I watched as Dana dropped some envelopes on her desk and heaved out a huge sigh.

“Do you really like being a doctor?”  I asked tentatively.  I’d been wondering that for a while now.  Another year had passed since I woke up, and I’d done my best to make myself useful around the hospital while I still tried to absorb all the knowledge possible about the world in a vain effort to try to catch up with the modern era.  I didn’t feel exactly prepared to go out and get a normal job yet, but I could drive now and go into the city without entirely freaking out about the number of people there.  I could even shop on my own and knew how to deal with all the digital technology stuff that people in this era seemed so reliant on.

But since I’d started helping out at the hospital, cleaning or running errands or whatever Dana needed of me, I’d noticed something.  Dana didn’t seem particularly in love with her job, and since she and Lola were important to me, that bothered me a great deal.

In answer to my question, Dana sighed again.  “Is it that obvious?  No, I don’t.  I studied medicine because I thought it would be a good way to take advantage of the kind of hybrid I am, and sometimes it helps.  Sometimes.  Often, though, I’m still fighting with people to explain that yeah, I look like a vampire but I have dryad powers, see?  Or just because I don’t have vampire magic doesn’t mean you can’t trust me!  I feel like somedays it’s more of a fight than if I were just a straight vampire or dryad.”

I considered that as I tried to reshelve her books for her.  “Is there something else you would prefer to do?  It seems unfortunate that you picked a career you don’t enjoy just because you were trying to find a place that would accept you.  Shouldn’t you just be accepted regardless?  It’s not your fault you’re a hybrid.”

Dana sank into her desk chair, sighing yet again.  “No, no hybrid is ever to blame for what they are, yet that’s the way the world works – a fair number of supernaturals don’t like hybrids, even if they’re their own children.  Look at me.  My vampire mom loved me and accepted me, but the vampire House I grew up in didn’t.  Much like how you described your life with your coven, they viewed me as being at the bottom of the rankings, disposable – help to be ordered around to do whatever they wanted.  Clean the house, recruit supernaturals to donate blood, whatever.  I was responsible for anything they didn’t want to bother doing, but mostly they viewed me like the maid.  Mom loved me and tried to stand between me and the House – she insisted we stayed so we’d be protected by the House, but I never really saw that as protection.  They didn’t help me, even when she begged them to, like this one time at school I got accused of something I didn’t do and expelled, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to help.  Mom was frustrated about it, but she didn’t have much power in the House.  She was fragile and delicate, and over time, she basically just faded until she died.  Alone, I had no buffer between me and the House, and it got worse than simply wanting me to be their maid.  Eventually, I just left and went searching for my other parent, hoping maybe they’d accept me.”

She folded her hands together, her eyes darkening a bit.  “Dryads, they’re not like others.  They don’t have a gender, and they spend most of their time out in the trees.  They can actually coax plants to literally rip up their roots and move – dryads are a little like shepherds of the forest, and in theory a group of dryads could move an entire forest if they wanted to.  When they want to reproduce, though, they basically plant themselves in the forest and reproduce asexually, sending off a root that, over the course of several years, grows into a small child.  Once the child is fully formed and awakens, the root is severed from the parent dryad and they can unroot themselves and continue with their lives.  So something like me – a dryad hybrid – is extremely unusual since dryads don’t usually reproduce that way.  Thing is, vampires can reproduce using the blood of a partner, if they want to, and for whatever reason, my mom wanted to.  Sometimes I wonder if she was just deeply in love with my dryad parent and knew they’d never be with her the way she wanted, because it wasn’t like my dryad parent consented to having a kid with her – and they wanted nothing to do with me.  To them, I was an abomination that shouldn’t exist.”

I was kind of horrified.  At first, her life sounded a lot like mine, but this was even worse.  “They wouldn’t accept you just because you were made differently than dryads normally reproduce?  Or did it have to do with agreeing to your birth in the first place?  If your mom didn’t get their consent, that wasn’t your fault!”

Dana smiled sadly.  “You’re right, it wasn’t.  But at the end of the day, hybrids bear the brunt of our parents’ sometimes foolish or reckless choices.  In some ways, Mom choose the House over me – she stayed with the House, despite how awful they were towards me, even though she tried her best to soften the blow.  We could have left, but she never wanted to – to her, being a part of a House was important.  When my dryad parent turned out to be a disappointment, I realized I was just going to have to figure out what to do on my own.  I couldn’t keep living with a vampire House, even though that would make getting blood easier since they usually have regular donors set up.  I didn’t want to just be a servant in the House because I was a weird hybrid.  And dryads…well, they didn’t care that I have the same magic as they do.  They just cared that I wasn’t dryad.  So I had to find a place that wouldn’t care if I was both vampire and dryad.  It’s not exactly easy, and this career has helped some, but what helped more was finding Lola.  Suddenly I had someone else to worry about, someone who needed me, someone who loved me despite what I was.  All she needed in response was my love, and I was eager to give that to her.”

“That does seem nice,” I said absentmindedly, my fingers going automatically to fiddle with the ring Lola had bought me.  “People that just accept you no matter what.  Family should be like that.”

Dana considered me for a bit.  “You’re kind of similar to us, in many ways.  Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”  She chewed on her lower lip for a bit.  “Want to be family with us?”  She burst out suddenly.  “I’m not going to adopt you as my kid, not when you’re centuries older than me, but we can still be family without an official slip of paper.  You can consider yourself my brother or cousin or whatever you want to be, but we can make up our own family with people who are important to us and who get it.”

I felt my heart beat faster with the thought of family – not just my mother, who had tolerated my existence but hadn’t fully supported me, but real family.

“Only if Lola agrees,” I stated after I was sure I could speak without my voice giving away my excitement.

“Oh, she will,” Dana assured me.

And of course, she was right.

“Yes!  Yes, yes, yes!”  Lola threw her arms around my neck, almost knocking me over in her enthusiasm.  “You can be my brother, Nicky!  I mean, not Mama’s son, but my brother.  And her brother?  I don’t know, that sounds weird, but you can be family!”

As unexpectedly boisterous as her enthusiasm was, I was happy for it.  Sure, we might not have a name for what I was to them, technically, but that didn’t really matter to any of us.  We were still family.