“The Blood of the Sídhe” I whispered the words before I realized what I was doing.
“Bailey?”
I turned to look at Zo. Her blond hair was a mess from her sleeping bag. “You okay, Bay?”
I glanced down at my arm. The cut was gone.
“Bay?”
“I'm okay,” I said softly, careful not to wake the others.
Zo crawled over her sleeping bag toward me and then, without a word, she threw her arms around my shoulders.
“You know I've got your back,” she said. “You know that, right, Bay? No matter what. It's you and me”
“I know,” I said, and all of a sudden, I was in kindergarten again, and Zo, blond pigtails waggling in fury, was demanding to know who'd made me cry so that she could make them eat dirt. Literally.
“Pleats?” Delia whimpered in her sleep. “No pleats”
Zo's expression never faltered. “I'm not gonna let anything hurt her, either, Bay,” she said. “Or Annabelle”
Zo, in her pajamas, was ready to take on the world for us, armed with nothing but premonitions and what every teacher she'd ever had had defined as an “attitude problem”
I loved her for it.
“You look tired,” Zo said. “Go back to sleep” From the tone of her voice, I inferred that I'd been given my orders. Obediently, I lay back down, and I was nearly asleep when I noticed that Zo was still sitting up, and her eyes were open. She was watching me. Guarding me. Guarding all of us.
I closed my eyes again and hoped that Zo would soon do the same.
“You're beautiful”
“No,” I said, staring back into his eyes. “You are”
He laughed then. “You surprise me,” he said. “Everything about you surprises me”
I could feel his breath on my face, and it made my skin heat up.
“Your eyes surprise me every time I look into them and they're looking back at me” He brought his hands gently to the side of my face. “Your mouth surprises me, because you always seem to smile more with one half than with the other, like part of you knows a funny secret that none of the rest of us, not even your other half can guess”
He brushed a finger over my lips, and I sucked in a breath. This was so right. It all felt so right.
“You surprise me, Bailey Morgan,” he said. We swayed to the music, and the tune filled my head. This was so right, and I wanted it with all of my being. Wanted him.
“Kane,” I said. There was so much to ask him. He could have any girl. Why me? He hadn't even really known my name, and now I was surprising him?
“Just dance with me,” he whispered back. “That's all I want, Bailey” He paused. “You. Me. Right now”
We continued dancing, moving as one to the strange music that coursed through our bodies and into the air. His hand moved from my face and down my arm. I winced.
“You're hurt,” he said tenderly.
I looked down at the red scratch on my left arm. Where had that come from? I couldn't remember.
Without another word, he brought his lips to my arm, and silently pressed them to the cut. “There,” he said, “all better. “
And when he said it, everything was all better. There was nothing to worry about. There was just me, and Kane, and our dance.
He brought his lips close to mine. “All better,” he said again. “Just the way it should be”
“The way it should be,” I repeated, and my lips gravitated toward his.
And then, he was gone.
“You wake me up at the crack of dawn, but you won't even let me throw a pillow at her?”
“She might be dreaming something important” I recognized Annabelle's patented “I am sensible, hear me roar” voice.
“I was dreaming about Juicy Couture,” the first voice replied. “And you don't think that's important?”
Groaning slightly, I rolled over onto my side and opened my eyes.
“Morning, sunshine,” Zo said.
“Good afternoon's more like it,” Delia grumbled. “Did you know that they got me up at seven, Bailey? Seven!” Delia was clearly scandalized that there were people in this world who got up at seven o'clock, let alone that one of them would have had the audacity to wake her up at that ungodly hour.
“We wanted to maximize our use of daylight hours,” Annabelle explained to me. After a full night's sleep, she seemed more in academic mystery-solving mode than ever.
Zo cleared her throat.
“Fine,” Annabelle admitted. “I wanted to maximize our use of daylight hours, and Zo wanted to go for a run and then eat what, as best I can tell, was the majority of a very large pig”
“So you woke me up why?” Delia asked, not letting go of it.
“Because you take five times as long to get ready as anyone else, and we wanted to be ready to go when Bailey woke up,” Zo said, answering for Annabelle without any psychic prompting.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“A little after noon,” Delia said. “I've been ready for three hours, and I couldn't exactly go back to sleep after I got dressed”
I got up from my sleeping bag and gave Delia a small hug. “Would it make you feel better if I let you give me highlights?” I asked.
Delia's eyes lit up. “Maybe,” she said. “Can I give you colored contacts, too?”
“I don't wear contacts,” I said.
Delia rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Well, can I?”
I sighed, but thinking of Delia up at the crack of dawn, and poor Annabelle and Zo listening to her complain while they all waited for me to wake up from another Kane dream, I had to give in.
“Fine,” I said, “but we put it all back like it used to be before my mom sees me”
“Agreed,” Delia said. “You get dressed, and I'll warm up”
I didn't ask how exactly she was going to warm up to changing the color of my eyes. I was pretty sure I didn't want to know. Moving quickly, I slipped on a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Okay,” I said, feeling as if I was about to face a firing squad. “Just get it over with”
Delia looked at me and then nodded. “Honey blond and amber streaks,” she said, running her hands over my hair.
