The Shedding

The next morning, Elena stood in the bathroom, staring at her reflection.

Her eyes were changing. The irises, once a warm hazel, were turning a bright, reflective yellow. The pupils seemed to tremble, narrowing into slits when the bathroom light flickered.

She coughed. A hard, hacking spasms that tasted of copper.

Something hard hit the porcelain sink.

* Clink.*

She looked down. Lying in the basin, amidst a splatter of bloody saliva, was a molar. It was a human tooth, white and rooted.

She ran her tongue over the gap in her gum.

It wasn't a gap.

Something sharp, serrated, and hard was already pushing through the tissue. A fang.

Elena gripped the edge of the sink. Her fingernails dug into the ceramic. With a sickening screech, the ceramic gouged.

She lifted her hand. Her nails were gone. In their place were thick, translucent talons, curved and deadly.

"What am I?" she whispered.

She wasn't healing. She was molting.

She thought of the locket. The man in the photo. *Sarah.*

Julian wasn't fixing her. He was making her into a monster.

She looked at the door. Julian was in the basement. He always spent the hours between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM in the archives.

She needed to know.

She went to the bedroom, to Julian’s jacket hanging on the chair. She found his spare keycard.