Chapter 3

The house was bigger than I expected, older too, the kind of house that has a personality, where the floors creak in specific spots and the windows don't sit quite flush in their frames. It felt lived in the way only old houses do. Priya pulled into the driveway, and before we were even fully there, the front door opened.

Her mother came out first. Small woman, Priya's same eyes, hair pulled back. She looked at Priya with this wide open relief, and then she looked at me, and the relief didn't disappear exactly, but it changed. Tightened. She pulled it back behind a smile that she placed carefully on her face.

"Zara," she said. "We've heard so much about you."

"Thank you for having me," I said.

Her hands when she took mine were cold. She held on a second too long.

Priya's brother was in the doorway. Maybe nineteen or twenty, tall, and he looked at me the same way the people in town had, that alert confused look, and then he looked at Priya, and something passed between them that was not a sibling look, it was something older than that.

"Come in, come in," Priya's mother said.

The inside of the house smelled like food and wood and something I couldn't place. They fed me. They were warm, genuinely warm in most of the ways that counted. Priya's mother asked about my job; her brother asked about the city. They laughed at the right moments. But every now and then I would catch one of them looking at me when they thought I wasn't looking, and the expression on their faces in those unguarded moments was the thing I kept snagging on.

It wasn't hostility. But something else. It was more like concern. Like I was something fragile that had been brought inside during a storm.

They showed me to the guest room after dinner, and Priya hugged me goodnight, and I brushed my teeth and got into the bed and stared at the ceiling. The house was quiet in the way city apartments never are, no traffic, no neighbors, just nothing.

I don't know what time it was when I woke up.

The house was dark. I was thirsty, I remember that; I was going to get up and find the kitchen. And then I heard the voices.

Low. From down the hall. I could not make out words at first, just the shape of conversation, and then I could, because one of the voices went up and they stopped being careful.

It was Priya's mother. "You should not have brought her here. Not a human, Priya. Here, of all places. And you didn't tell me you were bringing someone."

Human.

The word landed weirdly. I stayed completely still.

"I had no choice; she had nowhere to go, and she was heartbroken, and I wasn't going to leave her like that." Priya's voice was lower, controlled.

"You had every choice. You could have helped her without bringing her to Wrenfield. You should have taken her somewhere else, just not here."

"She would have been fine in the city." Her brother said.

"Would she?" Priya said. "You don't know that."

"She had her heartbroken; it's not like someone died, and this is not something you get to decide on your own." Her mother again. "There are rules here. The elders are already going to know; they probably already do. Mara said she could smell her from across the street…. Your father is not going to like this."

"I know."

"Then why...."

"Because she needed me." Priya's voice cracked at the end. Just slightly. "And I am not going to apologize for that."

I was sitting up in bed now. Fully awake. The word human was still sitting in the center of my chest like a stone.

A human.

She had said it the way you'd say not a child or not a civilian. Like it was a category. Like it was my category specifically, and it was a problem.

I sat in the dark guest room of a house I had never been to before in a town where strangers had stared at me and said I smelled wrong, and I thought about Priya's face when she invited me here, how certain she had been, how she had already known we were coming before I even said yes. If they called me a human like I was a different kind of species, then what are they? Oh my God, what have I done? Who is Priya now? I am in a strange land and it seems they are not humans. I need to get out of here now. What if they brought me here to kill me? But Priya wouldn't do something like that to me.

The voices went quiet again down the hall.

I looked out the window trying to get my thoughts together and plan what I was going to do next. The house was surrounded by forest; the cold air calmed me down a bit. About closing the window, something caught my eye. Someone was there, and the person was looking at me. Are those eyes shining? Oh my God, what is going on here? How can someone be out there at night in a forest and their eyes are shiny, and those colors, how rare, dark blue. I quickly closed the window. I need to get out of here; this place gives me the creeps.

I could not go back to sleep; my mind was on overdrive, and only thoughts of getting out of here were in it.