Tattoo Read online

  “This from the girl who insists that her shoes would hate being worn by anyone else,” Zo said. I opened my eyes just in time to see Delia launch a pillow at Zo.

  “Hey, a girl's shoes are sacred”

  The word echoed in my head for a moment.

  Sacred.

  “Maybe,” Annabelle said, lifting the thought out of my head before I'd even put it into words. “Maybe there is something sacrosanct about the tattoos”

  I wasn't surprised that my thoughts sounded smarter when Annabelle said them. When she'd moved back to the U.S. in the seventh grade, she'd used such big words that the rest of us hadn't been able to understand her. We figured it out eventually.

  That was when Annabelle had stopped talking to anyone but us.

  Delia flipped her hair behind her shoulder. “As great as this superpower talk really is, I think we have some other issues to deal with, like the fact that this Mango Mermaid polish really needs three coats to achieve the tone I'm looking for”

  Some people panic in a crisis. Delia painted her nails.

  “Or maybe I could frost them,” Delia said. “If I paint over them with a thin coat of Misty Madness.” She brushed one hand over the fingertips on the other, lost in her musings on the perfect nail.

  No one but me saw the flash of blue-green light from Delia's stomach.

  To fight, to live

  We two of three bestow this gift…

  I shook my head to clear it of the now-familiar words.

  Delia gawked at her hand. After a moment, she spoke. “Wow. Just wow”

  “What?” Zo, Annabelle, and I asked at once.

  Delia held up her right hand. “Notice anything different?” she asked.

  The hand looked normal to me.

  “Your ‘wow, just wow' has something to do with your nails?” Zo flopped back down on the bed.

  Delia held her other hand up next to it. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the nails on her right hand were a different color from the nails on her left. “Slightly frosted,” Delia said in a shaky voice. “Like I just painted over them with Misty Madness”

  “Can you do it again?” Annabelle asked, her pen flying rapidly over the paper as she spoke. “Can you change the color of the other nails?”

  Delia ran her right hand over her left. “Misty Madness,” she said out loud. Again, I saw the faintest hint of blue-green light roll in a wave off the tattoo on her stomach, and Delia beamed as she held up her newly frosted left hand.

  “This,” she said, “is so cool”

  “So,” I said slowly, “I have the power to start fires, Annabelle's psychic, and Delia can change her nail polish color just by running her hand over it?” Something about that last power didn't seem quite right.

  “Maybe it's not just the nail polish color,” Delia said. “Maybe it's any color” With a grin, she held her hands up to her head and ran them both down her hair. “Blond,” she said, and as her hands passed over her thick locks, the hair turned blond, from the roots down.

  Delia turned to look in the mirror. “This is so not me,” she said, and the next instant, she was changing herself back.

  Without a word, Annabelle walked over to my computer and turned it on.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I'm going to try to find out what sort of telekinetic power would allow Delia to change something from one color to another,” she said simply, as though this was the kind of thing she did every day.

  “Telekinetic?” I asked. Just because Annabelle could see into my head didn't mean I could see into hers, and I was having trouble following her, which freaked me out, since I considered myself completely fluent (or close to it) in Annabelle—gestures, big words, and all.

  “A mental power,” Annabelle explained as her fingers flew over the keys. “I can use my mind to read the minds of other people. Bailey, you can use your mind to start fires, and Delia can use hers to change colors and “ Annabelle glanced at Zo with an apologetic smile. “I'm sure your mind does something,” she told Zo.

  I bit back a smile. Zo picked up the pillow Delia had tossed at her and with artistlike precision, sent it flying into the side of Annabelle's head. Annabelle rolled her eyes. “I didn't mean it that way,” she said. “You don't have to be so sensitive”

  Zo? Sensitive?

  “Yeah, right,” Zo said, and then she wrinkled her forehead and continued speaking. “I'm sorry, cousin,” she said in a muted voice. “That was inappropriate and uncalled for”

  Zo looked down at her shoes, and Delia, Annabelle, and I all stopped what we were doing and stared at her.

