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Helen’s cheeks flushed a little. “Oh, they’re just drop biscuits,” she replied. “Sweet potatoes, shortening, salt, baking powder, the usual.” She smiled. “Although I use cashew cream instead of dairy—Ray’s dairy intolerant.”

I felt my eyes widen, and Elliot grinned at me. “So’s this one. Well, alpha-gal intolerant.”

Helen turned to me “Oh, darlin’, you poor thing. You should’ve told me. I woulda dug out the chicken sausage.”

I shrugged. “Everything else looks great, ma’am. No need to worry. And I do love smoked salmon.”

She smiled. “Well, we’ve got a lot of it. Ray’s partial to some fishin’, and he brought home several big ones this year.” She patted my arm. “And don’t you ma’am me, darlin’. I’ve known you since you were in diapers.”

I felt my neck flush. “Yes, ma—Helen.”

She patted my arm again, then winked at Elliot. “Such a charmer,” she remarked.

It was then that I noticed a faint undercurrent beneath the smells of breakfast. Tangy, like iron and copper, but with a hint of earth and something like mushroom. Odd, but not entirely unpleasant.

I don’t know if Elliot saw my nostrils flare, but he turned his head slightly to the side in a question. I shrugged. I didn’t want to say anything, because I felt like if I did, it would potentially offend Helen. Telling someone their house smells metallic and a little musty seemed kind of rude.

“Will Ray be joining us?” Elliot asked, and I watched Helen’s smile falter for just a moment.

“Oh, no. He’s out with the ’pacas. I’ll save him some for his lunch.”

“We could help him, so that he could come in—and we’d still get the work done,” Elliot offered.

The emotion that flickered across her face was definitely panic.

“Ma’am—Helen—is something wrong?” I asked her. “Does Ray…” I trailed off.

Her cheeks flushed. “Oh, heavens, no, darlin’. Nothin’ like that,” she said quickly. “He’s just… antisocial.”

“He’s a ghoul, isn’t he?” Elliot asked, suddenly, and Helen’s eyes went wide and fearful. Elliot tapped the side of his nose. “I almost didn’t notice over the delicious smells, but…” He shrugged. “Shifters have good noses.”

The panic in her expression dimmed. “You’re a shifter?”

“We both are,” I put in.

Helen looked over at me. “You got sick when your twin did?” Of course she’d remember that.

I shook my head. “No. Last year.”

“And how is Noah?” she asked. I should have remembered the fact that Helen had immediately started calling Noah by his chosen name, no questions asked. Of course she’d be okay with me coming back with a boyfriend.

I sighed. “Currently in jail for killing our mother,” I replied heavily. “Although he didn’t.”

“Lord, no,” she breathed. “That little thing wouldn’t harm a flea.”

Noah absolutely would harm a flea, and he’d talked more than once about hunting squirrels and rabbits in wolf form, which I still wasn’t totally comfortable with, and not just because if I ate either one I’d end up in anaphylaxis.

But Noah wasn’t going to kill anything with self-awareness, especially not Momma.

I nodded. “I know.” A pause. “Do you know what happened to my sister? Momma’s lawyer mentioned her, and I just… wanted to know about her.”

Helen’s expression clouded. “Not specifically, no, poor thing. She caught the virus, got real sick.” She pressed her lips together. “Your momma said she was doin’ better, though. But a week or two later, she was dead.”

I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was implying that my father might have killed my sister. Or that someone else from the Community might have, rather than the virus.

Helen turned and began moving biscuits from the cooling rack to a serving plate. “I can’t rightly say what happened,” she said softly. “The virus takes people sudden-like, sometimes.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“Now,” she said, smiling at me as she handed me the plate. “You boys take a seat, and I’ll call Ray in to join us.”

Ray was hilarious , but in the best-worst sort of way—dad-jokes and waggly eyebrows and wildly inappropriate comments.

I couldn’t decide if I was sad I’d never gotten to know him when I was a kid, or if it just would have made me even more resentful and depressed about the state of my own family life and my apparently-homicidal father.

Ray was, of course, a ghoul, and the saggy right side of his face gave him an asymmetric smile that was far more crooked than Elliot’s, but it was clear from the wrinkles at the corner of his other eye that he did it a lot.

And just as clear from the crows’ feet around Helen’s eyes that he made her laugh a lot, too.

It was also obvious that Ray was delighted to have company who didn’t seem to care that he was a ghoul.

Ghouls are one of the rarer Arcanid types, and, unfortunately, one of the most loathed.

Like vampires, their physiologies require extreme amounts of protein.

