The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (29 page)

Her father hadn’t moved from where he was standing in front of the television. Even though he’d told her to turn it off, he’d watched until the end.

Pearl thought about finally saying the words she hadn’t said all day long, ever since she saw the message from Tana:
I know where she is, Dad.

But didn’t say those words or any others. She picked up the remote, solemnly clicked off the television, and went upstairs to put on her pajamas for bed.

CHAPTER 25

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

—Miguel de Unamuno

T
ana’s fear was a living thing, clawing at her throat, as Aidan’s red eyes focused on her. She swallowed terror down as best she could without choking. Not meaning to, she took a step back, the knife coming up. It seemed a flimsy thing against two monsters.

“You came back,” Aidan said a little dazedly, holding out his hand, as if he didn’t even notice her weapon. He looked relieved to see her, relieved and hopeful. “I thought it would be—I don’t know—not like this. I’ve done bad things, Tana.”

Still holding the knife, she crouched down and gripped his fingers with her other hand. Even though his skin was cold, she squeezed in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “It’s going to be okay. Let’s get out of here.”

“Everything looks different, silvery and blurry, like watercolor
smears and… I can hear your heart, Tana. Your blood, your heat. It’s blowing off you—bright and red and sweet as anything. But that’s not—I know that’s not how you look. I can’t see things right anymore.”

Aidan’s mouth had changed, his canine teeth grown a little longer and sharper. But he had that same persuasive way of talking. “It was an accident, Tana. She was going to turn Winter, but she took too much. Now he won’t wake up. But if we just let him rest, then…”

Tana’s gaze went to Midnight, with Winter’s body in her arms. That was the accident he was talking about, not Bill Story or Zara.

“You know that’s not true,” Rufus said, sounding a shade short of hysteria. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Shut up!” Midnight shouted. Fangs gleamed in her open mouth. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“There’s a dead man in the hallway.” Tana tried to make it sound as if she were perfectly calm, but the quaver in her voice betrayed her.

“Bill had never seen it, a person dying and waking up a newborn vampire. He wanted to record what happened. We
all
did.” Rufus’s voice kept its manic edge. “Things just got out of control.”

“He brought over some of his equipment to film me biting her,” Aidan said. “I didn’t want to do it. I was afraid I’d hurt her the same way that I—” He stopped talking abruptly.

Midnight pressed her lips to Winter’s pallid cheek and whispered words against his skin.

“What went wrong?” Tana asked, to keep them talking. She was
trying to think through the fear, trying to plan. If she wanted the marker, she was going to have to get Aidan alone. It wasn’t safe for him to hand it over in front of them.

“Midnight finally convinced Aidan that it would be okay,” Rufus said. “We waited awhile, until we figured the infection was in her system and then used the venipuncture stuff she brought to draw some blood from Winter. Sterilized it with a lighter, which I know isn’t great, but they’re brother and sister, so whatever. She drank the blood and waited. Then she died.”

“She
died
,” Aidan said. “Just like I did. She died and we watched her. We even filmed it. It took forty minutes before it was over.”

Tana shuddered, thinking of Aidan alone in the room, listening to his heartbeats count their way down to dead. There was something changed about him, something that turned his familiar face into a mask. She could see a newly born thing looking out of his eyes.

“It was horrible,” Rufus said. “But that’s what she wanted. It’s what she told us to do, and she kept yelling at us to keep going, to keep filming.”

“And when she got up, she was really hungry.” An odd expression passed over Aidan’s face, as though he was remembering that hunger, as though it was waking anew inside of him. “She was burning up with it.”

“Bill got too close and she
lunged
at him,” Rufus said, lowering his voice, as though that was going to help.

“He tried to get away from her,” said Aidan. “But it only made
the wound rip open wider. I grabbed her and tried to pull her off him. I
tried
. But then the smell of the blood was too much for me and I—”

Tana remembered the wounds on Bill’s other wrist and thought she knew what he meant. She wondered if being turned had wrought some inner change on Aidan or if this was his true self, his true self without any reason to hesitate.

“We didn’t mean to,” Midnight said, looking up abruptly. “It’s still gnawing at my gut. The hunger. All I can see is blood. All I can smell is blood.” She shook Winter, and his head flopped back and forth, a marionette with his strings cut. “Wake up, Winter. No more birthdays, remember? It happened just like we said and all you have to do is wake up.”

Tana sucked in a breath. She felt as though everything teetered on a razor’s edge.

“Winter volunteered to be the first one turned, after,” Rufus was saying, and Tana tried to focus on him, on what was happening then and there. “He trusted her. And then she just didn’t stop feeding—she went on and on and we didn’t know how to stop her. Winter seemed lost, swooning in her arms. He had been making these breathy sounds, and they just got quieter and quieter. Christobel realized that something had gone wrong before any of the rest of us did. She tried to get Midnight to let Winter go.”

“And what were you doing all this time?” Tana asked Rufus.

He swallowed hard. “I was still filming. I hadn’t realized—” He stopped talking before explaining exactly what he hadn’t realized.
That Midnight had gone crazy? That Winter was dying?

“So what happened after that?” Tana prompted, and Midnight’s mad eyes found hers.

“They want to take Winter away from me,” Midnight said. “We’re not supposed to be parted.”

