Fledgling(7)

“… what?”

“I locked the door to keep you safe. You were trying to jump from a moving car, for Godsake. You would have been badly hurt or killed if you had succeeded.”

“Oh.”

He took me by the arm and led me into his house.

Once I was inside, I looked around and immediately recognized that I was in a kitchen. Even though I could not recall ever having been in an intact kitchen before, I recognized it and the things in it—the refrigerator, the stove, the sink, a counter where a few dishes sat on a dish towel, a dish cabinet above the counter, and beside it, a second cabinet where my nose told me food was sometimes stored. I remembered the blackened refrigerators and sinks at the burned ruin. But this was what a kitchen should look like when everything worked.

The kitchen was small—just a corner of the cabin, really. Beyond it was a wooden table with four chairs. Alongside the kitchen on the opposite side of the cabin was a small room—a bathroom, I saw when I looked in. Beyond the bathroom was the rest of the cabin—a combination living room-bedroom containing a bed, a chest of drawers, a soft chair facing a stone fireplace, and a small television on top of a black bookcase filled with books. I recognized all these things as soon as I saw them.

I went through the cabin, touching things, wondering about the few that I did not recognize. Wright would tell me and show me. He was exactly what I needed right now. I turned to face him again. “Tell me what else to do to keep you out of trouble.”

“Just don’t let anyone see you,” he said. “Don’t go out until after dark and don’t …” He looked at me silently for a while. “Don’t hurt anyone.”

That surprised me. I had no intention of hurting anyone. “All right,” I said.

He smiled. “You look so innocent and so young. But you’re dangerous, aren’t you? I felt how strong you are. And look what you’ve done to me.”

“What have I done?”

“You bit me. Now you’re all I can think about. You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

He drew an uneven breath. “Yeah. I thought so. I probably shouldn’t let you.”

I looked up at him.

He took another breath. “Shit, you can do it right now if you want to.”

I rested my head against his arm and sighed. “It might hurt you to lose more blood so soon. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t you? Why not? You don’t even know me.”

“You’re helping me, and you don’t know me. You let me into your car and now into your house.”

“Yeah. I wonder how much that’s going to cost me.” He put his hand on my shoulder and walked me over to the table. There he sat down and drew me close so that he could open one of my filthy shirts, then the other. Having reached skin, he stroked my chest. “No breasts,” he said. “Pity. I guess you really are a kid. Or maybe … Are you sure you’re female?”

“I’m female,” I said. “Of course I am.”

He peeled off my two shirts and threw them into the trash can. “I’ll give you a T-shirt to sleep in,” he said. “One of my T-shirts should be about the size of a nightgown for you. Tomorrow I’ll buy you a few things.”

He seemed to think of something suddenly. He took my arm and led me into the bathroom. There, over the sink, was a large mirror. He stood me in front of it and seemed relieved to see that the mirror reflected two people instead of only one.

I touched my face and the short fuzz of black hair on my head, and I tried to see someone I recognized. I was a lean, sharp-faced, large-eyed, brown-skinned person—a complete stranger. Did I look like a child of about ten or eleven? Was I? How could I know? I examined my teeth and saw nothing startling about them until I asked Wright to show me his.

Mine looked sharper, but smaller. My canine teeth—Wright told me they were called that—were longer and sharper than his. Would people notice the difference? It wasn’t a big difference. Would it frighten people? I hoped not. And how was it that I could recognize a refrigerator, a sink, even a mirror, but fail to recognize my own face in the mirror?

“I don’t know this person,” I said. “It’s as though I’ve never seen her before.” Then I had another thought. “My scars are gone.”

“What?” he asked. “What scars?”

“I was all scarred. A few nights ago … three nights before this one, I was scarred. I remember thinking that I must have been burned—all over. And I couldn’t see for a while when I first woke up, so maybe my eyes were scarred, too.” I sighed. “That’s why I hurt so much and why I was so hungry and so tired. All I’ve done is eat and sleep. My body had so much healing to do.”

“Scars don’t vanish just because wounds heal,” he said. “Especially not burn scars.” He pushed up the sleeve of his right arm to display a shiny, creased patch of skin bigger than my hand. “I got this when I was ten, fooling around our barbecue pit. Caught my sleeve on fire.”

I took his arm and looked at the scar, touched it. I didn’t like it. It felt the way my own skin had when I examined my scars. I had the feeling I should be able to make his scars go away too, but I didn’t know how. I turned his hand to look at the bite mark I’d made, and he gasped. The wound seemed to me to be healing as it should, but he snatched his arm from me and examined the hand.