The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (9 page)

When Tana woke up, she found out that it was her father who’d saved her. He’d used a shovel to hack off his wife’s head. Then he’d made a tourniquet from a strip of his shirt and taken his disobedient daughter to the hospital, where doctors sewed up her arm.

No one said it was her fault. No one said they hated her. No one said it was because of her that her mother was dead.

No one had to.

CHAPTER 9

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

—T. S. Eliot

T
ana could barely keep her eyes open. Gavriel was at the wheel, having taken the keys from Aidan’s pockets after depositing him in the backseat. Tana should have protested, but she’d let him get in on the driver’s side, let him turn the key in the ignition. She’d gathered up the bottle of water and the two sandwiches, still wrapped in plastic, brushed off the grit and eaten them while they sped along the road, headlights picking out the dark shapes of trees and houses. The windows were down, and Gavriel’s hair blew around his face like frayed black ribbons.

She didn’t know where they were going, only that they were driving away from her former life and into a distorted fun house mirror version of it.

After the food, she felt as sleepy as if she’d been drugged. It was the adrenaline draining away, she was pretty sure, the terror receding. She tried to convince herself that she wasn’t safe, that she was in a car with a vampire who, in addition to being a
vampire
, was talking like a crazy person, but her body didn’t seem to have any more fight in it.

She blinked a few times, trying to stay awake. “What was going on back at the house? Those chains—why didn’t you get out of them before, if you always could?”

“I killed someone—a vampire—and I was exhausted and—” He stopped and looked at the road for a long moment. She studied his features, the androgynous, exaggerated beauty of his wide mouth and lashes so heavy they made him seem like he was wearing eyeliner. “My mind is—not as it was. There is a madness that comes over us when we’re starved and carved, a madness that can be cured only by feeding—but such things they have done to me that it would take a river of blood to wash away all my wounds. I struggle for my most rational moments. I could have gotten out of the chains, yes, but it would have cost me.”

Which meant it had cost him, later, in the trunk of the car, when he was already burned.

“You don’t seem crazy,” she said. “Well, you don’t seem
that
crazy.”

The side of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “Some of the time,
I’m not. But the rest of the time is most of the time. And when I am, unfortunately I am all appetite.

“They left me there with the tied-up boy, saved for the following night, like a sweet on the pillow. I was still waiting for it to get closer to dark when you came in.”

Tana watched the shadows shift across his face along with the lights from the road. She wondered if he could smell her blood, drifting from her pores along with her sweat.

She guessed that he’d planned on draining Aidan before he escaped, even if he didn’t say so out of some sense that it was bad manners.

She wondered if Gavriel thought about biting her—his face, turned to the road still, was as calm as a statue of a saint in a cathedral, but she had seen him with Aidan. She had seen the way his fingers dug into Aidan’s skin and how the muscles in his neck strained and when he’d looked at her, mouth painted with blood, his gaze hadn’t tracked. She wondered what it would be like to be infected and to give in, to let herself be turned, to be ageless and frozen and magic and monstrous.

There were so many girls and boys running away to Coldtown, who would do anything to have the infection burning through their veins the way it burned through Aidan’s. The vampires inside were incredibly circumspect about biting people—that’s why all the pictures of them feeding inside Coldtown showed them feeding from tubing and shunts. More vampires were a drain on the food supply. What Aidan had—what she (maybe) had, too—was rare and desirable. There was a girl Tana had met, a friend of Pauline’s, who cut
thin lines on her thighs with razor blades before she went out to clubs, so that a vampire might be drawn to her.

When she looked at Gavriel’s mouth then, it was still stained carmine along the swell of his lower lip. Maybe because he’d saved her at the gas station and she was feeling grateful or because she was so tired, she found herself fascinated with his mouth, with the way it curved into a sinner’s smile. She knew she was looking at him like a boy, like a gorgeous boy whose smile could be admired, and that was dangerous and stupid. She didn’t even know if he thought of her as a girl at all.

She needed to stop thinking about him like that. Ideally, she should stop thinking about him entirely, except as something dangerous. “Why were they after you—those men and the Thorn? Was it bad, what you did?”

“Very bad,” he agreed. “An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it. I had a tutor who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was—but now I think he was also right.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tana said, leaning against the cushioned headrest. “Mercy can’t be evil. It’s a virtue—like kindness or courage or…” Her voice trailed off.

He turned to look at her. “This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, either.” Then, helplessly, she yawned.

He laughed, sounding like any boy from her school. She wondered
what color his eyes had been long ago. “Go to sleep, Tana. Lean back your seat. If you let me borrow your car for tonight, I promise I will repay you.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. “With what?”

The smile stayed on his lips. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

She was almost sure he was joking. “Okay. So where are we going?” she asked, her head nodding against the window.

His voice was soft. “Coldtown.”

“Oh,” she said, blinking herself awake again.

“I must. But if Aidan comes through the gates with me, he’ll be safer, and you’ll be safer without him. They’ll hunt for him out in the world. And he’s likely to start hunting, too.”

