Tattoo Read online

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. They were right. I'd heard the voices before I'd ever put on my tattoo, and if our powers did come from the tattoos, then…

  “It's in the blood,” I said out loud. “Valgius, it was something he kept saying, about the power being the blood” I paused. “I thought he meant his blood and our powers, but maybe he meant my blood” I gulped. “My blessed blood”

  Delia lifted her arms above her head in an impromptu stretch, and Keiri's eyes went immediately to her stomach.

  “Or maybe,” Keiri said, her eyes locked on the tattoo, “he meant both” She leaned forward and ran a finger over the edge of Delia's tattoo.

  Delia squirmed. “No touchy,” she protested. “That tickles”

  “The power is in the blood,” Keiri said. “Of course”

  “Care to let us in on that ‘of course'?” Zo asked. I thought she was restraining herself quite nicely, all things considered.

  “I'd wondered how they managed to give you all such strong powers. Sídhe powers” Keiri finally tore her eyes off Delia's stomach. “It's their blood”

  “What's their blood?” Delia asked suspiciously.

  I answered for Keiri. “The tattoos” I took a deep and only somewhat cleansing breath. “I keep seeing that color everywhere, whenever any of us uses our powers” It all clicked into place. “Sídhe blue, blood green,” I babbled on. “Don't you get it?” I didn't wait for anyone to answer. “And when Alecca made Adea bleed, she “

  “She what?” Now it was Delia's turn to squeak.

  “Her blood was the color of our tattoos,” I said.

  “It was a transfer of power by blood,” Keiri said, her eyes sparkling with the very idea of it. “Their blood, applied to your skin”

  “I'd like to take a moment to ewwwwwwwww” Delia wrinkled her nose. “I don't want some guy's blood all over me. I don't care if he is a fairy king”

  “It's not all over you,” Zo said, half to comfort Delia and half to torment her. As for me, at this point, there wasn't much that could surprise me.

  I was descended from people who'd been literally and mystically touched by fairies? Sure.

  I was wearing fairy blood on my back? Okay.

  An evil fairy who may or may not have been one of the three Fates was on some kind of murderous power trip just because she'd ended up on the wrong vertex of a love triangle? Why the hell not?

  I tried not to think it. Every part of me that had ever seen a scary movie absolutely forbade me from thinking it. I was determined not to think it. And yet…

  “What next?”

  It took Annabelle all of about thirty seconds to shove a pen and paper into my hands.

  “I don't even know if I can move,” I said. That last dream-vision, or whatever Keiri had called it, had taken a lot out of me. Actually, that was an understatement. That last dream-vision had kicked my butt and then gone all kamikaze on the rest of me.

  Keiri put her hands on my shoulders.

  I stared back at her, more than a little uncomfortable. I barely knew this woman. Granted, I was lying on her couch and she apparently knew more about my long-past family history than I did, but still.

  “Relax,” Keiri said, and I felt myself instantly relaxing. Was she pulling an Annabelle on me? The next second, I didn't care, because slowly, the pain trickled out of my body like water off an icicle.

  “What was that?” I asked when she was finished.

  Keiri shrugged. “Let's just say that my Guardian gifts extend beyond mind reading”

  As casually as I could, I got a good look at her hair. It was dark, somewhere between brown and black. Or maybe, I thought, it actually was both.

  I didn't say anything, even though I was pretty sure that Annabelle, Keiri, and the entire psychic population of the Western Hemisphere were picking up my thoughts. Instead, I took the pen Annabelle had given me and started writing down everything I could remember about the argument between Adea, Valgius, and Alecca.

  “You know anything else useful?” Zo asked Keiri bluntly as I wrote.

  Keiri didn't seem put off by Zo's tone. “More?” she asked. “I told you what I knew of Adea's origins, and the mechanism through which you received your powers. What more can I tell you?”

  “Do you know what our symbols mean?” Annabelle asked. “I have a linguist looking into them, but anything you can tell us would be greatly appreciated”

  “May I see?” Keiri asked.

