Ms. Baez nodded. “You want to know a secret? Vampire blood is pretty great for vampires. It grants them a piece of the drained vampire’s power. So, yeah, they can drink it.”
“Why?” one of the teachers burst out. Pearl hadn’t heard anything like that before and she was surprised.
“Think of it like the accumulation of toxins in animals. At the lowest level of the food chain, there is a very tiny bit of toxin in each, say, blade of grass. Now, if a mouse comes along and eats lots and lots of grass, all the toxins from those individual blades accumulate in the mouse. Then a raptor comes along and eats a dozen mice, and gets all those toxins and so on and so on. If you think about toxins like power, then you can see why the older the vampire, the more power it’s accumulated and the more power another vampire can absorb by draining it.”
“They don’t need us at all,” said Pearl, under her breath. She imagined a world with only vampires in it, all red eyes and cold skin.
“So long as they can’t have babies, they do,” Pauline whispered back, “You can’t have new vampires without new people. And if you eat all the old vampires, you’re going to need new ones ASAP.”
“How come they don’t then?” Tana called down, still standing, not bothering to raise her hand again. “Why don’t they just eat one another and leave us alone?”
Principle Wong stood up, ready to scold Tana, but Ms. Baez wasn’t paying any attention.
“Oh, they do, kid,” said Ms. Baez. “They eat one another. They eat us. They eat every damn thing. They’ll drink up the whole world if we let them.”
CHAPTER 11
Death is the king of this world: ’Tis his park
Where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
—George Eliot
The inside of the Dead Last Rest Stop was huge, bigger than most malls, but with services malls would never have any reason to provide—showers for a dollar; canned goods; a boutique with sepulchral dresses and coats in black and purple and silver; a pharmacy; an interfaith chapel; five restaurants; three bars; a dance club; and even a bag check so that kids arriving by bus could pay two dollars to dump their luggage for a couple of hours while they shopped or slept in rentable coffin-shaped pods. Loud Eurotrance remixes of funereal music pumped out of speakers all along the walls, and every store window announced the same thing, whether in big blinking letters or hand-lettered signs: OPEN 24 HOURS.
Tana felt dazed. It was surreal to be inside of a brightly lit space, safe, when she’d been in mortal danger for the last twelve hours.
The central area was a hexagonal room with polished black floors, ebonized benches, and a central sculpture of what looked like a large red crystal heart with a stake driven through it. Televisions along the walls broadcast popular feeds from inside Springfield’s Coldtown. On one, golden-haired Lucien Moreau was teaching a human girl how to waltz; on another, a ginger-haired vampire girl was talking to the camera, describing how her night had gone while a human boy cuddled up to her pale skin, offering her a piece of tubing taped to the needle in his wrist.
Tourists stopped to stare at the feeds. They took pictures of one another in front of the crystal heart, arms thrown over one another’s shoulders and too-wide smiles on their mouths.
A tired-looking middle-aged woman stood off to one side, handing out pink flyers to anyone who passed her. “Have you seen my daughter?” she asked, over and over. “She’s only twelve. Please, I know she came through here. Have you seen her?”
At first, people under the age of sixteen weren’t allowed to go through the gates of the Coldtowns, but then a nine-year-old was turned away because the guards thought she was lying about being bitten. She wasn’t. People died. There were tests for infection, but the tests were expensive, making self-reporting critical to keeping the quarantine. Since that incident with the child, anyone was allowed to enter any Coldtown at any age without proving anything.
Tana looked at the woman, at her tired face and at the smiling little girl on the flyer. She thought of Pearl and wondered what that girl imagined was waiting for her behind the gates.
Midnight walked past the woman without even seeming to notice her and collapsed on one of the benches. Both her hands pressed the velvet cloth of her shirt over the scratches to stop the bleeding.
“I’ll get bandages and stuff,” said Winter. “You stay right here. And you stay with her.” He scowled at Tana.
Tana nodded and Winter walked toward the pharmacy, looking back twice. His big boots clopped like hooves on the shiny granite tile floor.
A few passing kids wearing backpacks stopped to stare at Tana in her bloody clothes and at Midnight, with her smeared mascara and the way she was clutching her shoulder.
“What are you looking at?” Tana told the kids, snarling the way Pauline would have, and they hurried off.
Midnight smiled at her lopsidedly.