The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (3 page)

Tana remembered the screams rising from the basement a week later, screams that went on all day long, while her father was at work,
and then all through the night, while her father turned up the television until it drowned out every other sound and drank himself to sleep. In the afternoons after school, between bouts of screaming, Tana’s mother would call for her, pleading, begging to be let out. Promising to be good. Explaining that she was better now, that she wasn’t sick anymore.

Tana, please. You know I would never hurt you, my beautiful little girl. You know I love you more than anything, more than my own life. Your father, he doesn’t understand that I’m better. He doesn’t believe me, and I’m frightened of him, Tana. He’s going to keep me imprisoned here forever. He’ll never let me out. He’s always wanted to control me, always been afraid of how independent I was. Please, Tana, please. It’s cold down here and there are things crawling on me in the dark and you know how much I hate spiders. You’re my baby, my sweet baby, my darling, and I need your help. You’re scared, but if you let me out, we’ll be together forever, Tana, you and me and Pearl. We’ll go to the park and eat ice cream and feed the squirrels. We’ll dig for worms in the garden. We’ll be happy again. You’ll get the key, won’t you? Get the key. Please get the key. Please, Tana, please. Get the key. Get the key.

Tana would sit near the door to the basement with her fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana’s little bed.
Make her stop
, Pearl said, but Tana couldn’t.

And when their father put on chain mesh gloves, the kind chefs use to open oysters, and big work boots to bring their mother food at
night, Pearl and Tana cried hardest of all. They were terrified he would get sick, too. He explained that only a vampire could infect someone and that their mother was still human, so she couldn’t pass on her sickness. He explained that her craving for blood was not so different from how someone with pica might crave chalk or potting soil or metal filings. He explained that everything would be fine, so long as Mom didn’t get what she wanted, so long as Tana and Pearl acted normal and didn’t tell anyone what was wrong with Mom, not their teachers, not their friends, not even their grandparents, who wouldn’t understand.

He sounded calm, reasonable. Then he walked into the other room and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And the screams went on and on.

It took thirty-four days before Tana broke and promised her mother that she’d help her get free. It took thirty-seven days before she managed to steal the ring of keys out of the back pocket of her father’s tan Dockers. Once Dad left for work, she unlocked the latches, one by one.

The basement smelled damp, like mold and minerals as she started down the creaking, wooden stairs. Her mother had stopped screaming the moment the door opened. Everything was very quiet as Tana descended, the scratch of her shoes on the wood loud in her ears. Her foot hesitated on the last step.

Then something knocked her down.

Tana remembered the way it felt, the endless burn of teeth on her skin. Even though they weren’t fully changed, the canines had still bit down like twin thorns or like the pincers of some enormous spider.
There had been the soft pressure of a mouth, and pain, and there had been another feeling, too, as though everything was going out of her in a rush.

She’d fought back, screaming and crying, kicking her chubby little-kid legs and scrabbling with the nails of her pink child fingers. All that had done was make her mother squeeze her more tightly, make the flesh of her inner arm tear, make her blood jet like pumps from a water gun.

That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father that the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.

CHAPTER 3

Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

—Henry Ward Beecher

A
idan’s eyes were wide and terrified. He strained against the bungee cords, trying to talk through the tape. Tana couldn’t make out the words, but she was pretty sure from the tone that he was begging her to untie him, pleading with her not to leave him. She bet he was regretting that time he’d forgotten her birthday and also the way he’d dumped her via a direct message on Twitter and, almost certainly, everything he’d said to her last night. She almost started giggling again, hysteria rising in her throat, but she managed to swallow it down.

Sliding her fingernail under the edge of the duct tape, she began to peel it back as gently as she could. Aidan winced, his caramel eyes blinking rapidly. Across the room, the rattle of chains made her stop what she was doing and look up.

It was the vampire boy. He was pulling against his collar, shaking his head, and staring at her with great intensity, as though he was trying to communicate something important. He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair was a mad forest of dirty curls. As she stared, he kicked a leg of the bed with his foot, making the frame groan, and shook his head again.

Oh yeah, as if she was going to leave Aidan to die because the pretty vampire didn’t want his snack taken away.

“Stop it,” she said, louder than she’d intended because she was scared. She should climb over the bed, to the windows, and pull down the garbage bags. He’d burn up in the sun, blackening and splintering into embers like a dying star. She’d never seen it happen in real life, though, only watched it on the same YouTube videos as everyone else, and the idea of killing something while it was bound and gagged and
watching
made her feel sick. She wasn’t sure she could do it.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid
, said her heart.

Tana turned back to Aidan, her hands shaking now. “Stay quiet, okay?”

At his nod, she pulled the tape free from his mouth in one swift rip.

“Ow,” Aidan said. Then he lunged at her teeth-first.