  Without a word, Annabelle slipped her barrette out of her hair, turned around, and lifted her hair off her neck, baring her tattoo.

  “It's a symbol associated with Adea,” Keiri said. “I'm not sure what it means, only that my grandmother carved it into a tree in her backyard when she was a young girl”

  “We saw it on the website,” Delia volunteered helpfully.

  “I asked the webmistress to add it to their website— my best effort at luring in anyone who had any actual information on Adea after I discovered that the Daughters of Adea weren't quite what I had hoped them to be” Keiri paused and then spoke again. “Yes, perhaps I did hope too much”

  At the exact same moment, Annabelle's and Keiri's eyebrows shot into their hairlines.

  “Did you just—”

  “Yes, I did”

  “And the block?”

  “Gone”

  I was having a little trouble following, and I wasn't the only one.

  “Care to share with the class, girls?” Zo asked.

  “Annabelle wondered if I'd hoped too much of the Daughters,” Keiri said. “It just took me a moment to realize that she'd wondered it silently”

  “She read my mind,” Annabelle said. She wrinkled her forehead. “She made her way through my block somehow” The idea that someone might actually be reading her mind clearly concerned Annabelle.

  “Welcome to my world,” Zo told her gleefully, reading her cousin's face as well as I was.

  “I didn't fight through the block,” Keiri said. “It's gone”

  “How?” Annabelle asked doubtfully. “How can it have just disappeared? You said there was a powerful, external magical force at play” Still in a bit of a huff, she straightened her hair, securing it over her tattoo with the barrette.

  Immediately, Keiri reached for Annabelle's hand. “And now you're gone again,” she said. “I can't hear you”

  Annabelle, her hand still on the barrette, unclipped it and drew it back. “What about now?” she asked.

  Keiri nodded. “You're back,” she said.

  All of us looked at the barrette in Annabelle's hand.

  “Old-fashioned, but a nice accent piece,” Delia commented. “Where'd you get that, anyway?”

  I knew the exact moment the answer dawned on Annabelle. Her mouth dropped open slightly and her eyebrows shot up. “At the booth at the mall,” she said, “where we got the tattoos”

  “It's magicked,” Keiri said quickly. “Powerful magic. Sídhe magic”

  I thought of the woman who'd sold the tattoos to us. She'd had blue eyes. Eyes like Adea, Valgius, and Alecca. Eyes the color that Delia had turned mine that morning. Who was she? Yet another question to add to my ever-growing list.

  “Why couldn't I have gotten the mind-blocking barrette?” Zo asked, scuffing her foot into the ground.

  “You don't wear barrettes,” Delia said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “It's totally not suited to your style” Delia paused. “Excuse me, your ‘style.' “ She added air quotes the second time around, trying to distract Zo from the fact that she'd yet again gotten the short straw in the power lottery.

  “It's not like Annabelle even really needs it,” Zo said. “You never have any incriminating thoughts, Anna—”

  “Here, let me show you something,” Keiri interrupted Zo. She left the room and returned a moment later holding a small, clear crystal in her hand. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was attached to a translucent cord.

  “What is it about me that s
creams ‘give me a crystal'?” Zo asked.

  “Your tomboy pastiche?” Delia guessed.

  Keiri bit back a smile. “Or it could be the fact that those gifted with premonition are often also given divination,” she said, “and that Annabelle, as a psychic, would be the most dangerous to have an open mind, since she'd have already compiled everything important that the rest of you have been thinking” Keiri shrugged. “Just a thought”

  “What's ‘divination'?” Zo asked, intrigued at the idea that she might actually have another power.

  “Divination actually just means finding,” Keiri said. “In some circles, it's another word for premonition. If one goes looking for the future, through tea leaves or palm reading or tarot cards, then that's divination. At least, if they do it successfully and they find the future, it's divination. Otherwise, it's just tea leaves” Seeing Zo's look, Keiri got back on track. “If your premonition stems from an underlying power of divination, then you might be able to use that power toward another end”

  “You mean she could find stuff other than the future?” Delia asked.

  Keiri nodded.

