Inhuman Heritage

by Sonnet O'Dell

  When I pulled back from him, Jareth wrapped his fingers into my hair and brought my mouth to his. It was very different kissing him, his lips were hard and rough, his van dyke beard tickled my face and made me want to pull away even more. When I struggled with his grip he let me go and I gathered up the sheet so I could fully move to the other side of the bed. Jareth looked at me, he could see the naked line of my back and if he were a human I would have said he was panting.

  “Think about it. I do not want to lose this alliance.” I made a disgusted sound that he thought of mine and Aram’s relationship as an alliance even if I doubted that we were still in a relationship. I turned keeping my back to Jareth and didn’t turn round till I heard the bedroom door close. I started gathering up my clothes, dressing in a hurry and I went out the employee’s door so I wouldn’t have to see either of them again.

  I came home to an empty apartment. I had started thinking that perhaps I needed to get a pet, an actual cat rather than just a witch that had been a cat, something to be happy to see me when I came home. I threw my keys into the dish on the table next to the door and hung up my coat. March was still cold and wet, the snow had gone but there was still no sun and no warmth to the days. I sighed leaning against the door. Aram and I were breaking up. I felt the tears start down my face and I was deeply sad. I kept trying to think of something, anything to explain why we had fizzled out so quickly. Aram and I were deeply attracted to each other, he loved me although I had never yet said it back. I didn’t really know if I did love him yet. I know I felt something for him, I wouldn’t be crying now if I didn’t.

  I dragged my feet walking towards the fridge and pulled out the freezer drawer. I was going to drown my sorrow with my two favorite men. Ben and Jerry. I pulled out a tub, wrapped a dish towel around it so I didn’t freeze my hands and hit the button under the blinking light on my answer machine.

  “Ms. Farbanks, this is Doctor Armitage, Christina Armitage. We met in the hospital. I just wanted to let you know that the results from the tests from your blood are in and I would like to discuss the results with you. Please call me so we can meet and discuss them. This is my home number.” She repeated the number twice and I managed to write it down on the corner of the newspaper. I took the top off the ice cream and started spooning it into my mouth as the second message played.

  “Hey it’s me,” said Incarra’s voice. “I haven’t spoken to you in an age. Call me tomorrow okay. I want to hear all about that new dishy boyfriend of yours.”

  “He dumped me,” I said but I had a spoonful of ice cream in my mouth so it came out more ‘me mumped be’. I waited for the last of my three messages. I leaned forward reaching into the open wooden box that was still sitting there and pulled out the photograph of my mother and the blonde woman. I bet my mother had never gotten dumped.

  “Cassandra child, it’s Virginia. When you have a moment I would like to see you. I think we can finish your aura cleansing now.” As her voice finished playing on the answer machine the spoon dropped from my mouth and I knew why I had recognized this woman in the picture before. It was a young Virginia. I gaped at the photograph; they couldn’t have been more than twenty in it. It had been hidden in a secret drawer in the box and I had found it when I’d knocked the box down breaking the drawer.

  Virginia Too-good was my mentor of sorts. She had been helping me to learn my magical powers. I’d gotten them from my mother, who’d jumped from one reality to another leading to the situation that my life was now in constantly. I spent the day in one reality where there was no magic and no monsters and at night I came here where I had power. It had been growing since I had a near death experience in September of last year. Although Virginia was teaching me, she wouldn’t talk to me about my powers. I had always suspected that she had known my mother and now I had proof. I clutched the photograph, put the ice cream back in the freezer and decided I would go to Virginia’s to talk to her and this time damn it she was going to give me some answers. I snatched my keys, put the photograph into my coat pocket and took the elevator downstairs. Virginia lived in a rather quaint three story house in the middle of Nunnery Wood that was on the other side of town. I used to have to walk there, now however I had a bike. A Suzuki Hayabusa GSX1300R motorbike, in screaming fire engine red with gold insignia on the front side-custom paint job.

  I’d done some work for the Governor of a prison in Birmingham in January. It had been my last big pay day-five hundred an hour for eight hours a day over three days, you do the math–and most of that check after covering my bills had gone on the bike. It was brand new, shiny and I loved it. I loved the speed and it had taken me a little while to learn to ride it. It would get me to Virginia’s in no time. I checked the clock on my phone, it was nearing two in the morning but after a minute of thinking about it, I decided that I didn’t care. She’d said when I had a chance, now was convenient for me. I mounted the bike, kick started the engine and streamed off into the night.

  The lights were still on at Virginia’s when I got there. I rode the bike half way up her drive then dismounted to roll it the rest of the way. I kicked the stand down and leaned it against it; pulling the helmet from my head I adjusted my braid. My hair is long brown and when riding a motorcycle you didn’t want it flapping everywhere, it made the braid I normally kept my hair in even more practical. I rested the helmet on the seat and marched up the porch steps to the front door. Before I could knock the door whined and opened on its own. I peered inside, Virginia was not standing in the hall waiting for me but I stepped inside anyway. I didn’t call out. I pulled the photograph from my pocket determined and walked up the stairs to find her. There were voices coming from the second floor parlor, Virginia had company. The door was pulled to but a small stream of light illuminated a patch of the wooden floor. I crept towards the door avoiding the squeaking floorboard and quickly crossed the light. I leaned my right shoulder against the door jam and peered through the gap. Victoria’s guest was the Grand Magus, the head of the magical council of wizards. They were arguing about something.

