Secret Keeper

The light in the interrogation room was a harsh LED blue that made each bead of sweat on the officer’s wrinkled brow glow like loose diamonds. The room was cold, compact, and restricting in its emptiness. I felt like a stray kitten without its mother, trapped in a cardboard box that had been dipped in quickly-drying cement.

The only other two within my small box were humans. The officer, who scratched at the space between his receding hairline and advancing forehead with an aggressive use of nail, and Peter. 

Standing tall beside me with his fingertips placed on the table by my nose, almost shielding me, was Peter Prince. He wore a loose black tie and a spearmint-colored button down with the sleeves rolled up. The overhead light refracted off his glasses, making the wireframed reflection glint toward the officer. But from my angle, I could see his eyes.

There was a toughness there I had never seen, in the squint of his magnetic grey irides. I thought, for a moment, that maybe my Moonkin gods had come to my aid, disguising themselves as this thirty-two-year-old human. 

Despite the crescent crease beneath his eye and the line of past smiles denting his cheek, he looked, in this moment, like he could have been as young as I was. He looked like someone I’d run into at my high school. The power of youth blazed in his face, a fire I couldn’t emulate, as I sat in a rickety chair with a pair of red marks where the handcuffs had cut into my wrists. 

But, no. It was all wrong. He was supposed to be my father in the roles we’d plucked for ourselves when we left our tribes. I had to remember who I was supposed to be, who he was supposed to be, because every fact of my life needed to be tediously manicured to fit this officer’s whims.

I wouldn’t go to juvy. I couldn’t. The fear of being locked under constant surveillance and risking the secret of our existence nearly outweighed my fear of being alone.

If they caught me in something I’ve done, I’d go to juvy, and on the next Fullmoon, I’d transform and the whole world would know about the Moonkin. But if I said the wrong thing, revealed that I knew something about their homicide case, things could be even worse. What did the secret of our kind matter to me when they could find out our legal documents were fake and take us all into custody? They might separate us. They might send us to a country we’d never been to before all because of a lie on officially-stamped papers.

What if the detective asked the orphanages about our origins, and they revealed they’d never heard of a Kai or Chrissa Lowell? What if our lies weren’t strong enough, our family bonds we’d tediously cultivated weren’t powerful enough to keep us from ICE’s crushing grip?

I tried to steady my breathing as tears sprung to the corners of my eyes. My hair hadn’t grown back yet so I couldn’t hide them with my bangs like I used to. I missed my hair and I missed my eyebrows and I just wanted to go home. I pulled my hood as far down in front of my face as I could with the one hand that wasn’t Velcroed to the lie detector. 

The investigator or officer or whoever he was still had notes and notes he was glancing through. Were they notes about me? Notes about us?

Lie detectors are outdated technology. They measure your pulse; they only matter if you feel nervous or guilty about the topic, my twin sister had said to me once, while we were watching a movie at Peter’s house.

That was before Sandy had married him and we’d become his adopted kids. That was before we had real green cards through marriage to a U.S. citizen. 

That was before I killed Illiana.

I thought of my ex-partner’s face, of their black bob that crested into a shaved back at their nape, of the way they pushed their glasses up their nose or the way they squeezed my hand. 

The tears fell faster, even as I tried to control my quickening breathing. They trickled down my face like the waterfall at The Gorge of Sorrow, where I touched Illiana’s hand for the last time.

If you feel nervous or guilty about the topic…

Finally, I heard it. The wild sound of the lie detector’s dial buzzing like an agitated wasp in my ear.

“Are you nervous, son?” said the officer, throwing a final manilla file onto the table. It hit the grainy wood with a slap that made me flinch.

I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. My mouth blubbered to answer and the buzzing grew faster.

The man’s gaze flicked casually to the lie detector and back toward me. I drummed my fingers on the table to try and drown out the buzzing. 

“Okay then,” the officer said, seating himself in the chair across from us. “Let’s get started.”

“He needs a lawyer,” Peter stated, his body still postured protectively in front of me.

“He doesn’t need a lawyer to be a witness,” the cop drawled. “But we can certainly get him one. It’ll only take—” He checked his watch. “Oh, it looks like she would’ve just gone home. We could wait until Monday.” He lifted his eyebrows as he stared into my face, “But I imagine you don’t want to stay in the cell all weekend, do you, son?”

“Cell? Why would he be in a cell?” Peter asked.

“For alluding arrest and assaulting an officer.”

My shoulder’s hitched up. Peter’s full face turned to me and I found I couldn’t meet his eyes. “But…” Peter started, “He needs a lawyer for those charges. Why did you bring us here now?”

“Mr. Lowell here has agreed to testify as a witness for one of our current investigations,” the officer said with an air of calm that only managed to suffocate me. “Are you comfortable being recorded, son?”

“What investigation?” Peter asked, before I had time to form the word no.

The officer touched his fingertips together and gestured toward us. “This is a small community, Mr. Prince. Much to the sheriff’s chagrin, the case has been broadcasted on local news for the last month. I’m sure you’re familiar with the name Illiana Hayashi?”

Of course Peter was aware of Illiana. 

