Holly Black - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Lucien spread his arms wide, laughing. “Well, come on then. Do it. Or no, let’s wait until the Spider gets here and we can do a little gladiatorial show for him. Do you think he’d like that? Waiting would give you a moment or two to get your bearings again.”

Tana took an unsteady step toward him. Her head spun.

The guards moved forward, too.

She’d seen Gavriel rip free of the heavy chains that bound him in the coatroom, tear free from the metal trunk of her car. And if Lucien was his maker that meant he was older and more powerful than Gavriel. She couldn’t possibly fight him in hand-to-hand combat. Even throwing her knife would be futile. He wasn’t going to be surprised, not when she was standing right in front of him, and would have ample time to dodge.

“Lucien,” Gavriel said. “If you’re proposing a duel, I believe she gets to pick the weapon. I hope she picks me.”

Tana looked up and saw, all over again, that one of his hands was free from the chains. Despite her muzzy head and the fear that clutched her chest, she couldn’t help thinking there was something off, if only she could figure out what.

The chains. That was the problem. Lucien had sent Elisabet out to get Gavriel, had sent her with chains that were definitely and absolutely supposed to imprison him. Except they hadn’t. He’d been weak after they escaped from Lance’s farmhouse; he’d been hungry and burned by the sun. But he’d still pulled apart those iron chains, had still torn her trunk as if the metal was only thick paper.

Lucien should have known how strong Gavriel was, if Lucien was stronger.

The chains were rigged tonight, but they weren’t rigged then.

“You really didn’t know she was coming, did you? To save you,” Lucien said, whirling on Gavriel. He reached into the folds of his jacket and removed a slender blade, as bright as the scales of a fish. “Did you see? She almost shot me in the heart.”

“Then you were completely safe,” Gavriel said. “Since you don’t have one.”

“It hurt ,” Lucien said petulantly, stabbing Gavriel’s stomach and then again, the knife making a horrible sound as it scraped a rib. “See? It hurts .”

Gavriel made a soft choking noise. Blood stained his mouth. Lucien must have hit a lung.

“But there’s nothing you like better than when it hurts a little, is there?” Lucien asked.

Gavriel’s bloody mouth lifted in a voluptuous smile. “Sure there is. I like it when it hurts a lot.”

Lucien stabbed him again, twisting the blade around in Gavriel’s guts. Gavriel moaned. “This is what you get, coming back here, thinking you’re going to have revenge on me. On me , your maker !”

“The nerve,” Gavriel whispered, that mad light bright in his eyes, blood dripping from a corner of his mouth.

Drawing him off her, Tana realized. Gavriel had gotten Lucien’s attention and drawn his anger deliberately. But what was he doing? Lucien had said that the Spider had sent assassins after him. Could the Spider have decided to free Gavriel and let him work off his debt by killing Lucien? But then why would the Spider come? Why not stay in Paris and let the work be completed without any danger to himself?

Her head spun. There was something she was missing. She felt it the way you can feel a word on the tip of your tongue.

Lucien left his knife where it was, shoved in Gavriel’s belly all the way to the hilt, and he paced back and forth across the marble floor. He looked transcendent with fury, lit up from the inside.

One of the gray-clad guards, a vampire with dark skin and broad cheekbones, stepped forward. “The Spider is nearly at your door,” he reported. “I suggest you ready yourself.”

Lucien looked at them as though he’d forgotten the audience of guards, forgotten the imminent arrival of an ancient vampire, forgotten any bargains.

Gavriel reached for the hilt of the knife embedded in his own stomach and pulled it out. Then he glanced at Tana and grinned an odd, conspiratorial grin, as though they were sharing some secret. “Tana, go.”

And just like that, all the pieces came together in Tana’s mind. She started to laugh, the nervous, crazy laughter she felt she’d been holding back since she’d woken up in a bathtub to find a house full of corpses. The lunatic laughter of someone who’d been in over her head from the start.

Lucien looked at her with a furrowed brow. She was laughing so hard that Lucien himself started to smile uncomfortably.

“The Spider is here,” she managed to spit out, calming finally. “He’s already here, isn’t he? He’s been here the whole time.”

With a heave, Gavriel pulled his left arm free from the chains, the manacles hanging around his wrist like a bracelet. He brought up the dagger, stained with his own blood and ran his tongue over the blade. “She’s far cleverer than you.”

“How did you—?” Lucien asked. “What is she talking about with this ‘Spider is here’ business?”

“The Spider’s dead,” Gavriel said, his mouth curving into a wide, terrifying grin. “He’s been dead. Dead for weeks. Dead when I left Paris. That’s how I escaped. I killed him.” Lucien shook his head, looking at Gavriel with blank incomprehension. “No. That’s not possible. He’s ancient. You can’t have killed him. You’re just—you’re—”

“I’m the Spider now,” Gavriel said.

The gray-clad Corps grabbed Lucien’s three robed guards. Quickly and efficiently, wooden blades were thrust into their hearts. They dropped, one after another, with sickly thuds.

“It took ten years for my opportunity to come. And he left me a mighty legacy—his secrets, repeated in front of me, his vaults and bank accounts and all the things that made him the Spider, operating from behind the scenes.

“But the greatest legacy he left me was his blood. I’m much stronger than you remember. Much, much, much stronger.”

Lucien looked at him, the full horror finally breaking across his face. He looked around his ballroom, empty except for enemy guards and the video cameras looking down on him. The video cameras that were recording all of this.

“When did you know?” Gavriel asked Tana conversationally.

“Just now, really,” she said.

“Did I ever tell you how I met her?” Gavriel asked Lucien, his chest a mess of dark blood. He seemed to barely notice the wounds, didn’t even wince as he took a few steps across the marble floor. She thought of what Jameson had said about crows letting ants sting their wings because they’d grown addicted to the burn of acid. She wondered if you could be hurt so often that you might miss it.

Lucien didn’t answer, but the arrogance was gone from his face.

Gavriel smiled, gesturing casually with his hands as he spoke, the knife in one cutting through the air. “After the Spider was dead, I still wasn’t myself for a long time. I seemed to wake, lying on the cold floor, surrounded by what remained of my captors. And I realized that with the Spider dead, I commanded all his resources. And then I thought of you, Lucien.

“I landed in the Boston Harbor without letting myself heal, half mad and half starved. I looked very much like I was truly on the run, I think. And you sent Elisabet after me immediately once you heard I’d arrived, didn’t you? Right around the time you sent a letter to the Spider vowing to recapture me.

“Elisabet and her churls caught up with me by the side of the Blackstone River. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.” He smiled with the memory. “She trapped me easily. I was exhausted and I had no reason to fight very hard—after all, she intended to bring me right to your side. In fact, wrapped in steel chains, thrown in the back of their black-windowed limousine, I slept as I had not slept in a decade.