Inhuman Heritage

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “Just help him get to the van,” I said and picked up Sorin nestling him against my chest. He sleepily rolled his head into the crook of my neck and snuffled. If he would just sleep through the rest of this night, things might be easier on the little guy. LeBron was lying back against the pillows in the back of the van as I slid into the front seat trying not to rock Sorin with my movements. Wraith got behind the wheel.

  “So, where are we going?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I could count how many times Virginia had allowed Wraith into her house on one hand and still have fingers to spare. She looked confused when we helped LeBron into her upstairs parlor laying him down on the couch. Incarra and Anton were hovering from the living room. It looked like they had been talked into a game of scrabble and my return provided a little much needed excitement. Once he was settled and Sorin was tucked in to sleep on the couch opposite him, Wraith trundled back out to his van and it chugged away back down the drive. I leaned against the frame of the arch into the living room and looked at my two friends as they automatically resumed their seats. Virginia was upstairs performing what healing magic she could on LeBron.

  “Hey guys. How’s it going?”

  “That woman,” Incarra said, “is seriously...” Incarra struggled to find a word but gave up. “I mean she sorta buzzes with this energy, she needs to learn there are other beverages than tea and she’s wicked tight when it comes to scrabble words.”

  “You didn’t try to use bling-bling did you? I don’t care if they’ve now put it in the dictionary, I refuse to recognize it as an actual word.”

  “That’s not what I mean but she’s more than just a little old lady.”

  “She’s a witch.”

  “You mean a proper one not one of those skinny posers in filmy black clothes.”

  “I don’t think Virginia has worn black more than once when she lost her husband.” Anton was very silent, flipping a blank tile between his fingers and carefully not looking at either of us.

  “I can feel it coming off her in waves,” said Incarra rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “You do too but yours comes and goes. Like it’s fluctuating.”

  “I always thought you were a sensitive. I could tell by the way you would stare at Nancy.” Incarra bounced in her seat and pointed an accusing finger at me.

  “Ha! I knew it. What is she? Hell beast? Animagus?”

  “If we must bastardize Harry Potter then yes, but it wasn’t her choice and she kinda got stuck.” Incarra gave me big eyes as she took that in. I looked back over my shoulder as a whisper of movement caught my attention. Virginia was standing at the top of the stairs, her grey eyes focused intently on my profile.

  “Can you guys hang tight for just a little bit longer?” They both nodded. Incarra understood I thought that I had things to deal with but Anton just looked like he wanted me away. I sighed and started walking up the stairs towards her. She said nothing turning to take the next set of stairs up to her attic. I followed. Once in the attic she crossed to her chair. Sitting down, she rubbed at her joints and I knew her arthritis was bothering her again. It always did when she felt stressed. I found another chair pulling it over so that we sat with her small tea table between us. Virginia raised her face to look at me finally.

  “What brought you to my house at that hour?” She was referring to the fact that I’d caught her in a private conversation long after she usually stopped receiving visitors.

  “You wanted to see me,” I said pulling the photograph I had with me out. I’d folded into my purse and slid it across the table towards her, “and when I saw this I wanted to see you too.” Her hands shook a little as she lifted up the photograph at the edge and held it up so she could look at it better.

  “That is you and my mother.”

  “How do you know it’s me? It would be more likely that it was my daughter considering your mother’s age.” I glared at her slightly.

  “You don’t have a daughter.” I made it a statement.

  “Quite correct. I did have a son once.” I hadn’t known that about her and felt immediately guilty and then abruptly furious. It was such a calculated move on her part to quell my outrage by making me pity her.

  “What has that got to do with my mother? I’m sorry to be blunt but this is not about your feelings right now, it’s about mine. I have had a hard time of late, strange things have been happening in my mind, my body and to my powers and I will not stand for you dodging me anymore.” She placed the photograph down on her lap.

  “You’re right, it’s not relevant at the moment and your friend filled me in on what you’ve been doing to yourself. I was surprised, I thought you much stronger than that.” I gripped the edge of the chair and could smell burning as the flames started to coil to life around my fingers. I took deep breaths to calm myself.

  “I have had everything I thought I knew, ever thought I believed kicked out from under me, Virginia. I lost all sense of who I am and I’m not sure I’ve gotten it all back now. I have made it over the grief and the pity portion of coping and when I’ve got time, I have a lot of damage control to do but I want to know the truth. I need answers. I don’t like feeling like I have no control.”

  “How much do you know?”

  “More than I was ready for in one go. This doctor...” I launched into an explanation about the two times I’d met doctor Armitage and her fascination about what made me what I was. I ended with my last visit to her at her office and what she’d told me there. Virginia took it all in saying nothing. I ended my narrative and fixed my eyes on her waiting for her to say something.

  “You know a lot it seems but nothing is certain...”

  “It’s already started, Virginia. I’ve felt different, my aura has changed, my dreams have been getting prophetic and then there is the bird.” Virginia’s eyes snapped to my face.

  “Bird?”

  “In my dreams, it’s this great big glittery red and gold bird, its cry is deafening and it feels like it’s chasing me.”

