“I’m sure everything will be okay,” Mum says. I don’t look at her. It’s confusing being with her when she’s like this. I can’t really tell who the person in front of me is. She’s not my mum as I know her, and she’s not the woman she was from before she was turned either. It’s almost like she is acting out a different reality, in which she is just human, in this time, and she is ethnically completely English; it’s like she has become what this room and its decor expects her to be. I concentrate on the zip of my rucksack as though it’s stuck, thinking about the little note in the front pocket that lists sweets from her human life, and feel kind of dizzy, unsteady in my own body. I put my rucksack on my back. “I have to go,” I say.

I walk up to my mum so that I’m standing just behind her. I’m not very good at goodbyes, or any form of greeting, actually, with my mum, even when she is properly present in her body, both human and demon halves. “Umm, okay, so . . . bye,” I say, and I awkwardly tap her shoulder. Before I can turn to leave, though, she grabs my forearm. Her eyes widen. Her knuckles are almost white. And then she says to me in a whisper, “Be careful!” I frown. “There’s a man who walks around here.”

“It’s okay, Mum, he’s the doctor.”

“He likes women who look like you. He’ll follow you if he sees you. He bites.” She looks desperate.

“Seriously, I’ll be fine,” I say.

“You won’t,” she says. “You won’t.” She’s shaking her head.

“Okay,” I say. “Whatever. I’ll be careful.” And then I tug my arm free of her grip. “I have to go.”

I see her face fall as I walk out. She looks sad, and sleepy; she blinks slowly, and watches me leave.

Dr. Kerr isn’t anywhere to be seen in the corridor. I turn left toward the double doors that lead outside onto the grounds, rather than right toward the reception and waiting room. As I walk, I think about something I have often wondered about: whether, perhaps, my mum didn’t turn me to save my life when I was a newborn baby, as she often told me she did, but maybe rather so that, for her whole life, she would have me to look after her.