The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (13 page)

She thought about Aidan out in the parking lot and about Gavriel’s bare arm. If Aidan drank enough of Gavriel’s blood, maybe he’d be better for a while, but they were just buying time in scraps and tatters.

It had been almost seven hours since the vampire’s teeth scraped her leg. Too soon to let herself hope she’d be okay, but she found herself hoping anyway. She thought of her own bed in her own room and imagined herself curled up there, her cat sleeping on her feet and Pearl doing her homework in the next room. She thought of bright light streaming through the windows and her phone ringing because Pauline wanted to go to the pool hall where the cute guy worked to play game after game of darts as they’d done all last summer, scoping him out between throws. And she thought of how, once Pauline and the guy finally dated, they’d all snuck back in there one night with Aidan and thrown stuff at the board—first kitchen knives, then forks, then even broken pieces of a glass someone had dropped.

It had turned into an oddly surreal night, but not as surreal as this one.

After a few moments, she forced herself to dry off as much as she could with the small towel and to step into her new clothes, tossing the old ones into the boutique bag. Without a bra, the thin fabric of her new dress showed the outline of her nipples, but she couldn’t bring herself to put on any piece of clothing she’d been wearing for the last thirty-odd hours, no matter how bare she looked.

She reached into her purse to see if she had a comb and some lipstick—anything to make herself seem less sickly—when she noticed that her phone was flashing. She had six new messages. Her mailbox was full. She must have turned her ringer off at some point at the party and not remembered to turn it back on.

Stepping out into the dressing area, she put the phone back into her bag and found a comb to draw the tangles out of her hair. As wavy as it was, it would tangle again fast, but at least she’d look a little less messy. Maybe by some alchemy it would make her feel less of a mess, too. She brushed her teeth in the sink, over and over again until her gums bled.

Then she listened to the messages.

The first one was from her father, giving her hell for not coming home in the morning. The next was from her father again, asking her where she was, saying the police had called. Then there was a message from Pearl, twelve-year-old arrogance dripping from her voice, saying that Dad was worried and that she was sure Tana was
fine
, but could Tana call
please
, because listening to him was
boring
. Then there was a call from a police officer, leaving a number, saying that he
understood she’d been at a party the night before and he needed to talk to her. Then her sister again, saying to please, please, please call; this time she sounded frightened.

The last message was from her father.

“The police have been to the house,” he said. “They described to me what happened at the party and how only three kids, in all probability you and two others, managed to get away. Since you haven’t come home or tried to contact us, I’m assuming that you’ve been infected.” There was a long pause. When her father resumed speaking, his voice was unsteady. “Thank you for staying away, Tana. It’s the responsible thing to do, and I hope that no matter what happens, you leave us—especially Pearl—with our memory of you the way it was. We love you, sweetheart, and we’ll miss you, but please don’t come back here. Don’t ever come back.”

For a moment, she was tempted to call home anyway, to tell them that she was okay while she still could, to say something cruel to her father to get him back for leaving a message like that, to at least text Pearl.

You leave us with our memory of you the way it was.

Tana deleted the messages and put her phone away.

She’d decided. She was going to Coldtown.

She cleaned off her boots in the sink and laced them onto her feet, wishing she didn’t have to. She’d have liked to never touch them again, but she didn’t have the money for new shoes. The boots were a little damp, but she thought they’d dry soon.

With the dollar and change she had left, she bought a slice of pizza and ate it, sitting on a plastic chair in the food court. It tasted
like sawdust and cardboard. Across the way at a nearby table, some boys in baggy jeans were shoving one another in a good-natured way.

“We should do what other countries do and blow those corpses sky high,” said one of them, leering at two girls with purple pigtails and black lipstick who were passing the table. “Bomb
all
the Coldtowns.”

One of the girls turned around and flipped dual middle fingers at him. “Hey, idiot, you want to fight the vampires? Move to Europe. Too bad about the skyrocketing infection rate there.”

“Maybe I will. I’ll have my own show—
Slade Slays
—and kill every vampire there is. How about that?”

“How about it’s called
Slade Dies
,” called the girl. “That show I’d watch.”

All the other boys at the table started laughing.

