by Eli Grant
“They are never going to accept you!”
The shout exploded out of me in a rush of pain, accompanied by a burst of fire. Everyone jumped back, but it flared from my lips for only a second before I crumpled forward, holding my burning throat and aching ribs.
Seconds ticked past. Domino looked back at the road, while the other three stared at me, tense.
“What do you even care?” Domino said finally, his eyes on the road and his jaw set. “You’re no changeling.”
I reeled like he’d hit me, my gut clenching and a wash of cold running through my veins.
“Fuck you,” I hissed, my throat hurting almost as much as my ribs. “Where the hell do you get off? I don’t agree with you so I’m not a changeling anymore? It’s not a club, asshole.”
“When’s the last time you met a changeling who could stop bullets?” Domino asked, and my mouth snapped shut. “Or breathe fire?”
“That was—” I scrambled for an explanation, feeling suddenly lightheaded, drifting out to sea with no anchor. “I don’t know how I did that, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Or all the other weird shit you do.” Domino kept going. I could see the tense set of his shoulders, his white-knuckled grip on the wheel. “The magic resistance, the camouflage, the strength, the speed. You think none of us noticed? One or two of those things you could chalk up to changelings being weird, but all of them? With no visible Fae traits, no need to wear a glamour?”
My hands were shaking as I looked at Anton, Mariposa, and Whisper, hoping to see confusion, disbelief, some sign that they thought Domino was losing it. My stomach sank as I instead saw them looking back at me with a kind of wary guilt, like Domino was only saying what they’d all been thinking.
My heart was beating too fast, my mouth dry. He had to be wrong. There had to be an explanation. Because if I wasn’t a changeling...
“Then what am I, Domino?” I asked, wishing for once that I sounded angry instead of just... lost. “If I’m not a changeling, then what the hell am I?”
Before he could answer, something slammed into the right side of the van like the wrath of god and the world turned upside down.
The End
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