FATE

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  Needless to say, I'd spent the entire summer as one giant bruise, and the fifties-style burgers and fries had lost most of their appeal over the course of our carhop tenure.

  “We've got a lot to discuss.” Annabelle explained her logic, turning around to give me a look that clearly stated that she was still waiting to hear what had happened to me during first hour. “And these discussions are probably ones we shouldn't have in public.” She paused. “Right, Bay?”

  I nodded. The last thing I needed was for someone to overhear me saying something about the voices in my head. The popular crowd already thought I was a loser; I didn't need the rest of the school thinking I was clinically insane, too.

  “Annabelle's right,” I said, for probably the eight millionth time in the past few years. “We need privacy, and things don't get more private than staying inside the car.” Fifties was hands down the fastest, easiest option that ruled out the possibility of eavesdroppers.

  “Done.” Zo was pleased—the summer we'd worked at Fifties, she'd easily eaten her weight in onion rings.

  Delia wasn't as enthused, but she tried to stay positive. “I hear they're serving salads now,” she said, tactfully not mentioning that a Fifties salad was, in all likelihood given the rest of the menu, a bunch of deep-fried lettuce. “And speaking of salads, Bailey, talk!”

  Delia didn't bother with actual segues. She just didn't have to.

  “Okay,” I said, dragging out the word to give my mind time to process bits and pieces of memory from this morning: the sound of the voice in my head, the words it had spoken, the way Alec had looked at me, the weirdness I'd felt in the room just before walking out the door.

  My friends didn't interrupt my thought process— not even Delia, who had trouble staying quiet more often than not.

  “There were voices,” I said. “In my head.”

  My friends took this news quite well.

  “No offense, but aren't there always voices in your head?” Zo asked. “I mean, you're psychic. It kind of comes with the gig.”

  “Not that kind of voice,” I said. “This wasn't someone's thoughts. This was someone talking to me, the way that Adea and Val do.”

  “And you're certain it wasn't either of them.” Annabelle's words were a statement, not a question, but I confirmed them anyway.

  “I'm positive. When Adea and Valgius talk to me, their voices are …” There were so many words. Bone-shattering and mind-boggling and wonderfully terrible. “Trust me. This wasn't them. It sounded …” It took me a second to find the right word. “Younger.”

  At the time I'd heard the words, my impressions had centered on the venom in the tone, but as soon as my mouth picked younger to describe it, I knew it was true. Adea and Valgius never sounded hateful. Even Alecca, who'd been a Big Bad in every sense of the term, didn't resort to mean. There was enough power in her voice that she didn't need to.

  Once you reach a certain point on the evil scale, mean just looks kind of silly.

  “The voice warned me away from Alec,” I said. “And whoever it was”—with my realization about the speaker's age, the suspect list had just gotten a whole lot shorter—”they really meant it.”

  “Who's Alec?” Zo asked.

  I sensed, rather than saw, Delia rolling her eyes. “Alec's her geek. Obvi.”

  “The one who knew what your tattoo meant?” Annabelle asked.

  I nodded.

  “And now one of the Sidhe …” She paused. “We are working on the assumption that the voice was a Sidhe, yes?”

  I nodded. Maybe there were other possibilities— another psychic, some mystical creature I didn't even know about—but given who and what I was, Sidhe was our best bet. And besides, if what James had said the night before, about Sidhe innately knowing their own, was to be believed, it made sense for me to trust my instincts. I'd felt Morgan near before I'd seen her. I'd felt the other Sidhe the moment I'd entered the Other-world.

  I'd felt that same familiarity, only less so, with each cutting word the voice in my head had spoken.

  “Alec knew what your tattoo meant, and now one of the Sidhe is warning you away from him. Either he's dangerous and someone's warning you off for your own good, or somebody doesn't want the two of you together because it interferes with their plans.”

  “I think he knows something,” I said. “Something that somebody else doesn't want me to know.” I just couldn't imagine what that could be. I'd been to the Otherworld. I'd met other Sidhe. What could a high school geek know that would set one of them on edge?

