Chapter 10: A Mother's Secret

The hidden compartment behind his mother's bedroom dresser revealed itself purely by accident.

Elias had returned to Eleanor's apartment for the first time since her funeral, driven by Dr. Chen's cryptic words about his father and the growing certainty that his mother's secrets ran deeper than a simple medical deception. The small one-bedroom unit felt like a museum of careful poverty—everything clean and orderly, but worn thin by years of minimum-wage subsistence.

He'd been searching methodically through her belongings, looking for any clue that might explain the woman who had shaped his entire existence through lies. Her dresser drawers yielded nothing but neatly folded clothes that still carried her scent—vanilla soap and the industrial disinfectant from whatever cleaning job she'd held that month. But when he pulled the dresser away from the wall to check behind it, a loose floorboard shifted beneath his feet.

The board came up easily, revealing a space that had been carefully hollowed out and lined with plastic to protect its contents from moisture. Inside lay a manila envelope, thick with documents and photographs, and a small wooden box that rattled when he lifted it.

Elias sat on his mother's bed and opened the envelope with trembling fingers.

The first photograph stopped his breath entirely.

It showed Eleanor at perhaps twenty-two, her punk-rock haircut and defiant expression exactly matching the picture he'd grown up seeing. But this image was different—she stood in what appeared to be a laboratory setting, wearing a white coat over her torn jeans and band t-shirt. Behind her, barely visible in the background, were containment units and monitoring equipment that suggested something far more sophisticated than any medical facility he'd ever seen.

She wasn't just a minimum-wage worker. She had been a scientist.

The next photograph showed her with a man Elias had never seen before—tall, blonde, with the same green eyes that looked back at him from mirrors. His father, unmistakably. The man stood with his arm around Eleanor, both of them smiling in front of what appeared to be a research facility. A sign partially visible in the background read "Chimera Project - Phase II."

Chimera. The word sent chills through his restored human nervous system. Dr. Chen had called his transformation a chimera, an impossible fusion of different biological elements. But if his parents had been involved in researching it decades ago...

The documents beneath the photographs confirmed his worst fears.

Research notes in Eleanor's handwriting detailed something called "Project Ouroboros"—a classified program investigating what the reports termed "adaptive biological integration syndrome." The clinical language couldn't disguise what they were describing: people who could absorb and integrate the biological characteristics of anything they consumed.

The condition was hereditary.

And it was spreading.

Elias read through page after page of case studies, each one describing transformations that mirrored his own experience. Subject 7 had consumed household pets and taken on their characteristics. Subject 12 had integrated with plant matter, becoming something that was neither fully human nor entirely botanical. Subject 19 had achieved what the researchers called "perfect adaptive integration" before disappearing from the facility entirely.

His father was Subject 19.

The final pages of the research notes described Project Ouroboros's termination following "multiple containment breaches and civilian casualties." The surviving subjects were to be monitored long-term, their offspring tracked for signs of inherited syndrome manifestation.

Eleanor's personal notes, scrawled in the margins of the official reports, told a different story:

They want to weaponize it. Turn people like Marcus into living weapons. I won't let them have our son.

Moved to Oregon. New identities. Maybe if I can keep Elias from feeding, keep him weak, the syndrome won't manifest.

It's not a cure, but it might be containment. Twenty years of liquid diet suppressed Marcus until he was eighteen. If I can do better, maybe Elias will never have to become what his father became.

The final entry was dated just three months before her death:

He's getting stronger. I can see it in his eyes, the way he moves. The hunger is there, waiting. I may have delayed the inevitable, but I haven't stopped it. God forgive me, I may have made it worse.

Elias set the papers aside with numb fingers and reached for the wooden box. Inside, cushioned in cotton, lay a collection of items that made his blood run cold: photographs of crime scenes, newspaper clippings about mysterious disappearances, and a small tape recorder.

The photographs showed the aftermath of attacks that bore unmistakable signs of his kind of hunger. Bodies partially consumed in ways that suggested something far beyond normal predation. Crime scenes where investigators found traces of multiple different species, as if the attacker had been a living amalgamation of biological impossibilities.

The newspaper clippings tracked a pattern of disappearances across the Pacific Northwest, spanning nearly three decades. Always adults, always taken from isolated locations, always leaving behind evidence that baffled forensic investigators. The most recent clipping, dated just six months ago, described the discovery of a "unusual biological residue" at a campsite where a family of four had vanished without a trace.

His father was still out there. Still hunting. Still transforming.

Elias activated the tape recorder with shaking hands. His mother's voice, younger and steadier than he remembered, filled the small bedroom:

"If you're listening to this, Elias, then I'm dead and you've probably started to change. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry for what I did to you, what I put you through. But I had to try.

Your father... Marcus wasn't a bad man. He was brilliant, actually. Top of his class in biochemistry, recruited straight out of graduate school for what they told us was cutting-edge medical research. We both were. The Chimera Project was supposed to help people—adaptive healing, regenerative medicine, the ability to repair any injury by incorporating healthy tissue.

We didn't know it would make monsters.

The syndrome changes you slowly at first, then all at once. Marcus held on longer than most because he was strong, because he loved us. But in the end, the hunger wins. It always wins. He became something that could only sustain itself by consuming other people, other families.

I saw what he became in those final weeks. Not just the physical changes—those were horrible enough—but the way he looked at you when you were just a baby. Like you were... food. That's when I knew I had to run.

The injury on my arm in that old photograph? Marcus bit me during his final transformation. He was trying to make me like him, trying to ensure his kind would survive. I managed to get away, but barely.

I've spent twenty-seven years trying to keep you from becoming what he became. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe starvation just delayed the inevitable. But I couldn't watch my son turn into a monster, couldn't let him follow his father's path.

There's a woman named Dr. Sarah Chen who worked on the original project. She might be able to help you, might know ways to control what you're becoming. But Elias, if the hunger gets too strong, if you feel yourself slipping away... there's a gun in my bedside drawer. Sometimes the only way to stop a monster is—"

The recording cut off abruptly, leaving Elias alone with the weight of his mother's final message. He found the gun exactly where she'd indicated, a small revolver with a single bullet in the chamber. Beside it lay a note in her handwriting:

I told you not to breastfeed him.

The words Dr. Chen had mentioned, the message that had somehow reached his mother decades ago. But the context made everything clear now—it hadn't been about normal breastfeeding. Eleanor had been considering passing her husband's syndrome to their infant son through her own transformed biology.

Someone had warned her against it. Someone who had known what would happen if she did.

Someone who was now waiting for him at Pier 7.

Elias gathered the documents and photographs, stuffing them back into the envelope with mechanical precision. His mother's secrets lay spread across her bed like evidence at a crime scene—the truth about his family, his condition, and the monster he was destined to become.

But one truth stood out above all others: he wasn't alone. Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, his father continued to hunt and feed and transform. Other subjects from the original project might still be alive, still struggling with the same hunger that had driven Elias to the morgue.

And Dr. Sarah Chen, the woman who had tried to save him before he was even born, claimed she could help him control what he was becoming.

The sun was setting over the harbor when Elias finally left his mother's apartment, the envelope tucked securely inside his jacket. The protein shakes he'd consumed throughout the day sat uneasily in his stomach, his body rejecting the liquid sustenance that had once sustained him.

The hunger was returning, just as Dr. Chen had predicted. Stronger now, more focused, carrying with it the genetic memory of what his father had become and what he himself was capable of becoming.

Pier 7 lay just a few blocks away, where answers waited in the form of a woman who understood the true nature of his inheritance. But as Elias walked through the darkening streets, he couldn't shake the feeling that some knowledge came with a price too terrible to pay.

His mother had spent her life trying to contain the monster in his DNA. Soon, he would learn whether that containment had been mercy or cruelty, protection or just another form of torture.

Behind him, Eleanor Vance's empty apartment held its secrets close, but the truth was finally free to hunt in the harbor district's foggy streets.