“Do you know what happens to corpses?” Rufus yelled. “They bloat. They get blowflies and they stink. The longer we wait, the worse it’ll be.”

Tana wondered how many bodies he’d seen before, how many he’d moved, and how many had belonged to people he’d once cared about. He sounded entirely practical, but there was something in his face that belied that indifference.

She wondered where Zara’s body was, whether he’d buried her already or taken her to the gate or if she was waiting, rolled in a blanket in another room. Tana wondered if he’d done whatever it was himself or if Christobel had, before she’d started painting.

Most of all, she wondered if either of them still wanted to be vampires.

“I’ll help,” Tana said, letting go of Aidan’s hand and standing. If they moved around, maybe she could talk with Aidan alone. And if that was impossible, then she still had to get out of the house, marker or no marker.

“Winter stays with me,” Midnight told them, stroking her brother’s hair.

“That’s disgusting,” Aidan said.

She flashed him a terrible look. “He’s mine!”

“Fine, we’ll leave him,” Rufus told her, walking toward the door. Tana followed, holding her breath as she went through, gripping her knife tightly in her palm, waiting for cold hands to seize her and pull
her back. When that didn’t happen, she looked over her shoulder at Aidan and raised both her eyebrows. “You, too. We’re going to need help lifting the bodies.”

It turned out that even as a vampire, Aidan liked being bullied a little. But not enough to give her the marker.

“When you get back,” he promised her, quietly, in the hall, “I want us to talk.”

And so, she helped wrap and carry Bill Story and then Zara. Her body had been resting on the divan in the front room, posed as though she were a mannequin about to come to life.

Every night, in every Coldtown, people die. People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.

Death drinks down their warmth until their veins are dry. Death forgets restraint. The older vampires might grow dusty and careful, but those freshly made want to glut themselves and sometimes, foolishly, they do.

And so, each morning, the denizens of Coldtown who remain must bring out their dead. They’re brought in front of one of the guard towers, and in the afternoon, the guards come from the safety of the wall and hammer two silver nails into the corpses—one in the head and one in the heart. If the bodies are still there the next day, spoiling in the sun, they’re shipped home to their families.

By the time Tana and Rufus and Christobel had wrapped Zara and Bill in sheets and set them down beside the other bodies, the sun was high
in the sky, hot and unforgiving. The three of them walked back through the too-bright streets, littered with the night’s leavings: several kids slumped together in an alley, wrapped around one another for warmth like bears in a cave; a scattering of feathers and sequins in a gutter; stubbed out corn silk and clover cigarettes with blue lipstick smudging the filters; broken bottles of whiskey; and withered white flowers. They stepped over it all without speaking, too tired to do anything else. Distant bird noises and petals blown from rooftop gardens filled the air with daylight sounds and smells. Tana wanted to sleep, but this was the most vulnerable that Aidan was likely to be. And after dragging bodies he’d killed through the street, she wanted that damn marker.

She wanted it back and she wanted to punch him in the face.

Aidan was sitting on a bare mattress in a room upstairs, one with windows covered in garbage bags in a disturbing echo of the one she’d found him in at Lance’s party. He was thumbing through a yellowed paperback he’d gotten from somewhere around the house. Dylan Thomas. Aidan looked up at her, grinned, and tossed the book to one side. She remembered Bill’s slack, changed face and bluish skin in the unforgiving light of day. Bill, whom she didn’t know at all, but who would have still been alive if not for Aidan. Aidan, with his constant need to please everyone around him, who had changed a girl into a monster to make her happy.

And Zara, beautiful Zara, with two puncture marks on her neck. She’d pinned up her hair and picked out a beautiful dress to go to her grave. Zara, whom they’d had to throw out as if she were garbage.

Aidan, who was partly responsible for the deaths of three people. Aidan, who was a monster.

“I can’t stay,” Tana said, hovering in the doorway.

Aidan shook his head, squinting against the indirect light of the hall. It obviously bothered him, but he didn’t seem to hurt. “She’s watching the footage that Rufus recorded over and over again. She’s watching me bite her and listening to herself talk about exquisite pain and transmutation and ‘this is my body this is my blood.’ Watching herself kill Winter. Over and over and over. With Winter’s body still right there, decaying next to her. I can’t take it. And I keep thinking about Kristin dying and how horrible I am and I just can’t stop.” He hit his hands against his head three times like he was trying to drive the demons out. “I saw her die and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen, her dying with the others, all of them dying—I mean it was the absolute worst, unimaginably bad. But now, when I think about it and I remember all the blood, it’s awful and yet I want to lick it all up, lick the walls of the party, and I can’t stop, Tana, I can’t—”

“Kristin?” Tana said, but then it came back to her that that had been the name of his new girlfriend, the strawberry-haired one who’d worn the dog collar at Lance’s party. Tana sat down on the edge of the mattress and put her hand against his back, feeling his shirt slide over his chilled skin. “It’ll get better. You’re not used to being what you are yet, that’s all. It takes time, but you have endless time, Aidan.”

“I don’t want to get used to it,” he said.

Tana thought about the three vampires in the square, burning up in the sun, and what Winter said about their not being able to handle what they’d become. She’d heard distant but distinct screams that morning, too, as they walked through the streets. “You
have
to,”
Tana said, making her voice firm. “And you have to give back what you were holding onto for me.”