  “And that has to do with the crystals how?” Zo asked. Keiri was winning Zo over despite herself.

  “Crystals are often used in scrying,” Keiri explained. “If you're looking for something in a small terrain, such as your bedroom “

  Or your kitchen, I added silently. How had Zo known her dad had left the pizza money in a drawer underneath a notepad? How had she known it wasn't on top of the notepad?

  “…in small terrain, such as your bedroom, you might be able to divine for an object without working with any medium. You may simply sense its location, but when you're working on finding something, or someone, over a larger space, say a city, then scrying would probably be a diviner's best bet”

  Keiri held the crystal out at arm's length and let it drop. She held on to the cord, and the crystal wobbled back and forth. After a moment, she handed the cord to Zo. “If you hold it over a map,” she said, “and concentrate on your target, it should stop swinging over the correct location, allowing you to pinpoint your target”

  “So she's kind of like a human lost and found,” Delia said brightly.

  “If her premonition does in fact stem from a greater power of divination,” Keiri said, “then yes”

  Zo eyed the crystal warily. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Might as well give it a try”

  By that time, my hand hurt from the fast and furious writing I'd been doing, and I set the pen down. “What are you going to find?” I asked her.

  “Let's try something simple,” Keiri said. Her eyes scanned the room, and then she picked up the pair of earrings on the coffee table. “Close your eyes,” she told Zo.

  Surprisingly, Zo complied without so much as a single sarcastic comment or eye roll. Silently, Keiri leaned over and slipped one of the earrings into the front pocket of my jeans, and then handed the second one to Annabelle, who stuck it to the back of one of the couch pillows.

  “Now concentrate,” Keiri said, her voice soft and lilting. “Think of the earrings. Where are they?”

  “In Bay's pocket on the back of the couch,” Zo replied without pausing. Then she wrinkled her forehead. “One's in Bailey's pocket,” she corrected herself. “The other one's on the back of the pillow behind Annabelle”

  She opened her eyes.

  Without a word, I handed her the earring from my pocket.

  “What about the scrying thing?” Delia asked. “Do you have a map, Keiri?”

  Five minutes later, at Delia's insistence, Zo was swinging the crystal over a map of the city, scrying for hot guys. Every once in a while, the crystal would change directions, pulled to a particular area of the map like a magnet to metal.

  “Try something more specific,” Keiri suggested.

  “Like a particular hot guy?” Delia asked.

  Annabelle rolled her eyes.

  Delia grinned impishly at me. “Scry for Kane,” she said.

  Zo laughed out loud and complied. She swung the crystal gently over the map, counterclockwise. I watched it, my mind on Kane. And Kane's eyes. And Kane's arms.

  And Kane's mouth.

  Without warning, the crystal jerked to a stop at the intersection of Whaley and Vermuse.

  “Found him,” Zo said, wiggling her eyebrows at me. “Looks like he's at the school” As soon as the word “school” left her mouth, Zo's jaw clenched tight. Her head flew back with such force that I was afraid she'd snapped her neck, and she sank down to all fours, the cord attached to the crystal still firmly clasped in her hand. Even without tension in the cord, the crystal stood on its end, pointing to the exact location of the high school.

  At my feet, Zo shuddered, and I bent down and rubbed my hand down her back. “Zo,” I said softly. “Zo?”

  She was too deeply absorbed in the vision to hear me.

  “Leave her be,” Keiri said. “She'll come back to us once she's seen what she was meant to see”

  When Zo finally did sit up and open her eyes, the four of us stared at her, waiting.

  “Dance” The first word out of Zo's mouth wasn't anywhere near what I'd expected.

  “You want us to dance?” Delia asked, clearly perplexed.

  Zo, her face ashen, shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “School dance”

  Delia grinned. “Now this is what I'm talking about,” she said. “It's about time we started getting something out of these premonitions of yours. What was everyone wearing? Who was Kane dancing with? Is my date hot? Do you come to your senses and buy that dress at Escape? Is there a lot of black or is it more.” At the look on Zo's face, Delia finally trailed off. “Oh,” she said glumly. “Not a happy dance vision?”

