“Oh, no,” Mum said, her face set with determination. “No, no, no, absolutely not.”

Victoria had taken a single step into the hospital room, and Mum was already on Defcon One.

“Mum!” I said.

“No, Ethan, I’m not having this. That b***h is at the heart of all of this, somehow. I don’t care what you say, Ethan.”

Victoria stood in the room with an eyebrow raised.

“Miss Hall, how lovely to see you again.”

“Don’t you start with me, you…”

“Mum! Please! I need to talk to Victoria.”

Mum flinched. She looked at me and crumpled. The fact she was on shaky territory over the whole ‘You were adopted’ revelation was weighing on her.

“I’ll be right outside,” she said.

She shot Victoria the filthiest look you’ve ever seen, then stalked past her to wait in the corridor.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

Victoria grimaced, but then she shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter. What happened, Ethan?”

“A little adventure involving a knife and a murderous demon. How are you even here?”

“Vincent. He felt something happen, something with a lot of power. He cast a scrying spell and saw you bleeding out on the floor. I got here as fast as possible. What demon?”

“I’m still trying to get it straight in my head.”

Victoria pursed her lips, irritated at my sudden restraint. At that point, with so much hanging in the balance, I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened or what I knew. I need to think it all through by myself.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it some other time. In the meantime, I come bearing gifts.”

“A fruit basket?”

“Nothing so prosaic. How are you healing?” she asked.

“I’m getting there,” I replied. I knew she was asking about my real healing rather than a normal person’s recovery.

“Good. Well, drum roll please, we think we’ve found out what you are. We examined your blood cells, and it was obvious. Here, I have a video.”

Victoria flipped through her phone. Showed me a video, a closeup of my blood cells. I saw a bunch of roundish pink disks. A bunch of round, blue disks.

I was no Jess in the science department, but even I knew blood didn’t contain blue cells.

“You see them?” Victoria asked.

“I see them.”

“Now watch what happens when we injected some adrenaline into your blood.”

A squirt of liquid shot into the collection of red and blue cells. The blue ones multiplied in number.

“What does it mean?”

“I’ve seen this before,” Victoria said. “In demon blood.”

“I’m a demon?”

“I don’t think so. Well, maybe partly.”

“A part demon? What? How?”

“I have a theory. I think maybe, just maybe, you’re an experiment. Listen. When I was working for Section 13, there was a scientist there who was my colleague. A rather brilliant man by the name of Henry Jefferson. One of our projects was trying to create formulas from supernatural blood. We’d been tasked with inventing a serum that would make better soldiers. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. It was the only way we could justify the science wing to the Ministry of Defence.”

“But we could never get it to work. Even Henry, as brilliant as he was, failed. What we’re seeing here suggests someone perfected the formula. It suggests that they tested it on you.”

“I think I’d remember someone injecting me with a demon blood cocktail.”

“Not if you were very young,” Victoria said. “Henry had a theory that the reason the formulas we came up with wouldn’t take was because our subjects were too old. So either he or someone else - I think they tested it on you when you were very small. You’re the first artificially created hybrid, Ethan. Part human, part supernatural, a product of a science experiment. You’re human, Ethan, you’re just superhuman.”

Get stabbed by a demon. End up in hospital. Find out you’re an adopted, superhuman, secret experiment. Just an average twenty-four hours in my life these days.

“Since your powers didn’t manifest until you were twelve, whoever injected you would have thought the serum failed.”

“You think I’m an experiment?”

“I think so, yes. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I am.”

It was weird, but I felt relieved hearing this. All the endless speculations and uncertainties about me were finished. I was a science experiment, plain and simple. Okay, so the demon blood part wasn’t great, but at least I had a better idea of what I was now. I could start to learn to control it, rather than feeling it was about to take over whenever the fire kicked in.

“Uh, well, thanks, Victoria,” I said, feeling bad about not telling her what I’d learnt in High Wycombe.

“You’re welcome,” Victoria replied. “I’m glad we could solve some of the mystery, at least. There’s a lot more testing to be done, of course. We need to find out the extent of your powers. If they’re permanent, any side potential side effects, if we can reverse engineer the formula from your blood. We also need to know who did this to you. I strongly suspect Henry, though. He disappeared fourteen years ago. The timeline fits. This is just the beginning, Ethan.”

I looked at the video of my blood cells again.

“Wow,” I muttered. “Jess would love all of this.”

“Jess?”

“Friend of mine. She’s smart, big on science. Especially the weird stuff.”

“Intelligent girl, is she?”

“And then some.”

“I’d like to meet her,” Victoria said.

“I’m pretty sure she’d like to meet you.”

I remembered Jess and I were not on great terms right now. Neither were Dee and I.

How on earth had I let things get this bad between us?

“It’s a shame that can’t happen,” Victoria said.

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“Ethan, you need to listen. The world we live in, the world you’re now a part of, is dangerous. People get hurt. People die. You’ve seen and experienced this first hand what, four times now in the last week alone.”

I guessed what was coming next.

“And it’s too dangerous for normal people to get involved in,” I concluded.

Victoria nodded.

“Your family and your friends are important. Putting them at risk is unfair. The only way to protect them is to keep everything hidden from them.”

“Yeah, I get that,” I said. But I had my doubts.

“Good. You can keep the phone,” she said in an offhand manner. It was the latest iPhone. Couldn’t argue with that. “Oh, and Alice sends her regards and says get well soon. I think she might have a soft spot for you, young mister Hall.”

With that, Victoria left.

Mum stayed until visiting hours were done and then decamped to a nearby Bed and Breakfast.

I thought about what Victoria had said and something was bothering me. On the one hand, she had a point about keeping everything from my friends and family. If anything happened to Mum, Jess, or Dee because I’d brought this dangerous world to their doorstep, I’d never forgive myself.

So she had a point there.

But there was something more important than that. As bad as it was to put my friends and family in danger, wasn’t it worse for them to be in danger but not know how, or why? If I was involved in stuff that could hurt them, didn’t they have a right to know about it?

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that was the case.

There was something else, too. All the fighting that had been going on between us all. We’ren’t most of the arguments we’d had in the last few days because we’d all been keeping secrets from each other?

Most of the problems between Dee and I were because of the secrets we’d been keeping from each other, and I doubted they were helping my relationship with Jess. As for Mum? She deserved to hear the truth.

Despite what Victoria had said, I couldn’t carry on keeping everyone in the dark with lies and half-truths.

As evening closed in, I reached a decision. I was going to do something I’d never done before:

I was going to tell the truth. All of it, every detail.

My friends and family deserved that much from me.

I got out of bed. The wound in my stomach had closed up enough for me to move around with minimal pain, and my arm was on the mend. I pulled the drip out and got dressed.

A nurse doing the rounds walked in and looked at me in shock.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing, young man?”

“Leaving.”

“You most certainly are not,” she replied. “Get back into bed or I’ll need to have you restrained.”

I finished tying my shoelaces. Stood up. Glanced at the nurse, grinned.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said, and I walked out.