FATE

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  It just seemed wrong. Axia and Lyria, Drogan and Eze … they weren't gods. They just weren't. They were Sidhe, a proud, ancient race whose world was offset from ours. They were powerful, but they weren't all-powerful. They were beautiful, but they weren't necessarily good, and the part of me that had grown up in this world couldn't shake the feeling that if there was a god, a real one, he was something else entirely.

  Annabelle, oblivious to my silent philosophizing, took another bite of her sandwich and then continued, happy to lecture indefinitely now that she'd sunk her teeth into the subject. “Just to give you a familiar example of some non-Olympians, the Fates, also referred to as the Moirai, were considered separate from, and to some degree lower than, those who dwelled on Olympus.”

  You reek of mortality.

  Lower than the Olympians, through my association with this world and the mortals who lived here. Separated from the Otherworld; exiled to the Nexus.

  “Other non-Olympians included the Muses, the Graces, and the Furies. Tangentially, the number three seems to hold a great deal of significance in these myths, though there were, of course, nine Muses.”

  “What about cupids?” Delia asked. “That's Greek mythology, right?”

  “Cupid,” Annabelle corrected, “as in singular, and that name is actually Roman. To the Greeks, he was Eros.”

  My mind went again to James, and I tried to picture him as Cupid. From there, my thoughts progressed (or maybe digressed) into a rather elaborate daydream involving James setting his sights and his arrows on me.

  “Eros was quite easily distinguishable among the Greek gods,” Annabelle continued, “due to his wings.”

  I knew better than anyone that the Greeks had gotten a lot of things wrong, so I didn't let A-belle's words burst my daydream bubble quite yet, even though I had to admit that James didn't seem overly romantic, at least not toward me. Still, James could have been Eros. If quiet, timid Lyria was Aphrodite, anything was possible.

  “Speaking of Cupid,” Delia said, refusing to use the Greek name, probably because the Roman one made her think of Valentine's Day, which most girls loathed but Delia actually adored, because red was one of her best colors and she had a weakness for those candy hearts that pretty much no one else liked but everyone handed out each year anyway. “Can I fold down the backseat so I can spread out my supplies?”

  Delia saying the words Cupid and supplies in close proximity to each other could not possibly be a good thing.

  “That depends,” Zo said suspiciously. “Are we going to have a repeat of the poster-board massacre?”

  Massacre was probably overstating things. A little.

  “I was eight” Delia retorted, “and it's not like anybody died!”

  “Answer the question,” Zo deadpanned.

  “Fine,” Delia said pertly. She lifted one manicured hand into the air. “I do solemnly swear that I have my poster board under control.”

  “And no part of this secret project involves putting streaks in my hair?” Zo continued, suspicious as always.

  “For the last time, they're called highlights,” Delia huffed, “but I promise to leave your hair alone.”

  “Deal.”

  Delia climbed out of the car and opened the back, letting down the tailgate and manhandling the rear seats into a folded position so that she could spread out the suspiciously large amount of “supplies” she'd brought.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to stay focused and not allowing myself to think too much about Delia's project. “Cupid, Zeus, Hades, Artemis, Aphrodite, the Fates, etc., etc. Anything else?”

  I could tell just by looking at her that Annabelle was dying to correct my et ceteras, but instead she just glanced at her packet. “There's a story is section B-1 you really need to read. It should be highlighted in red.”

  “Red was Aphrodite?” I tried to remember the color scheme.

  “Hades,” Zo corrected. Though she wouldn't have admitted it under threat of torture, Zo was better at following her cousin's endearingly anal organization techniques than the rest of us. It must have been something in those Porter genes.

  “It's a story about how exactly Hades got his bride,” Annabelle said, and it occurred to me for the first time that somewhere out there, Xane probably had a mother.

  “I know this one,” Zo said. “So-and-so kidnaps such-and-such and brings her to the underworld.” Zo's grasp of Greek mythology was shaky at best. She had this theory that the whole thing was one giant soap opera.

