Which was exactly how Poppy looked. As Phil watched with fascination and awe and dread, she blinked and rolled her head a little, then opened her eyes. She shut them again almost immediately, but James went on talking to her, and the next time she opened them they stayed open.
Then, with James urging her gently, she sat up. "Poppy, " Phil said. An involuntary outburst. His chest was swelling, burning.
Poppy looked up, then squinted and turned immediately from the beam of the flashlight. She looked annoyed.
"Come on," James said, helping her out of the open half of the casket. It wasn't hard; Poppy was small. With James holding her arm, she stood on the closed half of the casket, and Phil reached into the hole and pulled her up.
Then, with something like a convulsion, he hugged her.
When he pulled back, she blinked at him. A slight frown puckered her forehead. She licked her index finger and drew the wet finger across his cheek.
"You're filthy," she said.
She could talk. She didn't have red eyes and a chalky face. She was really alive.
Weak with relief, Phil hugged her again. "Oh, God, Poppy, you're okay. You're okay."
He barely noticed that she wasn't hugging him back.
James scrambled out of the hole. "How do you feel, Poppy?"
he said. Not a politeness. A quiet, probing question.
Poppy looked at him, and then at Phillip. "I feel ... fine."
"That's good," James said, still watching her as if she were a six-hundred-pound schizophrenic gorilla.
"I feel ... hungry," Poppy said, in the same pleasant, musical voice she'd used before.
Phil blinked.
"Why don't you come over here, Phil?" James said, making a gesture behind him.
Phil was beginning to feel very uneasy. Poppy was ... could she be smelling him? Not loud, wet sniffs, but the delicate little sniffs of a cat. She was nosing around his shoulder.
"Phil, I think you should come around over here," James said, with more emphasis. But what happened next happened too quickly for Phil even to start moving.
Delicate hands clenched like steel around his biceps. Poppy smiled at him with very sharp teeth, then darted like a striking cobra for his throat.
I'm going to die, Phil thought with a curious calm.
He couldn't fight her. But her first strike missed. The sharp teeth grazed his throat like two burning pokers.
"No, you don't," James said. He looped an arm around Poppy's waist, lifting her off Phil.
Poppy gave a disappointed wail. As Phil struggled to his feet, she watched him the way a cat watches an interesting insect.
Never taking her eyes off him, not even when James spoke to her.
"That's your brother, Phil. Your twin brother. Remember?"
Poppy just stared at Phil with hugely dilated pupils. Phil realized that she looked not only pale and beautiful but dazed and starving.
"My brother? One of our kind?" Poppy said, sounding puzzled.
Her nostrils quivered and her lips parted. "He doesn't smell like it."
"No, he's,not one of our kind, but he's not for biting, either.
You're going to have to wait just a little while to feed." To Phillip, he said, "Let's get this hole filled in, fast."
Phillip couldn't move at first. Poppy was still watching him in that dreamy but intense way. She stood there in the darkness in her best white dress, supple as a lily, with her hair falling around her face. And she looked at him with the eyes of a jaguar.
She wasn't human anymore. She was something other. She'd said it herself, she and James were of one kind and Phil was something different. She belonged to the Night World now.
Oh, God, maybe we should just have let her die, Phil thought, and picked up a shovel with loose and trembling hands. James had already gotten the lid back on the vault. Phil shoveled dirt on it without looking at where it landed. His head wobbled as if his neck were a pipe cleaner.
"Don't be an idiot," a voice said, and hard fingers closed on Phil's wrist briefly. Through a blur, Phil saw James.
"She's not better off dead. She's just confused right now. This is temporary, all right?"
The words were brusque, but Phil felt a tiny surge of comfort.
Maybe James was right. Life was good, in whatever form. And Poppy had chosen this.
Still, she'd changed, and only time would tell how much.
One thing-Phil had made the mistake of thinking that vampires were like humans. He'd gotten so comfortable with James that he'd almost forgotten their differences.
He wouldn't make that mistake again.
Poppy felt wonderful-in almost every way.
She felt secret and strong. She felt poetic and full of possibility. She felt as if she'd sloughed off her old body like a snake shedding its skin, to reveal a fresh new body underneath.
And she knew, without being quite sure how she knew, that she didn't have cancer.
It was gone, the terrible thing that had been running wild inside her. Her new body had killed it and absorbed it somehow. Or maybe it was just that every cell that made up Poppy North, every molecule, had changed.
However It was, she felt vibrant and healthy. Not just better than she had before she'd gotten the cancer, but better than she could remember feeling in her life. She was strangely aware of her own body, and her muscles and joints all seemed to be working in a way that was sweet and almost magical.
The only problem was that she was hungry. It was taking all her willpower not to pounce on the blond guy in the hole.
Phillip. Her brother.
She knew he was her brother, but he was also human and she could sense the rich stuff, lush with life, that was coursing through his veins. The electrifying fluid she needed to survive.
So jump him, part of her mind whispered. Poppy frowned and tried to wiggle away from the thought. She felt something in her mouth nudging her lower lip, and she poked her thumb at it instinctively.
It was a tooth. A delicate curving tooth. Both her canine teeth were long and pointed and very sensitive.
How weird. She rubbed at the new teeth gently, then cautiously explored them with her tongue. She pressed them against her lip.
After a moment they shrank to normal size. If she thought about humans full of blood like berries, they grew again.
Hey, look what I can dot
But she didn't bother the two grimy boys who were filling in the hole. She glanced around and tried to distract herself instead.