She imagined herself lying on her bed in her own bedroom, with strings of fairy lights hanging above her and kitschy stenciled-over paintings from Goodwill on the wall. She thought about Pearl in the other room, watching terrible television with the volume turned up too high. Her dad would come home and then they would have dinner together. It made her feel very strange to imagine herself back there—comfortable and claustrophobic at once, as though she’d grown larger when everything else had stayed small.
Her father had warned her to leave Pearl alone, but she had to say some kind of good-bye. After a moment, she went to the window and took a photo of the view of the walls from the inside in the early morning light. Then she composed a text to go with it: Coldtown is crappy & I love you & I’m fine.
Hopefully, Pearl would like that. Hopefully, Pearl would understand.
A few minutes later, Zara came back with a big silver tray, piled with a fairly random assortment of things: black olives, mandarin orange slices, pickled beets, baby corn, smoked oysters still in the can, a block of misshapen cheese, and a hunk of stale and slightly burnt bread. Tana popped three olives into her mouth, along with a stalk of vinegary baby corn.
Rufus got out a bunch of little glasses from a cabinet, along with a bottle of yellowish and slightly cloudy liquid. He poured with his back to them and then brought the shots over to everyone, like a butler. She thought abruptly of the drinking game she and Aidan had played at the farmhouse, The Lady or The Tiger. She didn’t remember who’d come up with it, only that their friends had been playing it since freshman year of high school, after they’d talked about the story in English class. What she did recall was Pauline standing unsteadily on the granite island in Rachel Meltzer’s house, red Solo cup in hand, declaiming a limerick of unknown provenance:
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from a ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
“What is it?” Aidan asked, holding his glass up to the light and frowning at it.
“You know how in prison they make Pruno?” said Zara. “Well, this is our Coldtown specialty—our very own moonshine. Regular old white sugar, baker’s yeast, and water. We run it through a still, bottle it, and sell it.”
Tana sniffed hers. It seared her nose hairs. Tiger, she chose silently and drank. Immediately, she began to cough.
Aidan raised his eyebrows. “What’s it supposed to taste like?”
“Satan’s balls,” Rufus said, and they all laughed. He raised his glass. “To bravery, because you’ve got to be brave to drink this!”
Christobel and Zara threw theirs back, then Aidan, then Midnight and Winter. They all winced, and Zara howled with laughter.
“Burns all the way down,” Rufus said.
“And keeps burning,” Aidan put in, but he was smiling.
For a moment, Tana felt light-headed. A cold shudder went through her body, and she was reminded of the infection lurking in her blood. I have the opposite of a fever, she thought, and shook it off.
The food was weird, but it was food. She stuffed herself with it, gnawing on the bread and spreading mandarin slices over it as if they were jam. The shots got easier to knock back, too, although the more she drank, the dizzier she felt.
After the third, she forced herself to stand. “I think maybe I better lay down. I don’t feel so good.”
“Well, on that note,” said Rufus, a smile stretching his mouth. “Let’s show everyone to their rooms.”
Christobel and Zara stood, too, glancing covertly toward Aidan.
In that moment, Tana knew something was definitely wrong. What she saw passing between them was more than laughing behind someone’s back; it was scheming.
“Come with me,” Christobel told Aidan, her silky gown skimming over her body as she walked toward the stairs. He started after her when Tana grabbed his hand.
“Wait,” she said, her mouth feeling numb enough that she wasn’t sure she could get the words out. “Wait.”
He looked back at her, confused and very drunk.
But once she had his attention, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would prove something bad was about to happen. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother them—I mean, they said we could just break in anywhere, right? We can go find our own place.”
Aidan frowned, looking at Christobel and then back at Tana, as though he was trying to puzzle out her meaning. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I feel weird,” he said, and she realized why it was so hard to think.
They’d been drugged.
Tana watched helplessly as he climbed the stairs, Christobel in the lead and Zara following, pushing him along. She didn’t know how to save Aidan; she turned toward the open door, toward escape and the cool morning air that might clear her head. She took two faltering steps. Rufus kicked the door shut.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
Midnight started to laugh from the couch. “Your face!” she said. “Oh my god, Tana, I wish you could see your face! I should have recorded it. Don’t be scared—I mean, really, you’d think after traveling with a vampire, you wouldn’t let us rattle you.”
Stupid, Tana thought. I am so stupid. I got tired and distracted and sad. I stopped paying attention. “What are you going to do to us?”