Holly Black - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

What really happened in the basement of Tana’s house wasn’t like any of her happy dreams where she and her mother frolicked together. After she’d gone down the stairs, a monster had attacked her, mad with hunger, teeth gnawing with such ferocity that the vein in her arm was severed, gobbets of flesh sliding down its throat.

She had shrieked and shrieked for her mother, but her mother was already there. Her mother was the monster.

When Tana woke up, she found out that it was her father who’d saved her. He’d used a shovel to hack off his wife’s head. Then he’d made a tourniquet from a strip of his shirt and taken his disobedient daughter to the hospital, where doctors sewed up her arm.

No one said it was her fault. No one said they hated her. No one said it was because of her that her mother was dead.

No one had to.

CHAPTER 9

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

—T. S. Eliot

Tana could barely keep her eyes open. Gavriel was at the wheel, having taken the keys from Aidan’s pockets after depositing him in the backseat. Tana should have protested, but she’d let him get in on the driver’s side, let him turn the key in the ignition. She’d gathered up the bottle of water and the two sandwiches, still wrapped in plastic, brushed off the grit and eaten them while they sped along the road, headlights picking out the dark shapes of trees and houses. The windows were down, and Gavriel’s hair blew around his face like frayed black ribbons.

She didn’t know where they were going, only that they were driving away from her former life and into a distorted fun house mirror version of it.

After the food, she felt as sleepy as if she’d been drugged. It was the adrenaline draining away, she was pretty sure, the terror receding. She tried to convince herself that she wasn’t safe, that she was in a car with a vampire who, in addition to being a vampire , was talking like a crazy person, but her body didn’t seem to have any more fight in it.

She blinked a few times, trying to stay awake. “What was going on back at the house? Those chains—why didn’t you get out of them before, if you always could?”

“I killed someone—a vampire—and I was exhausted and—” He stopped and looked at the road for a long moment. She studied his features, the androgynous, exaggerated beauty of his wide mouth and lashes so heavy they made him seem like he was wearing eyeliner. “My mind is—not as it was. There is a madness that comes over us when we’re starved and carved, a madness that can be cured only by feeding—but such things they have done to me that it would take a river of blood to wash away all my wounds. I struggle for my most rational moments. I could have gotten out of the chains, yes, but it would have cost me.”

Which meant it had cost him, later, in the trunk of the car, when he was already burned.

“You don’t seem crazy,” she said. “Well, you don’t seem that crazy.”

The side of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “Some of the time, I’m not. But the rest of the time is most of the time. And when I am, unfortunately I am all appetite.

“They left me there with the tied-up boy, saved for the following night, like a sweet on the pillow. I was still waiting for it to get closer to dark when you came in.”

Tana watched the shadows shift across his face along with the lights from the road. She wondered if he could smell her blood, drifting from her pores along with her sweat.

She guessed that he’d planned on draining Aidan before he escaped, even if he didn’t say so out of some sense that it was bad manners.

She wondered if Gavriel thought about biting her—his face, turned to the road still, was as calm as a statue of a saint in a cathedral, but she had seen him with Aidan. She had seen the way his fingers dug into Aidan’s skin and how the muscles in his neck strained and when he’d looked at her, mouth painted with blood, his gaze hadn’t tracked. She wondered what it would be like to be infected and to give in, to let herself be turned, to be ageless and frozen and magic and monstrous.

There were so many girls and boys running away to Coldtown, who would do anything to have the infection burning through their veins the way it burned through Aidan’s. The vampires inside were incredibly circumspect about biting people—that’s why all the pictures of them feeding inside Coldtown showed them feeding from tubing and shunts. More vampires were a drain on the food supply. What Aidan had—what she (maybe) had, too—was rare and desirable. There was a girl Tana had met, a friend of Pauline’s, who cut thin lines on her thighs with razor blades before she went out to clubs, so that a vampire might be drawn to her.

When she looked at Gavriel’s mouth then, it was still stained carmine along the swell of his lower lip. Maybe because he’d saved her at the gas station and she was feeling grateful or because she was so tired, she found herself fascinated with his mouth, with the way it curved into a sinner’s smile. She knew she was looking at him like a boy, like a gorgeous boy whose smile could be admired, and that was dangerous and stupid. She didn’t even know if he thought of her as a girl at all.

She needed to stop thinking about him like that. Ideally, she should stop thinking about him entirely, except as something dangerous. “Why were they after you—those men and the Thorn? Was it bad, what you did?”

“Very bad,” he agreed. “An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it. I had a tutor who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was—but now I think he was also right.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tana said, leaning against the cushioned headrest. “Mercy can’t be evil. It’s a virtue—like kindness or courage or…” Her voice trailed off.

He turned to look at her. “This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, either.” Then, helplessly, she yawned.

He laughed, sounding like any boy from her school. She wondered what color his eyes had been long ago. “Go to sleep, Tana. Lean back your seat. If you let me borrow your car for tonight, I promise I will repay you.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. “With what?”

The smile stayed on his lips. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

She was almost sure he was joking. “Okay. So where are we going?” she asked, her head nodding against the window.

His voice was soft. “Coldtown.”

“Oh,” she said, blinking herself awake again.

“I must. But if Aidan comes through the gates with me, he’ll be safer, and you’ll be safer without him. They’ll hunt for him out in the world. And he’s likely to start hunting, too.”

“But what if he doesn’t want to be a vampire?” Tana asked. As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that he would want it— of course he would want it. Didn’t he say as much before he attacked her? Being a vampire would get him all the glory he could ever imagine—he wouldn’t just be known as the guy at a party most likely to seduce someone else’s girlfriend or the small-town boy yearning for a big city. In Coldtown, he would be drowned in attention—and the massacre at the farmhouse would make his story only more tragic. More romantic.