Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (16 page)

Eze, who was once known as Zeus, ruled the heavens, which had to refer somehow to the Seelie Court, since Eze was the Seelie Queen. Drogan was Hades, meaning he had inherited the underworld, also known as the Unseelie Court. An image came to my mind as I thought about the kind of place that the so-called King of Darkness would call home: dark and cavernous, but somehow every bit as beautiful as the land of light. That just left Morgan, who was Poseidon. James hadn't mentioned her, but he had told me that there were three
rulers before he'd cut himself off, leaving me with the impression that mentioning Morgan's existence, let alone her name, was forbidden. According to mythology, Poseidon ruled the seas.

The ones in the Otherworld, and the ones on Earth.

The second that last thought occurred to me, I knew it was true, but I wasn't entirely sure how I'd arrived at the conclusion, or even if it was a conclusion, or if it was some kind of memory, carried by my Sidhe blood to my human brain, slumbering there and waiting to be recalled. This insight came to me all at once, but I needed a few seconds to process it. Luckily, Anna-belle broke from talking to take a bite of her chicken sandwich.

A few seconds later, she was back in action. It took more than a chicken sandwich to keep our resident Research Girl from imparting wisdom to the masses (read: Delia, Zo, and me). “There are numerous myths involving Zeus, to the extent that there isn't really a definitive myth. He was thought to have many children: the Muses, Artemis, Apollo, Hercules … the list goes on and on, but it does not, interestingly enough, include Aphrodite, whom some consider to be older than Zeus himself.”

“Must be a clerical error,” I told her. “Because Lyria—that's Aphrodite—she's definitely Eze's daughter, and she's definitely a teenager. Though I guess the Sidhe version of a teenager is still probably thousands of years old. At least.”

I wondered how old James was, or Xane or Lyria or
Axia or any of them. If they'd played a role in Greek mythology, then they'd been around in the heyday of ancient Greece, and if James was to be believed, he was the first James. In other words, the “young ones” among the Sidhe were a
lot
older than I was. At this rate, I'd be sitting at the kids' table at “family” gatherings until I died.

If I died.

“In mythology, Aphrodite sprang to life fully formed from the foam in the sea,” Annabelle continued. “She's the goddess of love and beauty, though the love side of that equation seems to tend more toward lust than anything else.”

Zo stopped shoveling food into her mouth just long enough to whistle when Annabelle said
lust.

Annabelle blushed and glared at Zo, in that order, and then continued. “Aphrodite was known as a jealous goddess. She was moody and vengeful and very aware of her own beauty.”

I tried to picture Lyria. She'd been so quiet, quieter even than Annabelle, and she'd come to my rescue when Kiste and Cyna were playing the bitca game with me.
Timid
was a word I'd use to describe her, and maybe
graceful,
but
moody, jealous,
and
vengeful?

The ancient Greeks had apparently been smoking something when it came to the myths they'd constructed for Lyria.

“What about Artemis?” It was hard to think of Lyria without thinking of Axia. Of the two sisters, Axia was dominant, though hers was a quiet strength, diametrically
opposed to Xane's arrogance and even her own mother's steely, regal air.

“Artemis was the goddess of the hunt,” Annabelle replied. “She was often depicted carrying a bow with arrows. She was strong and sleek, the ethereal huntress, and was also considered to be the goddess of the moon. Her twin brother, Apollo, was the sun god.”

Sun and moon: the symbols intertwined on my lower back. Together, they meant life.

“There was no Apollo,” I said, sorting things out as I talked. “Just Artemis and Aphrodite, Zeus and Hades.”

Then again, just because I hadn't met Apollo didn't mean he didn't exist. For all I knew, James could be Apollo.

“What about Hot Fairy Dude?” Delia asked, practically (though not, I was sure, actually) reading my mind.

I considered the possibility. James as Apollo. The sun god, James.

It just sounded wrong. Then again, I was deeply suspicious that “James” wouldn't sound quite right with anything.

