The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (35 page)

It was so hard to push through the feelings and
think
. Everything was getting murkier. The shadows were closing in. When she opened her eyes, all she saw was the blurry blue of Midnight’s hair.

Think
, she told herself muzzily.
Think.

She forced her hand to close on the metal shell of the purse and push at the lock, letting her money, the marker, and everything else spill out onto the dirt. She felt among the fallen things, looking for something, but she no longer remembered what she had been searching for.

A wave of blissful weakness washed over her. She was so tired. And her ears were full of a distant thudding that seemed to slow, like a drum beat in time to music about to end.

Then her fingers closed on an object she recognized. The rose water she’d taken from one of the purses at Lance’s party. Pulling off the stoppered top clumsily, she splashed the contents in Midnight’s face.

The vampire screamed.

Tana plunged back into reality. She was lying in the dirt, about to die. Panic hit her hard and she scrambled to stand, even though she swayed unsteadily on her feet. She grabbed for what she could find on the ground, holding her pathetic weapon up as she knocked into trash cans and then the wall.

Midnight’s face was red along one side, as if she’d been scalded. Drawing back her lips over her teeth, she hissed like a cat and rushed at Tana.

Tana had a sudden, vivid memory of her teacher in art class explaining how understanding anatomy was important to life drawing. He’d borrowed a skeleton from the biology room and started talking about ulnas and tibias, when Marcus Yates, the school’s most reliable weed dealer, called out something about stabbing someone so you hit them right in the heart.
Up under the fifth rib
, he’d said.

She didn’t have time to count, but she remembered those words as she brought up the stick she’d grabbed—the broken piece of rake—and slammed it into Midnight’s side, thrusting it up toward her heart.

Midnight screamed again, thrashing as Tana pushed the weapon in deeper, using it like a spear. Then, abruptly, Midnight went limp. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth hung open, a terrible grimace distorting her features.

Tana slumped back, wiping her bloody hand on her dress, too stunned to quite process what had happened. She sat in the dirt, shaking with horror and cold.

Get up, Tana
, she told herself.
Get up and get out of here. You’ve got the marker. Go.

Quickly, without looking at Midnight’s body, Tana stuffed her things back into her purse and stood, leaning against the side of Lucien Moreau’s house. Light streamed out of the tinted glass window, shockingly bright. It seemed to smear in her vision.

Don’t think about it. Go. Just keep going slowly until you make it to the gate. You can sleep in your car. Go
.

She took four stumbling steps, before she realized the problem with her plan.

Midnight had bitten her. She was infected. And this time it wouldn’t be something her body could fight off. There would be no resisting, no control. She’d be like Aidan was, or worse. Tana fell to her knees, all her thoughts a riot of denial.

Then the door opened and two vampires walked down the steps. They were dressed in ratty black jeans and dark jackets. One of them was smoking a cigarette, although he tossed it to one side when he saw her.

“Get up,” he said.

She started to laugh, but it came out more like choking. “I can’t.”

“You murdered a vampire,” he told her, pointing to a camera high up on the side of the house. “Lucien sees everything that goes on here. And he doesn’t like humans attacking his guests.”

“Well, good, then,” Tana mumbled, still grinning stupidly, “because that didn’t happen.” Lucien, being a vampire, might not see it that way. But it was hard to care much when everything hurt.

As the guards took her, she knew she ought to scream or beg, kick or cry, but she had no more fight left. She let herself be lifted and carried back to the party. They took her through an entrance she hadn’t seen before into a small hexagonal-shaped room, which was empty except for the built-in bookshelves that covered the walls and for an ottoman, where they dumped her.

Tana wasn’t sure how long she sat there before Lucien Moreau came in. He’d changed his clothes and was now dressed in a blue shirt and loose gray trousers, looking relaxed as ever. Up close,
though, Tana noticed a rank smell clung to him like spoiled meat. Crouching down, he seized her jaw between three of his fingers and turned her face one way and then another. He smiled then, baring his fangs. She felt the iron strength in his hand and the terrible indifference of his gaze, as though she were an animal he was considering the best way to butcher.

