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.”