Tattoo Read online

  “She will destroy us. She will destroy the balance”

  “Tell me,” I said fiercely. “Tell me how to stop her. Tell me what I can do”

  Adea opened her mouth and then shut it again, her beautiful features marred by pain. “There are limits to what we can tell you,” she whispered. “Limits to what we can give”

  “We've given you all we can”

  Adea looked sadly at the Seal beneath my feet. “The balance,” she said simply, “will be destroyed”

  In my mind, I saw a flash of the boy we hadn't been able to save, saw his soul ripped from his body, but this time, my legs vibrating with pressure from the Seal beneath my feet, I saw Alecca pull the boy toward her, saw her engulf him until the outline of his tiny body had been absorbed into her form.

  I couldn't tear my eyes away from her face, from her blue, blue eyes. And in her eyes, I saw hunger, power, and

  dozens of souls ripped from their bodies by the web she wove: the little boy; me, Annabelle, Delia, and Zo; the kids at the dance, just as Zo had foretold.

  The Seal shook beneath me, and I could see the beginnings of a crack spread through the surface like glass slowly shattering. “I know you. I have always known you”

  The voice shook me to the core, my teeth chattering and my eyes tearing over. I blinked, pushing the sound of it out of my head, and when I looked down again, the Seal was whole, the crack tiny.

  Nausea rolled through my body. “Adea? Valgius?” Their names left my lips before I knew I'd called for help.

  No answer came as my cries echoed through the space. They were gone, and I was alone.

  Time runs thin. Blood runs thin.

  My heart beat with the words, and it took me a moment to realize they existed only in my memory.

  Time runs thin. Blood runs thin.

  I was alone.

  I didn't wake up immediately, but fell instead into a restless sleep, running footraces with myself in my dreams that I could not possibly win. They were the kind of dreams that involved forgotten tests and long ago embarrassments and dogs at my heels, ready to bite.

  I woke up in a pool of sweat. My hair matted to my face, I turned to look at my alarm clock. It was set to go off in another fifteen minutes. Shivering, I sat up and pulled the covers tight around my body, my mind a mix of nightmares that weren't real and nightmares that were. Without even thinking about it, I put my hand to the tattoo on my back, but there were no voices. The only sound I heard was the beating of my own heart.

  “The balance,” I said out loud, feeling the need to fill the silence. I tried to gather my thoughts. It looked like Alecca's plan was working. She was gaining power, and Adea and Valgius were losing it. Whatever connection I'd had with the ancient Sídhe Fates that had allowed me to hear their voices in my head was gone. I could feel it, even though I couldn't have begun to explain the logic of it all. Adea and Valgius were gone. Even awake, I was on my own.

  I racked my mind, trying to remember everything I could from my dream. They'd spoken of a balance between humans and Sídhe, about being trapped. I'd seen Alecca devour the boy's soul, seen the Seal crack.

  I eased my feet onto the floor of my room and groaned. My entire body felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat to it from the inside out. Trying to convince myself that a hot shower would make it all better, I stumbled my way into the bathroom.

  “Well, maybe not all better,” I mumbled under my breath, flipping on the hot spray. I had a sinking suspicion that a steamy shower couldn't fight all of the world's evils. I stepped into the steam and let the water beat against my aching skin.

  I stood there until my feet ached from standing on the hard shower floor and the front half of my body was pink and numb from the spray. Moving slowly, I turned around, letting the water run down my neck, my back. As it passed over my tattoo, a shock ran up my spine, and instinctively, my hand went to cover the symbol. I turned back around, careful to shield my mark from the water and grumbling about the distinctly not-pleasant twinge I could still feel in my lower back.

  “This thing should have come with a warning,” I muttered. “Do not let water come into contact with tattoo. Will electrocute you immediately”

  Time runs thin. Blood runs thin.

  I heard my own voice inside my head, repeating the words Adea had once said to me. Flipping off the shower, I grabbed a towel and began drying off as well as I could with one hand over my tattoo.