  “Inappropriate?” I asked. Since when had anything been inappropriate in the world of Zo?

  “Cousin?” Delia squeaked. “Since when do you call Annabelle cousin?”

  “I so did not just say that,” Zo said. “Why in the world would I say that?”

  “You even had a little Annabelle tone to your voice,” Delia said. “Totally weird”

  As soon as the words left Delia's mouth, silence fell over the room.

  Zo had spoken with Annabelle's quiet, understated tones.

  “You!” Zo said, pointing a finger at her cousin. “You put those words in my mouth, didn't you? How did you do that?” Zo glared at Annabelle. “I knew I'd never call you cousin on my own”

  “I didn't mean to,” Annabelle said meekly. “Honestly, Zo, I didn't. I didn't even know I could”

  “It's okay,” Zo said, softening her tone at the look on her cousin's face. “You didn't mean to, and I did overreact a tad bit”

  I stared first at Annabelle and then at Zo. “Tad bit?”

  “Damn it, A-belle,” Zo yelled, somewhere between reluctantly amused and thoroughly exasperated. “Stay out of my head”

  Annabelle sat there for a few seconds, saying nothing. “I'm not sure I can,” she said finally. “But I'll try”

  I looked at Annabelle, and a silent communication passed between us. I hadn't meant to set Alexandra's shoe on fire. Annabelle hadn't meant to put her words in Zo's mouth, just like she didn't mean to eavesdrop on every conversation I had with myself inside my head.

  To fight, to live

  We two of three bestow this gift…

  • • •

  “Two of what three?” I muttered out loud, trying to forget the words I couldn't help but remember.

  No answer.

  Meanwhile, Delia was having a great time with her newfound power. “Do I want to wear mocha or pearl?” she mused under her breath. With a swipe of her hand, her fashionable white shirt darkened to a creamy light brown. Delia brought her hand back down, and the shirt turned white again, with just a bit of shine. Back and forth her hand went as she debated. “Mocha or pearl? Mocha or pearl?”

  “ ‘Transmogrification,' “ Annabelle said out loud, reading the word off my computer screen. “ ‘The ability to transform one type of matter into another type of matter.' “ She paused. “If I'm reading this right,” she said, wrinkling her forehead, “if Delia has transmogrification, then she should be able to change surface characteristics, like color, but she should also be able to change the form itself”

  “Turn one thing into another?” Zo asked. She stared morosely down at her foot. “Stupid foot tattoo,” she muttered. “Delia can change stuff, and I've got a whole lot of nothing”

  “Hold on for just one second,” Delia instructed. “Are you telling me that I could just wave my hands over, I don't know, a piece of paper and turn it into a Coach purse?”

  “There's a chance that your power is limited simply to color,” Annabelle said, still totally in academic, chart-making mode, “but I haven't come across any such—”

  Delia cut her off. “This is officially the best day of my life,” she said. Without another word, she charged over to my trash can and picked up a gum wrapper. “Baby blue cashmere socks,” she said, running her other hand over it. Blue-green light surged out of her palm, wrapping itself around the wrapper
, vibrating with words that only I could hear.

  To know, to feed-

  To change, l'Sídhe

  The next thing I knew, Delia was holding a pair of baby blue cashmere socks. “I love my life,” she said. “Anyone else want anything? I think I'm going to make myself a dress like the one Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars last year”

  “Maybe you shouldn't,” Annabelle said, biting her lower lip. “What if there's a side effect we don't know about?”

  “You have got to be completely insane,” Delia said. “I've got the magic touch, and there's no way I'm not going to use it. The way I see it, the fashion gods are smiling down on me”

  Delia turned back to the trash can, and an instant later, she collapsed on the ground.

  “Delia!”