  “She needs more than I can give her, she needs more training and I am not as spry as I was. I am begging you.” They were arguing about me.

  “Virginia, she’ll only cause trouble at the school, she’s not like the other students.”

  “What if I talked to one of the tutors or an enforcer? Find someone willing to tutor her privately. Her powers are growing.”

  “Even more reason for us to leave her the hell alone, we got involved before and it was a disaster.”

  “Please, Francis, she is not her mother, they don’t know about her, it won’t be the same and even if they do come, it’s cruel to leave her unprepared. She is reaching the end of her twenty-first year and has not come into her full power; she is only two weeks away from it never happening.”

  “I’m sorry, Virginia, but I must put my foot down about this,” said the Magus moving to end their conversation. “Her mother wasn’t human and neither is she and we do not mess in inhuman affairs.”

  I dropped the photograph to cover my mouth. I’d asked all sorts of questions about my mother and I’d wanted answers. I’d wanted to know why she’d left this world. If she had any family and at my lowest point I had even wondered if I was her first child. All these questions had centered around who my mother was. I’d never thought to ask what my mother was. It had never occurred to me. Not even once.

  I didn’t know whether to scream, cry, collapse or run away. In the end I choked out a squeak covering my mouth as they went silent and I scrambled to recover the photo. Virginia opened the door stepping out into the corridor to confront an intruder and her eyes widened staring at me. I felt sick and my eyes were watering, I held them wide trying to stop the tears tumbling out and ran. I nearly fell on the stairs and I could hear her calling my name but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t turn back. I couldn’t ever go back.

  Chapter Four

  I was sitting in the private office of Doctor Christina
Armitage. She hadn’t been too pleased when I had called her at home at half two in the morning but she had agreed to see me first thing the next day. I’d put my locket with the two doves on immediately and had been unable to sleep a wink all night. I’d spent time praying that it wasn’t true, that the doctor would confirm that I was a normal person then I could go back to Virginia and call her a liar. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world. I wanted there to be some other reason why my powers had increased and why I was different. I didn’t want to think the reason I got on so well with the preternatural communities was because I was preternatural myself. Was that terribly hypocritical of me? I had felt bad after thinking that.

  Doctor Armitage came in the door. She looked a little tired although her clothes and her blond bob was neatly in place. She handed me a coffee with milk and sugar taking a seat at her desk. I was nervous I suppose. I clutched the coffee watching her as she brought up some files on her computer.

  “I’m glad you called even if it was at nearly three in the morning. I think this is important for you to see.” I nodded, I didn’t want to comment on anything till I had seen it. She brought up an image on the screen that was all red and gold. It took me a little bit of staring at it, like a magic eye picture, to see what it was. It was a magnified picture of my blood stream.

  “Your fibrin platelets,” she said using a pen to point to the gold circles, “aren’t normal. They’re a golden color as you can see and they are present in your system constantly but in greater supply it seems when you’re hurt. It increases your ability to heal from what I can see, your body is always ready to heal even a minor cut or bruise. It’s extraordinary.”

  I swallowed down some of the coffee, there was only one sugar in it so it tasted a little bitter to me, much like hearing what the doctor was saying; it was hard to swallow. She continued drawing my attention to the way the cells glittered.

  “It doesn’t explain why it’s gold colored though but I am going to assume that had something to do with the magic in you. We’ve long been trying to identify if there is some genetic factor, something we can measure to show magic but as yet we’ve not pinpointed anything that connects all the subjects.”

  When Doctor Armitage said we I had to assume that she meant her profession, I didn’t for the minute think that she was running these trials and experiments herself or that even any of them were being performed at this hospital.

  “I had the lab extract just some of those platelets so we could pull your genetic profile and examine your chromosomal count.” I’d done well at biology in school and I knew that you got half your DNA from your mother and half from your father. This was the crux of the matter, this would tell me whether I was who I thought I was or not.

  “It took so long because I had to have them run it three times to be sure of what I was seeing. Half your alleles are humanoid but not human. The other half are just, well, I can’t even say they’re humanoid; they barely registered. I’ve run them against all samples of preternatural life that we have in the national and international database and can’t find anything that matches.” I bowed my head. Nothing, nothing matched me. That wasn’t good. I took deep breathes. “Your chromosomal count is what is really fascinating. A normal human has twenty three pairs. You have twenty five.”

  My head snapped up and the doctor recoiled a little seeing the tears that had started streaming down my face. I shook my head; I still wanted it not to be true. I wanted to believe that my day time world was the one I belonged in, not the strange other world and here she was telling me that I really shouldn’t exist in the normal world. It was crushing.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Just keep talking. Twenty-five pairs.” But my voice was thready as I spoke barely above a whisper. My world was crashing to pieces around me.

