“I love you,” said Pauline. “So stay safe, okay?”
“Hey, so what’s the status of you and David?” Tana asked.
“Oh, shut up.” Pauline laughed and then her voice wobbled. “Don’t die and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Smiling, Tana hit the End button on her phone and put it back on the sill. Then she glanced at herself in the mirror. To her horror, her front teeth were scarlet. She ran her tongue over her gums, tasting the salt of her own blood.
Maybe she’d bitten her tongue?
Leaning over the sink and cupping her shaking hands, she scooped up water from the faucet, took a mouthful, swished it around, and spat red. Then she snarled at the mirror. And with the blood gone, she could see that her gums were bleeding because her canines had grown longer. They weren’t as thin or sharp as vampire teeth, but they were no longer quite human teeth, either.
“Marisol,” she called in a high, scared voice she didn’t even recognize as her own.
Aidan had drank Gavriel’s blood and nothing had happened to him. What was happening to her?
A moment later, the vampire came into the room, her nostrils flaring at the smell of blood. Her red eyes studied Tana’s reflection in the mirror. “What now?”
“Look at my teeth,” Tana said in a quavering voice, pulling the towel around herself more tightly.
The vampire grabbed her head, tilting it back and then reaching into her mouth to press her finger against the points of Tana’s teeth. Marisol stepped back and shook her head. “Someone gave you a bellyful of vampire blood, I’ll wager. You’re going to be fine. It’s the way vampires used to be turned, before the world fell. They’d be fed on vampire blood until they were ready. Sometimes it would take weeks to get to the stage you’re at—you must have drank quite a lot.”
She had.
“But what does it mean?” Tana asked, her fingers going to her teeth unconsciously. “Am I going to die? Am I going to turn?”
“No,” Marisol said. “It just means that you’re ready to die. You’ll be stronger once you’re turned.”
Tana nodded, trying to calm herself. Nothing was wrong. She wasn’t going to wake up a vampire. Not today, anyway. It was just a symptom of infection. A symptom she’d never heard of before, admittedly, but a symptom all the same. More toxins, she remembered, from the speaker at school. An accumulation of toxins.
“Okay,” Tana said, taking a deep breath and walking past Marisol into the bedroom. She couldn’t let herself seem weak. “Forget about it. I’m fine. Let’s go show off my new teeth to Lucien Moreau.”
A few minutes later, not having liked anything Marisol picked out, Tana dressed in the least formal thing she managed to find—a dark red, sleeveless leather dress—and followed Marisol through the halls. Not a single one of Elisabet’s shoes fit even a little, for which she was obscurely glad. It was creepy enough that her clothing fit so well. The leather dress hugged her skin, stretching tight across her hips. Tana’s black hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, and Gavriel’s necklace still sparkled on her collarbone. As she walked, her tongue traced the points of her longer canines.
Marisol turned the knob of a lacquered black door and indicated Tana should enter, but she didn’t move to follow. The door closed behind her as she padded across the floor as lightly as she could in bare feet. Heavy drapes covered the windows. Lucien walked toward her as though he saw perfectly, even through the gloom. In the room were two big black leather chairs and a desk carved with griffins at each of the four corners. Tana spotted a key ring of carved bone, scrimshawed with an image she couldn’t make out, resting atop it. Three keys hung from the ring.
She’d gotten only two keys from the vampire she killed; she hoped they were the right two.
“You clean up nicely,” Lucien said. “But you’re younger than I thought. How old are you exactly?”
Tana wasn’t sure if she should thank him or not. She decided not. “Seventeen.”
“I didn’t believe you at first,” he went on. “When you told me Gavriel had given you the garnets. I was baffled as to why would he have given them to a mortal girl. Did he tell you about it—the necklace?”
“He said it belonged to his sister,” said Tana. She walked over to one of the chairs but didn’t sit. Lucien frightened her and fascinated her, too. She was a guest in his house, but she was also a prisoner.