Bailey Morgan [2] Fate (8 page)

Zo seemed to have realized what she'd done. She should have known not to mention anything related to c-o-l-l-e-g-e around my mom.

“And her mother works there, too, doesn't she? I bet Dr. Porter could arrange for a private tour of some kind. I wonder if she knows anyone at Wellesley …”

I didn't need to be psychic to predict that Anna-belle's mom was going to be getting a call from mine very soon. With my luck, the four of us would end up spending fall break visiting colleges together, with special tours set up by whomever Dr. Porter knew at each one.

I seriously needed to figure out how to control my
fateing just enough to make sure that didn't happen. The moping penalties I would inevitably incur if it did would probably result in my hospitalization.

“What is that wonderful smell?” Zo's words sidetracked my mother.

“Cookies,” my mom said, and the two of them stood there for a second, grinning at each other. I could barely remember what their relationship had been like back when Zo's mom was around, but these days, Zo and my mom were both downright gleeful in their mutually beneficient relationship. In no time at all Zo had a cookie in each hand and I was nibbling around the edges of one of my own.

“So,” my mom said, “anything interesting happen at school today?”

Zo and I met eyes.

A boy in one of my classes recognized the tattoo you don't know I have.
I sent the thought in Zo's direction, and she sent another response we wouldn't be saying out loud back my way.

Some lady at the mall gave us magical necklaces,
Zo thought,
but we don't know how they work yet.

I'm going through some rite of passage in the fairy realm tonight,
I thought back to her.

Bailey has a new crush,
Zo continued.

I gave her a horrified look. As bad as talking about the Sidhe would be, talking about a potential crush would be a million times worse! My mom
loved
getting the lowdown on my love life (or lack thereof) a little too much.

“Interesting?” I repeated my mom's word choice. “Nope.”

Zo paused just long enough to make me nervous. “Not a thing.”

Fifteen minutes, several probing questions, and a half-dozen cookies (two for me, four for Zo) later, the two of us escaped to my room.

“What have I told you about thinking about anything that falls under the heading of
romance
in my mom's presence?” I said once the door was shut behind us.

Zo rolled her eyes. “Bailey, your mom isn't that perceptive. You're just really bad at bluffing.”

“And which one of us has a secret identity?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“The same one of us that could use her mind-control powers to make her mother do whatever she wanted.”

Clearly, Zo had lost her mind. I couldn't mind meld my mom. It wouldn't work. She'd know, or somebody would smite me for even thinking of doing such a thing. This was
my mom
we were talking about.

“Let's research,” I said, letting my mental shields down just enough to let some of my power leak over onto Zo.

“Cool,” she said. “Research!”

I smirked, and she threw a pillow at me.

“Darn you, Bay!”

“I thought you wanted me to use mind control,” I said, the picture of innocence.

“Not on me!” She threw another pillow. “Brat.”

I sent her a mental image of me sticking my tongue out.
Brat.

Zo took a defiant bite of the cookie she'd brought upstairs with her, and then we both snorted.

“Soooooo,” I said, drawing the word out. “Google?”

In the time it took me to actually navigate my way to Google (because, of course, I had to check my email first, and then a couple of my favorite websites, and then my email again), Annabelle probably could have skimmed eight encyclopedia entries on Greek mythology, four on Celtic traditions, and two on the historical role of jewelry in ritualistic mysticism. Unfortunately, I didn't exactly have A-belle's skills, which was why I had options for college and Annabelle had Options with a capital O.

“Bailey,” Zo said, and the one word carried an entire sentence with it, one that simultaneously warned me about moping, told me to concentrate on the task at hand, and suggested that I would need to supply her with more cookies soon.

“Right,” I said. “Research. This is me paying attention.”

This was me having no idea what exactly I should research. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Three or four times, I moved to type a word, only to jerk my hands away from the keys at the last second. Did I really want to see what the internet could tell me about Morgan? It would be easy to run a search for some of her older aliases, but at the same time, I wasn't sure how much learning about Poseidon or Neptune would tell me about the real Morgan.

Mythology never got things quite right. The Sidhe weren't who the Celts thought they were, the Fates weren't who the Greeks thought they were, and Morgan wasn't Poseidon or Neptune, even though she had once answered to those names.

“Bay. Lee.”

Zo broke my name down into two words this time, which basically meant everything that she'd communicated before, but with more urgency on the cookie front. She was getting antsy, and I knew from vast amounts of experience that an antsy Zo was not a good thing.

“Why don't you go get us some more cookies,” I suggested. “And I'll get started up here.”

“Likely story,” Zo said, tweaking my ponytail with one hand. I couldn't help but note that her skepticism didn't stop her from taking my advice and heading back down to the kitchen for round two of Cookie Day.

Once Zo left the room, I tried to make good on my
end of the deal, but I honestly didn't know where to start. I stared at the screen until my eyes started burning, but I refused to blink, hoping that something— other than the constant niggling reminder in the back of my mind that sooner or later, I'd have to learn to do all of this on my own—would come to me. Slowly, painstakingly, my fingers typed a single word.

R-e-c-k-o-n-i-n-g.

I hit enter, knowing as I did that there probably wasn't a website that explained an ancient Sidhe ceremony that took place in the world beyond the Nexus.

The first thing that popped up in the search results was some movie I'd never heard of about a crime-solving priest. Then there were a couple of e-zines, a page about zombies, and finally, a simple definition. I clicked on that last one, and words soon filled my screen.

