Free Bailey Morgan [2] Fate by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Sidhe more powerful too.
    Hadn't Adea said something about connections? Or maybe she'd called them ties. I couldn't really remember.
    I cursed my memory, but part of me had to admit that maybe it wasn't so much a matter of not being able to remember as it was a matter of not paying that much attention the first time. Adea had used her “let's talk about the future” voice, and then she'd gotten all cryptic and I'd zoned out. It was a perfectly natural response—one that had gotten me through many college talks with my mom (not to mention my meeting with Mr. McMann earlier today), but unfortunately, I was beginning to suspect that in this case, this particular method wasn't exactly what you'd call helpful.
    “I'm back, and I come bearing cookie.”
    I glanced toward Zo, still caught up in my thoughts. “Cookie?” I asked on autopilot. “As in singular? Don't you usually come bearing cookie
s
?”
    Zo shrugged. “There might have been a few casualties on the way up the stairs.”
    Translation: She'd eaten them.
    “You come up with anything good while I was gone?” she asked, handing me a cookie, which I set gingerly aside, because some of us didn't have stomachs the size of Montana and metabolisms that made warp speed look slow.
    “Maybe,” I said. “I was thinking about the story that Keiri told us.”
    “Keiri? As in Daughters of Adea, Sidhe-worshipping, told-us-about-the-Fates Keiri?”
    I nodded. “That would be the one. She said that Adea and Val were the connection between humans and Sidhe.”
    Zo nodded.
    “Nexus means connection,” I continued, realizing even as I said it that I wasn't properly communicating the depth of my thoughts. Luckily, with Zo, it didn't matter, because she could read me as well as Annabelle read Latin.
    “If Adea and Val connect the two worlds,” she said, “that means you do too. Right?”
    I nodded.
    “And this whole Reckoning thing is supposed to be you going to … what do they call the other world again?”
    What
did
people call the Sidhe world? I'm sure Annabelle could have given us an alphabetized list of mythologically correct names, and I was pretty sure that Adea and Valgius had referred to it simply as “the place beyond,” but I settled for something a little more self-explanatory.
    “I don't know,” I said slowly. “I guess people call the other world … ummm … the Otherworld.”
    “Clever,” Zo opined.
    I grinned at her. “I thought so.” After all, the other Sidhe lived there, and it was a world other than the one I spent most of my time in.
    “What do you think it will be like?” Zo asked, her head tilted to the side and her voice softer than usual.
    “I don't know,” I said. “The Nexus is pretty.”
    The words sounded moronic to my ears, but Zo just nodded. “I think I remember that,” she said. “I was kind of concentrating on the evil fairy trying to kill us atthe time, but I remember things being very …” She trailed off.
    Now it was my time to nod. “Yeah.”
    The Nexus was hard to describe. Something about it defied description.
    “Are you scared?” Zo's words caught me off guard. Our therapy session in the car aside, Zo wasn't exactly known for her sensitivity. She was more of a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of girl.
    “A little,” I said. “Adea and Valgius tried to make it seem normal, like of course I'm going there and I'm going to meet others just like me, but at the same time, something about the things they said made it sound like there was more to it than that.” I paused, because up until then, I'd concentrated on what Adea and Valgius had told me, rather than the way they'd told me.
    For a long time, Zo and I sat there, both of us quiet. I wasn't sure what she was thinking, and I didn't probe her mind to find out. Instead, I thought about what had been said in the Nexus and what had gone unsaid and about the fact that Morgan had definitely done some saying and unsaying of her own.
    “I'd go with you if I