Aidan was smiling at her, his floppy brown hair falling over his ruby eyes, his sharp teeth evident, as he crossed the patchy asphalt.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
Behind him, from the shadows, came a second vampire.
CHAPTER 37
They do neither plight nor wed
In the city of the dead,
In the city where they sleep away the hours.
—Richard Eugene Burton
Holding the crossbow to her chest, Tana crept back across the lawn. The house looked empty without the noises of partygoers spilling out of the doors, but the smoked glass windows of the estate glowed with light. As she climbed the steps to the side door on the long wraparound porch, she saw a camera swinging slowly to take in the empty yard. The light on it glowed red; it wasn’t recording.
She ducked under it anyway. Sucking in her breath, she turned the handle on the door and crept inside.
All the vampire hunters must have started out like this, with barely any supplies and a serious grudge. She thought of Pearl, somewhere in this bleak walled city, and was determined to hold that grudge as tightly as any of them ever had.
At ten, Pearl had started watching the vampire-hunting shows obsessively after a spate of nightmares so bad that she’d woken screaming. Watching Lucien came later. He must have seemed safe, trapped behind the high gates of Coldtown, seen only through a computer screen. Pause him and he stops. Hit play and he smiles. Watch him look through the screen as if he could see all the way down to your tiny, bruised soul.
We all wind up drawn to what we’re afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it. But the real Lucien was the reason that the world had fallen, the cause of the deaths of everyone at the farmhouse, and about to hand Gavriel over to some ancient and terrible creature. The only way anyone would be safe from him was if someone made him dead.
Creeping through the empty rooms, all she saw moving were cameras mounted high on the silk-covered walls, all of them with red blinking lights.
Finally she heard voices, echoing through the corridors. They were coming from the massive glass-ceilinged ballroom. She crept closer, crouching down outside the double doors and peering in. Three of Lucien’s people were there, all dressed in black robes, setting up a large table in the middle of the room, along with two chairs. Behind it was Gavriel, stripped to the waist, his arms and legs spread apart by silver bars and coiled with heavy chains. Long bluish-red marks crisscrossed his chest. His dark blood had dried in a pattern, like a map, across his belly.
It will all seem very real.
Lucien paced back and forth, dressed in cream and white, his pale gold hair pushed back from his face. “What possessed you to free those prisoners?” he yelled suddenly.
Gavriel looked at him, his face unreadable. “I freed no one, more’s the pity. Even when I freed myself, I found new chains.”
“Just like you didn’t kill that guard. Your girl did this, too, I suppose. And where is she now?” Lucien wiped a bloody hand against his trouser leg, not seeming to notice the stain.
Gavriel said nothing.
“The Spider has been sending people after me, you know—assassins. Craven just-turned fools, not even a decade old. After me. Because of the show. Because he thinks it’s an embarrassment to parade around in front of the humans, as if being a vampire is being the citizen of some blood-drenched country and he’s the minister of propaganda. Well, now everyone’s going to see how I cleaned up his little mess.”
“Is that what I am?” Gavriel asked, his voice soft. “His mess?”
Lucien looked up at him in surprise, as though he hadn’t remembered that Gavriel was there. “No. You’re mine,” Lucien said after a moment’s pause. “I made you and you’re mine. My mess.”
Tana wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was creepy as hell. She pressed her shoulder against the back of the door. Her heart slammed against her chest and she tried to work up her nerve.
Every plan is a house of cards. Change one thing, one variable, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. So suppose Tana shoots Lucien, then what? Lucien’s people try to catch her, Gavriel tries to get free of his chains, and maybe they both make it or one of them makes it or they don’t make it at all.
There’s no way out, she reminded herself. There’s only what you do before you die.
Tana’s fingers itched on the trigger of the crossbow.
“They’re here,” said one of Lucien’s people. “The Spider’s Corps des Ténèbres are here.”
Tana’s hand was steadier than it should have been, and the bow felt light in her arms, with the vampire blood running through her. She thought about all those hours she’d played darts with Pauline in the bowling alley, thought about how she’d learned to aim them just right.