The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

CHAPTER 25

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
-Miguel de Unamuno
Tana'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."
"Because you don't trust me," he said.
"You're not used to what you are yet," she told him. "That's all. Friends don't blackmail each other."
"You can't leave me here, Tana," he said. "Promise me that you won't leave me."
After a long moment, she said, "I'll be here for eighty-eight days at least. I'm infected, remember? That's a lot of time." She wasn't sure she was infected, not anymore, but she figured that it'd be safer if he thought her being Cold was certain.
Safer, because if there was any way to, she was leaving him. She was going home, home to hide under covers that smelled like bleach and violets and to sleep until she forgot the last three days. She wanted to take a shower so hot that it gave her a sunburn. She wanted to cry until she didn't have any tears left, until the salt of them dried on her cheeks and blew away.
"We could find him again-Gavriel," Aidan said, making the name into a taunt, but not a mean one. He sounded like Pauline did sometimes when she was teasing Tana about a boy, the way she'd once sounded when she was teasing Tana about Aidan. "I bet we could find him if we looked, and I know you'd like to see him again, even if you won't say so."
Tana let herself smile with relief that Aidan had moved on to a subject that didn't involve dying. He might let her out of the room without a fight, might let her out with the marker. "Okay, sure. Let's look for him."
"I bet he wants to see you, too." With a sigh, Aidan reached into his jeans and took out the manila envelope, then put it in her hand. "We'll start tomorrow. You trust me now, right?"
She wanted to open it up and look, but she didn't want to take her gaze off Aidan. She could feel the weight of the marker, could trace her finger around the outline of it through the paper. That would have to do. She slipped it into one of the zip pockets of her jacket while he watched.
"I trust you," she said, and stepped into the hallway.
The dim slashes of sunlight through the painted windows were little comfort. As soon as she'd walked a few steps, she started to run down the stairs. She was tired through and through, tired from adrenaline, exhausted from being drugged the morning before, and worn down from fear so deep it seemed to live in her bones. She forced herself to walk out the front, down the street, and seven blocks in a random direction before she let out her breath. Then she looked for a house with boarded up windows. Using the bolt cutter to force her way inside, she searched it as thoroughly as she could in her exhausted state, climbing her way to the topmost room. There, she pushed a dresser against the door, made a nest of the dusty curtains and curled up in their center, happy for the warmth of the sun on her face, happy for it to burn away everything about the night before.
It was full, black night when Tana woke. She came out of sleep like a thunderclap-waking from dreams so deep and dark that she couldn't remember anything but dirt and hands pulling her down into graves with cities inside them. She was covered in sweat, as though she'd slept through a fever.
Outside her window, the lights of Coldtown were glowing like luminous jellyfish floating on a vast sea-candles in some windows and electric lights in others, generators pumping and wind turbines whirring. Tana's clothes were stiff and rusty with dried blood. She stripped them off and wrapped herself in the poncho like a robe.
It had been two days ago, around sunset, when the vampire had scraped the back of her knee with his tooth. Which meant that forty-eight hours had passed since then, had passed while she was asleep. That was Sunday night and it was Tuesday night now. Which mean that her body must have shaken off the infection. If her symptoms hadn't gotten worse yet, then, against all odds, she'd beaten it.
She wanted to scream and jump up and down. She settled for spinning around the room, not caring that she was wearing only a weird poncho, not caring about anything except that she was going to stay human. She was going to be fine.
It felt almost dangerous, that something so good had happened. But if she got ready fast, she could be out past the gate and on the road before dawn.
The upstairs of the house had several bedrooms, most of which had been stripped of furniture. She found the bathroom at the end of the hall, and when she turned the taps on in the bathtub, water flowed. It was dark at first and stank of iron, but after she let it run a little while, it became clear. She showered under the icy spray-the water heater having probably stopped functioning years back-finding an ancient cracked lump of soap and rubbing her skin with it until she got the blood off her knees and out from underneath her fingernails. Then, with nothing else to wear, she put her jeans back on along with her new underclothes and shirt.
