Inborn (The Birthright Book 1)

Chapter 3

When we pulled up into our driveway after school that day, an unfamiliar car sat in front of the garage. Well, truck actually. It was a hulking black SUV. Xavier and I traded curious glances and went inside.

Our parents were home and sat in the two living room chairs, turned to face the couch on the outside wall. Three people sat on the couch, two men and a woman. The woman sat in the middle and smiled wide when she saw me.

Mom waved me over, so I dropped my backpack, squishing up next to her in the chair. She put her arm around me, and Xavier took a seat on the floor.

"Kids," my dad said, "this is Hayden, Kenji, and Bryce." He pointed at them in turn. Kenji and Hayden were older than me, probably in their mid-to-late twenties. Hayden smiled, flashing a set of perfect white teeth, and I liked him immediately.

Kenji had short, glossy ebony hair and almost-black eyes that sparkled when she smiled at me, like we were old friends, though I was positive I'd never seen her.

Bryce was younger than the two of them, probably close to my age, and had a crop of thick hair the shade of molasses that jutted out in peaks in the front like the meringue on my mom's coconut cream pie. He wore black square glasses and his left cheek dimpled when he smiled.

"They're part of Earth Patrol," my dad said with derision. I wasn't sure if it was because of the organization itself, or the name.

"Never heard of it," Xavier said.

Kenji's eyes twinkled. "We prefer it that way. It's easier for us to do our job."

"And what is your job?" I said. It sounded like a protection agency of some sort, but I had a feeling it was more complicated than that.

Mom leaned closer to me, if that was possible. "It's an expanded version of what I used to do."

"Your mom is a legend," Kenji said with admiration. "It was her original group that sparked others to take up the same task, and it's grown enough that we've started to organize our efforts in recent history."

In her twenties, my mom was recruited by a guy to join his small group of nonhumans to investigate potential nonhuman stuff going down in this country. It sounded like it was mostly murders involving people with alien DNA, and they tried to help in whatever way they could. And though I'd heard some stories, Mom didn't talk about it much, and I always got the feeling things ended badly.

But now I thought I understood why they were here. "You're here because of the girl they found dead in the woods."

Her sparkle faded and Kenji nodded solemnly.

"So it wasn't a human who killed her," I said.

"It wasn't a human who was killed, either," Bryce added. "Human authorities are struggling to even decide how she died. They're boiling it down to some type of poison. We're here to investigate for ourselves."

"They haven't noticed anything else is weird?" I said, imagining they'd performed an autopsy and done all sorts of tests, especially since they didn't know how she died.

"DNA-altering serum," Hayden said with all authority. I wasn't sure how, but I took that to mean they'd examined the body themselves. "When she died, it froze in place, thankfully."

There were different degrees of DNA-altering, depending on how human you looked. Some just altered you inside enough for a blood test, while others could turn you from a fish into a human. I understood that this serum was really only needed on Earth for the most part. A lot of alien descendants had enough human blood mixed in that whatever their ancestors looked like, they were human on the outside without any altering. Then some aliens apparently looked human anyway. My family was one of the two, though I didn't know enough about my ancestry to know which.