The Only

Chapter Seventeen - Neima

For three weeks, Neima stayed isolated in her room. She felt like a jungle cat trapped inside a cage, pacing from one corner of the room to another. Her feet created an obvious worn mark on the carpet.

On her last lap, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and paused. The last morphing happened right after Cesar escorted her to her room. She barely got her foot in the door when a pulsating shock knocked her to her knees, and she cried out in agony.

Poor Cesar did not know what to do to offer any comfort. He had never witnessed her morphing and, very much like Karl, had thought she suffered a heart attack. She wasn't too far from believing it herself. The shock ripped through her as if designed to shove her heart out through her chest.

It was the most painful morphing she ever experienced, and it left her with the most perplexing look. Her skin was pale, much like Cesar's but freckled, and her hair was dark brown, almost black, with thick, heavy waves, much like some of the other Nocturnes. Her eyes remained very dark, like a Mutare — just like Yasmin's.

And of course, there were the fangs. As a means of entertainment during her confinement, she spent hours in front of the mirror learning to master them. It was fun, until Cesar warned her that her constant manipulation might bring on the intense hunger they were designed to assuage.

The thought of consuming white blood cells, to satisfy an insatiable craving, made her stomach turn. She immediately stopped playing with them, but it didn't stop her tongue from occasionally pressing against the very sharp tip. It was too tempting. Instead, she focused on avoiding reflective surfaces. It was too hard to look at herself. The quarantine had been successful in the fact she hadn't morphed again, but it hadn't done anything to quiet her growing fears. She had changed and not just in appearance.

When Karl and Cesar first mentioned she could become susceptible to the virus, she didn't take it to heart. After all, she had lived millennia among humans and had endured many tragedies. Natural disasters. Plagues. Wars. Famines. She had seen it all. But the excruciating morphing left her with more than just different looks. Her very biology had transformed. She was still the Only but was not herself. Immortality had always given her a sense of security when it came to her own welfare...until now.

She felt different. A new type of energy pulsed through her with a force that seemed to elongate her limbs. She felt more powerful, more alert. Everything seemed to be clearer. It was no wonder the Experiments walked around with so much swagger. The world really looked and felt different to them.

Neima sensed the need to stretch, and when she extended her arms over her head and pushed her muscles to flex, each of her vertebrae popped and snapped. Her double-knuckled fingers were the last to crack, and she unexpectedly let out a low growl in relief.

This new way of living was how she imagined being under the influence of drugs felt like, if she took drugs...or if they had any effect on her. Her body had its own way of healing, so drugs were never needed, and alcohol just made her go to the bathroom more often. It was a good thing, too. More often than not, she got out of a lot of sticky situations simply by out drinking a man. All she had to do was wait until he passed out and then simply leave the room. Vanish. It's what she did best.

Sometimes it would get back to her that whoever she left never woke up. Alcohol poisoning or some other kind of "accident" was usually the culprit. But it never bothered her. She didn't think about it.

The possibility of dying was never, well, a possibility. She had "died" several times, most often violently. Having endured a head injury, a stab wound, or perhaps a broken neck, she had always woken up after morphing; most often after being buried alive or in a dark cave. She shivered at the thought of clawing her way out of the dirt. Her nails suddenly felt packed full of soil, she could smell the damp stench of newly turned earth.