The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (17 page)

The woman’s eyebrows went up. “You some kind of baby bounty hunter?”

Tana sighed. “We just need forms for going inside, and we want to turn in a vampire for a marker.”

“De-registration?” Now the woman shook her head. When she spoke, she sounded tired. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t want to go into Coldtown. Take your bounty for the vampire and live another day. One marker isn’t going to get the both of you out anyway.”

Tana looked at the clock. “There’s four of us, not counting the vampire, so please just get us the paperwork. We know what we’re doing.”

The woman sighed. “Everyone’s always in such a hurry to rush off to their own death. Well, hold your horses a minute. We had a woman and her three children—can you imagine!—through two nights ago, so I know the packets are around here somewhere. I just need to find my notary seal.”

While she rustled around at her desk, Winter circled the room, stopping in front of a bulletin board with a sea of posters tacked up, one stapled over the next. Most advertised higher bounties for particularly famous or dangerous vampires. A few were from parents looking for someone to take on a commission to buy back their child with a marker—and begging for a hunter who’d charge them a price they could pay. Some promised rewards other than cash: cars, property, old engagement rings, stocks, and even the vaguely ominous
ANYTHING WE HAVE, ANYTHING YOU MIGHT WANT, ANYTHING AT ALL
.

“Did you ever see the Matilda feed from a couple of years back?”
Winter asked suddenly, looking toward Tana. The spikes of his blue hair had wilted, and his eyeliner was a little smeared under one eye, as though maybe he’d rubbed it without thinking.

Tana shook her head.

“There was this vampire, Matilda, who came to Coldtown. She infected another girl by accident—well, the girl
wanted
to be infected—but anyway, Matilda detoxed her and filmed the whole crazy twelve and a half weeks. And the part that was really fascinating was that sometimes she would sit in front of the camera and talk about what it was like being a vampire. She told us about the people she killed, what blood tasted like, how her vision was different, how
she
was different. She wanted to warn everyone, she said, that being turned wasn’t like the Eternal Ball or the Coldtown feeds made it look. It wasn’t glamorous or special or anything.”

Tana watched his face as he spoke. “And you still want to be a vampire? I mean, that’s why you’re both going inside?”

“Yeah.” Winter’s voice was firm, but there was something in his eyes—fear and a kind of awful, drowning look, like a man who is slipping deeper and deeper into quicksand and knows that struggling will just make things worse. “Messed up, right? But somehow Matilda made it seem real—like since it
wasn’t
glamorous and special, then maybe I
could
have it. But I know it’s what every wannabe coming here wants. Most of them are going to die without getting it. Get used for blood or get turned and find out they’re not any better at their new life than they were at their old one.”

Tana didn’t say anything.

“You think we’re going to wind up like them, but we’re not.”

“I don’t think anything,” said Tana.

He sighed as if he was annoyed but kept talking anyway. “Midnight was obsessed with it before me—immortality, the dark gift—you should have seen the walls of her room when she was twelve. Scrawled with poetry about eternity and piled with animal teeth, pastel candies in the shape of coffins, pages torn from Edgar Allan Poe books and pasted over her dressers and spattered with her blood. But I was the one that started going on message boards and meeting other kids who wanted to run away to Coldtown. After a while, Midnight wanted us to make our own board, so we could talk about the real stuff—and eventually we realized that it was time to put up or shut up. So we know what we’re doing and even if you think—” He stopped speaking abruptly, ripping a page off the wall.

“What is it?” Tana asked.

The woman walked back to the counter, nodding to herself and muttering. She put down a couple of forms in different colors. “This isn’t something you do on a lark. Or because you’re sad. Or because you’re young and stupid. It’s forever.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Tana said coldly, gathering up the papers.

“You kids don’t really have a vampire, do you? That’s nothing to joke around about—you put down false information and that’s a crime. You’d need to present the vampire or, if it was a kill, you need to have preserved the head.”

“Oh, we have a vampire all right,” Winter said distractedly, darting a glance toward the door. “In fact, why don’t I go get everybody? You can start the paperwork, Tana.”

“Okay,” she said, puzzled.

On his way out, he shoved a piece of crumpled paper into her hand, the same page he’d pulled off the wall.

“I didn’t know, honest I didn’t,” he whispered. “I thought maybe—but I swear, I wasn’t sure.”

She tried to focus as the gray-haired clerk explained acceptable forms of identification and where Tana would have to stand to get her photo taken and the dotted lines on which she needed to sign, but it was difficult. She kept getting distracted and looking back at the poster she was smoothing out, as though the image on it might change.

