Valentine

Chapter Nineteen - Elizabeth

Meredith was speaking to the coven, but I couldn’t hear her over the drumming in my ears. My heart was racing, in a strange combination of fear, exhilaration and anticipation. I was sure that every vampire in the room could hear it, but no matter how many deep breaths I took, I couldn’t slow it down.

The chair was solid under me, a welcome counterpoint to the lightheaded feeling I was experiencing. I briefly wondered if this was how death-row inmates felt when they were led to the chair, then shrugged it off as too morbid to consider.

I reminded myself that I wasn’t going to die. I was going to turn. There was a difference. The fact that turning required dying first was beside the point. I would not stay dead.

Meredith had stopped talking. I raised my chin, refusing to allow the watching coven to see my fear, even though I was sure they already knew.

“Elizabeth,” Meredith spoke softly and I looked up at her. “Are you ready to begin the transformation process?”

“Y-yes,” I couldn’t help the slight stutter – my mouth had become drier than the Sahara Desert in a drought.

“Very well. I will need access to your throat. I will administer the bite into your internal jugular vein, as the serum will reach your heart sooner from that point.”

I stared at her blankly, and a slight frown appeared on her flawless face.

“I will need access to your throat.”

“Oh!” I felt heat creeping into my face as I recognised the strange intimacy of someone biting my neck. True, Meredith had explained it as an almost clinical procedure, which made me feel better for a split second, but the relief had quickly faded.

“Which…” I cleared my throat, trying to work saliva into my mouth and fighting the urge to ask for a glass of water. “Which side?”

“The left.” If I hadn’t been so nervous, Meredith’s gentle smile may have calmed me. As it was, I simply forced another deep breath and tilted my head to the right, exposing my throat.

Her transformation happened swiftly. From a sweet young blonde, she shifted to a creature from low-budget horror movies: her nails lengthened into scarlet claws, her face showing the change far more than Orion’s had. Her eyes were blood-red, with a deep ridge over them where her brows had been. Her hair, long, and luxuriously blonde before, had thickened and grown coarse and dull.

I tried not to flinch as she approached me, her sharpened canines extending over her lower lips. I had a moment’s hesitation, a brief second of wanting to leap from my chair and run for my life, before I recalled that the whole reason for me being here was to get away from that life.

I kept my throat exposed, my hands gripping the arms of the chair with enough force that I could feel my knuckles whitening. I wanted to close my eyes and relax into it, but fear kept them wide as I saw Meredith bending over from my peripheral vision.

I felt a warm gust of her breath on my neck, heard her whisper something, though my heart was pounding too fast for me to recognise words, and felt a sharp, piercing pain as her fangs sank deep into my throat.

I gasped, but the pain eased quickly, the serum from Meredith’s bite acting more efficiently than modern medicine’s best anaesthetics. I felt her sweep her tongue over my neck, wondered what that was about, briefly wished it was Orion instead, and then she was gone from my side and I was left alone in the chair in the middle of the stage.

I wanted to straighten my head, sit more comfortably, but the paralysis had set in. She’d warned me about it, but I still experienced a moment of fear, a primeval urge to fight it, to survive.

I tried to draw breath, to calm myself, but my lungs had seized, or I couldn’t feel them. I didn’t know enough about the process to understand what would happen, what my body would experience. I simply had to remember not to fight it.

Fighting it would result in an agonising death, Meredith had said. She hadn’t mentioned how long the process would take. Would I be sitting here, paralysed, for days, weeks on end?

Surely not. My body would starve. Unless the vampire serum prevented that, fed it somehow? I felt as though I were in a trance. Thoughts came and went, each one more abstract than the last, as though I were floating on an ocean, the waves turning me this way and that, with no clear destination in mind. I simply recognised the need to go with the tide, not fight it, and not try to make sense of it.

I was unaware of my eyes closing, but suddenly, everything was dark, and I was at peace.