The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (42 page)

Her lips parted, eager to taste, before she remembered herself.

Out the window, the sky was dark. She stood shakily.

He opened red eyes.

She wanted to tell him about Valentina and how she had to go, how she’d promised she’d help, and how she would help, except that right then she didn’t want to help anyone so much as to kiss him and maybe bite him again, too, but mostly kiss him and do all the things that came after kissing.

She wanted to tell him all of that, except then the camera above the painting, the one that recorded everything they did, would record her words, too.

At the thought of Lucien watching, her gaze flickered to it, before she could make herself to look away.

“I’ve got to get back to my room,” she said, not quite able to meet his gaze. She wanted him, wanted to stay and blot out all her fear with desire. She forced herself to take a step toward the door.

He looked as if he wanted to say something that would stop her, but he only stood, putting his hand against the wall to steady himself. Dark, bluish blood ran from his wrist.

Good-bye
, she thought.
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

“It’s nearly over,” Gavriel told her, his voice low, a mad smile pulling up one corner of his mouth. “Time for us to read the day’s entrails and prophesy a glorious future.”

CHAPTER 34

Death did not come to my mother Like an old friend.

—Josephine Miles

W
hen Tana was little, she hadn’t liked it when her mother went to parties.

She’d loved watching her get ready: loved the chiffon and silk dresses, the velvet jackets, even the crisp, just-back-from-the-dry-cleaner suits with safety pins attached; the glittering earrings and necklaces and brooches; the magic of rouging cheeks, outlining lips, and darkening eyes with shadow then liner and mascara; the spray of perfume hanging over everything like a sweet musky cloud, clinging to her mother’s skin and hair, giving her a cool, remote elegance.

“Should I wear the pearls tonight or the gold dangles?” her mother had asked her, holding them up.

Lying on top of the duvet on her parents’ bed, Tana studied her mother very carefully before choosing. You couldn’t ask Pearl questions
like that, because she picked the pearls every time, for her name. This time, though, Tana picked the pearls, too. They looked pretty with Mom’s dress.

But as her mother’s high heels clacked on the parquet wood floor, Tana always started to get nervous about the night ahead. Her mother might not be back before bedtime, and Dad didn’t understand that Tana was allowed to keep her light on for an extra half hour if she was in the middle of a really good book, plus he flatly refused to check the closet for monsters. The milky tea they had before bed was never quite sweet enough, and when he read to Pearl, he didn’t do the voices. Since he didn’t know how to do all those things right, bedtime went all wrong.

At ten years old, she was supposed to be a big girl. Dad would tell her that she was too grown up for night-lights and worrying about monsters under the bed. When she tried to explain that it was the
closet
she worried about, he smiled as if she’d told a joke.

But if you didn’t believe in monsters, then how were you going to be able to keep safe from them?

That’s how Tana wound up staying awake, waiting for her mother to come home. After an hour, tossing and turning in the dark, she snuck downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, with a single lamp on, eating dry saltines. For a while that was fine, but then, with shadows closing in and Dad and Pearl sleeping all the way upstairs, she got a little bit scared. The wood of the house creaked slightly and the pipes groaned. Outside the window the wind shivered through the bushes, and her gaze kept darting to the movement as she wondered if something was there. She kept thinking of the news programs and the attacks that all the grown-ups didn’t want her to know about.

By the time the headlights of Mom’s car swept over the lawn, Tana had completely freaked herself out, but she made a vow that she wouldn’t let Mom see it. She was a big girl, as Dad said.

What she didn’t expect was the way her mother looked when she walked in—ashen-faced, her mascara smeared as though she’d been rubbing her eyes or crying. For a moment, she just stared at Tana, her face haunted. Then she smiled a sickly, forced, horrible smile.

“Oh, did you stay up, waiting for me, my good girl?” her mother asked.

“Mommy,” Tana said, crossing the kitchen to throw her arms around her, calling her something she hadn’t called her for years. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sweetheart, peanut, lamb chop,” her mother said, and even her voice sounded strange. “Time to go to bed.”

They walked up the stairs. Tana yawned. She was glad her mother was back, even though something bad must have happened, something that she felt inadequate to the task of understanding.

At the landing, her mother crouched down and took Tana by the shoulders, staring at her with a blazing intensity.

