“Do you like it?” Alec asked, and I knew from his voice alone that his palms were sweating. If I'd wanted to, I could have probed his mind more, could have poked around and seen what he was really thinking, but as previously discussed, I so was not going here again.
“I love it,” I said quietly. And I did. It wasn't beautiful in the way that the Otherworld was. The colors of the flowers were shades I'd seen before, every day, in the most commonplace objects. The bridge was made of the same color wood as my kitchen table. But the fact that I could picture myself loving this place as a little kid made me like it now. If I weren't Sidhe and hadn't seen the things I'd seen, the way that the ordinary fit together into something extraordinary here would have blown me away.
Instead it made me smile, even as I wondered if anything in this world would ever match what I'd seen the night before. Would I ever be in awe of earthly beauty again? Or was this feeling—warm and right and happy—the most anyone could ask for, especially of a first date?
“You want to sit?” Alec asked, nodding toward the bridge.
“Okay,” I said, glad that the weeping willow (and its shadow) was on the far side. Alec and I walked up to the bridge and I pulled him to a stop before he crossed out of the light. “Let's sit here,” I said.
Ohhhhhhhh!
Along with the mental gasp, I heard an audible one in the distance and came to the conclusion that Delia had used up her stealthiness for the day, and that she was in awe of this place as well.
“So,” I said, as Alec and I let our legs dangle off, “why haven't I seen you before this week? Are you new?”
That wasn't exactly what I meant to ask, especially because I had the feeling that Alec wasn't new, that I'd seen him around before, but hadn't noticed him. There was something familiar about him that I couldn't quite place, something that couldn't be explained away if he was new.
“I'm not surprised that you haven't noticed me before,” Alec said. “But I've always noticed you.” He mumbled the next bit into his shirt. “Always.”
Oh. And also, wow.
Everything all right up there? Zo asked. Delia and I can't hear anything.
Everything's fine, I replied, secretly glad that I'd managed to keep my more private thoughts from bleeding over. Great, actually.
How great? Delia asked smugly. And how much do you love me?
I didn't answer, and as the minutes passed lazily by, I found that I didn't need to consult with Delia to find something to say to Alec. It's not like I poured my heart out to him, or him to me. We didn't even talk that much, but being quiet with him felt good. After we'd been sitting on the bridge for more than an hour, I found myself telling him things I hadn't told anyone.
Things my friends would have called moping.
Things that might have hurt them if they'd heard me say or think them.
And then I told him stories about everything the four of us had been through together. Or almost everything.
“They're really important to you,” he said.
I nodded.
“You're really going to miss them,” he said, his voice even softer.
I nodded again.
“You like nodding,” he commented.
I nodded. He nodded back. And then, I finally got him to talk for a while about something that wasn't me. Of course, the topic he chose to talk about was the bridge, which was apparently a scale model of a bridge in England that was designed by Isaac Newton so that all the pieces fit together to support weight without needing any nails or screws to join them.
“It's about the angles,” he said.
“What about you?” I asked.
“My angles?” Alec frowned, as if doing some mental calculations.
“No,” I said. “Just … what about you? What's your family like? Who are your friends? What do you like doing when you're not sitting on bridges?” I was already babbling, so this seemed as good a time as any to get in a few of the questions I was supposed to be asking. “How did you know what my tattoo meant when you saw it yesterday?” and “What's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you, and oh, by the way, did it involve any supernatural fairy types?”
And where are the voices that keep warning you away from me? I added silently, knowing that I couldn't voice it out loud without really giving the game away.
Alec blinked several times at the sheer number of questions that had left my mouth in a blur of words.
I think I broke him, I thought to Delia.
Were you babbling? she asked.
Ummm … maybe.
He'll be fine. Just give him a chance to process.
In the back of my mind, I heard Zo mentally grumbling about how my physics class had turned into a battleground, yet her stakeout was yielding a whole lot of nothing. According to her, I had all the fun.
“Sorry,” Alec said, though I wasn't sure what he was apologizing for exactly. Being scared by my babble? Sometimes, it even scared me …
“I zoned out there for a second,” he continued. “But … ummm … your questions. Well, my family. I have two … ummm … sisters. We get along okay, I guess. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes I think that they don't really get me. The things I like. The things I say. Well, you know how sisters are …”
Actually, I didn't, but I wasn't going to risk scaring him into silence again.
“My friends are kind of like yours. They're more like family—even when I don't want them to be. Let's see … what else …”
As he murmured to himself, going back over my list of questions, I saw a flash of color in the corner of my eye and turned my head, half-expecting to see something freaky. Instead, I saw a butterfly, brighter-colored than any of the nearby flowers. I watched as it flew by Alec, and I found myself hoping the little guy would stay out of the shadows. I was pretty sure the Sidhe didn't have anything against butterflies, but I wasn't what I would call positive.
But before the butterfly got anywhere near the shadow, it disappeared. One second it was there. The next it wasn't.
“Bailey?” Alec must have noticed that my facial expression didn't match up to whatever he was saying. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, staring hard at the place the butterfly had been a moment before. “I'm fine.”
