A Matter of Fate (9 page)

“Hang out.”

Nor do I like the stark disapproval in her voice. “Yes. Do you have a problem with this?”

“You two ditched school to go to the beach, in a storm, to
hang out
.”

Every part of me is bristling. First Caleb, now Cora? “I can do what I want, you know.”

“Even if it’s stupid?”

“Gods, Cora, what’s your problem?” I snap. “And by the way, it’s not like I have to ask your permission if I want to go somewhere with someone!”

“Someone,” she bites out. “Oh yes, we’re talking about just a random boy at school now, aren’t we?”

“You don’t know him, so I don’t see why you’re acting like—”

“But I do know Jonah now.”

The phone nearly slips from my fingers. “What?”

“While you were off hanging out with his brother, Lizzie and I met Jonah.”

Just like that, all of the happiness built up over the afternoon disappears in a torrent of confusion and longing. My heart is beating hard. Too hard.

“What happened with Kellan today?” she asks.

I’m so off balance at the moment, I actually tell her. “We kissed. It was . . . I don’t even know how to explain it. It felt
right
.” Two fingers touch my mouth; I’m still able to visualize how wonderful his lips felt on mine.

“WHAT?” And then—”I’m coming over.”

“That’s not necessary,” I say, sitting up, but it’s too late. I’m talking to a dial tone.

Cora shows up fifteen minutes later. She walks in without knocking. Lizzie arrives not one minute later, her lithe body stiff with worry.

“What is this?” I accuse. “Are you guys staging an intervention over me ditching school?”

“We should be,” Caleb mutters from the other side of the room. He’s still so pissed off he won’t make eye contact. Instead, he’s spent the entire time we’ve been inside surfing the net on his phone.

Lizzie sits down next to me. “Sweetie, we’re worried about you.”

This is unbelievable. “It’s not like I’m the first person to ditch school, you know!”

“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s because of the Whitecombs.”

“The
who
?” I ask.

Lizzie looks to Cora and then to me. “Didn’t you even ask Kellan his last name?”

Cora snorts, “Figures,” and ceases pacing. She throws herself in the chair opposite the couch and says, “You’d think she’d at least learn his last name before sticking her tongue in his mouth.”

“Jesus, Cora!” I explode, blushing furiously.

“Not helping the cause,” Lizzie mutters to an unruffled Cora. Caleb tosses his cell phone down and sighs loudly.

My Spanish Inquisitors both fold their arms and wait for my answer. “I didn’t know his last name,” I finally admit, grappling with the growing discontent in my stomach. “It doesn’t change anything, though.”

Cora laughs outright. “Oh, really? Think about the importance the Lilywhite name carries in the worlds. Or Pinksten. Or Carregreen.”

I am so tired, all I want to do is go upstairs and crawl into bed. “If you have something to say, then just say it. I’m not in the mood to play games.” Lizzie opens her mouth to speak, but I cut her off, despite what I’ve just said. “Look—I
connected
with someone today, and I’m not quite understanding why this has got you all bent out of shape! And, besides, it’s none of your business, anyways!”

Cora jerks back onto her feet. “Seriously, Chloe? This is how you’re going to play this?”

I jut a finger out at her. “I’m not the one playing games right now, Cora.”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, like she’s counting to ten or something. Then she opens her eyes and says, fairly calmly, “You may have only shown me a little bit of your memories of Jonah, but I clearly saw the depth of your feelings for him. Are you telling us those are gone, after just one afternoon with his brother?”

Of course they’re not. There’s never been anything that’s been able to dull my feelings for Jonah. Not even when I believed I was insane for falling in love with someone in my dreams. Not even when I was kissing his brother today, as wrong as it sounds.

But I feel trapped. Cornered. Confused. Guilty. So I lash out at the people in front of me. “For all I know,
he
has no idea who I am! It’s not like he’s made any effort to talk to me. If he’s really the same person, he’d have talked to me,
come
to me. But he hasn’t!”

“To be fair, you haven’t made any efforts yourself,” Lizzie offers.

I hold back the impulse to smack her. “That’s different!”