“I actually think James might not be an Olympian,” Annabelle said. “From the way Bailey described her experiences in the Otherworld, it sounds as if the Olympians she met have all been pretty high up in the Sidhe hierarchy. Zeus and Hades rule the two courts; Artemis and Aphrodite are Zeus's heirs. If James was Apollo, I think you would have gotten some sense of his status, Bailey.”

I definitely couldn't see James as a prince of anything. He seemed too normal, too goofy, too borderline human. Lyria, Axia, and Xane had identified themselves as heirs to the thrones from the get-go. James hadn't been involved in their political squabbling at all.

“So if he's not an Olympian, what does that leave?” I asked. Now that my earthly crush was shrouded in mystery, I felt more compelled to figure out everything about my Otherworldly one, especially who he was to the ancient Greeks.

“Unfortunately, James not being an Olympian doesn't narrow down our choices that much,” Anna-belle said. “The Greeks had gods for pretty much everything. James could be anyone.”

For once, my hormone-driven brain didn't zero in on the part of that sentence that focused on a cute male. Something else about Annabelle's words jumped out at me, grating in my ears. In lecture mode, A-belle was saying the word
god
just enough for it to bother me. It was one thing to talk about Greek gods and myths, but when the characters from those stories were people I'd met …

It just seemed wrong. Axia and Lyria, Drogan and Eze … they weren't gods. They just weren't. They were Sidhe, a proud, ancient race whose world was offset from ours. They were powerful, but they weren't
all
-powerful. They were beautiful, but they weren't necessarily good, and the part of me that had grown up in this world couldn't shake the feeling that if there was a god, a real one, he was something else entirely.

Annabelle, oblivious to my silent philosophizing, took another bite of her sandwich and then continued, happy to lecture indefinitely now that she'd sunk her teeth into the subject. “Just to give you a familiar example of some non-Olympians, the Fates, also referred to as the Moirai, were considered separate from, and to some degree lower than, those who dwelled on Olympus.”

You reek of mortality.

Lower than the Olympians, through my association with this world and the mortals who lived here. Separated from the Otherworld; exiled to the Nexus.

“Other non-Olympians included the Muses, the Graces, and the Furies. Tangentially, the number three seems to hold a great deal of significance in these myths, though there were, of course, nine Muses.”

“What about cupids?” Delia asked. “That's Greek mythology, right?”

“Cupid,” Annabelle corrected, “as in singular, and that name is actually Roman. To the Greeks, he was Eros.”

My mind went again to James, and I tried to picture him as Cupid. From there, my thoughts progressed (or maybe digressed) into a rather elaborate daydream involving James setting his sights and his arrows on me.

“Eros was quite easily distinguishable among the Greek gods,” Annabelle continued, “due to his wings.”

I knew better than anyone that the Greeks had gotten a lot of things wrong, so I didn't let A-belle's words burst my daydream bubble quite yet, even though I had to admit that James didn't seem overly romantic,
at least not toward me. Still, James could have been Eros. If quiet, timid Lyria was Aphrodite, anything was possible.

“Speaking of Cupid,” Delia said, refusing to use the Greek name, probably because the Roman one made her think of Valentine's Day, which most girls loathed but Delia actually adored, because red was one of her best colors and she had a weakness for those candy hearts that pretty much no one else liked but everyone handed out each year anyway. “Can I fold down the backseat so I can spread out my supplies?”

Delia saying the words
Cupid
and
supplies
in close proximity to each other could not possibly be a good thing.

“That depends,” Zo said suspiciously. “Are we going to have a repeat of the poster-board massacre?”

Massacre
was probably overstating things. A little.

“I was
eight”
Delia retorted, “and it's not like anybody died!”

“Answer the question,” Zo deadpanned.

“Fine,” Delia said pertly. She lifted one manicured hand into the air. “I do solemnly swear that I have my poster board under control.”

“And no part of this secret project involves putting streaks in my hair?” Zo continued, suspicious as always.