  “Sheesh,” I said out loud as the sting from the water finally faded. “It wasn't like I was trying to wash it off”

  The moment the words left my mouth, my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach.

  Time runs thin. Blood runs thin. Tattoo. Off.

  “Three days,” I said, flashing back to the moment Delia had ripped open the package.

  “No instructions. It just says three days. Friday to Saturday, Saturday to Sunday, Sunday to Monday. Perfect”

  Her words echoed in my head.

  Three days.

  Perfect.

  It hurt when water touched my tattoo, as if the tattoo really didn't want to be washed off. I realized about two days too late that if I'd wanted things to go back to normal, if any of us had, all we'd had to do was suffer electrocution by washing off our tattoos.

  “We're idiots,” I said. “All of us” We'd gotten our powers when we'd put on temporary tattoos. Key word: temporary. Keiri had said that the tattoos were written in Sídhe blood; that the powers came to us through that blood.

  Temporary tattoos. Temporary powers.

  It had been there on the package the whole time. Three days. Three days before the blood ran thin.

  Three days that ended today, or more specifically, tonight during the dance. Even if we could somehow manage to get the dance called off (that was the best idea I'd managed to come up with in the shower), that didn't buy us any more time to stop Alecca. After tonight, we wouldn't have any powers. We wouldn't be able to fight her.

  I rushed for my bedroom, bursting with the knowledge and ready to race across the street to get Delia and Zo, when I realized that I was still wearing nothing but a towel and a tattoo I so didn't want anyone to see.

  Haphazardly throwing on clothes, I assembled an outfit that I knew would make Delia lock me in fashion prison and severely tempt her to destroy the key, but given the current state of affairs, that really wasn't one of my priorities.

  I ran down the steps, tripped over the last one, and promptly fell flat on my face.

  And I was supposed to save the entire school. Poor school.

  “Slow down, honey. No need to hurry. You won't miss the bus. In fact, you actually have time for breakfast this morning”

  “Mom, I really don't have time,” I said, clamoring to my feet. “I really need to talk to Zo, and—”

  She cut me off with a single raise of her left eyebrow. The left eyebrow raise was never a good thing, and it usually ended up with her in lecture mode or me grounded. “You spent all of yesterday with Zo,” my mother said. “You saw plenty of her and Delia and Annabelle this weekend. They spent Friday night over here, and we barely saw anything of you on Saturday, and on Sunday you came home so tired you just collapsed into bed and barely touched your dinner”

  To my mother, that was a cardinal sin.

  “You've spent more time with them in the past three days than you have with your family in weeks, so don't tell me that you don't have time to sit down and eat breakfast because you have to rush over to Zo's” My mom fixed me to the spot where I stood with another look, raising her eyebrow even higher and daring me to argue. “There's nothing so important that you can't wait another fifteen minutes to tell her”

  The lives of hundreds are at stake, I pictured myself saying, because an evil fairy princess who doubles as one of the three Fates is sucking out the souls of innocent people, and my friends and I have been imbued with the powers to stop her, but we only have the powers for like another twelve hours, and I really need to talk to them about wha
t we can do to save the balance of the worlds and everyone at my high school, including Alex Atkins, the bane of my existence.

  I opened my mouth and then shut it again. There was no world in which me telling my mother that could end well. Biting my bottom lip to make sure I didn't accidentally blurt it all out, I followed her grudgingly back to the kitchen, where she loaded my plate full of bacon, eggs, and still-hot biscuits.

  “So, what did you want to talk to Zo about?”

  I took a big bite of biscuit to refrain from answering the question. The only good thing about talking around the breakfast table was that chewing each bite twenty-three times made for a wonderful stalling technique.

