Inhuman Heritage by Sonnet O'Dell Read Free Book Online

couldn’t ever go back.

Chapter Four
    I was sitting in the private office of Doctor Christina Armitage. She hadn’t been too pleased when I had called her at home at half two in the morning but she had agreed to see me first thing the next day. I’d put my locket with the two doves on immediately and had been unable to sleep a wink all night. I’d spent time praying that it wasn’t true, that the doctor would confirm that I was a normal person then I could go back to Virginia and call her a liar. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world. I wanted there to be some other reason why my powers had increased and why I was different. I didn’t want to think the reason I got on so well with the preternatural communities was because I was preternatural myself. Was that terribly hypocritical of me? I had felt bad after thinking that.
    Doctor Armitage came in the door. She looked a little tired although her clothes and her blond bob was neatly in place. She handed me a coffee with milk and sugar taking a seat at her desk. I was nervous I suppose. I clutched the coffee watching her as she brought up some files on her computer.
    “I’m glad you called even if it was at nearly three in the morning. I think this is important for you to see.” I nodded, I didn’t want to comment on anything till I had seen it. She brought up an image on the screen that was all red and gold. It took me a little bit of staring at it, like a magic eye picture, to see what it was. It was a magnified picture of my blood stream.
    “Your fibrin platelets,” she said using a pen to point to the gold circles, “aren’t normal. They’re a golden color as you can see and they are present in your system constantly but in greater supply it seems when you’re hurt. It increases your ability to heal from what I can see, your body is always ready to heal even a minor cut or bruise. It’s extraordinary.”
    I swallowed down some of the coffee, there was only one sugar in it so it tasted a little bitter to me, much like hearing what the doctor was saying; it was hard to swallow. She continued drawing my attention to the way the cells glittered.
    “It doesn’t explain why it’s gold colored though but I am going to assume that had something to do with the magic in you. We’ve long been trying to identify if there is some genetic factor, something we can measure to show magic but as yet we’ve not pinpointed anything that connects all the subjects.”
    When Doctor Armitage said we I had to assume that she meant her profession, I didn’t for the minute think that she was running these trials and experiments herself or that even any of them were being performed at this hospital.
    “I had the lab extract just some of those platelets so we could pull your genetic profile and examine your chromosomal count.” I’d done well at biology in school and I knew that you got half your DNA from your mother and half from your father. This was the crux of the matter, this would tell me whether I was who I thought I was or not.
    “It took so long because I had to have them run it three times to be sure of what I was seeing. Half your alleles are humanoid but not human. The other half are just, well, I can’t even say they’re humanoid; they barely registered. I’ve run them against all samples of preternatural life that we have in the national and international database and can’t find anything that matches.” I bowed my head. Nothing, nothing matched me. That wasn’t good. I took deep breathes. “Your chromosomal count is what is really fascinating. A normal human has twenty three pairs. You have twenty five.”
    My head snapped up and the doctor recoiled a little seeing the tears that had started streaming down my face. I shook my head; I still wanted it not to be true. I wanted to believe that my day time world was the one I belonged in, not the strange other world and here she was telling me that I really shouldn’t exist in the