Free Dangerous Lovers by Jamie Magee, A. M. Hargrove, Becca Vincenza

looked like she thought this was an honor. I wasn’t so sure. “So… there’s no one else like me? I’m the last of a dying race?”
    Olivia seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “Yes and no,” she said. “There are no others who have your unique blood, but at the same time you have a little bit of all the races in you, just not enough of any one race to be categorized as one of them. But yes, you are the last known of your kind.”
    Oh, wonderful, I really was a freak. I guess that explained a lot.
    “Does that mean that I’m part Searcher?” I gestured to Nelly. “Part Wolf?” I glanced at Jackson. “And part… whatever else there is? And if my race is supposed to be great warriors, why am I the only one left?” I was rambling, but really, could you blame me?
    “Because there are those who see your kind as a threat,” Olivia replied. “There is a hierarchy in our world, and those who head this order have never taken kindly to competition. You can see why they would see your kind as competition. Nonetheless, Warriors used to be an abundant race. Your people defended and protected all of us, and most were grateful. However, some were not. When your numbers started increasing, a council of our leaders passed a decree that your kind should be put into slavery for fear the Warriors might betray them. Not surprisingly, your people refused to take this treatment from the people they had so long protected. They revolted… and then they were hunted into near extinction. Some survived—you’re proof of that—but they retreated into hiding, living among the humans. Those who were not found by our kind were hunted by those whom they had once hunted: the Lamia. Your mother among them, but Diana was there when they came and she managed to get you to safety, though she was unable to save her sister-in-law.”
    Diana was my mother’s name, so what Olivia was saying made no sense. Unless…
    “She was my aunt? That’s impossible, she raised me. She was my mother!” My voice shook. My cheeks heated and fists balled. And when my left eye twitched, I dragged a trembling hand across my damp forehead.
    Nelly’s voice cut in, almost inaudible. “It’s true. She’s telling the truth.”
    I whipped my head to the left to face her. Tears streaked her face and for the first time ever, I refused to feel sorry for her.
    “You knew about this? You knew and you never told me?” I couldn’t keep the venom from my voice. I felt instant and utter betrayal.
    “I couldn’t! We just wanted to keep you safe… to let you have a bit of normalcy before you had to face a world that would try to destroy you! You have to trust me, please. Trust me, Alexa. We did what we thought was best.” She was pleading now, tears flowing freely down her cheeks, and normally, I would have forgiven her without any question. But this was not normal.
    I scoffed, and my voice came out a pitch deeper than normal. “Trust you? How can you even ask me that? I’ve always trusted you, and now I find out you’ve been lying to me for my entire life! How can you expect me to trust you? How can you say that about our mother? How can you even pretend that I had some sort of normalcy when I had to train every day of my life to be a killer? And now I find out that that’s what I’m made for—killing! How can you sit there and tell me any of this is okay?”
    I was seeing red. All red. Red-hot lies. Red blood spilled as a result of those lies. And Nelly’s red face as she admitted to those lies. I slammed my eyes shut, trying desperately to envision the color blue. Seeing only red, darkening and darkening into a near black—
    Something warm and soft touched my cheek. A beautiful, glorious rainbow exploded behind my lids. So exquisite and lacking in only one color. I almost raised a hand in attempt to capture it. But as the colors settled over me, so did my right mind. Peeling my eyes open, I looked down to see that Akira was resting her hand on my