“Are you sure I don't have a fever?” I asked, trying to sound pathetic.
My mom rolled her eyes heavenward, so sure was she of her temperature-reading capabilities, but to placate me, she placed her hand on my forehead again and frowned.
“You do feel a bit warm,” she said, sounding puzzled. “Why don't you run up and change into your pajamas, and I'll bring you some chicken noodle soup and a Sprite.”
I'd used my powers on my mom. I was officially going to a very bad place. Just not literally, I hoped, or at the very least, not soon.
Despite the nagging guilt at mojoing my mom, I couldn't help but feel a tiny bit proud of my ingenuity when, fifteen minutes later, I finished my soup and closed my eyes. I'd come up with a valid excuse for going to bed when it was barely dark outside, and I'd made it fly with my mom without putting a mind meld on her. That was a definite improvement over my past efforts at parental subterfuge.
Without my friends nearby, I didn't have to worry about others' thoughts in my head. Unfortunately, my own were enough to keep anyone awake at night. My mind bounced back and forth, from the extraordinary to the mundane, from the image of bald Jessica to Alec smiling to Delia presiding over our Geek Watch proceedings with typical flair. Images of my meeting with Mr. McMann mingled with my recollections of the Otherworld landscape. I thought of James, and that made me think of Alec again, and thinking of the two of them made me think of Kane, which made me think of Alexandra Atkins, which led me right back to Jessica, the snakes, and the voices in my head.
I thought of my bleeding finger and of the pendant I wore around my neck even now. I thought of blue-green color seeping into my world, touching everything and leaving nothing unmarked until every last bit of normality had been sapped from my life. I thought of physics and friction and what it felt like to be caught in the middle of two force vectors, competing with each other for the right to tell you what to do.
I thought of my friends and Drogan and Eze and the way the vampire girls had slid their hands up and down James's body, eyeing me possessively all the while.
And then, for a split second, there was nothing, and in that single moment of peace, my breathing evened out and consciousness ebbed slowly away.
This time, I woke up facedown, my nose smushed up against the Seal in a position that was neither comfortable nor flattering. I pushed myself to a sitting position and pulled my legs in close to my body.
“You're here early,” Adea commented, her tone that very distinct kind of neutral that says “I know you, and I know you're up to something.”
“I have questions. I need answers.” I didn't beat around the bush. “What can you guys tell me about what happened at school today?”
The two of them exchanged a glance, and I didn't like the look of it. At all. They knew something, but they weren't telling. I hated being kept out of the Otherworldly loop.
“Your powers have matured even more than we had realized,” Valgius said. It took me a second to get that he was referring to the giant memory-rewriting fest I'd gone on that afternoon.
“What else can you tell me?” I said. “I don't want to hear about my powers. I want to hear about what happened, who did it, and how.”
“There's nothing we can say that we haven't told you already,” Adea said softly.
“There are limits to what may be said, rules that govern the sway we hold over your choices.”
I hadn't heard Valgius sound that serious since the fight with Alecca.
I knew Morgan showing up wasn't a good thing. And if that hadn't tipped me off, the thing with the snakes might have.
“She interferes,” Adea said.
“Who does?” I asked, but I had a pretty good feeling that she was referring to Morgan and not snakes and that she'd somehow read my mind. How had she managed that one? I wondered. It had been a long time since my thoughts were transparent to the other Fates.
“Sometimes you shield your thoughts,” Adea said, answering my unasked question instead of the one I'd voiced. “Sometimes you broadcast them. It's a very human trait, Bailey.”
She reeks of mortali—
I didn't let myself finish that thought. All I reeked of right now was a need for answers. And I was going to get them.
“What does she interfere with?” I asked. I knew instinctively that I shouldn't say Morgan's name in this place. I wasn't sure why, but right now that particular why didn't matter, and for once, I heeded the little red flags in my head and played it cautious.
“She interferes with the Reckoning,” Valgius said.
“What is a Reckoning?” I said. “And don't just tell me it's my introduction to the others. I met them last night, and I don't feel Reckoned.”
Adea chose her words carefully. “For most Sidhe, the Reckoning is a time of acceptance; a time when they come before the court they've chosen and pledge their allegiance to our way.”
“It's a transition into adulthood,” Valgius said. “It is a choice.”
“What kind of choice?” I asked suspiciously. Adea and Valgius were silent. “Let me guess: You can't tell me, because there are limits to what you're allowed to say and telling me would break the rules.”
I chose my next question carefully.
“Whose rules are we playing by here?”
“To be Sidhe means to be connected. Even as separated as this place is from Home, we are connected. To the Others. To the land. To the courts.”
Another nonanswer. Yay. I tried to wade my way through to their meaning. “The Others, the land, and the courts.” The first part was simple enough. “The Others” referred to the other Sidhe, a number of whom I'd met the day before and some of whom had made my head their second home. “The land” meant the Otherworld itself, which pulled at my soul even now, calling me Home. “The courts,” however, was what I zeroed in on.
Seelie and Unseelie.
