Neither of my companions answered my question about where we were headed. They took it as rhetorical, since I vaguely knew the answer before I'd asked the question. Instead, Adea issued an order, her tone light, but impossible to disobey.
“Take our hands.” Her voice sounded the way that honey looked dripping off a spoon: light and golden, thick and flowing.
Knowing I didn't have a choice, I lifted my hands and slowly took one of theirs in each of mine.
Birth. Life. Death.
Our hands warmed until they were so hot that I expected my fingers to melt. It hurt, but not as much as it should have, and in a strange way, the pain felt good. Right. Familiar.
Birth. Life. Death.
We were three, and as we stood there, memories washed over me. Memories that weren't mine, but weren't theirs either. Memories of what it meant to be born, to live, and to die. Memories of the Earth itself, memories of this place. Memories of the Seal, forged by human and Sidhe.
And something older than all of that. Older than the Nexus. Older than Adea and Valgius and the blood in my veins.
“Do you feel them?” Adea asked me. “Do you feel their call?”
Each night I came here and, as I wove, became one with the mortal realm. This time, the connection stretched out in a different direction, and their voices—unspoken, but somehow musical—echoed in my mind.
Sidhe. Sidhe. Sidhe.
In that moment, we stopped being the three Fates. We stopped being Birth and Life and Death, and our connection to the world I lived in faded away, drowned out by something bigger, something that came from so far inside of me that I was half-afraid that it would turn me inside out trying to reach the surface.
Sidhe. Sidhe. Sidhe.
“This is their call,” Valgius said. “Can you answer it, Bailey?”
I had to. I had to answer it or it would kill me, but I didn't know how.
“Shhhhhhhhh.” Adea's comforting murmur made me realize that I was emitting a pained, low-pitched whine.
“Remember, Bailey,” she said. “That's all you have to do. Just remember what it was like before we were three, when we were simply one with our world and the others like us. Remember what it was like to be Sidhe.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, as much in fear of this moment as anything else, and as I stood there, their hands in mine, I remembered, and then I knew.
Feral beauty. Unforgivable power. Everlasting light.
That was what it meant to be Sidhe.
I felt the change even with my eyes closed and knew that we were suddenly and inexplicably elsewhere, as distant from the Seal as the Nexus was from the mortal realm. The air was crisp and cool, but my body warmed itself from the inside out, until the combination of the two was near divine in its perfection, like stepping out of the pool on a warm summer day, body covered with water and the sun shining down on me. Every inch of my flesh was alive with contrasting sensations, and I was overcome with the thought that until this moment, my body had been little more than skin I was forced to wear.
“Welcome home, Bailey.”
For the first time, Adea's voice didn't strike me as musical or powerful; the echo of her thousands of years didn't hurt my ears or fill me with awe. Without even opening my eyes, I knew that voices such as hers belonged here, and when I spoke, the sound came from a place inside of me that I hadn't known existed. “Where are we?”
I couldn't bear to open my eyes for fear that seeing this place would somehow tarnish the beauty I felt in it.
“Faerie. Olympus. Avalon. The Beyond. This is a place of many names.”
Those words were familiar, and whatever part of me was still human remembered that I'd given this place a name of my own—the Otherworld—but standing there, eyes closed, the true name echoed through the recesses of my mind, two words melded into one.
Sidhe. Home.
I opened my eyes.
At first, all I saw was colors, each so rich and distinct from the others that my memory of the mortal world melted away, as gray as Dorothy's Kansas in comparison to Oz. Slowly, the colors became shapes: rolling hills and lush vegetation and a perpetual sunrise or sunset—I couldn't tell which—painting the sky in shades of pink and purple and orange. Somehow, I knew that this place was unchanging, that even in the darkness of night, if there was such a thing, the colors would be there, as rich in black as they were in golden white light.
It took me a moment to realize that the light wasn't coming from whatever passed for this world's sun. Instead, it radiated from our skin. I looked down at my hands, wondering at their unearthly glow.
If Delia could see me now, I thought, she'd want to strap me on a chain and wear me around her neck.
The thought was fuzzy, and the contrast between it and the strength of my impressions of this place—so lyrical that they should have felt alien in my head—reminded me that this was the one place my friends could never follow.
“Are you ready?” Adea's voice came out as barely more than a whisper, and it was unclear whether she was speaking to me, Valgius, or herself. There was something urgent in her tone, some frenetic need to do something, be somewhere.
“I'm ready.” My answer should have surprised me, but it didn't. There comes a point when something is so true that whether or not it was expected simply doesn't matter.
Adea laughed then, and the sound was visible in the air around us, the way warm breath is on a cold winter day. Her joy at being here, at being Sidhe, hung in the air, the exact color as the horizon of the Otherworld sky. She ran then, straight forward, into the vast landscape before us, and I found myself immediately on her heels, tearing through the land with speed that should have been impossible. The world around us settled back into a blur of colors as we ran, and I savored each sensation: each time my bare feet hit the ground, each flower that reached out to caress me, welcoming me as one with the land.
