Inhuman Heritage (5 page)

“What? What are you saying?” His next words were all statements.

“You enjoy having sex. You enjoy having sex with a vampire. You would enjoy sex with a vampire even more if you did not have to worry about public romantic entanglements. You find me attractive.”

I couldn’t find words, I was completely stunned. I’d never in my life imagined having this kind of conversation with the serious Jareth. Not ever.

“There would be no shame in it. It could be a secret kept behind closed doors.”

“I don’t get what you’re trying to say to me.” It wasn’t entirely true. I had an inkling but I was desperate to believe my mind had just got stuck in some smutty place and that I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I almost had myself convinced then Jareth touched me, just his hands on my arms.

I was drowning in his emotions. Jareth desired me, heat radiated through his hands and up my arms. My pulse raced. I could feel his lust for me, he had big lust, his want of me was purely physical and that want flowed into me and colored the blush of my cheeks. I might have coped if my own little powers hadn’t switched on like he’d hit a button inside me. I was hit by a stream of images. How he saw me. Myself in that dress, the old fashioned one I had worn on my first date with Aram and the fantasy that he had been the one to rip me out of it. My appeal had not been immediate with Jareth, it had grown each time I had surprised him. He was also very attracted to the power in me, keeping me around as an ally and keeping me happy was just good tactical sense. I had never had a connection like this and the only thing that let me pull out of it was the fact that nowhere in it could I sense that Jareth felt any love for me. He was fond of me sure and he wanted to have sex with me, he had listened to me and Aram a few times and wanted to know the feel of me under his body, but he did not love me. Jareth by his own definitions was inviting me to be his mistress. Seeing as that was the role I had cast myself into surely the partner didn’t matter all that much to me. I felt slightly offended.

When I pulled back from him, Jareth wrapped his fingers into my hair and brought my mouth to his. It was very different kissing him, his lips were hard and rough, his van dyke beard tickled my face and made me want to pull away even more. When I struggled with his grip he let me go and I gathered up the sheet so I could fully move to the other side of the bed. Jareth looked at me, he could see the naked line of my back and if he were a human I would have said he was panting.

“Think about it. I do not want to lose this alliance.” I made a disgusted sound that he thought of mine and Aram’s relationship as an alliance even if I doubted that we were still in a relationship. I turned keeping my back to Jareth and didn’t turn round till I heard the bedroom door close. I started gathering up my clothes, dressing in a hurry and I went out the employee’s door so I wouldn’t have to see either of them again.

I came home to an empty apartment. I had started thinking that perhaps I needed to get a pet, an actual cat rather than just a witch that had been a cat, something to be happy to see me when I came home. I threw my keys into the dish on the table next to the door and hung up my coat. March was still cold and wet, the snow had gone but there was still no sun and no warmth to the days. I sighed leaning against the door. Aram and I were breaking up. I felt the tears start down my face and I was deeply sad. I kept trying to think of something, anything to explain why we had fizzled out so quickly. Aram and I were deeply attracted to each other, he loved me although I had never yet said it back. I didn’t really know if I did love him yet. I know I felt something for him, I wouldn’t be crying now if I didn’t.

I dragged my feet walking towards the fridge and pulled out the freezer drawer. I was going to drown my sorrow with my two favorite men. Ben and Jerry. I pulled out a tub, wrapped a dish towel around it so I didn’t freeze my hands and hit the button under the blinking light on my answer machine.

“Ms. Farbanks, this is Doctor Armitage, Christina Armitage. We met in the hospital. I just wanted to let you know that the results from the tests from your blood are in and I would like to discuss the results with you. Please call me so we can meet and discuss them. This is my home number.” She repeated the number twice and I managed to write it down on the corner of the newspaper. I took the top off the ice cream and started spooning it into my mouth as the second message played.

“Hey it’s me,” said Incarra’s voice. “I haven’t spoken to you in an age. Call me tomorrow okay. I want to hear all about that new dishy boyfriend of yours.”

“He dumped me,” I said but I had a spoonful of ice cream in my mouth so it came out more ‘me mumped be’. I waited for the last of my three messages. I leaned forward reaching into the open wooden box that was still sitting there and pulled out the photograph of my mother and the blonde woman. I bet my mother had never gotten dumped.

