The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (31 page)

Valentina looked at her, surprised. “Wasn’t his job to stop the spread of infection? Stop outbreaks by
killing
new vampires.”

Tana couldn’t seem to stop from staring at the frozen screen, at the greedy expression on Gavriel’s face. Then she gave Valentina a lopsided grin. “I guess he quit. I mean, that’s like a Coney Island–style hot dog–eating contest.”

They looked at each other for a long moment and then started giggling uncontrollably.

“So you’re still going to Lucien Moreau’s?” Valentina asked, walking to a rack and taking down a long black gown with one hand and a golden gown with the other.

Tana nodded, walking over to pet the nap of the velvet. “If Jameson comes in, though, you better show him that video. The reason he told me about his friend being at Lucien’s was that he worried she’d get caught in the cross fire if Gav—if
the Thorn
came after Lucien. He wanted to warn her.”

She remembered what she’d said to him about Gavriel—that whatever he would do, he would do alone. But then why turn so many new vampires? Maybe she’d been very wrong.

“I think I’ll come with you,” Valentina said.

“To the party? Didn’t you just tell me that it was dangerous?” Tana tilted her head to one side, trying to puzzle out Valentina’s change of heart.

“I’m going to warn her,” Valentina said. “I saw her that once, so I can find her again. I owe Jameson.”

“Well, that’s good news for me.” Tana bent down and started unlacing her boots. “It’s always more fun to show up at a party with friends.”

CHAPTER 26

POST BY: MIDNIGHT

SUBJECT: SAD VAMPIRE

I thought I would be writing a different post. I know I promised I would tell you guys what it was really like beyond the walls of Coldtown, but I’m not sure I can bear to. In all my imaginings, I never thought it would be anything like this.

Now Winter is dead and I’m a vampire.

I was going to just post the video footage I took and not explain, but that’s not fair to you all who have been my real true Dark Family, supporting me through everything, encouraging me to go on this journey. I know that you’d want to hear about what happened, not just see it.

I’ve posted lots of times about hating how every second I was getting older. You saw all my freak-outs that my cells were dying and my hair was falling out. Every time I woke up with strands on my pillow, I was sure that piece of hair was gone forever and I would go bald and be ugly. Sometimes I thought I could feel the decay inside me, taste the rot in my mouth before I brushed my teeth in the morning. For days before I left for Coldtown, I couldn’t eat because the idea of food disgusted me, the way I could feel it heavy in my stomach.

I know you feel the same way sometimes, like there’s something wrong with us because we’re not the magnificent monsters we were meant to be. Well, you’re right. I can tell you now, from the other side, that we were right. Everything feels right now.

My being bitten is on tape, and I’m going to upload that video as soon as I edit it. It was just as amazing as I had hoped it would be. The pain wasn’t so bad. Your skin gets kind of numb around where the fangs go in, and there’s this amazing feeling, like someone is pulling all the weakness and rot away to make room for something else.

But here’s the part that’s hard to talk about. I did a bad thing. A really bad thing.

I’m the one that killed Winter. I didn’t mean to. I only meant to turn him, but things got way out of control when my new fangs slid into his vein. Drinking someone’s blood is nothing like having your blood taken. Drinking blood is like an explosion of rose petals, it’s like honey and milk and every warm thing in the world. It’s like drinking pure light.

I held him to me and drank and drank and drank. It was like drowning in him, like being closer than ever, together inside my veins. But now Winter isn’t here to laugh with or help me pick out outfits, or to understand me the way no one else ever did. Maybe no one else ever will understand me like that.

I’ll never be anyone’s twin sister. No one will recognize me as the mortal I once was. The last bits of the girl I gave up being died with him. Now there is only Midnight.

I guess it wouldn’t have come to this if I hadn’t wanted to be a vampire, if I hadn’t wanted to be a marvelous monster and beautiful like the dawn. But even though I will miss Winter every minute of every day for the rest of eternity, I know that he wanted this for me. So, in his memory, I am going to rip out this town’s throat.

Oh, and you, my faithful friends and readers, deserve a warning. The videos are disturbing, but we always say that we want to see the real stuff, so here it is.

CHAPTER 27

Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed

But Death intenser—Death is Life’s high mead
.