  Not that I could disprove that particular point, based on everything I'd seen.

  “Hades kidnapped a girl named Persephone and took her to the Underworld as his bride,” Annabelle said. “While she was there, she ate some pomegranate seeds, and because of this, she was trapped there for a certain number of months each year, unable to return to the world above.”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking of Drogan and Xane and the underworld I hadn't seen. “No pomegranate seeds.”

  “No food,” Annabelle corrected. “Nothing to drink, either. It's another one of those overlaps between Celtic and Greek mythology. Several sources I found mentioned that if a human eats or drinks in the Other-world, they can never leave. Ever. In the rare instances in which they do leave, they starve to death, because mortal food never tastes the same again.”

  For a split second, a jolt of something akin to fear passed through my body as I realized how close I'd come to drinking the night before. I stared down at my hamburger, and the bite in my mouth seemed to turn to sawdust. I was objectively lucky that I hadn't had anything to drink last night, but I could still almost taste the air, the mist, the place itself on my tongue. I put my burger down, my appetite gone.

  “In Greek mythology,” Annabelle continued, uncharacteristically oblivious to my train of thought, “if a mortal drank ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, he or she became immortal, like the gods themselves. It's unclear what happened after that, or if something like that could actually happen to you, because you're not entirely human to begin with, but either way, I don't think you should eat or drink anything while you're there, just in case.”

  I glanced at Zo. Following Annabelle's dictate would have been much harder for her than it would be for me.

  “I have two questions,” Delia announced from the backseat.

  “Shoot,” Annabelle said.

  “First question is for Bailey. This Hades guy, the one who kidnapped Persephone?”

  An image of Drogan—pale skin, hair the color of midnight—filled my mind. “Yeah?”

  “Is he hot?”

  It was such a Delia question to ask. Next, she'd be asking me what Eze had been wearing.

  “He's old,” I said. “Really old.” That was probably an understatement. I wasn't sure how many thousands of years Drogan had been ruling the Unseelie Court, so I put it in terms I knew Delia would understand. “He looks at least thirty.”

  “Oh.” Delia got over her disappointment surprisingly quickly. “My second question is for Annabelle.”

  Annabelle tilted her head to the side, waiting.

  “Are we done with the researchy stuff yet? Because lunch period is already half over, and I'm going to need at least twenty minutes to bring you guys up to speed on Geek Watch.”

  Good old Delia. If you needed someone to break up solemnity, Delia was your girl.

  “I'll run some searches on crossing over and the mythological significance of shadows tonight,” Anna-belle said, “but for now, I'm done. It's all you, Dee.”

  Zo leaned around her seat to meet my eyes. She said nothing out loud but sent a thought my way: I knew letting her near poster board was a mistake.

  Delia had Annabelle and me get out of our seats so that she could fold them down as well. Then she instructed the three of us to sit on top of the folded seats so that we could see the display she'd set up on the others. The centerpiece was the poster board I'd caught a glimpse of this morning. Delia had written GEEK WATCH in scripty, all-capital letters at the t
op. Underneath, in a variety of colorful markers, she'd provided pictures, statistics, and commentary on the top four chic geeks at our school. There was Jared Sands, aka Music Geek, under whose name she'd written:

  She'd listed similar attributes for each of the others: the math genius who'd probably grow up to be the next Bill Gates (with better fashion sense, Delia insisted); Lit Geek, who Delia was pretty sure was the kind of guy to quote Shakespeare to a girl and actually mean it; and Cryptic Geek.

  “His name is Alec,” I told her. “Alec Talbot-Olsen.”

  Delia grabbed a marker and wrote that down. Whereas she'd printed out pictures for all of the other guys, Alec's profile was mainly question marks, though she'd ascertained that he was “adorably shy,” “really, really smart,” and “mysterious.”

  “You know, if a bunch of guys put our pictures on a poster and sat around discussing the way we look and act, we'd call them pigs.” Zo made this comment in a completely neutral voice, and without taking a peek in her mind, I couldn't tell whether she was bothered by this fact, or amused.