“Do you hear this crap?” Cora asks Lizzie and Caleb. “The girl has not one, not two, but three separate shifts over this guy’s presence after dreaming about him her whole life, and now she’s acting like a baby.” She swivels her focus back to me. “Is this some kind of punishment?
He didn’t talk to me, so I’m going to make out with his brother. That’ll show him.
Because if that’s what you’re doing, it’s a really shitty thing to do, Chloe.”

I have never been so angry at her in my entire life. “Shut your mouth, Cora, before I shut it for you. You don’t know anything about any of this!”

She actually laughs at that.

“Way to finesse the situation, Cora,” Caleb mutters. But he knows this is just like her.

So does Lizzie. She steps in between us. “Everyone, let’s discuss this rationally.”

It’s my turn to count to ten—then to twenty—before being able to continue. “What are we talking about?” I demand. “How is any of this your business? Why are you so put out that I like Kellan?”

But of course, Lizzie sidesteps these questions. “In a situation like this, with these boys . . . it’s totally understandable how you would be confused. They’re identical twins. You’re probably just transferring your feelings from one to the other.”

Anger flares once more. What do they know about my feelings toward Jonah?
Nothing
. But what’s worse is the terrible surge of jealousy that pumps through me.

They know him. They talked to him. He’s always been mine. My secret. My love.

And now they know.

“What did you think you were accomplishing today when you hooked up with his brother?” Cora yells around Lizzie.

“I’d like the answer to that one myself,” Caleb murmurs.

How do I even go about answering that when I don’t fully understand it myself? “I don’t know!” I yell in return. “For once, I just ran with what I was feeling. What’s wrong with that?”

“People like us,” Lizzie says flatly, still positioned between me and Cora, “do not run with our feelings. We do not have that luxury.”

The irony of that is too much to pass up. “Oh, that’s choice, coming from you of all people!” I snarl, and Lizzie steps away, wounded.

“Nice, Chloe,” Cora snarks, but I’m done with all of this.

So I unleash some words of judgment, too. “Wouldn’t you know that best, Lizzie, since you’re a master of bottling up those feelings, even if it means hurting those they’re intended for.”

“Chloe, this is beneath you!” Caleb growls, but Lizzie waves him off.

“I know what’s expected of me,” she counters. “I don’t delude myself into thinking or feeling things that cannot be.”

I laugh bitterly. “Well, forgive me, but I felt something today, and I went with it. It was nice for once to do something for
me,
not because it’s expected or because I had to.”

“Way to be responsible,” Cora snaps.

There’s a roar in my ears, so loud I can’t even hear my own heartbeat. “How
dare
you.”

Cora blinks, surprised.

Take a breath,
the little voice quickly urges.

“Chloe,” Lizzie says, her eyes just as wide. “I don’t think Cora meant—”

But the words keep coming. “I’m
so sorry
that I’m such a disappointment to you all. I fully realize what a pathetic excuse of a Magical I am, and how I embarrass the crap out of you all over how I don’t manage to fulfill my expectations—”

“Chloe,” Caleb says, flying closer. “You need to calm down—”

“Why? So yet another person can tell me how I’m an utter failure?”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Cora says quickly.

I snarl. “Isn’t it, though?”

A lamp in the room explodes and light bulbs in two others flicker and then shatter themselves. Things go blurry and all I can feel is such rage I don’t know if I can hold it all in anymore.

Not responsible. Letting them down. Not fulfilling expectations. Not living up to potential. Always doing the wrong things, making the wrong choices.

I am an utter failure in the eyes of everyone I know.

“Calm down,” Caleb soothes again, but I don’t see him.

All I can think of is how, yet again, I’m not doing what I
should
be doing. I wish somebody had given me a manual, so I could get something right once in a while.

“Just listen,” Cora says, more calmly. She comes back into focus when she approaches me like I’m a rabid dog—warily, hands up. Caleb blocks her from coming too close. “I surged with Jonah.”

“You didn’t ask permission?” Caleb yells, strangely aghast.

“I didn’t know,” she stresses. To me—”I mean, this guy literally steps out of your dreams and shows up a year later. You, of all people . . . I would’ve thought you’d want to figure it out immediately! Chloe, I
saw
your feelings for him,
felt
them. I just don’t get why you . . . I don’t know, ignored him! Went off and kissed his brother! Why did you? What happened?”