  “Not a happy dance vision,” I confirmed on Zo's behalf.

  “What happened?” Annabelle voiced the question I couldn't seem to make my mouth form.

  “One minute, I was staring at the map and the crystal was hovering over the school, and the next.” Zo met my eyes, only mine. “I was there, at the dance. There were these lame crepe-paper decorations, and the music was completely ridiculous, and the people “

  “Were being chain-saw-massacred?” Delia guessed, completely seriously.

  Zo rolled her eyes, and I breathed a sigh of relief. If she was back to rolling her eyes at Delia, she was okay. “Not chain-saw-massacred,” Zo said. “One second they were dancing, and the next they were on the ground”

  Somehow, that so wasn't what I'd expected to hear.

  “It started slowly. Marissa Baker, you know, the goody-goody newspaper chick? Well, she was taking people's pictures, and then, right in the middle of shooting a bunch of couples dancing, she fell, no warning, to the ground. Nobody noticed. Nobody”

  Marissa Baker was the kind of person people didn't notice at dances.

  “And then …what's the kid's name? The one with the really thick glasses and the greasy part?”

  I racked my mind for a name, but I couldn't seem to remember it, even though he sat behind me in homeroom.

  “He asks Jessie Perkins to dance, and she's about to blow him off, and then he falls over, and she just steps right over him”

  As I contemplated the fact that Jessie, like her BFF (Alex Atkins), was evil, Zo continued rattling off names of kids.

  “And then they were all dropping at once, and people finally started noticing when Alex dropped. “

  Alex? I couldn't imagine her falling like the others. Alex Atkins didn't have a weakness, just like she didn't have a functional heart or any kind of conscience. I had serious doubts about whether she actually even needed to eat or sleep.

  “Everyone started screaming, and the more they screamed, the more of them fell unconscious to the floor, completely still. And pale”

  Zo's voice was matter-of-fact now, and she was pretending that what she was saying didn't bother her at all, but Keiri was psychic, and the rest of us knew Zo too well
to buy her tough-guy act.

  “Anything else?” Annabelle asked. I could tell by the tone of her voice that it was taking great restraint on her part to abstain from forcing Zo to write down an alphabetized victim list.

  Zo nodded. “There was a woman there. Sort of” Zo shook her head and let her blond hair fall in her face. “She was sort of there, and sort of not”

  Alecca. I knew before Zo described the woman she'd seen that it would be her.

  “Light hair, dark lips” Zo paused, and I knew what was coming next. “Blue, blue eyes”

  “Alecca” This time, I forced myself to say her name out loud. “But why? What's she doing to them, and why kids?”

  I couldn't help but remember her words. I will absorb their lives into mine, and with their power, I will destroy you.

  “Power” Keiri answered my question, even as my memory did the same. “There's power in life,” she said simply. “Especially in young life. If Alecca found some way to absorb part of her victims' life forces into her own, she could amass tremendous amounts of power”

  The power to kill Adea and Valgius. I'd seen Alecca's eyes when she'd found them together. Something told me that a couple of millennia under the sea hadn't made her change her mind about the whole destroy-them-at-all-costs thing.

  Annabelle's phone buzzed, breaking our silence, and when she glanced at the incoming number, she took in an audible breath. “Lionel,” she told us.

  “Our linguist,” Delia told Keiri, the way any other fashionista would have said “my stylist” or “my masseuse”

  “Answer it,” I told Annabelle. While she talked, I turned back to Zo.

  “The dance is tomorrow night,” I said, sounding way more confident than I felt. “If we stop Alecca before then, none of this will ever happen” Secretly, I wondered what “all of this” entailed. Were people just passed out, or were they … I couldn't even force my mind to say it, but seeing Alecca as I had, knowing her as I did, I had to wonder if she'd stop at absorbing part of a person's life force when she could go for the whole thing. She hadn't seemed bothered at all by the fact that killing Adea and Valgius might somehow mess up her world and ours. It was hard to imagine that she'd care any more about a single human life.