The Veil by Cory Putman Oakes Page A

he hadn’t
wanted
to show me the island.
    “What happened there?” I asked him. “What made the island look like that?”
    “Actually, the answer to that question begins and ends with your family,” Lucas said matter-of-factly.
    “My . . . family?” I repeated, confused. “You mean Gran?”
    “No, I mean your
real
family.”
    “Gran
is
my real family,” I told him firmly. “I don’t care that we’re not actually related. She’s the only family I know.”
    “All right,” Lucas said patiently. “When I said ‘real’ family, I meant your blood family. Your blood relations. Your mother, your father, and your real . . . er, your blood grandmother.”
    “I understand.”
    He paused for a moment before continuing. “Your blood grandmother’s name was Rosabel Stirling,” he said. “As your Gran told you yesterday, she was a very powerful and well-respected woman. Beloved in our world. She was also, as you may have guessed by now, an Annorasi.”
    I
had
somewhat guessed that, given the direction this conversation had been going, but it was a bit of a shock to hear it said out loud nonetheless.
    “My grandmother was an Annorasi,” I said. It sounded just as strange when I said it.
    “Yes, and so was your mother,” Lucas went on. “Margaret Stirling.”
    “And my father?”
    Lucas sucked in a breath. “That’s where things get interesting, Addy. Thomas Prescott, your father, was a human.” He paused, watching my reaction.
    I stared at him blankly. “So?” When Lucas said nothing in reply, I started to get my back up on my father’s behalf. “Do the Annorasi have a problem with humans?”
    Suddenly I wasn’t at all sure the “humans” category included me anymore. Not entirely, anyway. If my mother was an Annorasi, and my father was a human, what did that make me? I gulped.
    “It’s not that we have a
problem
with them,” Lucas said carefully. “It’s complicated. Most of the Annorasi are pretty indifferent to humans. They just aren’t a part of our world. But there is oneparticular group within the Annorasi who dislike humans. Your Gran mentioned them yesterday. We call them ‘the Others,’ for lack of a better term. It was the Others who killed your parents and your blood grandmother.”
    “But
why
? Just because my father was a human?”
    “As far as the Annorasi go, the Others are renegades when it comes to what they think about humans,” Lucas said darkly. “They believe humans are inferior to us. In fact, they believe humans were only created in order to serve the Annorasi. They would like nothing more than for our two worlds to merge so they could have a more ‘direct’ role in the running of the human world—more than we do now. To them, an Annorasi deigning to marrying a human is the worst sort of sacrilege imaginable.”
    “Oh,” I said, trying to picture a group of sinister super humans intent on taking over the world. I was beginning to wonder if I’d stumbled into some sort of comic book.
    “Again, it’s important for you to realize most Annorasi do not think like the Others,” Lucas assured me. “Most of us keep out of the human world all together. The few of us who live here are usually around to help humans in some way. Some of us protect humans from the Others. Some are here to teach things. Not magic, of course—humans are not capable of learning things like that—but we do pass on what knowledge we can.”
    I frowned. There was an arrogance to Lucas just then, when he was talking about what humans were capable of, that I found decidedly unattractive. For about two seconds. Then he was quickly back to his charming self again.
    “How are you digesting this so far?” he asked, his eyes a bit worried. “Am I making sense, or are you starting to think I’m in need of the institution you mentioned earlier?”
    “So far, so good,” I assured him. “But I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the island.”
    I sneaked a peek back at the