Holly Black - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Off-key and deranged.

CHAPTER 33

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

—Adrienne Rich

Tana walked down the hallway behind Lucien, past the oil paintings of landscapes in the French countryside and gory handprints. They came to a heavy oaken door. Lucien was reaching for the knob when the door opened wide.

Gavriel was framed in the opening. He had on the black jeans and black shirt he’d worn on their road trip, although they had a softness to them that suggested they’d been freshly laundered. His feet were bare. Stepping back, he waved them inside.

“See, I returned her,” Lucien said, giving Tana a push against the small of her back, so she was forced to stumble into the room. “Unharmed. Undebauched.”

Tana scowled. “You really are from another time, aren’t you?”

Ignoring her, Lucien crossed the threshold, closing the door behind him. “We need to talk, my dear.”

“All three of us?” Gavriel asked archly.

“She’s your guest. We should entertain her—and keep an eye on her. According to you, she’s killed two vampires in the span of a single day. Really, I should never have been left alone with her. She must be very dangerous.” Lucien’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. He drew out from a pocket a folding knife with a handle of bone and began to pick underneath his fingernails with the point, scraping out flakes of dried blood and bits of tissue. She noticed there was something wrong with the way his nails curved, as though his fingers were tapering into claws.

“You’re right. I never should have,” Gavriel said, turning to Tana with a half smile just for her.

More dangerous than daybreak. She wondered if he remembered that he’d said those words. But right then, she didn’t feel dangerous at all. She felt revolted and very, very afraid.

She looked around the room, trying to get her bearings. The windows were the same gray glass and the sun still blazed outside, making them glow, although she no longer had a sense of time. It might have been late afternoon or early evening. On the floor, beside the bed, was a leather duffel, several knives spilling out of it. She wondered where Gavriel had stashed it before his confrontation with Lucien.

The room was large enough for the four-poster bed at its center and the settee along one wall, its upholstery a shining black patent leather. Above it hung a painting, a meticulous study of a human heart crawling with maggots on a silver plate. It reminded Tana of her art teacher, and she wondered suddenly if it could be one of his pieces.

She should take a picture and text it to Mr. Olson, she thought. But that just made her imagine Lucien and Gavriel posing on either side of it, glowering at each other, and from there, hysteria threatened to crawl up her throat and force a giggle out of her.

That was the worst part. She could plan and she could make herself keep going, but she couldn’t control when her brain overloaded on horror and threatened to shut down spectacularly, in a sputter of hysterical laughter. She felt as if she was teetering at the very edge of what she could handle; and if she started laughing now, she wouldn’t stop.

Lucien crossed the room and flopped down on the settee, sprawling out, showing exactly how comfortable he was in Gavriel’s bedroom. Which made sense, since they were, after all, in his home. He continued carving the underside of his nails with the knife, picking loose the last of what darkened them. The more she looked at him, the more she realized that some of his blond hair was stained with blood, too—toward the back of his head, where he probably couldn’t see it. On the cameras, it would read as nothing, a blur.

She wanted to laugh again, which was ridiculous, because none of this was funny.

Tana perched on the corner of the mattress. When Gavriel looked over at her, she couldn’t quite meet his gaze. She remembered how he’d watched her with the vampire in the basement, seen her stained mouth and her red teeth. What had he thought of her? She’d fallen a long way from the nice girl who offered him a ride in the trunk of her car.

No, not funny in the least.

“So,” said Lucien. “The Spider’s advance guard—his Corps des Ténèbres —is coming tonight at dusk. The Spider himself will come later in the evening when everything has been arranged for him. We don’t have much time for preparations and only one chance for this plan to work.”

The casual way he spoke of the Spider’s arrival, as though coming and going from Coldtown for vampires like the Spider or Lucien or Elisabet was as simple as crossing any other border, was alarming. She wondered if the only creatures really stuck inside the city were humans. No, she thought, humans and vampires created after Caspar.

Gavriel ran pale fingers through the mess of his black hair, an oddly human habit. He cut his gaze toward Tana and then back to Lucien. “Just let me get close enough and I’ll kill him. Don’t doubt that.”

“The chains would have to be real,” Lucien said. “He, above all others, knows what will hold you and what won’t—I’ll have to use heavy steel, but we can loosen a few links. Understand? It will all have to seem very, very real.”

“Yes,” Gavriel said, so softly that it was almost an exhalation of breath. “And there must be some sign of struggle. Marks on my body and face, as though we really fought.”

Lucien’s lips pulled back from his teeth in an expression that was half smile and half snarl.

“What is the plan, exactly?” Tana asked. Lucien glanced at her in annoyance, before his face very deliberately smoothed out. Maybe he’d realized that she couldn’t help Gavriel stick to a plan she didn’t understand. Or maybe he’d remembered he was trying to make her like him.

“It’s simple, really,” he said, waving a hand in Gavriel’s direction. “The Spider is going to come pick up his prize. We’re going to truss up Gavriel, and when the Spider gets close enough—and he will, he won’t be able to resist gloating—Gavriel will pull free from the restraints and kill him.”

Gavriel nodded his agreement. “And then Lucien’s people will fall upon his Corps .”

“And thus will the new world triumph over the old,” finished Lucien.

“Nice,” Tana said, feeling as though she ought to say something, but also as though everything she thought of seemed insufficient. That odd feeling of the surreal descended on her again.

Some vampires were going to murder some other vampires.

Lucien and Gavriel, best vampire frenemies, were going to murder some other vampires.

She put her hand in front of her mouth, smothering a smile.

Once upon a time, she and Pauline had had a big falling out over a leather jacket that Tana had borrowed and their mutual friend Ana puked on. There’d been a huge screaming fight and then avoiding each other for a week, eating lunch at different tables and upsetting their mutual friends with their endless snarking. But then Pauline got cast as a lead in a play and turned up at Tana’s house to run lines. The fight was over, just like that.

Could Gavriel feel that way about Lucien, though? Was it possible to forgive someone who caused the death of his sister, whose necklace he’d carried with him for more than a century? Was it possible to forgive someone whose fault it was that he’d been locked in a cell and lost his mind?

Lucien stood up and started toward the door.

Quietly, Gavriel spoke, mouth curling up at one corner. “There is one more thing I would say to you.”