The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

CHAPTER 21

Dying is a wild night and a new road.
-Emily Dickinson
When Tana woke, the sky overhead was just beginning to darken. She could smell onions frying and heard music playing. People shouted to one another on the street, laughter in their voices. All the kind of stuff she might have expected to find in every city except this one.
Aidan was sleeping beside her, his jaws slightly apart.
She stretched, feeling the stiffness of her muscles. She was still groggy and for a moment imagined putting her head down and just sleeping on and on. But if Aidan opened his eyes and saw her like that, all curled up and delicious, like a blood-filled muffin, she doubted he'd resist biting. She pushed herself to her feet. The more she remembered where she was and what had happened, the more fear pushed away the last dregs of drugged lethargy.
Her purse was still slung across her body and she unclasped it, pushing aside everything that wasn't the small manila envelope. Panic sped her heart and made her almost too afraid to look. But the marker was still there, tucked away safe. No one had taken it. For a moment, she actually thought nice things about Midnight and Winter-they might not care if she died, but at least they hadn't robbed her.
She held the marker up to the light.
Just a little larger than a quarter and even lighter than one, it was terrifying to think that this gleaming coin, this object that was supposed to save her life, was small enough to drop through a drain by accident or slip through a hole in a pair of jeans. Bright silver with gold at the heart where the circuits were, surrounded by small angled cutouts in the metal, it looked like nothing so much as an old-fashioned subway token. She closed her hand into a fist over it, tight, then put it away.
She went over the rest of her inventory. She had the clothes on her back, her boots from home, and her handbag. That held the religious symbols and rose water she'd found at the party, a random assortment of cash rolled up in a brown paper bag, and the garnet locket with the broken clasp that Gavriel had given her in the parking lot.
At the thought of him, she pressed her tongue absently against her teeth, making the bite there sting anew. It throbbed along with the beat of her heart, drumming in her ears. When she realized what she was doing, shame heated her face. It was bad enough that she'd kissed him like that, but it was the same impulse as hitting the gas on an icy road, and she couldn't let herself forget it.
He wasn't going to save her. He didn't even know where she was, no less that she needed saving. They weren't going to sneak out of Coldtown to have mad, bad adventures together where he recited lots of poetry and visited Pauline at drama camp. If he liked her in some strange, savage way, it wasn't the way humans liked one another and it wasn't the way people in storybooks liked one another, either.
Stop being stupid, she told herself, even though it was much too late for that. She'd been a hundred kinds of stupid already.
"Tana." Aidan rolled over on the mattress. His face was gentle with sleep, his hair messy, but his eyes watched her with a disturbing intensity. He slowly shifted into a sitting position, and she noticed that his lips had taken on a blue tint. He gave a long, shuddering sigh. It was almost forty hours since he'd been bitten, and he was looking ever worse as the hours ticked by. "What do you think Rufus and Midnight and those other psychos are going to do now?"
"Wait," she said grimly, and after a moment, he seemed to realize what she meant. She said it again, though, just to be sure. "They're going to wait."
"I won't-" he began, then stopped himself. The words were hollow anyway. They both knew he would.
"Don't worry about it. We're going to get out of here," she told him, although there was a flatness to her tone. Even she wasn't sure she believed it.
Leaning back against the wall, he didn't seem ready to attack her yet, but she wondered how long she had. He was still just waking up. "Haven't you ever thought about it-being a vampire?" he asked.
"Everybody's thought about it," said Tana.
"I mean, what with your mom and all-" He stopped abruptly, as though he'd just realized he'd stumbled into dangerous territory. He gave her one of his old, charming half smiles, a teasing one. "And you kissed a vampire. That's crazy. That's not usually what they do with their mouths, you know. I'm kind of jealous."
"Oh, come on," she said, rolling her eyes. "Like you care what I do. You dumped me, remember?"
"First of all," Aidan said, giving her his most insouciant smile and holding up a single finger, "I never said I was jealous of him. Maybe I was jealous of you for getting all his attention. He's not a bad-looking guy, if you don't mind a side serving of lunatic raving. Good mouth."
That made her laugh, a real, relaxed laugh, like in the old days.
