“Okay enough,” I replied, just as quietly. I wasn’t okay, not really, but I also wasn’t going to fall apart in the next ten minutes. Probably.
“What’s wrong?”
I shot him a look.
“Okay, what’s wrong that I don’t already know about?”
I squeezed honey on my cornbread, then gestured with the bear-shaped bottle.All this.
Elliot’s hand kneaded gently. “What’s the worst part?”
“That everything I knew, growing up, was based on a lie. Based on some messed-up belief that shifters areholierthan everybody else.”
“Oh, we are,” he said, and I could tell that he was trying to tease, trying to lighten the mood.
“Not funny,” I told him, shooting a glare.
“Mays is right,” Hart put in, reminding me that shifters weren’t the only ones with sharp hearing. “If the Community of the Divine Transformation, emphasis ontransformation, venerates shifters, that means they’re creating a social hierarchy of sanctity based on subspecies class. My guess? Shifters, then Arcs, then humans. And I don’t think they’re terribly keen on the rest of us Nids. They didn’t seem to think much of me, anyway.” Hart smirked.
I frowned.
“No more they are,” Ray put in. “There’s a reason I keep away from them. Said hello to someone, once. Didn’t even get out my name before she turned and ran, praying at the top of her lungs for God to save her from demons.”
That definitely explained why I’d not met Ray when I was a kid. If he and Helen assumed every Community member would see him as ademon, there was definitely no reason why he would want to have any interactions with any of them.
It also explained why I’d never metanyArcanids, other than the people we’d seen on the rare occasions that we went into Staunton or, once, to Charlottesville to see the psychologist my parents had asked to ‘fix’ Noah. Momma had explained that some people got very sick and became things that were different because God had judged them less worthy—because they were sinners.
She hadn’t said that some people became shifters because God had judged themmoreworthy.
But Momma hadn’t been a shifter, so maybe she didn’t believe that? Or maybe she did, and thought thatshewas unworthy because she hadn’t become one. Or hadn’t become oneyet.For all I knew, people deliberately tried to expose themselves in order to gain the chance to become transformed, although I didn’t remember a particularly high incidence of illness growing up.
I let out a sigh, and felt Elliot’s hand squeeze my thigh again, but I kept my thoughts to myself. The conversation had moved on without me, now discussing the current legislation in Virginia tied to the Magic-Free Movement. Also not something I had the bandwidth for.
I excused myself and hobbled my way to the bathroom.
I didn’t come back to the kitchen when I was done, instead sinking down on the stairs that led up to the cramped secondfloor, leaning the crutches next to me. I just didn’t have the energy—the optimism—to go back to the table, to listen to more conversation about legal restrictions on my sub-species, about the evangelical monsters who’d condoned the killing of my mother, about whatever other horrors they’d moved on to discuss in my absence. I was exhausted, wrung out, and the ground that had felt so stable under my feet—poisoned ground, but solid, nonetheless—had just been rocked and fractured.
I had hated almost everything about the place I’d grown up. The people—aside from Noah—that I’d grown up with. Hated them, but understood them. Knew what they believed. Knew what they’d expected of me and what I thought about those expectations.
Except apparently I hadn’t.
My father was a wolf shifter—like Noah, like me—and believed that being a wolf made him holier than any ordinary humans. Than my mother. Than Noah and me.
I wondered what would have happened to Noah if we’d stayed. If he would have been accepted as a shifter, or if being trans meant that he still would have been seen as an abomination. Would Father have killed him? Would having Arcana have killed him first?
What would Father have thought ofme? No. Whatdidhe think of me?
I was as certain as Hart was that my father was in contact with the other Community Elders, that they knew where he was—or at least how to reach him. Which meant that if he didn’t already know I was also a shifter, he would soon.
What remained to be determined was whether that would cause him to reach out to see if I could be convinced to rejoin the Community, or whether it would just make him furious that someone so unworthy would be granted the power of transformation.
My money was on the latter. So was my life.
If I knew my father—something that was now very much in question—he was likely to get angrier the longer he went without dealing with the problem. I couldn’t say that I was looking forward to the eventual confrontation, either, given that I was the problem in question.
I’d been the problem before.
It had led to hours spent on my knees in the basement, the door tucked on the far side of the stairs I now sat on. If I opened it—which I hadn’t been able to force myself to do yet—a set of open wood-plank stairs would lead me down to a bare cement floor, the walls cinder-blocks pressed into the earth. There was a single exterior door—a wood-plank root cellar door leading outside that had always been kept padlocked shut.
