Holly Black - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Finally, Tana learned the music of the locks and crept up the stairs just as the keys began to turn. There, she waited for him. He had been careful, but not careful enough. When the door opened, she sprang up and bit him. They would tumble down the stairs together in a blur. And when she woke, she was a vampire and her father was unconscious beside her.

Then her mother came down and hugged Tana in her soft arms and told her that everything would be okay. They were going to leave very soon, but first Tana had to bite her mother. Her mother would be very insistent, saying that she couldn’t bear to worry about Tana out in the world alone and that she wanted to be with her always. Sometimes Tana’s mother would even beg.

Please, Tana, please.

Tana always bit her. When Tana was very little, in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda or sherbet. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she’d licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

After Tana’s mother was infected, she bit Tana’s father while he was unconscious, because she needed human blood to complete her own transformation, and biting him was fine because you couldn’t go Cold from being bitten by infected people. After that, they would put him to bed; he was probably tired.

He slept peacefully while Tana and her mother told Pearl that they would be back for her when she was older. Then they put on long gowns and went out into the night, mother vampire and child vampire, to hunt and haunt the streets together.

They’d be the good kind, like the devoted scientists who’d infected themselves to study the disease better; like the vampire bounty hunters who hunted other vampires; like the vampire woman in Greece who still lived with her husband, making all his meals at night and leaving them for him to reheat while she slept the day away in a grave of freshly turned earth under the root cellar. Tana and her mother would be like that, and they would never kill anybody, not even by accident.

In the dream, everything was convenient, everything was perfect, everything would be fine forever.

In the dream, Tana’s mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.

I don’t want to be a vampire , she told herself over and over again. But in her dreams, she kind of did.

CHAPTER 5

He whom the gods love dies young.

—Menander

Driving across Lance’s lawn, Tana ran over a coiled length of hose and crushed the daffodil patch that his mother had planted. Then she threw the Crown Vic into reverse and pulled up to the window as tightly as she could. As soon as her bumper hit the wall, she got out, climbed on top of the car, and tried to wriggle back through the window, this time holding a tire iron.

It took several tries and a lot of jumping and scrambling and kicking. When she did make it in, her calves and hands scraped, she realized that the room was darker than it had been. The shadows were lengthening as afternoon turned inexorably toward evening. It was probably after six already, maybe after seven. The smell of death hung heavy in the air.

“Tana,” Aidan said as soon as he saw her. “Tana, they’re going to come in as soon as it’s dark. They told us.” He looked pale and frantic, worse than she remembered him looking when she’d left. “We’re going to die, Tana.”

“ Condamné à mort ,” a voice rasped from the other side of the door. She could hear the creatures whispering to one another in the hall, shifting hungrily, waiting for the sun to set.

Her hands shook.

She whirled on Gavriel, who was watching her with those eerie garnet eyes, huddled in the corner like a black crow. “What does that mean?”

“There are so many odd dappled patches of sunlight here,” he called to them from his pile of blankets and coats, ignoring her. “Come in. I long to watch your skin blister. I long to—”

“Don’t say that!” she cut him off, panicked. If the vampires pushed their way in, she had no idea what she would do.

Run, probably. Abandon them.

Aidan pulled against his bonds. “They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn of Istra. I think he’s in trouble.”

“Are you?” Tana asked.

“No, not exactly,” said Gavriel.

Tana shuddered and looked back toward the window and her car with longing. The Thorn of Istra ? She’d once seen a late-night special called Piercing the Veil: Vampire Secrets from Before the World Went Cold . On-screen, two guys in tweed jackets talked about their research into how vampires had stayed hidden for so long. Apparently, in the old days, a few ancient vampires held sway over big swaths of territory, like creepy warlords, with more vampires who were basically their servants. Vampires took victims who wouldn’t be missed, killing after every feeding. But if a mistake was made and a victim survived long enough to drink blood, it was a Thorn’s job to hunt down that newly turned vampire and to kill anyone it bit during its short, savage life. Being a Thorn for one of the old vampires seemed to be half a punishment and half an honor.

On the program, the tweedy men had chuckled over how desperate those Thorns must have been once Caspar Morales started his world tour, all of them scrambling to put down an infection that had already spread out of control.

The Thorn of Istra had, apparently, been driven mad by it. The special showed a grainy video of a meeting beneath the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. And while elegantly dressed vampires conducted business around him, the Thorn had been in a locked cage, his face and body streaked with blood, laughing. He’d laughed even harder when they found the videographer and dragged him up to the cage, howling wildly just before he bit out the man’s throat. She’d seen the expressions on the pale faces of the other vampires. He’d frightened even them.

“The Thorn of Istra’s hunting you?” Tana asked. The thought of the Thorn out of his cage was chilling. “But that’s no problem?”

Gavriel was silent.

Maybe she should leave him. Untie Aidan and get the hell out of there, even if it meant leaving one chained-up vampire to fend off however many were on the other side of the door. Even if it was unfair.

She took a deep breath. “Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?”

His expression turned very strange, almost as if she’d struck him. “Yes,” he said finally.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead, too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she knew she wasn’t going to.

She walked over to Gavriel, her gaze tracing the configuration of his heavy chains. One was looped around the foot of the bed frame. His wrists had been manacled together in front of him with thick iron cuffs, those chains linked to the ones attached to another pair of cuffs, these on his ankles.

The easiest way to free him would be to lift the bed, something he could probably have done if his arms weren’t restrained, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. She was certain she couldn’t do it with Aidan still lying on the mattress, weighing the whole thing down.

“Do you think you can keep from biting me?” she asked him.

Aidan was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know.”

Well, at least he was being honest.

She grabbed Gavriel’s gag from a heap of things on the floor and climbed onto the edge of the bed. “You’re not so far gone yet. Try,” she told him. Bending down, she tied the cloth around Aidan’s mouth as quickly as she could, double-knotting it on the back of his head so that it would take a while to work free. At least she hoped it would.