  “You have to talk to him,” Delia said. “Trust me on this one. If someone is telling you to stay away from him, what that really means is that he's worth having. Every guy I've ever dated has come complete with a ‘back off, he's mine’ memo. Apparently, your geek is a desirable.” She smiled. “The movement is growing.”

  Zo snorted. “Delia, I seriously doubt that the Sidhe want Bailey to stay away from Geek Boy so that they can date him themselves.”

  “But they could want him for something else,” Annabelle said thoughtfully. “In some mythologies, the fair folk enjoy playing with humans. Making them their pets. Some people even believed that fairies stole human babies and replaced them with their own.”

  “So either the Sidhe want Alec for something, in which case Bailey needs to be his personal bodyguard, or he knows something, in which case Bailey needs to get the information out of him. Either way, I stand by my original assessment. The two of them totally need to date. Bailey can guard his body all she wants.” Delia delivered that last sentence with a tone that had me fighting off a blush.

  Still, it wasn't the worst idea in the world …

  “Was there anything else?” Annabelle asked me.

  “She wants something she can research,” Zo said, interpreting for her cousin. “Apparently, now that she's looked up everything you asked her about this morning, she's lusting after a new assignment.”

  “I do not lust,” Annabelle said.

  Delia reached up to pat A-belle's arm consolingly. “That's just because you haven't found the right geek yet. Don't worry, Delia is on the case!”

  Delia referring to herself in the third person was never a good thing. Trying to head off disaster, I gave Annabelle what she'd asked for. “When I heard the voices, I was sitting in shadows. And I keep feeling like someone is watching me, like there's something more to a shadow than there used to be. And then there was this weird thing as we were leaving class. I can't even describe it, but it felt distinctly creepy.”

  “Shadows,” Annabelle murmured. “I'll add it to my research queue. And I'll look for information about the Sidhe crossing into our world, too. Even if they're just here psychically, it might help us figure out how it's done.”

  About that time, I noticed that the car wasn't moving. “How long have we been at Fifties?” I asked.

  “Five minutes,” Zo said proudly. “We made great time.”

  I was grateful that I'd been so caught up in our conversation that I hadn't noticed the driving techniques that allowed us to make it to Fifties in half the time it should have taken.

  “We should probably order,” Annabelle said. “And then I have some things we need to discuss.”

  We ordered, and I tried to figure out what exactly the next discussion would entail. When Annabelle pulled out a three-inch-thick binder and started handing out packets of paper, I flashed back to what Zo had said about Annabelle finishing her research assignment and wanting a new one.

  A-belle was nothing if not efficient.

  “This is the best overview I could find of Greek mythology,” she said. “It's pretty comprehensive, and covers the Olympians, lesser gods, and heroes.” All business, she handed us each another, smaller packet. “This one has information on the specific entities you asked about, Bailey, compiled and paraphrased from a variety of sources and color coded by god. Aphrodite is yellow, Artemis is green, Poseidon is blue, Hades is red, and Zeus is pink.”

 
Taken out of context, Zeus being pink would have seemed weird, but thinking about Eze, it made perfect sense.

  When Annabelle started handing out a third packet of printouts, I thought Zo was going to have a heart attack. This was probably more reading than she'd done all of last year.

  “This is everything I was able to come up with on the Otherworld, also known by a variety of other names, all of which refer to a place inhabited by fairy races and offset from the mortal plane in some way.” Annabelle paused for a breath and then rattled on. “Incidentally, one of the terms for the Otherworld is Faerie, which is also used to refer to the creatures who live there. This term has its root in the Greek fata, which was originally used in reference to the three Fates.”

  Normally, when A-belle started a sentence with “incidentally,” the rest of the sentence was the kind of thing that she found interesting but I didn't even understand: boring with a side of over-my-head. This time, however, I followed her point surprisingly well. Even though the Greeks and the Celts hadn't melded their mythology in any way that approximated reality as I knew it, somehow, the word fairy—however it was spelled—came from the way the ancient Greeks had referred to Adea, Alecca, and Valgius.

  Maybe on some level someone had figured it out. The Fates were faeries, the creatures who lived in the Otherworld. Sidhe.