  “Just stuff,” I answered vaguely. My mom leaned in, and I could sense a barrage of questions coming on. “Dance stuff,” I said. That much at least was true. “I …uh …think Delia might have a date”

  I sent a silent apology to Delia, because I knew my mom would grill her the next time they spoke, but it was the first thing I'd been able to come up with, and as I said it, I realized it was probably true. Delia Cameron wasn't the type to go to any dance without a date, not even the dance of doom.

  “Oh really,” my mom said, fascinated. “But she hasn't told you guys about it yet?”

  I shook my head. Usually Delia was an open book when it came to guys and dating. Anyone within a ten-yard radius knew more than they wanted to about her dating life, but the past few days hadn't given us much girl-talk time.

  Ten minutes and a bunch of vague references to Delia and boys later, I was out of my kitchen just in time to see the school bus pulling up in front of my house. Zo and Delia were already climbing on, and I had to jog in order to catch up to them before the bus driver shut the door and drove off without me.

  We made our way to the back of the bus, where Annabelle always saved us seats.

  “I need to talk to you guys” I didn't bother with small talk.

  “So talk” Zo still wasn't in an exactly charming mood.

  Annabelle glanced around, and then leaned over to whisper something to the seventh graders sitting next to us.

  “Hey, man, let's sit up front,” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” his friend agreed. “I want to sit in the front of the bus”

  I shot Annabelle a grateful look and began. “We're in way, way over our heads”

  “You think?” Delia asked. The sweet, pretty-girl tone in her voice almost masked the sarcasm.

  “I agree with Bailey,” Annabelle said. “I was thinking last night, and—”

  I interrupted Annabelle, the knowledge that our time was running out building up inside me until I had to blurt it out. “Three days,” I said. The others stared at me, their expressions ranging from thoughtful to looking at me as if I was speaking Latin. “On the tattoo package,” I continued, “it said three days. That's how long our powers last” I looked at each one of them in turn. “That's how long we have to beat this thing”

  “We put them on to last through the dance,” Delia said automatically, and then she realized what she'd just said. “And the dance is tonight”

  “Tonight,” Zo said, and even though there was no emotion in her voice, I knew that she wasn't just thinking about our tattoos. She was thinking about what she'd seen, seeing it again through new eyes.

  “Time runs thin” I forced myself to repeat the words I'd heard so many times. “I had another dream last night. Adea and Valgius can't help us anymore,” I said. “There's some kind of balance thingy, and since this thing is becoming more powerful, they've gotten weaker, and now I can't even hear them in my head anymore”

  “What else do you remember?” Annabelle immediately started grilling me. She could have given my mom lessons in probing-question technique—everything I'd managed to piece together came tumbling out of my mouth.

  “So basically,” Zo said when we were finished, “we're screwed”

  “That would be the gist of it, yeah,” I said.

  “We wouldn't have been given these powers if we didn't stand a chance at stopping her,” Annabelle said in a way that almost made me believe her. “I thought about it, and I think we may be able to trap her somehow, before the dance” Annabelle wrinkled her forehead. “From what Bailey said about the balance, maybe we should come up with a plan that would swing the balance back in the other direction and sap Alecca of her power”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” Zo asked.

  “Carefully,” Annabelle said immediately.

  And with charts, I added silently, but for the first time since this whole thing had started, charts and research seemed to be the farthest thing from Annabelle's mind. Now she was all about strategy.

  “We each have our gifts,” she said. “We've been given them for a reason. They must work together somehow. Maybe if I can enter Alecca's mind, Bailey can enshroud her in some kind of ring of fire. Zo, you could divine for her weakness, a physical weak spot, and then Delia could transmogrify something to attack that spot”

  That was so a better course of action than I'd managed to come up with.

  “What we need is to plan the attack down to the most minute detail,” Annabelle said.

  “Oh joy” Zo was more of a fighter than a planner.

  Annabelle ignored her cousin. “Unfortunately,” she continued, “we have two pretty big problems”

  Problems. Like we didn't have enough of those already.

