“Lead on,” Aidan said. His skin had an odd sheen to it, and he looked pale, as though his blood was cooling inside him, as though body warmth would soon be something that could only be stolen from others.
A few cars were parked on the sidewalk. One sheltered a woman bundled up in a comforter in the backseat among bags of garbage. Was she alive? Tana couldn’t see the blanket rise or fall. Another car burned merrily, sending acrid black smoke up into the sky.
Tana passed two girls holding each other up, clearly coming from a party. One had green glitter sparkling in her hair, and the other was wearing the torn remains of a gold-sequin dress. They were barefoot, seeming to have lost their shoes. Both had bruises and needle marks all the way up their calves to their thighs, disappearing beneath the hems of their dresses. Both had identical expressions of dazed contentment as they staggered along.
A few blocks away, someone began to scream. A moment later, that scream was joined by another and another. Three voices, each distinct, each rising and falling in a continuous cry that made up a hellish melody. The barefoot girls stumbled, looked in the direction of the sound, and then kept on walking, one speaking softly to the other.
Midnight bit her lower lip, sucking the ball of a silvery ring into her mouth. She shook her head.
Aidan closed his eyes, seeming to drink in the sound.
“Come on,” Tana said, turning down a garbage-strewn alley, heading in the direction of the screams before she thought better of it. This is exactly what’s wrong with me, she told herself as she walked. If there’s trouble, I go straight for it.
“Are you sure?” Winter asked, but followed her anyway.
Several blocks later they came to a crossroads with a large courtyard. A crowd of humans had gathered around the edges, some of the people carrying white flowers. Three vampires knelt at the very center of the road, underneath a defunct stoplight—a man, a woman, and a young girl—screeching up at the sky as the sunlight scorched them. Their hair flamed. Flesh was blackening and flaking off, like paint from the planks of an old house. Underneath, their skin looked raw and red, as though they were made of embers instead of muscles and ligaments. In moments, their cries had grown guttural, and then the noise diminished. Two people from the crowd inched closer to the bodies, and the woman vampire jerked upright. Tana saw a flash of fangs before the vampire collapsed again in a heap of black smoke and steam. Gasps rose from the crowd, and a few people stepped farther away.
“I know what this place is,” Winter said under his breath. “Suicide Square.”
For a moment, Tana was sure she hadn’t heard him right. She felt dizzy with horror.
“If you’ve seen videos of vampires burning in the sun on YouTube, this is where most of the footage comes from.” He pointed up at a camera mounted outside a window. Then he nodded to the audience. “People come out to watch them die—happens every morning. Citizens hope to get infected or for the vampire to give out money or information—sometimes they can be generous right before they die, I hear. Or other times they’ll kill a bunch of the crowd, just for spite.”
“But why do they want to die?” Tana asked.
Midnight looked at the dying vampires. Her lip curled with contempt. “Most of them never wanted to go Cold in the first place. They can’t hack drinking blood or being stuck in Coldtown. A lot of them can’t deal with the things they did when they were freshly turned. Not everyone’s worthy.”
Not everyone’s a monster, Tana thought. It should have made her feel better, more proof that vampires weren’t so inhuman that they didn’t feel pity or fear or regret. Instead, it just reminded her that sometimes there were no good choices.
“Or they get superbored,” Winter said. “That’s why the old ones die. Eventually, they don’t care enough to feed and they starve.”
Midnight gave him an unfriendly look and he stopped talking. She drew herself up, and Tana could see her willing him to remember his role. They had an image to project—two beautiful, condescending creatures who needed nothing but each other, who walked in each other’s shadows automatically. But Tana could tell that Midnight didn’t like Winter’s talking about some future where even if they were vampires, they still might not be happy.
“You can ask Lucien Moreau about it personally,” Midnight said, as though reminding her brother of something he should already know. “We’re going to crash one of his parties.”
Aidan had moved into the shadows of a building, as if the sun bothered him. Tana wondered if he was trying to imagine himself as one of them, wondering if he could hack it, wondering if he was worthy.