The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (33 page)

Blood gouted, dark and thick as syrup, before he began to wither, too. Lucien’s white suit was splattered, the bystanders’ faces and elaborate clothing were dotted with blood as if it rained down from the sky like a summer storm in a nightmare. Tana felt it on her cheeks, wet and still warm, as though he’d just fed.

The white-haired vampire’s face remained frozen in shock or grief, his last expression preserved as his head spun from his shoulders. It hit Lucien’s shining marble floor and rolled into the crowd.

Gavriel spun on Lucien and Elisabet. It was only then that Tana realized Lucien had moved, seizing up the dagger from the body of the first fallen vampire.

Elisabet made a small sound of surprise.

“Good entrance, right?” Gavriel asked and then looked at Elisabet. “And what a delight to see you here with him.”

He was as beautiful as he’d ever been, features sharpened by anger. But it was impossible to look at him, spattered with gore, and believe that once his mouth had been on hers. He seemed like something out of a dark hallucination, now, something terrible and unknowable, a trickster god of murder.

“We wondered how long it would take you to arrive,” said Lucien, holding the dagger as though it were merely something to gesture with. “You took a circuitous path.”

Gavriel shrugged. “It was my own time to take.”

“That little feast of yours last night was quite something,” said Lucien. “Do you know what kind of chaos you’ve unleashed, infecting all those people?”

The corner of Gavriel’s lip rose. His eyes shone with mad delight. “No idea, but I look forward to finding out.”

At that, Lucien laughed. It might have even been an honest reaction. “You’ve changed.”

Gavriel acknowledged the words with a small bow of his head. “In a decade, how could I not have? And what a decade it’s been.”

Lucien flinched. “You’re angry that we betrayed you, and you have every right. That was my fault and my failing. I have regretted it often.” He swept his hand through the air. “But look at the world you made. How beautiful and vibrant it is. We were wrong to cling to the shadows and creep through the night. Your mistake has set us all free. Now, at last, you can see what the old vampires feared.”

“You left me to rot away in chains,” Gavriel said.

Gavriel and Lucien locked eyes.

Gavriel went on in a soft voice. “And you tried to recapture me for the Spider. Do you deny it?”

“My people were afraid. Elisabet worried he’d broken you and sent you to hunt us down. The ancient vampires hate any of us who adapted. They hate me most of all, broadcasting secrets. We tried to capture you, but not for the reasons you think.”

“You shouldn’t worry over me,” said Gavriel. “Not anymore. All the pieces were sewn back together in nearly the right places.”

“What can we give you, Gavriel?” Elisabet asked. “What can we do to show you how sorry we are? Whatever it is, we know that you’re owed it.”

Gavriel licked the blood off his knife, his tongue sweeping to the tip of the blade. “I want to watch both your ashes blow away across the face of a blood red moon.” He sang the next bit, his voice swelling with madness. “By the light, by the light, by the light of the blood red moon. I’ll be killing you soon. Do you remember that song? I’ve altered the words a little.”

“So nothing will satisfy you but death?” asked Lucien, clearly uncertain at how to talk to this new Gavriel.

“I came a long way for it. I’d hate to go back empty-handed.” He truly sounded crazy, Tana thought. Crazy like some poet or prophet. Crazy and lethal. He shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

“Let us show you how grievously sorry we really are,” Lucien said, with the voice that had enchanted so many children hungry for the grave, the voice that mesmerized viewers the world over. He put his hand on Elisabet’s shoulder, pressing down lightly. “Let us make a formal apology. We’ll kneel and beg your forgiveness. Could you think of any other creature we would kneel before?”

Elisabet glanced over her shoulder at him, as if looking to read on his face whatever he planned, but then, slowly, sank to her knees, her skirt puddling around her. She looked like a beautiful supplicant at a shrine.

Even Gavriel seemed transfixed, staring down at her. His brows drew together, and his chin lifted as though he was trying to wrench himself free of her hold on him.

Lucien moved behind her, stroking her dark hair back from her face. “She took my men and went after you. They wanted to protect me. Isn’t that sweet? But I swear to you, I had nothing to do with it.”

Elisabet looked up and struggled to rise, but Lucien seized a handful of her hair and jerked her head back. Then with Gavriel’s own knife, Lucien sliced her throat open. The river of her veins parted, blood pouring out like water. He cut farther, severing her head.

The whole room gasped as Elisabet’s body slumped forward, Tana gasping with them. Lucien wore a tiny, odd smile as her body began to curl and wizen, her honey-colored skin wrinkling like bark. Her lush
mouth withered, and the hollows where her eyes had been grew as sunken as the gluey holes of Tana’s purse. Lucien let her head fall.

A moment before, Elisabet had been one of the most dangerous people in the ballroom. Now she was dead. A few partygoers knelt down beside her as if there was something yet to do for her, as though she’d just fainted. A woman with a pierced nose and mermaid braids stroked the vampire’s once-smooth cheek. A boy drew his finger through Elisabet’s blood and popped that finger into his mouth.

“You’re worth more to me than she ever could be, Gavriel,” Lucien said, stepping away from her body. “Now that I’ve punished her for you, perhaps you will see how much I mean that. I loved Elisabet in my way, but you are as a son to me. Forgive a father his sins.”