Light and Dark.
Eze and Drogan. They were too old and too powerful to be the young-sounding ones who'd threatened me that afternoon, but that didn't mean that they weren't behind it.
“There's something going on here,” I said. “And they won't let you tell me what.” I refused to say Eze's or Drogan's name, because I hadn't and couldn't say Morgan's.
“Some of what will happen is their doing,” Adea said, keeping her words as vague as mine had been, “and some of what will happen is not. The Reckoning represents a decision. For most Sidhe, that decision involves the court to which they pledge. Light and dark, male and female, hot and cold: all things in the Otherworld exist in balance, and the Reckoning serves that balance as much as either court.”
I wasn't exactly comforted by the fact that they were throwing around the b-word. Balance (or lack thereof) was what had allowed Alecca to gather enough strength to try to end the world two years ago. Balance was the purpose of the Seal, and once upon a time, Morgan had told me that I was a balance unto myself.
And—though I couldn't remember exactly what they'd said before—I was about ninety percent sure that the spell Adea and Valgius had used to call me to the Seal the day before had somehow involved balance.
Was that what Adea meant when she said that they'd already told me all that they could? If so, I seriously needed to pay better attention the next time someone used mystical chanting to pull me out of study hall.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked.
Adea and Valgius looked at each other and then they spoke as one. “Be careful.” Their warning was so soft that I had to strain to make out the words, yet the combined effect of their voices was powerful enough to make me take a step backward.
I had to remind myself that I wasn't afraid of them. The three of us had a bond that went back centuries longer than I'd even been alive. We were the Fates, as connected to one another as birth, life, and death themselves.
And yet … they had secrets, things that they couldn't or wouldn't tell me. Things that I needed to know.
“When are we going
?” I asked. I didn't have to specify where.
“Later,” Adea said. “They aren't expecting us until long after your nightfall. You have time, Bailey.”
Time for what?
“Time for answers,” Valgius said. He held out a hand and I took it, allowing him to help me to my feet.
“Time for answers,” I repeated, hoping that I'd find something in the words themselves. No such luck. “And where might those answers be?”
Adea gave me a look, the meaning of which was as mysterious to me as the workings of the average male mind. “Trust your instincts,” she said.
The last time I'd acted on my instincts in the Nexus, I'd ended up in the Otherworld and my most basic and primal self hadn't wanted to leave. “Trust” was not something I should probably be applying to my instincts any time soon.
I waited, figuring that given enough time, Adea and Valgius would find another loophole and give me a nudge in the right direction, but instead the two of them went to work. Valgius walked toward the Seal and, as his eyes bore into it, light surged into his hands. Soon, he was holding a sphere so bright and pure that it made the fabric I worked with look gray and dingy by comparison. He took the light, molded and cajoled it, whispering words whose meaning I'd never been able to grasp. I couldn't even replicate the sounds in my mind and, no matter how hard I'd tried over the past two years, I'd never been able to carry any part of his whispered words with me back to the mortal realm.
As Valgius whispered and moved his hands back and forth over the light, a tiny string emerged, stretching out from the ball in a timid, elegant line until, after a moment, it broke free and flew back to the Seal.
Val's murmurings continued, but I turned my attention to Adea, who'd gathered a square of light from the Seal. It stood in the air before her, moving on its own, interconnected with thousands of others, and Adea, perfectly serene, began to sing. Her voice was low and melodic, and there was something hauntingly beautiful about the song. It was the last thing a mortal heard before the end, and I got the feeling that when a person had a near-death experience and they talked about the light at the end of the tunnel, what they were really talking about was thismoment, this song. It was too big for just one of the senses, too old for anyone, even Adea, to really understand its tune.
The light in her hands grew brighter as she sang. It expanded, stretching and fighting against the confines of its physical form until it broke free, splitting into thousands of pinpoints of light that twinkled and then disappeared.
Birth was a whisper. Death was a song. And all of a sudden, I knew what Adea meant by telling me to trust my instincts. The two of them couldn't give me answers, but there were some things beyond the control of the Other-world courts. What had happened at school today had been part of the mortal realm, part of human life.
And if it was part of life, that meant it was part of me. I might not have been able to conjure up cabana boys or control my own future, but there was one thing I could do to find answers.
I could weave.
I turned to the Seal, my body already beginning to move in tandem with Adea's song and Valgius's rhythmic, whispered words.
Life.
Life.
Life.
The souls of the world rushed into my body, and the force of it threw my head back. I couldn't breathe, but I didn't need to.
Life.
Life.
Life.
This was my oxygen. This was my purpose, my connection, my everything. I felt the souls of the world, felt them everywhere in every aspect of my being, and I couldn't stand still.
Life.
Life.
Life.
I had to weave. The web appeared before me, thousands of overlapping fabrics whose threads arched toward my fingertips. My fingers grappled with the fabric. Like a spider, I wove, my movements hardwired into my nature.
Life.
Life.
Wrong.
