The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

And no one really wanted them gone.

There were seven hot zones in the United States, seven cities kissed by Caspar Morales, seven places brought over into the dark. Of those cities, six became Coldtowns, and five of those Coldtowns remained operational. All but San Francisco had feeds running out, plenty of them corporate-sponsored and lucrative. Between the reality shows about vampire hunters—most of which had a high rate of cast turnover—and the reality shows featuring vampires—there was a very popular one cut from the live feed in Lucien Moreau’s Coldtown parlor—the United States stabilized into an odd détente with vampires.

Coldtowns were jails ruled by their inmates. Within them, vampires were free. But any vampire on the outside—without the protection of those walls, whether hiding, newly turned, or committing massacres—was fair game for hunters and for the military.

And if people argued that the system was flawed, that the infection was still spreading, that romanticizing the dead was making the problem worse, well then, one only had to look at how bad things were outside the United States—and how much money there was to be made by continuing to let things stay just the way they were.





CHAPTER 13


He would make a lovely corpse.

—Charles Dickens




When Tana got to the parking lot, Aidan was sitting in the backseat of her Crown Vic with the door open and his legs out. Gavriel was bent over him, one arm on the roof of the car, talking in a low tone. He stopped speaking when he caught sight of her. A breeze blew his hair back from his face, making it look like the ruffled feathers of a crow.

“Hey,” Tana said.

Aidan looked a little less sick, his cheeks were even a slight pink. Gavriel had somehow acquired heavy-looking black motorcycle boots. She wasn’t sure if he’d had them on when she’d woken up at the Last Stop, but he hadn’t been wearing them at the gas station. She remembered his bare feet and the cracked bottle glass he hadn’t seemed to notice.

She wondered what he’d done to get those boots.

Please, she thought. Please, no more. Please, no more horrors tonight.

“The gates of Coldtown are close as my own shadow,” Gavriel said. His wine-colored eyes studied her in her new dress and combed hair, as if he was trying to memorize the way she looked. It made her conscious that she was wearing barely more than a slip, and she pulled at the hem awkwardly. “You can turn me over to the guards when we arrive. There’s a reward for vampires, I’m told.”

Tana gave Aidan a look, remembering what he’d said at the gas station. “I wonder who might have mentioned that.”

Just then, Midnight came up behind Tana, looking between Gavriel and Aidan intently. “Is he okay?” She tucked blue hair behind her ears.

“He will be,” said Gavriel. “He’ll be a new creature made from old skin.”

Aidan tilted his head toward Midnight. “Sorry about—you know. I want to come to Coldtown with you.”

Tana wanted to object to his giving up on getting better, but resisting blood would just get harder with time. He was being realistic. And who was she to tell him to throw away immortality?

Midnight gave him a wavering smile. Winter, behind her, glowered. He had two overstuffed black garbage bags slung over one shoulder and a beat-up suitcase hanging from his other hand.

Since listening to her phone messages, an awful numb calmness had settled over Tana, one which she was afraid to consider too closely, one which fed on bad ideas and adrenaline. She ached to make awful choices, to drown out all her thoughts in a cacophony of doing. She wished it was an unfamiliar feeling, that ache, the urge that made her hit the gas when she ought to hit the brake.

She hoped this wasn’t one of those decisions.

But she couldn’t imagine pleading with her father through the door to let her in, couldn’t imagine trying to prove that she wasn’t infected—if she even turned out not to be—and didn’t want to upset Pearl.

Sometimes it seemed as though all her life was already used up in that dark basement, as if her mother’s mouth on Tana’s arm was the last thing in her life before this that had felt real. Everything else was just prologue and epilogue. A grace period of pretending that her life was going to be like other people’s, that the bite didn’t mark her as already touched by darkness, fated for darkness, a girl with one foot already in the grave.

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