The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (28 page)

The other wrist was marked with two small puncture holes.

One of his legs twitched spasmodically. He looked at her with his glazed-over brown eyes. The smell of blood rose up, breaking over her like a wave, rich and hot. Her tongue pressed against her teeth eagerly. Bile rose in the back of her throat.

“Ru-un,” he said between rapid, heaving breaths and then just stopped, like a toy that had been switched off. A rattling sound came from deep inside his rib cage.

Tana’s heart was thudding in her chest, beating like punches from a fist.

In that moment, she realized she’d seen him before—a picture of him anyway. He must be the neighbor they’d talked about. Bill Story, the one who’d been chronicling life inside the walls, the one who’d refused to leave even after his friends sent him a way out. She was sure that however he imagined dying, it wasn’t like this.

She carefully removed Bill’s glasses. Then she pressed her fingers to his eyelids, closing his eyes and hoping they’d stay closed. Then she crossed his hands over his chest, the way that dead pharaohs posed on their sarcophagi.

No matter what warning he’d whispered with his final breath, she couldn’t run. She couldn’t go anywhere without the marker. Carefully, she slid the long knife out of her boot.

Edging along further, she turned a corner and saw Christobel standing by a window with a can of paint and a brush. She was blackening the panes and crying at the same time, her thin shoulders shaking and her eyes red-rimmed. She looked at Tana and started to cry harder.

“What are you doing?” Tana whispered.

“Getting everything ready for tomorrow.” Her makeup streaked her blotchy cheeks in tracks of glittering gray and silver. Her voice sounded vague and dreamy, almost singsong. “We’re going to be vampires, and the house has to be ready for us. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You shouldn’t have left. Why did you leave?”

Since Tana had been their prisoner, she’d assumed that if she was spotted sneaking back into their fortress with a big knife, it would be
cause for alarm. But Christobel was looking at her as if she had gone out for groceries and taken too long getting back and now their whole dinner party was ruined.

There was another low moan from behind a door down the hall and the sound of frantic hushed voices. Christobel looked nervously in that direction and then back at Tana.

“After you left, we thought—when we didn’t hear you anymore, it seemed like Aidan had fed on you. So we thought it was safe. We were sad, but—”

Tana nodded and gestured for her to go on, to speed past that part. She knew why she’d been locked in the room with him, even if not everyone on the other side of the door was willing to admit to it.

“Midnight and Zara fought over who would go first. Zara said it was her house and so she’d go, so she went and he—he drained her.”

“Oh,” Tana said, thinking of the human Aidan she’d known. Aidan, who was silly and selfish, but who could never have been a murderer.

“I know he didn’t mean to.” Christobel started crying even harder, dropping the paint can and kicking it with her foot. The black paint spattered the wall and ran in rivulets, like rotten blood. “He was so upset after. But it was supposed to be you who died, not Zara. It’s not fair. We did everything right. We gave him you to eat, as the sacrifice for the newly risen vampire. It was supposed to be
you
.”

“Where is he now?” Tana asked, trying to keep from slapping the
girl. “Down there?” She’d pointed toward the room where the sounds came from, and the girl nodded.

Is it safe?
she wanted to ask, but she didn’t think that Christobel was going to give her an honest answer. With Bill Story and Zara dead, it was hard to imagine that Aidan was still hungry, but what did she know about newborn vampires? At the farmhouse, those creatures had fed until they were swollen like ticks.

Tana walked farther down the hall, her footsteps tracking more black paint as she went. When she glanced over her shoulder, Christobel was looking out the window, even though she’d painted it so thickly that there was nothing to see.

It was supposed to be you.

In that moment, with her hand on the doorknob, Tana wished that life were like a recording where you could fast-forward past all the scary parts where everything got turned upside down to whatever came next, no matter how bad. Taking a deep, ragged breath, she pushed the door open. Then the tableau revealed itself and there was no more wishing.

Aidan crouched on the floor with inhuman stillness. That and the unnatural pallor of his skin made it clear that he was changed, even before he looked up at her with his new scarlet-tinted eyes. Beside him rocked Midnight, back and forth, holding her brother’s body.

Winter’s blue bangs hung in his face, and his mouth looked chalky and chapped, the way Pearl’s mouth sometimes did when she’d brushed her teeth and hadn’t wiped all the toothpaste away. Two bright pinpricks marred his throat, one leaking a thin line of
blood. Winter’s eyes were closed, but Midnight’s eyes were open and red as coals in the heart of a fire. At the sight of Tana, she made a horrible keening sound and clutched her brother closer.

Rufus hunched in a corner of the room, wearing only pajama pants. A tiny video phone rested next to him as though he’d dropped it and forgotten it was there. The blinking light showed that it was still recording.

CHAPTER 24

Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

—Emily Brontë

P
earl sat in front of the television, eating spaghetti with lots of sprinkle cheese. Her father was in the kitchen, cleaning the stove. He’d been cleaning since Tana left—doing laundry, scrubbing the inside of the microwave, even pulling out the refrigerator and getting down on his knees to wash the tiles by hand. He’d been at it so long that although it was after ten, he still hadn’t eaten dinner. The only times he stopped were when the phone rang with calls from Homeland Security and, later, Aidan’s parents.

On the television, a news anchor in a blue suit stood in front of the logo
TEEN BLOODBATH
with a big red spatter over the letters.

