“Hey,” Aidan said, touching her shoulder and making her jump. He was carrying a bottle of water, but he stared at the screen as if he’d forgotten about everything else. “Look at that.”
“It’s like the Hotel California,” Tana said. “Or a roach motel. Roaches check in but they don’t check out.”
All infected people and captured vampires were sent to Coldtowns, along with the sick, sad, or deluded humans who went there voluntarily. It was supposed to be a constant party, free for the price of blood. But once people were inside, humans—even human children, even babies born in Coldtown—weren’t allowed to leave. The National Guard patrolled the barbed-wire-wrapped and holy-symbol-studded walls to make sure that Coldtowns stayed contained.
Springfield was the best known and the biggest Coldtown, with more live feeds, videos, and blogs coming out of there than from Coldtowns in much larger cities. That was partially because it was the first and partially because the Massachusetts government made sure that people trapped inside had power and communications sooner than the others The outbreak in Chicago was contained so fast that the quarantined area never had a chance to evolve into a walled city-within-a-city. Las Vegas was Springfield’s rival in live-streaming vampire entertainment, but blackouts were common, disrupting feeds and making regular viewing unreliable. New Orleans and Las Cruces were small, and the Coldtown in San Francisco had gone dark a year after its founding, with no one broadcasting anything out. There were people in there; satellites could track their heat signatures at night. That’s all anyone knew. But Springfield wasn’t just the best known and the biggest, Tana thought, looking at the screen, it was also the closest.
“It’d be a good place to hide out,” Aidan said, with a sly look at the car and the trunk with the vampire inside.
“You want to turn Gavriel in for a marker?” Tana asked him. There was one exception to the whole not-being-allowed-to-leave thing, one way out of Coldtown if you were still human—your family had to be rich enough to hire a vampire hunter, who would turn in a vampire in exchange for you. Vampire hunters got a bounty from the government for each vampire they put in a Coldtown, but they could give up the cash reward in favor of a marker for a single human’s release. One vampire in, one human out.
Even amateur hunters who turned in a vampire could get a marker. If Aidan got one, then he could go into Coldtown and, if he stayed human, if he beat the infection, he could get out again.
“Not for a marker,” Aidan said, his eyes still on the screen. “For the cash. We could get some serious money from the bounty on a vampire. Enough for me to hole up for a couple of months in some crappy hotel and ride this thing out.”
“I think I got—not bit, exactly.” She blurted the words that she couldn’t tell Pauline, that she’d been afraid to say out loud. He needed to know if they were going to make real plans. “Scraped. With a tooth.”
That made him look at her, really look at her, his eyebrows drawn together with actual concern. “And you don’t know if you’re going to go Cold.”
“I have to assume I am.” She tried to not let him see how scared she was, how her heart thundered to say the words. “We have to assume.”
He nodded. “It’d be enough money for both of us to hole up for a while. Two rooms, two keys. We could pass them under the door to one another when we were done. But we’ve got to do something. I’m hungry, Tana.”
“Gavriel helped us—” She stopped herself, unsure. The farther they got from the farmhouse, the more Gavriel seemed like a monster all on his own. She thought of his eyes, red like spilled garnets, red as poppies, red as the bright embers of a fire. She thought of what they taught in school: cold hands, dead heart. Plenty of vampires had forgotten how to feel anything but hunger. He’d helped her, sure, but that didn’t mean she could trust him not to turn on her now that they were out of danger. Vampires were unpredictable. “At least that gives us a direction to head in. I’m going to grab some food. You should try to eat, too, and see if it cuts down the craving.”
She waited for Aidan to make some comment, but he turned to watch more images from Coldtown on the tiny television, his lips slightly apart, his cheeks flushed.
If she was a good person, she’d take him there. In case he gave in to the hunger. He might. And if he did, he’d be ageless, eternal. He’d be charming girls with his flipped hair until the Earth crashed into the sun.
If she was a really good person, she’d take herself there, too.