The big question of vampires, the question that haunts governments and individuals alike, the question that bugs me every night when I see their red eyes watching the citizens of Coldtown the way hungry cats watch fish in a bucket is: What are they? Are they diseased or demonic? Are they citizens who have become ill, deserving hospitals and care, as some have argued? Or are they the bodies of our loved ones animated by some dark force that we ought to seek to destroy? Living here in Coldtown, I’ve tried to observe and document our new world, but I have failed to be able to answer this one question. I have even failed to decide for myself.
Maybe it’s crazy to think that I’m going to be able to tell anything significant just from watching a human girl become a vampire. After all, I will be far from the first to see it. Scientists have observed vampirism, even undergone it. But I still want to be able to look at this woman in the eye when she rises from the dead. I want to use something entirely different from instruments and monitors; I want to use my instincts. I want to see whether I believe I am looking into the same person’s eyes.
There’s something easy about the idea that vampirism is some kind of disease—then they can’t help it that they attack us, that they commit murders and atrocities, that they can only control themselves sometimes. They’re sick; it’s not their fault. And there’s something even easier about the idea of demonic invasion, something forcing our loved ones to do all manner of terrible things. Still not their fault, only now we can destroy them. But the third option, the possibility that there’s something monstrous inside of us that can be unleashed, is the most disturbing of all. Maybe it’s just us, us with a raging hunger, us with a couple of accidental murders under our belt. Humanity, with the training wheels off the bike, careening down a steep hill. Humanity, freed from the constraints of consequence and gifted with power. Humanity, grown away from all things human.
And so, dear readers, the answer I hope to have for you tomorrow will not be a scientific one. I hope to be able to decide for myself—when we turn, is there something shoved inside of us or is it more that something inside of us has been released?
CHAPTER 39
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Tana walked out of the hall, pushing past Corps des Ténèbres guards and heading for the front door. She turned back once, to look at Gavriel standing in the center of the floor like a marble statue painted with red, but her head was pounding and her neck was sore and when she opened her mouth to speak, she found herself struck dumb. It was all too much. She had glutted herself on horror, and all she could do was stumble out of the house and fumble inside her leather dress for Jameson’s cell phone.
Cool air brushed over her skin.
Pearl. She had to find her sister, but if her sister saw her now, she’d scream and scream and scream.
Blood was so sticky.
Gavriel hadn’t called out to her, hadn’t moved.
But then, she’d nearly ruined his revenge before she’d stolen it for herself; maybe he was glad she’d left.
She walked through the streets of Coldtown and felt nothing. Come to the Eternal Ball, Jameson’s phone said. We got her.
It was easy to find, even as disoriented as she was. People didn’t mind giving directions, apparently not bothered that her face was spattered with blood, not minding that her hands were dark with it. Their casual demeanor was horrifying, but not as horrifying as how easy it had been to push a knife into a begging vampire’s heart.
She found the place, the domed church with stained glass windows painted black along the first few floors. Strobe lights lit the panes on the dome. The door, papered with pink-stenciled posters, was painted the same tarry black as the windows. Music thrummed from within, and a few people sat on the steps, smoking and talking. A girl with green hair in a dozen braids held up a video camera to interview an elderly woman with long white hair and gleaming red eyes. Tana recognized her with a dull pang of surprise as the old lady from the Last Stop.
The doorman pulled aside the velvet rope, waving Tana ahead of a small line of people waiting to pay the cover charge, not even bothering to take her pulse. Maybe the rules were different for people accessorizing their red dresses with a large quantity of bluish-red blood.
Then she was inside, among the dancing throng. Music pounded the air, and a carpet of people filled the hall, twirling and shaking to the music. Girls and boys danced in cages that rose and fell from the ceiling in sudden, heart-stopping, roller-coaster jerks, making everyone scream. And above it all, cameras like the ones she’d seen on Suicide Square, like the ones in Lucien Moreau’s house, watching everything with their pitiless eyes, broadcasting the whole thing live.