Tana watched his face as he spoke. “And you still want to be a vampire? I mean, that’s why you’re both going inside?”
“Yeah.” Winter’s voice was firm, but there was something in his eyes—fear and a kind of awful, drowning look, like a man who is slipping deeper and deeper into quicksand and knows that struggling will just make things worse. “Messed up, right? But somehow Matilda made it seem real—like since it wasn’t glamorous and special, then maybe I could have it. But I know it’s what every wannabe coming here wants. Most of them are going to die without getting it. Get used for blood or get turned and find out they’re not any better at their new life than they were at their old one.”
Tana didn’t say anything.
“You think we’re going to wind up like them, but we’re not.”
“I don’t think anything,” said Tana.
He sighed as if he was annoyed but kept talking anyway. “Midnight was obsessed with it before me—immortality, the dark gift—you should have seen the walls of her room when she was twelve. Scrawled with poetry about eternity and piled with animal teeth, pastel candies in the shape of coffins, pages torn from Edgar Allan Poe books and pasted over her dressers and spattered with her blood. But I was the one that started going on message boards and meeting other kids who wanted to run away to Coldtown. After a while, Midnight wanted us to make our own board, so we could talk about the real stuff—and eventually we realized that it was time to put up or shut up. So we know what we’re doing and even if you think—” He stopped speaking abruptly, ripping a page off the wall.
“What is it?” Tana asked.
The woman walked back to the counter, nodding to herself and muttering. She put down a couple of forms in different colors. “This isn’t something you do on a lark. Or because you’re sad. Or because you’re young and stupid. It’s forever.”
“Thank you for the warning,” Tana said coldly, gathering up the papers.
“You kids don’t really have a vampire, do you? That’s nothing to joke around about—you put down false information and that’s a crime. You’d need to present the vampire or, if it was a kill, you need to have preserved the head.”
“Oh, we have a vampire all right,” Winter said distractedly, darting a glance toward the door. “In fact, why don’t I go get everybody? You can start the paperwork, Tana.”
“Okay,” she said, puzzled.
On his way out, he shoved a piece of crumpled paper into her hand, the same page he’d pulled off the wall.
“I didn’t know, honest I didn’t,” he whispered. “I thought maybe—but I swear, I wasn’t sure.”
She tried to focus as the gray-haired clerk explained acceptable forms of identification and where Tana would have to stand to get her photo taken and the dotted lines on which she needed to sign, but it was difficult. She kept getting distracted and looking back at the poster she was smoothing out, as though the image on it might change.
The paper promised a $75,000 bounty for the kill or capture of the Thorn of Istra. But it wasn’t the amount of money that shocked her—it was the picture.
Despite obviously being the blurry copy of a copy of a copy, she knew him immediately. Gavriel looked as though he’d stepped out of the late nineteenth century, in a smart suit on an old Parisian street, a bow tie over the starched white collar and a derby half hiding his black curls. Gavriel, looking directly at the camera with a sneer on his wide lips and eyes that smoldered with banked fire. Gavriel, holding a walking stick in one hand as though he were going to whip the photographer across the jaw with its silvery handle.
Her first thought was, what a funny mistake. The Thorn was hunting Gavriel, had broken out of his cage underneath Paris to find Gavriel. And then she remembered, as she stared at the paper, how when Aidan had insisted the vampires whispering through the door were threatening to take Gavriel back to the Thorn, Gavriel had said, no, not exactly. He’d tried to correct Aidan, but she hadn’t been paying attention.
No, not exactly.
The Thorn of Istra, the mad vampire. She thought of the grainy video of him she had seen, head tipped back, so covered in blood that she hadn’t remembered his features, hadn’t remembered him as looking like anything but a monster, laughing, endlessly laughing.
Mad as a dog. Mad as a god.
Gavriel.
CHAPTER 16
Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne