The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (19 page)

With the sound of metal grating against metal, the cage began to slide abruptly downward. Tana’s stomach lurched. Midnight made a small cry of surprise. As they came away from the wall, the door fell from the top, closing with a rusty clang. The cage was something she’d never seen before, not in any of the photos from Coldtown. It felt like something from another time.

“This is crazy,” Tana said dizzily.

Midnight looked a little awed herself. “It’s because they don’t want any doors on the wall to open right onto the city.”

The streets below seemed mostly abandoned, although a few stragglers had stopped to watch their descent from a distance. Tana looked out at the city. She felt as though she had stumbled into a world alien and yet familiar. She’d seen it on the news, seen it in the background of the vids of runaways and in the photographs of daring journalists. She had seen the blackened, burnt remains of old buildings captured in pictures—seen what had once been a row of storefronts, now with spiderweb shatters in the glass, with blankets and plastic bags covering the empty frames of windows, and the jagged
outlines of edifices stretching out toward the far walls. Spires whose panes flickered with light. Great domed buildings pulsing with distant music. A landscape gone feral.

“Hey,” Midnight said, pointing down the side of the wall. “Look—the boys.”

Tana turned slowly, trying not to make the thing sway more than it was. Aidan, Winter, and Gavriel were in another cage suspended beneath theirs—one that swung in a pendulum-like motion, but went no lower. Gavriel stood with his fingers through the bars, looking out at the orange haze in the east with a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Winter stood next to him, with Aidan on the floor, his feet dangling through the bars.

“I think ours is broken,” Aidan called up to them.

“They mess with vampires like that, I heard,” said Midnight, softly, nodding to the wall. “They’ll wait as long as they can.”

In the dim light, Tana saw scorch marks along the cinder block exterior, ones that seemed to have flared up as if something had been very close to it while burning.

“You’ve got to get out of there,” Tana called. “I really think—”

Gavriel tore the gate off the hinges.

Midnight screamed at the suddenness of it. One moment, the vampire had been looking out at the sky and the next he had peeled back the metal with his hands. Now Tana looked at the warped remains of the hinges, pulled like taffy, and then at Gavriel’s face, transformed by whatever power let him do that. His mouth gaped open, fangs evident. When he looked up at her, hunger twisted his features, and she was suddenly glad to be far from him.

He jumped down to the dirt below, landing as easily as a cat.

A few moments later, the cage that held Tana and Midnight hit the ground, too, knocking Tana to her knees. There was a loud buzzing and their door opened. Midnight staggered out, pulling her garbage bag behind her as her brother lowered himself on a loose piece of chain.

They stumbled through a section of road that was probably once a roundabout but was now an asphalt courtyard, an island of overgrown shrubs and weeds at its center.

Aidan followed them, falling clumsily. He got up and brushed himself off, looking back at the wall with horror, as though the reality of their situation had just settled over him.

“Quick,” Midnight said, pulling her brother to his feet. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where are we going?” Aidan called as he ran. He reached for Tana’s hand. She took it and they raced after Midnight and Winter.

The streets had been paved a long time ago, but they were cracked now, with deep pits. Tana had to watch each step as she moved, fast as she dared, skipping after Aidan. She looked back once to see that Gavriel was still with them, his face blank.

He must be very, very hungry
, she thought.
Very, very, very hungry.

From the windows of houses, from behind drapes and blinds and shutters, they were being watched. Watched as they stumbled past mounds of refuse, past rats that scattered at their approach and gleaming blackflies that rose like an oily mist off rotting food and the long-dead body of a dog.

They turned onto a narrow street, Winter and Midnight dragging their garbage bags and suitcase, looking shaken.

Halfway down the block, Midnight leaned over and braced her hands on her thighs, breathing hard. Her hair hung down, the shadows turning it dark. “We have to figure out where we are,” she said.

“Dawn’s coming,” said Tana, letting go of Aidan. She was winded, too, and leaned against the brick wall. The building opposite it was covered in graffiti, elaborate paintings of dragons of which she could make out only a few details in the gloom.

Midnight knelt down and unzipped her case. “Just give me a minute. I downloaded a bunch of different sketches kids uploaded of the streets. They are the only maps we’ve got.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Winter said tonelessly. He wasn’t talking to them, Tana could tell. Maybe he wasn’t talking to anybody.

Gavriel moved beside Tana. In the dark, she couldn’t see him very well. He just looked like a pretty boy, tall and lanky. She thought again of the crumpled paper in her purse and of him, caged beneath a cemetery. How long had he been there? How long had he looked just as he did now? A hundred years? Two hundred? Could he even remember the press of time? Maybe having stepped outside of it would drive anybody crazy.

“I must go,” Gavriel said, pushing back ash black hair and looking at her with the utter sincerity of the drunk or deranged. “You will take care, won’t you? This city is hungry.”

“You’re going now?” Tana asked him. She should have been relieved, knowing what he was and what he was capable of, but she didn’t want him to go. The thought of being alone with Aidan and Midnight and Winter filled her with a nameless anxiety. “It’s almost dawn. You don’t even know where you’re going.”

He smiled, a real smile, the kind real boys gave real girls. “It’s been a very long time since anyone worried for me.”