The paper promised a $75,000 bounty for the kill or capture of the Thorn of Istra. But it wasn’t the amount of money that shocked her—it was the picture.

Despite obviously being the blurry copy of a copy of a copy, she knew him immediately. Gavriel looked as though he’d stepped out of the late nineteenth century, in a smart suit on an old Parisian street, a bow tie over the starched white collar and a derby half hiding his black curls. Gavriel, looking directly at the camera with a sneer on his wide lips and eyes that smoldered with banked fire. Gavriel, holding a walking stick in one hand as though he were going to whip the photographer across the jaw with its silvery handle.

Her first thought was,
what a funny mistake
. The Thorn was hunting Gavriel, had broken out of his cage underneath Paris to find Gavriel. And then she remembered, as she stared at the paper, how when Aidan had insisted the vampires whispering through the door were threatening to take Gavriel back to the Thorn, Gavriel had said,
no, not exactly. He’d tried to correct Aidan, but she hadn’t been paying attention.

No, not exactly.

The Thorn of Istra, the mad vampire. She thought of the grainy video of him she had seen, head tipped back, so covered in blood that she hadn’t remembered his features, hadn’t remembered him as looking like anything but a monster, laughing, endlessly laughing.

Mad as a dog. Mad as a god.

Gavriel.

CHAPTER 16

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

A
ll Tana’s holidays were always awful. Her mother’s parents would come and hug Tana and hug Pearl and talk about what a tragedy it was that their mother would never see how big they got or how pretty they were. Her other grandparents—her dad’s parents—would say little digging things about the state of the house and the girls’ wrinkled dresses. They would sigh over how the green beans were overdone or the roast was burnt. Tana would hear them late at night telling her dad that he owed it to his daughters to remarry—that it would give them stability and self-esteem. That it would help Tana forget.

Their father had grown up in Pittsburgh. He got a fake ID at fifteen so that he could work in one of the two remaining steel mills with his brothers and father. He worked hard and managed to put
himself through two years of community college, majoring in business. From there, he got accepted at a state school in Philadelphia, working as a janitor at a hospital to pay his way.

He met Tana’s mother on the way back from the fireworks on the Fourth of July. She was swimming in a city fountain while her art school friends only dipped their feet in. She looked like a beautiful nymph from a painting he’d seen in one of his classes. He waded into the fountain in his clothes, grinning like an idiot, and told her so. A few months later, they were married.

He’d loved her more than he’d ever loved anything. She had been wild and full of manic energy, a whirlwind that could sometimes crash into deep depressions. But other times she’d been gloriously full of fun. Without her at the center of everything, he was lost. No matter what Tana and Pearl’s grandparents said, he wasn’t interested in remarrying. Sometimes he went on dates, but they always ended quickly. He would come home and head into his old bedroom—a place that was left just as it had been since his wife died—for a while, before retreating to the couch in the den, where he’d slept since her death. The holidays stayed miserable.

Tana’s father was the kind of man who believed in doing the right thing, no matter what. Working hard, staying as honest as you could, doing what had to be done. Doing the right thing because it was right. And he believed that the right thing was obvious to anyone who took a minute to think about it.

When his wife got bitten by a vampire and her fever spiked and her skin became chilled, when she begged him not to turn her in, he knew what he had to do. He didn’t care about the government
billboards and TV spots admonishing people to observe the quarantine. The rich bribed private hospitals to lock up their loved ones in very private rooms. And he knew there were plenty of other working stiffs doing what he did: turning their basements into makeshift prisons with reinforced doors and heavy chains.

The way he saw it, locking up his wife when she’d gone Cold was the right thing to do, so he did it.

Saving his elder daughter from bleeding to death was the right thing to do, too. To keep her safe, he had to kill his infected wife, so he severed her neck with a shovel.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t hesitate. He had hated it, but he’d done it just the same. Even though it was a terrible thing. Even though he lived in the past now, plodding through life as if against a heavy storm, so distracted by grief that he could barely remember to do the grocery shopping or turn off the stove after he’d warmed some packaged dinner.

Tana wondered if he had a fantasy like hers, one where he had been the one who was bitten, one where he and his beloved vampire wife were still together. One where they hunted the streets and swam in fountains under a fat, bright moon.

Growing up, Tana thought that she and her dad didn’t have much in common. Tana wasn’t ever sure what the right thing was, but out here on the road, she couldn’t help thinking of him. She wondered whether, if push came to shove and she discovered what it was she was supposed to do, she could be like him and be strong enough to do it.

CHAPTER 17