“Now for the latest update on the sundown party turned tragedy,” she read off the teleprompter, “we go to Mitch Evans at the gas station off Highway Ninety-Three where a trio of teen survivors of
the tragedy were spotted late Sunday night. Aidan Marinos and Tana Bach, along with an unidentified third young person, were caught on video, isn’t that right, Mitch?”

Then the screen flashed to a newsman with an ill-fitting toupee standing in front of a gas station and holding a microphone on a bewildered-looking kid. “Absolutely, Tiffany,” the man in the toupee said. “We’re here with Garrett Walker, who’s been working behind the counter at Global Gas for nearly a year. Can you describe what you saw last night?”

Pearl scooted forward on the sofa. “Dad!” she yelled. “Dad, they’re talking about Tana on television.”

“Sure I can,” the kid with big red spikes in his hair, Garrett, said. “Two kids came into the mart. She was all scratched up, and the boy looked a little shifty, so that made me keep my eye on them. I thought maybe they were going to steal something.”

“What do you mean,
shifty
?” Mitch Evans asked on the screen.

Garrett shrugged. “He was looking at things too long. Staring right through you.”

“And how about the girl?” asked the reporter.

Garrett squinted at the sky, as if he was trying to remember. “She bought a sandwich, I think. Nice blue eyes. Short skirt. Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to her until after what happened out by the pumps.”

Pearl reached out and picked up the cell phone resting beside her on the leather cushions of the couch. She’d looked at it about a hundred times since she’d seen the text from her sister that morning: a
photo of a normal-looking street just after sunrise and the words
Coldtown is crappy & I love you & I’m fine
.

Every time Pearl looked at it, she could hear Tana saying the words, could hear her exact tone of voice. She even knew what they meant, because sisters spoke a certain kind of language so deep it was almost code. They meant that Coldtown was okay and not too scary, but also that Tana was teasing her for thinking of it as a romantic place. They meant that Tana wasn’t a vampire yet because she could take photographs of sunrises. They meant that Tana was trying to hide how she really felt, which wasn’t fine at all.

Pearl’s dad walked into the room, sponge in hand. “What are you yelling about?”

She pointed at the screen. “Watch. They’re talking about Tana.”

“Turn it off,” her father said, his voice hard.

“No, they’re talking about Tana,” Pearl repeated, because he must not have heard her.

“The police already explained what happened at the gas station. Now, do what I say and turn it off.” He sounded stern, but Pearl didn’t care. She wanted to hear.

On the screen, Mitch Evans looked very serious. “Tell us about that. You could see the whole thing?”

“Yeah, and I never saw anything else like it, neither,” said Garrett. “The one boy looks like he’s going to rip her throat right out when another boy comes out of nowhere. The new boy lifts the first one up into the air and bites down on his neck. Bites right down on it like no muss, no fuss. Just like on TV. The girl’s lying there—doesn’t even try to run. Then finally she gets up, brushes herself off,
and the vampire—he must have been a vampire, right?—loads up the boy into the back of the car and they all drive off like nothing happened.”

None of it sounded like Aidan, who was funny and nice and used to tease Pearl until she laughed. None of it sounded like Tana, who would have run or fought or something.

“The girl got into the car voluntarily? Was she cooperating with the vampire?”

“Looked like,” said Garrett.

After she’d noticed the text that morning, Pearl had gone out to the kitchen and taken a picture of their dad, asleep at the kitchen table, and another picture of her mostly empty cereal bowl and sent those to Tana along with a message:
Everything weird and boring here. U better have fun fun fun and send pix so i can be jealous.

She hadn’t gotten any reply.

“Pearl,” her father said warningly.

“No!” she shouted, hurling her plate of spaghetti at him, the sauce spattering across the wood floor and the plate shattering. “No! I want to hear about Tana.”

“And you couldn’t tell if the girl was Cold?” asked Mitch Evans on the television.

Some of the spaghetti stuck to the wall and other pieces fell. They all looked like worms.

“I couldn’t tell nothing. You saw the footage, didn’t you?” asked Garrett, the gas station guy.

“Unfortunately the police haven’t released the video to the public yet, but we hope to show clips of it to our viewers soon. But I can say
that Tana Bach, Aidan Marinos, and their unidentified companion are the only survivors of the massacre that left us with forty-eight teens dead, snuffed out at a party that should have marked one of the happiest times in their lives. The police are left asking how did three teenagers escape, what horrors did they endure during the seventeen hours they were held captive in that farmhouse, and where are they going now?

“Viewers, we want you to call the number flashing at the bottom of the screen if you see anyone matching their description or spot a gray 1995 Ford Crown Victoria with green patches. Remember, do not approach them. At least one has already been turned, the other two are probably infected, and their state of mind is unclear. They are considered highly dangerous. Back to you, Tiffany.”

They returned to the newsroom. “Thank you, Mitch,” said Tiffany with a stiff smile. “And remember, if you do come into physical contact with a vampire, you are legally obligated to report yourself to the authorities. Do not attempt to wait to see if you’ve become infected. Do not attempt to self-quarantine. Call 911, explain the nature of the attack, and wait for further instructions.

“Next up, we’ll hear from an expert who will go over the best way to vampire-proof your house and after that we have an exclusive interview with the bounty hunter who claims to have details on one of the three vampires who perpetrated this slaughter. But first, a word from our sponsors.”