Back in her room, she tugged on her jacket, slipping one hand into the pocket.
The envelope was still there. With trembling fingers, she opened the flap and took out a folded up page ripped from the Dylan Thomas book. My hero bares his nerves along my wrist. Over the poem, Aidan had written in red marker: I'm not ready to let you leave me. Tipping up the envelope, a quarter slid out into the middle of her palm.
The weight had been right and the shape-it was just the object that was wrong.
He must have written those words as she carried bodies through the streets, knowing what he'd say when she got back. Knowing the whole time that he was going to con her. Tana punched the wall, not caring that her knuckles split. She hit it again, punching it over and over until blood smeared the wallboard.
Never again, she promised herself. No matter what, she was never going to let anyone get the better of her ever again. No more mistakes.
Rufus looked more somber than she'd seen him, when he opened the door. He blinked in surprise at the sight of her. He was wearing plain jeans and a T-shirt instead of his usual finery. His eyes were bloodshot.
"Aidan and Midnight cleared out about an hour ago," he said, leaning against the door frame. "With Winter's body." Behind him, she heard Christobel calling down sleepily, asking who was at the door. He ignored her, but a little bit of snark bled back into his voice when he spoke again, one brow raised. "I guess they don't need us anymore. Zara's dead and it was all for nothing. But Midnight, she was wearing her best, most tattered finery, planning on presenting herself to Lucien Moreau."
Tana slammed her hand into the wall again. "Damn it!" she shouted up at the sky. The stars winked down at her as if they were laughing at how silly she'd been. "Well, I guess that's where I'm headed."
"You can't go to Lucien's dressed like that." Rufus sounded apologetic. "If you're not a vampire, the only way to get in is to dress as deliciously as possible-like a raw, quivering, little pork chop-and stand around with all the other humans, hoping you look good enough to get picked. Unless you know somebody who can get you on the very exclusive list."
Tana didn't know anyone who could get her into a fancy vampire party. But she could think of a person who might be on the list, one boy with a vampire girlfriend, who must visit her sometimes, maybe even without climbing across a rooftop.
Tana kept looking up as she walked through the streets, hoping to spot Jameson's white crow or some sign that he was around. The chance of her actually lucking into finding him was low, but since she didn't have any other way to contact him, she figured she'd go past places he'd taken her, eat at the cart they'd eaten at before, and ask Valentina at Oddments & Lost Things if he'd brought any other strays past.
She bought coffee at A Shot of Depresso, where crushed beans were stirred into boiling water in massive copper vats, and the proprietor stood on a stool to ladle some into a cup. For fifty cents extra, you could get a squirt of fresh goat milk from a sleepy goat chewing on a patch of clover near a stall filled with bright green bottles marked laudanum.
Standing in line, she noticed that very few of the people in front of her paid in cash. Some seemed to be racking up a tab, giving their name and getting a note put down on a ledger. Others bartered tomatoes, a skinned rabbit, a bundle of weed tied with string, and even a handful of aspirin for their serving.
In addition to the coffee, Tana bought a giant glass of cold mint tea and two squirrel-meat burritos, which were surprisingly good. The queso was fresh made, and the red sauce was spicy and delicious, coating the stringy and kind of gamy meat. She sat in the moonlight at the edge of a clearing where a mismatched group of tables and chairs rested and ate until she felt full and was pretty sure Jameson wasn't coming. Kids bundled in layers of clothes shared cigarettes back and forth and scrounged in their pockets for stuff to trade. An old man with white hair and red eyes sat beside a chessboard, inviting anyone with a shunt in their arm to play him for the price of dinner.
When she was done, she wiped her hands on her jeans and stood, telling herself she was going to remember to eat more than one meal today.
Then Tana made her way over to Oddments & Lost Things, knocking on the door and peering in through the grate. She heard the metal shift of the locks and then Valentina was there, ushering her inside.
"Tana, right?" she said, smiling. Today she wore a peacock blue slip dress with green flats, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail.
