Just another Friday afternoon at the mall.
We totally should have known better.
“Yes, yes, no, and what were you thinking?” Delia passed judgment on our outfits one by one as we came out of our dressing rooms to stand in front of the three-way mirror. She and I had gotten yeses, and Annabelle had been the no. Zo looked down at the sport pants and T-shirt she'd found in the faux-exercise section of Escape, Delia's favorite store and our current location.
“What's wrong with this?” Zo asked defensively. Annabelle looked down at her own floor-length skirt with a frown.
“We're talking about a dance here, Zo, not dance class”
As if Zo had ever in her life stepped inside a ballet studio.
With a thoughtful expression on her face, Delia stalked away and came back a few minutes later with a tiny black dress. She held it out to Zo and pointed firmly to the dressing room.
Zo snorted. “Queenie, you gotta be out of your mind” From Zo, “Queenie” was a term of endearment. Sort of.
Delia just kept pointing. Beside me, Annabelle was trying very hard not to smile. The rest of the week, no one told Zo Porter what to do, but the mall was Delia's turf, not Zo's, and with a glower that was more for show than anything else, Zo disappeared back into the dressing room.
Annabelle waited patiently, preparing herself for Hurricane Delia, the fashion tornado.
“You need to show a little more skin,” Delia said. She looked the outfit up and down. “The colors aren't bad, and it fits well, but”
“No” Annabelle just shook her head. “I like it”
“Oh” Delia paused. Zo she could argue with, but on the rare occasions that Annabelle actually verbally expressed an opinion, nothing and no one could change her mind.
“You did say it was a good color and fit well,” I told Delia consolingly. Then I turned to Annabelle. “And don't feel bad that your outfit didn't make the Delia cut,” I told her. “The only reason mine did is because Delia picked it out to begin with”
“There is that,” Delia admitted with a good-natured smile, bouncing back from the minor fashion defeat. “Zo, what's taking so long?”
“Do you know how many straps this thing has?” Zo sounded so incredulous and puzzled that as her voice floated over the dressing room door, I giggled.
“While we're waiting.” Delia popped into my open dressing room and back out a moment later with a giant smile on her face. “Tattoos!”
She wiggled the sheet at us, her eyes lighting up with the motion.
“I thought you wanted to save those for the dance,” I said.
Delia scanned the back of the package. “No instructions,” she said. “It just says three days” She paused for a moment. “Friday to Saturday, Saturday to Sunday, Sunday to Monday. Perfect”
Her words echoed in my head.
Three days.
Perfect.
“Though the fact that our school is having the biggest dance of the year on a Monday night,” she continued, “is just plain wrong. Evil, really”
“You wanna see evil?” Zo asked from inside the dressing room, where I could only assume she was still recovering from waging a losing battle with the straps. “Look in the mirror”
“You have the dress on, don't you?” Delia asked with a huge smile.
Silence.
“I think she dooooeeees,” I said, dragging out the word.
“Come on, Zo,” Annabelle prodded, picking up my teasing tone and making it her own. “Let us see” She paused and winked at me. “I bet it looks pretty”
Annabelle knew exactly how to press Zo's buttons.
“Shut it, A-belle,” Zo growled.
Annabelle shrugged and shut her mouth, an evil, almost little-sister-like grin on her face.
“While we're waiting,” Delia said, emphasizing the word “waiting,” “you want to do the honors, Bay?” She held the package of tattoos out to me.
For a moment, I stared at them through some kind of haze, feeling my blood pump through my veins and listening to the rush of it in my ears.
“Bailey?” Annabelle asked, gently touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I'm fine” I forced myself to focus and took the tattoos from Delia's outstretched hands to “do the honors” and open them. The moment my hand touched the package, a chill ran from the base of my neck down my spine. I stared at the four tattoos and ran my finger over the top of the package. Gingerly, I tugged at the plastic cover, but it didn't move. I tightened my grip and tried again. The second I felt the packaging give under the pressure, I closed my eyes.