  “The first problem is that in order to fight Alecca, we need to find her,” Annabelle said. “That would be Zo's department. We can't really plan an attack if we have no idea where it's going to take place”

  “And the second problem?” I asked, knowing this one was going to be a doozy

  “Well,” Annabelle said, “today's Mabon”

  I glanced at Delia and Zo and saw that the significance of that statement wasn't ringing any bells with them, either.

  “The fall equinox,” Annabelle reminded us. “The day and night are equally long” Annabelle looked at me. “If what you said about Adea and Valgius not being able to help you is true, it supports my theory” Annabelle said the word “theory” almost apologetically, as if she knew she was starting to sound too academic for her own good. “When you first told us about the ‘unfortunate supernatural curfew,' you said that Adea warned you that daylight would shield us so long as light was in the majority”

  Annabelle took a deep breath. “Before Mabon,” she said, “the day is longer than the night. After Mabon, the night is longer than the day”

  “In other words,” Zo finished up for her cousin, “the light is no longer in the majority”

  “And Adea and Valgius aren't blocking her anymore,” I said, knowing it was true. “They just can't”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Delia said. “Problem one is that we don't know if we'll be able to find her before the dance?” Annabelle nodded. “And problem two,” Delia continued, pausing only for a moment, “is that we're afraid she'll find us”

  I turned to Zo and the question flew off my lips before it had fully formed in my mind. “In your vision,” I said, “of the dance …were we there?”

  Zo didn't say anything, and I knew the answer was no.

  The bus pulled to a stop at the high school, and I noticed for the first time that somehow, in the midst of all our strategy talk, Delia had managed to transmogrify the bus into a limo. Not quite covert, but we didn't exactly have time to worry about being covert anymore.

  “So what do we do?” I asked, hoping Annabelle had a nice and nifty logical answer.

  For a moment, there was silence.

  “We get out of the limo,” Delia said, “and then we worry about the rest”

  We stepped out of the car, and I couldn't help but glance around the schoolyard. A couple of jocks were standing on top of a picnic table; that guy with the thick glasses was duct-taped to a tree. Marissa Baker was probably hidden away in the newspaper room, writing another article that no one cared about, and Alex…
>
  Alex had her arms draped over Kane's shoulders.

  I thought of my dream, of the way he'd looked at me and the way I'd felt inside, and then I looked back at Alex as she mesmerized every male in the near vicinity with a bouncy-boob laugh that was so obvious it made Delia look like the queen of subtle.

  “And we're supposed to save that,” Annabelle said, lifting the thought from my mind.

  Murderous fairy-Fates aside, life was so not fair.

  As I sat in my math class, listening to my teacher drone on about the law of sines, I felt like a walking time bomb. With every sound in the room, every pencil moving across a page, every note passed, every whisper, I jumped in my seat, half-expecting to see a gray tentacle come out of nowhere to devour the entire class. Everywhere I looked, I saw Alecca: saw her red lips, saw her silver blond hair, saw her dead, blue eyes. I saw her ripping their souls out of their bodies and the red lips swallowing them whole. What if she decided not to wait for the dance? What if she knew Zo had seen it and decided to strike early? What if there was nothing I could do about it?

  Honestly, that last question didn't seem like much of a what-if.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Andrews” An office aide poked her head into the room, and I could feel the entire class sigh with relief for any break from the doldrums of basic trig. If they only knew. “The office needs to see Bailey Morgan”

  I grabbed my things, then hesitated before following the aide out of the room. Luring me to my death through the school's administration didn't seem like Alecca's style, but even so, I imagined her voice taunting me as I walked.

  You won't win. You can't.

  That's what she would say to me if she had the chance. I half-wondered if she was saying it to me, if she was speaking to me the way Adea and Valgius had before Alecca killed the boy. Biting my bottom lip so hard it ached, I opened the door to the office.

  “Ah, yes, Ms. Morgan,” the principal said the moment he saw me. “You're to report to the gym. The dance committee is finishing up a few things and they need your help”