The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (22 page)

Hopefully, Pearl would like that. Hopefully, Pearl would understand.

A few minutes later, Zara came back with a big silver tray, piled with a fairly random assortment of things: black olives, mandarin orange slices, pickled beets, baby corn, smoked oysters still in the can, a block of misshapen cheese, and a hunk of stale and slightly burnt bread. Tana popped three olives into her mouth, along with a stalk of vinegary baby corn.

Rufus got out a bunch of little glasses from a cabinet, along with a bottle of yellowish and slightly cloudy liquid. He poured with his back to them and then brought the shots over to everyone, like a butler. She
thought abruptly of the drinking game she and Aidan had played at the farmhouse, The Lady or The Tiger. She didn’t remember who’d come up with it, only that their friends had been playing it since freshman year of high school, after they’d talked about the story in English class. What she did recall was Pauline standing unsteadily on the granite island in Rachel Meltzer’s house, red Solo cup in hand, declaiming a limerick of unknown provenance:

There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They returned from a ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

“What is it?” Aidan asked, holding his glass up to the light and frowning at it.

“You know how in prison they make Pruno?” said Zara. “Well, this is our Coldtown specialty—our very own moonshine. Regular old white sugar, baker’s yeast, and water. We run it through a still, bottle it, and sell it.”

Tana sniffed hers. It seared her nose hairs.
Tiger
, she chose silently and drank. Immediately, she began to cough.

Aidan raised his eyebrows. “What’s it supposed to taste like?”

“Satan’s balls,” Rufus said, and they all laughed. He raised his glass. “To bravery, because you’ve got to be brave to drink this!”

Christobel and Zara threw theirs back, then Aidan, then Midnight and Winter. They all winced, and Zara howled with laughter.

“Burns all the way down,” Rufus said.

“And keeps burning,” Aidan put in, but he was smiling.

For a moment, Tana felt light-headed. A cold shudder went through her body, and she was reminded of the infection lurking in her blood.
I have the opposite of a fever
, she thought, and shook it off.

The food was weird, but it was food. She stuffed herself with it, gnawing on the bread and spreading mandarin slices over it as if they were jam. The shots got easier to knock back, too, although the more she drank, the dizzier she felt.

After the third, she forced herself to stand. “I think maybe I better lay down. I don’t feel so good.”

“Well, on that note,” said Rufus, a smile stretching his mouth. “Let’s show everyone to their rooms.”

Christobel and Zara stood, too, glancing covertly toward Aidan.

In that moment, Tana knew something was definitely wrong. What she saw passing between them was more than laughing behind someone’s back; it was scheming.

“Come with me,” Christobel told Aidan, her silky gown skimming over her body as she walked toward the stairs. He started after her when Tana grabbed his hand.

“Wait,” she said, her mouth feeling numb enough that she wasn’t sure she could get the words out. “Wait.”

He looked back at her, confused and very drunk.

But once she had his attention, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would prove something bad was about to happen. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother them—I mean, they said we could just break in anywhere, right? We can go find our own place.”

Aidan frowned, looking at Christobel and then back at Tana, as though he was trying to puzzle out her meaning. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I feel weird,” he said, and she realized why it was so hard to think.

They’d been drugged.

Tana watched helplessly as he climbed the stairs, Christobel in the lead and Zara following, pushing him along. She didn’t know how to save Aidan; she turned toward the open door, toward escape and the cool morning air that might clear her head. She took two faltering steps. Rufus kicked the door shut.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

Midnight started to laugh from the couch. “Your face!” she said. “Oh my god, Tana, I wish you could see your face! I should have recorded it. Don’t be scared—I mean, really, you’d think after traveling with a
vampire
, you wouldn’t let us rattle you.”

Stupid
, Tana thought.
I am so stupid. I got tired and distracted and sad. I stopped paying attention.
“What are you going to do to us?”

“She’s infected, too, you know,” Winter said. “We should put them in together.”

“Really?” Rufus looked over at Midnight for confirmation. “Her?”

She stretched out her skinny-jean-covered legs on the couch. Her velvet top slipped to one side, showing the bandage. “I guess we’ll see.”

“Come upstairs,” Christobel called to Tana.

With Rufus and Winter leading her, she had no choice.

The windowless bedroom contained a mattress and a few blankets piled haphazardly on it. A brass chandelier. A scratched old skylight with water damage at the corners showed a small patch of blue
sky and a lot of brown leaves. The door was big and old, with an electronic cat hatch in it.

Now, when it was too late, she had a moment of terrible clarity.
Two infected people. Eventually, we snap and attack each other, taste human blood. Then we’re not human anymore. Then we’ll be willing to bite them. Of course, that’s what they want.

She heard locks turn, one after the next. On the other side, someone started giggling.

Thirty brass locks with thirty brass keys.
Like in her dream. Fury pierced her then.

She punched the door, kicked it, threw her whole body against it, but she was weak and everything was getting cloudy. “I’m going to kill you!” she yelled through the opening, her voice coming out slow and strange. “Open this door so I can kill you.”

Aidan tried to rise and collapsed heavily onto the mattress, chuckling, obviously not understanding half of what was going on. “You never give up, do you?”

