Reactor, February 2026
Set in late 19th-century Boston, “Of Two Bloods” is a clever homage to Sherlock Holmes told through the lens of two unconventional medical students navigating racial prejudice, inheritance fraud, and hidden identities.
Royal Bridges, a young Black medical student passing as white at Harvard, is being blackmailed by the arrogant R. Howard Spencer Jr., who threatens to expose Bridges’s racial heritage unless Bridges helps him contest the inheritance claim of his late uncle’s housekeeper, Lucia Giuliano. Lucia maintains she was legally married to the wealthy sea captain William Francis Spencer, but her marriage records were destroyed in a fire at the state archives.
Bridges’s roommate, Paul Chambers — an illegitimate son of a wealthy Englishman — overhears the confrontation and offers his assistance. Chambers reveals that he, too, is a person of color passing as white, wiping away face powder to show darker skin beneath. He also drops the bombshell that his half-brother is the famous consulting detective, placing this story firmly in a Holmes-adjacent universe. Chambers has been trained in his brother’s methods: observation, disguise, and deduction.
The two begin investigating by interviewing Carteret, the captain’s former first mate, who reveals that Spencer had married numerous women across his seafaring life — raising the possibility of bigamy, which would invalidate Lucia’s claim regardless of her marriage license. Chambers then disguises himself as a woman to visit Lucia’s younger sister, Maria Teresa, at her convent school. There, they learn a crucial detail: Howard Spencer Jr. is adopted, though he doesn’t know it.
Chambers makes a bold nighttime return to the convent to press Maria Teresa for more information, but the two are ambushed and Chambers is shot in the shoulder. Maria Teresa helps get him to safety, and Bridges treats his wound — in the process discovering that Chambers is a woman. After some tension, Bridges agrees to keep this secret as well, and even offers marriage, which Chambers gently declines, having developed feelings for Maria Teresa.
The investigation reaches its climax when Lilly Spencer, a Native American woman from Seattle, arrives in Boston with documents proving she is Captain Spencer’s first and only legal wife, and has his genuine will naming her heir. At the captain’s Beacon Street home, Maria Teresa dramatically reveals to Howard that his biological mother was the captain’s Chinese wife, who died in childbirth at sea — making him the captain’s own illegitimate son and, by the same stroke, ineligible to inherit as a nephew.
Howard, disinherited and exposed, is also quietly implicated as the one who shot Chambers — motivated by jealousy over Maria Teresa. The case resolved, Chambers prepares to follow Maria Teresa to Seattle, pursuing both a future with her and the kind of detective career his famous half-brothers have modeled. Bridges bids his extraordinary friend farewell, his own secret intact and his Harvard career secure.
Nisi Shawl (they/them) is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, an editor, and a teacher. They are the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
Cynthia Ward has sold stories to Analog, Asimov’s, Nightmare, Weird Tales, Worlds of IF, and elsewhere. She’s the editor of Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West Volumes 1-2 (WolfSinger Publications) and a coeditor of Weird Trails (Sam Teddy Publishing). With Nisi Shawl, Cynthia co-created the Locus Award-winning Writing the Other. Her most recent novel is The Adventure of the Golden Woman (Aqueduct Press). She lives in Los Angeles, where she is not working on a screenplay.