The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (23 page)

Pearl didn’t want to see it. Not right then, after all the stuff the police had said about her sister, not when her dad had come back from the hardware store with wild rose vines for the lintels and a big blowtorch he didn’t explain. She clicked off the television and opened her laptop, booting up the feed for Lucien Moreau’s party.

Her dad hated that she watched stuff like this, where the vampires weren’t portrayed like villains, but today she didn’t care.

She brought another spoonful of cereal to her mouth as the inside of his mansion came on the screen. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, with its gold damask wallpaper and candles on sconces jutting out from the walls. Elisabet, Lucien’s consort, was on the screen, her beautiful dark hair pulled back into a chignon and the front of her dress wet with blood. Her red lipstick made her fangs seem even brighter when she smiled. Lucien Moreau, elegantly dressed in cream, his hair like spun gold, caught her up in his arms, whirling her around. His mouth was stained equally bright when he brought it to hers.

Pearl smiled.

That was where her sister was going. Tana was going to live like that, like a princess in a faraway city. Maybe, someday, Pearl could even join her. And once she did, she just knew that everything would be perfect forever.

CHAPTER 21

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

—Emily Dickinson

W
hen Tana woke, the sky overhead was just beginning to darken. She could smell onions frying and heard music playing. People shouted to one another on the street, laughter in their voices. All the kind of stuff she might have expected to find in every city except this one.

Aidan was sleeping beside her, his jaws slightly apart.

She stretched, feeling the stiffness of her muscles. She was still groggy and for a moment imagined putting her head down and just sleeping on and on. But if Aidan opened his eyes and saw her like that, all curled up and delicious, like a blood-filled muffin, she doubted he’d resist biting. She pushed herself to her feet. The more she remembered where she was and what had happened, the more fear pushed away the last dregs of drugged lethargy.

Her purse was still slung across her body and she unclasped it, pushing aside everything that wasn’t the small manila envelope. Panic sped her heart and made her almost too afraid to look. But the marker was still there, tucked away safe. No one had taken it. For a moment, she actually thought nice things about Midnight and Winter—they might not care if she died, but at least they hadn’t robbed her.

She held the marker up to the light.

Just a little larger than a quarter and even lighter than one, it was terrifying to think that this gleaming coin, this object that was supposed to save her life, was small enough to drop through a drain by accident or slip through a hole in a pair of jeans. Bright silver with gold at the heart where the circuits were, surrounded by small angled cutouts in the metal, it looked like nothing so much as an old-fashioned subway token. She closed her hand into a fist over it, tight, then put it away.

She went over the rest of her inventory. She had the clothes on her back, her boots from home, and her handbag. That held the religious symbols and rose water she’d found at the party, a random assortment of cash rolled up in a brown paper bag, and the garnet locket with the broken clasp that Gavriel had given her in the parking lot.

At the thought of him, she pressed her tongue absently against her teeth, making the bite there sting anew. It throbbed along with the beat of her heart, drumming in her ears. When she realized what she was doing, shame heated her face. It was bad enough that she’d kissed him
like that
, but it was the same impulse as hitting the gas on an icy road, and she couldn’t let herself forget it.

He wasn’t going to save her. He didn’t even know where she was, no less that she needed saving. They weren’t going to sneak out of Coldtown to have mad, bad adventures together where he recited lots of poetry and visited Pauline at drama camp. If he liked her in some strange, savage way, it wasn’t the way humans liked one another and it wasn’t the way people in storybooks liked one another, either.

Stop being stupid
, she told herself, even though it was much too late for that. She’d been a hundred kinds of stupid already.

“Tana.” Aidan rolled over on the mattress. His face was gentle with sleep, his hair messy, but his eyes watched her with a disturbing intensity. He slowly shifted into a sitting position, and she noticed that his lips had taken on a blue tint. He gave a long, shuddering sigh. It was almost forty hours since he’d been bitten, and he was looking ever worse as the hours ticked by. “What do you think Rufus and Midnight and those other psychos are going to do now?”

“Wait,” she said grimly, and after a moment, he seemed to realize what she meant. She said it again, though, just to be sure. “They’re going to wait.”

“I won’t—” he began, then stopped himself. The words were hollow anyway. They both knew he would.

“Don’t worry about it. We’re going to get out of here,” she told him, although there was a flatness to her tone. Even she wasn’t sure she believed it.

Leaning back against the wall, he didn’t seem ready to attack her yet, but she wondered how long she had. He was still just waking up. “Haven’t you ever thought about it—being a vampire?” he asked.

“
Everybody’s
thought about it,” said Tana.

“I mean, what with your mom and all—” He stopped abruptly, as though he’d just realized he’d stumbled into dangerous territory. He gave her one of his old, charming half smiles, a teasing one. “And you
kissed
a vampire. That’s crazy. That’s not usually what they do with their mouths, you know. I’m kind of jealous.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Like you care what I do. You dumped me, remember?”

“First of all,” Aidan said, giving her his most insouciant smile and holding up a single finger, “I never said I was jealous of
him
. Maybe I was jealous of
you
for getting all his attention. He’s not a bad-looking guy, if you don’t mind a side serving of lunatic raving. Good mouth.”

That made her laugh, a real, relaxed laugh, like in the old days.

