Mr doctor
Kendrick
I wasn’t living my best life, I often talked to myself. My beast, however, had other things to say. He was mostly perturbed by the fact that I didn’t let him out as often as I should. Unfortunately, both I and him were what I would call men of culture, as humans sometimes like to say, and occasionally we would ever so slightly disagree. This was one of those subjects. The second, however, was on the subject of the human.
My nose was particularly different, I noticed when I was a child. I could smell things that weren’t normal. Now, I couldn’t define what the non-normal nature of it was, but I knew it was just not human. Humans, as I had spent enough time around, had this scent similar to smoked fish. Sometimes it would be mixed with things like plastic and metal, and depending on how sick they were, you could smell more concentrations of plastic in the body. It simply was. I couldn’t explain it.
This human, however, smelled different from other humans. She didn’t have that plastic or metal smell, even though she did—but maybe in trace amounts. Sitting in front of her now, I was sure of it. She blinked several times, right now her blue eyes just confused but mostly calm. She looked slightly different too. Her hair was longer and thicker. Her skin was slightly brighter, perhaps due to the heavy inclusion of protein in her diet. She was also slightly bigger—not fatter, what I would like to call more muscular.
But the most important thing in the ratio was her scent. Her scent was not human. At least, not entirely. And I didn’t know how to tell her. I found myself stuck and confused about the subject, but I simply stared.
“Well?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “You’re fine, I guess,” I settled on saying, though I didn’t know how to tell her that I wasn’t sure what the heck she was. I didn’t know how to tell her that she was strange, to say the least.
I looked at Alejandra, the woman I was so sure was my mate, and shook my head. She too was like me, carrying a nose with a keen sense of smell—or maybe it was just her eyes. And that was mostly why she kept them hidden behind a pair of spectacles. Her eyes were strange enough.
I tilted my head outside, gesturing for Alejandra to follow me. With no complaints, she stood from where she sat and followed me. I didn’t stop walking until we reached outside her great-great-uncle’s house. I stopped when we were a very good distance away and nothing but the small forest surrounded their home.
“I don’t like that,” she said. “No, I really don’t like that.”
I stopped walking and turned back. “Is it that bad?”
Her feet moved her slowly until she stood by me. She stood quite short—at least shorter than me by every parameter. Her head was tilted back as she watched me. She raised her eyebrows, nearly fully hidden behind the spectacles she wore.
“Do you remember how I was able to properly diagnose you?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “You again with those human terms of yours,” she said. “Yes, I know how you were able to properly diagnose me,” she said, rolling the word over her mouth to speak it.
I rolled my eyes in turn, feeling slightly frustrated. But it was that frustration that had my blood boil every time I watched her.
“No,” I said. “It’s not like that,” I said slowly. “The word simply means to watch a scenario and judge it based on things that have existed before. I watched something, I believe it’s wrong, and I use my knowledge to judge properly what that scenario could be.”
She didn’t seem convinced anyway. “Whatever you say, Mr. Doctor,” she smiled.
“Oh, fuck.” I groaned but didn’t do anything anyway.
“My nose tells me that she’s beyond human,” I said simply, deciding to hit the nail on the head and stop dancing around the issue.
“I know,” she said. “That is why I called you. I hoped that cute little nose of yours would be able to make a proper—what was that word again?” She smirked.
“Diagnosis.”
“I know that,” she waved me off. “Yes, whatever. But humans—you know what they smell like. Does she smell like it to you?”
My mate shook her head. “My nose isn’t quite as sharp as yours, but for the most part, yes. At least she passes as human in the nose of anyone.”
Suddenly, she stopped abruptly, her eyes wide, perhaps with the realization that I was on to something.
“She passes as human,” my mate echoed. “Human,” she said again, almost as though she was intentionally repeating it. She spoke slowly, as though she were trying to calculate the number of letters in each word.
A familiar scent wafted into my nose just then as the wind from the south fluttered it to me. It didn’t smell like Alejandra. I’d let him stick around until he thought he wasn’t detected—until he was comfortable coming out.
I nodded her on, encouraging her definition. “But what does that do? So what is she, if she's not human?” I shook my head. “I don't know. She doesn't smell like a witch, she doesn't smell like an elf, or—I don't even know.” I shook my head. “It's almost as if it's at the tip of my tongue, or in this case, at the tip of my nose, but I don't know what it is. You know, like that inscrutable itch.”
She gave a nod of understanding. She placed her hands on her wide hips, suddenly propping one leg and leaning against the other. “That explains quite a lot of things. But if she's not human, then it would qualify her to be the Luna. It will throw out Selena's chances left. The argument that she is human, therefore cannot be Alpha's mate, can therefore be thrown out of the window. But if she's inhuman, then what the fuck is she?”
I watched as the wheels and gears turned in my mate's head. The same way she didn't know, I didn't know either. Now, one interesting thing that humans had was DNA testing. We didn't. But it was easy enough to tell who was whose child and who was whose father just by their scent. Different families carried different blood, and that particular blood was distinct from another's. So things like cheating and having a child for someone who was unknown was unheard of. The scent of the father could always be smelled on the child, and that of the mother.
But in this case, I couldn't ascertain who her parents were, so I asked her. “Well, I'm humbled. We can always ask her.”
My mate shook her head. “No. She seems to be a girl who is shrouded in pain and misery. I highly doubt she'll have a story worth telling. She doesn’t have anyone who’s looking for her, neither does she seem to be in such a hurry to go back home. She’s more on the hopeless side of that.”
My mate continued, pressing her luscious lips together, looking down at the earth beneath her feet. “If she had parents, she would want to go back quickly. She would say, I want to go home. She’s more inclined to survive, which means she’s not going anywhere. She’d rather stay here, maybe because she sees this place as better than where she comes from.”
Her eyes came up to mine, hidden behind those glass spectacles. “It means, obviously, that she’s an orphan. She has no siblings, no family, no friends, nothing.”
My bottom lip quivered slightly. “She’s pathetic,” my mate said.
I felt as though I was doused with a bucket of water. I shook my head. “You know, every time I think I have hopes for you to be nice and sweet, you dash them. You always—” I sighed. “—my hopes, Alejandra.”
She smiled. “Oh, I don’t think you’d like me if I wasn’t me,” she said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that she’s hopeless, as opposed to pathetic. But that’s because she has no parentage. Her parents deserve everything. Your lineage is who you are; it’s what you will be in the future. She stands alone, solitary like an island—or you know, one of those plastic things that float on the human seas.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Oh, fuck this,” I said, pulling her close to me and planting a kiss on her luscious lips.
“Oh, fuck. That’s disgusting.”