“We should probably go anyway.” Alec looked disappointed. I didn't need psychic powers to tell me that he didn't want this to end.
“We don't have to go yet,” I said quickly, but given that the last thing I wanted to do was disappear, à la the butterfly, I didn't sound as convincing as I otherwise would have. Alec stood and held out a hand to help me up.
“It'll be dark soon,” he said. “We should go.”
I took his hand, and the connection between us tickled my fingers. After a long moment, he let go, and the two of us walked off the bridge and back toward the woods.
I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the butterfly one more time, and then I actually stopped and turned around. “I'll be right back,” I called to Alec. “I forgot … something.” I ran back to the bridge and, as casually as I could, brought my hands to the necklace around my neck and lifted the charm so that the mirror was angled toward the bridge.
The reflection showed swirls of blue-green, and when I looked harder, I saw—just for a second—a place of extreme beauty, larger and bolder and more magical than life.
Bay?
Zo's thought, tinged with worry, brought me back to the present, and in the mirror, the Otherworld faded away.
Knowing that Alec might get suspicious if I stayed any longer, I headed back, with an excuse prepared about how I'd wanted to look around the bridge just one more time. The two of us settled back into silence as we walked through the woods and to my car, and we drove without talking until I dropped him off at the high school and then headed for home.
I was almost halfway there when I realized that either Alec hadn't answered my question about him knowing the meaning of my tattoo, or he had, but I'd been too zoned out to hear h
im.
I drove home on complete autopilot, parking my car at my house before walking across the street to Zo's. I didn't bother ringing the doorbell; none of us had bothered with knocking for years, and our doors were almost always unlocked. Oakridge was the kind of town where nothing ever happened. It was safe—or at least it had been until something had brought the Sidhe here. First Alecca and now this. I wondered if this was just the way things were going to be from now on. The biennial fairy fight: keeping the Otherworld in the Otherworld for the protection of this one.
I so didn't want to have to do this again in another two years. Especially if I'd be doing it alone.
Anyone could see how excited they are about their future without you.
This time I didn't have to question whether or not there was a foreign presence inside my head. There wasn't. This was all me. My memory. My issues. I just couldn't forget the things my attackers had said, and every time I let my guard down, my memory took me to the one place I didn't want to go.
I actively redirected my thoughts toward what the mirror had shown me on Alec's bridge. I would have preferred to think of just Alec, but beggars can't be choosers, and anything was better than giving time and space in my mind to irrational fears I shouldn't have had to begin with.
“Good. You're here.” Zo must have heard the front door open, because she walked out of the kitchen to greet me in the foyer. “I was starting to worry that we had left you and lover boy—lover geek—whatever— alone too soon. I don't trust him.”
Zo didn't trust anyone outside of our group. She just wasn't built that way.
“You can trust Alec,” I said, knowing my words would be completely lost on her. “I think I do.”
Zo was skeptical. She tossed me a Twinkie and I scrambled to catch it.
“Eat this,” Zo instructed sternly. “It's good for you.”
“Is not!” Delia yelled from upstairs. “She lies!”
The acoustics at Zo's house were perfect for yelling. Zo did her best to look mortally wounded by Delia's assertion that Twinkies did not equal health food. “Would I lie about something as important as Twinkies?
They represent at least three food groups: cakey, creamy, and …” She racked her brain for a third.
“Yummy?” I suggested. There was nothing for bringing me out of a funk like a conversation on the nutritional benefits of junk food. Of course, that didn't change the fact that my friends and I had much more serious things to discuss.
“You hear that, Queenie? Twinkies are yummy! Boo. Yeah.”
Zo didn't seem to realize how ridiculous the contrast between her tough-girl tone and the content of her speech really was. I didn't want to be the one to break it to her that the word yummy wasn't exactly intimidating.
“Come on.” Zo nudged me with the Twinkie box, and I noticed that she was carrying a bag of baby carrots in her other hand. “A-belle's in heavy research mode, and she's doling out jobs.”
“Is your job snack patrol?” I asked as the two of us made our way up the stairs toward her bedroom.
Zo shrugged. “It's better than making charts.”
Why was I completely unsurprised that Annabelle's research regime relied heavily on visual aids?
As I found out when I entered Zo's bedroom (aka Research Central) a few seconds later, the charts were very big. Poster-board-sized, as a matter of fact. And from the looks of it, Delia had been in charge of making them. As if Geek Watch weren't bad enough. This was just tempting fate.
Which was, technically speaking, tempting me.
Funny that I didn't actually feel tempted. Mainly, I was just really tired. Tired from a long day of first dates and supernatural mysteries, and tired of feeling a noticeable pang of sadness with every private joke that passed between the four of us unsaid.
They don't even know they're leaving.
You don't even know they're already gone.
“Tell us absolutely everything about your date.” Delia greeted me with a high-speed demand. “Was it absolutely amazing? What did you guys talk about? Was he really deep?” She paused, reflective. “I bet he was deep.”
Even though we had much bigger things to talk about, I knew that holding out on date details was completely futile. “I think he was deep. The two of us talked … about everything. Well, not everything.”