And as we ran, the colors and the scene around us changed, until mountains grew under our feet, erupting out of the ground in purples and grays that were more silver than anything else. I kept running, and the growing mountains thrust us higher and higher toward the sky, into the clouds and a light, pearly mist that tasted sweet on my tongue.
And then, without warning and without planning to do so, I stopped running, knowing beyond any human understanding that we had arrived at our destination. I stood very still, my heart pumping viciously behind my rib cage, my hair in my face, and my brain suddenly aware that we were being watched. Big time.
I could only see a few dozen of them, but I could feel more, staring at me from great distances, from the tops of other mountains, from down in the lush green valleys, from underneath brilliant blue-green waters.
The entire Otherworld was looking at me and into me, and for the first time since I'd left the Seal, I felt horribly and utterly human.
When we were little, I was always the shy one, and Delia, who didn't have a shy bone in her body, and Zo, who wasn't exactly a cowering miss herself, had developed a game that they called “everybody look at Bailey” to help me embrace my inner diva. The game went like this: once or twice a year, when we were in a big crowd of people, the two of them would meet eyes and then as loud as they could yell, “Everybody look at Bailey!” And everybody would look at me, and I would want to die until I remembered that they were standing there beside me, smiling at me like I was the type of person people should want to look at.
For a moment, the memory was clear in my mind, but as quickly as it had come, I lost it. Earth and mortals had no place here, even in memory, and every thought I might have had about my friends was quickly replaced with longing.
Need, I thought, not knowing what it was I needed. Adea put her hand on my shoulder, and a pleasant shiver ran through my body at the physical contact.
Then, just as I was starting to regain my mind, or at least some semblance thereof, a woman stepped forward from the many beings who watched us. Her hair was the color of an opal, a pale pearly white that refl
ected pink as she moved. “Welcome, Bailey. We've been waiting for you …”
“For a very, very long time.” A man finished her sentence, and I searched for him, scanning the crowds of beings with two-toned hair, iridescent skin, and eyes every shade of blue. Finally, my gaze settled on a man who was in every way the woman's opposite. She was small; he was broad-shouldered and gave the impression of being even bigger than he actually was. Her skin was the color of caramel; his was the white of untouched snow. The rest of him—eyes, hair, and expression—was dark.
Beside me, Adea and Valgius inclined their heads. It took me a second to figure out that they were bowing.
Why hadn't anyone told me that I'd need to know how to bow?
“I am Eze,” the woman said, and I couldn't keep from thinking that her hair looked like it belonged more on a unicorn than on a woman, Sidhe or no. There was something mythical about just standing in her presence. “Queen of Light.”
That would explain the bowing. I glanced at the man who had spoken earlier, wondering if that made him the King.
“I rule the night,” he said, deigning to answer my unasked question. “I am Drogan, King of Darkness.”
If I'd been watching this scene in a movie, I probably would have thrown popcorn at the screen to protest the cheesy dialogue, but somehow their words carried a kind of depth I couldn't explain based on their meanings alone. The part of me that had recognized Morgan at the mall recognized the same thing in the two of them, something ancient and familiar, horrible and awesome, and I found that my body wanted to bow to them.
King of Darkness, Queen of Light.
“Leave us,” Eze said to those watching us, her words screaming command, even though she wasn't speaking all that loudly. For a moment, I thought I'd displeased her, but Eze smiled warmly at me, the expression at odds with the biting chill in her voice as she spoke to the others. “She is new to our world, and you will overwhelm her. Adea and Valgius, you may stay.”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the eyes all around me disappeared, their owners fading back into the mountains, until there were only a handful of sets left: Adea and Valgius, Drogan and Eze, and six others, who stepped forward, summoned by an order I couldn't hear or a lure I couldn't feel. A fire appeared in front of me, and I stared into it, wondering if the others were still watching.
And then, without warning, Eze was beside me, and the light from her skin was almost more than my eyes could bear, her hair flashing the palest of pinks as she moved. She reached a hand out and touched my face. “Poor child,” she said. “Lost for so long. How you must have longed for us, not knowing what it was that you were missing.” Her fingers trailed lightly over my skin. “How lonely you must have been, how scared in a world in which eternity means nothing.”
I wasn't lonely, I wanted to say. I've never been alone. But somehow, the mention of eternity brought to mind my realization from earlier that day that nothing lasts forever, and I couldn't push back the feeling that I'd been moving inexorably toward loneliness my whole life and just hadn't gotten there yet.
“You'll never be lonely here, Bailey.” Drogan's voice was heavy and deep, as much a contrast to Eze's as his appearance was to hers. “You'll never be alone.” He took my hand in his and began tracing his fingers across the back of it in light, deliberate movements.
“You are welcome here, Bailey.”
“You are home.”
The King and Queen spoke in tandem, and after another eternity, Drogan let go of my hand and Eze drew hers back from my face. The two of them turned and walked slowly and imperiously away.
“Adea, Valgius, come,” Eze called over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Drogan said, his voice washing over me, the sound of it at once caressing and beating at my skin. “Do.”
There was something hard about the words. Something frightening.
“Let the young ones talk amongst themselves.”
Young ones? I tore my eyes away from the most royal of the Sidhe and turned toward the others I could feel in this space.
