“But why die like this?” Tana asked softly, to herself, not really expecting an answer. Two of the vampires had stopped moving, but the little girl—now almost entirely cinders—moved occasionally, spasmodically, causing what was left of her to crumble. People had begun to throw the white blossoms, pelting flowers at the girl in particular.
“Tradition?” Winter shrugged, turning away from the spectacle. He was trying to play it off as if he were apathetic about what was happening, but he looked pale and sick. Watching the vampires burn up in front of him wasn’t like watching it on video. It was different to hear their screams echoing across the square. It was different when, with every breath, you sucked in the smell of scorched skin and hair.
“Now at least we know where we are on the map,” Midnight said. There was a light in her face that Tana hadn’t seen before, a beatific calm, as though, perhaps for the first time, she felt sure about everything. “It should be easy to find Rufus’s place.”
Tana took Aidan’s arm, lacing her fingers through his, ignoring how cold they felt. His gaze seemed to snag on people from the crowd and follow them for a bit, before moving to study another, a cheetah surveying a herd of gazelles for stragglers.
They marched a few more blocks in the dawn light, Winter and Midnight in the lead, looking for the right street. Some had regular names like Orange or Dickinson or Mill Road. But others had new names scrawled along the fronts of buildings or pasted over the original signs, proclaiming them Way of the Dragon or The Nonsense Court of Endless Alley or Butcher’s Boulevard. The confusion was made worse by house marks that were even stranger—some numbered in random order, others in hammered cuneiform, or even random letters of the alphabet. There was a series of houses scrawled with what seemed to be a combination of stick figure drawings and mathematical code.
The area they walked through mostly consisted of row houses; a few brick industrial buildings; and the odd church, one with its stained glass windows smashed and its door spray painted with the word ROTTERS in bright neon green. The streets were quiet, but sometimes Tana thought she saw someone watching them from a window. They passed a brown lawn with what looked like a body collapsed in a wilted bush. The reek of it, a heady mix of decay and spilled wine, persuaded her to stay back and to pull Aidan’s arm—hard—when he started over.
“The hunger’s bad,” he said. “Clawing at my stomach. For a while, I was okay, but I don’t think I am going to be okay for much longer.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure how long she was going to be okay for either.
As they walked on, she noticed a dark-haired boy watching her from the vantage of a peaked roof. He was shirtless, his brown arms covered almost entirely in colorful tattoos. An albino crow sat on his arm, its snowy head and bone-pale beak tipped to one side. Even from the street, she could see the glint of the creature’s pink eyes.
“Hey,” Winter said. “There. That’s the house.”
Tana turned to observe Midnight walking toward a set of steps, her garbage-bag luggage resting by the side of the street. The place was three stories in height with what looked like a rotted-out balcony on the third floor. The sides had been painted a deep gray but had chipped and bubbled off to reveal pale blue underneath. There was very little lawn out front, and what grass grew there was scrubby and brownish.
Tana glanced back toward the roof on the other side of the street, but the boy with the crow was gone.
“Do they know about us?” she asked, hesitating on the stairs. “Me and Aidan? We’re not exactly… safe to be around.”
Midnight narrowed her eyes at Tana, then knocked her fist against the wood frame. “That’s not going to be a problem,” she said over her shoulder.
Then the door opened a crack, a chain keeping it from opening farther. Midnight said something. The door shut and then, latch removed, swung open wide.
A boy was standing in the doorway, looking like a pirate or a prince. Half his head was shaved, and he wore layered clothing of leather and flowing cotton, with rings on each of his fingers and long necklaces of silver and bone hanging one over another at his throat. He waved them inside with a grand sweep of his bejeweled hand.
Tana followed the others into a house that had long ago fallen into disrepair. Mildew discolored the ceiling, and flickering candles cast strange shadows on the smoke-stained walls of the curtained room. A tall girl with honey blond hair wearing a vintage pale pink gown almost the color of her flesh sat on an old Victorian settee with the stuffing hanging out. Next to her, on a threadbare divan, was a dark-skinned girl, her hair dyed bright red and twisted up with a stick, wearing black jeans and an army coat. The room was coated in a perfume of herbs and alcohol so raw that it scorched Tana’s nose to breathe. Against one wall, cans were stacked up, next to cardboard boxes. She could read them from where she was: peaches in syrup, peas and carrots, corned beef hash.