  “Has it caught you?”

  “No, I’m too scared to let it. You know what it is don’t you? You’ve known all along what’s been happening to my powers and you knew my mother, more than in you just met her once or twice.” Virginia nodded taking up the photograph and stroking her fingers over the image of my mother. She looked really sad, I could see tears creeping at the corners of her eyes but they didn’t fall.

  “She was my best friend.” I blinked at her. She took a deep breath but continued to look at the photograph rather than at me. “I first met your mother when I was in my early twenties. I was at the magic college studying to become an enforcer and she was the new girl. Her hair was a tangly, dark brown mess and her clothes-although they suited her-were a few centuries out of date. I thought she was quirky but the others used it as an excuse to pick on her. That’s how we met really, some of my fellows were picking on her and I was about to step in to help her but she didn’t really need it.”

  Virginia shook her head unable to fight a smile. “She made a dog out of fire that chased those taunting her down the corridor. Her talent for fire magic was unparalleled. I liked her instantly and we became really good friends even though I thought she was my junior. I always felt though that she kept something hidden from me, she was always jumping at shadows and never truly relaxed even around me. I guess she never felt safe.” She slid the photograph onto the table and folded her hands into her lap.

  “When it came to my graduation day, she promised me she would come but she never showed up. She vanished. I went to her place and it looked like there had been a fight but when it came down to it I didn’t know enough about her, where she came from, who her people were, to involve the police. I tried myself for several years to find what had happened to her but to no avail, she’d just gone.” She looked at me with a slight tilt to her head. “You look so much like her.”

  “I got that a lot while I was growing up.” Virginia’s smile faltered a little as s
he returned to her story.

  “The next time I saw your mother I was sixty-nine, barely a week away from turning seventy and having to resign my post when we got a call about a building that was on fire. Normal water would not put it out so we were called to deal with what appeared to be a magical accident. We cleared the building extinguishing the fire floor by floor until we could find the epicenter. I heard a colleague shout that he could see a woman through the flames so we convened to rescue her. When I saw her, she looked so much like Morganna that I thought perhaps, as she was about the age I’d first met her, that she was her daughter. But when she saw me, despite how I had changed with age, she knew me right away and I was shocked that she was Morganna. She’d not aged a day since I’d last seen her. She’d started the fire by accident, her powers were out of control because she was so very scared and she was carrying something she refused to let anyone near. It was an egg about thirteen inches tall, like that antique one laid by the Great Elephant Bird of Madagascar almost four hundred years ago. She would not be parted from it. It was red and golden, and was incredibly beautiful.” I tilted my head a little confused, what was my mother doing with an egg? A rather large egg.

  “How big is that?”

  “About three hundred times the size of a hen’s egg.”

  I whistled and shook my head, we were getting off subject and I returned my eyes to Virginia to urge her to continue the story.

  “I took her home with me. I lived with my son, my husband having died many years before and I made it his job to look after her. Months passed and they were always together, Morgan and my son and the egg. She would sleep curled up next to it, play it music, bathe it and I watched my son grow deeply fascinated with both. I should have seen it coming, because soon they were in love and there was no time to stop it.”

  “Why would you want to stop it?”

  “Stop interrupting please.”

  “Sorry,” I said bowing my head slightly.

  “It was late in March when the egg started to crack and hatch. My son was so excited. I think he was hoping for a dragon or something. Inside the egg was a baby, a little girl that she named Cassandra.” My mouth dropped open and I stared at her. I couldn’t believe her, it just didn’t sound real.

  “I came out of an egg. You’re shitting me.”

  “I am doing no such thing and watch your language.” I sunk back into the chair and rubbed at my temples. I already knew I wasn’t normal and I suppose humans, too, came from eggs just much smaller ones. I had a horrible image of my mother having to lay the egg like a hen would and then my mind flicked to the bird in my dreams.

  “What am I?”

  “Your mother explained that her people were phoenix’s in human form, they’d evolved through magic and time to look like the dominant species on the planet to survive. They worship one of the four old gods of an eastern religion, very strictly. Your mother had run once, been dragged back and when she found she was to have you she ran again fearing that you would be adopted into the same life of obedience and fanaticism. They are not people you ever want to meet.” I got that feeling. I couldn’t imagine a family so bad that you would need to run away from them. I was curious though.

  “You were all like a little family, and then they took vows and made it official.”

  “Your son was my father...my step father,” I said correcting myself.

  “Yes, my Ozborne. You’re the closest I suppose I ever got to a grandchild. You were a beautiful baby, your magic was so strong you used to make stuffed toys dance in your playpen and when you laughed sometimes candles in the room would light.”

  My brain was working slowly, thoughts ticking over one after the other, then a big one dropped right down in front of me, something that was essential to my world, both my worlds.

  “Wait. Are you saying I was born on this side?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then what the hell makes me switch all the time? How did we get to that side in the first place? Why did we have to? Who’s my father?”

