Page 44 of Fangs, Frost, and Folios
“What are you going to do with me?” Elise asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Terry said. “I might hand you over to my wife.” He smiled and his long fangs gleamed. “She’s the mean one.”
Tenzin sat down next to Sadia, who was typing on her phone.
The girl looked up. “Oh. Hey.”
“Hey.” Tenzin tried to copy the casual rhythm of speech she’d used. “What are you doing?”
She lifted her phone. “Just texting with Kaya.”
“Your friend.”
Sadia nodded. “Yeah. She’s… Well, she’s kind of like my sister. Neither of us has a sister—well, technically Kaya has a sister who’s way older because her parents are vampires too and they adopted her big sister a long time ago, so her sister is kind of more like her aunt or something. Not like me and Ben.” Sadia frowned. “It’s a little like me and Ben, I guess. Technically I think Ben and Caspar are both my brothers, which is… weird.”
“Vampire families are complicated.”
Sadia nodded. “Yeah. But Kaya gets it. So we act like we’re sisters sometimes.” She laughed a little. “I know we’re not, but—”
“Sisters are important. I had sisters.” Tenzin hadn’t remembered that in centuries. She blinked. “I had sisters.”
Sadia put her phone down. “You did?”
“I did.” She closed her eyes. “One older and one younger. Maybe two younger. I think one died when she was small.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tenzin looked up. “Don’t be. That was very common. Maybe it was more common for children to die than to live then.”
Sadia sank back into the sofa. “Like my family.”
“Yes.” Tenzin knew that most of Sadia’s family were dead. Other than a few cousins on her mother’s side, Giovanni had found death records for most of the girl’s extended family. “But you’re not dead. You’re very much alive. You survived. You must not ever feel guilty, because the fact that you survived means that all of them also survived.”
Sadia frowned. “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”
“Humans now are very frightened to talk about death, but it’s the one thing that all mortals experience.” Tenzin frowned. “Unless they become a vampire.”
“Like I will.”
Tenzin cocked her head. “Will you?” She’d long suspected that the girl would choose immortality. Very few humans were as suited to immortal life as Sadia.
“Yes.” Sadia heaved a great sigh. “But I know that it’s not for a very long time, and Dad always reminds me that my frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age twenty-five, so I can’t make any permanent decisions until after that anyway.”
Had Tenzin’s frontal cortex been undeveloped when she was turned?
That would probably explain a few things.
“You can’t decide that right now,” Tenzin said. “But I have sensed something that you should be aware of so you can make plans.”
Sadia’s eyes went wide. “Can you really tell the future? Dad says you can’t and Mom says you can.”
“I can tell this future: you will be starting to menstruate within the next week.”
The girl’s expression froze. “Tenzin, ew.”
“There is nothing ‘ew’ about it. It’s very evident from your scent. This is a thing that must be celebrated, so I want you to—”
“Oh my God, can Ben tell that I’m about to start my period too?”
