Chapter 289 Lucia's Education
POV: Lucia | The Sanctuary and Rookeries operational building
My education in what I am has been a series of discoveries, most of them accidental, each one another piece in a puzzle I'm only beginning to understand.
The vampire speed manifested when I was five, trying to reach a jar on a high shelf before Ash could stop me. One moment I was on the floor, the next my hand was on the jar—before the thought had even finished forming. The surprise made me knock it to the floor, where it shattered, which is how Ash found out.
The werewolf strength came a week earlier, when a stuck drawer in the operational building came completely off in my hands, handle and all. The sound brought Papa running from the next room, his expression shifting from concern to something else entirely when he saw what I'd done.
Daywalking I've had since birth—the most documented of my abilities, the one Parliament monitors most closely. Papa explained it as a dhampir quality both my parents possessed, the one piece of my inheritance that makes logical sense.
The empathy is newer, harder to grasp. It arrived not as an event but as a quality in rooms—an awareness of emotional temperature before I've gathered enough information to know what it should be. It produces a kind of knowing I'm still learning to trust.
The partial transformations—wolf ears and vampire fangs—have been with me for eight months now. Isla documented them immediately, and Katherine and the fae healers work with me on controlling them. These sessions are the most frustrating part of my week because they require deliberate production rather than accidental discovery, and deliberate production requires understanding what produces them—something I haven't fully grasped yet.
Papa handles the control sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the focused attention he reserves for what matters most. Isla teaches the medical sessions, Katherine the fae ability sessions. Between them, I have more adults focused on understanding what I am than anyone else I know—a quality of attention that's both care and concern, existing simultaneously as so many things in my life do.
Last week I asked Isla what I am. She said I was Lucia—accurate but not the complete answer to what I was asking. I understood she was giving me the version she believed rather than the version that's less certain: that I'm something biologically specific that hasn't been named yet because the naming requires an understanding nobody currently has.
I asked Dante when I want the other version—the uncertainty rather than certainty. He said I was me and that was enough—the most honest answer, but one that doesn't address what I'm trying to understand.
The question isn't what I am biologically but what I am in the world—something new that the world doesn't have a category for yet. This absence of category creates a specific feeling, like floating in the space where the word for what I am should be.
"Wolf?" I ask Papa in Tuesday's session. "Vampire? Something else?"
He looks at me with that expression he gets when something I've said is more true than I knew it was when I said it.
"Something else," he says. "Something new. The first of something."
"That's lonely," I say.
"Yes," he says. "It is. For now."
I'm thinking about what "for now" means when the empathy quality arrives with its specific information—the emotional temperature of what's present. What's present is Papa's sadness, something that's been there a long time, not the sadness of the moment but something older and larger, directed not at the Tuesday session or at me but somewhere else, somewhere I cannot see.
"Papa," I say. "Why are you sad when you look at me?"
He goes still with the quality of someone perceived in a way they weren't prepared for, the stillness of a person deciding whether to manage their response or give me the real one.
"Because you remind me of someone I loved," he says.