Born Between Worlds

I never felt like I belonged, no matter where I was. I had kind friends, and parents that saw to my every need, so I couldn’t fathom why I felt that way. The feeling never went away, even when I got older. While we were still children, my best friend Leela often said I was strange for feeling the way I did, and that she wouldn’t have even cared if her parents passed away if it meant she could be adopted by my parents. I found her thoughts to be stranger than mine.

Once I became an adult, however, I started to notice things. I could see and hear things that others could not. I feared my mental health was deteriorating, but I soon learned that it was not the case. I quickly found out that my abilities extended beyond heightened senses—I could manipulate the world around me.

Wanting to figure out the extent of my powers, I decided to infuse it into my work. I had joined a software company after completing my degree and was a month into developing a new social media app. As a side project, I made my own version of it to see how far I could dig into my friends’ and parents’ past. I found nothing out of the ordinary at first, but I stumbled across something alarming: I was adopted.

Dad was infertile; he couldn’t be my biological father. But the paper trail ended there. There was no record of whom they adopted me from. I confronted them about it that same weekend and they broke down almost instantly. Mom and Dad apologised for not telling me sooner. Their original plan was to tell me when I turned eighteen, but they changed their minds. However, both of them said they couldn’t remember the name of the woman who gave me up for adoption, not even what she looked like. I found that odd.

I wanted to test my abilities even further. I asked them to trust me and placed my hands on their heads. It took me a minute, but I could finally see it: my biological mother’s face was hidden deep within their memories, almost as if they had been sealed away. It wasn’t long before I found her name: Aranna Ryan. I thanked my parents for telling me the truth and decided to look for Aranna. It took me three days to track her down to another corner of the country. She was living with a man called Razel Locke. They weren’t married, but had been living together for ten years. I wondered whether he was my biological father.

When I arrived at their house, Aranna asked me to come inside immediately and locked the door. Razel was with her. Tears began to brim their eyes as they apologised for abandoning me when I was a newborn, saying they had no other choice. It was when they explained their reasons that I realised why I always felt so different from everyone else—I was only half-human.

Aranna was a witch, while Razel was a demon. The news was darker than what I could have ever imagined. My mom’s coven had banished her the moment they learned that she was seeing Razel, and when they later found out that she was pregnant with me, they had set out to kill both her and me. Aranna had no choice but to give me up before the coven could find me and leave town with Razel. The two of them said they had taken care of most of the coven that pursued them, but that they didn’t wish to seek the remainder of them.

I felt different. I couldn’t forgive them for what they had done to us. I convinced them to join forces with me and bury every last one of them. Once we were done, I helped my biological parents return to our town and reintroduced them to my adoptive parents. I finally felt like I belonged somewhere.