“So why don’t you turn? Get your mom to bring you over?”
“I’m contrary,” he said with a snort, looking out onto the dance floor. She followed his gaze and saw that he was watching Valentina as she talked with a boy in a long leather coat. Aidan and Pearl were still spinning in mad circles. “Sometimes I don’t know what I want.”
Tana liked the feeling of the cool concrete under her cheek. It was rough and smooth at the same time, like the way she imagined a dragon’s scales might feel. “She’s pretty.”
He sighed. “Yeah.”
“She told me how great you were—saving her and her friend and all.”
Now he grinned a rueful grin and shook his head. “Oh, now I see where you’re going with this. Save your breath.”
“You don’t like her?” Tana asked and then wished she hadn’t, because if he said something awful about Valentina, she was going to hate him.
“Of course I like her,” he said, as though it was hard for him to imagine how anyone wouldn’t. “And if you tell her, I am going to make you very sorry you opened your mouth. Look, Valentina is… it’s hard to explain. She’s here for one reason and one reason only, the same reason most people give up their safe normal lives to come here—to be vampires. She isn’t looking for somebody like me. She might bring home a regular guy sometimes, if she’s lonely, but she’s not serious about any of them. She’s looking for someone like your friend out there.”
Boys were so stupid, Tana thought. “You should dance with her.”
He winced, as though she suggested he stab himself in the foot. “I don’t really dance, and she was just imprisoned—maybe she’s not really up for dancing.”
Tana shrugged, sliding off the stool. “Let’s go ask her.”
“Absolutely not,” said Jameson.
“Oh, so you’re just going to sit here in the shadows, watching her like a crazy person,” Tana said. “Making sure she doesn’t get in any more trouble.”
“If she does, there’s not much I can do, is there?” He took another gulp from the mug in front of him. It had a blue band around it and a crack down one side, which appeared to have been glued hastily because there was still a line of hardened clear material like a badly healed scar.
“She thought your mom was your girlfriend,” Tana said. She made a gesture to Valentina, vague enough to mean anything and then pointed to Jameson. He looked alarmed. “And she wanted to save her, because it was something she could do for you. That’s how she wound up imprisoned at Lucien’s. I bet she didn’t tell you that.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, grabbing her arm hard enough to hurt.
“If you knew what kind of week I’ve had and what kind of week I’m about to have, then you’d know you better just go along with me.” With that, she dragged him up off the stool and out into the crowd.
He gave her a murderous look, but he let himself be pulled. Valentina saw them coming and looked, if anything, more terrified than he did. Pearl ran toward Tana, though, eager for more dancing, waving up at the cameras overhead as though she was waving to all her friends back home.
“This isn’t going to change anything,” he said, under his breath.
And then they were dancing together, all five of them, sweat slicking their limbs and the music buzzing in their heads. Even Jameson was smiling as Valentina spun around him, his fingers lingering a moment too long on her hips and his gaze slanting down, shyness coloring his cheeks. Aidan whirled Pearl in his arms, lifting her into the air and making her laugh.
Tana danced until the pain in her head faded away, until her bare feet hurt from being pounded against the floor, until her body was gloriously exhausted and with every move she knew she’d won the day because she’d survived it. Valentina somehow persuaded Jameson to stay on the dance floor. He had his hands circling her waist and her head was bent toward him like a flower bends toward the sun. And Tana finally understood how the wildness of the Eternal Ball was the wildness of grief, the intoxicating dance of carnival, where one leaves oneself at home and becomes something else for a night, hoping that the old skin will still fit when one comes back to it in the morning.
The way they arranged things was that Pauline agreed to take off from camp, drive to the gate, and pick up Pearl on the outside. Tana and Aidan walked Pearl there, through the winding streets and the refuse, past the bodies and the swarms of roaches. Dawn didn’t yet blaze on the horizon, but the air had already changed, the wind bringing the warm smells of day before the daylight itself.
Tana held Pearl’s hand in hers. Her sister was getting sleepy, stumbling a little, eyelids drooping as the excitement of the night wore off.