“For the last time, they're called highlights,” Delia huffed, “but I promise to leave your hair alone.”

“Deal.”

Delia climbed out of the car and opened the back, letting down the tailgate and manhandling the rear seats
into a folded position so that she could spread out the suspiciously large amount of “supplies” she'd brought.

“Okay,” I said, trying to stay focused and not allowing myself to think too much about Delia's project. “Cupid, Zeus, Hades, Artemis, Aphrodite, the Fates, etc., etc. Anything else?”

I could tell just by looking at her that Annabelle was dying to correct my et ceteras, but instead she just glanced at her packet. “There's a story is section B-1 you really need to read. It should be highlighted in red.”

“Red was Aphrodite?” I tried to remember the color scheme.

“Hades,” Zo corrected. Though she wouldn't have admitted it under threat of torture, Zo was better at following her cousin's endearingly anal organization techniques than the rest of us. It must have been something in those Porter genes.

“It's a story about how exactly Hades got his bride,” Annabelle said, and it occurred to me for the first time that somewhere out there, Xane probably had a mother.

“I know this one,” Zo said. “So-and-so kidnaps such-and-such and brings her to the underworld.” Zo's grasp of Greek mythology was shaky at best. She had this theory that the whole thing was one giant soap opera.

Not that I could disprove that particular point, based on everything I'd seen.

“Hades kidnapped a girl named Persephone and
took her to the Underworld as his bride,” Annabelle said. “While she was there, she ate some pomegranate seeds, and because of this, she was trapped there for a certain number of months each year, unable to return to the world above.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking of Drogan and Xane and the underworld I hadn't seen. “No pomegranate seeds.”

“No food,” Annabelle corrected. “Nothing to drink, either. It's another one of those overlaps between Celtic and Greek mythology. Several sources I found mentioned that if a human eats or drinks in the Other-world, they can never leave. Ever. In the rare instances in which they do leave, they starve to death, because mortal food never tastes the same again.”

For a split second, a jolt of something akin to fear passed through my body as I realized how close I'd come to drinking the night before. I stared down at my hamburger, and the bite in my mouth seemed to turn to sawdust. I was objectively lucky that I hadn't had anything to drink last night, but I could still almost taste the air, the mist, the place itself on my tongue. I put my burger down, my appetite gone.

“In Greek mythology,” Annabelle continued, uncharacteristically oblivious to my train of thought, “if a mortal drank ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, he or she became immortal, like the gods themselves. It's unclear what happened after that, or if something like that could actually happen to you, because you're not entirely human to begin with, but either way, I don't think
you should eat or drink anything while you're there, just in case.”

I glanced at Zo. Following Annabelle's dictate would have been much harder for her than it would be for me.

“I have two questions,” Delia announced from the backseat.

“Shoot,” Annabelle said.

“First question is for Bailey. This Hades guy, the one who kidnapped Persephone?”

An image of Drogan—pale skin, hair the color of midnight—filled my mind. “Yeah?”

“Is he hot?”

It was such a Delia question to ask. Next, she'd be asking me what Eze had been wearing.

“He's old,” I said. “Really old.” That was probably an understatement. I wasn't sure how many thousands of years Drogan had been ruling the Unseelie Court, so I put it in terms I knew Delia would understand. “He looks at least thirty.”

“Oh.” Delia got over her disappointment surprisingly quickly. “My second question is for Annabelle.”

Annabelle tilted her head to the side, waiting.

“Are we done with the researchy stuff yet? Because lunch period is already half over, and I'm going to need at least twenty minutes to bring you guys up to speed on Geek Watch.”

Good old Delia. If you needed someone to break up solemnity, Delia was your girl.

“I'll run some searches on crossing over and the
mythological significance of shadows tonight,” Anna-belle said, “but for now, I'm done. It's all you, Dee.”

Zo leaned around her seat to meet my eyes. She said nothing out loud but sent a thought my way:
I
knew
letting her near poster board was a mistake.