  “Yes,” she said and she brought up a 3D mock-up of a double helix. “These two pairs.” She circled them with the end of the pen so I could see what she was talking about. “Now this one, I’ve seen before, it’s most common in shape-shifters. It indicates that you might be able to change to another form. Have you ever?” I shook my head. I had to keep my mouth shut for fear that I would start wailing like a baby. The doctor paused again to ask me if I was alright and I nodded just so that she would keep explaining it to me. I wanted to know as much as I didn’t want to believe it was true.

  “The last pair is unknown. It something I’ve not seen before. There is part of it that is similar to vampires but it’s much more than that.”

  “Like a vampire?” I reached out grabbing her arm, I know I was digging my fingers into her flesh but to her credit she didn’t cry out, she stroked the back of my knuckles trying to sooth me into letting go. I released her when I felt it, that I could crush the radius in her arm if I wanted. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please finish.”

  “It’s similar to vampires not in the need to consume blood or anything but more in the not aging immortal way. But both these two genes are in flux from what I can tell. They don’t appear to be stable. If they stabilized I would imagine it would put you as far beyond most preternatural beings as they are beyond humans.”

  My powers had been in flux. They seemed to be growing but my control over it came and went. I flashed back to last night and what Virginia had said. She is reaching the end of her twenty first year and has not come into her full power; she is only two weeks away from it never happening. The chromosomes were in flux. If I waited two weeks and something didn’t happen, I might be normal. It might all go away. That gave me a little more hope. All I had to do was turn twenty two without incident. I looked at the floor and started scrubbing at my eyes, I was afraid they were going to be all red and puffy no matter what I did.

  “You really didn’t know any of this?” asked Doctor Armitage.

  “No. Mom started to talk about a little of it, about the magic but she died and my father died when I was a baby. I hardly even remember him.”

  “Died? Are you sure?” She seemed shocked.

  “My father was humanoid, didn’t you say that?”

  “No, the humanoid part was in the matrilineage—that’s genes passed down from your mother. She was a humanoid preternatural; it’s your father that we have no idea what he was.” I stared at her. No, I knew the man in my mother’s photographs was a human. He had died in a car crash; anything more than human to the degree that she was suggesting would have walked away from such a thing with barely a scratch. I told the doctor this. She scratched her chin and didn’t look like she was going to agree with me.

  “What does that look mean? What is it?”

  “If what I can see from the tests is true, then the man you think is your father, isn’t.”

  * * * *

  I slammed the door behind me as I entered my flat carrying the last of the boxes that were labeled as my mother’s and my father’s belongings. I’d cleared my lock up after taking off the locket so I could shift back to my normal reality. I laughed bitterly like there was anything normal about my life now. I started tearing through the boxes looking for something, a diary, a letter, something that would tell me the truth. I wanted to scream at my mother. Tell her how unfair it was for her to leave me not only alone but without knowing anything. It hadn’t been too long ago I had been thinking about how taking each day as it comes and enjoying it to the fullest was a wise philosophy considering how short life was.

  Now I might have a lot more days to come, I might not ever look older than I was now. The horror of being stuck like this forever. I’d always pitied the vampires, they were eternal and most were beautiful, true, but they could never change, so if you were turned before you could grow out of that fat face or to do something about that boil. You were frozen in time. I didn’t even know if a vampire could get a haircut without it all growing back to the way it was over night, I certainly didn’t notice if their hair grew at all. I really couldn’t imagine always being this way. Immortality would thrill most humans but for some re
ason it really frightened me. All that time. What the hell was I supposed to do with it?

  I started to remember my dreams. The giant red bird that had been chasing me, searching for me. It had glittered red and gold and now I wondered if that was some subconscious image of my awakening power. I had a friend who had told me that my aura was changing color. She told me at first it had been sort of grey but now seeing me again she could see it flaking away and a new color shining through. A gold color. It was like I had been bound by something, like it was keeping the power tamped down. That would explain why I had grown up normal. Grown up believing I was human. My mother had never told me I was special, she always said that I was just like everyone else, equal to them. Why did she tell me that when she knew it wasn’t true? When she knew that I would be so different?

  I abruptly crashed to my butt on the floor and buried my face against my knees. I kicked the piles of boxes in a futile effort to make myself feel better but it was a very small satisfaction. I started to cry all over again. I wanted my mother more than anything. I wanted her to sit next to me, put her arm around me and tell me not to cry. I’d rest my head on her shoulder and she would explain everything, then it would be alright, because she would be here with me. I didn’t want to face this alone. I picked up the phone that was lying on the coffee table from where I’d called the doctor last night. When I had left her office she was making noise about more tests, measuring my increased strength, she even wanted to cut me to see how quickly my body healed it. I had been mad at her for turning my pain into some opportunity for herself, making me feel like some kind of freak show. I stared at the phone and wondered who I could call.

  I couldn’t call Incarra. Although she was my best friend and I wanted to talk to her about this I couldn’t. It was too big to edit for someone who wasn’t in the know about the other world. How would I explain to my friend that I wasn’t human? She wouldn’t believe me. She’d call someone to lock me up because I needed help or she might run screaming. It would scare her if I started talking about all this with her. Anton was the same. He was even less involved in my life since I had quit college.