Petrov tapped his flask against his knee.
"Devochka," he said. "You have a future in this business."
She grimaced. "Only if you agree to be my assistant director. You did better than I did."
He laughed. "Thank you for the offer, but I have to graciously decline. I'm too old for a career change."
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.
