Semi-Human Cleo sat in her room. Her daddy was downstairs in the shop. For the first time in her life, she had not gone with him. He had started to weigh up whether he could keep the shop closed but she had told him that she wanted to be left alone, and so reluctantly, he had gone.
Veela are women… Very beautiful ones, he had explained. They have a special ability to charm men. To make men… want them. Now, that might sound glamorous, but it’s not like love - not like real love. It’s more like a spell… He didn’t want her to use her powers on people. He had made it sound dangerous. If she got it wrong, people would do bad things to her. But it wasn’t like she knew how to control it… She didn’t even really know what it was. So how was she supposed to avoid using it?
It was confusing. And frightening. She had struggled to know what to ask. What does it mean?What happens next? The few questions she’d had, he hadn’t been able to answer. He didn’t know. It felt more like a disease than anything. Like there was something flowing in her blood, and when she hit puberty… then what?
She had spent most of the morning in bed, just… lost. She’d declined her daddy’s offer of lunch when he came up, lying that she’d just had breakfast. She wasn’t hungry. In the afternoon, she pulled her schoolbooks out, wondering whether there was anything about veela in there because how could she get to grips with this when she didn’t even really know what it was? She’d got her intermediate books the previous week. She didn’t know which book it would be most likely to be in. She just pulled them out the bag in the order they were packed.
It was in her Defence textbook that she found them.
Veela are semi-human magical beings. beautiful women with white-gold hair and skin that appears to shine moon-bright. When angry, Veela take on a less pleasant appearance; their faces elongate into sharp, cruel-beaked bird heads, and long scaly wings burst from their shoulders.
Her eyes stuck on the first sentence. Semi-human. It took her some minutes to move past that. Cruel-beaked. She felt her face tentatively. Was she going to morph into some hideous bird creature? Was this why her father her always told her not to lose her temper? Further down the page, there was mention of how they could throw fire. She did that. Whenever she lost control, she burnt things. And it talked about men, the extremes they’d go to… Men throwing themselves off cliffs, to their deaths, to follow veela. She slammed the book shut, and sat back from it.
Was she going to do those things? Her daddy had made it sound like she needed to be scared of the rest of the world, but that made it sound like she posed more of a danger to them. She thought about the people in her life… Parker. Professor Xavier. Her daddy seemed afraid of what they might do to her. But what would she do to them? She wasn’t sure how long she spent lost in visions of Parker’s body lying broken on the Quidditch Pitch, it somehow being her fault, until the click of the front door closing brought her to.
Her daddy’s head appeared in the door frame.
“It called me semi-human” she burst out, gesticulating at the book, tears streaming down her face.
“Cleo-”
“Am I a monster?”
“No, sweetheart-”
“I am! I’m some kind of bird, monster thing that makes people kill themselves! I’m not even a human being!” She threw herself onto her bed, sobbing into her pillow.
Her daddy sat down beside her. He had never been very good at knowing the right thing to say. And what could you say to that? He rubbed her shoulder as she cried, tears prickling his own eyes. He wasn’t sure there was anything you could say.