To fight, to live
We two of three bestow this gift…
“Bailey? Earth to Bailey, do you read us?”
“Now that,” I said under my breath, “was freaky”
“What?” all three of my friends asked at once, Zo's voice muffled from behind the dressing room door.
“Voices,” I replied. “In my head. They were saying something about gift bestowing. “ About that time, I realized that I sounded completely insane, and I decided that it wasn't the world's best idea for me to go around talking about the voices in my head, especially in public places. “Just kidding,” I amended. “What are you guys, the gullibility triplets?”
Annabelle looked at me, her face carefully blank and her eyes measuring. After a long pause, she reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of scissors.
When the Boy Scouts said “be prepared,” they'd never met Annabelle. She brought new definition to the word.
Delia daintily plucked the tattoos out of my hand and took the scissors from A-belle. With one clean snip, she had a tattoo in her hand. “It kind of looks like a butterfly …or half of a butterfly,” Delia said. “Except for this line here” She ran her finger down the center of the symbol.
Annabelle took the tattoos and touched the edge of one of them. Where Delia's had been two gently intersecting circles divided by a single curving line, the tattoo Annabelle was pointing to was thinner and longer, like two crescent moons crossing paths. Or, I realized, like two freakishly shaped eyeballs staring at me.
“Take it,” I said, answering the question in her eyes with a shudder. “It's yours”
Annabelle took the scissors from Delia and made quick work of cutting out the tattoo. With mock solemnity, she handed the rest of the sheet to me.
I looked down at the two remaining tattoos. One was perfectly circular, with alternating zigzagged and sloping lines bursting out from the center, like a sun drawn by a “creative” four-year-old child. The other was almost indescribable, a mixture of lines, dots, and overlapping triangles. I felt dizzy just looking at it.
“You got a preference, Bay?” Zo asked, finally coming out of the dressing room to get in on the tattoo action. My mouth dropped open. The little black dress was amazing, and the way it clung to her athletic frame looked almost sultry, in a little-bitty-blonde kind of way.
“Shut mouth,” Zo told me with a half grin. If I'd been anyone else, she would have glared the flabbergasted look right off my face, but instead, she just nudged me. If Zo had one soft spot, it was me. “Pick a tattoo, Bay”
I tried not to look back at the two remaining tattoos, but I couldn't keep my eyes off the sunburst.
“I,” Delia said, giving Zo's dress a once-over, “am a genius”
“You like the sun one” Zo interpreted my shrug and ignored Delia completely.
“Do you mind if I take it?” I asked.
“Mind?” she repeated. “Of course not. Do I look like a sunshine girl to you?”
With the contrast between the black dress and her mop of bright hair, Zo did look sunny. In fact, except for the wry expression on her face, she looked like Sunny McSunshine, but I wasn't about to tell her that.
“No,” I said as I cut the last two tattoos apart. “You're not sunny”
“Amen to that,” Delia added. “Now let's put these babies on. I'm putting mine on my stomach. With a little midriff show
ing, it'll be totally hot. Just a taste of the forbidden” She looked in the three-way mirror, admiring the belly-showing top she'd selected for her own dance attire.
“No way mine's going on my stomach,” Zo said.
Annabelle wrapped her arms protectively around her waist, and Delia sighed, every inch the fashion martyr.
“I think I'll put mine on the nape of my neck,” Annabelle said, sweeping her light brown hair over her shoulder. “That way, I'll know it's there, but no one else has to”
“What about you guys? Bay? Zo?” Delia looked from Zo back to me.
Zo looked almost comically horrified at the girlyness of the whole situation, and I just stared back at Delia, completely at a loss. I didn't have a clue where to put my tattoo or, for that matter, how to get a guy (or The Guy) to go with me to the dance on Monday. Why was it that being a girl came so naturally to some people (cough, Delia, cough cough), and yet I didn't know the first thing about it?