  “It does seem kind of … wrong,” Annabelle said meekly.

  Delia waved their objections away. “One: We're only saying good things about them. Two: We're barely talking about the way they look. If a bunch of guys were doing this, it would be all about our bodies, which is why they'd be pigs. And three: These guys are totally unappreciated at our school, and we're appreciating them. Do any of you really think they'd mind?”

  Clearly, Delia had put a lot of thought into this. Underneath all of the fashion and boy talk, she was actually one of the nicest people I'd ever met. She'd been popular for as long as I'd known her, but she'd never ditched the rest of us, and she didn't seem to care about popularity at all. While the rest of the girls at our school were tearing each other down, Delia was earnestly bestowing fashion advice upon the masses. The worst thing anyone could say about her was that she was shallow, and those of us who knew her knew she wasn't even that. Long story short, Delia wouldn't have been doing this if she'd thought there was a chance of hurting somebody.

  “Here we are,” Delia said, gesturing to a small stack of poster-board squares about an eighth the size of the first.

  “We?” I asked. Delia nodded and then proceeded to hand us each a square with our picture on it. All four pictures had been taken the same night, two years ago. I wondered if Delia had done this on purpose, or if seeing Morgan the day before had just brought sophomore year and that particular dance up in her subconscious mind. More likely, she'd chosen these pictures because it was the last time Zo had given Delia complete control over her appearance: dress, makeup, hair, and all.

  “We've got four possibilities here”—in a rare show of tact, Delia very pointedly did not call them geeks— “and four of us. Now we just have to decide who the best match for each of us is, and then we'll pin our pictures on to indicate the pairings. We'll reassess later in the week, and if us or the guys aren't feeling it, we'll scramble and try again.”

  “You've got to be kidding me,” Zo said. “This isn't a game show, Queenie.”

  Delia dazzled us with a brilliantly white smile. “But it could be.”

  Zo rolled her eyes, but she gave in, because as much as she played the martyr, she and Delia were in a constant process of making each other's lives interesting. Without Delia around, Zo would probably be too busy beating guys at soccer to ask them out, and without Zo to argue with, Delia might have gotten caught up in the fact that with almost everyone else, her charm got her whatever she wanted. They were both extremes, and they balanced each other.

  So why weren't either of them more worried about the four of us splitting up?

  Even in the middle of Geek Watch, after a morning of boys and psychic conflict, I couldn't quite keep from thinking about it, and this time, the thought was accompanied by another pang of sheer yearning, for the Otherworld. For no reason that I could see, my longing for the Otherworld and my fear of losing my friends were tied together in my mind. I turned this realization over, unsettled and wondering if I'd ever be able to separate the two.

  “Pay attention, Bay.” Zo poked me in the side. “You don't want to miss the rules to Pin the Girl on the Geek.”

  “Now, to determine compatibility, I ran a few analyses …”

  Zo and I stared at Delia. I wondered why Annabelle didn't seem taken aback, and then I did the math.

  “And by ‘I,’ you mean ‘Annabelle,’ right?” I said.

  “Natch.”

  I didn't question how exactly Annabelle had had time to do all of the research she'd done for me and come up with some kind of compatibility matrix for Delia. The two of them had computer class together, and knowing A-belle, in that single period she'd probably also discovered a mathematical equation for world peace and cured puppy cancer.

  If I hadn't known her middle name was Elisabeth, I would have sworn it was Multitasking.

  Unable to resist playing along, even though part of me refused to let go of the longing and the worry that colored my thoughts, I accepted the compatibility charts from Delia. The first thing I noticed was that Annabelle scored high on compatibility with Alec, due to their joint interest in ancient languages. The second thing I noticed was that I scored pretty much the same across the board, whereas Zo and Delia both had obvious counterparts.

  “Bailey gets Alec.”

  Despite my having sworn her to secrecy the day before, Zo wasn't taking any chances on somebody else getting dibs on the first guy I'd shown interest in since Kane. I'd never been great at sticking up for myself.