Protein is good for shifters, too, but a shifter could get by as a vegetarian, while a vampire or a ghoul needed animal-based protein.

At least ghouls could consume meat—they tend to prefer it raw, like the bloody steak Ray had with his eggs.

Vampires literally needed blood . They could also eat food, but they needed blood.

Something about the hemoglobin that I didn’t fully understand.

But ghouls looked a bit like old horror-movie zombies, and since people are people, a lot of them seemed to think ghouls were similarly dangerous and stupid.

I didn’t know many, but none of the ghouls I’d met were any less intelligent than the humans I interacted with on a regular basis—not that that was honestly saying that much, given how stupid most people are.

Ray was definitely witty and clever, and had somehow managed to avoid talking to anyone in the Community ever , since I knew they condemned vampires, ghouls, orcs, and other Arcanids as sinners justly punished for their sins.

I wondered if the Community knew what my father was.

“So you boys gonna take the critters?” Ray asked, drawling the words. He didn’t have to. In fact, it was clear Ray had a lot of practice speaking around the more lax side of his mouth, and he didn’t have to drawl or lisp if he didn’t want to.

“The goats and chickens?” I asked. “I don’t think we’ve figured that out. Do you want them?”

“The goats, no. Those bastards’ll chew up my barn.” Goats did chew. A lot. On everything. “They’d fight with the ’pacas, too. We don’t need that many chickens, but if you wanted to offload some of ’em, I’d take a handful.”

There were about ten chickens.

“They’re yours,” I told him. “As many as you like.”

Ray grinned, and I couldn’t help but be impressed by his sharp teeth.

Vampires and shifters might have fangs, and orcs have tusks, but ghouls have a whole mouthful of sharp teeth.

Like sharks. It probably didn’t help their case that they were misunderstood and not dangerous, since they really did look like they could bite your face off.

“I promise I won’t eat ’em,” he said, still grinning. He must have noticed me looking at his teeth.

“Hey, they’re your chickens,” I told him. “Eat them if you want.”

That got me a laugh. “I’ll wait until they stop laying,” he replied cheerfully. Then he grinned again, a mischievous gleam in his yellowish eyes. “Or until they kick the bucket. I don’t mind carrion.”

“Ray, that’s disgusting,” Helen admonished, although I could tell she was also pretending a little.

He shrugged. “Don’t have to kill them that way,” he replied. “Seems more humane to me.”

She grimaced. “Then you’re eating them out in the barn,” she retorted. “You know I hate it when you eat roadkill in the house.”

Ray cackled.

Elliot looked scandalized for about a half-second, then scrubbed it from his face, replacing it with a slight smile.

Ray wasn’t wrong. Ghouls were the only Nids who could eat carrion—even shifters really shouldn’t.

It was asking for a case of the world’s worst food poisoning.

But ghouls had iron stomachs with some sort of super-bacteria that helped them digest things that were so far gone that not even the vultures would touch them.

“Do they… taste good?” I asked, unable to help myself.

Ray laughed. “Not especially, but they don’t taste bad, either. But I’d much rather steak and eggs any day.”

“I also didn’t know ghouls can’t have dairy,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining, since I have alpha-gal and can’t have dairy, either.”

“As a species, we can,” he replied. “That’s just me.” He smiled. “Never knew what I was missing, so I can’t say I mind much.”

“I wish I didn’t know what I was missing,” I grumbled.

Ray chuckled. “Always the case, isn’t it?” he asked.

He wasn’t wrong. There were a lot of things that were worse when you knew how good things could be, but you couldn’t have them anymore. Ice cream was only one of them.

Elliot took over the conversation, asking about alpaca farming, asking about how to take care of goats and chickens, asking about what they grew in the massive garden beds that stretched along the side of the farmhouse.

He talked about the herbalism work he and Henry had been doing, and Helen had several recommendations for things she or her family members had used for injuries, aches, and so on.

I actually felt myself relaxing the longer I spent in Helen’s kitchen, the smells of the food, the distinctive odor of dust and old wood, woodsmoke, and the musky-mushroomy odor of ghoul settled into my skin in a strangely pleasant way.

I’d always looked forward to seeing Helen as a kid, and I realized, now, that I genuinely liked her.

And Ray. I wished I’d gotten to know them better when I’d lived here—I could imagine doing homework at this table instead of the one in my parents’ kitchen, smelling biscuits instead of whatever more appropriately ascetic food my father had dictated that my mother cook.

Pasta with simple tomato sauce, meatloaf and baked potatoes, tomato soup and plain turkey sandwiches.