Mattie's eyes glistened, and she blinked rapidly, which was her tell for holding back tears. "That's the most beautiful thing you've ever said to me, and you've said a lot of beautiful things."
She scooted closer and pressed herself against his side, resting her head in the hollow of his shoulder where it fit as if the space had been designed specifically for her. Her bandaged hand rested on his chest, and he covered it gently with his own, careful of the splint.
They lay like that for a while, breathing together, the ceiling fan turning slow circles above them. The room was cool, but the warmth between them was the kind that came from the inside, generated by proximity and trust and the chemical aftermath of shared pleasure.
"Your second canine is loosening," Mattie said.
"Did you feel it when we kissed?"
He was suddenly embarrassed about the missing tooth and how odd it must have felt for her to kiss him.
"I did, but you also keep tonguing it. You do it unconsciously when you're thinking."
She was right, and becoming aware of it, he stopped tonguing it. The right canine was noticeably more mobile than it had been this morning, shifting at least two millimeters when he pressed against it. It would probably fall out tonight.
"Two to three days," he said. "That's what Dave said."
"For the fangs to come in."
"For the base growth. The full functionality takes longer."
"Are you scared?"
He considered lying, or deflecting, or turning it into a joke about Russian fatalism, but she deserved better than that. Especially tonight.
"Not scared," he said. "More like unsettled. I spent nearly thirty years understanding my body as one thing, and now it's becoming something else. The healing, the strength, the senses, those were gradual, but I still scrambled to adapt to each change. But the teeth and the fangs and the venom are different. They are the visible signs of who I'm becoming. I can't pretend that I'm unchanged anymore. Not to others, and not to myself."
"Is it really that bad?"
"It's complicated. My identity is human, and on this island, I'm the human scientist among immortals, and that distinction protects me in a way. Losing that distinction means figuring out who I am now."
Mattie lifted her head to look at him. "You're Dimitri. That hasn't changed."
"Hasn't it?"
"Fangs and venom don't define who you are on the inside. What you do does that, and so far, you've acted with honor and courage and moral clarity. Nothing about that has changed since you've become immortal."
The simplicity of her logic cut through the tangle of his existential uncertainty. She was right, of course. The essence of who he was had nothing to do with canines or fangs or venom glands. It had to do with the choices he made, the things he valued, the people he loved.
He wrapped his arm around her and focused on the weight of her against him, the rhythm of her breathing, the warmth of her skin, the whoosh of the fan above, and the ambient noises of the island percolating through the closed window.
At some point, the boundary between wakefulness and sleep became blurred enough that his thoughts drifted from the organized channels of conscious reasoning into the looser, more associative currents of the pre-sleep mind.
He thought about fangs and how strange it would be to have retractable teeth. He thought about the clan in Los Angeles and whether they had labs with proper equipment. He thought about Petrov, who was probably at the brothel right now.
He thought about Dave, and the merge, and what it would feel like to have eight additional consciousnesses sharing space in his mind. That thought was terrifying. But after tonight, after experiencing the feedback loop of simultaneous giving and receiving, the concept of shared consciousness felt marginally less alien.
Not the same thing.
No, it wasn't even close. But he was starting to understand the principle of a connection that amplified rather than diminished.
Mattie's breathing had slowed and deepened. She was asleep, or nearly so, her body relaxed against his with the boneless trust of someone who felt completely safe.
His tongue found the loose canine and pressed against it. It shifted. By morning, it would be on the pillow like the first one.
Everything was changing. His teeth, his body, his species, his understanding of what was possible. The island that had been a prison was becoming a staging ground. The escape that had been a fantasy was becoming a plan. The isolation that had defined his existence was dissolving, replaced by connections that multiplied faster than he could track them.
25