“Secondly,” he said, holding up another finger, “you scared the hell out of me when we were dating, Tana. I was used to having girlfriends who’d yell at me or get upset about the stupid stuff I did, or try to save me from myself. You weren’t like that. Sometimes I felt like you were a better me than I was.”

“I didn’t know what we were doing a lot of the time,” she protested. “I didn’t even—”

There was a rustling sound at the door, cutting off her words. A girl’s hand snaked through the plastic flap, a dozen silver rings on her fingers and fresh glossy green polish on her nails. She was holding a wooden bowl. A bowl filled so full of red liquid that setting it down caused some to spatter over the floorboards, sinking into the grooves of the wood. The scent of it was iron and basements and losing baby teeth so her big-girl teeth could come in. It was skinned knees and Gavriel’s mouth on hers. It was smeared walls and staring eyes.

Tana scrambled to her feet.

Blood.

For a long moment, she and Aidan looked at the bowl. Tana felt hypnotized by the sight of it. The slick redness was as dark and deep as a pool of melted garnets.

If she drank it, she would turn into a monster. She let herself imagine that for a moment, imagining her new monster body and monster eyes and monster thirst. She imagined Midnight and Winter, Rufus and Christobel and Zara opening the door to the room and finding a monster-girl inside.

And if she didn’t drink and Aidan did, he would die and wake again—newly turned, ravenous, and alone with her.

“See?” An unfamiliar girl’s voice came from the other side of the door. Probably Christobel or Zara. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt. We didn’t want to have to lock you up. We donated that blood, all of us together, pulled it out of our veins with needles. And now we can’t go to the clubs tonight, but see? We’re worthy. Drink it and you can come out of the little room. Drink it and we’ll all be friends again.”

Thicker than water.
That’s what people said about blood. It looked it, too, viscous and syrupy. Tana could imagine the silky texture of it on her tongue, the warm saltiness, how it would stain her lips and teeth.

“Maybe we should,” Aidan said, his voice going low, seductive and seduced. He took a step toward it. “We could do it together, like a suicide pact. Except we’ll never die, Tana.”

Walking quickly across the floor, her heart hammering, she
picked up the bowl and flung it as hard as she could against the wall. The wood cracked, two halves bouncing off the floor where they fell. Bits of plaster rained after it.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Aidan said, in a tone of pure astonished frustration. He walked toward the wall as though drawn.

Tana slumped, sliding down to the floor, where she sat staring at the blood painting the wall. The stain seemed to make a shape like a great bird, feathers dripping down as it flew up into the sky.

She couldn’t quite believe she’d done it, either.

“I’m not going to get any better.” His voice rose, staring at the red. “I’m so Cold, Tana, and I am only going to get Colder.”

She slammed her hand against the floor, trying to focus her thoughts. “Gavriel let you drink his blood, right? Back at the Last Stop. And it helped. All we need is more.”

He laughed, but not as though he thought it was funny. Not as though he thought it was a possibility, either. “The most precious stuff in Coldtown and you’re going to just
ask
for some… like you’re borrowing a cup of sugar?” He reached out a hand to the wall, streaked with blood. “Give up. I came knowing I was going to be a vampire. What’s the point of waiting? We’re not going to be fine, Tana. We’re never going to be fine ever again.”

She wondered what it was like to bite someone. She thought about the expression on Gavriel’s face when he’d sunk his teeth into Aidan, the way his mouth had moved on Aidan’s throat and his fingers had dug into Aidan’s skin. It was as though some serene frenzy had come over him. He looked transcendent, a dreamer not yet awakened.

Her stomach clenched just thinking about it, a combination of desire and dread that made her wonder if it was a symptom of the infection. She shouldn’t find the memory of that anything but horrific. But putting aside what she should feel, oh yeah, she got why Aidan might be embarrassed at the memory of drinking from Gavriel’s wrist.

That thought wouldn’t leave her head as she watched Aidan brush his fingers over the wall and bring them—painted red now—to his mouth.

“
Aidan
,” she said softly, hopelessly, just before he licked them clean, one by one.

He made a sound in the back of his throat and knelt down, pressing his lips to the wall, laving it with his tongue. Already, he seemed inhuman, a creature feeding instead of a boy she’d known.

Tana inched away, putting as much distance between them as the small room would allow. A shaky breath escaped her mouth, sounding like a sob.

“Okay!” she shouted, her voice coming unsteadily. “Midnight, are you out there? Okay, he did it. He caved. You can let us out now. You can let him out.”

She heard only the sound of murmuring voices floating up from the rooms below.

There was a commercial that ran sometimes on television, especially during daytime soap operas when moms might be watching. It showed chicken nuggets on a plate in front of a human boy and a blood milk shake in front of a slavering vampire girl tied to her chair with ropes. The human messily gorged on the nuggets in the time
the vampire just got started on her milk shake. Then voice-over guy said, “Shipton’s nuggets will make your kid hungrier than a newborn vampire.”

The joke’s on you
, she told herself, remembering.
Nothing is as hungry as a newborn vampire.

He was going to die. And before he came back to life as a vampire, if Tana wanted to live, she was going to have to kill him just like her dad had killed her mom. Kill him before he attacked her with all that new strength.