"Your mouth smells like the inside of a head shop," she told me.
"Wull, thass juss fackin roo," I told her. Or at least, I tried to. Her thumbs kept me from pronouncing actual words. I guess my primal undead reptile brain did not appreciate her being this close to my face, because I felt that raw pressure in my mouth again and heard my fangs drop with a snick.
Jane blanched and sat back on her heels. "You have four fangs instead of two."
"What?" Ophelia dropped to her knees and squinted at my extended teeth. Her own mouth fell open, and her brow wrinkled. "I have never seen that before."
Jane pulled a compact from Ophelia's purse and held it up to my mouth. And while I was fully aware that vampires could see their own reflections, it was definitely comforting to see my own face in the glass. And that it had stayed the same.
Or had it?
The girl in the mirror was gorgeous, frozen forever at twenty, with the sort of lineless, airbrushed perfection that only existed in magazine ads. I'd heard about this little quirk of vampire evolution, but I'd never seen the "before and after turning" comparisons. Vampires had to be beautiful to lure in blood donors. And while I was cute before, now I'd been upgraded to a full-on ten. My eyes, dark like my mother's, almost glowed with flecks of amber and gold. My hair was braided, but I could glimpse reddish-gold highlights that hadn't been there before. My normally olive skin had paled to a creamy tan, but it was luminous and smooth, without one blemish in sight. My lips were full and rosy, and oh, my God, I totally had two sets of fangs.
I carefully tapped the tip of my tongue against the expected major canine fangs. Right next to both of my canines were slightly smaller, but still very sharp, extended fangs that had replaced two of my premolars. Any vampire looked dangerous, but somehow those two little extra-sharp teeth made me appear even more threatening.
Ophelia pushed the mirror out of the way and put her hands on my face, manipulating my jaw back and forth as she examined my mouth.
"Do you mind? That's my face!" I snapped at her. Literally. I tried to bite her, which she did not appreciate.
"Sorry," Ophelia said, yanking her hand back and pushing to her feet. "I've never seen this before. Do you know how old I am? I have not said ‘I've never seen this before' in a really long time."
Jane stood and pulled me to my feet. She peered at my eyes and spread my brows and cheekbones apart with her fingers. I swatted her hands away. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Jane, respect boundaries, please," Ophelia said dryly.
"What is going on, Ophelia? What's wrong with me? Is Ben going to be OK?"
Jane shot a look at Ophelia but didn't say anything. I got the impression that there was some sort of relationship between the two of them, but it wasn't necessarily a friendly one. Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember Ophelia ranting about someone named Jane sending her a "high-handed" e-mail and plotting some sort of revenge. But I was pretty foggy about the details other than having to Google what "high-handed" meant.
"We don't know," Jane said. "His heart has stopped, which could be a sign of the turning process. But it's also part of the process of dying."
"But I didn't give him any of my blood," I protested. "I drank a little bit of his, and that was it. I thought you couldn't be turned into a vampire without blood."
"Well, vampires aren't supposed to be up and walking around twenty-four hours after being turned, either. That's the only reason we allowed Ben into this room. You weren't supposed to be a threat. But the rules seem to be changing," she said, giving me a long, speculative stare.
Ophelia patted my shoulder in what I thought might have been meant as a comforting gesture. "We'll know if his body doesn't start to decompose over the next couple of days."
I blanched, and the disgust at that image was enough to make me feel the most like myself I had since I'd woken. "That's lovely, Ophelia, thank you."
"Meagan, you're a vampire now. You waved good-bye to ‘lovely' yesterday."
My hands dropped to my sides. "You keep saying that. I don't know what you mean."
Jane and Ophelia exchanged another long look.
"Stop giving each other secret face messages and send actual words in my direction!"
Jane sat on the edge of my hospital bed and leveled me with a serious look. "We don't know what to tell you, Meagan. We're flying blind here. I'm not even sure you're a real vampire."
What did that mean? Was I some sort of supernatural freak? A vampire-shark hybrid? My knees felt watery, and all that warm Ben blood threatened to come up.