The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Meeting of the Minds

I BROUGHT KUTOYIS BACK TO THE HOUSE AND LEFT HIM WITH MARK. Then I waited for Sadie, bracing myself for how pissed she was going to be when I came clean. I never purposely hid our relationship with the Blood Nation. It had never come up. But when I heard Hannah talk about the Bloods in her visions several weeks ago, when Sadie was still shacked up with Cole in Manhattan, I put it together.

But some part of me had always known. Kutoyis and Sadie shared the same disdain for their immortality, felt trapped among those like them, feeling that no one else just like them existed. And though there were some obvious differences, their issues were much the same. Kutoyis didn't want to kill himself, but he did feel that he wasn't supposed to be immortal. And while Sadie wanted to leave her supernatural family for the human world, I suppose chasing the human half of herself, Kutoyis wanted just the opposite. He felt like a freak among humans, and he wanted to find a group of creatures like himself to live among. In some ways, they each wished they had been born into the other's life.

Well, the grass is always greener.

Kutoyis had always had Sky, like Sadie had Noah, until he'd lost Sky to the human world decades ago. Sky was his twin sister, cursed or blessed with the same magic and immortality that Kutoyis had. They were born to human parents we'd known for years, and so their magical heritage was a mystery. Much like the fourteen elder Survivors, each of whom, save Hannah, had been born to human parents.

But something happened to them. We weren't there to witness it. It happened when Ginny was a toddler and my father had taken us to France to try to see our mother, who still refused to acknowledge our existence. While we were absent from the Blood Reserve, Kutoyis's mother gave birth to twins. They had turned magical, and their father had tried to kill them out of fear. As the story goes, the infant boy summoned the strength of a man and killed his father in a way that their mother would never speak of. After that, he was named Kutoyis, after a legend sacred to the Blood Nation, one in which an abused woman created a son with a certain kind of magic when she took the blood of a buffalo from an arrow, boiled the blood in water, and prayed for someone to save her. The magical boy they called Kutoyis was born out of plea for help, formed fully into a man, and killed his proverbial father to save his mother. He went on to be one of the most powerful warriors in the Blood Nation's history.

So our Kutoyis, too, was born out of some kind of magical circumstance, killed his father, and became the most powerful warrior in the Blood Nation's history, because he was supernatural.

And 143 years later, he rocked a hipster kid look as he played foosball in my house with Mark or maybe lost to Ginny on some war game on her PS3. You'd never know any of the history about him now. He passed for human as well as we did.

I retold myself this story as I waited for Sadie, practicing for the way I would present him and our relationship with the Bloods to her. When she walked in the front door, her hair in a messy braid creation, clad in heels that made her taller than I was and a cropped Louis Vuitton leather jacket she'd stolen from Ginny's closet, over a floral sundress that made her look much happier than she ever actually was, I was reminded of the similarities between these two. They were both born in nearly primitive though organized communities, struggling among humans to cope with a life out of a different century and a different world, and steeped deeply in hatred of themselves. And they didn't look the part for a second.