With her last bit of strength, she crawled onto the mattress, which smelled like cigarettes and old perfume. Curling up next to Aidan, with daylight streaming down from above, she passed out before she could answer him.

CHAPTER 20

Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.

—Jean Paul Richter

T
he Monday morning after Tana went missing, Pearl woke up early. Her father was at the kitchen table, head pillowed on his hands, sleeping in the same clothes he’d worn the night before. A half-finished coffee rested next to him, a filmy ring formed around the inside of the mug.

Most days on summer vacation, she’d gone over to a friend’s house to swim in their pool, or shop for cheap earrings at the mall, or imitate dance moves from YouTube videos, but today she didn’t want to go anywhere. Her stomach felt sour with nerves.

She poured herself a bowl of Cheerios and added milk. Carrying it into the living room, she set it down on the coffee table and switched on the TV from the couch, flicking through channels until she came to a show she recognized—
Hemlok: Vampire Bounty Hunter.

All the neighborhood kids had been super into Hemlok when they were younger. For the last three whole summers, Pearl had played bounty hunters and vampires with them, running through backyards with a branch in her hand, holding it up like a stake. She’d even dressed up like Hemlok one Halloween, although Mike Chavez told her that it wasn’t a good costume for a girl. But in the last year, Hemlok had been on at the same time as another show that she liked better, so she hadn’t seen any of the new episodes. And this summer, boys and girls didn’t play with each other anyway.

But right then, the familiarity of the show was reassuring, so she left it on.

“The thing about vampires,” Hemlok said from his equipment room, strapping stakes carved from rosewood and hawthorn onto a bandolier, their tips capped with plastic so they didn’t go blunt during travel. “They’re all messed up in the head. They’re hungry all the time. We gotta think like they do, think like predators, and outsmart them at their own game. They might be faster and stronger, but we’re still human, and that’s what makes us better, that’s what counts.”

The show cut to him sitting in his truck with his assistant, Jeana. She was drinking from a Big Gulp, in white jeans and a cutoff shirt studded with rhinestones, her hair teased so big that it hit the roof. They were parked in front of a strip club, loud music pumping from the speakers. A rerun, Pearl realized; an okay one, but not supergreat.

“We think we’ve spotted her inside that building,” Jeana said, in her exaggerated camera-friendly whisper. “There’s a door around back, so we’re going to have to get one of us on either side of the building and see if we can’t flush her out.”

Before he started vampire hunting, Hemlok used to be a wrestler. He quit (although some people say he was thrown out of the league) after an opponent died in the ring. Pearl knew all this from the Hemlok fan club she’d joined when she was nine, around the same time that Hemlok started going on talk shows and telling the story, weeping as he explained that the death of that man was the moment he realized he needed to change his life.

Looking at the screen, Pearl wondered for the first time if the vampire was scared.

Before, she’d always figured that good vampires went to one of the Coldtowns or someplace they were supposed to be and that bad vampires stayed behind to attack people. But now that it was Aidan, who’d always been nice to her, and her big sister, Tana, out in the world, sick or newly turned, she couldn’t think of things that way anymore.

Of course, there were bad vampires like the ones who killed those kids in Tana’s class. Maybe the vampire that Hemlok was hunting was like that. But how could he tell?

Back on the show, Hemlok was getting extra supplies out of the back of his truck.

“There’s three ways to kill a vampire and be sure it’s dead,” Hemlok said. “You put wood through its heart, you set it on fire, or you chop off its head. Anything else is fighting a gunslinger with an open-handed slap. ’Course some people stand by bleeding them out, but to me, that’s like a silver nail in the head, might hold them for a while, but ain’t permanent.”

“And don’t forget sunlight, baby,” said Jeana, zipping herself into a chain mail shark suit. “Sunlight sure kills ’em.”

He rolled his eyes. This was a big part of the show, the relationship between the two of them. “Nobody looking to kill a vampire is going to be like, oh yeah, I guess I better get out some sunlight. That’s no weapon.”

“It kills ’em.” She tossed her hair. “That’s all I’m saying. Kills ’em good.”

He grunted and picked up a clear bottle, screwing off the top. “Now some of you been asking about which holy waters or wild rose waters to use on stakes or why I use holy water at all, since there’s been a whole bunch of hubbub about how it doesn’t really do anything. Well, first of all, I always use oil, not water, ’cause it seeps into the wood better and stays there. And I use rose oil that’s been blessed, so that’s double duty.

“And for all you people who say holy whatever doesn’t help taking down vamps, I’m out here in the field—so who are you going to believe, me or some scientists?”

Leaving that question hanging in the air, he hefted up a giant crossbow, its body carved into a crucifix. “Now, another common viewer question is which of my weapons is my favorite.” A wooden stake sat cocked and ready in place of a quarrel. “That’s this baby. She can drop a vampire from thirty feet.”

“It’s time to start killing,” Jeana said, tapping a white ceramic watch.

He smiled at the camera. “Okay, let’s roll.”

Pearl felt along the couch for the controller. They were almost to the part where the vampire came out from the bar. There was a chase after that, and Jeana almost got bit on the arm, but her chain bodysuit
protected her. Hemlok wound up shooting the vampire with the crossbow and sawing off her head for the bounty.