My thoughts skipped back to my own alleged connection to magic. My hereditary connection. Sam’s and my adoption was never a forbidden subject or anything. Every now and then it would come up—when we studied genetics in school, when I had to fill out health forms for the army—but my family rarely talked about it. I rarely even thought about it. My parents were my parents. My cousins were my cousins. It was that simple. Oh, sometimes at big family events I would look around at the sea of honey-blond hair and brown eyes—the Luther family trademarks—and feel a tiny sting of displacement, but Sam and I had never been the kind of adopted kids who dreamed of their birth parents, for the simple reason that we knew our birth mother was dead.
When we were teenagers, Sam had once asked our parents where we came from. It was dinnertime, and my parents simultaneously put down their silverware and exchanged a look, like they’d been waiting for the question and had run drills. My mother got up and went down the hall to the fireproof box where they kept all the important documents. While she was gone, my father informed us in a grave, heartfelt voice that our twenty-year-old birth mother had walked into a Denver hospital in the middle of a terrible rainstorm, already well into labor. The doctors put her in a room and did what they could for her, but she died after an emergency C-section, leaving behind fraternal twin girls with no names. An effort was made to find the young woman’s family, but it dried up after a few weeks, and we were registered with a social worker. After a few months, we were adopted by the Luthers, a couple who desperately wanted children but couldn’t conceive. They were our parents in every way that mattered.
Sam and I looked at the birth certificates and newspaper clippings my mother brought back, soaked up the information we found, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Even later, when Sam went through her teenage rebellion, or when Dad and I fought tooth and claw over my decision to join the army, we weren’t the kind of kids to throw “You’re not even my real parents!” at Mom and Dad. Sam and I weren’t always well behaved, but there was one thing you could say for us: we always knew what we had.
Now, though, I had to look at the whole thing in a different light. If there really was such a thing as witchblood, we must have inherited it from one of our biological parents. Could that have had something to do with why no one had stepped forward to claim us? Had our birth mother been running from something when she stopped at the hospital in Denver? What about our biological father—had the witchblood come from his side? I didn’t know a single thing about him.
And I had no desire to, I decided. If Simon was right and I did have some sort of access to magic, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a good life, with an easy job in my favorite town. I was surrounded by family who loved me, not to mention the herd, and best of all, I could watch Sam’s daughter grow up. From what I’d seen so far, getting involved with magic was dangerous . . . and I’d had enough danger for several lifetimes.
After a few minutes I began to doze on my bed, with dogs and cats jumping on and off at intervals as they either checked on me or begged for attention—however you wanted to look at that. At four o’clock I woke with a start, because my unconscious brain had made a connection my conscious mind had somehow missed.
Maybe there was someone I could ask.
Chapter 9
I climbed off the big bed as quickly as my sore muscles would allow, heading for the bedroom closet. My army duffel bag was still in the back. I unzipped one of the side compartments and dug out a handful of paper from the trip I’d made to LA ten months ago. I came out with a wad of scribbled notes and addresses, a Xerox of the missing person’s paperwork, and a bunch of receipts. Shuffling through the scraps, I finally found what I was looking for: a business card emblazoned with the logo of the Los Angeles Police Department.
When John had called to tell me that Sam was missing, I had immediately made arrangements for the herd, packed up my car, and headed west, unwilling to wait hours for the next available flight to LA. I didn’t know the city very well, but Sam was, as she’d said, my goddamned twin. There was no way I wasn’t going to go look for her.
I spent two feverish days in Los Angeles trying to retrace Sam’s steps and figure out what had happened. At the end of the second day, John got a call from an LAPD detective who broke the news of Sam’s death. My sister had been one of the victims of a serial killer named Henry Remus, who’d kidnapped and murdered four women before dying himself. The police didn’t expect to recover Sam’s body, but there was enough evidence—Sam’s blood and the testimony of her surviving friend, who’d also been abducted—to count my sister among the dead.
That wasn’t enough for me, though, so I went to see the cop, a homicide detective named Jesse Cruz. He was a pretty good guy, especially considering that I wasn’t exactly using my best manners at the time. He patiently went over the evidence with me again and again, and let me talk to Sam’s friend. Eventually I was convinced that yes, Sam really was dead.
While we were still talking at the station, though, our conversation was interrupted by a woman in her early twenties, a pretty brunette with bright green eyes who’d called Cruz by his first name. She came skidding into his office, talking fast about something—and then stopped mid-sentence to stare at me. Her face rearranged itself into confusion. “What are you?” she’d asked in a bewildered voice.
I glanced at Cruz, who’d stood up as soon as the girl rushed in, but he looked as confused as I felt. I rose uncertainly, taken aback by the question. Not who are you. What are you.