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came out with a trace of bitterness that Kira couldn't fight, but she couldn't hide all her feelings.

She almost wanted to cry and fall into her mother’s arms, but she held back and watched as her mother’s hand rose to catch the gasp leaving her mouth. Kira observed as her mom backed up into the couch and, like an afterthought, fell into a seated position.

"Oh god, oh god," her mother repeated until Kira came to sit down next to her. "Where was Luke? I never imagined you’d been in real danger." Kira grabbed her mother’s shaking hand.

"It’s okay, I saved myself…" Kira let her words linger. Her mother stiffened and looked at Kira with eyes full of horror.

"How much do you know?"

"Not everything, but enough. I stayed with Luke overnight because I needed some time to adjust before I came home. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to look at you knowing I was just a mistake, that I’m your charge and not your daughter. Oddly enough, it feels half-normal and only half-painful." Kira let her fingers slip from her mother’s and moved to the other end of the couch, rolling her knees into her chest.

Her mother sat very still, looking straight ahead with wide eyes. "Will you ever forgive me?" she whispered while bowing her head into her hands.

"I hope so," Kira answered truthfully. She didn't know if she could ever let the pain of not knowing who she was fall away. She loved her mother, but right now, she felt as though she didn't know who her mother really was. "Were you ever going to tell me I was adopted? That my whole life has been a lie?"

"Oh, Kira." Her mother reached for her hand, but Kira moved it away, not ready to forgive her yet. "It hasn't all been a lie. I am your mother, in every way but genetically. Your father and I love you. Your sister loves you. We’ve always been a family." A tear escaped Kira’s eye then. "If you won't forgive me right now, will you at least let me explain?"

"Yes." Kira let the word slip from her mouth before she could stop it. This was the point of no return. Once the story was told, everything about her heritage would be true, but in some ways she thirsted for it. She needed a history—a past to hold on to. "You need to start with my real parents."

"Can we talk outside?" her mother asked while rising from the couch. "These are stories even your father cannot hear."

Kira nodded.

She and her mother always had important conversations outdoors. When she had wanted to go to boarding school, they had walked in a park for an hour. When she got her ears pierced, they had gone to the swing set in her old backyard. Something about the wind and the trees seemed calming—they made even the biggest arguments seem small. For the first time, Kira wondered if it was a conduit trait, that maybe something about being in the sun calmed her people. But she pushed the thought aside, not wanting to linger on any musings that made her feel at all subhuman.

Kira grabbed a blanket to wrap around her shoulders and quickly made instant hot chocolate to bring outside while her mother ran up the steps. She set her mother’s cup on the table and nestled into the chair to wait. The air was cool on her cheek—a typical Carolina fall. The leaves of the dense forest behind her house rustled with each churning breeze, almost like waves with their cyclical splash. But here, only the scent of salt in the air reminded her that she lived on the coast.

Kira’s mother walked outside in a sweatshirt with a box of tissues in hand. "Kira, I don’t even know where to begin. I haven’t spoken of the conduits in years. Your father doesn’t even know about my past. I never wanted any of us to be a part of that world."

"Start with my father, your brother. What was he like? You are Punishers, right?" Kira tried to keep the crack from her voice. She thought it the logical place to start, the beginning of her father’s tale before he even met her real mother. She wished she had a picture, some sort of token to remember them both by.

"Your father was amazing. He was the protective older brother, the ideal fighter, the perfect son, the dream boy, but most of all he was someone you knew without a doubt you could count on for anything in your life. He wanted to protect the entire world, to fight epic battles, and he started by helping me." Kira noticed that her mother’s gaze had glazed over. She was staring somewhere beyond their backyard, back into her memories. "When we were younger, he made sure none of the kids bullied me for being small and weak with my power. You see, Kira, I ran away from that world because I had no place in it. As a child, I could never truly channel the sun properly, and when my power matured at the age of sixteen, I still couldn't hurt a fly. To a Punisher that is the ultimate insult, and many of our people turned against me, but never your father. I lived at home, just waiting until I could leave and go to college and be normal. And, he accepted me."

Kira grabbed a tissue then. It seemed her mother and she had both been misfits in unfamiliar worlds, and she painted the most beautiful picture of her true father as someone fearless. Something Kira wished she had inherited some of.

"When he was eighteen, he went on his first hunt and made his first kill. He returned, boasting of how much fun he’d had and how exhilarating the fight was. He said he was the only newbie who hadn’t needed help from the elders to stop his vampire. I could tell, just by looking at him, that he had found his place and that he would grow to be one of our best fighters. Conduit societies are stuck in the past in many ways. The men went out to hunt for vampires to help protect humanity, and the women remained at home protecting the children in case our location was ever found out. And the entire town knew your father would be the best of us. Every time he came back from a trip, he shined with pride, and others told the tales of his heroics. Because for us, the stronger the fighter, the more divine, and your father was seen as a heavenly angel to many of our people."