Tana inhaled the perfumed dust of the store and looked around with fresh eyes. She hadn't realized how tired she'd been the day before, waking from being drugged and then exhausting herself with terror. Now, she felt angry and wide awake and a whole lot better.
"Yeah," Tana said, pushing the stray hairs that had come out of her braid behind her ear. "You wouldn't know where to find Jameson, would you?"
Valentina shook her head. "Sometimes he just shows up out of the blue with something he found-a sack of decent coffee beans or, once, a girl's ring he thought might fit me-but it's not like he comes by a lot or anything. He has a cell phone, or at least he did. He gave me the number, but I've never called it."
"Can we try?" Tana asked.
Valentina opened the worn wooden drawers of the desk, sifting through the detritus. She pulled out a cell phone, the face of it cracked and the plastic scratched. When she pressed a button, though, the screen came to life. She tapped a few more keys, and Tana heard the faint sound of ringing on the other end. Valentina brought it to her ear. After a moment, she shook her head and hung up. "Voice mail."
Tana sighed and took the phone from her, copying the number down. "He has that girlfriend at Lucien Moreau's, so I was hoping he could help me get into the party. But if I can't find him, at least you can help me find a really hot dress, right?"
Valentina gestured to the wall, where dozens of gowns hung, overlapping one another, silk and chiffon, beaded and spangled. "Absolutely. I hear Lucien likes bright colors that show up well on television. But are you sure you want to go tonight?"
Tana shook her head. "It has to be tonight. Why?"
"New vampires. A bunch of them." Valentina went to a garment rack in the back and returned with three dresses on hangers-one white, one gold, and one red.
"What do you mean?" For a moment, Tana thought of Aidan and Midnight. But surely two new vampires weren't enough to draw any notice.
Valentina dumped the clothes over a chair and pulled a heavy laptop from behind the counter. It was covered in stickers and hooked up to a weird-looking device with strips of metal. "You really didn't see? Oh, you probably didn't bring a laptop."
"I didn't bring much of anything," Tana said, moving around the counter to watch. Valentina's background screen came on-a picture of a bunch of friends in graduation robes. Tana looked for Valentina among them, but before she could pick her out, Valentina opened her browser.
"Here, look, this is a site that compiles the best links from all Coldtowns-and this is the page for ours." She clicked through, bending over the screen, her ponytail spiraling over one cheek. "Springfield."
She clicked on a link and a screen sprang to life. It was inside a theater, but someone had taken out most of the seats and there was a party going on. People got up on stage, declaiming poems and swigging from bottles, lace dripping from the cuffs of their billowing poet shirts.
Valentina hit the fast-forward button, speeding through two more performers, before a boy in black climbed onto the stage. She tapped the key to return it to normal speed, and Tana saw Gavriel grinning out at the audience, garnet eyes shining, black curls wild around his face, looking as mad as he'd been caged beneath a Paris cemetery.
He took an extravagant bow, one arm flung out with a flourish. Then turning, he dragged a single chair onto the stage. The stuffing had been ripped out of it, the brocade hanging down in tatters. "I have a performance to offer you tonight. It is not a unique talent that I have, but we marvel not over the man who eats a single meal or who does one meager shot of liquor. We marvel over excess. That is what I would give you.
"Come, let me bite you. Have you ever wanted to be as I am? To be immortal? I will turn you. Any of you. All of you, if you like. Tonight. Come to me." He threw his arms wide. "I am thirsty. Let me drink. Let me gorge."
For a long moment, he waited. The crowd had gone hushed. Then a single dark-skinned woman broke from the ranks and started toward the stairs. She walked up the steps slowly, looking back at her friends. She had on a silver-and-black harlequin dress and had painted one of her eyes with a black diamond. Tana could see the fear on her face as she walked slowly to the chair and sat down. Tears glittered in her eyes as she stretched out her long, elegant neck.
Valentina stopped it, freezing the screen as Gavriel bent toward her. "He does it, too. Bites all of them, drinks a ton of blood, and then staggers out. Leaves them alive, every one. They're saying that's the Thorn of Istra."
"He is," said Tana softly.
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."