"Secondly," he said, holding up another finger, "you scared the hell out of me when we were dating, Tana. I was used to having girlfriends who'd yell at me or get upset about the stupid stuff I did, or try to save me from myself. You weren't like that. Sometimes I felt like you were a better me than I was."
"I didn't know what we were doing a lot of the time," she protested. "I didn't even-"
There was a rustling sound at the door, cutting off her words. A girl's hand snaked through the plastic flap, a dozen silver rings on her fingers and fresh glossy green polish on her nails. She was holding a wooden bowl. A bowl filled so full of red liquid that setting it down caused some to spatter over the floorboards, sinking into the grooves of the wood. The scent of it was iron and basements and losing baby teeth so her big-girl teeth could come in. It was skinned knees and Gavriel's mouth on hers. It was smeared walls and staring eyes.
Tana scrambled to her feet.
Blood.
For a long moment, she and Aidan looked at the bowl. Tana felt hypnotized by the sight of it. The slick redness was as dark and deep as a pool of melted garnets.
If she drank it, she would turn into a monster. She let herself imagine that for a moment, imagining her new monster body and monster eyes and monster thirst. She imagined Midnight and Winter, Rufus and Christobel and Zara opening the door to the room and finding a monster-girl inside.
And if she didn't drink and Aidan did, he would die and wake again-newly turned, ravenous, and alone with her.
"See?" An unfamiliar girl's voice came from the other side of the door. Probably Christobel or Zara. "We don't want anyone to get hurt. We didn't want to have to lock you up. We donated that blood, all of us together, pulled it out of our veins with needles. And now we can't go to the clubs tonight, but see? We're worthy. Drink it and you can come out of the little room. Drink it and we'll all be friends again."
Thicker than water. That's what people said about blood. It looked it, too, viscous and syrupy. Tana could imagine the silky texture of it on her tongue, the warm saltiness, how it would stain her lips and teeth.
"Maybe we should," Aidan said, his voice going low, seductive and seduced. He took a step toward it. "We could do it together, like a suicide pact. Except we'll never die, Tana."
Walking quickly across the floor, her heart hammering, she picked up the bowl and flung it as hard as she could against the wall. The wood cracked, two halves bouncing off the floor where they fell. Bits of plaster rained after it.
"I can't believe you did that," Aidan said, in a tone of pure astonished frustration. He walked toward the wall as though drawn.
Tana slumped, sliding down to the floor, where she sat staring at the blood painting the wall. The stain seemed to make a shape like a great bird, feathers dripping down as it flew up into the sky.
She couldn't quite believe she'd done it, either.
"I'm not going to get any better." His voice rose, staring at the red. "I'm so Cold, Tana, and I am only going to get Colder."
She slammed her hand against the floor, trying to focus her thoughts. "Gavriel let you drink his blood, right? Back at the Last Stop. And it helped. All we need is more."
He laughed, but not as though he thought it was funny. Not as though he thought it was a possibility, either. "The most precious stuff in Coldtown and you're going to just ask for some... like you're borrowing a cup of sugar?" He reached out a hand to the wall, streaked with blood. "Give up. I came knowing I was going to be a vampire. What's the point of waiting? We're not going to be fine, Tana. We're never going to be fine ever again."
She wondered what it was like to bite someone. She thought about the expression on Gavriel's face when he'd sunk his teeth into Aidan, the way his mouth had moved on Aidan's throat and his fingers had dug into Aidan's skin. It was as though some serene frenzy had come over him. He looked transcendent, a dreamer not yet awakened.
Her stomach clenched just thinking about it, a combination of desire and dread that made her wonder if it was a symptom of the infection. She shouldn't find the memory of that anything but horrific. But putting aside what she should feel, oh yeah, she got why Aidan might be embarrassed at the memory of drinking from Gavriel's wrist.
That thought wouldn't leave her head as she watched Aidan brush his fingers over the wall and bring them-painted red now-to his mouth.
"Aidan," she said softly, hopelessly, just before he licked them clean, one by one.
He made a sound in the back of his throat and knelt down, pressing his lips to the wall, laving it with his tongue. Already, he seemed inhuman, a creature feeding instead of a boy she'd known.