Tana got up and threw away her grease-smeared paper plate. Then she walked over to where Winter and Midnight were sitting by the outlets. Midnight had her head bent over her laptop, earbud cords hanging down around her neck. Winter looked up at Tana and blinked a couple of times, pulling off his bulkier headphones, his blue hair flattened where he’d mussed it. She noticed for the first time the T-shirt he was wearing underneath a black jacket—it had the words
COLDER THAN YOU
across the front in small white letters.

She snorted.

“Wow,” he said. “You look much better.”

“Thanks.” She made a face. “You still want that ride? I’d understand if you didn’t.”

Winter touched Midnight’s arm, making her look up. “We better talk about it. I think maybe—”

“We want the ride,” Midnight said firmly, in a tone that dared her brother to contradict her.

He didn’t.

CHAPTER 12

Call no man happy till he is dead.

—Aeschylus

V
ampires were always more beautiful than the living.

Their skin was without blemish, marble smooth, and pore-less. The older they got, the more their unnatural red eyes grew bright as poppies and their hair became as lustrous as silk. It was as if whatever demon possessed them, whatever force kept their corpses from the grave, had refined them in the blaze of its power, burning away their humanity to reveal something finer. Caspar Morales had stolen the fire from Prometheus, and his children were spreading it.

They looked absurdly gorgeous, glowing from the television like fallen angels. Even from the beginning, that was a problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

After the infections started burgeoning and the first walls around
the infected areas were built—the crude ones that kept only some things inside—news cameras couldn’t get enough coverage. Reporters were always climbing around the rubble, filming, putting their lives in danger.

And it wasn’t just television and newspapers. Flickr and Tumblr and Instagram were full of pictures of teeth and blood. In the beginning, an amateur videographer uploaded footage of long-limbed vampire girls feeding on a shock-faced middle-aged man. It got hundreds of thousands of hits in a matter of hours. Gossip columns ran long pieces on vampires who acquired an almost celebrity status, their string of kills only seeming to increase interest.

Vampires were fairy tales and magic. They were the wolf in the forest who ran ahead to grandmother’s house, the video game big boss who could be hunted without guilt, the monster who tempted you into his bed, the powerful eternal beast one might become. The beautiful dead,
la belle mort
. And if, after gorging themselves in an orgy of death, they became less lovely, if they became bloated and purple and horrible, then they hid it well.

Everyone was afraid to die and vampires never would. It was tempting to wish to be one, even if not everyone had the courage to try.

But everyone wanted to see one, if from afar.

And no one really wanted them gone.

There were seven hot zones in the United States, seven cities kissed by Caspar Morales, seven places brought over into the dark. Of those cities, six became Coldtowns, and five of those Coldtowns remained operational. All but San Francisco had feeds running out,
plenty of them corporate-sponsored and lucrative. Between the reality shows about vampire hunters—most of which had a high rate of cast turnover—and the reality shows featuring vampires—there was a very popular one cut from the live feed in Lucien Moreau’s Coldtown parlor—the United States stabilized into an odd
détente
with vampires.

Coldtowns were jails ruled by their inmates. Within them, vampires were free. But any vampire on the outside—without the protection of those walls, whether hiding, newly turned, or committing massacres—was fair game for hunters and for the military.

And if people argued that the system was flawed, that the infection was still spreading, that romanticizing the dead was making the problem worse, well then, one only had to look at how bad things were outside the United States—and how much money there was to be made by continuing to let things stay just the way they were.

CHAPTER 13

He would make a lovely corpse.

—Charles Dickens

W
hen Tana got to the parking lot, Aidan was sitting in the backseat of her Crown Vic with the door open and his legs out. Gavriel was bent over him, one arm on the roof of the car, talking in a low tone. He stopped speaking when he caught sight of her. A breeze blew his hair back from his face, making it look like the ruffled feathers of a crow.

“Hey,” Tana said.

Aidan looked a little less sick, his cheeks were even a slight pink. Gavriel had somehow acquired heavy-looking black motorcycle boots. She wasn’t sure if he’d had them on when she’d woken up at the Last Stop, but he hadn’t been wearing them at the gas station. She remembered his bare feet and the cracked bottle glass he hadn’t seemed to notice.