If Pauline had been at the party, none of this would have happened. When they got wasted, they usually curled up underneath the dining room table, limbs draped over each other like kittens in a basket, and no boy in the world, not even Aidan, was bold enough to face Pauline’s razor tongue. But Pauline was away at drama camp, and Tana had been bored, so she’d gone to the party alone.
The kitchen was empty, spilled booze and orange soda pooling on the countertops and being soaked up by a smattering of potato chips. Tana was reaching for the coffeepot when, across the black-and-white linoleum floor, just on the other side of the door frame to the living room, she saw a hand, its fingers stretched out as if in sleep. She relaxed. No one was awake yet—that was all. Maybe she was the first one up, although when she thought back to the sun streaking through the bathroom window, it had seemed high in the sky.
The longer she gazed at the hand, though, the more she noticed that it seemed oddly pale, the skin around the fingernails bluish. Tana’s heart started to thud, her body reacting before her mind caught up. She slowly set the pot back on the counter and forced herself to cross the kitchen floor, step by careful step, until she was over the threshold to the living room.
Then she had to force herself not to scream.
The tan carpet was stiff and black with stripes of dried blood, spattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas. The walls were streaked with it, handprints smearing their dingy beige surfaces. And the bodies. Dozens of bodies. People she’d seen every day since kindergarten, people whom she’d played tag with and cried over and kissed were lying at odd angles, their bodies pale and cold, their eyes staring like rows of dolls in a shop window.
The hand near Tana’s foot belonged to Imogen, a pretty, plump, pink-haired girl who was planning to go to art school next year. Her lips were slightly apart, and her navy anchor-print sundress rode up so that her thighs were visible. She appeared to have been caught as she was trying to crawl away, one arm extended and the other gripping the carpet. Tana reeled back, then braced to go farther into the room.
Otta’s, Ilaina’s, and Jon’s bodies were piled together. They’d just gotten back from summer cheer camp and had started the party off with a series of backflips in the backyard just before sunset, as mosquitoes buzzed through the warm breeze. Now dried blood crusted on their clothing like rust, tinting their hair, dotting their skin like freckles. Their eyes were locked open, the pupils gone cloudy.
She found Lance on a couch, posed with his arms thrown over the shoulders of a girl on one side and a boy on the other, all three of their throats bearing ragged puncture marks. All three of them with beer bottles resting near their hands, as if they were still at the party. As though their white-blue lips were likely to say her name at any moment.
Tana felt dizzy. The room seemed to spin. She sank to the blood-covered carpet and sat, the pounding in her head growing louder and louder. On the television, someone was spraying orange cleaner on a granite countertop while a grinning child ate jam off a slice of bread.
One of the windows was open, she noticed, curtain fluttering. The party must have gotten too warm, everyone sweating in the small house and yearning for the cool breeze just outside. Then, once the window was open, it would have been easy to forget to close it. There was still the garlic, after all, still the holy water on the lintels. Things like this happened in Europe, in places like Belgium, where the streets teemed with vampires and the shops didn’t open until after dark. Not here. Not in Tana’s town, where there hadn’t been a single attack in more than five years.
And yet it had happened. A window had been left open to the night, and a vampire had crawled through.
She should get her phone and call—call someone. Not her father; there was no way he would be able to deal with this. Maybe the police. Or a vampire hunter, like Hemlok from TV, the huge, bald former wrestler always decked out in leather. He would know what to do. Her little sister had a poster of Hemlok in her locker, right next to pictures of golden-haired Lucien, her favorite Coldtown vampire. Pearl would be so excited if Hemlok came; she could finally get his autograph.
Tana started giggling, which was bad, she knew, and put her hands over her mouth to smother the sound. It wasn’t okay to laugh in front of dead people. That was like laughing at a funeral.
The unblinking eyes of her friends watched her.
On the television, the newscaster was predicting scattered showers later in the week. The Nasdaq was down.
Tana remembered all over again that Pauline hadn’t been at the party, and she was so fiercely, so selfishly glad that she couldn’t even feel bad about it, because Pauline was alive even though everyone else was dead.