She barely made it to the wastebasket before lunch reappeared.
JESSE AND MR. MINEGOLDwere amazing. Jesse scooped her off the floor while Minegold emptied the sick basin, wordlessly and without judgement. Jesse read the pages she shoved at him.
“I have a heartbeat and a pulse and a fricking period,” Sophie muttered into his chest, tears still flowing. “I don’t care what I am, I said that, but it was a lie. I care if I’m not human because then I lived a lie this whole time. I tricked my parents. They wanted a human child to raise.”
“Baby, if anyone tricked your parents, it wasn’t you. And a changeling- well, maybe that has different meanings. It might mean changed into a human. And what makes you human, anyway? Didn’t they do blood tests? They didn’t come back from the lab and say ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t human blood, we can’t test it.’ You’re a human. Now, I’m not, but I look like one.” He shook his head, pain in his eyes.
“That doesn’t matter to me. Even if,” she swallowed, reaching for the tissues Mr. Minegold set beside her, “even if I wasn’t human, I wouldn’t mind if my parents hadn’t raised me thinking I was.”
“Youarehuman. You are not changeling as when the fae leave their babes in exchange for others. This man, this book, was written almost 600 years ago. He does not know everything, nor every term.” Minegold perched on the arm of a wingback chair across from the couple. “But I know there are othermeanings for that word. Changed into. Humans can be made vampires and werewolves, even succubi and incubi. Did you know that in some cases, demons can be made human?”
“Not covered in high school biology,” Sophie replied bitterly.
Mr. Minegold leaned forward, hand in a fist. He turned it over and opened it, palm up, to Sophie.
“What’s this?”she asked, carefully taking a folded bit of cloth from his palm.
“I wore this.”
Sophie opened it carefully and smothered a gasp. It was gray and tattered, but she could still make out the six-pointed star with letters over it. “Oh, Mr. Minegold—”
“Call me Jakob, little one.” He took it back and stuffed it in his pocket. “They told us once that we were not human.”
“My parents, too. Nigerian. Armenian.”
“Ah. Because of blood or coloring. We are so very strict sometimes in how we think. We should maybe worry more about how we feel. I haven’t been ‘human’ in over eighty years, but I think I am growing more human all the time, even this weekend. I never thought to have a son again, and now look at me. He brings me home a daughter.”
Sophie slid forward like a well-rosined bow across strings, into the older man’s arms. “I’m sorry I’m making a big deal.”
“Hush now. It’s not a ‘big deal’ to want to know your story, your heritage. Some people try to steal it from you, some try to hide it for your own good. I doubt your father thought it would go well if he handed you to your parents with a reminder that your father was a vampire and your mother was a... something else.”
Sophie stayed, head on his shoulder for another moment before Jesse pulled her back.
“You never told me to call you Jakob,” Jesse muttered, half-accusingly.
“It sounds odd if my s— if I—”
“You ought to make him an uncle. Uncle Jakob sounds nice.” Sophie sniffed in heavily.
“She speaks the truth. And...” Mr. Minegold pulled something from his other pocket. “Feel like giving a little blood to the old vampire, dear?”
“What?” Sophie blinked in surprise.
“Come with me.”
THE “APOTHECARY” TURNEDout to be an old-fashioned canning pantry, but aside from a few jars of pickles and peach preserves, the shelves were filled with things that would have shocked most 1950s housewives.
“In this line of work, sometimes you fight dark magic with light magic. This,” he shook the little bottle from his pocket in front of Sophie’s eyes, “this is Bindwort. Mixed with a drop of blood from the being in question, it shows remarkable things.”
“Like what?” Sophie tore her eyes away from
“To be blunt, this thing is like a monster identifier,” Jesse sighed. “When something comes to town and we don’t get there in time, we mix blood or slime or whatever traces we find left behind with Bindwort. Toss in a match. Do a spell of revelation and watch the smoke take form. We can’t ask your parents or your birth parents these questions. So... Uncle Jakob,” Jesse rolled the name experimentally off the tongue, “wondered about this. Want to try?”
“How much blood?” Sophie asked with some slight trepidation.
“A drop. Watch.” Minegold lit a match and threw it into a small metal bowl on the counter just outside the pantry. Jesse dropped in a handful of the Bindwort, which smelled like a mixture of orange and sage. Taking one of the seemingly endlesstacks he used for maps and the like, Minegold poked his ring finger and let the drop of blood fall into the smoking bowl while he muttered something in a language Sophie didn’t recognize. It could be Hebrew, Greek, or Latin for all she knew.
Two forms started to appear in the smoke. The first was a smoky, undefined version of Minegold’s human face. Alongside it rose another visage with elongated canines and feral eyes, bright beams of red in their centers.