After The Incident, I had lived in the Princes’ bathtub for weeks, soaking in a pool of my own dirt in a self-assigned house arrest. The others had formulated plans to get me out of trouble with the high school and Child Protective Service by claiming that I was working for a landscaping company that didn’t yet know I existed.

Peter had to lend his home to me and make me food during my depressive soak for weeks, so the others must have explained what happened. But Peter could never truly understand how it had felt to be there.

I still didn’t completely understand how it had happened. I hadn’t known that the bite of a Moonkin could turn a human, like in proper werewolf myths, until I had seen Illiana on the Fullmoon. They weren't in their right mind. Xe didn’t even recognize me.

The tribe gave chase through the woods, herding the scared Illiana away from civilization. But it all came to an end in the vast black drop of the Gorge of Sorrow, where Illiana fell. Despite my pulling, despite me and the others’ combined strength, Illiana fell. Xe was lost to the Sorrow.

Peter knew this, but he didn’t really understand in the way I wished he did. The burden I carried with me forever now, like a pit in the peach of my body. Because it had been me who had kissed Illiana on their cut lip; it was me who turned them. And it was my hand that felt Illiana slip away. I was the monster who let them fall.

There was nothing to be done. There was no call to action. There were no aspirations of Illiana’s that I could dedicate my life to achieving. It was my fault, and the vengeance I desired was self afflicted. But the others didn’t blame me and that’s why I knew they didn’t understand.

Not even Illiana’s mother and grandpa hated me in the way I deserved. When I had revealed the Moonkin secret to them, and told them my story and Illiana’s involvement, they had not beaten me with clubs in the way I wished they would. I deserved some sort of physical scar to carry on my body. I deserved the scorn of everyone I had ever cared about because I had killed Illiana.

I remembered how I had crumbled when Illiana’s grandpa reached out to me. He had been forced to read my lips because I didn’t know sign language and Ms. Hayashi had gone mute with shock. Despite the concentration in his brow as he watched my mouth with eyes screened with cataracts, there had been a certain sadness to the way his mouth sunk down his face. When I was finished, he struggled over to me and hugged me. His arms locked me against his chest. It was like we were a pair of featherless birds, frail and trapped against the ground with nothing but each other.

Ms. Hayashi came over after a while. She joined our hug. We cried together, two parakeets protected by Ms. Hayashi’s sinewy hold. We were safe there. Until the police found me on my walk home.

“Well, I don’t approve,” Peter was saying. “As his father, I revoke whatever he agreed to—Stop recording.”

The officer pressed a button on the recording device and leaned back in his chair. “Sir, Lowell’s file lists him as emancipated. He is legally of adult status, and I don’t think you have authority to intervene right now.” He turned to look at me in a way that was near sympathetic. “You’re going to help us with our case, now, aren’t you? You’d be doing the right thing.”

Now the pressure was on me to speak. But my lips flapped and I didn’t know if I could.

I felt it, now. My emotion-reactant powers. I was scared, and my body knew it. The others knew it too, with how the buzzing grew wilder. 

I’d be doing the right thing.

My sweat evaporated along my neck and chest and back as my skin warmed up. I pulled my hands off the table and clasped them in my lap, focusing on the pressure of my palms mashed together like it was the only thing preventing me from cracking down the middle.

There had to be some way to stop it.  To stop myself before I lit my clothes on fire or produced enough smoke to alert the cop to my powers. 

That would get me in more trouble. What would I do if they found out I had powers? Producing heat was so much harder to hide than transforming into a dog.

Would they know I started that forest fire that burned down a quarter of the woods?

Would they know that every arson charge was true, and every fire alarm that went off was because I was too panicked or sad or upset? Would they lock me in a cement box like this one, where my volatile powers could not spread? 

I’m dangerous, and humans fear what they cannot control.

Somehow I was shaking my head back and forth. There was a scrunch in my features as I concentrated on the movement. It was both a decline to the officer’s question and a subtle way to fan the smoke out of my face.

“I need a verbal statement, Mr. Lowell. Are you refusing to be a witness to our case?”

“No. I mean, yes,” I managed. Now that my words had come back and the interaction was near over, I felt myself calming down. There was a strange emptiness in my brain. I became aware of the nausea and the throbbing in my skull.

“Alright,” the officer said, standing up. He shook Peter’s hand across the table, then unclipped the handcuffs from his belt.

“Wait—!” I blurted, backing up in my chair.

“You want a lawyer, you have to wait until Monday. Put your hands up, please.” He reached for the lie detector, which was still Velcroed to the fingers of my right hand. As I glanced from the glinting cuffs toward his trajectory, I noticed there was a tendril of smoke extending from the Velcro.

“Wait—I can do it!” I yelped, snatching my hand back.

“No, let me remove them.” He added some grumbling as I finally thrust my wrists forward.

I scrunched my face as his cold hands made contact with my fingers, hoping he wouldn’t notice the temperature difference. He undid the Velcros with one deft movement and clasped the icy steel around my wrist with the other. I shuddered at the chill of the metal, the way it clicked as it locked and the feel of it slicing lines into my skin.

I didn’t open my eyes, resigning myself to my fate. At least it’s nowhere near Fullmoon. But how long would I last in a cell, with such reactive powers?