Gavriel took a step back, the shock on his face evident. “Did she really deserve that?” “You asked for our deaths,” Lucien said. “I gave you hers. Ask me for something else, and I will give you that, too. I knew from the moment you broke out of the cage under Père-Lachaise Cemetery that you would come here, either as my prisoner or of your own free will.” Abruptly, Lucien raised his voice. “Cut the feeds from this room! Cut them!”

One by one the lights on the cameras around the room went from green to red.

The crowd that had gathered began murmuring. Tana wondered what it meant that Lucien had left the streaming video on while he murdered Elisabet and only now was calling for it to be turned off. What could be worse than that? She edged toward the door, pushing through the crowd.

Gavriel looked incandescent, trembling with readiness.

“We never would have hurt you,” Lucien said. “We knew that once we’d captured you, we could begin to plan. Plan a glorious future and a far better revenge than you dreamed, my dear lost friend. The old ways are dead, and it’s time the old ones died with them.”

“Starting with you?” Gavriel said, but his gaze kept tracking from Lucien to Elisabet, as though he was still surprised by her corpse.

“You don’t really want to kill me,” Lucien said. “Look at you, you’re even sorry Elisabet is gone. You just want to come home.”

“Do I?” Gavriel asked.

“You know why, in films, the villain hesitates before he kills the hero? You know why he explains his whole dastardly plan? Do you know why you’re hesitating now?”

Gavriel quirked a smile. “I do know. But I wager you’ll never guess.”

Lucien plunged on. “Because the villain knows that without the hero to hate, his life would be empty. Once he’s murdered his adversary, he’s alone.”

“So you’re the hero?” Gavriel asked.

“Every hero is the villain of his own story, wouldn’t you say?” Lucien was speaking to Gavriel, but he pitched his voice to carry to the crowd of partygoers. He knew how to draw them to him and make them hang on his every word.

“I wouldn’t.” Gavriel looked amused, though, as if this rhetorical style was familiar to him. As if it charmed him, not the show itself, but the memory of Lucien acting this way.

“Isn’t every hero aware of all the terrible reasons they did those good deeds? Aware of every mistake they ever made and how good people got hurt because of their decisions? Don’t they recall the moments they weren’t heroic at all? The moments where their heroism led to more deaths than deliberate villainy ever could?”

Gavriel was staring at Lucien as though fascinated, as though finally one of Lucien’s attempts to capture his attention had worked.

“You’ve been alone for ten years—and maybe longer than that. But you won’t be alone anymore. I know you. I know you better than anyone in the world, and if you forgive me, I will serve up vengeance enough to sate even you. Together, we’ll kill the Spider.”

Gavriel’s knife hand sagged.

He was going to do it, Tana realized. He was going to let a man who’d just murdered his girlfriend talk him into making an alliance, with her corpse still on the floor between them. She turned away, disgusted, through a door to the outside.

On the lawn, she felt dizzy from the mingled scents of incense and blood, and her head had started to throb. She leaned her hand against the wall near a collection of trash cans and garden tools, waiting to see if she was going to vomit. Then she’d walk to the front and see if Valentina was still there.

“Tana?” a girl’s voice asked. Tana looked up to see Midnight, coming toward her from the front yard in a shiny vinyl dress. Her blue hair hung around her shoulders, and she looked as sweet and calm as if the last two days had never happened. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Tana said, taking another shuddering breath. “I’m okay. Just give me a minute.”

“I’d hoped you’d come to the party,” Midnight said, stepping closer. The scent of decay wafted off her. “I wanted to thank you for everything you did the other night.”

Tana was about to tell her that she was welcome, when Midnight grabbed for her throat.

CHAPTER 28

How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!

—Robert Blair

V
ienna in 1912 was very different from Paris a mere twenty years before. The streets were full of motorcars and bicycles during the day, and at night the whole city glowed with electric lights. Phones rang and elevators whisked the bourgeoisie up the floors of their rent palaces along the Ringstrasse, where the walls of the old city had once been. Sigmund Freud had published
Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
already and Carl Jung was just about to publish
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.
The modern age was well under way, and everyone believed themselves to be marching forward to a better tomorrow. But prostitutes still prowled the ground where gallows had once hung, willing to lie down on top of tombs with a man for the price of a newspaper. Other things prowled there, too. Vienna was a city with its lights on, and no one wanted to acknowledge what happened in the dark.

Lucien Moreau strode through the night streets in his buttoned-up black sack coat, Elisabet beside him in a beaded, high-necked lace dress, all cream and gold and black. Gavriel was on the other side, in a charcoal coat that nearly matched Lucien’s own.

They were gorgeous creatures, wholly fascinating, and unequivocally broken, Lucien mused as they walked.

They were also likely to be executed before the night was out, all because of him. A vampire was supposed to seek permission before creating progeny, and he hadn’t. He would never have received it, not for either of them, unstable as they were.

Gavriel was half in love with death. He’d lost a lover to it and put his own brother in a grave, so maybe it was no surprise that he stalked murderers through the city streets, sinking his fangs into their jugulars and gulping down their blood. Every night, it was as though he avenged his brother by killing some stand-in for himself.

And one only had to look to see the madness that glittered behind Elisabet’s eyes. Lucien had discovered her in Portugal, on trial for the murder of her husband. He’d been impressed with the way she spat on the ground and declared that not only she’d done it, but if the Lord raised him back up in that very courtroom, she’d do it again. He and Gavriel broke her out of the prison that night; she’d gone with them without a single look back. When she hunted, she used a razor instead of her teeth and attacked her victims with a ferocity that would have been unnerving in a man twice her size.