  Having successfully imparted that interesting tidbit, Annabelle continued summarizing her findings. “From what I've been able to tell, it appears as though most myths have the Otherworld as home to a variety of different kinds of supernatural creatures, including fairy varieties other than Sidhe.”

  Wrong, I thought. The Otherworld was for Sidhe, and only Sidhe. Power and beauty. Nothing else.

  “Some stories divide the Otherworld into two parts, so I've divided this information into sections as well. The Seelie Court, which you'll find on pages three and four of this handout, traditionally houses the more benign fairies, and the Unseelie Court—on pages five and six—seems a lot more sinister.”

  Wrong again. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that Eze and Drogan were matched on many levels; neither of them was more dangerous than the other. They were equally wonderful and equally horrible and even thinking their names generated in me a bone-deep desire to bow.

  A tap at the window made me jump, as much as I could with my seat belt still on. Zo rolled down the window, and a poor, beleaguered carhop, who was probably thinking about how much she hated roller skates and hamburgers and us, handed over a large bag bulging with food. It took us a few minutes to get the money right, and the entire time I kept one eye on the carhop, wondering if we'd be the ones to push her over the carhop edge.

  After we'd paid, she begrudgingly handed us some napkins and a single packet of ketchup to share, and without another word or, heaven forbid, a smile, she skated away.

  Zo rolled up the window and, like some kind of fast-food Santa Claus, began happily doling out our food. I accepted my cheeseburger and then craned my neck to look at Delia's salad, which appeared to be impressively green, aside from a liberal splattering of croutons half the size of my fist.

  Downright jovial now that she was surrounded by edibles, Zo spared a thoughtful look for the thick wad of papers Annabelle had handed her. “You want to give us the condensed version of this, A-belle?”

  Annabelle, after chewing a dainty bite of onion ring, agreed, and the rest of us dug into the food and tuned in to the Annabelle Porter Show. “Most of the individuals Bailey asked about were Olympians, senior gods who were thought to dwell primarily on Mount Olympus.”

  I remembered the mountain I'd stood on the night before and the way it had morphed to meet our needs, the way it had literally grown beneath my feet, catapulting me into the sweet mist of the sky as I ran.

  “The Olympians came to power after overthrowing an older generation of gods called the Titans. If we assume that this reflects something that actually happened in Sidhe history, I can only guess that there was some kind of power struggle and that the current rulers emerged as victors during or before the heyday of ancient Greece.”

  I nibbled around the edge of a Tater Tot. A-belle in scholarly mode was a thing to behold.

  “After the war with the Titans, three of the Olympians, brothers, emerged as leaders and divided their world among them. Zeus became ruler of the heavens, Hades inherited the underworld, and Poseidon got the seas.”

  I tried to interweave this information with what I'd learned the night before. Mythology never got things quite right, so I didn't expect what I'd seen to line up exactly with what Annabelle was saying, but decided I'd settle for making as much sense out of the overlap as I could.

  Eze, who was once known as Zeus, ruled the heavens, which had to refer somehow to the Seelie Court, since Eze was the Seelie Queen. Drogan was Hades, meaning he had inherited the underworld, also known as the Unseelie Court. An image came to my mind as I thought about the kind of place that the so-called King of Darkness would call home: dark and cavernous, but somehow every bit as beautiful as the land of light. That just left Morgan, who was Poseidon. James hadn't mentioned her, but he had told me that there were three rulers before he'd cut himself off, leaving me with the impression that mentioning Morgan's existence, let alone her name, was forbidden. According to mythology, Poseidon ruled the seas.

  The ones in the Otherworld, and the ones on Earth.

  The second that last thought occurred to me, I knew it was true, but I wasn't entirely sure how I'd arrived at the conclusion, or even if it was a conclusion, or if it was some kind of memory, carried by my Sidhe blood to my human brain, slumbering there and waiting to be recalled. This insight came to me all at once, but I needed a few seconds to process it. Luckily, Anna-belle broke from talking to take a bite of her chicken sandwich.