Tana inched away, putting as much distance between them as the small room would allow. A shaky breath escaped her mouth, sounding like a sob.
"Okay!" she shouted, her voice coming unsteadily. "Midnight, are you out there? Okay, he did it. He caved. You can let us out now. You can let him out."
She heard only the sound of murmuring voices floating up from the rooms below.
There was a commercial that ran sometimes on television, especially during daytime soap operas when moms might be watching. It showed chicken nuggets on a plate in front of a human boy and a blood milk shake in front of a slavering vampire girl tied to her chair with ropes. The human messily gorged on the nuggets in the time the vampire just got started on her milk shake. Then voice-over guy said, "Shipton's nuggets will make your kid hungrier than a newborn vampire."
The joke's on you, she told herself, remembering. Nothing is as hungry as a newborn vampire.
He was going to die. And before he came back to life as a vampire, if Tana wanted to live, she was going to have to kill him just like her dad had killed her mom. Kill him before he attacked her with all that new strength.
Her best bet was probably the wooden bowl. It was already split in half, and maybe she could chip off a splinter big enough to work like a stake.
But just the thought of it, of pressing it into his chest deep enough to puncture his heart, made her sick.
Aidan sat down heavily, his back to the bloodstained wall. His lips were red. "I'm sorry," he said miserably, and she couldn't help wondering if he wasn't just apologizing for what he'd done, but for what he would inevitably do. "I'm sorry, Tana."
She nodded. "I know. Me, too."
They sat like that, on opposite ends of the room, watching the river of light move across the floor as early morning stretched into afternoon. Aidan began to shiver, his gaze going again and again to the wall. Occasionally, he would turn to look at her with a wild light in his eyes and then turn away, breathing heavily as though he was in pain.
Think, she told herself, think.
She got up, pacing the room, forcing herself to look at the trim of door frames and baseboards, to consider what could be pried loose and used to kill him. Of course, there was another way.
If she took a little blood, his still-human blood or blood from the wall, so long as she was infected, she'd change, too.
Haven't you ever thought about it-being a vampire?
It would be good-bye, Pearl; good-bye, Pauline; good-bye, dream of Los Angeles and palm trees and bright blue ocean. Good-bye, lying on a towel in the backyard under the summer sun, ants crawling across her foot, slippery cocoa butter gleaming on her skin. Good-bye, beating heart and burgers and having blue-gray eyes.
Kill Aidan or die herself. Die and rise.
We'll never die, Tana.
She looked at the wall where the bowl had struck, considering the small hole halfway up the plaster, and had a sudden desperate thought.
Crossing the room, she kicked the blood-soaked wall, just above the baseboard. Even in her steel-tipped boots, her toes hurt, but she'd cracked the plaster. She kicked again, widening the hole. Maybe she didn't have to make a terrible choice. Maybe she could put off being a monster for another day.
"What are you doing?" Aidan said, looking up at her.
"I don't know," she said. "It might not work."
She walked to where a sharp-looking piece of the bowl had fallen and picked it up. Then she closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and slammed it midway between the first hole and the dent.
Dust coated her skin and clothes.
Then, wedging her boot in the first hole, she reached up through the second to the slats, gripped the wood, and started climbing. It was hard to balance, and harder, with her foot pressing down, making more plaster crumble, not to slip. And then, hardest of all, to slam the piece of bowl into the wall from that position so that she made another hole and kept climbing.
"Tana?" Aidan asked. She looked down, realizing he was standing beneath her. He had a hungry expression on his face. His mouth was slightly apart, his pink tongue pressing against one of his canines speculatively, as if testing it for sharpness.
"I think I can make it to the skylight," she said. Normal, normal, keep acting like everything's normal. I'm climbing a wall as if I'm the lamest superhero in the world and you're dying and everything's normal. "If the chandelier holds me and if I can actually jump on it."
Tana was reminded of a similar exercise they did every year in gym class. Last time, she'd gotten halfway up the climbing wall before jumping off and landing on one of the mats in exhaustion. Pauline, who'd conned an ice pack out of the school nurse for her unhurt wrist so she could sit on the bleachers and avoid the whole thing, had called her a sucker for even trying that hard.
