The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (25 page)

“And before you ask why I think he’s the Thorn of Istra, it’s because the post says so. The girl claims you and your friends—including the Thorn—picked up her brother and her at some kind of crap tourist place.”

Tana stared at the phone.

“You can read it yourself if you want.” Jameson forked up some eggs. “But basically it says you survived a massacre, where you met the Thorn. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, but her brother figured it out at the gate when he saw a wanted sign. Let’s just say that lots of people were interested in her post.” Jameson’s voice was neutral, his tattooed arms resting on the table. She studied them—words in large ornate script that disappeared under a white T-shirt, roses winding on green stems, and moths of pale brown and white wings. “Particularly Lucien Moreau.”

She nearly choked on her eggs. “The guy on TV?”

Lucien Moreau. Pale gold hair and a face like a pre-Raphealite painting. Ancient and ageless, he showed up during the quarantine, waltzing into the city, taking over the biggest house he could find, and installing cameras everywhere. The parties that raged on in his house were as famous as the Eternal Ball, but more elegant and more deadly. You could watch them online and on certain late-night local channels, but no mainstream station would ever broadcast them unedited. Tana didn’t watch, but Pearl and her friends did. She’d heard them whisper about what they’d seen: the blurry outlines of velvet capes, the tangled limbs, and Lucien, charming as ever, talking to you right through the camera, promising you with the curve of his mouth and the brightness of his eyes that no matter how loudly you screamed, you’d like whatever he did, and you’d never be the same once he was done.

“I have a friend who lives in Lucien’s house. She does errands and stuff for him. She was supposed to be keeping an eye on the gate. Apparently, ever since the Thorn broke out of his prison in Paris, Lucien’s been scared he’s coming here.”

“Why?” Tana forced herself to pick up the mug, ignoring her unsteady hands. She took a sip of the coffee, the hot liquid steadying her enough to take a bite of the eggs. At the first taste, she realized she was hungrier than she’d imagined.

Jameson leaned forward in his plastic seat. “Lucien is the reason he was in a cell. Apparently, your friend Gavriel let Caspar Morales slip through his fingers. Lucien, or maybe Elisabet, or probably both of them together, told some ancient vampire called the Spider what
Gavriel had done, which is how the Thorn of Istra spent the last decade being tortured somewhere under the streets of Paris.”

Tana thought about what Gavriel said in the car after they’d left the gas station. The words had seemed nonsensical at the time, but now it seemed to Tana that they were a riddle.

This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy
.

An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it.

Tana’s head was spinning again. “How do you know all that?”

“I told you,” he said. “My friend lives with Lucien. Did the Thorn say anything about what his plans were? Did he talk strategy?”

I have a friend, too. And I mean to kill him.

“There’s somebody he wants dead,” Tana scraped a pile of eggs onto a tortilla and lifted it to her mouth. After the third bite and another swig from the mug, she started to feel a lot better. “But I don’t know anything other than that. I wouldn’t have even believed that Gavriel was the Thorn of Istra if Winter hadn’t shown me this.” She took the crumpled flyer from where she’d jammed it into her purse hours and hours before, unfolding it on the table, pressing out the creases. Seeing his black curls, the silver-topped cane, and the violence in his eyes, Tana was surprised all over again at the memory of his mouth’s softness. “He didn’t act like—I mean, he was terrifying, but he was weirdly kind, too. Not how you’d think.”

Jameson peered over at the paper and whistled at the amount of the bounty. “How come you didn’t turn him in at the gate?”

Tana shook her head. “He helped me out. That would be a pretty crappy way of paying him back. But I don’t understand—why would Lucien and Gavriel even know one another?”

“Lucien is Gavriel’s
maker
,” Jameson said.

“What?” She couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine Gavriel, whom she thought of as half the boy who’d promised her another day and half the screaming creature underneath Père-Lachaise Cemetery, having anything to do with slickster Lucien Moreau, who had sold licensing rights to his image so that posters of him could be sold at malls across the country. “Look, obviously I don’t know much of anything. All I can tell you is that Gavriel’s traveling alone, and there were some vampires hunting for him. He let us assume they were sent by the Thorn of Istra, but I guess they belonged to this Spider person. The massacre Midnight mentioned in her post, that was because of them.”

A white thing streaked down from the sky, surprising Tana into nearly toppling off her chair. The crow spread its albino wings and alighted on the table, regarding her with its ruby eyes. It stalked across the plastic surface, cawing once and then picking at a few fallen curds of egg.

Jameson started to laugh as the bird hopped up onto his shoulder. Flapping its wings, it flew up to his head. “This is Gremlin,” he said, swatting the crow back to the table.

Tana put out her fingers tentatively and was surprised when the bird scampered over and rubbed its beak against her skin. She smiled a little, relaxing. There was something about an animal that made it hard not to feel like the person who kept it was basically decent.

“Let me explain something about Coldtown,” Jameson said. “Mostly, we’re an ecosystem that works. The vampires need lots of living people to supply them with blood, willingly, through the
shunts. If they had to go around attacking people, they’d risk spreading infection and losing their food supply. But when something shakes Coldtown up, we descend into chaos very quickly. Whether it’s human terrorists breaking the windows of the Eternal Ball and setting themselves on fire or turf wars between rival vampires gangs, things can get heated pretty fast. So if Gavriel’s here to stir things up, there are a lot of vampires and humans who already hate Lucien and who would join him—”

She tried to imagine Gavriel’s recruiting anybody and shook her head. “I think whatever he’s going to do, he’ll be alone. He’s not really—he’s kind of crazy.”

