"--Yes, she'd be read as colored. She does look oddly mixed, to me, but it's not like people with mixed ancestry get the benefit of the doubt." 

"Yes. Might make adopting a baby hard, at least in the United States. I guess I could suggest she bleach herself."

"Maybe--but given that she has no legal identity, it might be easier to find an under-the-table adoption if she presents as a wealthy colored woman looking for a colored baby than an odd-looking white woman looking for a white baby." 

"Maybe. I don't know how much she's going to care about the exact details of the baby, some folks of this type build up weirdly specific fantasies about the babies they imagine they will one day have if demon/human relations ever improve, maybe she wants a Vietnamese one in particular or something... or, more likely, she wants one whose birth mother was eating decently and not under a lot of stress during the pregnancy, because that affects lots of things..."

"I can't say as I know much about adoption, but she's not going to have much luck getting a baby in this country who isn't the same color people think she is." 

"Maybe she's already frantically researching 1928 adoption practices in South America."

"That is possible." 

"I'll let her know. I think probably a majority of the demons who want to adopt are going to be naturally occurring - even if the ex-humans are more likely to be interested in children, there are way fewer of them and they're likely to have already had a shot at it while human - but some naturally-occurrings could probably pass better than this one."

"Do naturally occurring angels and fairies look the same way?" 

"Yes. The wings are different."

"How do people deal with that in the future?" 

"With what, people being assorted colors? Way less of a going concern in general."

"...Oh. Good. Makes it harder to steal a solution--unless stealing the solution to race prejudice in general is possible--" 

"Unfortunately it was lots of slow attitude shifts punctuated by costly activism."

Sigh. "I was afraid it would be something like that." 

"Very inconvenient," he agrees. "Probably material abundance will help."

"One would hope." 

"Material abundance from, hopefully, a colorful bunch of demons. I'll write to Mrindeh."

She nods and sits back thoughtfully. 

Cam composes his letter but the response isn't instant so he goes back to reading.

Lavinia chews her lip and pores over her son's copy of the Necronomicon. 

Eventually Cam has a reply from Mrindeh. "She says she's prepared to go door to door in Alabama if that's what it takes, if she can get summoned here."

"I can't say I'm unsympathetic to that point of view," she says, reaching over to pat one of her daughter's tentacles. 

"I'll make most of the circle, give me a few to readjust a standard fairy adoption binding to cover demon magic."

(Lucy processes the implications of that sentence and makes a face no one else can see.)

"'Kay."