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My parents both went completely still. They glanced at each other, guilty and almost horror-struck, and I felt a queasy kind of dread. Even though I knew I absolutely had to hear this answer, I wanted to run away. The truth, I sensed, was going to hurt.
“You’ve always known,” I said. “Haven’t you? That the wraiths were coming after me. But you never told me why.”
Dad said, “We knew. And no, we didn’t tell you.” It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents—
the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.
“Honey—” Mom took a couple of steps forward, then stopped when she got a good look at my face. “We didn’t want to scare you.”
“Tell me why.” My voice shook. “Tell me right now.” She wrung her hands. “You know we thought that we could never have you.”
“Please, not the ‘miracle baby’ speech again!”
“We thought we could never have you,” Dad repeated. “Vampires can’t have children.”
In my frustration, I could have thrown something at him. “Except two or three times in a whole century—I know, I get it, okay?” Mom’s face was grave. “Vampires can never have children on their own, Bianca. We don’t have life to give. Only—half life. The life of the body.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Something horrible occurred to me, and I thought I might throw up. “Am I not really yours?”
Dad shook his head. “Honey, you’re ours. You’re absolutely ours.
But to have you, we needed help.”
My first, confused thought was about fertility clinics. I didn’t think they took vampire patients. But then I realized the last words my mother had spoken: half life. The life of the body. Mrs. Bethany had talked about this before, when she initially spoke to me about the wraiths. The vampires represented the body. The wraiths represented the spirit.
Slowly, I said, “You struck a bargain with the wraiths. They—they made it possible for you to give birth to me.” They actually looked relieved that I’d said it, though relief was about a thousand light-years away from what I was feeling. Mom said, “We found them. We asked for their help. We didn’t know what they’d ask—
most vampires don’t know about this, and we’d only heard whispers, rumors—”
Dad cut in. “The spirits…took possession of us, I guess. Only for an instant.”
I grimaced. “While you were—”
“No, honey, no!” Mom crisscrossed her hands in front of her like she was trying to erase those words from existence. “It wasn’t like that! I don’t know what they did, but sure enough, within a few months you were on the way. We went back to thank them.” She repeated bitterly,
“Thank them.”
“And they said that you belonged to them.” Dad’s expression was grim. “They said when you came of age, we had to let you become a wraith instead of a vampire. Now they’re trying to kill you—to murder you, because murder creates wraiths. They’re trying to steal you, Bianca.
But you don’t have to be afraid. We won’t let them.” My whole life, I had felt so special—so loved—because my parents had told me I was their miracle baby. I had always felt safe with them.
But I wasn’t a miracle. I was the result of a dirty, ugly bargain that both sides had betrayed. And the parents I had always trusted with all of myself had been lying to me since the day I was born.
“I’m going,” I said. My voice sounded strange. I pulled the pendant they’d given me from my neck and threw it to the floor.
Dad said, “Bianca, you need to stay and work this out.”
“I’m going, and don’t you dare try to stop me.” I ran through the door, willing myself to make it downstairs before I started to cry.
Chapter Twenty
I’D THOUGHT NOTHING COULD BE WORSE THAN losing Lucas, but I was wrong. The worst was realizing that I’d lost him for nothing because he’d been right about all of it—vampires, my parents, everything.
He told me my parents lied. I yelled at him for it. He forgave me.
He told me vampires were killers. I told him they weren’t, even after one stalked Raquel.
He told me Charity was dangerous. I didn’t listen, and she killed Courtney.
