The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

The Key, pt. 2

I reread it three times, and then I could read it no more. There was my answer — and Kutoyis' and Sky's — and yet it seemed unreal. But it explained everything. We were like everyone around us, only different. We were powerful but somehow destroyable and yet healable, like I had been when I scarred. We were inexplicably drawn to the human world and yet linked at our cores to our supernatural selves. Because each of us was not one person, but two. We were not conceived as one being, but two. The sum of our parts were worth more than our whole. How could we ever feel normal?

And though I had thought this our likely truth ever since I learned what "chimera" had really meant, it was so different to think of it truly, as an admission from Lizzie. I was not bred from two different species to exist as a half-and-half. I was instead two full people mushed into one. Two sets of DNA in one tiny cell. Two beings in one body.

I thought of my still heart. Shouldn't it beat? Wasn't I the offspring of two creatures with beating hearts? Where did my stillness come from?

I shook off the watch and bracelets I wore on my left wrist and stared at the five symbols. There was a white and blue symbol: my human Blood parents, one of whom was magical in some way, like a witch. There were two other symbols: a green and a red for Lizzie and John. I suspected John was the red Survivor symbol, and though I didn't still didn't know why, I suspected Lizzie was the mysterious shimmering green symbol. We'd deduced that greens were reserved for shapeshifters, though I couldn't imagine Lizzie was one. If she weren't full Survivor, we knew her to be Sorcerer.

I traced the symbols on my wrist. Blue, white, green, and red that yielded a purple-black color in the middle.

Blue, white, green, and red. Human, human, shifter-Survivor, and Survivor.

Then it clicked.

I grabbed my notebook and scribbled a formula to make me understand it better.

Human + human = human

(Survivor + shifter-Survivor) x (exposed to Human world) = vieczy-Survivor

Human x vieczy-Survivor = Sadie

The black color in my symbol was the missing piece. The second I'd gone out into the human world, one half of me activated like the 28 rogue had. But I had a human half in me that kept the monster in me at bay. So what was I?

A bit of everything.

Lizzie might have apologized for turning me into this, but she might have kept me from becoming the kind of creature I didn't want to become. And, after all, she afforded me the one thing I'd really always wanted: a piece of humanity.

Looking at the symbols again, I knew that this could all be conjecture, and in the end, it didn't matter to anyone but me — and Kutoyis, and if she were alive, Sky — but I supposed I should let him heal a bit more before adding the shock of a lifetime. For just the way I felt resentment bubbling toward my surface for the fact that he and Sky got to live as humans, would he not feel the same resentment toward me that I got to live among Survivors? He and I understood each other so perfectly: We wanted the exact opposite things. The exact opposite lives.

There was a knock at the door, and though I wasn't ready to face anyone, I was surprised they'd held off for this long.

Everett came in and sat next to me. "Ginny sent me. She said you had something to share."

"She did now?" I asked. That girl. Always in my mind.

He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me toward him. "Why didn't you tell us about him?"