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“Many of the families are interrelated,” I told him. “If there was an Arcanavirus outbreak, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if many people ended up with the same kind of transformation.”

Hart turned on the track that led up to the house. “And that’s another fucking coincidence, don’t you think?”

“What is?” I was confused.

“The Community of the Divine Transformation ? Headed by a pack of shifters?”

I gaped at him. “That’s… That has to be an actual coincidence,” I argued.

“Seriously?” He took his eyes off the road for a split second and hit a pothole in the track. “Shit!”

I grimaced as the bump jarred my knee. “Transformation is at the core of most major world religions,” I pointed out. “The fact that it’s also the word we use for the biological changes brought about by Arcanavirus doesn’t mean that every religion is tied to Arcana.”

“How old is the Community?” Hart asked.

“I—don’t know,” I had to admit.

“And if it’s older than about thirty years, was it called something else before?”

I stared at him, torn between denial and dawning horror. “I don’t know,” I repeated.

Hart made a soft sound. “Try this one on. Whether there was already a culty-ass group of religious nut-jobs here or not, some fundamentalists decide that they’re too holy to have been corrupted by Arcana, the way that some of the anti-Arcanid purists claim.”

I was familiar with the type—people who firmly believed that if you were only holy enough, saintly enough, you would be immune to Arcanavirus. Or, at least, if you did contract it, you wouldn’t be changed or killed by it.

“Because they believed their own sanctimonious bullshit, they decided that transformation had to be the marker of saintliness or what-fucking-ever. So they rebranded. Pushed the fucking gospel of shifter transformation as the marker of holiness, but they also know that if they make that public , they’ll run afoul of the government, who will stop them from enabling Arcana infections in pursuit of their enlightenment or whatever they fucking call it. ”

“So instead they hide anyone who gets sick,” I breathed.

“Waiting to see what happens. Whether they die or live. What they become.” I swallowed.

“And if you manage to survive, then you’re elevated in the faith.

And if not…” I thought about Rachael. About the fact that Noah might also have ended up dead if I hadn’t managed to call for help.

“Exactly.”

The idea that Noah and I had been raised by a community of shifters who had never told us…

Actually, that was probably a good thing, since if we’d known, I might not have insisted that Noah needed to go to the hospital.

And without that catalyst, I had no idea if we would have ever managed to leave.

I shuddered. “Shit.”

“It’s fuckin’ bullshit, is what it is,” Hart countered. “Holier-than-though, evangelical bullshit.”

I had to rethink things. Everything I thought I’d understood about my childhood, about the religious beliefs that I’d had beaten into me, about the way I thought the world had been ordered. If Hart was right… all of it was wrong.

“You’re saying the whole Community is shifters?” Ray paused, holding a chicken wing that had been slathered in a thick, slightly sweet, Tennessee-style barbecue sauce that I was sure must have taken Helen hours of slow simmering.

“Helen, this is amazing,” I told her honestly, ignoring Ray’s question because it hadn’t actually been directed at me.

I also wasn’t really interested in participating in the conversation because I still felt deeply unsettled by the whole thing, and focusing on barbecue-slathered chicken was much, much safer.

Helen smiled, the corners of her blue eyes crinkling. “Thank you, darlin’. It’s how my momma used to make it, although we put it on pork ribs, but it’s just as good on chicken.”

“I appreciate it,” I told her honestly. I rarely got the chance to have barbecue anything, since most of the time, the things people barbecued were beef and pork.

“And I appreciate the fact that you put it on something vegetarian,” Hart added, raising his fork with a square of portobello mushroom.

Helen smiled again. “Of course, darlin’. We may not get elves up here too often, but I know y’all can’t eat anything animal. No reason for you to miss out just because your biology doesn’t like meat.”

Hart grinned back, then popped the bite in his mouth.

In addition to the barbecued chicken and mushrooms, there was cornbread with honey and vegan butter, southern-style molasses baked beans, and a vinegar apple coleslaw.

And Helen was beaming. Clearly, she loved cooking and loved feeding people.

But where they lived, next to the Community, I was sure they rarely had any company, and what company they were likely to have was probably Community, which meant that any offers of food would have been rebuffed in the name of gluttony.