Tana was reaching for the bungee cord restraining his wrist when it happened. His sudden movement startled her so much that she
stumbled back, losing her balance and yelping as she fell onto the pile of jackets. His blunt canines had grazed her arm, not far from where her scar was.

Aidan had tried to bite her.

Aidan was infected.

She’d made a noise loud enough to maybe wake a nest of sleeping vampires.

“You asshole,” she said, anger the only thing standing between her and staggering panic. Forcing herself up, she punched Aidan in the shoulder as hard as she could.

He let out a hiss of pain, then smiled with that crooked, sheepish smile that he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. “Sorry. I—I didn’t mean to. I just—I’ve been lying here for hours, thinking about blood.”

She shuddered. The smooth expanse of his neck looked unmarked, but there were lots of other places he could have been bitten.

Please, Tana, please.

She’d never told Aidan about her mother, but he knew. Everyone at school knew. And he’d seen the scar, a jagged mess of raised shiny skin, pale, with a purple cast to the edges. She’d told him how it felt sometimes, as if there were a sliver of ice wedged in the bone underneath.

“If you just gave me a little, then—” Aidan started.

“Then you’d die, idiot. You’d become a vampire.” She wanted to hit him again, but instead she made herself squat down and root among the jackets until she found her own purse with her keys. “When we get out of this, you are going to grovel like you never groveled in your life.”

The vampire boy kicked the bed again, chains rattling. She glanced over at him. He looked at her, then at the door, then back at her. He widened his eyes, grim and impatient.

This time, she understood. Something was coming. Something that had probably heard her fall. She waded through scattered coats to a dresser and pushed it against the door, hopefully blocking the way in. Cold sweat started between her shoulder blades. Her limbs felt leaden, and she wasn’t sure how much longer it was going to be before she couldn’t go on, before the desire to curl up and hide overtook her.

She looked over at the red-eyed boy and wondered if a few hours before he’d been one of the kids drinking beer and dancing and laughing. She didn’t remember seeing him, but that didn’t mean anything. There’d been some kids she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have remembered, kids from Conway or Meredith. Yesterday, he might have been human. Or maybe he hadn’t been human for a hundred years. Either way, he was a monster now.

Tana picked up a hockey trophy from the dresser. It was heavy in her hand as she crossed the floor to where he was chained, her heart beating like a shutter in a thunderstorm. “I’m going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I’ll hit you with this thing as hard as I can and as many times as I can. Understood?”

He nodded, red eyes steady.

His wax-white skin was cool to the touch when she brushed his neck to find the knot of the cloth. She’d never been this close to a vampire, never realized what it would be like to be so near to someone who didn’t breathe, who could be still as any statue. His chest neither rose nor fell. Her hands shook.

She thought she heard something somewhere in the bowels of the house, a creaking sound, like a door opening. She forced herself to concentrate on unknotting the cloth faster, even though she had to do it one-handed. She wished desperately for a knife, wished she’d been clever enough to pick one up when she’d been in the kitchen, wished she had something better than a pot-metal trophy covered in gold paint.

“Look, I’m sorry about before,” Aidan called from the bed. “I’m half out of my head, okay? But I won’t do it again—I would never hurt you.”

“You’re not exactly someone who’s big on resisting temptation,” Tana said.

He laughed a little, before the laugh turned into a cough. “I’m more the run-toward-it-with-open-arms type, right? But really, please believe me, I scared myself, too. I won’t do anything like that again.”

Infected people got loose from restraints and attacked their families all the time. Those kinds of stories weren’t even headline news anymore.

But vampires weren’t all monsters, scientists kept insisting.
Theoretically, with their hunger sated, they are the same people they were before with the same memories and the same capacity for moral choice.

Theoretically.

Finally, the knot came apart in Tana’s hand. She scuttled back from the red-eyed boy, but he didn’t do anything more than spit out the cloth gag.

“Through the window,” he said. His voice had a faint trace of an
accent she couldn’t place—one that made her pretty sure he was no local kid infected the night before. “Go. They’re swift as shadows. If they come through the door, you won’t have time.”

“But you—”

“Cover me with a heavy blanket—two blankets—and I’ll be tucked in tight enough against the sun.” Despite looking only a little older than Aidan, the calm command in his voice spoke of long experience. Tana felt momentarily relieved. At least someone seemed to know what to do, even if that someone wasn’t her. Even if that someone wasn’t human.

Now that she was out of his range, she set down the trophy carefully, back on the dresser, back where it belonged, back where it would be found by Lance’s parents and—Tana stopped herself, forced herself to focus on the impossible here and now. “What got you chained up?” she asked the vampire.

“I fell in with bad company,” he said, straight-faced, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he was joking. It rattled her, the idea that he might have a sense of humor.

“Be careful,” Aidan called from the bed. “You don’t know what he might do.”