  So what was going to happen when I didn't have anyone to stick up for me?

  Darn those thoughts and the way they just wouldn't leave me alone! Darn the fact that everyone else could enjoy Delia's matchmaking machinations, while I just kept thinking that a year from now we probably wouldn't even be living in the same city, let alone attending the same school. And most of all, darn the mental image of the hills and the colors and the feeling of belonging I associated with the Otherworld, a place where I instinctively knew that I'd never be lonely or scared or alone.

  “Of course Bailey gets Alec.” Delia tossed her pony-tail over one shoulder. “As we've already established, she's going to be his bodyguard and pump him for information. Plus, he totally likes her already. I can tell.”

  As far as I knew, Delia had never even met Alec, but she sounded so sure that he liked me and, honestly, I trusted her guy radar a lot more than mine.

  “I'm fine with Bailey getting Alec,” Annabelle said. “I really don't have a preference.”

  Since I'm not going to ask anyone out anyway. She didn't mean to send the thought to me, but I caught it anyway. They probably wouldn't even say yes.

  “I think Annabelle should go with Lit Guy,” I said. Of all the photos on the poster board, his looked the nicest, and sitting there, listening to her thoughts, I couldn't help but think that Annabelle could use someone to quote a little Shakespeare to her. Of the four of us, she was probably the prettiest, the one who'd grown into her looks the most over the past few years, but trying to tell her that was like putting a piece of chocolate cake in front of Zo and telling her not to eat it.

  Futile.

  “Okay,” Delia said, consulting her charts. “If Bailey takes Alec and Annabelle goes with Lit Guy, then that means I get Math Boy, and Zo, you're with the quiet, broody one.”

  Zo and her boy would probably just sit around for hours, glaring at each other. I wondered if in some crazy way that actually made them a good match. It was certainly easier to imagine than picturing Delia with the captain of the math team.

  “Now, come on, pin the girl on the geek!”

  Annabelle, Zo, and I obeyed, and our pictures stared back at us.

  We aren't really going to do this, are we? Zo asked me silently.

  I glanced at Alec's name, smiled, and shrugged. “Why not?”

  Remind me to kill you later.

  “Sure,” I said, “but serio
usly, given the creepy voice thing, you may have to get in line.”

  Annabelle and Delia, who had no idea what Zo was silently saying to me, didn't pay much attention to the audible half of the conversation; Delia just gave me a look, which I interpreted to mean quite clearly, “You'd better not be mind-talking about my boobs.”

  “So … what now?” I asked. I'd told them everything I knew about the mystery that was Alec Talbot-Olsen. Annabelle had shared the fruits of her researchy labor with us, and Delia had divided the school's most eligible geeks among the four of us. As far as lunch periods go, this one had been pretty productive, except for the fact that I'd barely eaten anything at all.

  “Now we go back to school,” Annabelle said. “If we wait any longer, Zo will have to speed to get us back in time.”

  Poor, deluded Annabelle seemed to think that if she could keep Zo from running perpetually late, Zo would stick to the speed limit. Clearly, A-belle didn't know her cousin as well as I did.

  Zo tossed the keys in the air and caught them. “We've got a few minutes,” she said. “You got any other wisdom to impart on the geek front, Delia?”

  Delia just about died of shock at the question. For once, she was stunned into silence.

  “What about you, A-belle? Any more graphs?” Content to bide her time, Zo tossed the keys into the air again. Annabelle, moving with surprising speed and grace, grabbed them and then scrambled for the driver's seat.

  Zo's mouth dropped open. “No fair.”

  Annabelle started the car and buckled her seat belt, quite pleased with herself. “All's fair in love and war. And car pools. Now, flip the seats up and buckle your seat belts. I don't want to be late for calculus.”

  Delia and I obeyed, even though we had to nudge Zo to her seat in order to flip the others up. One of these days, Zo was going to learn to stop underestimating her cousin.