Chapter 6
DIMITRI
Dimitri stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his mouth open and examined his new canines.
They had finally reached the length his teeth had been before they fell out, and he could finally ditch the face mask, but now he had other things to worry about.
He closed his mouth, opened it again, and angled his head so the bathroom light fell on the upper row of his teeth.
They weren't vampire-novel teeth, but they didn't look like his old canines either. They were unmistakably longer and more pointed, and the enamel felt thicker.
He ran his tongue along them and felt the edge snag.
"Ouch," he said quietly. He hadn't been expecting them to be so sharp since they weren't elongating yet. That would take weeks, perhaps even months.
Dimitri closed his mouth and tried to decide whether to tell Mattie about the urge to bite or try to contain it.
It was difficult, and he'd found himself looking at her neck the last couple of days, the long soft line of it where it met her shoulder, the place he had already kissed a thousand times but now held a different sort of appeal for him.
He opened his mouth and stared at the fangs for a moment, then closed his lips over them.
"Absolutely not," he murmured to his reflection. "Not before I start producing venom."
He ran cold water and splashed his face twice, and then he rested his hands on the edge of the sink and took a long breath.
The venom glands were growing. He could feel them at the base of his throat, and once they were functional and produced venom in response to sexual desire, the bite would become immensely pleasurable for Mattie. The venom functioned as an analgesic, an aphrodisiac, and a hallucinogenic.
It was a cruel twist of biology that the urge to bite came before the ability to make it good for his partner. It shouldn't be that way, because nature favored balance and symmetry.
Perhaps the problem was that he'd transitioned as an adult, not a boy of thirteen, and things worked differently for him.
If he bit her now, he would put two puncture wounds in her neck and he would hurt her. There would be no analgesic effect. No softening of the sensation. Just pain and blood, and his girlfriend looking at him with accusation in her eyes instead of the adoration he loved so much.
He could not do that to her or to himself.
"Dimitri?" she called from the bedroom. "What are you doing in there for so long?"
"Flossing."
He closed his mouth around his teeth.
"Since when? You never floss."
Like every self-respecting Russian, he preferred toothpicks. They were just so much more efficient than the flimsy string that kept tearing.
"I've started now." He walked out of the bathroom. "You finally convinced me that I should take better care of my teeth."
Mattie didn't believe him. "Okay. Whatever." She went back to reading her book in bed.
Sprawled on her belly with the nightshirt hiked up and exposing her upper thighs, she presented the kind of temptation he couldn't say no to, even when not struggling with new immortal urges.
He had to get out of the room.
Instead, he looked at her neck.
Dimitri closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, just long enough to reset.
When he opened them again, he sat down on the bed beside her, but he did not lean over to kiss her the way he usually would.
Instead, he picked up the jar of salve she'd left on the nightstand and sniffed at it as if he had not made it himself, then set it down again.
"Did you use it?"
"Not yet. I'll do it later." She smiled suggestively at him. "Or you could do it for me."
He swallowed. "Of course, but first, I want to check on Petrov."
She blinked at him. "Why?"
"He's out of sorts because Dave is going to meet Anita tonight. I think he needs some company while the meeting is in progress. Maybe we can invite him for coffee downstairs?"
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Since when are you so considerate?"
He shrugged. "I just imagined how I would feel if it were you meeting with Dave while I had to stay here. I would be going nuts."
Mattie searched his face, but he kept his expression relaxed, and his mouth closed, and he was very aware of the two points behind his upper lip and the distance between his mouth and her neck.
Her expression softened. "All right. Let's have coffee with Petrov."
She stood up, lifted her leggings off the chair she'd left them on, and pulled them over her legs. "That's as dressed as I'm willing to be right now."
"You look adorable." He followed her out of the bedroom and into the hallway.
Petrov's room was the next door down, and Mattie knocked.
There was a sound of something heavy being set down, the creak of a bed frame, footsteps, a muttered curse, and then the door opened.
Petrov stood in the doorway, wearing a white undershirt that had not been white in some time. His belly pushed against the fabric, and a significant quantity of bushy dark hair with some gray in it curled over the neckline.
Looking more plastered than usual, he was holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka in his hand.
"Mattushka," he said, using a new nickname for Mattie. "What is this?"
She smiled at him. "We thought you might want to come down for coffee."
Petrov's eyes moved from her face to Dimitri's and stayed there for a moment. Petrov was not sober, but Petrov was sharper drunk than most men were when clean, and Dimitri had a feeling that his mentor suspected this was not about coffee.
"You knocked on my door to offer me coffee," Petrov said.
"I did."
"I would have preferred an invitation to the bar."
"Sorry, but neither of us can go there. Remember?"
"I do. It's tragic." He started to back into his room, but Mattie lifted a hand to stop him.