—John Keats

T
he gates of Lucien Moreau’s house stood open, with bouncers choosing guests from a human crowd gathered in front of them. Tana looked around at the girls in glittering red dresses and inky gowns, their eyes shimmering with liner and shadow and fake feathery lashes, and at the boys in their tight coats. Valentina had said it would be hard to stand out, and it was.

Tana had chosen a long, ivory silk dress with a plunging neckline, the kind worn by starlets in old movies, with a slit on her thigh that hid the scratch but revealed a lot of the rest of her leg. Unlike
most vampire partygoers, she had no fresh holes at the crooks of her elbows, where needles slipped in for venipuncture, no marks except for the old scar on her arm, and she hoped that might be unique enough to get her inside if Jameson’s name didn’t. Tana had piled her mass of black hair up on her head, secured with two silver combs she’d bought at the pawnshop so that everyone could see that the only thing at her throat was Gavriel’s garnet necklace, each stone shining like a single droplet of blood. She hoped she looked fresh and clean, untasted, wrapped up like a dumb little sacrifice.

She’d left her boots, jacket, and backpack at the shop and concealed the rest of her things in a vintage clutch of hammered brass, sculpted into the shape of a gilded lion’s head with gluey pits for eyes where stones had once been set. Her knife she’d strapped to her thigh with two leather belts.

It had taken her the better part of an hour to put together the outfit and fifteen more minutes of struggling in front of a cloudy window to get her hair up and staying that way. Then Valentina had made Tana sit in front of a mirror while she brushed her lashes with mascara, highlighted the arch of her brow with silver, and painted her lips a pale shell pink. As she walked up to the gate, the lion clutch banged against her hip from a thin chain, making her change rattle inside it, a hollow metallic sound.

Valentina wore a bronze dress that shimmered with beading. It showed off the long expanse of her legs. Her lion’s mane of hair hung around her shoulders, and her golden makeup was brighter than ever. Tana grinned at her as they waded through the crowd to the gate.

The bouncer was a big, muscular man with long hair pulled back
in a black velvet ribbon. His gaze stopped on Tana for a moment, but instead he waved in a tall girl, naked except for a mangy mink coat. Tana edged closer as a trio of boys in leather pants slipped past. Then the bouncer chose two girls in matching green silk cheongsams, their hair styled and colored in identical copper bobs so it seemed as if they were twins.

“Our friend is on the list!” Tana yelled over the noise, pointing and hoping the bouncer could hear her.

“Your friend?” he repeated back dubiously. “Really? What’s the name?”

“Jameson,” Tana said, standing up on her toes, trying to see the clipboard.

“He got any more name than that?” the bouncer asked. A superior smile twisted his lips.

Valentina stepped forward, managing to project an impressive aura of haughty impatience. “You know his name. Jameson Ramirez Alonso. Now, he told us to meet him here, and he told us we wouldn’t have any trouble getting in. This is ridiculous.”

The bouncer looked as though he wanted to hassle her a little more, but something about her crossed arms and downturned mouth warned him off it. “Fine, go on.”

Relief washed over Tana, and then, before she could quite believe it, they were walking past the scrollwork gate with knife-sharp posts and into Lucien Moreau’s party.

“Nice job,” she said, under her breath.

Valentina smiled, chin high. “Good plan. We’re like a pair of hot girl spies.”

The house was a massive Victorian with a wraparound porch. The building loomed tall and strange, with several roofs of slate and glass. Partygoers stood on the sloped lawn beyond the gates, a few lying in the patchy grass or laughing as they ran in teasing circles. A thick, cloying incense perfumed the air, and the closer she got to the massive door, which stood open atop the steps, the stronger the smell grew. Myrrh and musk, covering up some sweet, foul stench underneath.

She walked up the steps and through the open door into the foyer. There was music playing somewhere, the thin tortured sound of violins, accompanied by discordant, distant human cries. Her heart started to speed and her breath came unsteadily. She had the immediate sense that this party wasn’t for humans, no matter how many were present or who watched the recordings from their homes.

Cameras looked down from the corners of the ceilings, blinking with green lights to show they were on. On the local cable channel back home, from three until four thirty in the morning, there was a show in which a girl called Asphodel, wearing a long purple wig, would broadcast clips of the party she thought were worth highlighting and discuss them with callers. Black bars covered any actual penetration of fangs so as not to offend the FCC. A red-eyed girl in a silver dress passed Tana, spattered with blood, jolting her out of any pretense this was anything but a dangerous fishbowl of monsters, a snake cage full of mice.