  “Just a little dizzy,” Delia said, rolling over onto her back. “That's all”

  “You feel like you've run a marathon,” Annabelle said, tilting her head to the side as she lifted the thoughts out of Delia's mind. “Using the power takes a lot out of you. Much more than mine does for me or Bailey's for her”

  Delia curled up into a ball with her new cashmere socks (formerly a gum wrapper) still in her hand. “Totally worth it”

  “That's what you say now,” Zo said, “but when Bailey's mom comes in here and starts fussing because you look sickly, maybe those socks won't look so good”

  “You're just bitter because your foot tattoo didn't pay off the way my girly stomach tattoo did,” Delia said. Delia was never too tired to argue with Zo. “You can't stand the fact that I—”

  Delia's words were cut off by a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I said. Delia pulled her shirt down over her stomach to conceal the tattoo the second before my mother walked in.

  “I just came to see if you girls wanted a snack before I go to bed,” my mom said. She paused and looked down at Delia. “Are you feeling all right, sweetheart? You look a little pale”

  Immediately, my eyes flew to Zo, and sure enough, the tattoo on her foot flashed like a strobe light in front of my eyes, leaving my ears ringing with words I'd heard before.

  To see, to feel

  To stand upon the ancient Seal

  “That's it,” I said the second my mom left. “To see”

  “What's it?” Zo asked. “See what?”

  “Your power,” I said. “Remember the thing with the lime green miniskirt? I mean, what are the chances that Alex would be wearing a corduroy lime green miniskirt and wanting to try on a pair of hot pants right after you said somebody would?”

  Delia looked like she was about to start calculating the fashion probability of that happening, so I plowed on before she could interrupt. “And then this thing with my mom. You knew she was coming”

  “ ‘Premonition,' “ Annabelle read off the website. “ ‘A precognitive power in which the seer knows or sees the future before it occurs.' “

  “That's it?” Zo asked. “Annabelle does her funky mind control thing, Delia can turn trash into jewels, Bailey sets stuff on fire, and I sometimes know some little insignificant event is going to happen before it does?”

  For a moment, we were all silent.

  Why? I thought. Why could we do these things? Who was coming? What had begun? Even without touching the tattoo or remembering what I'd heard, I couldn't banish the questions.

  “This sucks,” Zo said. “Why couldn't I have been the one with the fire?”

  “Impulse control?” Annabelle suggested. She shuddered, and I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not. “It's probably a good thing that Bailey's the one with pyrokinesis”

  “Pyrokinesis,” I repeated, remembering the feel of flames surging through my blood.

  “Sure,” Zo said, “rub it in. And you probably won't even set the trash can on fire”

  “Don't set the trash on fire,” Delia said immediately. “Do you know how many pairs of shoes I could make out of the contents of that trash can?”

  “Trust me,” I told Zo. “You're the lucky one. I mean, I actually set someone on fire, Annabelle could probably make someone walk in front of a moving car if she wanted to, or make them say something awful to someone, or who knows what else, without even meaning to, Delia's probably going to transmogrify herself right into a coma, and we don't even know what's going on”

  Annabelle's eyes widened. Apparently, she hadn't even thought that perhaps her mind control powers weren't limited to speech.

  Delia yawned. “It's a definite possibility,” she admitted sleepily in reference to my coma comment. “But I'll be the best-dressed comatose person you've ever seen”

  Annabelle flipped through the notes she'd made, cross-referencing a couple of the pages. “You're right, Bay,” she said finally. “We don't know why or what we're supposed to do or how we can keep from hurting people. All we know is that this all somehow goes back to the tattoos and to the two voices you keep hearing”

  “So what do we do?” I voiced the question that everyone in the room was thinking.

  “First off, you should write down everything you hear, Bailey,” Annabelle said. Now that we were in her domain, she was more than happy to take charge.

  More charts. I could practically see Zo thinking the same thing, and with her new psychic powers, Annabelle had to have heard us both, but she plowed on. “Tomorrow, we go directly to the source”

  The rest of us looked at one another. What source?