“Your lower back,” Delia told me after a long moment, like an artist finally touched by her muse. “With that two-piece outfit, which, I must add, was yet another stroke of genius on my part, it'll be divine. Not quite as obvious as the stomach, but still sexy. Mysterious, even”
“That's our Bailey,” Zo said. “One giant mystery”
I smacked her in the stomach. “Nice dress,” I told her. “Very sunny” She barely even noticed.
“So where are you sticking yours?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest.
Zo didn't falter for a second, and even though I knew her well enough to know that she hadn't decided until the minute I asked, she replied with all the certainty in the world: “I'm putting mine on my foot”
“Your foot,” Delia repeated dully.
Zo nodded.
“Your foot?” Annabelle asked, a smile tugging on the edge of her lips.
Zo nodded again. “Yup,” she said. “The top of my foot”
Delia spent about two seconds rolling her eyes and then turned her attention to her own midriff in the three-way mirror. “What do the instructions say about applying?” she asked, holding the tattoo near her belly button. “I think these things usually need water or something” As the words left her mouth, Delia's hand pressed quickly to her stomach, and the tattoo, as if being sucked inward by a vacuum cleaner, moved swiftly toward her navel.
Delia looked down with a shrug. “I guess I figured out how to work it,” she said. I didn't respond. Instead I stared at Delia's stomach, at the green almost half-butterfly. For a split second, the lines moved and swirled on their own, the blue-green color deepening until it was almost black.
Blood of the Sídhe.
The words echoed in my head. In the next instant, they were gone, and Delia was peeling her hand back from her stomach to reveal a glittering, nearly black tattoo.
“Perfect,” Delia said, satisfied. Then she saw me staring at her. “Something wrong, Bay?”
As I stared at her stomach, I saw the black color of her tattoo flash in a burst of light, and in the next instant, the color morphed back to the blue-green it had been in the package. The light faded, and I heard Delia calling my name.
I tore my eyes away from her tattoo and glanced at Annabelle and Zo. Neither of them had seen a thing.
“Your turn, Bailey,” Delia pronounced. “You wanted it on your back, right?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out, and as I stood there, trying to remember what the whispering voice in my head had said, Delia took my silence as permission to pluck the tattoo from my hands, lift up the shirt she'd selected for me, and carefully arrange the sunburst on my back.
The moment it touched my skin, the room exploded into color. Blue, green, black, fuchsia, and the brightest yellow I'd ever seen. The colors swirled and throbbed, and I felt an ice cube run down my spine, followed by an incredible burst of heat from my lower back. Voices flooded the air, and the world around me fell into slow motion, a blur of colors that I couldn't quite make shapes out of.
To fight, to live…
The words repeated themselves over and over again in my head, spoken by two voices at once. The first was deep, and my body ached with the sound of it. The second, softer and feminine, soothed the ache but sent the world around me spinning as the voices melted into some kind of chant. I heard it behind me and around me. Inside of me. Cool and soothing, deep and dark, the voices pressed against my mind.
To fight, to live
We two of three bestow this gift
To see, to feel
To stand upon the ancient Seal
To know, to feed
To change, l'Sídhe
From earth she comes
From air she breathes
From water, her prison beneath the seas
Fire burn
Desire bleed
As we will, so mote it be.
The colors around me bled into one another, and with a burst of light, they and the voices were gone. The silence was heavy in the air, and with no warning, the entire world went black, and then there was nothing.
“Your hair looks like moonlight”
I looked deep into Kane's eyes, blue offset by a fringe of dark lashes.
My entire body tingled as I looked up at him, barely able to believe that this was happening, that this was real. I was Bailey Morgan, background girl, and he was looking at me the way normal guys looked at Delia.
He rested his arms gently on my waist, encircling my hips.