"Come on, Konstantin. Why would you want to stay in your room alone when you can have coffee with good company?"
Petrov considered this for a moment longer than the question warranted. Then he shrugged and stepped back into the room. For a moment, Dimitri was sure that the guy was going to close the door in their faces without even saying good night.
Instead, Petrov lifted the crumpled button-down off the back of the chair where he had thrown it earlier, the same one he'd been wearing all day under his lab coat, and shrugged it on.
"Company is acceptable," he said and proceeded to fasten two buttons in the middle of his shirt, which left the bottom open over his belly and the top open over his chest hair, which Dimitri supposed was a compromise they were all going to have to live with tonight.
They went down to the lab.
Petrov lowered himself onto one of the stools with a grunt that was out of proportion to the distance his knees had traveled and set the vodka bottle on the lab table.
Dimitri sat on the stool next to him.
"Ground or instant?" Mattie asked over her shoulder.
"Ground," Petrov said. "I am suffering enough as it is."
"Ground it is."
"I'll make it." Dimitri rose to his feet.
"No." She stopped him with her hand. "I'll make it."
She was so stubborn, insisting on doing things that were difficult to do with just one hand, but Dimitri had learned to pick his battles, and he sat back down.
She walked into the kitchenette area of the laboratory and got the hand grinder down from the cabinet one-handed. Watching her, Dimitri admired her determination, but more than that, he admired the swell of her breasts, perfectly outlined by her flimsy nightshirt.
The urge to bite returned full force.
"So," Petrov said.
"So," Dimitri said back.
"Why coffee at night? We never have coffee past seven in the evening."
"Company, Konstantin. I thought you could use some tonight."
Petrov lifted the vodka, considered it, and set it down again without drinking. "So could you, Dimitri."
He didn't ask how his mentor knew that the initiative to spend the evening together wasn't solely for his benefit. After all, the three of them were spending so much time together that it was a miracle they hadn't had any major fights yet.
Mattie set three mugs on the table and sat down without saying a word. She had decided to let them talk.
Petrov sighed. "I'm worried about Anita with the Eight. Even if they behave perfectly, they are going to scare her because of the way they are, and I couldn't go and warn her, explain that they are different and that she shouldn't be afraid."
"They are not that scary," Mattie said. "I got used to them almost right away." She smiled. "They have a certain charm."
Petrov looked at her as if she were missing a few screws. "They act like cyborgs, and they killed five soldiers by tearing out their hearts."
"They were perfectly calm when they did that," Mattie said. "It was premeditated."
He arched his bushy brows. "And that's supposed to make me feel better about them being alone with Anita?"
"Yes." Mattie waved her good hand. "They didn't act in anger. They had a good reason to eliminate those five. Those immortals wanted to kill Dimitri and me. Anita is not a threat."
He shook his head. "They need Dimitri and me. Our survival is crucial to theirs. They killed those soldiers to protect their own interests."
"Yes, but they didn't need me." Mattie took a sip of her coffee. "They saved me because I was important to Dimitri. The same is true for Anita. They will not harm her because she's important to you."
Petrov opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. "It's not the same situation, devochka. Dimitri is in love with you, and if anything had happened to you, he would have been devastated. I'm not in love with Anita."
Mattie leaned forward and stared into his eyes.
"It doesn't matter that you don't love her.
You care about her enough to want to take her along when we leave here, so you'll be devastated if something happens to her.
They know that. Besides, they don't want her.
They are only meeting her as a favor to you. "
He groaned. "I know that. But she's a sexy lady, and they might get ideas."
So that was what Petrov was worried about.
"She is sexy to you," Dimitri said. "Not to them. They are no longer interested in sex."
Petrov made the sound that meant he was neither convinced nor willing to fight it.
Mattie took another sip of the coffee, and Dimitri took a slow breath through his nose and concentrated on the smell of the brew and not on the line of Mattie's neck.
"The Eight are not like other immortals," Petrov said. "They are a unit, and sometimes units do things individuals wouldn't."
The guy was looking for reasons for the discomfort he felt, not realizing that he just missed Anita and wanted to be with her, and it bothered him that the Eight were enjoying what he couldn't.
"These enhanced soldiers have not acted out of character since the day we met them," Dimitri said.
"Oh really?" Petrov asked. "Did you predict that they would ask you to merge with them so they could experience love through you?"
Dimitri winced.
Petrov was right. That had been totally unexpected.
"You are worrying for the sake of worrying," Mattie said.
"Maybe," Petrov admitted, reaching for his bottle of vodka and taking a swig from the little that was left. "But I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight. I have no way of finding out what happened in that hotel room until they come to the lab tomorrow."
Dimitri picked up his mug and took a sip.
"You trust Dave to get us off this island," he said to Petrov. "You have trusted them with your notebook. You are trusting them with our necks. You can trust them with Anita."