  “The woman who sold us the tattoos,” Annabelle said, jotting one final note down in the margins of her paper. “If anyone knows anything about the tattoos, it would have to be her”

  Delia sat up. “You know what that means, don't you?” she asked, a gargantuan grin spreading across her face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow morning, we're going back to the mall”

  That night marked a first among our Friday-night sleepovers. I was normally the first or second one out, but that night, while everyone else slept, I stared up at the ceiling from my sleeping bag on the floor. What if whoever was “coming” came while we were sleeping? What if I had a nightmare and burned the house down? For that matter, what if Delia turned the whole house and all of us into some kind of massive Jimmy Choo? For all I knew, Annabelle, who was asleep on the floor next to me, might well be in the process of unintentionally turning the whole neighborhood into zombies who said things with muted voices while staring at their shoes.

  “Isn't it fabulous?” Delia murmured into her pillow. She was an infamous sleeptalker. “Très chic”

  My eyelids drooped, and I rolled over onto my side, telling myself sternly to keep my eyes open. Until I got a handle on this fire thing, I was determined not to fall asleep.

  So, of course, thirty seconds later, I fell asleep.

  I heard the waterfall before I saw anything. The air hummed with it, the sound of water falling on stone saturating the silence of the room. I opened my eyes and realized that I didn't remember closing them. I stared up at the ceiling. Not my ceiling. There was water flowing there, from one side of the ceiling to the other, and then down the walls and onto the floor. My hands went to grab my sleeping bag to pull it over my eyes, but instead, they hit cold stone. I sat up and realized that I wasn't in a sleeping bag at all and that, given the freaky overhead waterfall thingy, that shouldn't have come as a surprise.

  I ran my hand over the stone beneath me. Its surface was smooth, but every so often, my hand would run across some kind of indentation. It took me a moment to realize that something had been carved into this stone. I stood up and backed away, anxious to get a look at the whole thing. It was round and raised slightly above the rest of the floor. As I backed off the stone carving, I felt grass underneath my feet; wet grass on a pleasantly warm summer day.

  “It's always summer here, when we wish it to be summer. “

  That voice. I knew that voice. Feminine and soft, but so powerful. So old.

  The owner of the voice laughed. “No lady likes to be told that s
he's old, child,” she chided.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. This was not happening.

  “Not even an immortal lady,” a second voice added. This one was low and deep, and no less horrible or less wonderful than the first.

  “Immortal?” I squeaked, and then I cursed myself. My eyes were closed, I was trying to convince myself that this wasn't happening, and yet I talk to them? Brilliant.

  “Look at us, child”

  I didn't want to, but the voice was so beautiful, so awful, that I couldn't help myself. Slowly, I turned around, and after a deep breath, I opened my eyes.

  The woman's hair was such a dark shade of red that I was only half sure it wasn't black. It fell in thick waves, past her shoulders and down to her waist, and it shined so much that had the room been pitch black, she could have lit the entire thing with the light of her hair.

  The same kind of light came from her eyes, which were so blue I could barely stand to look at them.

  The man beside her had hair darker than hers, black with a blue shine to it, and he had the same disarmingly blue eyes.

  “Immortal?” I asked again, and a million other better questions ran through my head. Where was I? Why was I here? Who were they? Why did they keep talking to me? What did they want from me?

  “Rest easy, child,” the woman said, plucking my fears and questions from my head with ease. “We are not here to harm you. You are safe in this place. For thousands of your years, this place has remained pure and untarnished by violence. For now, it is safe”

  She gestured to the round, carved stone on the floor.

  “The Seal,” she said softly. “It protects this place from those who would do it, and your world, harm”

  This chick was saying “harm” just enough to make me nervous.

  She stepped forward and took my hand in hers. Her skin was soft and slightly cool, like the stone seal itself. “I am Adea,” she said. “He is Valgius. We must speak quickly. We cannot bring our world into your dreams for long.

  “To answer your questions: We are not immortal. Someday, hundreds of thousands of your years from now, we will grow old. We could die before then should great harm come to us or the balance, and through the balance, the Seal, but we have lived for tens of thousands of your years. To you, our life span may seem immortal, but that is simply your word for a very long time.