Charity

      When Charity Marlow’s phone rang at 12:04 a.m., she knew without even glancing at the caller ID that something was wrong. No one ever called in the middle of the night to say everything was fine.

      Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, Charity had dressed, brushed her hair, and brewed a pot of coffee. The deputy who knocked on her door declined a travel cup, so she made him wait while she fixed one for herself because “questioning” sounded like the kind of ordeal that would require coherence on her part.

      Coherence was the very least of what Charity Marlow owed her daughter, but it was all she had left to give.

      On the way to the sheriff’s station, she sat in the passenger’s seat of the patrol car and sipped quietly from her cup, and not once during the drive across town did she ask why Delilah was in custody. Charity had been both waiting for and dreading that night’s phone call for nearly twenty-five years.

      At the station, in a small room equipped with bright lights and cheap chairs, she sat across a small scarred table from Matthew Pennington, who’d held the title of sheriff for the past twelve years in spite of her consistent vote for whoever ran against him. Two armed deputies were stationed at the door, one on each side, and Charity saw no reason to pretend she didn’t understand their presence.

      “I suppose you want a blood test,” she said before the sheriff could even open his mouth.

      He nodded, but she read irritation in the stiff line of his jaw. Pennington liked to run the show. “We’ve got a phlebotomist from County General waiting for that very thing. Of course, you’d be saving us all a lot of time if you could just tell us what you and your daughter are.”

      Charity set her travel cup on the table. “Sheriff, if I weren’t human, I wouldn’t exactly feel inspired to bare my soul to you and your gun-toting hee-haws.” She tossed a glance at the deputies beside the door, both of whom scowled at her. “But I am human, and your lab should be able to confirm that with little more than a microscope. And since you clearly know otherwise about Delilah... Well, I’d be just as interested as you are in what the lab has to say about her blood sample.”

      Pennington leaned back and crossed thick arms over the brown button-up shirt stretched tight across his soft chest. “You’re telling me you don’t know what species your own daughter is?”

      Charity nodded. “In fact, considering that you have her in custody, I’d guess you know more about her genetic origin than I do.”

      “Well, you’d be wrong there.” Frustration deepened the sheriff’s voice even beyond the chain-smoker range. “I have her medical records. The blood test they ran at birth says she’s human.”

      Charity nodded again, but made no comment.

      “According to her record, she hasn’t had blood drawn since the day she was born.”

      “I believe that’s accurate.”

      “She’s never been sick?” Pennington leaned forward, arms folded over the table, and Charity winced at the acrid bite of cigarette smoke clinging to his uniform. “Not once in twenty-five years?”

      “Every child gets sick at some point, Sheriff. But Delilah never had anything I couldn’t treat myself.”

      “Because you’re an RN.”

      Charity sat a little straighter in her hard plastic chair. “Actually, I’m a nurse practitioner.”

      “That’s right,” the sheriff said, but she saw right through his sudden recollection of her employment history. “You finished your MSN when Delilah was three. Was that so that you could legally treat her yourself?”

      “In fact, it was. And as her primary medical caregiver, I found no reason to run further blood tests on a perfectly healthy child.” Charity looked right into the sheriff’s eyes. “But I would be willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll go first.”

      The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.

      “What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”

      Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.

      “Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”

      “Why don’t you tell us what you know?”

      Charity crossed her arms over her favorite blue summer sweater and when she leaned back in her chair, a gray-streaked strand of straight brown hair fell over her ear.

      “Keeping your secret can’t help her anymore, Mrs. Marlow,” Wayne Atherton said. “We can’t help her either, if we don’t know what she is.”

      Unlike Pennington, Atherton truly seemed to want to help, so Charity cleared her throat and took a long sip of her coffee. “Almost twenty-five