“You killed a vampire at my party,” Lucien told her. He shook his head as though she was in a great deal of trouble and a very naughty girl.

“So did you,” said Tana. If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic. She’d seen a lot of old movies, and that was definitely the way to go out. As if she were Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable not giving a damn. She wanted to make Pauline and Pearl and even her father proud when they watched the feed; if she could be a little bit funny before, maybe the dying part would be less horrible to see.

A corner of his mouth lifted, as if maybe he appreciated a little sass from his prey. “It’s
my
party.”

She thought of the walls of Lance’s farmhouse, streaked with blood. She thought of pink-haired Imogen with her pale staring eyes. “It’s all your fault,” she said muzzily. “You. You’re the reason.”

He gave her an odd look. “I like it when you humans don’t bother being sorry, but it’s a little much to say that it was my fault.”

“So what happens to me now?” She remembered the infected girls and boys shackled to the parlor walls, fed on by vampires. Maybe she’d become one of those. Or maybe he’d just kill her. Maybe she could try to kill him right back, if only she could make herself stand up.

Lucien looked at her, as though he was weighing that very question.
Then he slid his hand down from her jaw to her throat, tipping her head with cool precision. Tana took a deep breath, waiting for him to strike, fumbling in the cushions for any weapon. It was almost over, she told herself.

Then his fingers flicked her garnet necklace, and his expression changed. “That’s pretty against your throat. Where did you get it?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Gavriel.”

His eyes widened fractionally, studying her as though he’d never bothered to really look at her before. Lucien stood and went out, slamming the door behind him. Fear washed over her, but she was so tired and dizzy from blood loss that she couldn’t even hold on to it. She stood up and then slid to the floor.

She thought of Gavriel as he’d been earlier that night, with his curved daggers and his mad song. She wondered if he would come and sing to her.

Tana fell into an uneasy doze, curled up on the carpet.

She regained consciousness lying on cold stone, something soft piled under her head.

“Get up,” Valentina was saying, shaking her shoulder. “Tana, you’ve got to get up.”

She tried to open her eyes, but they felt as though they were glued together and wouldn’t move. Her limbs felt so heavy that she thought she might sink right through the floor.

“She’s lost too much blood,” said an unfamiliar voice, a girl’s. It echoed in the room. “It’s all over her. There’s no way she’s going to make it.”

“I don’t think that’s
her
blood,” said a boy.

Tana reached out with her fingers and touched steel bars, chilly against her skin. She wasn’t sure where she could be. The room smelled damp, with the vaguely mineral smell of basements.
Open your eyes
, she told herself, but she couldn’t.

“Somebody!” Valentina shouted. “She’s really sick. Somebody, please!”

When she woke again, she was lying in a massive bed in a dimly lit room. Her arm was shackled to the brass headboard and there was a long IV running from her arm to a bag of clear fluid that hung from a picture hook on the wall, over a bedside table. Someone had taken the painting down and leaned its gilded frame against a chair.

She still hurt, pretty much all over.

“When you’re in danger, everything becomes clear, doesn’t it?” Gavriel said softly, in a tone that made her shiver. He was sitting on her non-IV side, in a leather chair beside a makeup table, his face in shadows. “Everything else falls away. Danger is a terrible addiction, but that’s what I like—the clarity of thought it provides. How about you?”

And even though she’d known him for less than a week and plenty of what she did know of him was horrendous, at the sight of him, she let out her breath all at once. She let herself fall back on the bed, boneless with relief.

She knew she shouldn’t feel that way about a monster, but right then, she wanted nothing more than a monster of her very own.

“What’s happening to me?” she finally asked, then rattled her
arm, indicating the line of tubing. Had she dreamed Valentina’s voice?

“Would that it were the waters of Lethe dripping into your veins.” He leaned forward, so that the dim light of the tinted window showed the curve of his mouth and the way his dark lashes brushed his cheeks when he lowered his eyes. He looked very young and very old at once. Then a corner of his red mouth lifted in a wry smile. “But alas, the answer is merely that you lost a lot of blood and we’re giving you saline.”

