Leading a sheltered life in the human world, I’d passed as a boy living with my grandmother for the first eighteen years of my life. I was told both my parents were killed—a home invasion—when I was a baby. I grew up totally unaware what I really am, and who and what grandmother is … until I met Stacy.
Long strawberry hair, freckled button of a nose, green captivating eyes, and soft creamy skin, Stacy was beautiful. We were inseparable senior year, but hid our attraction in public because grandmother had always been adamant about me not making friends. I was told I carried a terrible illness in my blood that could be spread through sharing food, coughing in someone’s face, and even touching others. As I got older, the dangers of a sexual relationship were hammered into my head. Grandmother’s daily questioning and reminding started during my freshman year and became a horrible drudgery. When I began questioning the illness, insisting she give it a name, she’d push my questions away with a wave of her arthritic hand.
In my senior year, I had myself examined by a doctor at a free clinic by using the fear of having contracted an STD. After a clean bill of health, Stacy and I began to explore the sexual side of a relationship together, in depth, but without imbibing in the actual act of sexual intercourse.
In the summer of my nineteenth year, Stacy was leaving for an out of state university in less than two weeks and I was staying to attend Seminole Community College. The thought of separating intensified our relationship, and we decided to share our bodies totally. That’s when I killed her.
Grandmother rushed me Down Under, a place I had no idea existed.
I met my father shortly thereafter and found out he was the most dreaded creature in the otherworld, a wendigo.
I also found out my grandmother was really my mother, an aswang. They are cannibalistic, eaters of the dead—kind of a vampire-slash-witch. They move among the human race as older women, often caregivers. Mother is a mid-wife and had lived off of dead fetuses my whole life. Since I had absolutely no knowledge of the underground life she’d lived, I found it easy to accept that for centuries, humans were blind to the world Down Under.
Living the life of a Rogaire means constant moving, occasional identity changes, and a hunger I could never allow myself to quench.
Reminiscing about my past gives no comfort for the future as I pause in front of the window and silently curse the death of the berserker, Vicen. It was impulsive, stupid, and now I have no one to ask about the creature I’d just had sex with. It’s not like I can trot into Purgatory, sit at the bar, and ask around. I was in a blind rage when I entered the bar and couldn’t remember a single face in the room but Vicen’s anyway. What I did notice, what was crystal clear, was that the whole frigging place was scared shitless of me. What the hell right do I have to dream of sharing a life with another when I can strike that kind of fear in all creatures?
“Shit! Not like you didn’t know this was going to end badly when you started following the berserker. And all because you’d witnessed the confrontation he’d had with CeCe. Not like you didn’t know someone was going to die the minute you allowed yourself to take on the body of the beast.”
I sighed heavily at my own ridicule. The best I could hope for is that the body CeCe was wearing was glamoured by a witch spell, not real, or borrowed, or possessed. Because although I would kill Vicen again in a human heartbeat if I caught him threatening CeCe, I didn’t like the thought I’d killed another innocent girl.
But I saw CeCe in Purgatory...
Should I hit the bar again? Ask around? I can’t leave it like this with CeCe. Well, I could, but I sure as hell don’t want to.
Whatever I decide to do, I know it’s not safe here anymore. I just took a woman to my bed. She somehow disappeared without a trace, and I should move on and forget her.
The beast rumbles inside me.
I pull a trunk out from under a lamp by the couch and begin to load all of the personal items I would take when I left. I’m thinking Michigan would be a good place to gravitate. I believe that’s where CeCe is going to attend college in a few weeks. Didn’t she mention Michigan State?
One thing Grandmother—I mean, Mother—had taught me was how to get all the money I need to survive in the human world without any suspicion. At least I’ll never have to live on the streets.
Chapter 8
I am the doppelganger again