Now, she wished she'd tried a lot harder. She wished she'd practiced climbing that wall every day.
"You're going to leave me here?" he asked her.
Tana shifted her weight, muscles straining. "When I get up onto the roof, I'll see if I can find some way to get you out-"
He shook his head, his voice oddly flat. "It's too late for that. I'm dying. I can feel it."
There was nothing she could say. His skin was pale enough to be nearly translucent, the flesh around his eyes blue as bruises. She wondered if he could feel his heart slowing, if the catch in his voice was because he was finding it harder to breathe.
"I'll get you out tonight, then, once you're changed," Tana told him.
He didn't answer, just watched her grunt as she pulled herself higher. She wished she was stronger, wished she hadn't woken up exhausted. Sweat started at her brow and her thighs. Her arms burned. She ignored everything and concentrated on not falling.
High up the wall, she looked out at the chandelier. What had seemed a short distance to jump from the floor now looked impossible.
Beneath her, Aidan paced the floor like some kind of large, hungry cat. If she fell, if she twisted her ankle or broke her leg, she would look a lot like prey.
Jump, she told herself. Jump.
But she was too scared. Looking down, she felt off-balance, all her limbs shaking. She didn't think she could do it.
Taking a deep breath, she gave herself a little pep talk: Get over your fear of this or get over your fear of murdering in cold blood someone you care about, because those are your choices.
It was, admittedly, a pretty crappy pep talk. But it worked.
She jumped.
Her legs hit the brass arms of the chandelier, hands grabbing for the central column. She barely made it, one leg hooked over, the other dangling down, fingers flailing for a grip. Her purse strap pulled against her throat.
Plaster fell from the ceiling, dusting her in a rain of white. The chain slipped a little, and she slipped, too, one of her hands sliding from the chandelier. Her head banged against one of the lightbulbs as the whole thing swung dizzily.
It's going to pull free from the ceiling, she thought. I'm going to fall.
Straining with her remaining arm and leg, she tried to heave herself back up. She felt a sharp tug, and the strap of her purse pulled against her throat tight enough to choke. Then there was a snapping sound and the leather slid free.
Looking down, she realized that Aidan had her purse in one hand, holding it out as if he was proud of himself. He'd bitten the strap.
"Give that back!" she yelled. "Why did you-"
"Be careful," he told her, a smile in his voice. "You don't want to fall."
He had the marker. But if she let go now, with the chandelier half ripped free from the ceiling, there was no way it would hold her a second time, from a second jump.
She had to focus on getting up and getting to that skylight, even if what she wanted to do was cry.
Hands shaking and head ringing, she pushed herself back to a more secure position on the chandelier. Every time it hitched lower, she was sure she was going to fall. Every time it swung, she was even more sure she was going to fall. But she managed to get herself into an upright position, one foot balancing on an arm of the chandelier while she stood.
Reaching up, shaking and sweaty, she grabbed hold of the lever. The window pivoted inward. A drizzle of dirty water rained down, along with a few leaves.
"Now what?" Aidan called up. Then he started to cough.
She was going to have to pull herself up. It was going to be all arm strength and desperation that got her out, if anything got her out at all.
She extended her hands as far as she could and grabbed hold of the sill. Then she launched off the chandelier, scrabbling to get her chest over the edge of the skylight. That moment, when her feet had only air underneath them and she was breathing in gasps, trying to haul herself up, pure terror sparking like acid in her veins, was awful. And when she made it, upper body resting on the tiles of the roof, she stayed that way for a long moment, afraid she was too tired to even pull up her legs.
Finally, dragging herself forward, she looked back down at Aidan. The chandelier hung between them, on an angle, electrical cords ripped loose from the ceiling.
He was grinning. "Wow. That was amazing."
Panting, exhausted, she said, "Please, please give me my purse back. I don't know why you took it and I don't care. Just give it back."
"Sorry, Tana," he said, unzipping it and rooting around inside, pulling out the small envelope. With pale, unsteady fingers, he took out the small silver disk with the computer-chip center and held it up in the growing light. "I wanted to make sure you had to come back. I'm scared."