Which made no fucking sense if the core of the Community’s beliefs was that shifters were on a higher plane of holiness. Because we needed more food than humans, but I knew that my father…

He’d always been extremely thin. I’d wondered more than once where my weight had come from, excusing it as a form of psychological compensation for having had my meals controlled as a kid.

But maybe it was genetics—and my father had spent his adult life denying those same genes, starving himself even as he limited what Noah and I and our mother could eat.

I picked up another cornbread muffin, broke it in half, and spread butter on the crumbly center, frowning down at it.

I twitched when Elliot’s warm hand closed over my upper thigh. “You okay, baby?” he murmured softly.

“Okay enough,” I replied, just as quietly. I wasn’t okay, not really, but I also wasn’t going to fall apart in the next ten minutes. Probably.

“What’s wrong?”

I shot him a look.

“Okay, what’s wrong that I don’t already know about?”

I squeezed honey on my cornbread, then gestured with the bear-shaped bottle. All this .

Elliot’s hand kneaded gently. “What’s the worst part?”

“That everything I knew, growing up, was based on a lie. Based on some messed-up belief that shifters are holier than everybody else.”

“Oh, we are,” he said, and I could tell that he was trying to tease, trying to lighten the mood.

“Not funny,” I told him, shooting a glare.

“Mays is right,” Hart put in, reminding me that shifters weren’t the only ones with sharp hearing.

“If the Community of the Divine Transformation, emphasis on transformation , venerates shifters, that means they’re creating a social hierarchy of sanctity based on subspecies class.

My guess? Shifters, then Arcs, then humans.

And I don’t think they’re terribly keen on the rest of us Nids.

They didn’t seem to think much of me, anyway. ” Hart smirked.

I frowned.

“No more they are,” Ray put in. “There’s a reason I keep away from them. Said hello to someone, once. Didn’t even get out my name before she turned and ran, praying at the top of her lungs for God to save her from demons.”

That definitely explained why I’d not met Ray when I was a kid. If he and Helen assumed every Community member would see him as a demon , there was definitely no reason why he would want to have any interactions with any of them.

It also explained why I’d never met any Arcanids, other than the people we’d seen on the rare occasions that we went into Staunton or, once, to Charlottesville to see the psychologist my parents had asked to ‘fix’ Noah.

Momma had explained that some people got very sick and became things that were different because God had judged them less worthy—because they were sinners.

She hadn’t said that some people became shifters because God had judged them more worthy.

But Momma hadn’t been a shifter, so maybe she didn’t believe that?

Or maybe she did, and thought that she was unworthy because she hadn’t become one.

Or hadn’t become one yet. For all I knew, people deliberately tried to expose themselves in order to gain the chance to become transformed, although I didn’t remember a particularly high incidence of illness growing up.

I let out a sigh, and felt Elliot’s hand squeeze my thigh again, but I kept my thoughts to myself. The conversation had moved on without me, now discussing the current legislation in Virginia tied to the Magic-Free Movement. Also not something I had the bandwidth for.

I excused myself and hobbled my way to the bathroom.

I didn’t come back to the kitchen when I was done, instead sinking down on the stairs that led up to the cramped second floor, leaning the crutches next to me.

I just didn’t have the energy—the optimism—to go back to the table, to listen to more conversation about legal restrictions on my sub-species, about the evangelical monsters who’d condoned the killing of my mother, about whatever other horrors they’d moved on to discuss in my absence.

I was exhausted, wrung out, and the ground that had felt so stable under my feet—poisoned ground, but solid, nonetheless—had just been rocked and fractured.

I had hated almost everything about the place I’d grown up. The people—aside from Noah—that I’d grown up with. Hated them, but understood them. Knew what they believed. Knew what they’d expected of me and what I thought about those expectations.

Except apparently I hadn’t.

My father was a wolf shifter—like Noah, like me—and believed that being a wolf made him holier than any ordinary humans. Than my mother. Than Noah and me.

I wondered what would have happened to Noah if we’d stayed. If he would have been accepted as a shifter, or if being trans meant that he still would have been seen as an abomination. Would Father have killed him? Would having Arcana have killed him first?

What would Father have thought of me ? No. What did he think of me?