“H-how do you know Penny’s name and mine if you didn’t torture them?”
Sainvire dabbed the last cut with ointment and applied a Band-Aid. He wiped his stained hands with a cloth and smiled at Poe. “There. All done.” He stood up and pointed to an open door. “I’ll tell you what you need to know after you get out of those wet clothes and take a hot shower.” He handed her a bottle of peroxide.
“Make sure to put some of this liquid on the wound on your left leg. You don’t want the infection to get worse.”
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“I don’t want to take a shower,” she said, purposely ornery.
“It’s up to you,” he shrugged. “But you’re covered in foul water. If you’re into bacteria and disease, then more power to you. In any case, you won’t get any answers from me.”
“Why the hell not?” Poe demanded.
“Because I refuse to sit in a room with you another minute.” He presented her with a beneficent Gandhi smile and added, “You stink.”
Before Poe could protest, the vampire strode out of the room, leaving Poe to gape after him. She was shivering and utterly alone, surrounded by fussy vampires.
(((
Poe hardly enjoyed one of the few hot showers she had taken in fourteen years, which was a shame since the water didn’t smell like fishy sludge, nor was it discolored and grainy. The roomy bathroom filled with tiles, mosaics, and mirrors was completely lost upon her. She didn’t even appreciate the huge old-fashioned shower tub that surpassed the size of Goss’.
How could she when images of her friends’ demise flashed in her mind continuously?
“Awfully sorry, Sister and Goss,” she said out loud, “I let you both down so bad.”
Never had she unsuccessfully worked so hard to change her train of thought. If it hadn’t been for phobia and cowardice, her friends might still have been alive.
She didn’t deserve to cry, but tears of frustration flowed anyway.
In less than twenty minutes, Poe hopped out of the great tub with a pile of dripping, freshly laundered clothes. She had used her raw fist to beat blood and dirt 103
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from her shirt and pants. She did as Sainvire said and dabbed peroxide at the nail wound on her leg, red, puffy, and swollen from the shower. She hung her wet clothes on the side of the tub.
After attending to her thigh and various lacerations, Poe happened to look up and jumped back in fright. Poe realized that the peeping tom looking back was her own reflection. She wiped the thin film of steam clinging to the surface of the mirror.
An unrecognizable face stared back. Huge dark brown eyes, almost black with very long, straight lashes, blinked. Her wing-tip eyebrows were raised in shock. A pinkish-white scar running from mid-forehead down to the left underside of her eye marred her smooth skin. Her small nose had a cut on the bridge. On either side of her face were thin red scratches, probably from when she jumped through glass. Her naturally puffy lips were swollen even more from a vampire slap.
“Boy, I look awful.”
She probably deserved every scrape and bruise, too. After all, she was still alive. What a betrayal. The tiny mirror in her bunker only showed a third of her face at a time. This big contraption of a mirror was unwelcome because in her head she still had an image of herself having the ungainly body of a kid.
She could not stop, however, and unwrapped Sainvire’s lush green towel beginning to bleach from the peroxide. Her physique sure had changed. Ignoring the welts and darkening bruises on her rounded hips, arms, legs, and chest, Poe gawked at her body, temporarily forgetting about her friends.
“What in the world happened to me?” She had felt the changes, especially the curvy bumps, had even stared down at them on occasion, but she had never seen them reflected on a giant mirror like this before.
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Her full breasts with peach nipples scared the hell out of her. To think, she hadn’t even considered wearing a bra all this time. Embarrassing!
“No wonder Morales became all pervy whenever he saw me.” She made a mental note to scour the city for a brassier if she survived the night.
Her gaze traveled down her narrow waist to her stomach with barely a ghost of roundness. From there her eyes led southward, purposely skipping the vee of her privates, jumping straight to her curvilinear butt, then her slim but muscled thighs