protest, my news and the fact that I had yet to dish it temporarily forgotten. There are some things in life that take precedent over just about anything. Our joint Fifties-related trauma was one of those things. The summer we were sixteen, all four of us got jobs as carhops at Fifties, a drive-in restaurant where your food was delivered directly to your car by girls on roller skates.

Needless to say, I'd spent the entire summer as one giant bruise, and the fifties-style burgers and fries had lost most of their appeal over the course of our carhop tenure.

“We've got a lot to discuss.” Annabelle explained her logic, turning around to give me a look that clearly stated that she was still waiting to hear what had happened to me during first hour. “And these discussions are probably ones we shouldn't have in public.” She paused. “Right, Bay?”

I nodded. The last thing I needed was for someone to overhear me saying something about the voices in my head. The popular crowd already thought I was a loser; I didn't need the rest of the school thinking I was clinically insane, too.

“Annabelle's right,” I said, for probably the eight millionth time in the past few years. “We need privacy, and things don't get more private than staying inside the car.” Fifties was hands down the fastest, easiest option that ruled out the possibility of eavesdroppers.

“Done.” Zo was pleased—the summer we'd worked at Fifties, she'd easily eaten her weight in onion rings.

Delia wasn't as enthused, but she tried to stay positive. “I hear they're serving salads now,” she said, tactfully not mentioning that a Fifties salad was, in all likelihood given the rest of the menu, a bunch of deep-fried lettuce. “And speaking of salads, Bailey, talk!”

Delia didn't bother with actual segues. She just didn't have to.

“Okay,” I said, dragging out the word to give my mind time to process bits and pieces of memory from this morning: the sound of the voice in my head, the words it had spoken, the way Alec had looked at me, the weirdness I'd felt in the room just before walking out the door.

My friends didn't interrupt my thought process— not even Delia, who had trouble staying quiet more often than not.

“There were voices,” I said. “In my head.”

My friends took this news quite well.

“No offense, but aren't there always voices in your head?” Zo asked. “I mean, you're psychic. It kind of comes with the gig.”

“Not that kind of voice,” I said. “This wasn't someone's thoughts. This was someone talking to me, the way that Adea and Val do.”

“And you're certain it wasn't either of them.” Annabelle's words were a statement, not a question, but I confirmed them anyway.

“I'm positive. When Adea and Valgius talk to me, their voices are …” There were so many words.
Bone-shattering
and
mind-boggling
and
wonderfully terrible.
“Trust me. This wasn't them. It sounded …” It took me a second to find the right word. “Younger.”

At the time I'd heard the words, my impressions had centered on the venom in the tone, but as soon as my mouth picked
younger
to describe it, I knew it was true. Adea and Valgius never sounded hateful. Even Alecca, who'd been a Big Bad in every sense of the term, didn't resort to mean. There was enough power in her voice that she didn't need to.

Once you reach a certain point on the evil scale, mean just looks kind of silly.

“The voice warned me away from Alec,” I said. “And whoever it was”—with my realization about the speaker's age, the suspect list had just gotten a whole lot shorter—”they really meant it.”

“Who's Alec?” Zo asked.

I sensed, rather than saw, Delia rolling her eyes. “Alec's her geek. Obvi.”

“The one who knew what your tattoo meant?” Annabelle asked.

I nodded.

“And now one of the Sidhe …” She paused. “We are working on the assumption that the voice was a Sidhe, yes?”

I nodded. Maybe there were other possibilities— another psychic, some mystical creature I didn't even know about—but given who and what I was, Sidhe was our best bet. And besides, if what James had said the night before, about Sidhe innately knowing their own, was to be believed, it made sense for me to trust my instincts. I'd felt Morgan near before I'd seen her. I'd felt the other Sidhe the moment I'd entered the Other-world.

I'd felt that same familiarity, only less so, with each cutting word the voice in my head had spoken.

“Alec knew what your tattoo meant, and now one of the Sidhe is warning you away from him. Either he's dangerous and someone's warning you off for your own good, or somebody doesn't want the two of you together because it interferes with their plans.”

“I think he knows something,” I said. “Something that somebody else doesn't want me to know.” I just couldn't imagine what that could be. I'd been to the Otherworld. I'd met other Sidhe. What could a high school geek know that would set one of them on edge?

“You have to talk to him,” Delia said. “Trust me on this one. If someone is telling you to stay away from him, what that really means is that he's worth having. Every guy I've ever dated has come complete with a ‘back off, he's mine’ memo. Apparently, your geek is a desirable.” She smiled. “The movement is growing.”

Zo snorted. “Delia, I seriously doubt that the Sidhe want Bailey to stay away from Geek Boy so that they can date him themselves.”

“But they could want him for something else,” Annabelle said thoughtfully. “In some mythologies, the fair folk enjoy playing with humans. Making them their pets. Some people even believed that fairies stole human babies and replaced them with their own.”

“So either the Sidhe want Alec for something, in which case Bailey needs to be his personal bodyguard, or he knows something, in which case Bailey needs to get the information out of him. Either way, I stand by my original assessment. The two of them totally need to date. Bailey can guard his body all she wants.” Delia delivered that last sentence with a tone that had me fighting off a blush.

Still, it wasn't the worst idea in the world …

“Was there anything else?” Annabelle asked me.

“She wants something she can research,” Zo said, interpreting for her cousin. “Apparently, now that she's looked up everything you asked her about this morning, she's lusting after a new assignment.”

“I do not lust,” Annabelle said.

Delia reached up to pat A-belle's arm consolingly. “That's just because you haven't found the right geek yet. Don't worry, Delia is on the case!”