“But what if he doesn’t want to be a vampire?” Tana asked. As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that he would want it—
of course
he would want it. Didn’t he say as much before he attacked her? Being a vampire would get him all the glory he could ever imagine—he wouldn’t just be known as the guy at a party most likely to seduce someone else’s girlfriend or the small-town boy yearning for a big city. In Coldtown, he would be drowned in attention—and the massacre at the farmhouse would make his story only more tragic. More romantic.

Plus, Aidan was hungry.

She was the one who didn’t want to be a vampire. And she was afraid that as time went on, she’d become less and less sure of that.

“The fever is in his blood,” Gavriel said. “He looks for no cure but one. I think he is decided in his heart, but who can confess to such a decision?”

“It’s hard to fight the infection,” Tana said, her voice coming out harsher and more despairing than she’d intended. She didn’t want to talk about her mom. She didn’t want to tell him that the fever might be in her blood, too. In a few hours, she could be as bad as Aidan. “They
can’t
. You don’t understand. It takes them over and they can’t think straight.”

He said nothing in return. In that silence, she realized how stupid she was being. He must have been infected once, must have given in to it, must know better than she did how it felt.

“If you go to Coldtown,” she said, hoping to change the subject, “you won’t be able to get out. Are you sure whatever you’re going there for is worth it?”

“What’s that?” he asked suddenly, one hand leaving the wheel to touch her arm.

“What?” she said, looking down.

His long fingers traced the outline of the scar just beneath the crook of her elbow, his expression unreadable. Her skin felt too warm against the coolness of his touch, as though she were feverish. “These are old marks,” he said finally. “You were just a child.”

“Should it matter?” Tana asked. She was usually careful, but she must have pushed up the sleeves of her dress.

“Why should death discriminate between age and youth, you mean?” he asked calmly. “Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.”

She was relieved he hadn’t asked her any of the awful, stupid questions she’d grown used to:
Who bit you? I heard that it doesn’t hurt when you’re bitten—does it hurt? Did you like it? Come on, you’re lying, you did like it, didn’t you?
But then, he must know most of the answers. “Seems like Death came back for me.”

He grinned, a subtly odd grin that somehow made her smile back. “You drove him off again. Sleep, Tana. I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him. We have been adversaries for so long that we are closer than friends.”

“I’ll just close my eyes for a minute,” she said. “It’s not even really that late.”

There was something else that she wanted to say, something that she was sure she was on the verge of saying, but the words were swallowed up by the night.

Tana awoke to the sound of voices. She was alone in the car, spread out across the front seat, head pillowed on her arm, one of her booted feet kicked up against the glass of the driver-side window. The pleasant scent of coffee in the air mixed with car exhaust. And she felt chilled through, as though she’d kicked off a blanket in the middle of a winter night.

For a moment, waking up seemed like a nice thing to do. She remembered a party and being worried about going alone, where she was sure she was going to run into Aidan. She heard his voice outside the car, though, so it must all have worked out. Except for memories that seemed to be part of a nightmare—stuff that couldn’t be real. Blood and empty eyes and a shimmering rain of shattered glass.

Then everything came back to her in a rush and all her muscles clenched with instinctive alertness. Her heart sped and she scrambled in her seat, kicking the wheel in her eagerness to be upright.

Her Crown Vic was parked in a lot, far from the central cluster of cars and trucks. In the distance she saw a large, sprawling building, blinking bulbs and glowing floodlights announcing it as
DEAD LAST REST STOP OPEN 24 HOURS
. The sheer gaudy brilliance of it made the outer edges of the lot seem even darker by comparison.

She’d never been there before, but she knew the place, the same way she knew South of the Border. Kids at school wore T-shirts emblazoned with the logo or plastered its bumper stickers on their cars. The Dead Last Rest Stop was as flashy and famous as it was because of its proximity to the first Coldtown.

They’d come a lot of miles while she’d slept.

Gavriel was sitting on the hood of her car, a paper bag and a steaming cup resting beside him. His head was down and, shadowed as his face was, he looked like a pale human boy and not a monster at all. Aidan stood with his hands in his pockets, talking to two people she didn’t know. He must be reeling with infection, but he seemed to be hiding it well, his voice only a little unsteady. The pair were a girl and boy, their hair dyed the vibrant azure blue of butterfly wings and gum balls. They looked so alike that Tana thought they must be siblings.

“You sure you can give us a ride? I mean, thanks, of course, but I just want to make sure you’re serious,” the boy was saying. His hair was razor-cut in the back and sprayed into a shaggy, teased mop, with longer pieces framing spiky bangs. His eyes were lined with kohl, and a
single silver stud shone just above the right side of his lip, like a beauty mark. “Out here in the dull world, we’re just a couple of kids without any cash, but inside it’s all about barters and favors and who you know. Midnight is tight with lots of people through her blog, so we’re going to be set up when we get to the city. We brought plenty of stuff to trade and we’ve got a plan. So we could help you if you help us.”