"I won't leave you here," Tana said, low, looking directly into his eyes, so he could see that she meant what she was promising. "You don't need any proof of that. You know me. I'm crazy-crazy enough to come back, marker or no marker."
"Then it doesn't matter, right?" And he flashed her one of his exasperating puppy-dog looks. "I'll give you the rest of the bag, just let me keep the marker. It's my dying wish."
Please, Tana. Please.
"No," she said.
"Too bad." Aidan closed her bag and threw it to her. She snatched it out of the air, angry and even angrier that he was giving her something to be grateful for.
"You better not lose that marker," Tana said, stomach churning, resigning herself. "You better not give it to some hot kid you want to impress. It's still mine."
"I won't," he said, bringing it to his mouth and kissing it with his dried-blood-stained lips. "Come for me after it's dark."
Tana rolled onto her back, lying on the roof and looking into the faded blue of the sky. She was exhausted, her mind supplying only the words I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired over and over, a chant that felt more true every time she thought it.
She blinked and a shadow fell over her. She sat up to see a Latino boy walking toward her across the peak of the roof. She yelped in surprise.
He was the same boy she'd seen that morning. He had short, cropped jet hair, multicolored tattoos snaking up the dark skin of his arms, and bright gold hoops in both his ears, but no bird this time. "You okay?" he asked.
She nodded.
He walked over to the skylight and looked down into it. "They locked you in there with that boy? What's wrong with him?"
She nodded. "Aidan's infected. They fed him blood. He's going to turn."
The boy shook his head. He seemed piratical enough to fit in with Rufus and Zara and Christobel, and he'd known they were a they, but he hadn't called out to them that morning from the rooftop. She really, really hoped they weren't friends.
He stuck out his hand. She took it, letting herself be hauled onto her feet. The gentle slope of the roof made her steps unsteady, but she didn't think she was in any danger of falling unless she tried to go fast.
"I saw you," she said. "With the bird."
"I live around here," he told her. "Lived here since before the quarantine. It's safer higher up. My name's Jameson."
Tana looked around at the sea of rooftops, some connected and some not. "If you show me the way to the street, I'll buy you dinner."
"The sun's going down," he said. "They call that meal breakfast around here."
She looked up at the clouds, painted with the scarlet and gold of dusk. "Breakfast, huh?"
Jameson shrugged, walking toward the peak of the roof. "Welcome to Coldtown. Breakfast at dusk. Lunch at midnight. Dinner at dawn. And don't expect everybody to be as nice as me. C'mon."
Hesitating, Tana glanced back at the skylight. "He's dying down there. By himself."
"Everybody dies alone," Jameson said, and kept going. "Not everybody wakes up right after. Come on."
After a moment, not knowing what else to do, she followed him. He led her from rooftop to rooftop, until they came to a fire escape, which they clanked down noisily.
Coldtown was a city running upside down, where day was night and night was day. As they got closer to the town center, the streets filled with shopkeepers and street vendors setting up for the coming night. Kids on torn blankets selling dented canned goods for a quarter apiece called out to her as she passed. There were other makeshift stalls, one full of small generators that ran on solar power and operated by hand crank; another with an array of dresses and coats on racks; and a third with chickens and rabbits in cages. A woman stoked a fire underneath two enormous soup pots while a man on a stool stirred them furiously; a sign behind the couple promised a ladle-full of vegetable broth at half price if you brought your own bowl. A man in a top hat and red suspenders called out gleefully from behind a smoking barbecue grill, "rat on a stick, better get 'em quick, crispy and sweet, meat for a treat!"
Tana's stomach growled, but she wasn't sure she could bring herself to eat. She wondered if it was the infection, if it was finally going to steal her hunger for anything other than blood. At that thought, her stomach churned worse than ever.
By the time she got to High Street, her head was spinning.
"Go grab a seat," Jameson said, gesturing to a place with small grubby plastic tables and mismatched chairs. "I'll get us something. You can pay me back."
