She guessed that he’d planned on draining Aidan before he escaped, even if he didn’t say so out of some sense that it was bad manners.
She wondered if Gavriel thought about biting her—his face, turned to the road still, was as calm as a statue of a saint in a cathedral, but she had seen him with Aidan. She had seen the way his fingers dug into Aidan’s skin and how the muscles in his neck strained and when he’d looked at her, mouth painted with blood, his gaze hadn’t tracked. She wondered what it would be like to be infected and to give in, to let herself be turned, to be ageless and frozen and magic and monstrous.
There were so many girls and boys running away to Coldtown, who would do anything to have the infection burning through their veins the way it burned through Aidan’s. The vampires inside were incredibly circumspect about biting people—that’s why all the pictures of them feeding inside Coldtown showed them feeding from tubing and shunts. More vampires were a drain on the food supply. What Aidan had—what she (maybe) had, too—was rare and desirable. There was a girl Tana had met, a friend of Pauline’s, who cut thin lines on her thighs with razor blades before she went out to clubs, so that a vampire might be drawn to her.
When she looked at Gavriel’s mouth then, it was still stained carmine along the swell of his lower lip. Maybe because he’d saved her at the gas station and she was feeling grateful or because she was so tired, she found herself fascinated with his mouth, with the way it curved into a sinner’s smile. She knew she was looking at him like a boy, like a gorgeous boy whose smile could be admired, and that was dangerous and stupid. She didn’t even know if he thought of her as a girl at all.
She needed to stop thinking about him like that. Ideally, she should stop thinking about him entirely, except as something dangerous. “Why were they after you—those men and the Thorn? Was it bad, what you did?”
“Very bad,” he agreed. “An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it. I had a tutor who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was—but now I think he was also right.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tana said, leaning against the cushioned headrest. “Mercy can’t be evil. It’s a virtue—like kindness or courage or…” Her voice trailed off.
He turned to look at her. “This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy.”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, either.” Then, helplessly, she yawned.
He laughed, sounding like any boy from her school. She wondered what color his eyes had been long ago. “Go to sleep, Tana. Lean back your seat. If you let me borrow your car for tonight, I promise I will repay you.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. “With what?”
The smile stayed on his lips. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”
She was almost sure he was joking. “Okay. So where are we going?” she asked, her head nodding against the window.
His voice was soft. “Coldtown.”
“Oh,” she said, blinking herself awake again.
“I must. But if Aidan comes through the gates with me, he’ll be safer, and you’ll be safer without him. They’ll hunt for him out in the world. And he’s likely to start hunting, too.”
“But what if he doesn’t want to be a vampire?” Tana asked. As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that he would want it—of course he would want it. Didn’t he say as much before he attacked her? Being a vampire would get him all the glory he could ever imagine—he wouldn’t just be known as the guy at a party most likely to seduce someone else’s girlfriend or the small-town boy yearning for a big city. In Coldtown, he would be drowned in attention—and the massacre at the farmhouse would make his story only more tragic. More romantic.
Plus, Aidan was hungry.
She was the one who didn’t want to be a vampire. And she was afraid that as time went on, she’d become less and less sure of that.
“The fever is in his blood,” Gavriel said. “He looks for no cure but one. I think he is decided in his heart, but who can confess to such a decision?”
“It’s hard to fight the infection,” Tana said, her voice coming out harsher and more despairing than she’d intended. She didn’t want to talk about her mom. She didn’t want to tell him that the fever might be in her blood, too. In a few hours, she could be as bad as Aidan. “They can’t. You don’t understand. It takes them over and they can’t think straight.”