Reckoning: noun.

Counting or computing a specific sum.

An itemized bill.

A settlement of accounts, as in “a day of reckoning.”

“Okay,” I said, as I processed this information and came to three very important conclusions: first, that there was a distinct chance that I'd be spending my first night in the world beyond doing the equivalent of Other worldly math homework; second, that the phrase “a day of reckoning” was distinctly creepy and made me think of cheery things like the end of the world and Judgment Day; and third, that there was a distinct chance that watching the movie with the crazy priest
might have been more helpful than what I was doing now.

Since I didn't have a copy of the movie, I settled for moving on and trying again, this time with a different word, one that I didn't really expect to tell me anything more than
Reckoning
had.

N-e-x-u-s.

It was Annabelle's word. I'd spent months referring to the place I went each night to weave as “the place I go each night to weave,” but Annabelle had started calling it the Nexus, and the name stuck. I probably could have just asked her where she got the word and what exactly it meant, but for some reason, I wanted to see for myself.

Nexus: noun.

The connection between items in a series.

A little more digging told me that it came from a Latin word meaning “to bind,” and with that single piece of information, I found myself flashing back to the first time I'd gone there, and the second, and the third. Everything I knew about that place and Sidhe history hurried busily to the forefront of my mind, each detail elbowing the others for room in my thoughts.

Once upon a time, the two worlds—the one the Sidhe lived in and the human world—were just barely offset from each other in metaphysical space. Over time, the barrier between the two became harder and harder to cross, and the more complete the separation between the worlds became, the more the Sidhe began to fade away, their power weakened by their distance from our world.

I tried to remember how the rest of the story went. I'd only heard it once, back when I'd first found out that the entities we were dealing with during our tattoo crusade were actually the mythological Fates. The specifics were a little fuzzy in my mind, but some details—like the fact that the barrier between the worlds had become harder to cross—were as solid and firm as they would have been if someone had spoken them to me just a moment before.

“As their connection to the human world weakened, so did their powers,” I murmured, trying to remember if that was the exact phrasing the woman who'd told me this particular tale had used. “So they did something to make sure that they'd never lose that connection completely.” I paused and gave up on repeating the story word for word, settling for my own version of what had happened. “They built the Nexus— the realm in between two realms—and they sent three small Sidhe children there, to watch humans live and to become permanently connected to those lives in the most intimate way possible.”

That was how Adea, Alecca, and Valgius had become the Fates. That was why, when I went to the Nexus each night, the Sidhe in me connected with the human souls in this world. Because in the Nexus, Adea, Valgius, and I were the connection between this world and the world of the Sidhe. The power inherent in human lives ran through us, and that made the rest of the Sidhe more powerful too.

Hadn't Adea said something about connections? Or maybe she'd called them ties. I couldn't really remember.

I cursed my memory, but part of me had to admit that maybe it wasn't so much a matter of not being able to remember as it was a matter of not paying that much attention the first time. Adea had used her “let's talk about the future” voice, and then she'd gotten all cryptic and I'd zoned out. It was a perfectly natural response—one that had gotten me through many college talks with my mom (not to mention my meeting with Mr. McMann earlier today), but unfortunately, I was beginning to suspect that in this case, this particular method wasn't exactly what you'd call helpful.

“I'm back, and I come bearing cookie.”

I glanced toward Zo, still caught up in my thoughts. “Cookie?” I asked on autopilot. “As in singular? Don't you usually come bearing cookie
s
?”

Zo shrugged. “There might have been a few casualties on the way up the stairs.”

Translation: She'd eaten them.

“You come up with anything good while I was gone?” she asked, handing me a cookie, which I set gingerly aside, because some of us didn't have stomachs the size of Montana and metabolisms that made warp speed look slow.

“Maybe,” I said. “I was thinking about the story that Keiri told us.”

“Keiri? As in Daughters of Adea, Sidhe-worshipping, told-us-about-the-Fates Keiri?”

I nodded. “That would be the one. She said that Adea and Val were the connection between humans and Sidhe.”

Zo nodded.

“Nexus means connection,” I continued, realizing even as I said it that I wasn't properly communicating the depth of my thoughts. Luckily, with Zo, it didn't matter, because she could read me as well as Annabelle read Latin.

“If Adea and Val connect the two worlds,” she said, “that means you do too. Right?”

I nodded.

“And this whole Reckoning thing is supposed to be you going to … what do they call the other world again?”

What
did
people call the Sidhe world? I'm sure Annabelle could have given us an alphabetized list of mythologically correct names, and I was pretty sure that Adea and Valgius had referred to it simply as “the place beyond,” but I settled for something a little more self-explanatory.

“I don't know,” I said slowly. “I guess people call the other world … ummm … the Otherworld.”

“Clever,” Zo opined.

I grinned at her. “I thought so.” After all, the other Sidhe lived there, and it was a world other than the one I spent most of my time in.

“What do you think it will be like?” Zo asked, her head tilted to the side and her voice softer than usual.

“I don't know,” I said. “The Nexus is pretty.”

The words sounded moronic to my ears, but Zo just nodded. “I think I remember that,” she said. “I was kind of concentrating on the evil fairy trying to kill us at
the time, but I remember things being very …” She trailed off.

Now it was my time to nod. “Yeah.”

The Nexus was hard to describe. Something about it defied description.

“Are you scared?” Zo's words caught me off guard. Our therapy session in the car aside, Zo wasn't exactly known for her sensitivity. She was more of a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of girl.