“Cassandra child, it’s Virginia. When you have a moment I would like to see you. I think we can finish your aura cleansing now.” As her voice finished playing on the answer machine the spoon dropped from my mouth and I knew why I had recognized this woman in the picture before. It was a young Virginia. I gaped at the photograph; they couldn’t have been more than twenty in it. It had been hidden in a secret drawer in the box and I had found it when I’d knocked the box down breaking the drawer.

Virginia Too-good was my mentor of sorts. She had been helping me to learn my magical powers. I’d gotten them from my mother, who’d jumped from one reality to another leading to the situation that my life was now in constantly. I spent the day in one reality where there was no magic and no monsters and at night I came here where I had power. It had been growing since I had a near death experience in September of last year. Although Virginia was teaching me, she wouldn’t talk to me about my powers. I had always suspected that she had known my mother and now I had proof. I clutched the photograph, put the ice cream back in the freezer and decided I would go to Virginia’s to talk to her and this time damn it she was going to give me some answers. I snatched my keys, put the photograph into my coat pocket and took the elevator downstairs. Virginia lived in a rather quaint three story house in the middle of Nunnery Wood that was on the other side of town. I used to have to walk there, now however I had a bike. A Suzuki Hayabusa GSX1300R motorbike, in screaming fire engine red with gold insignia on the front side-custom paint job.

I’d done some work for the Governor of a prison in Birmingham in January. It had been my last big pay day-five hundred an hour for eight hours a day over three days, you do the math–and most of that check after covering my bills had gone on the bike. It was brand new, shiny and I loved it. I loved the speed and it had taken me a little while to learn to ride it. It would get me to Virginia’s in no time. I checked the clock on my phone, it was nearing two in the morning but after a minute of thinking about it, I decided that I didn’t care. She’d said when I had a chance, now was convenient for me. I mounted the bike, kick started the engine and streamed off into the night.

The lights were still on at Virginia’s when I got there. I rode the bike half way up her drive then dismounted to roll it the rest of the way. I kicked the stand down and leaned it against it; pulling the helmet from my head I adjusted my braid. My hair is long brown and when riding a motorcycle you didn’t want it flapping everywhere, it made the braid I normally kept my hair in even more practical. I rested the helmet on the seat and marched up the porch steps to the front door. Before I could knock the door whined and opened on its own. I peered inside, Virginia was not standing in the hall waiting for me but I stepped inside anyway. I didn’t call out. I pulled the photograph from my pocket determined and walked up the stairs to find her. There were voices coming from the second floor parlor, Virginia had company. The door was pulled to but a small stream of light illuminated a patch of the wooden floor. I crept towards the door avoiding the squeaking floorboard and quickly crossed the light. I leaned my right shoulder against the door jam and peered through the gap. Victoria’s guest was the Grand Magus, the head of the magical council of wizards. They were arguing about something.

“She needs more than I can give her, she needs more training and I am not as spry as I was. I am begging you.” They were arguing about me.

“Virginia, she’ll only cause trouble at the school, she’s not like the other students.”

“What if I talked to one of the tutors or an enforcer? Find someone willing to tutor her privately. Her powers are growing.”

“Even more reason for us to leave her the hell alone, we got involved before and it was a disaster.”

“Please, Francis, she is not her mother, they don’t know about her, it won’t be the same and even if they do come, it’s cruel to leave her unprepared. 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.”

“I’m sorry, Virginia, but I must put my foot down about this,” said the Magus moving to end their conversation. “Her mother wasn’t human and neither is she and we do not mess in inhuman affairs.”

I dropped the photograph to cover my mouth. I’d asked all sorts of questions about my mother and I’d wanted answers. I’d wanted to know why she’d left this world. If she had any family and at my lowest point I had even wondered if I was her first child. All these questions had centered around who my mother was. I’d never thought to ask what my mother was. It had never occurred to me. Not even once.

I didn’t know whether to scream, cry, collapse or run away. In the end I choked out a squeak covering my mouth as they went silent and I scrambled to recover the photo. Virginia opened the door stepping out into the corridor to confront an intruder and her eyes widened staring at me. I felt sick and my eyes were watering, I held them wide trying to stop the tears tumbling out and ran. I nearly fell on the stairs and I could hear her calling my name but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t turn back. I 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 normal world. It was crushing.