They’re all waiting, but I don’t know how to answer them. Jonah’s disappearance last year had broken me. The fear over that event, and the pain that still lingered, was excruciating.

I can’t live through it again.

Cora sighs through her nose, frustrated. Caleb barks out another warning, but she doesn’t back down this time. “You’re being supremely stupid, Chloe.”

“Cora,” Caleb says in a dangerously low voice, “enough. She doesn’t have all the facts yet, and may I point out, neither do
you
.”

Throat constricting, I manage to whisper, “What don’t I know?”

She glares at him before saying to me, “When I surged, I learned something.” She pauses, licks her lips in a weirdly defiant way. “Jonah knows you.”

“Tell us something that we don’t know,” my Faerie friend mutters.

“I’m not finished,” she says testily. And then, “I only got to see a brief flash before he locked me out, but it was there. Jonah’s here because of you, Chloe.
For
you.”

Jonah
knows?

He’s here, for me? Just like I’d always—

I stagger back, straight into Lizzie. She wraps her arms around me, like she’s shielding me from something.

What had I just done? How can I
ever
begin to explain what I’d done with his brother? What I felt, still feel . . . ?

There’s nothing to say. What could I possibly? Nothing. Nothing at all. Because my world has just turned upside down.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

I don’t bother to turn around when I answer Cora. “Yeah, it is.”

She leans against the windowsill next to me. “I can’t believe we’re finally in Annar.”

Both of us have wanted to visit the Magical city-state plane for as long as I can remember. And now that I’m finally here, the view in front of me surpasses anything that I’ve ever imagined. The architecture throughout the city is all done in gray sandstone flecked with quartz crystals that sparkle all day long. The streets are paved in small, smooth stones, the sidewalks in brick. Large trees provide generous shade over the roads, and everywhere I look, there is beautiful landscaping.

It’s like no city I’ve ever seen before.

Cora points into the distance. “That must be Karnach.”

She’s referring to a rotunda, the most prominent feature as far as the eye can see. Its dome looms wide and large, a central focus that all other buildings lean in toward. Karnach is the Council’s domain. Every single Council member has an office there, and from what my father tells me, it’s also where they conduct all of their meetings.

When I don’t acknowledge her, she says rather grudgingly, “Look, I’m sorry. I know that I sort of threw you for a loop yesterday, but I honestly felt like you needed a reality check.”

I simply stare at her. To say I’m still annoyed by yesterday’s fight is an understatement.

She’s genuinely flustered, which isn’t something she tends to be often. “Obviously you don’t want to talk about this with me right now—”

“You’re right about that,” I say flatly.

“But,” she continues, “I told you that Jonah and Kellan’s last name is Whitecomb.”

All of a sudden, I’m reminded of a time when I was little. Caleb, ten years my senior, was trying to explain things my parents frequently neglected to teach me about. “Each species of Magicals have similar names,” he’d pointed out as I gathered up colorful leaves to make a collage back home. “Chloe, are you listening?”

“Yep.” But as I was probably seven, I wasn’t really.

“For example, Magical Faeries all have names that are things found in nature. For example, my last name is Windbrook. Caleb Windbrook. Get it? A brook is something found in nature.”

A beautiful red leaf distracted me. I went to go get it.

“All Magical Elves have surnames that are plants.”

“Plants,” I’d repeated as I carefully placed my new find in a basket. He’d mentioned Goblins, Dwarves, and Gnomes, too, but I totally ignored him until he came to Humans. “Your kind all have similar names, too. Colors. Your last name is Lilywhite. What’s the color there?”

“White?”

He’d been relieved. “Exactly!”

“My friend Greenlee has a color name!” I’d exclaimed. “Is she a Magical, too?”

“No. That’s her first name. Human Magicals always have a variation of a color in their
last
name. That’s not to say that everyone with a color name is a Magical, though.”

I can’t believe I didn’t catch it last night. I smack my forehead. “They’re Magicals.”

“Yeah,” she says, smiling a little. “After he forcibly ejected me from his mind when I surged, I made a call to one of my dad’s old friends here in Annar, asked if they’d ever heard of any Whitecombs before, possibly a set of twins? And he had. Said they’re well known and that their father is on the Council.”