And there it was, a twinge of wrongness, fingernails on the chalkboard inside my mind. I forced myself to concentrate on that feeling, and the dance grew more frantic, my movements frenzied and unpredictable.
Wrong.
I couldn't stop to wonder at the wrongness or to force it into a more familiar form. All I could do was feel it and keep weaving.
Weave. Life. Wrong.
Wrong. Life. Weave.
My connection to the mortal realm lived on my skin and in it, but buried deeper in my being, there was something else, another connection, and as I worked my way through the wrongness, it separated into two feelings, one that danced along the surface of my body and one that burrowed deeper, like to like.
And then the fabric in front of me folded and changed, until I was looking at just one life, intertwined with thousands upon thousands of others. I stared at it, trying to find its rhythm, its reason for being here at this moment, demanding my attention more than the rest of the world's souls combined.
As I stared at it, my movements slowing, I saw the briefest flash of a pattern in the fabric, an image I knew as well as my own face.
My tattoo.
I continued weaving, each motion deliberate and slow, though I couldn't read meaning into the movements, no matter how hard I tried, and I watched as my life twisted and turned, as the threads that made up my past and my future unraveled and my fingers nimbly wove them back together.
Wrong.
The feeling surprised me, and as I turned it over in my mind and worked my hands over it in the flesh, the knowledge I'd been waiting for came to me. I felt my own life on my skin's surf ace and deep inside, and this time, the meaning of the wrongness was clear.
Mortal and Sidhe: two things that weren't supposed to mix. I'd realized earlier that the theory of liminality could be applied to me, as a person. I knew that I existed in between that which was human and that which was Sidhe. I just didn't know what that meant and, until this second, I hadn't realized how very wrong it seemed.
Almost as wrong as what had happened in my life that afternoon. The Otherworld and the mortal realm were separated. The Sidhe were not meant to cross over to my world, and humans were not meant to cross into theirs, except at special times and special places. Annabelle was right. There were rules, and the rules were being broken, and something was allowing that to happen.
Something liminal.
Something wrong.
Me. My life. My destiny. I was human, and I wasn't. I was Sidhe, and I wasn't. I was both and neither, and as I wove, the words of the forgotten spell echoed as music in my mind.
To you we call,
Our third of three.
Child of power
Who set us free.
Blood in your veins,
The barrier holds.
If balance wavers,
The bridge unfolds.
We call you now
With earth and sea,
Air and fire,
So mote it be.
“So mote it be.” I whispered the words, and as I did, the pull of the soul fabric finally let go of my body and it was my own again.
I couldn't pretend to understand everything that had happened while I was weaving, but I did manage to hold on to two things. The first was that the wrongness I'd felt in the world's web mirrored the wrongness I saw in myself. This afternoon, one or more Sidhe had crossed into the mortal realm, disrupting the pattern I wove, but the break in the pattern had been there before.
It existed in me.
I was mortal, and I was Sidhe. Once upon a time, I'd been a balance unto myself, but now, for whatever reason, that had changed. Maybe it was because I'd been to the Otherworld. Maybe it had to do with just how much my powers had grown over the past two years. Or maybe it was because senior year had thrown me off balance as a person and that had worked its way into my mystical makeup. Maybe I'd become a double liminality: half human, half Sidhe; half child, half adult. My whole life was one giant transition state, and I wasn't, by any meaning of the word, balanced.
/> Repeating the words of the spell over and over again in my mind, I fought my way to the connection between what I'd felt in myself and what I'd felt in the rest of the world.
Blood in my veins,
The barrier holds.
If balance wavers,
The bridge unfolds.
Somewhere there was a bridge that connected the Otherworld and the mortal realm, and because of me, because of my imbalance and the forty million transitions in mylife and mind, that bridge was open for business. The rules to crossing over were changing. It was becoming easier. Shadows, doorways, bridges … what was next?.
I could only hope that by the time I woke up tomorrow morning, Annabelle would be able to tell me who was taking advantage of these new rules, and that I'd figure out how to stop them.
Beside me, Adea stopped singing and Valgius whispered his last life into being.
“It's time,” Adea said. “Are you ready?”
Ready to see the others again? Ready for the beauty and the power and the feeling of being exactly where I belonged?
Ready for Reckoning, Part Deux?
I was and I wasn't, and it didn't matter either way. I stepped forward and took their hands in mine, and as heat surged between us, I allowed myself to Remember.
Feral beauty. Unforgivable power. Everlasting light.
That was what it meant to be Sidhe.
I was running, and it felt so good that I couldn't remember despising every lap I'd ever been forced to run in gym. I was fast and the world around me little more than a blur, but with each step I took, my heightened senses picked up on every sound, every color, every smell. I might as well have been blind and deaf in the mortal realm for the vast-ness of the differences between my perceptions there and here.
We ran through rivers.
Ran through forests.
Ran through colors.
Ran through sound.
We ran up mountains, but this time they did not grow beneath our feet and we did not stop when we reached their summit. The three of us kept running and I closed my eyes, savoring the feeling of the moment: the taste of the air, the way my body burned hot and cold at the same time.