She wondered what his game was, but since they were in a public place and running off might land her in a weirder or worse situation, Tana sat. He returned a few minutes later with two plates filled with what looked like scrambled eggs with chives, a couple of warm tortillas, and two mugs of black coffee with a film of grounds on top.
"Okay," Jameson said. "I helped you out and I bought you food. Now maybe you could tell me a little about the Thorn of Istra."
Tana just stared at him. "How come you think I-"
He took out his phone, thumbed a few buttons, and pushed it across the table toward her. She didn't understand what she was looking at for a moment. It was a blog post with a blurry photograph that Tana recognized as the one Midnight had taken with her camera phone. She must have messed around with it in Photoshop before posting, though, because the picture was brighter. Tana's and Gavriel's faces were recognizable, tipped toward each other in a moment before their mouths touched. His eyes were closed.
"And before you ask why I think he's the Thorn of Istra, it's because the post says so. The girl claims you and your friends-including the Thorn-picked up her brother and her at some kind of crap tourist place."
Tana stared at the phone.
"You can read it yourself if you want." Jameson forked up some eggs. "But basically it says you survived a massacre, where you met the Thorn. He didn't tell anyone who he was, but her brother figured it out at the gate when he saw a wanted sign. Let's just say that lots of people were interested in her post." Jameson's voice was neutral, his tattooed arms resting on the table. She studied them-words in large ornate script that disappeared under a white T-shirt, roses winding on green stems, and moths of pale brown and white wings. "Particularly Lucien Moreau."
She nearly choked on her eggs. "The guy on TV?"
Lucien Moreau. Pale gold hair and a face like a pre-Raphealite painting. Ancient and ageless, he showed up during the quarantine, waltzing into the city, taking over the biggest house he could find, and installing cameras everywhere. The parties that raged on in his house were as famous as the Eternal Ball, but more elegant and more deadly. You could watch them online and on certain late-night local channels, but no mainstream station would ever broadcast them unedited. Tana didn't watch, but Pearl and her friends did. She'd heard them whisper about what they'd seen: the blurry outlines of velvet capes, the tangled limbs, and Lucien, charming as ever, talking to you right through the camera, promising you with the curve of his mouth and the brightness of his eyes that no matter how loudly you screamed, you'd like whatever he did, and you'd never be the same once he was done.
"I have a friend who lives in Lucien's house. She does errands and stuff for him. She was supposed to be keeping an eye on the gate. Apparently, ever since the Thorn broke out of his prison in Paris, Lucien's been scared he's coming here."
"Why?" Tana forced herself to pick up the mug, ignoring her unsteady hands. She took a sip of the coffee, the hot liquid steadying her enough to take a bite of the eggs. At the first taste, she realized she was hungrier than she'd imagined.
Jameson leaned forward in his plastic seat. "Lucien is the reason he was in a cell. Apparently, your friend Gavriel let Caspar Morales slip through his fingers. Lucien, or maybe Elisabet, or probably both of them together, told some ancient vampire called the Spider what Gavriel had done, which is how the Thorn of Istra spent the last decade being tortured somewhere under the streets of Paris."
Tana thought about what Gavriel said in the car after they'd left the gas station. The words had seemed nonsensical at the time, but now it seemed to Tana that they were a riddle.
This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy.
An act of mercy that I regret-endlessly, I regret it.
Tana's head was spinning again. "How do you know all that?"
"I told you," he said. "My friend lives with Lucien. Did the Thorn say anything about what his plans were? Did he talk strategy?"
I have a friend, too. And I mean to kill him.
"There's somebody he wants dead," Tana scraped a pile of eggs onto a tortilla and lifted it to her mouth. After the third bite and another swig from the mug, she started to feel a lot better. "But I don't know anything other than that. I wouldn't have even believed that Gavriel was the Thorn of Istra if Winter hadn't shown me this." She took the crumpled flyer from where she'd jammed it into her purse hours and hours before, unfolding it on the table, pressing out the creases. Seeing his black curls, the silver-topped cane, and the violence in his eyes, Tana was surprised all over again at the memory of his mouth's softness. "He didn't act like-I mean, he was terrifying, but he was weirdly kind, too. Not how you'd think."
