I’m writing on an old memo pad I found. The pages will fit inside my diary. I’m sitting at a left-over desk in Theresa’s lab, which is roughly as big as the entire rest of CI, but it looks really bare right now. She’s got two stainless steel tables and some lab equipment. She turned the private office into a giant storage closet, but for now there’s not much in there. Even so, it’s grown a lot since how it looked when I left.

She’s so damn cute when she’s working. Every time she sees something unexpected, she chews on a lock of her hair makes a little pouting face. I have to seriously wonder if she realizes I’m still here, her concentration is so intense. She had to have good concentration for the Operatic kung-fu. I can do a little of that, but I was always more interested in the practical stuff. In fact, I threw dad over for Krav Maga and Jeet Kun Do for a while. He forgave me and admitted he’d studied Capoeria in his salad days.

Sooner or later, she’s going to get finished with the centrifuge or whatever, and we’re going to have time to talk, so I should really figure out what I’m going to tell her.

The secret initiation ritual is no problem. Delia says it’s not really a secret, just private. You might tell someone you’ve had sex, but you probably wouldn’t let them watch you. (That’s the only time she’s ever directly mentioned sex to me, in fact)

I’m glad to talk about my transformation. I feel so much better now. I still don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, but it doesn’t bother me. I’ll find the way.

And maybe I have my answer, which scares the hell out of me. I started writing at least partly to distract myself from blurting out “I’m having a baby!!!”

I’ve got to say it’s not at all what I expected from my mystical destiny. When a tattoo appeared all over my body and made me go on a road trip to New Mexico, I thought lots of things. Maybe it was the mark of the Vampire Huntress – the one girl in all the world with the power to slay the demons and vampires and monsters. Silly, I know, since practically everyone I grew up with had the power to slay the demons and vampires and monsters, but it sounded good. Or maybe it was a guardian spirit wrapped around me, meant to protect me. Not that I needed a lot of protecting, really. Or maybe some of my ancestors had made a deal with an ancient spirit for power and prosperity, and the dragon was the way of the spirit’s marking me as its property, and leading me to the town where the pact was made.

I never once thought it would disappear along with two days of my life and leave me pregnant. I never thought that my destiny was either to abandon the child I’d have, or protect it for some further purpose.

Seriously, I never thought I’d have kids. I’m a lesbian. Boys are stinky.

Okay, boys aren’t really stinky. That one guy in Williams was–