There, in Paris, he fulfilled the promise of his voluptuous mouth and passionate eyes. He fulfilled the promise of his blood. If his brother was bad, he was determined to be worse. He drank absinthe to his brother’s wine. He gambled away the boots right off his feet. And if Aleksander had been a rake, Gavriel was determined to best him by never saying no, not to even the crudest, most degrading and vile offers, not to anything.
That was when he met Lucien.
CHAPTER 19
You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
—The Child Ballads 78: The Unquiet Grave
Eyebrows raised, lips caught in midscoff, Aidan was watching Tana from the mouth of the alley. Midnight smirked, looking into her phone and thumbing something on the screen, while Winter glowered impatiently beside her. When the wind caught Midnight and Winter’s hair, it blew like two blazes of deep blue sky.
“Well, that was interesting,” Winter said, sour-voiced.
Tana rubbed her hand against her face, her thoughts too chaotic to make any sense. All she knew was that she was embarrassed. Her face felt hot and her tongue stung, reminding her of what she’d been doing. “You waited.”
Aidan took a step toward her, the smile leaving his face. “Hey. You okay? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
To get that reaction, her expression must be very strange, Tana realized.
Midnight rolled her eyes, as though Aidan was being ridiculous. “I bet you were a good girl back home,” she said to Tana. “A good girl all your life until you finally met the trouble you want to get in.”
“You obviously don’t know her at all,” Aidan told Midnight gruffly. Then he turned back to Tana. “Did he bite you?”
She shook her head. The more she thought about it, the more stupid she felt. She was probably infected, but that didn’t mean she should have tempted him into making it a sure thing. And, hungry as he was, crazy as he might be, he could have drained her dead, pinned her against the brick wall and ripped out her throat. She’d been playing with fire, just as he’d accused Midnight of doing.
Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.
At that thought, a feeling of vast exhaustion came over her. They’d made it beyond the gates of Coldtown, and Tana was tempted to lie down amid the refuse, close her heavy eyes, and pretend away everything else. She’d done her best to protect the world from what she and Aidan would become, and now that that was done, despair settled on her shoulders.
She didn’t want to be infected.
She didn’t want to think about the taste of her own blood, or about how, if she sucked hard enough on her own tongue, the taste would bloom fresh in her mouth.
She rubbed the scar on her arm and thought about what it must feel like to press teeth against skin, about what her mother must have had to do to rip open an arm. She stopped herself in the unconscious act of bringing her own wrist to her lips.
Winter sighed and took her by her elbow, steering her down the street. “You sure he didn’t bite you? You’re acting weird.”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t think, you know,” she said finally, stumbling along the cracked concrete sidewalk beside him and smiling a little guiltily. “I didn’t think they could even like that sort of thing.”
Winter’s lip curled at the edge. “You sure looked as though you—”
“Okay, okay.” She lifted her hands, interrupting him, warding off the words. She remembered looking at Gavriel’s mouth, smeared with Aidan’s blood, when he got into the driver’s side of the car back at the gas station. She’d thought about kissing him then, sure. But it was one of those messed-up fantasies that people have when they’re under stress. Sick, but harmless. It wasn’t like he was ever going to know.
“Haven’t you watched the feeds?” Winter asked her, more gently. “Vampires like anything and everything that keeps them from getting bored. Anything and everything.”
She shook her head again, shaking off the conversation in a motion that turned into a shudder.
“I’ve got pictures of you two lovebirds,” said Midnight in a singsong voice, holding out her phone. They weren’t clear, just images of two dark shapes leaned against each other, the outline of cheekbones and his fingers in her hair, the glare from a window above them that had probably messed up the camera’s light sensors.
“You should probably just delete those,” Tana said, embarrassed, reaching for the phone. “You can barely see anything.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so!” Midnight laughed, dancing out of Tana’s way, clearly pleased that her teasing had some effect. “While you were busy saying good-bye, I found us a place that’s not too far. My friend Rufus has a squat over on one of the renamed streets. Wormwood.”
Tana nodded, trying to smile. What she needed was sleep, she decided. Lots and lots of sleep.