It wasn't like I could tell Alec the truth about me, or about the Otherworld, or about the fact that he had Sidhe stalkers.
“We talked about almost everything,” I said.
“Like what?” Zo was less into the dating scene than Delia was, but still curious enough to oblige with a question.
“We talked about you guys and growing up and our plan for next year.” That was as close as I could come to telling my friends that I'd told Alec things that I didn't necessarily want to repeat to them. “And sometimes we'd just sit there, not saying anything. It was nice.”
“Did you find out anything that explains why the Sidhe would be interested in him?” That came from Annabelle, who just couldn't push down the desire for more information to index and factor into her equations.
“I asked him about my tattoo, but then I got distracted.” With the image of the butterfly fresh in my mind, the whole story came spilling out, from the eerie disappearance of aforementioned butterfly to what I'd seen when I'd viewed the bridge through my mirror. Just talking about it was exhausting, but at the same time, getting it off my chest made me feel lighter than I had all day. There was definitely something to be said for sharing a burden.
My friends listened patiently as I rambled on, and it only took about three seconds after I stopped for Annabelle to assimilate all of the information and come to a bunch of conclusions. “If the bridge served as some kind of portal to the Otherworld, that would explain what you saw in the mirror, Bailey. It would also explain what happened to the butterfly: it simply passed from this world to the next. Plus, if the bridge really is some kind of hot spot and Alec hangs out there a lot, it makes sense that he might know things that normal humans wouldn't and that he might have attracted the Sidhe's attention.”
I didn't follow any of Annabelle's conclusions one hundred percent, but interrupting her at this point would have been like jumping in front of a moving train and trying to bring it to a stop by blowing on it with breath after puny breath.
“This actually makes perfect sense with my preliminary search results on crossing over to fairy worlds. There were a few different options before, but if I add in the bit about the bridge, in conjunction with the role that Mabon has played in all of our encounters with the Otherworld …”
Annabelle trailed off, and Zo rolled her eyes. “Carry the one,” she said, in imitation of A-belle's distinct brand of academic murmuring.
“Shut up.” Annabelle made a face at her cousin, but then carried on with her musings without missing a beat. “This new information also gives us another example of one of our necklaces being used to show Otherworldly things that aren't visible to the naked eye. I'm still not exactly sure of the mechanism …”
“Have you guys seen things?” I asked. “In your necklaces, have you seen stuff?”
Their silence told me that they hadn't.
“If I'm the only one seeing things, then why did Morgan give the necklaces to all four of us?” I asked.
Annabelle tilted her head to the side, her eyes going wide and vacant as her brain went to her happy place, where theories bounded around like puppies. “Maybe the necklaces only function in a set. Perhaps ours ground yours in some way that lets you channel the power. It makes sense that if only one of the necklaces was to work as some kind of conduit, it would be yours, given that you're part Sidhe …”
“Interesting,” Zo murmured, still imitating her cousin. “This is just … fascinating. And the appendices of the algorithms of … Yes, yes, this is it!”
This time, Delia threw a pillow at Zo on Annabelle's behalf.
“Thank you,” Annabelle said primly. “But since the natives se
em to be getting restless”—she cast a pointed look in Zo's direction—”maybe a few visual aids are in order.”
It was official: A-belle was in full-on chart mode. Delia pranced over to the poster board and, with a gesture reminiscent of Vanna White, she presented Exhibit A for Annabelle.
“This is a list of all of the questions we're still trying to answer,” Annabelle said, slipping from musing mode into lecture mode with little warning. “Right now, there are three big areas to discuss. First, how do people cross from our world into the Otherworld and vice versa? Lore seems to indicate that it can be done, and Bailey said that James mentioned having done it at some point in his past. This is pretty firm evidence that crossing over does happen, especially if you take into account the incident at school this afternoon.”
Annabelle made a face, and I felt somewhat comforted that, unlike Delia, Annabelle wasn't completely unimpressed with the whole snake thing. That said, she recovered quickly, continuing with her verbal dissertation on the questions she still needed to answer. “What kind of rules govern crossing over, and how strong is the barrier? Another, related question: What exactly happened to make Jessica Moore's hair turn to snakes this afternoon?”
So I was right that Annabelle and Zo had maintained their memory of the event, even though I'd stripped it away from everyone else. It was just as well—I would have told them about what happened anyway.
Annabelle cleared her throat, and I knew her well enough to know that the sound was aimed more at getting my attention than at unblocking her airways. “It seems likely that something mystical happening at our school is in some way related to Bailey and the Sidhe. So who are the likely candidates to have orchestrated that kind of display, what do they want, and how do we stop them if they try to do something like that again? And, assuming that some Sidhe did cross over to torture Jessica, did their crossing follow the rules we think govern the relationship between the worlds? And if it didn't follow these rules, how is this possible?”
Annabelle took a breath, and I swear that other than the one she'd used to facetiously clear her throat, it was the first breath she'd taken since starting to explain the questions written in bullet-point form on the chart. If she'd held her breath that long under water, I would have checked her for gills.