“I love you,” she said. “You and your sister. I love you both so much, and nothing is ever going to change that.”

Tana nodded, thoroughly frightened.

“I would do anything to protect you,” her mother told her, eyes gleaming in the dim light. “Anything to get to stay with you both and watch you grow up. Anything, okay?”

“Okay,” Tana said.

But as her mother tucked her into bed, leaning over and pressing her cool mouth against Tana’s cheek, with the odor of perfume wafting
all around them and locks of her mother’s black hair hanging loose from her bobby pins, forming a curtain, Tana decided that she didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to be a big girl too stupid to check the closet for monsters, and she didn’t want to go to parties where awful things happened that you had to pretend about, not even if it meant you got to wear pretty dresses and glittering jewels.

She didn’t want to grow up, and yet she knew there was not a single thing she could do to stop it.

CHAPTER 35

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

—Voltaire

T
ana made her way dizzily down the hallway, her heartbeat loud in her ears, the scent of her own blood in her nose, a metallic taste in her mouth. Sounds came from rooms below as the household woke, crawling from their chambers, ravenous, the night stretching out in front of them with its glittering carpet of stars.

Tana didn’t want to be creeping down the hall alone, didn’t want to be sneaking out of Lucien’s terrifying manor without saying one last good-bye to Gavriel, but there was no safe way to say anything without being overheard. Better to leave him with the memory of his teeth against her throat and her teeth on his wrist. Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other’s arms.

And after tonight—after tonight, she’d have to chain herself up
behind a sturdy door and hope for the best. Self-quarantine was dangerous, and, even without the borrowed trouble of an excess of vampire blood chilling her veins, there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive.

You’re not even really human anymore
, some part of her sneered, sounding a lot like Winter’s voice.
Give it up. Just die already. It’ll be just like the dream you had—blood and forests and snow, girls with raven’s wing hair and rose red lips and sharp teeth as white as milk.

It worried her that it had gotten harder and harder to remember what it felt like to live her old life, even though she’d been living it mere days ago. Every memory had drowned in a sea of red.

She opened the door to Elisabet’s bedroom, intent on grabbing her phone and cash, then stopped abruptly when she saw Marisol waiting for her. The vampire was sitting on the high bed, one dagger-heeled boot against the brass footboard, twisting her silver tooth ring in her fingers, clearly bored.

“You took your time getting back,” Marisol said. Tana looked beyond her, to see the curtains in one corner of the room fluttering. The window was open and the white crow perched on the sill, looking in at her, its wicked curved beak opening to cry once. Something was attached to its leg—a little metal fastener where a piece of paper might fit if it was rolled up tight.

“What does Lucien want now?” Tana asked, forcing her gaze to Marisol. The vampire must have noticed the bird.
Why was she acting so nonchalant about it?

“You don’t have to worry.” Marisol slid off the bed with a sigh. “Lucien’s not the one that sent me.”

The taste of Gavriel’s blood was still in Tana’s mouth, and she didn’t feel entirely sober. “Jameson,” she realized, speaking his name out loud. “You’re his—”

“Mother.” Marisol smiled, a cat with a canary it was resisting batting around. “He asked me to help you save some girl, so here I am,
helping
.”

“Oh,” Tana said, thinking abruptly of what he hadn’t said when he’d talked about growing up in Coldtown—nothing about his mother, nothing about his parents at all. And then she couldn’t help thinking of her own mother, of how her mother could have been very like this. “
Oh
.”

Valentina was going to be so happy. Maybe happy enough to eventually forget the way Tana had ripped open a vampire’s throat with a screwdriver and blunt teeth right in front of her.

“Go ahead,” Marisol said. “The message on the bird’s leg is for you.”

Tana walked over to Gremlin. The bird was still, not pecking her fingers, letting her pull the thin piece of paper from the steel casing attached to its leg.

Trust her
, it said.
Trust me.

Tana sighed.

“There’s one other thing.” Marisol hopped off the bed, moving with unnatural grace. Her scarlet eyes gazed past Tana, taking in the room, as though looking for cameras. “Your friend wanted Jameson to pass on a message. Some girl from your hometown is here in Coldtown. Pearl. Does that mean anything to you?”

The world wavered in place. Blackness flooded the edges of
Tana’s vision. She felt as if she were falling, as if she were falling and falling and would never stop falling.