“He helped me back at the house,” Tana said, not sure why she was feeling defensive. Winter and his sister were supposed to love vampires so much they wanted to be vampires; why should he sound as if she were demented for unchaining one? “He’s still helping us, remember?”
“But why?” Winter asked. “No offense. I just don’t get it. I’ll bet he’s been a vampire a long time—before the world went Cold, even. Those old vampires hate humans, and they hate people like me and Midnight, specifically—any vampire turned in the last decade and anyone who wants to be a vampire. And here he is, letting us restrain him, voluntarily surrendering to imprisonment in a Coldtown. It doesn’t make sense.”
I struggle for my most rational moments, Gavriel had told her when they were driving. She’d seen the strain of it since then—moments when he seemed lost and others when he seemed lethal. “I don’t know,” she said. “He wanted to come to Coldtown, though. He’s not doing it for us.”
Winter took a moment to digest that, then he wrenched open the door to the office. A bell jingled overhead. He held it wide for Tana. She slipped past him and went inside.
As she did, Tana thought of what Gavriel had said to Winter earlier. You know me. You’ve known me since outside the rest stop, when I turned and the light hit my face.
Who was he that Winter could know him? She had a moment of anxious panic that Winter was playing her in some way, but she couldn’t think how.
Fluorescent lights overhead bathed the whole room in a harsh blinding glare that made Tana blink several times. A counter of cheap laminate was covered in sloppy stacks of multicolored forms. Two pens, each attached to dirty string with even dirtier tape, dangled down from either side of the counter. Behind the counter were four metal desks. Only one of them was occupied. A large woman in a bright dress with big abstract poppies on it stood up slowly, as though her knees hurt. Her gray hair was piled into an impressive danish-size bun on the back of her head.
She looked at Tana and Winter for a long moment, then walked over. “What do you kids want? It’s four in the morning. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“We want to claim the bounty on a vampire,” Tana stammered. She was unprepared for how much the way into Coldtown looked like a shoddily run DMV.
The woman’s eyebrows went up. “You some kind of baby bounty hunter?”
Tana sighed. “We just need forms for going inside, and we want to turn in a vampire for a marker.”
“De-registration?” Now the woman shook her head. When she spoke, she sounded tired. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t want to go into Coldtown. Take your bounty for the vampire and live another day. One marker isn’t going to get the both of you out anyway.”
Tana looked at the clock. “There’s four of us, not counting the vampire, so please just get us the paperwork. We know what we’re doing.”
The woman sighed. “Everyone’s always in such a hurry to rush off to their own death. Well, hold your horses a minute. We had a woman and her three children—can you imagine!—through two nights ago, so I know the packets are around here somewhere. I just need to find my notary seal.”
While she rustled around at her desk, Winter circled the room, stopping in front of a bulletin board with a sea of posters tacked up, one stapled over the next. Most advertised higher bounties for particularly famous or dangerous vampires. A few were from parents looking for someone to take on a commission to buy back their child with a marker—and begging for a hunter who’d charge them a price they could pay. Some promised rewards other than cash: cars, property, old engagement rings, stocks, and even the vaguely ominous ANYTHING WE HAVE, ANYTHING YOU MIGHT WANT, ANYTHING AT ALL.
“Did you ever see the Matilda feed from a couple of years back?” Winter asked suddenly, looking toward Tana. The spikes of his blue hair had wilted, and his eyeliner was a little smeared under one eye, as though maybe he’d rubbed it without thinking.
Tana shook her head.
“There was this vampire, Matilda, who came to Coldtown. She infected another girl by accident—well, the girl wanted to be infected—but anyway, Matilda detoxed her and filmed the whole crazy twelve and a half weeks. And the part that was really fascinating was that sometimes she would sit in front of the camera and talk about what it was like being a vampire. She told us about the people she killed, what blood tasted like, how her vision was different, how she was different. She wanted to warn everyone, she said, that being turned wasn’t like the Eternal Ball or the Coldtown feeds made it look. It wasn’t glamorous or special or anything.”