I stayed there for sixteen days. The nurses would feed me when they fed Noah.
Nobody asked me where my parents were or why they hadn’t come to get me—or to see Noah.
I’m not sure if that’s because they knew who our parents were—and that they would have viewed their newly-Arcanid son as an abomination who had been judged as unworthy and cursedby God forbeingtheir son instead of their daughter. Or maybe it was just because they’d seen enough kids be thrown out of their families for daring to get Arcana and become something other than human.
As for me, I’d proved my own unworthiness to my parents by standing by Noah—and probably also by liking boys instead of girls.
And yeah, me essentially living in the hallway of a secure ward in the James Blair Arcane Ward of the Augusta Health Hospital was undoubtedly a violation of hospital policy and more than a few laws, but nobody made me leave. I’d walked for over five hours, my feet aching and covered in blisters, to get there. I would have done whatever it took to stay—and they knew that.
When they finally released Noah, rail-thin and weak, I bought us bus tickets to Charlottesville, then to Richmond with the cash I’d stolen from our parents. One of the nurses had told me about Hands and Paws. That they could help Noah, but they only had shelters back then in the bigger cities.
They had helped. And even though I wasn’t a shifter, they helped me, too. We went into foster care with shifter-approved foster parents, changing households six times before we turned eighteen and moved out of the foster care system. Hands and Paws got Noah a tiny, awful apartment, and I stayed with him, because what else was I supposed to do? We both got jobs—I waited tables at about four different places, working my way from Waffle House up the chain of restaurants until I was working somewhere that paid enough in tips that Noah and I could get a real apartment. Noah worked at the Hands and Paws thrift store until he was old enough to take on full time hours, get his associate’s degree in counseling, and step into the role of intake counselor before working his way up to being Coordinating Director.
I started going to school part-time, then full-time and working part-time to put myself through college. It took me seven years, but I did it. BS in biochemistry from UVA, and then I took another three to get my MS in forensic science from VCU. From there, I went straight into the Virginia state crime lab in downtown Richmond. I’d started in CSI a year later. Fast-forward two-and-a-half years, they fired me, and I moved to Shawano, Wisconsin.
That’s the outline, but I also gave him some of the details. The enforced fasting to purify our bodies and souls. The hours of ‘contemplation and prayer’ in the total darkness of the basement cellar so that we could better come to understand God through deprivation. And, when that wasn’t enough, punishment for the frailties of our flesh.
Elliot’s face when I finished was a mask of horror, pity, and rage.
“So I really don’t give a shit that they’re dead,” I finished, still feeling oddly empty.
“They’re lucky they’re dead,” Elliot growled. “Because if they weren’t, I’d fucking kill them myself.” Elliot’s father literallyhadbeen killed, so when he said it, it meant a lot more than if some random person who knew nothing about murder or loss said it. He waspissed.
I found it disturbingly endearing and gave him a weak smile.
“Thanks.” I still felt strangely blank.
“Seth?”
I looked up at him, surprised, then registered that time must have passed. And he had probably been talking to me.
I put both hands over my face. “Shit. Sorry.”
“Baby, you don’t have to be sorry.” His calloused hands pulled mine away from my face, and he pressed a gentle kiss to each set of fingers. “How can I help?”
“I—don’t know,” I admitted. “The lawyer says I have to go… back.” The word was heavy and bitter, like lead mixed with the pith of a lemon.
“To—Swoope?” I was touched he remembered the name of the tiny-ass town that technically counted as my hometown.
“Not even,” I half-mumbled, feeling my neck flush. “Swoope is just the closest town—where the post office is.”
Elliot blinked. “What do you mean, ‘where the post office is’?”
I stared down at my hands, still held in his. “The Community lives up in the foothills. Father would go into town to get the mail once a week.”
“Once aweek?”
I nodded. “Otherwise it was just the Community.”
“The Community?”
I hadn’t said the whole thing in a decade. More than. “The Community of the Divine Transformation.”
I didn’t look up when he spoke, but I could hear the frown in Elliot’s voice. “That sounds…” He trailed off.
“Like a bunch of religious bullshit?” There was bitterness in mine.
“I…”
