Holly Black - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“I want to go with you ,” he’d say, his eyes big and pleading, his mouth quirked in a little half smile, as though he was acknowledging how ridiculous he was being. And it worked. It always worked, that combination of flattery and little-boy silliness and, underneath it all, that fear Tana had that she wasn’t as cool as he thought she was.

So she went to parties and pretended not to mind. And the more Tana didn’t say anything, the more outrageous his behavior got. He would make out with girls in front of her. He would make out with boys in front of her. He would wink at her from across rooms, daring her to criticize him.

That’s when things got kind of fun.

She schooled herself to even greater nonchalance. She’d walk over to Aidan after he seemed to be finished kissing someone, curl her arm around his shoulder, and ask to be introduced. She’d assign points for style and take away points when he’d struck out. No matter what he did, she never let him see it bother her.

“You’re playing some kind of game of sex chicken with him,” Pauline told her, pushing back a mass of tiny braids. “Who cares which one of you flinches first?”

“Sex chicken,” Tana said, snickering. “Too bad we don’t know anyone in a band—that would be a good name.”

Pauline whacked her with the magazine she was reading. “I’m serious. You know what I mean.”

Tana couldn’t explain why she kept on with it, couldn’t put into words the nihilistic thrill that came from suffering a little or the satisfaction of playing Aidan’s screwed-up game by his screwed-up rules and still winning. She was cool , and she wouldn’t be uncool no matter how much he goaded her. While Aidan sometimes seemed annoyed that she didn’t hassle him, there were other times he told her there was no other girl like her. No other girl in the world.

“You can’t win when someone else makes all the rules,” Pauline warned her. Tana didn’t listen.

Then one night, at another party, Aidan motioned her over and introduced her to the boy sprawled on the couch beside him. The boy’s mouth was pink, and he looked a little drunk from the bottle of tequila in front of him and from the drowsy kisses he’d been sharing with Aidan.

“This is my girlfriend, Tana,” Aidan said. “You want to kiss her?”

“Your girlfriend ?” The boy looked momentarily hurt, but he hid it well. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

“How about you?” Aidan asked her, challenging her. “Are you game?”

“Sure,” Tana said, her daring so tangled up with her determination that she wasn’t sure which one made her agree. Her heart hammered against her chest. It felt scary, as if she were stepping across some invisible boundary, as if she might not know herself afterward. As if she were becoming the self she’d always thought lurked just underneath her skin. Her coolest possible self.

The boy’s lips were very soft.

When she looked up at Aidan, the shock on his face went to her head like a shot of strong liquor. She was giddy with power. And when the boy kissed her back hungrily, she was giddy with that, too.

Aidan leaned forward, and his expression had changed—he had a smile on his face, like they were sharing a joke, just her and him, as if he got that all the parties were games of check and checkmate—as though Aidan knew they were both doing this in the hopes that the adrenaline might blot out every shitty thing that had ever happened to them and he was glad she was with him, that they were together.

It made her think of a year before, when she’d stood alone on train tracks and waited until the train was barreling toward her, until she could feel the heat of it, until her blood sang with fear, before she jumped out of the way.

It made her think of another day, when she’d pressed the gas pedal down on her car and gone skidding through the night streets, slicing through icy rain.

He smiled at her as though he really believed she was special. As though only she had ever really understood what it was to take a dare for the sake of being daring.

But none of that turned out to be true, because Aidan dumped her three weeks and a half dozen parties later, with a message that said only, “I think we’re getting too serious & I want to take a break.”

After that, she wasn’t sure what the game was or if she’d imagined it. All she knew was that she had lost.

CHAPTER 7

Death is a shadow that always follows the body.

—English proverb

Tana directed Aidan to pull the car into a gas station about an hour after they’d left Lance’s house. There were no other cars in sight, and these days all twenty-four-hour marts had bulletproof-glass cashiers’ booths, so she thought it’d be safe to stop. Full dark had fallen, her arm was starting to ache from holding the tire iron, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be able to keep it together much longer. Exhaustion was creeping up on her, her cuts stinging and her head throbbing. She hadn’t eaten anything since she’d woken—hadn’t even thought of eating—and each time her stomach growled, Aidan looked over at her as though her hunger reminded him of his own.

It was hard to stay alert, hard not to be distracted by images of the farmhouse, of bodies, rising up behind her eyelids when she blinked, everything drenched in red. And along with that, the memory of the vampire’s teeth scraping the back of her leg, his hand clamped on her calf.

She’d watched programs in health class talking about the spread of infection. There’d been an illustration of the human mouth and the vampire mouth side by side. She thought of it, illustrated in blue and yellow, pink and red. Vampire canines grew longer than their human counterparts, with thin channels that let the creature draw blood up through its teeth and into the back of its throat. When a vampire bit down, a little of its own fouled blood was pushed into the human bloodstream, causing infection. There’d been cases like hers before, cases where the teeth didn’t fully penetrate. Sometimes people were fine, sometimes they weren’t. If she didn’t go Cold in forty-eight hours, she’d know her luck had held.

Aidan pulled up to one of the pumps. “We can’t keep driving without a plan. We’ve got to go somewhere .”

“I know,” she said, her panic-fogged mind going round and round, every possible move seeming worse than the last. She had no idea what to do next. All she knew was that she felt about ready to jump out of her own skin.

As he opened the car door, a lock of hair fell into his eyes. He pushed it back, the way he’d always done. It seemed like such a normal gesture, when everything else was so not normal, when he wasn’t normal, that she had to swallow past the lump in her throat.

He reached for the pump, selecting regular unleaded.

Tana felt as though everything was happening much too slow and too fast, all at once. During the drive, she’d been afraid to talk, because if she started, she wouldn’t be able to hold how she felt inside. She wouldn’t be able to make him believe she was in control.

“We’ll get a map and make a plan,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t see how tired she was. If she seemed weak, she might seem more like prey. She made her voice as steady as she could. “I’m going to the bathroom to get cleaned up first, though. I’ll meet you in the mart after you’re done with the gas.”

From the trunk she heard a soft thump. Gavriel was back there, waiting to be freed. But what would he do then? Were they supposed to just dump him by the side of the road and hope for the best?