“Like the stuff people with contacts put in their eyes?” she asked, before realizing he probably had no idea what she was talking about.

He picked up her purse from where it rested beside her and shook it gently. “In case you were concerned. All just as you left it.”

She nodded. “Thanks. Although I guess whether or not I’ll ever get to use that marker is pretty up in the air right now.”

“You should have let me eat her in that parking lot,” Gavriel said, raising his eyebrows.

That startled a laugh out of Tana. It wasn’t just that what he’d said was funny—it was the waggish way he said it, as if he expected her to get the joke, expected her to get that he was joking. It made her feel less bizarre about how comfortable she felt around him, if he felt even a little bit the same way.

“It’s not so bad,” Gavriel said, standing and coming to sit at the end of the bed. The amusement had gone from his face as he watched his own hand smooth over her bedclothes. “You’re younger than I was when I turned and more adaptable than I remember myself to have been. You’ll be marvelous.”

For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was saying, and then she realized, of course, he must know she was infected. Lucien had seen the fight she’d had with Midnight, and Gavriel must have, too, given what he’d said a moment ago. He certainly could see the bite marks on her throat.

“I’m not going to be a vampire,” she said, trying to make her voice sound more certain than she was. She remembered the sound of her mother shouting up from the basement, calling for blood, being willing to sink her teeth into her own daughter’s arm. She remembered Aidan lunging at her in the coatroom of Lance’s party when she’d untied his gag. What would Tana do once the infection wormed deep into her brain, so that there was nothing but the need for blood and the willingness to do anything to get it? Once she was entirely Cold, Cold through and through. Then she would scream and threaten and beg for blood.

Her eyes started to water and she blinked back the tears. She hadn’t cried since the gas station, and she wasn’t going to cry now.

“Tana,” Gavriel said, helplessly.

“Whose necklace did you give me?” she asked, wiping her eyes with her free hand. “Lucien recognized it.”

“It belonged to my sister once,” he said, so quietly that she was sure there was more to the story than that. Then he smiled. “But Katya is long dead, and there’s no point in my keeping it when I hardly ever wear it.”

“Hardly ever, huh?” Tana said. “I bet garnets look good on you.”

He smiled distractedly, seeming to think of another time. Whatever it was, it made his features smooth out and his whole face look
softer and very young. “She had it on in Paris when she met Lucien and Elisabet. We pretended to drink Champagne with her at a mezzo-soprano’s salon in Montparnasse. I imagine Lucien remembers that necklace because he stared at my sister’s throat the entire evening.”

The casual way he said it, with genuine fondness, made her believe that Lucien—and probably Elisabet—had truly been his friend then. Tana thought about how much fun it must have been, once upon a time, to be vampires and have forever stretching out in front of you—an endless carnival of nights. They must have felt as almighty as angels, looking down on the world from their windows, choosing to spare each passerby.

She liked thinking of it, even as her body felt heavy with exhaustion.

“I heard all that stuff Lucien told you,” Tana said, forcing her mind back to the present. “You can’t really believe him, can you? I mean, you’ve got to be somewhat skeptical, right?”

“Are you asking if I’ve guessed that Lucien killed Elisabet because he didn’t want her to tell me something? In fact, I have.” He stood and came closer, brushed her hair back from her face. “But Lucien and I will sort out our own grudges after the Spider’s arrival. And I will tell you all my stories soon; no more deceptions. But now night is coming for you. We have tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Tana scrambled to sit up, the restraint on her wrist holding her to the headboard. “No! Later I won’t be myself.”

“Oh, you will be,” he told her softly, walking to the door. “We labor under so many illusions about ourselves until we’re stripped
bare. Being infected, being a vampire, it’s always you. Maybe it’s more you than ever before. You, distilled. You, boiled down like a sauce. But it’s you as you always were, deep down inside.”

She stopped struggling, horrified by the memory of Midnight’s face transformed by rage and those teeth sinking into her throat. Horrified by the memory of her mother’s voice in the dark. Horrified by the thought that she might be the same or worse and that it would be her, truly her doing those things. But Gavriel must know; he’d been human, he’d been infected, he’d been turned.