16
DIMITRI
The taste of blood woke Dimitri.
It was more than the faint, coppery hint of a bitten lip. He was actually tasting blood as if his lip had been split, and for one confused moment, he thought he'd been punched in the face again.
He sat up, and then he saw it on the pillow. A tooth.
A swipe of his tongue confirmed that his left upper canine was missing. It was sitting on the white pillowcase in a small smear of dark red, looking absurdly ordinary for what its falling out meant.
Dimitri probed the empty socket. The gum was swollen, tender, and already beginning to close. The new tooth wasn't out yet, but he could feel something beneath the surface, a hard ridge pushing down from inside the bone.
Not a tooth, a fang, and the right one would probably be coming out soon as well.
He looked at Mattie, who was still asleep, curled on her side with her bandaged hand resting on the blanket between them. Her breathing was slow and even, her lips slightly parted, a strand of blonde hair falling across her cheek. She looked peaceful, which made one of them.
Dimitri slid out of bed as quietly as he could, grabbed the tooth, and crossed to the bathroom. He closed the door, turned on the light, and leaned over the sink.
The face in the mirror looked like it belonged to a man who had just received very bad news. He opened his mouth and examined the gap. The socket was swollen, and when he pressed his tongue against it, he could feel the hard point of the emerging fang just beneath the gum line. He hadn't felt it before. Could it be that it was growing so fast?
How long would it take for it to fully come out? Days? Hours? He had no baseline for comparison, but he had a feeling it wouldn't take long.
He spat the blood into the sink and rinsed his mouth. The bleeding had already stopped, but his mouth was coated with it, and it took two more rinses before the taste was completely gone.
The right canine was a little looser than it had been the day before, and as Dimitri tested it with his tongue, he felt it shift, not much, maybe a millimeter, but enough. Now he was certain that this one would fall out possibly today, or tomorrow at the latest.
Two missing canines would be impossible to hide. Any immortal who saw his mouth would know immediately what was happening, and the news would reach Losham in no time.
Staring at his reflection in the mirror, Dimitri groaned.
He needed a plan. But what? Stay in his room and fake being sick? If the fangs didn't take too long to come out, he might get away with it. After all, they looked almost like regular canines when not elongated, so without stimulation, they would remain dormant. He would just have to avoid aggression, which shouldn't be a problem because he had never been the kind of guy who got into fights. Except, his new immortal body came with some troubling predatory traits, and he wasn't sure he would be able to keep his fangs from elongating in response to triggers that he would have ignored as a human.
Then there was Mattie, and what would happen during sex, but that would be in private, so he didn't need to worry about being exposed that way, though he worried about the biting instinct and how she would react to that.
Supposedly the venom bite was intensely pleasurable, but Mattie didn't seem eager for his fangs to come out, so she probably wasn't eager about experiencing that either.
A soft knock sounded on the bathroom door.
"Dimitri?" Mattie asked, her voice thick with sleep. "Are you okay in there? I heard you groan."
"Yeah."
He opened the door and found her standing there in his oversized T-shirt, her hair spectacularly tangled, her eyes half-closed against the bathroom light, and her bandaged hand cradled against her chest.
"What happened?" She squinted at him. "You look like someone died."
He held up the tooth.
It took her a moment to realize what he was showing her, and then her eyes widened, the last traces of sleep vanishing from her face.
"Oh no. It wasn't supposed to happen so soon."
"It did." He retreated into the bathroom, and she followed.
"Let me see."
He opened his mouth obligingly, tilting his head toward the light.