“Amber,” I remembered, the second Delia said the word. “The retreat”
Delia snapped her fingers to get my attention. “Eyes first,” she said. “Now don't blink, or you're going to end up with really weird-looking eyelids”
“You know,” Zo mused, “that could come in handy. You're in class, and you're sleeping, only your eyelids look just like your eyes, so.”
Annabelle shook her head. “Only you,” she said to Zo.
Zo grinned.
My eyes were starting to sting from holding them open for so long.
“Done,” Delia said. She turned me toward the wall, and with another wave of her hand turned Zo's soccer poster into a full-sized mirror.
“You didn't…now, that's just wrong, you can't…soccer …mirror “
I barely even heard Zo's words. There had to be some trick to this poster-mirror. I was pretty sure that that couldn't have been me in the reflection. The highlights brought out the blond tone in my hair, but at the same time, made the brown parts look darker, more dramatic. My skin practically glowed next to my new hair color, and then I looked into my own eyes.
They were blue. Shockingly, unapologetically blue.
Delia examined her work. “A little more dramatic than what I had pictured,” she said, “but all in all, I think it's stunning”
I couldn't tear my eyes away from my reflection. My hair shined as it had never shined before, the colors blending together to make me look …almost…
“Pretty” Annabelle lifted the word from my mind.
I looked at Delia. “I love it,” I said, “but the eyes might be a little much”
“I'll trade you the eyes for a different shirt,” Delia said.
“What's wrong with my shirt?”
“Don't make me go there,” Delia said.
“I thought this whole transmogrification thing was supposed to make her really tired,” Zo said, still in shock over the loss of her soccer poster.
Delia grinned. “I think this power is growing on me,” she explained. “Or I'm growing on it” She lifted her hands to my face and imperiously commanded my eyes to return to their normal color. Then, before I knew what was happening, she turned an appraising look on my shirt. She held her hand over it and whispered something I couldn't quite hear. Almost immediately, my shirt began melding itself into something else, right there on my body.
“Delia!” I yelped. “This isn't a shirt. This is like two-thirds of a shirt, max”
Zo, who'd finally managed to stop looking where her poster used to be, clapped me on the shoulder. “Take one for the team, Bay”
I gaped at her. Zo Porter, queen of the boyish sweatshirt, was telling me to wear this low-cut, belly-showing, almost see-through number to “take one for the team”?
Annabelle giggled and then cleared her throat. “We should be going,” she said. “We're already down to barely seven hours of daylight, and we don't know how things are going to go at the retreat”
I was supposed to go out in public looking like this?
“So what did you dream last night?” Annabelle asked me curiously.
I opened my mouth, but all I could think about was the fact that I felt more or less topless.
“It's a statement,” Delia told me encouragingly. “And you look fabulous” She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Let's hope we run into Kane again”
“Bailey” Annabelle tried to get me back on topic. “Did you dream?”
I nodded.
Annabelle nodded back at me. “Can you tell us about it on the way to the Richmond?”
I immediately started for the door. “Come on, guys,” I said, ready and roaring to get this day under way. “I'll tell you about my dream on the way to the Richmond”
Silence fell over the room for about two full seconds, and then, at the exact same moment, Zo and I realized what had just happened.
“Annabelle!”
Even I had to laugh at the guilty expression on her face, and then, we were on our way for real—me, my “shirt,” my new highlights, and all.
“Okay,” Zo said as we stepped into the hotel lobby. I could tell by her tone of voice that she was practically rubbing her hands together at the thought of interrogating some fairy worshippers, good cop/bad cop-style. “Who's first?”
“People skills,” Annabelle reminded her cousin. “This is going to take people skills”
“I have people skills,” Zo insisted.
The rest of us remained suspiciously quiet.
“We need to be covert” Annabelle tried a slightly different approach. “And “ She trailed off as Delia approached a woman to our left.
“What can you tell me about Adea and the Sídhe?” Delia demanded. The woman stared at her. Delia spoke again, more slowly this time. “What. Can. You” Delia gestured toward the woman to clarify that last word. “Tell. Me” Another clarifying gesture. “About—”
Annabelle snatched Delia's arm and pulled her aside. “You call that covert?”
“I'd be glad to tell you about Adea,” the woman said.
Delia arched an eyebrow triumphantly at Annabelle.
“Adea is a state of mind,” the woman said. She smiled serenely. “Adea is a philosophy of the heart. Adea is water and earth. Adea is fire and air”
I felt like raising my hand and mentioning the fact that I had personally met Adea, and that she hadn't been particularly watery, or airy, or…
“But the actual personage of Adea,” Annabelle pressed. “Are there stories surrounding her existence?”
“You misunderstand,” the woman said. “Adea is not a person”
“She's Sídhe,” I murmured.
The woman looked at me strangely out of the corner of her eye. I shut my mouth.
“Adea,” the woman said. “A Dawn Ever Always”
“A Dawn Ever Always?” we all repeated.