Oh, I thought, taking in their appearances. Young ones.
As Adea and Valgius disappeared with our lieges, I tried to remember the way I'd felt running through the Otherworld to get to this mountain, but I couldn't muster any kind of unadulterated emotion—let alone the kind of physical and mental grace I'd managed effortlessly before. I was Sidhe, I was home, and I was scared out of my freaking mind, because the only thing more intimidating than full-blown royal Sidhe were Otherworldly teenagers.
And as I stood there in front of the fire, six of them advanced on me at once.
I was a good friend, but I wasn't good at making friends. There was a big, big difference between the two, and other than Annabelle, I hadn't put my friend-making skills to the test since preschool. I hadn't needed to.
“Hello,” I said. My voice still had a certain amount of power to it, an age more in line with the memories I held of this place than the number of years I'd lived on Earth.
“Hello.” All six of them spoke at once, and the combined effect of their voices was paralyzing.
“You needn't be afraid,” one of the girls said.
“We won't harm you.” A second girl, nearly identical to the first, finished the sentence. Two other girls, who looked slightly older and slightly more like they were considering devouring me whole, said nothing, instead choosing to segregate themselves on the other side of the fire. They whispered behind pale hands, and something about the pointed glances they were shooting my way reminded me of the popular girls at my high school.
Great, I thought. I'm a dorky Sidhe. Because being part of an ancient fairy race isn't difficult enough on its own.
The girls who had spoken to me met my eyes again, and there was something about the tilt of their pearly pink mouths that seemed vaguely familiar. Before I could quite sort out what it was, one of the two males stepped forward.
“I'm Xane,” he said, “heir to the Unseelie throne.”
Xane, I thought. Rhymes with Kane. Like my ex, Xane held himself with a certain amount of confidence that I'd come to identify over time as arrogance, absolute certainty that whatever he wanted, he would be able to have. Including me.
“I am Axia.” One of the pearly-mouthed girls spoke again, and even though the expression on her face never changed, I couldn't shake the feeling that she was rolling her eyes at Xane's airs. “This is my sister, Lyria. Our mother is Eze.” Axia added that last bit almost hesitantly, as if she wasn't quite sure whether she wanted to claim her mother, let alone the throne, for herself.
For her part, Lyria said nothing and offered me a shy smile. I wondered how Eze had given birth to daughters like these.
“I take after my father,” Xane said, lifting the thought from my head with a smirk that made me wonder whether he was perceptive or able to get past my psychic shields. “Axia and Lyria are not so clearly begotten.”
“We will one day share the Seelie throne,” Axia said.
“If there's still a Seelie throne to share,” Xane scoffed.
Lyria frowned at him, but said nothing.
While the heirs argued among themselves, I turned the words I'd heard over and over in my head. Seelie. Unseelie. Light and dark, two parts of the same whole. I found that I didn't have to ask for definitions of these terms, the same way that I'd always known instinctively how to spell Sidhe, even though it wasn't written at all the way it was pronounced.
“They'll be at it for hours,” a voice whispered directly into my ear.
If I'd been in my world and not theirs, I would have jumped, but I was a different Bailey here, and I found that his presence didn't surprise me, that I'd known he was next to me, edging closer all the time.
“Drogan and Xane don't venture forth from their domain very often,” the voice continued, “and when they do, Xane makes it a point to argue with Eze's daughters the way Eze typically argues with his father.”
I turned to meet my whisperer's eye
s. Like all of the Sidhe (except for me), his were blue, so light that there was barely any color in them at all. His hair was an odd combination of brown and red, the kind of hair color the sidekick on an afternoon television show might have. His skin glowed, but it made him look more sunburnt than ethereal. His features were even and perfect, but the myriad of expressions that danced across them as I surveyed him looked comfortingly commonplace.
“I'm James,” he said.
“James?” I asked. Adea, Valgius, Eze, Drogan, Axia, Lyria, Xane, and … James. Something about that seemed just a little off.
“Is there something wrong with my name?” James asked, the edges of his lips quirking upward as I tried to think of a diplomatic way to answer his question.
“There's nothing wrong with it,” I said, grateful for his cheerful disposition and the fact that in this incarnation my voice was incapable of squeaking. “It just seems kind of … human.”
James's face changed at the word human, almost as if I'd said a deliciously naughty word or made a dirty joke.
“It was my name first, you know, ” James said, his tone completely conversational. “It's not my fault that I may have allegedly crossed over to the mortal realm one solstice and told a pregnant woman my real name.” A look of faux innocence replaced the mischievous glint in his eyes as he continued. “It's certainly not my fault if aforementioned woman liked my name—allegedly, of course—so much that she used it for her firstborn son.”
I caught on, quicker than I might have if this conversation had been taking place on Earth. “And if the name spread across the world and became very popular for generations afterward?” I asked.
James shrugged, looking just the tiniest bit sheepish as he did. “That would not be my fault,” he said. “Allegedly.”
I should have been weirded out that I was talking to the first James, especially as that meant he was at least a few thousand years old, but something about him felt so wonderfully normal that I couldn't quite accept that fact, and I chose to ignore it—and his reaction to the word human—entirely.