I woke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dim, though not completely dark, and daylight peered at me through long slats in the window shades. I spied a lumpy outline in the corner of the room, and felt my mouth twitch. Warren, I thought woodenly. I was going to kick his ass.
“You know, you’re not funny,” I said, causing him to jump. He straightened in his chair, rubbing a long hand over his eyes, and stretched loudly. “You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”
He held up a hand as he rose. “Don’t hate.”
“Too late.” Yawning widely, I lifted a hand to rub over my eyes, but discovered it was too heavy, too far from my face, and too much trouble to complete the movement. Which was odd. Yet having had the distinct displeasure of a lengthy hospital visit once before, I recognized the lethargy as being chemically induced, some sort of painkiller probably. The question was, why had they drugged me? “What am I doing here?”
“Recovering,” Warren answered, standing at my side. “And hiding.”
“Are they after me?” My heart fluttered beneath my breastbone. “Can you smell me again?”
“Shh, don’t worry. You’re in isolation. Nobody outside this room can sense your pheromones. It’s like…you don’t even exist.”
I took a tentative whiff. All I smelled was hospital; drugs, antiseptic, and the type of cleanliness that erases not only bad odors, but good alike. It was a clean I’d hoped to never experience again. I looked at Warren. “There’s nothing. I can’t smell me at all.”
“I can.” He smiled, perching himself bedside. He’d taken off the long duster that made him look like some demented cowboy, wore a simple khaki T-shirt and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back, the matting tightly bound to his head. Each time I saw him, he looked a bit more reputable. Scary.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, like he was bending over a rose instead of a body. “You, but more so. The unscented thread now blends in with the rest of your genetic makeup. It’s beautiful, really. Lit up like some life-saving beacon…if you’ll excuse the visual analogy.”
I closed my eyes and breathed, casting my thoughts downward, inward. Nothing. After several seconds I looked at him again. “So it’s like an identifying trait? Like, I don’t know, permanent perfume?”
“More like the vein that runs through a particularly strong wedge of blue cheese.”
“Thanks a lot.” Just when I started liking the guy. “So, when do I get to go home?”
He rose from the bed. I narrowed my eyes. It looked like he was putting distance between himself and me. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Joanna, so I’m just going to say it.” My heart did that little flutter again as he took a deep breath. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for just over a week.”
“Dead-dead?” I asked hollowly. “Really dead?”
“Well, obviously you’re here, but as far as the mortal world is concerned, yes,” Warren said. “Your funeral is tomorrow. I’ve saved you the newspaper clippings from the last week.”
He motioned to the papers stacked on the bedside tray, and I glanced over to see my face staring up from the top copy, with the headline heiress joanna archer plummets to death. The byline, dated four days ago, posed the question of whether it’d been foul play or if I’d leapt from the midtown apartment. I dropped my head back, unwilling to read any more.
I was dead, I thought numbly. I no longer existed. And I felt strangely well for the experience.
“If I’m dead,” I finally said, “then who am I?”
I motioned down the length of my body, wincing when my hand brushed against my chest. Gasping with as much surprise as pain, I looked down, gasped again, and clutched both breasts in my hands—what I could fit into them, anyway. They were extraordinarily sore, with a tenderness that had less to do with the natural flux of the moon than a surgeon’s steel and, apparently, some huge creative license. The drugs had kept me from feeling the ache before, but I sure felt it now.
“What have you done?” I cried, holding them tenderly. I don’t think I’d ever heard my own voice so breathy and panicked. Then, brain cells and synapses firing rapidly, another thought occurred. I hadn’t actually ever heard my voice this high-pitched before either. I tried it again. “La, la, la, la…mother fucker!”
Horrified, I glared at Warren. “You’ve changed my voice!”
“And your breasts,” he said, pointing out the obvious with what I considered a great deal of misplaced pride. I glared, and he took another step backward. Just then Micah entered the room, halting inside the doorway. I lowered my chin and narrowed my eyes.
“You knocked me out,” I said accusingly, before turning on Warren again. “And you let him!”
“Well, we couldn’t have a dead woman walking about town, could we?” Warren said, like that was a reasonable argument.
“You told me you would take care of it! You said you’d clean up and make sure I wasn’t in trouble.”
“And we did,” Warren argued, crossing his arms. “You can’t be charged with a crime, because the only one dead is you.”
“But I don’t want to be dead!” I screeched in some other person’s voice. What was I supposed to do now? Only come out at night? Suck blood or haunt the living?
Warren looked insulted. “Sorry, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment. We had to do something to keep you out of jail, not to mention alive, so we brought you here.”
I looked around. Where was here? It looked like a normal hospital room; uncomfortable bed, machines that made beeping noises. Really bad wallpaper.
“You’re in a private facility just outside of town,” Micah said, confirming my thoughts. “I work here.”
“You’re a doctor?” I asked, eyeing his sausage-fingers and substantial girth. He looked more like a pit bull in a lab coat.
“Micah takes all the cases that might send up red flags among the mortal physicians,” Warren said. “He’s an absolute genius with the scalpel.”
Why did I have the feeling the line between genius and mad scientist was frighteningly thin here?
I shut my eyes and dropped my head back onto the pillow. Maybe this was one of those dreams I’d been having. Any moment now I was going to wake up and be myself, and Warren would still be a bum, and Micah some bartender pulling the caps off bottles of Bud. Because I really could use a beer about now.
“That’s right,” Micah said, causing the dream to implode upon itself. I felt him palm my chin, turning it side to side. “I performed all the work on you myself, and did a bang-up job if I do say so myself.”
“Why are you touching my face?” My eyes flew open. “Why is he touching my face?”
Warren looked chagrined. Micah looked surprised. He too glanced at Warren. “You mean you haven’t told her yet?”
“Told me what?”
Warren chuckled lightly, a sound tinged with nerves, and had me jerking my head sharply in his direction. “Actually, I was just getting around to it.”
“Aw, shit,” I said in my foreign voice to no one in particular. “Do I dare look in a mirror?”
“It’s really not that bad,” Warren said, then backpedaled as Micah shot him a piercing stare. “I mean, you’re gorgeous. Nobody would ever think it was you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said dryly. Then, tentatively, I lifted a hand to my face to feel for myself. Everything seemed normal until I got to my nose, or whoever’s nose this was. Mine had been broken in a sparring class, and the slight off-centeredness lent a sort of aquiline quality to my features, or so I chose to believe. In truth, I was deathly afraid of even the thought of surgery…a slight irony given the circumstances.
I let my hands trace downward. My lips were full, but still my own; my chin, however, dipped to a more heart-shaped point than I remembered. I felt for a strand of hair and lifted it, peering sideways. “I’m blond.”
“The package said ‘Platinum Perfection.’”
I let my head fall back again. The boobs, the voice, the face, the hair…I didn’t need a mirror to put it all together. Unbidden tears suddenly filled my eyes. I never cried, so my guess was that it too was part of this grand prize package. God, they’d fucked with my body and my hormones. “You’ve turned me into a…a…a bimbo!”