Inhuman Heritage by Sonnet O'Dell Read Free Book Online Page A

normal world. It was crushing.
    “Are you alright?”
    “Just keep talking. Twenty-five pairs.” But my voice was thready as I spoke barely above a whisper. My world was crashing to pieces around me.
    “Yes,” she said and she brought up a 3D mock-up of a double helix. “These two pairs.” She circled them with the end of the pen so I could see what she was talking about. “Now this one, I’ve seen before, it’s most common in shape-shifters. It indicates that you might be able to change to another form. Have you ever?” I shook my head. I had to keep my mouth shut for fear that I would start wailing like a baby. The doctor paused again to ask me if I was alright and I nodded just so that she would keep explaining it to me. I wanted to know as much as I didn’t want to believe it was true.
    “The last pair is unknown. It something I’ve not seen before. There is part of it that is similar to vampires but it’s much more than that.”
    “Like a vampire?” I reached out grabbing her arm, I know I was digging my fingers into her flesh but to her credit she didn’t cry out, she stroked the back of my knuckles trying to sooth me into letting go. I released her when I felt it, that I could crush the radius in her arm if I wanted. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please finish.”
    “It’s similar to vampires not in the need to consume blood or anything but more in the not aging immortal way. But both these two genes are in flux from what I can tell. They don’t appear to be stable. If they stabilized I would imagine it would put you as far beyond most preternatural beings as they are beyond humans.”
    My powers had been in flux. They seemed to be growing but my control over it came and went. I flashed back to last night and what Virginia had said. She is reaching the end of her twenty first year and has not come into her full power; she is only two weeks away from it never happening . The chromosomes were in flux. If I waited two weeks and something didn’t happen, I might be normal. It might all go away. That gave me a little more hope. All I had to do was turn twenty two without incident. I looked at the floor and started scrubbing at my eyes, I was afraid they were going to be all red and puffy no matter what I did.
    “You really didn’t know any of this?” asked Doctor Armitage.
    “No. Mom started to talk about a little of it, about the magic but she died and my father died when I was a baby. I hardly even remember him.”
    “Died? Are you sure?” She seemed shocked.
    “My father was humanoid, didn’t you say that?”
    “No, the humanoid part was in the matrilineage—that’s genes passed down from your mother. She was a humanoid preternatural; it’s your father that we have no idea what he was.” I stared at her. No, I knew the man in my mother’s photographs was a human. He had died in a car crash; anything more than human to the degree that she was suggesting would have walked away from such a thing with barely a scratch. I told the doctor this. She scratched her chin and didn’t look like she was going to agree with me.
    “What does that look mean? What is it?”
    “If what I can see from the tests is true, then the man you think is your father, isn’t.”
    * * * *
    I slammed the door behind me as I entered my flat carrying the last of the boxes that were labeled as my mother’s and my father’s belongings. I’d cleared my lock up after taking off the locket so I could shift back to my normal reality. I laughed bitterly like there was anything normal about my life now. I started tearing through the boxes looking for something, a diary, a letter, something that would tell me the truth. I wanted to scream at my mother. Tell her how unfair it was for her to leave me not only alone but without knowing anything. It hadn’t been too long ago I had been thinking about how taking each day as it comes and enjoying it to the fullest was a wise philosophy considering how short life was.
    Now I