"But that all changed?" Kira guessed, knowing this story had everything but a happy ending.

"Yes, that all changed. Most youths mature at sixteen and start going on guided missions, but at age twenty we are allowed to hunt alone. At first, your father acted much the same and came back with joy in his eyes. However, one day, a few weeks before he turned twenty-one, he returned solemnly. Everyone thought he had failed to catch his target for the first time. Nothing unusual for a young hunter. They all let him be. But I knew your father, and I knew something else was wrong."

"Did you talk to him about it?" Kira asked. Their society was so different from everything she had grown up with. She couldn’t imagine the pressure of feeling like a warrior and never being able to make mistakes. Kira looked at her mother’s red curls as they blew in the breeze and wondered if she viewed them as a curse.

"I tried. I’ll never forget what he told me. I had been in the kitchen washing the dinner plates when I noticed him sitting outside on the back steps, so I paused and went out to comfort him. I told him that everyone makes mistakes and everyone misses every so often, but I could tell they were just empty words. He was looking up at the stars with the deepest confusion in his eyes, and then he turned to me and asked, ‘Ellie? Have you ever wondered if we were wrong?’ and for a moment I didn’t understand. But when he turned to look back at the night sky, I realized he meant us, the Punishers. Were we wrong in killing? Did vampires really have souls? ‘Of course not,’ I told him full of confidence. We were never even allowed to question those beliefs, rooted in our ancestral history for thousands of years. I saw him shut himself away when I answered. He stood up and went inside to finish the dishes, and I was the one left to ponder why he would ever ask me that."

"What would you reply now?" Kira asked her mother, realizing they almost mirrored the scene from her memories, sitting on the porch, but staring at the sun rather than the stars.

"I’ve never seen a vampire who didn't appear evil to the core, but I suppose there are always exceptions to the rules." Her mother paused, and Kira thought that maybe she was wishing she had used that response with her brother, to provide some sort of solace.

For a moment, Kira allowed herself to think of Tristan. Could he be that exception? But she shook her head and tried to focus on her real father and his story. "It was my birth mother, wasn’t it? A Protector changing his mind?"

Her mother nodded. "I didn’t realize it for a long time, but in the year that followed, he went on more solo missions and came back with rebellious ideas of capturing vampires and running tests on them rather than killing them. He wanted to research the old texts to see if anyone had ever found a vampire with his soul intact. He never found anything, but the elders were still so angry with him. He was their golden boy and within a year he became dirt. I noticed he received secret letters and made whispered phone calls when he thought our family was asleep. I confronted him, but he never answered straightly. I never dreamed he was secretly dating a Protector. Of all the rules in our society, that is the most unbreakable and the most forbidden. For two years this continued, but soon after his twenty-third birthday, he received news that scared him enough to finally come clean to me. I was twenty-one at the time and had been living away from home for a while. I had already met your adoptive father and we were so in love. Of course, I traveled home to visit, but the conduit life already seemed so far off to me.

"But one day, I opened the door of my apartment to your father’s very conflicted face. I read joy, but also the deepest sorrow, and I knew something was incredibly wrong. ‘Ellie,’ I remember him choking out to me before breaking down into sobs. I brought him inside, and there he confessed to me that he had fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, one who had the purest blonde hair imaginable. At first, I was horrified. I wasn’t sure whether to comfort or to scold him, but I knew I was all he had. He told me how they first met while she had been living in New York trying to protect its citizens from the ever-increasing local vampire population. That had been the site of his first solo mission, and they had been tracking the same clan when they ran into each other. At first, they hated each other but then they realized they needed to help each other in order to hunt down and weaken the clan. They started debating philosophies until each was unsure of the lessons they’d been taught since birth. And when they hunted down the clan, your father killed and your mother weakened, but neither felt the same joy as before. He said from that first meeting, they never stopped talking. At first, it had been secret run-ins in New York, then letters, then phone calls, until finally they had stopped taking on real missions and just escaped to meet each other in private. He said they had secretly gotten married a month ago, and he pulled a ring from a chain around his neck. And finally, he showed me a letter your mother had just written, confessing she was pregnant with a child."

"And it was the worst news imaginable?" Kira guessed and sipped on her hot cocoa for solace. She sank further into her seat and grabbed a preemptive tissue to wipe at the tears that would soon be falling.

"No, your father was the happiest I had ever seen him, but it was difficult. They knew there would be no turning back. A child meant a life on