“What is?” I was confused.
“The Community of the DivineTransformation? Headed by a pack of shifters?”
I gaped at him. “That’s… That has to be an actual coincidence,” I argued.
“Seriously?” He took his eyes off the road for a split second and hit a pothole in the track. “Shit!”
I grimaced as the bump jarred my knee. “Transformation is at the core of most major world religions,” I pointed out. “The fact that it’s also the word we use for the biological changes brought about by Arcanavirus doesn’t mean that every religion is tied to Arcana.”
“How old is the Community?” Hart asked.
“I—don’t know,” I had to admit.
“And if it’s older than about thirty years, was it called something else before?”
I stared at him, torn between denial and dawning horror. “I don’t know,” I repeated.
Hart made a soft sound. “Try this one on. Whether there was already a culty-ass group of religious nut-jobs here or not, some fundamentalists decide that they’re too holy to have been corrupted by Arcana, the way that some of the anti-Arcanid purists claim.”
I was familiar with the type—people who firmly believed that if you were only holy enough, saintly enough, you would be immune to Arcanavirus. Or, at least, if you did contract it, you wouldn’t be changed or killed by it.
“Because they believed their own sanctimonious bullshit, they decided thattransformationhad to be the marker of saintliness or what-fucking-ever. So they rebranded. Pushed the fucking gospel of shifter transformation as the marker of holiness, but they also know that if they make thatpublic, they’ll run afoul of the government, who will stop them from enabling Arcana infections in pursuit of their enlightenment or whatever they fucking call it.”
“So instead they hide anyone who gets sick,” I breathed. “Waiting to see what happens. Whether they die or live. What they become.” I swallowed. “And if you manage to survive, then you’re elevated in the faith. And if not…” I thought about Rachael. About the fact that Noah might also have ended up dead if I hadn’t managed to call for help.
“Exactly.”
The idea that Noah and I had been raised by a community of shifters who had nevertoldus… Actually, that was probably a good thing, since if we’d known, I might not have insisted that Noah needed to go to the hospital. And without that catalyst, I had no idea if we would have ever managed to leave.
I shuddered. “Shit.”
“It’s fuckin’ bullshit, is what it is,” Hart countered. “Holier-than-though, evangelical bullshit.”
I had to rethink things. Everything I thought I’d understood about my childhood, about the religious beliefs that I’d had beaten into me, about the way I thought the world had been ordered. If Hart was right… all of it was wrong.
“You’re sayingthe whole Community is shifters?” Ray paused, holding a chicken wing that had been slathered in a thick,slightly sweet, Tennessee-style barbecue sauce that I was sure must have taken Helen hours of slow simmering.
“Helen, this is amazing,” I told her honestly, ignoring Ray’s question because it hadn’t actually been directed at me. I also wasn’t really interested in participating in the conversation because I still felt deeply unsettled by the whole thing, and focusing on barbecue-slathered chicken was much, much safer.
Helen smiled, the corners of her blue eyes crinkling. “Thank you, darlin’. It’s how my momma used to make it, although we put it on pork ribs, but it’s just as good on chicken.”
“I appreciate it,” I told her honestly. I rarely got the chance to have barbecue anything, since most of the time, the things people barbecued were beef and pork.
“And I appreciate the fact that you put it on something vegetarian,” Hart added, raising his fork with a square of portobello mushroom.
Helen smiled again. “Of course, darlin’. We may not get elves up here too often, but I know y’all can’t eat anything animal. No reason for you to miss out just because your biology doesn’t like meat.”
Hart grinned back, then popped the bite in his mouth.
In addition to the barbecued chicken and mushrooms, there was cornbread with honey and vegan butter, southern-style molasses baked beans, and a vinegar apple coleslaw. And Helen was beaming. Clearly, she loved cooking and loved feeding people. But where they lived, next to the Community, I was sure they rarely had any company, and what company they were likely to have was probably Community, which meant that any offers of food would have been rebuffed in the name of gluttony.
Which madeno fucking senseif the core of the Community’s beliefs was that shifters were on a higher plane of holiness. Because we needed more food than humans, but I knew that my father…
He’d always been extremely thin. I’d wondered more than once where my weight had come from, excusing it as a form of psychological compensation for having had my meals controlled as a kid. But maybe it was genetics—and my father had spent his adult life denying those same genes, starving himself even as he limited what Noah and I and our mother could eat.
I picked up another cornbread muffin, broke it in half, and spread butter on the crumbly center, frowning down at it.
I twitched when Elliot’s warm hand closed over my upper thigh. “You okay, baby?” he murmured softly.