Ahead of them, Midnight was looking at her tablet. Its glow lit her face from beneath, as though she were going to tell a ghost story.

“They have a friend—” Tana began.

“I have a friend, too,” said Gavriel. “And I mean to kill him.”

“Oh.” Tana took a step back. He was on the run, the same as before, even if the reasons were different. She thought of the vampires at Lance’s sundown party, who were doubtless planning to drag him back to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery where they’d torture him until he got even crazier than he was now. Until his mind was so lost that he could no longer hold on to it even some of the time. He’d broken out once, but she doubted he could do it again. She made her voice as firm as possible. “Don’t let them catch you.”

He hesitated, clearly surprised by her words. Then he smiled again, inclining his head in a shallow bow, acknowledging everything she’d left unsaid. “Traveling with you was a delight worth any delay, but I can delay no longer.”

Midnight straightened up. “Okay, I figured out where we have to go. It’s not far.” She slung her garbage bag back over her shoulder and began to march down the alley. “Come on,” she said, looking back at Tana and Gavriel.

Aidan followed closely, with a worried look at the sky. “Is he going to be—”

“Tana,” Winter called. “We’re moving.”

“Remember what you told me in the car?” she said to Gavriel. “Death’s favorites don’t die.”

“I am no favorite.” As he said the words, his expression changed. His fingers closed on her shoulder. His eyes glittered like gems as he bent toward her. “But let me have one last thing I do not deserve.”

For a moment, she shrank back automatically, thinking he was going to bite her. Then, stunned, she realized that wasn’t what he intended to do at all. His lips brushed hers lightly, as though he was giving her the chance to push him away. She squeezed her eyes shut, to blot out the terrible thing she was about to do, and pulled him closer.

She wasn’t supposed to want this.

When he kissed her again, she gasped against his cold mouth—her breath held too long since he didn’t need to breathe at all—her tongue sliding against his, brushing against sharp teeth. He was careful, but she still felt the drag of their points against her lower lip. The cool press of his body made her skin feel fevered.

He pulled away from her and touched his mouth, his face full of a gentle amazement. “I didn’t remember it was like that.”

Tana’s heartbeat seemed to have moved into her whole body and thrilled it with a single speeding pulse. Everything was a little blurred at the edges and she wanted—she wanted him to feel like she did, like he’d done something forbidden, wanted to give him something he’d like and
really
wasn’t supposed to have, something that would feel wrong, something he wanted.

“Kiss me again,” she whispered, reaching up, her fingers sliding through his hair. She almost didn’t know herself as she moved against him.

He bent helplessly toward her.

She bit her tongue. Bit it hard, the pain chasing through her nerve endings and alchemizing into something close to pleasure. When her mouth opened under his, it was flooded with welling blood.

He groaned at the taste of it, red eyes going wide with surprise and something like fear. His hands gripped her arms as he pushed her body back against the brick of the wall, holding her in place. He’d been careful before, but he wasn’t being careful now as he licked her mouth; and it amazed her as much as it terrified her. He kissed her ferociously, savagely, their lips sliding together with bruising fervor. The pain in her tongue became a distant throbbing. Her fingers dug into the muscles of his back, their bodies pressed so close that he must have felt every hitch in her breath, every shuddering beat of her heart. And as scared of him as she had been, right then she was more frightened of herself.

Gavriel reeled back from her, lips ruddy. He wiped his mouth against the back of his hand, her blood smearing over his skin. Gazing at her for a long moment with something like horror, as though he was seeing her for the first time, he spoke. “You are more dangerous than daybreak.”

Before Tana could reply, he stepped into the lengthening shadows of morning and was gone.

CHAPTER 18

I want to be all used up when I die.

—George Bernard Shaw

W
hen Gavriel was young, Russia was nearing the end of her Golden Age. Revolution was coming, but the aristocracy pretended otherwise, swilling Champagne and speaking in perfectly accented French in their gilt parlors. The books of the day gloried in the nobility of suicide, willful decay, and romantic melancholy.

At twenty, Gavriel, called Gavriil then, had inherited his grandfather’s voluptuous mouth and flashing eyes, but he didn’t seem to be living down to that inheritance. He was the middle child, with a little sister called Katya, sparkling and sharp as a diamond in the Imperial Crown, and an older brother named Aleksander, who was constantly in debt to decadence. Aleksander was a drunk, a gambler, and a womanizer; each a costly habit on its own. Combined, they threatened to bankrupt the family.

Their father, the vikont, was three years in the grave when their mother begged Gavriel to talk with his brother and coax him to be more reasonable in his debauches. But it was impossible to convince Aleksander of anything that inconvenienced him now that he’d inherited the title and all the land that came with it.

“You are the good brother,” Aleksander would say. “There need only be one of those in a family, don’t you think? Two is indecent.”

“I will switch places with you if you like, Sasha,” said Gavriel. “Irresponsibility is a younger son’s portion.”

Aleksander would hear none of it. And, in truth, Gavriel was too distracted to make much argument. He had fallen in love with a girl named Roza, met through a friend’s sister. Roza had amber eyes and a mass of hair the dark blond of buckwheat honey. When she’d glanced shyly in his direction that first time, a half smile on her mouth, he found that he could barely catch his breath.