“Moonlight?” I murmured softly. No one had ever compared my hair to moonlight. No one had ever compared my hair to anything, except for this kid named Randy Vinelli who had told me when we were four that it looked like a dead squirrel.
“Moonlight,” Kane repeated, and with gentle fingers, he brushed my hair out of my face.
We swayed back and forth, his arms around my waist and mine on his shoulders, looking into each other's eyes and saying nothing.
“I've wanted this for so long,” I whispered into his chest. Five years to be exact.
“I know” Kane's voice melted into a lilting accent that I didn't recognize, and when I looked up, he was gone.
He'd told me my hair looked like moonlight, and now he was gone. Biting my bottom lip, I glanced down at the hair on my shoulder. It sparkled in the light of the dance floor, every trace of my normal brownish blond, not-blond, not-brown color replaced by deep, shining silver.
“Is she all right? Maybe one of you girls should pour a little water on her”
“Bailey? Can you hear me, Bay?” Zo's voice broke into my mind, and my vision of the silver hair began to disintegrate.
“Try pinching her”
“I don't think—” Annabelle started to say, but the other voice cut her off.
“Just slap her cheeks lightly, and—”
“Hey! Back off, Barbie”
I opened my eyes to see Zo glaring at a big-breasted Escape salesgirl.
“Are you okay, Bay?” Delia asked me, the words pouring out of her mouth at warp speed. “One second you were fine, and the next, boom, you're going all googly-eyed and then you're lying on the ground, and you wouldn't wake up, and we went for help, and—”
“And then,” Zo interrupted, totally in lioness-protecting-her-cub mode, “Push-up Bra Barbie over there wanted to smack you around a little to wake you up” She jerked her head toward the salesgirl, who was suddenly overcome with a need to go rearrange the buy-one-get-one-free jewelry.
“Is your outfit okay?” Delia asked the second the salesgirl was out of earshot.
“Are you okay?” Annabelle corrected firmly.
“I already asked that,” Delia replied immediately. “And I can already tell she's fine” Delia dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “Your skirt's not rumpled or torn or anything, is it?”
I looked down. For a split second, I saw myself as I'd looked dancing with Kane: moonlit hair, pearly skin.
She comes.
The words came unbidden into my
mind and echoed like a tuneless song stuck on Repeat.
She comes. She comes. To fight, to live, she comes.
“Damn, Bailey,” Zo said, breaking me out of the incessant chorus in my head. “You fainted from the pain of a fake tattoo. What's up with that?”
As soon as the word “tattoo” left her mouth, I bolted straight up, and my hand flew to the small of my back.
“It looks great,” Delia told me, folding her arms over her chest. “Perfectly positioned if I do say so myself”
I stood up, struggling to see the tattoo in the three-way mirror. There, in the middle of my back, it sat, like a sun rising out of my pants.
I shook my head to clear it of funky metaphors.
“You don't like it?” Delia asked, disappointed.
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. What was I supposed to say? That the tattoo had made voices in my head talk to me and the colors of the wind blur?
Instead, I looked at Zo and Annabelle. “Don't put yours on,” I said. “I think these things might be “ I trailed off, looking for the right word. “I think they might be defective or something”
“Too late. Check out the girly goodness” Zo held out her foot.
Without a word, I turned to Annabelle. Knowing what I was thinking, she swept her hair back, and I saw the tiny intersecting crescents nestled in the nape of her neck, a brilliant blue-green against her pale white skin.
“When did you guys do that?” I asked them, my mouth dry.
“Same time you did,” Zo answered, giving me a strange look.
“Did you.” I paused and glanced away. “Did anything weird happen when you put the tattoo on?”
“Yeah,” Zo said, and I practically sighed in relief. “I realized that I was letting Delia accessorize me, and I had a compelling urge to chop off my foot,” Zo continued.
“Like all the accessories in the world could turn you into a girl,” Delia shot back, but there was laughter in her voice. They'd had this “argument” maybe a million times.
“So nothing strange happened?” I prodded.