“I didn’t mean to—” He stopped, and when he spoke again, he sounded oddly formal. “Tana, I have no skill in this—I am long out of practice at keeping my thoughts clearly ordered and the sort of persuasion that might convince you may be beyond my clumsy tongue.” He brought his hand up to touch her hair, the brush of his fingers so light that she wasn’t sure if he’d actually touched her at all. “You’re brave and you’re good, anyone can see that—you dared to save even an unhappy creature like myself, merely because I needed saving. You have parried everything this night has thrust at you. But surely it’s enough. Whatever is driving you—please, please let it drive you no further.”
“You think I want to die,” Tana said. “I don’t. That’s not what this is about.”
He shook his head. “I mean only—do not come to Coldtown. You may love Aidan and you may think you can save him—”
For a moment, Tana was confused, then she remembered Aidan’s arm slung over her shoulders, introducing her to Midnight and Winter. “Oh, no, it’s not like that. Aidan isn’t my boyfriend. I know he said he was, but—”
Gavriel’s red eyes narrowed, but she couldn’t read his expression.
She stumbled on. “He used to be and he just said that because—because that’s the way he is.” Tana peered into the backseat of her car, where Aidan and Midnight were talking. Winter sat between them, fitting a cigarette into a long, pretentious holder, his body hunched forward. Tana sighed. “He didn’t mean anything by it. I think he thinks about girlfriend like some kind of honorary title, like the way that every president is still ‘President So and So,’ no matter who’s currently in office.”
Gavriel started to say something else, but Tana held up her hand to stop him. She was babbling, but she wanted to see her babbling through. “Listen, back at the farmhouse, on my way out, one of the—” Monsters, her brain supplied. “One of them got me on the leg. It’s not deep or anything, but—but it was his teeth. He was trying to bite me. He did bite me—a little.” Saying it out loud made it real all over again. She could feel herself start to shake.
He looked at her with alarming intensity, his red eyes like hot coals. “Where?”
She turned a little, to show him the back of her leg. The dress was short enough to show the bottom edge of the scrape.
He crouched down, pressing cool fingers just above her knee. Her breath caught in surprise. He pushed up the hem of her skirt slightly, hands gliding over her skin, making the tiny hairs stand up all along her thigh.
She threaded her fingers together, pressing her hands against the front of her dress, against her stomach, to keep them from trembling, to keep the rest of her from moving. She wanted to laugh, nerves jangling. It was so strange to be touched so gently by a creature like him—a creature who looked just like the kind of boy that you might let touch your thigh for a totally different reason. “So you see, it’s not like I have a death wish or I’m into some kind of adventure tourism or I knocked my head too hard when I hurled myself out that window.” She realized that she’d started babbling again, but she didn’t know how to stop. She thought about how she hadn’t shaved her legs since Saturday night and there was probably stubble. “If the cops catch up with me, they’d dump me in some place for observation. And if it turns out I’m infected, then I get sent to Coldtown anyway. This way, I can get a marker and have a way out—if it turns out I don’t get sick or even if I do and I make it through somehow. And I won’t have to go in alone. So, you see, it all makes sense…”
“There’s a very small puncture,” he said, moving his fingers again. She bit her lip to keep from making a sound. “Just one—and the scratch his tooth made dragging over your skin.”
“Deep?” she asked.
He let the skirt of the dress fall and braced his hands on his knees, looking up at her. His hair was black as crow feathers and falling across one of his eyes. “I can’t tell. There’s a bluish tint to the scab.”
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Blue meant poison. Blue meant that like some family curse, she was going to wind up just like her mother—hungry and sick and screaming. Blue meant the worst was likely happening.
“Tana, you might yet be well,” he said, but she didn’t believe him. He was just being nice.
She heard the door of the car open and Aidan laugh. “What are you guys doing? I mean, she has nice legs and all, but is this really the time?”
Gavriel stood up slowly. Embarrassed over any possible guesses about what she was doing and sick with the thought of the poison in her blood, Tana started to busily dig through Midnight and Winter’s garbage bags to pull out the chains. She tried to look busy, hiding her face from Aidan. Grabbing the coiled metal, she rubbed her thumb over a link and realized that the steel was wound through with wild rose vine.
Even upset as she was, her brain noted that was one of the things vampires aren’t fond of. Soon, maybe, she’d find out for herself what was true and what was just left over from a thousand scary stories that weren’t ever supposed to happen.
“Hey,” she called back to the car, her voice coming out unintentionally harsh and loud. “Anyone have a lock?”
Midnight slid out. “I think there’s one back there. We brought it in case we needed to secure a squat. Let me look.” She got closer to Tana and then stopped, studying her face. “Everything okay?”