  “I can’t tell you much about that last. I think I saw him once. I had gone to the shops, I wasn’t gone very long but when I came back there was a man. He was holding you in front of him. He seemed see-through but was slowly filling up, becoming more solid. He had shockingly bright red hair and he was covered by a cloak of red, gold and orange feathers. I was stunned for a moment by how handsome he was. Then I saw your mother, she was unconscious on the floor and slowly growing paler.”

  “He tried to kill her?”

  “I believe so. I acted quickly to activate the wards and he was shoved away. I caught you before you hit the floor. When Morganna woke, she was petrified that they were coming to take you so she attempted a colossal sized spell. To sacrifice her immortality to make both you and she human. It didn’t quite work, although she managed to make herself human, her spell back lashed. When it hit you it bound your magic but it whacked a curse on your mother, halving her life expectancy as a human. She still couldn’t be convinced that you would be safe, even with your power sealed off so my son sacrificed his magic to punch through to your other world. He knew nothing could exist without its opposite and what could be safer for the three of you then a world without real magic. They took you and went. I couldn’t stop them.”

  I launched myself out of the chair and paced over to the window pressing myself to the window frame, the cool glass against my cheek while I tried to take in everything she had told me. My mother had been an immortal and had sacrificed that to keep me safe from an enemy, her own people and my father; my biological father had tried to kill her for it. The man I’d grown up thinking as my father had been Virginia’s son who had fallen in love with her best friend. Virginia had known this and had kept it secret from me since we had met, three years she could have told me any of it, she could have a built a relationship with me where I could view her as my grandmother. I resented her too much now to ever consider her that close to me. I wondered if she was angry at me or angry at my mother, she’d stolen away her son and then he had died, she’d not known till I’d told her, she’d not been able to mourn. I could almost forgive her if it hadn’t been for the fact that she had seen my fear and panic over what was happening to me and still hadn’t spoken up.

  “Cassandra, please child, say something?” Virginia pleaded from behind me.

  “What do you want me to say? That I understand why you lied to me, that it’s okay that you kept lying to me even after things started to change.”

  “Things may not change,” she said rising from her seat and moving towards me. I dodged her outstretched hands. I didn’t want her to touch me. I had never liked the way she could switch from cold mentor to loving grandmother type figure and now even more so it bothered me.

  “Have you ever known a chain reaction that’s started but not completed? Did it begin because of what happened down in the market?”

  “No and more than likely. Phoenix’s rise from the ashes, Cassandra, you nearly died and your body is trying to rebirth itself. I can see your mother’s spell crumbling away from around you. She risked so much to protect you, they both did. I wish you could see that is what I was trying to do too.” I turned to her angry.

  “The only thing you’ve risked is our relationship. You didn’t have to tell me everything but you could have told me that much. I’ve been alone in all of this.” Virginia’s mouth twitched. She was not a woman you could yell at for very long without some harsh words of her own finding their way out.

  “You had your lover.” She said lover snidely, which indicated that she no longer meant Magnus when she said that, she meant Aram, the vampire she disapproved of.

  “No, I didn’t. We’re...” I was close to crying again and I didn’t want to. “He and I are not together. He has issues and suddenly so did I. I had no one to talk to. I couldn’t deal. I was different from everyone I knew, I could do a little magic and that wasn’t so ground shattering. I’m not human is a bigger blow to ta
ke. Although it explains a few things.” I rubbed my hands over my face trying to push the tears back into my eyes. I took deep ragged breaths just trying to force my emotions into check. “So I’m a...” I couldn’t force the word out so Virginia finished my sentence for me.

  “A phoenix.”

  “A phoenix,” I said and it took me three tries to repeat the very simple words. “How like the birds of legend am I? I mean I already know about the fire and I think my tears can heal.”

  “Strength, you’ll be able to carry immensely heavy loads, you might eventually learn to fly or teleport yourself and others through flames. Your mother had an incredible ability to heal herself and of course you wouldn’t age. The birds in mythology could live between five hundred and fifteen hundred years, I don’t know how long Morganna had been alive but I would wager she was more than three hundred.”

  “Doctor Armitage said I had a gene similar to that of a lycanthrope. What does that mean? I could learn to fly, not that I’m going to be jumping off any buildings to test that theory but that would be sort of cool.” I was pacing back and forth; soon I could hear my voice trail off till I was mumbling. I was close to panic. Virginia gripped me by the shoulders and I let her, I let her turn me to face her and stare me down till even the mumbling stopped. I was shaking just a little or she was, I couldn’t really tell but I felt wobbly.

  “None of this is certain. The spell your mother wrought was serious magic, it was meant to make you human but what it did do is unsure, it may have been enough so that you won’t have to worry about this. You heard what I said to the Magus, if you hit your twenty-second birthday without incident then it might all fade and you’ll be as normal as any person.”

  “Would I stop switching?”

  “That I don’t know. I fear that the only thing still pulling you away from this world might be that your mother’s...” she swallowed hard like it hurt to say these things, “remains are there, keeping the bridge open. You’ve still got two weeks till your birthday.” She reached up, her withered hand stroking the side of my head to soothe me. I closed my eyes and like most times before I saw the bird in my head, flying at me, screeching. I placed my hands over my ears and dropped to my knees. Virginia looked stricken.