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“Yeah?”
I nodded and sat down on the other edge of the couch, hugging a throw-pillow to my chest.
“In the human world,” I added.
“That must have been tough.”
“Only when I found out what I was,” I said. “I just thought my real mom couldn’t take care of me. That was what my foster parents told me. That happens all the time, right?”
“It does,” Uma said carefully.
“I’m starting to wonder if it’s because they knew what I was,” I said, suddenly emotional.
“Maybe it is,” Uma said. “But not because they didn’t want you; they wanted to keep you safe.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “They had to have been shifters then, right? I mean, I thought it was just me and no one was like me, but from what I’m starting to see now, I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Uma hesitated before she answered. “Your biological parents were definitely shifters. You can’t be one if they weren’t. I think what you said about them not being able to take care of you could have been the reason you ended up with a foster family. You’re a very rare kind of shifter, and life for you would have been very dangerous in the shifter community.”
I stiffened. “It’s nice of you to suggest that they were doing me a favor, but I don’t see how leaving me alone in this world, trying to fend for myself without help, is keeping me safe.”
“Hmm,” Uma said.
She didn’t have an answer to that. It was because I was right, I was sure. If I had a child who was like this, so different from the rest of the world, I would do everything in my power to take care of that child and to help them, rather than just pushing them away into a human world to figure it out alone.
“How are you coping with everything?” Uma asked, changing the topic. “You haven’t exactly asked to go out, and your magic feels… volatile.”
“You can feel it?”
Uma nodded. “I’m fae. I can pick up on all kinds of magic, and your signature is so different from the usual shifter magic. I can’t help but feel it.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, I’d love to go out, but I’m not going to ask for it.”
“They won’t let you out unless you do. Braxton is a busy man, and Dagger is on a mission of his own.”
I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t going to go to them like a child and ask if I could be let out, like a dog or something. It was ridiculous.
“What are you?” I asked instead, changing the topic away from myself entirely. “I mean, you said you’re fae, but I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I work with spells and magic, and a lot of it is drawn from nature in some ways.”
“I didn’t know there was more than one type of… creature. I don’t know what to call you. Or me.”
“‘Enchanted beings’ is the right term,” Uma said with a smile. “And there are a few, actually. On this earth, there are shifters and fae. Angelscanlive here, but I only know of one who does.”
“Angels?” I asked. “I thought… Are they real?”
“We’re all real,” Uma said.
I guess that was true. Until I’d shifted, I hadn’t known shifters were a thing, either.
“Vampires live on Earth, too, but they keep to themselves.”
I tugged at my earlobe. “It sounds like a storybook. How is any of this possible?”
Uma started from the beginning and explained to me how archangels lived in the Overworld and chose pure souls after death to become angels, the same way demons ruled the Underworld and chose certain souls to become vampires.
Demons and vampires were all about dark magic, and archangels and angels used light magic, and angels had created shifters. Apparently, the fae justwere. Uma wasn’t sure where she came from herself, and there was too much new information to process for me to get stuck on that part.