Jameson looked faintly relieved. “I’ll tell my friend to try and get away from Lucien’s for a few days, but I doubt she’ll go.”

Tana took a last swig of the coffee, drinking down the grounds, feeling the caffeine sing through her blood. The sky above them had turned dark, and she thought of Aidan, back in the house, dead and risen, and waiting for her to return. “Why’s she with him in the first place if he’s so awful?”

Jameson looked away from her. “She’s a vampire,” he said quietly.

The way he’d said it, as if he was embarrassed, made her wonder what it was like to have grown up here human. What did it mean to never have made the choice to come to Coldtown, to never want something from the vampires. What would he do for a marker like the one she’d lost? And how would he feel if he knew about the infection bubbling in her blood?

Reaching over, Jameson stroked Gremlin’s white feathers. “Did you know that crows get to like the chemical in ant bites? Formic
acid, I think. Anyway, they start to get so addicted to it that they’ll spread out their wings on top of anthills. I think that she—my friend—I think she knows that Lucien’s horrible, but she’s gotten to like it.”

Tana shuddered at the image. “Maybe she’s just used to it.”

“Maybe,” Jameson said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“My turn to ask you for something,” she said. The thing about Jameson was that he seemed so oddly normal. Tough-looking, with a shadow of stubble over his jaw and the wiry muscles of someone who spent a lot of time climbing across rooftops, but he’d helped her and hadn’t asked for anything much in exchange. “If you know a place where I can buy some stuff like clothes and maybe a weapon, I’d love some directions. I didn’t exactly come prepared.”

“I know somebody with a pretty decent pawnshop. I could walk you over.” Jameson raised both his eyebrows, waiting.

“Thanks again,” she said, and he stood.

Tonight, she was going to have to find her way back to Aidan and retrieve her marker. And once she did, she was going to have to find herself a new prison, one where she could hole up and wait out the infection with enough food and water and blankets to get her through eighty-eight days of torment.

Eighty-eight days, starting with this one.

CHAPTER 22

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

T
he night that Gavriel was bitten for the first time, he woke to freshly starched sheets and an unfamiliar high-ceilinged room. He stank of liquor; even his sweat smelled faintly of Chartreuse, and he thought he might still be drunk. When he sat up, his head spun such that he had to lie back down. Outside the windows, the gas lamps of Paris burned beneath a moonless sky.

“Drink this,” a man’s voice said, bringing a glass to his mouth.

He gulped what turned out to be water. He felt odd, hot and cold at the same time, as though a fever was coming on. He was used to waking in filthy rooms, used to shame on the face of the person or persons who’d brought him there, used to walking back to his tiny apartment with a sour stomach and rumpled clothes in the late afternoon, scandalizing his landlord.

What he wasn’t used to was finding himself in an opulent hotel with a blond man standing over him wearing a wicked grin. Vaguely, he remembered a piano playing and a sting at his throat, as though a cobra had struck him, and some great pressure against his neck. But he’d spent most of the evening in one of the more raffish
haut bohème
salons, and while he’d heard it said that places like that were frequented by snakes, no one meant it literally.

“I ought to go,” Gavriel said muzzily, trying to sit up again. “I’m not well.”

“Some sicknesses are worse than their cure,” said the man, pinning Gavriel in place with the press of a single hand. In the dim light, the iris of his eyes appeared to be spilled-blood red. Gavriel stared up at him, too amazed to be afraid. After courting the devil’s attention for so long, it seemed that at last the devil had come for him.

“When it’s done, we’ll be like brothers,” said the devil.

“I already have a brother,” Gavriel slurred. “He’s dead.”

The devil loomed over him, his grin widening to show off sharp teeth. “As am I.”

Gavriel opened his mouth to shout, but drunk as he was, he began to laugh instead.

When Gavriel woke again, light was streaming through the window, making his memories of the night before seem ridiculous. A particularly silly and indulgent nightmare, brought on by too many drinks and too much misery. No man loomed over him, ready to strike. No blood stained the bright white sheets. The hotel room was empty, his shirt and shoes resting on a nearby settee. On a low table, a fresh
bottle of Chartreuse was set out, beside a cut-crystal glass and a plate of baked oysters.

He blinked at the bed, at the rumpled sheets. He brushed fingers over his neck. They touched tender skin, as though he’d been bruised. That gave him pause, making him nervous enough to gather up his things and leave the room quickly, heading for home.

He felt light-headed as he made his way past the gambling dens and pawnshops that studded the Ninth Arrondissement around the Folies Bergère Music Hall. He walked inside a
boucherie
without even really deciding on it. There, he spent what meager coins he had on calf liver and ate it raw, straight off the brown paper in which it was wrapped, on the steps of his building.

Gavriel slept through most of the day, waking at night with a creeping chill in his bones. Outside his apartment, he heard all the sounds of night in Paris—people hawking wares, whether food or flesh. Someone was playing dice in the back alley below his window; the sound of them on the cobblestones made him think of a skeleton rattling in its coffin.