“The Daughters of Adea believe that a new light is always around the corner,” the woman said. “That there is light in nature, and that we must take our place in the light, give ourselves to—”
“Invigorating,” Zo said. “Excuse us for just one second”
There was no doubt about it. She was a charmer.
“Okay, so how did we miss out on the fact that Adea was an acronym?” Zo voiced the question on everyone's mind.
“A Dawn Ever Always,” Annabelle said incredulously. “That's not even grammatical”
“Call it a guess,” Zo said, “but I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that no one in this entire place has even heard of the Sídhe, let alone knows anything about the Adea that could actually help us”
“You'd be wrong”
I jumped about three feet in the air at the sound of a voice that most definitely wasn't one of the four of us.
“I don't mean to frighten you”
And that, of course, made it all better. I turned around, unsure what exactly to expect.
The woman greeted me with a smile. “I couldn't help but overhear,” she said. “You're looking for information on Adea” She lowered her voice. “And on the others”
“The others?”
“Come,” the woman said. “We'll be more comfortable in my room. We can speak more openly there”
My friends and I glanced at one another. The woman's creepy-serene tone was like something out of a movie, and I couldn't help but think that in the movie, the woman's character would probably be planning on killing our characters and eating us for supper.
“All right,” Annabelle said after a few seconds.
I swallowed hard and then wondered what I was afraid of. There were four of us, and one of her, and I was going to go with my gut and guess that she probably couldn't set things on fire. Plus, Zo's premonitions had to have been good for something other than the occasional Amber saving. If this woman had been, for instance, planning our impending doom, wouldn't some light in Zo's head have gone off?
I swallowed again when we reached our destination and the woman opened the door to her room. I touched my hand to my tattoo as I stepped in. No words of advice came into my mind. That was a good sign, right?
“Bailey,” the woman said as the door closed behind her. “You worry too much”
“How did you know her name?” Zo asked, her voice low and steely. When she got into protective mother-bear mode, it could get really ugly really quickly, but the woman's smiling expression didn't change. “The same way I know that your name is Zo,” the woman said, “and that the one examining the earrings on the coffee table is Delia”
“She knows the same way I know” Annabelle's voice was even, her tone appraising.
“Mind reader” Zo's words came out like an accusation.
“Unintentional, I assure you,” the woman said. “I am Keiri”
“Annabelle,” Annabelle said. After a split second, she paused. “How is that I knew your name and you didn't know mine?” she asked.
Keiri shrugged. “You're blocked,” she said. “Fairy magic, I believe”
“Forgive me for not speaking fluent freaky,” Zo snapped, “but what's that supposed to mean?”
“Is that the question you really want answered?” Keiri asked.
“No,” I said slowly, a million better questions racing through my mind. Fairy? As in Sídhe? What did all this have to do with my very close personal friends, the big voice people?
“Coffee?”
“Sure,” Delia replied immediately. “I like the earrings, by the way,” she said. “They're a nice color”
“They're soothing,” Keiri said, moving to pour the coffee for us as we sat. Tentatively, I took one of the earrings in my hand. The purple stones were small, perfectly symmetrical teardrops.
“Amethyst,” Keiri said. “It calms excess energy�
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“Uh-huh” Zo, always the skeptic, leaned back in her chair. “Likely story”
Keiri, not at all put off by Zo's skepticism, handed me a cup of coffee. “Things of beauty can have secondary purposes,” she said. “I'd think you four would know that by now”
So she knew about the tattoos. Rubbing my thumb over the rim of my coffee cup, I wondered how it was that she knew about our powers but hadn't picked up on my intense dislike of coffee.
“Can you tell us about Adea?” I blurted out, half afraid that she'd pick the anti-coffee thought right out of my head and take offense.
“And not the ‘A Dawn Whatever Whatever' one,” Zo ordered, still playing the tough guy.
Keiri clicked her tongue behind her teeth and shook her head. “They mean well,” she said. “The Daughters. I found the group online. Imagine my surprise when I joined and found that no one knew of Adea, that none came from Guardian lines”
“Guardian lines?” I asked.
“Let me tell you what I know,” Keiri said, “and then you can ask whatever questions you like” She paused. “My parents died when I was nine. My brother and sister went to live with our uncle, but I went to our grandmother”
I brought the cup of coffee to my lips just to keep from asking what any of this had to do with Adea. I took a tiny sip and felt my gag reflex lurch as the coffee hit my tongue. It tasted (not surprisingly) like coffee. I hated coffee.
“Long story short,” Keiri said, looking at me with an almost-grin, “my grandmother was what most people would call an eccentric” She took a sip of her own coffee. “She didn't get out of her house much, didn't speak to many people”
“She saw the future,” Annabelle said softly. “And the past”
Keiri nodded. “She was a dream seer. Her dreams often came true, and she often dreamed of the past. She'd learned early on to distrust others”
And the irrelevant information just keeps coming, I thought.
“Don't be so impatient,” Keiri told me. “It's the past that she dreamed about that concerns you” She took another long drink of coffee. “Tell me what you know”
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