Jameson peered over at the paper and whistled at the amount of the bounty. "How come you didn't turn him in at the gate?"
Tana shook her head. "He helped me out. That would be a pretty crappy way of paying him back. But I don't understand-why would Lucien and Gavriel even know one another?"
"Lucien is Gavriel's maker," Jameson said.
"What?" She couldn't imagine it. Couldn't imagine Gavriel, whom she thought of as half the boy who'd promised her another day and half the screaming creature underneath Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, having anything to do with slickster Lucien Moreau, who had sold licensing rights to his image so that posters of him could be sold at malls across the country. "Look, obviously I don't know much of anything. All I can tell you is that Gavriel's traveling alone, and there were some vampires hunting for him. He let us assume they were sent by the Thorn of Istra, but I guess they belonged to this Spider person. The massacre Midnight mentioned in her post, that was because of them."
A white thing streaked down from the sky, surprising Tana into nearly toppling off her chair. The crow spread its albino wings and alighted on the table, regarding her with its ruby eyes. It stalked across the plastic surface, cawing once and then picking at a few fallen curds of egg.
Jameson started to laugh as the bird hopped up onto his shoulder. Flapping its wings, it flew up to his head. "This is Gremlin," he said, swatting the crow back to the table.
Tana put out her fingers tentatively and was surprised when the bird scampered over and rubbed its beak against her skin. She smiled a little, relaxing. There was something about an animal that made it hard not to feel like the person who kept it was basically decent.
"Let me explain something about Coldtown," Jameson said. "Mostly, we're an ecosystem that works. The vampires need lots of living people to supply them with blood, willingly, through the shunts. If they had to go around attacking people, they'd risk spreading infection and losing their food supply. But when something shakes Coldtown up, we descend into chaos very quickly. Whether it's human terrorists breaking the windows of the Eternal Ball and setting themselves on fire or turf wars between rival vampires gangs, things can get heated pretty fast. So if Gavriel's here to stir things up, there are a lot of vampires and humans who already hate Lucien and who would join him-"
She tried to imagine Gavriel's recruiting anybody and shook her head. "I think whatever he's going to do, he'll be alone. He's not really-he's kind of crazy."
Jameson looked faintly relieved. "I'll tell my friend to try and get away from Lucien's for a few days, but I doubt she'll go."
Tana took a last swig of the coffee, drinking down the grounds, feeling the caffeine sing through her blood. The sky above them had turned dark, and she thought of Aidan, back in the house, dead and risen, and waiting for her to return. "Why's she with him in the first place if he's so awful?"
Jameson looked away from her. "She's a vampire," he said quietly.
The way he'd said it, as if he was embarrassed, made her wonder what it was like to have grown up here human. What did it mean to never have made the choice to come to Coldtown, to never want something from the vampires. What would he do for a marker like the one she'd lost? And how would he feel if he knew about the infection bubbling in her blood?
Reaching over, Jameson stroked Gremlin's white feathers. "Did you know that crows get to like the chemical in ant bites? Formic acid, I think. Anyway, they start to get so addicted to it that they'll spread out their wings on top of anthills. I think that she-my friend-I think she knows that Lucien's horrible, but she's gotten to like it."
Tana shuddered at the image. "Maybe she's just used to it."
"Maybe," Jameson said, but he didn't sound convinced.
"My turn to ask you for something," she said. The thing about Jameson was that he seemed so oddly normal. Tough-looking, with a shadow of stubble over his jaw and the wiry muscles of someone who spent a lot of time climbing across rooftops, but he'd helped her and hadn't asked for anything much in exchange. "If you know a place where I can buy some stuff like clothes and maybe a weapon, I'd love some directions. I didn't exactly come prepared."
"I know somebody with a pretty decent pawnshop. I could walk you over." Jameson raised both his eyebrows, waiting.
"Thanks again," she said, and he stood.
Tonight, she was going to have to find her way back to Aidan and retrieve her marker. And once she did, she was going to have to find herself a new prison, one where she could hole up and wait out the infection with enough food and water and blankets to get her through eighty-eight days of torment.
Eighty-eight days, starting with this one.