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It takes an effort, but I drag my gaze away from the most beautiful man in the world. She’s finished her joint.
We both smoke for different reasons. She likes to feel a little happier, lighter. I love to not be in as much pain as I usually am. Mine’s burned out between my fingers as I neglected it. I fake a smile and crush the cinders between my thumb and forefinger, indifferent to the burn.
“Shall we head back in?”
I need to get out of there, before I crawl to the man I’ve made up and beg him to take me, too.
CHAPTER TWO
DID I ALSO DREAM THAT UP?
Darina
I was born at the exact right time. A century prior and they wouldn’t have the medical knowledge to keep me alive. Fifty years and I would have been locked up in a lab and dissected. Five years ago, it would have been at the end of the Age of Blood when the world was still reeling from the revelation that regular humans didn’t occupy the place they thought they did in the food chain.
Hard for a regular joe to feel like they’re top of the shelf after learning that people who look like them—onlybetter—roam the street. Often beautiful, long lived or immortal, gifted with strength and powers; the sups are envied, feared, revered, hated.
I got to avoid the messy bit, appearing just when the world started to settle down.
If it had been a few days later, I would have been left to rot in the woods as my procreator no doubt intended. I was found alone, mere hours old, in the wildness. A dark offering to beasts by some witches, perhaps. Maybe it was just an irresponsible teenager dropping off unwanted trash where she knew nature would take care of the problem.
But my luck was such that I was there precisely when the best people in the world were hiking nearby. After hearing my cries, not only did they rush to take me to the nearest hospital, where they were told that I wouldn’t last more than a few days, but they also stuck around to see how I was doing.
My body is what the doctors have called “incompatible with life.” The hospital did their best to satisfy my immediate needs, but they didn’t expect me to see the end of the week.
I did.
The couple who found me then decided to claim me as their own, rather than letting me go into the system, though no one knew how long I’d live. They spent my first weeks in hospital rooms, watching me hooked to tubes while the doctors tried to work out the many things that were wrong with me.
About a month after, there was an attack—bigoted assholes targeting the maternity wardof a hospital known for catering to shifters. They were stopped before causing too much damage, but their assault did accomplish a power outage that turned the equipment off for a long hour.
Three babies died that day—all regular humans, ironically. Sups, even newborns, tend to be made of stronger stuff.
To everyone’s confusion, I wasn’t one of the casualties.
By all accounts, I should have been. I’m allergic to a lot of the things I should need to breathe, and move, and think. I can’t take in vitamins or minerals. I can’t tolerate a ten-foot-long list of materials found literally everywhere on earth.
I’m a freak.
But the machines keeping me alive died, and I didn’t. So my new parents decided to just take me home and deal with my conditions one day at a time.
No one knowswhatI am. To my doctors’ knowledge, my combination of conditions is completely unique. But in this day and age, being weird doesn’t get me burned at the stake for witchcraft or studied like a freak. It just gets me a little S underneath my sex on my passport.
S for supernatural.
My mother was dead against that label. She doesn’t believe one should register as a supernatural—it just makes the bigots’ life easier. But I couldn’t act like a regular if my life depended on it, so it doesn’t matter if my identification spills the beans.
For all that, I am, for all intents and purposes, human. Ish.
I age like Rachel, my little sister, who was born six months after me. I even look like her, which is insane given the fact that we share no actual blood bonds. And to my great frustration, I don’t have any obvious, cool powers. I don’t shift into animals. I can’t really use magic—I’ve begged Rain to teach mesome tricks, and while I’m not as hopeless as a regular, I suck at it. I can’t read anyone’s mind, I don’t have fangs, claws, or anything else that obviously sets me apart from my peers.
Yet everyone alwaysknowsI’m not a simple mortal at first glance, the sups and the regulars alike.
I once asked my sister what made me different. Rachel says I tend to be too still. I don’t blink as often as I should. I hear people talk from too far away, and my whispers can reach ears that shouldn’t hear a sound in the distance. There’s something wrong with my eyes too; they shift sometimes.And I’m occasionally too graceful. Too fast.
But my worst offense is my voice.
Rain’s opinion is that I smell too good for a human.