Delia referring to herself in the third person was never a good thing. Trying to head off disaster, I gave Annabelle what she'd asked for. “When I heard the voices, I was sitting in shadows. And I keep feeling like
someone is watching me, like there's something more to a shadow than there used to be. And then there was this weird thing as we were leaving class. I can't even describe it, but it felt distinctly creepy.”

“Shadows,” Annabelle murmured. “I'll add it to my research queue. And I'll look for information about the Sidhe crossing into our world, too. Even if they're just here psychically, it might help us figure out how it's done.”

About that time, I noticed that the car wasn't moving. “How long have we been at Fifties?” I asked.

“Five minutes,” Zo said proudly. “We made great time.”

I was grateful that I'd been so caught up in our conversation that I hadn't noticed the driving techniques that allowed us to make it to Fifties in half the time it should have taken.

“We should probably order,” Annabelle said. “And then I have some things we need to discuss.”

We ordered, and I tried to figure out what exactly the next discussion would entail. When Annabelle pulled out a three-inch-thick binder and started handing out packets of paper, I flashed back to what Zo had said about Annabelle finishing her research assignment and wanting a new one.

A-belle was nothing if not efficient.

“This is the best overview I could find of Greek mythology,” she said. “It's pretty comprehensive, and
covers the Olympians, lesser gods, and heroes.” All business, she handed us each another, smaller packet. “This one has information on the specific entities you asked about, Bailey, compiled and paraphrased from a variety of sources and color coded by god. Aphrodite is yellow, Artemis is green, Poseidon is blue, Hades is red, and Zeus is pink.”

Taken out of context, Zeus being pink would have seemed weird, but thinking about Eze, it made perfect sense.

When Annabelle started handing out a third packet of printouts, I thought Zo was going to have a heart attack. This was probably more reading than she'd done all of last year.

“This is everything I was able to come up with on the Otherworld, also known by a variety of other names, all of which refer to a place inhabited by fairy races and offset from the mortal plane in some way.” Annabelle paused for a breath and then rattled on. “Incidentally, one of the terms for the Otherworld is
Faerie,
which is also used to refer to the creatures who live there. This term has its root in the Greek
fata,
which was originally used in reference to the three Fates.”

Normally, when A-belle started a sentence with “incidentally,” the rest of the sentence was the kind of thing that she found interesting but I didn't even understand: boring with a side of over-my-head. This time, however, I followed her point surprisingly well. Even though the Greeks and the Celts hadn't melded their
mythology in any way that approximated reality as I knew it, somehow, the word
fairy
—however it was spelled—came from the way the ancient Greeks had referred to Adea, Alecca, and Valgius.

Maybe on some level someone had figured it out. The Fates were faeries, the creatures who lived in the Otherworld. Sidhe.

Having successfully imparted that interesting tidbit, Annabelle continued summarizing her findings. “From what I've been able to tell, it appears as though most myths have the Otherworld as home to a variety of different kinds of supernatural creatures, including fairy varieties other than Sidhe.”

Wrong,
I thought. The Otherworld was for Sidhe, and only Sidhe. Power and beauty. Nothing else.

“Some stories divide the Otherworld into two parts, so I've divided this information into sections as well. The Seelie Court, which you'll find on pages three and four of this handout, traditionally houses the more benign fairies, and the Unseelie Court—on pages five and six—seems a lot more sinister.”

Wrong again. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that Eze and Drogan were matched on many levels; neither of them was more dangerous than the other. They were equally wonderful and equally horrible and even thinking their names generated in me a bone-deep desire to bow.

A tap at the window made me jump, as much as I could with my seat belt still on. Zo rolled down the window, and a poor, beleaguered carhop, who was
probably thinking about how much she hated roller skates and hamburgers and us, handed over a large bag bulging with food. It took us a few minutes to get the money right, and the entire time I kept one eye on the carhop, wondering if we'd be the ones to push her over the carhop edge.

After we'd paid, she begrudgingly handed us some napkins and a single packet of ketchup to share, and without another word or, heaven forbid, a smile, she skated away.

Zo rolled up the window and, like some kind of fast-food Santa Claus, began happily doling out our food. I accepted my cheeseburger and then craned my neck to look at Delia's salad, which appeared to be impressively green, aside from a liberal splattering of croutons half the size of my fist.

Downright jovial now that she was surrounded by edibles, Zo spared a thoughtful look for the thick wad of papers Annabelle had handed her. “You want to give us the condensed version of this, A-belle?”

Annabelle, after chewing a dainty bite of onion ring, agreed, and the rest of us dug into the food and tuned in to the Annabelle Porter Show. “Most of the individuals Bailey asked about were Olympians, senior gods who were thought to dwell primarily on Mount Olympus.”

I remembered the mountain I'd stood on the night before and the way it had morphed to meet our needs, the way it had literally grown beneath my feet, catapulting me into the sweet mist of the sky as I ran.

“The Olympians came to power after overthrowing an older generation of gods called the Titans. If we assume that this reflects something that actually happened in Sidhe history, I can only guess that there was some kind of power struggle and that the current rulers emerged as victors during or before the heyday of ancient Greece.”

I nibbled around the edge of a Tater Tot. A-belle in scholarly mode was a thing to behold.

“After the war with the Titans, three of the Olympians, brothers, emerged as leaders and divided their world among them. Zeus became ruler of the heavens, Hades inherited the underworld, and Poseidon got the seas.”

I tried to interweave this information with what I'd learned the night before. Mythology never got things quite right, so I didn't expect what I'd seen to line up exactly with what Annabelle was saying, but decided I'd settle for making as much sense out of the overlap as I could.