  A few seconds later, she was back in action. It took more than a chicken sandwich to keep our resident Research Girl from imparting wisdom to the masses (read: Delia, Zo, and me). “There are numerous myths involving Zeus, to the extent that there isn't really a definitive myth. He was thought to have many children: the Muses, Artemis, Apollo, Hercules … the list goes on and on, but it does not, interestingly enough, include Aphrodite, whom some consider to be older than Zeus himself.”

  “Must be a clerical error,” I told her. “Because Lyria—that's Aphrodite—she's definitely Eze's daughter, and she's definitely a teenager. Though I guess the Sidhe version of a teenager is still probably thousands of years old. At least.”

  I wondered how old James was, or Xane or Lyria or Axia or any of them. If they'd played a role in Greek mythology, then they'd been around in the heyday of ancient Greece, and if James was to be believed, he was the first James. In other words, the “young ones” among the Sidhe were a lot older than I was. At this rate, I'd be sitting at the kids' table at “family” gatherings until I died.

  If I died.

  “In mythology, Aphrodite sprang to life fully formed from the foam in the sea,” Annabelle continued. “She's the goddess of love and beauty, though the love side of that equation seems to tend more toward lust than anything else.”

  Zo stopped shoveling food into her mouth just long enough to whistle when Annabelle said lust.

  Annabelle blushed and glared at Zo, in that order, and then continued. “Aphrodite was known as a jealous goddess. She was moody and vengeful and very aware of her own beauty.”

  I tried to picture Lyria. She'd been so quiet, quieter even than Annabelle, and she'd come to my rescue when Kiste and Cyna were playing the bitca game with me. Timid was a word I'd use to describe her, and maybe graceful, but moody, jealous, and vengeful?

  The ancient Greeks had apparently been smoking something when it came to the myths they'd constructed for Lyria.

  “What about Artemis?” It was hard to think of Lyria without thinking of Axia. Of the two sisters, Axia was dominant, though hers was a quiet strength, diametrically opposed to Xane's arrogance and even her own mother's steely, regal air.
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  “Artemis was the goddess of the hunt,” Annabelle replied. “She was often depicted carrying a bow with arrows. She was strong and sleek, the ethereal huntress, and was also considered to be the goddess of the moon. Her twin brother, Apollo, was the sun god.”

  Sun and moon: the symbols intertwined on my lower back. Together, they meant life.

  “There was no Apollo,” I said, sorting things out as I talked. “Just Artemis and Aphrodite, Zeus and Hades.”

  Then again, just because I hadn't met Apollo didn't mean he didn't exist. For all I knew, James could be Apollo.

  “What about Hot Fairy Dude?” Delia asked, practically (though not, I was sure, actually) reading my mind.

  I considered the possibility. James as Apollo. The sun god, James.

  It just sounded wrong. Then again, I was deeply suspicious that “James” wouldn't sound quite right with anything.

  “I actually think James might not be an Olympian,” Annabelle said. “From the way Bailey described her experiences in the Otherworld, it sounds as if the Olympians she met have all been pretty high up in the Sidhe hierarchy. Zeus and Hades rule the two courts; Artemis and Aphrodite are Zeus's heirs. If James was Apollo, I think you would have gotten some sense of his status, Bailey.”

  I definitely couldn't see James as a prince of anything. He seemed too normal, too goofy, too borderline human. Lyria, Axia, and Xane had identified themselves as heirs to the thrones from the get-go. James hadn't been involved in their political squabbling at all.

  “So if he's not an Olympian, what does that leave?” I asked. Now that my earthly crush was shrouded in mystery, I felt more compelled to figure out everything about my Otherworldly one, especially who he was to the ancient Greeks.

  “Unfortunately, James not being an Olympian doesn't narrow down our choices that much,” Anna-belle said. “The Greeks had gods for pretty much everything. James could be anyone.”

  For once, my hormone-driven brain didn't zero in on the part of that sentence that focused on a cute male. Something else about Annabelle's words jumped out at me, grating in my ears. In lecture mode, A-belle was saying the word god just enough for it to bother me. It was one thing to talk about Greek gods and myths, but when the characters from those stories were people I'd met …