“She’s infected, too, you know,” Winter said. “We should put them in together.”
“Really?” Rufus looked over at Midnight for confirmation. “Her?”
She stretched out her skinny-jean-covered legs on the couch. Her velvet top slipped to one side, showing the bandage. “I guess we’ll see.”
“Come upstairs,” Christobel called to Tana.
With Rufus and Winter leading her, she had no choice.
The windowless bedroom contained a mattress and a few blankets piled haphazardly on it. A brass chandelier. A scratched old skylight with water damage at the corners showed a small patch of blue sky and a lot of brown leaves. The door was big and old, with an electronic cat hatch in it.
Now, when it was too late, she had a moment of terrible clarity. Two infected people. Eventually, we snap and attack each other, taste human blood. Then we’re not human anymore. Then we’ll be willing to bite them. Of course, that’s what they want.
She heard locks turn, one after the next. On the other side, someone started giggling.
Thirty brass locks with thirty brass keys. Like in her dream. Fury pierced her then.
She punched the door, kicked it, threw her whole body against it, but she was weak and everything was getting cloudy. “I’m going to kill you!” she yelled through the opening, her voice coming out slow and strange. “Open this door so I can kill you.”
Aidan tried to rise and collapsed heavily onto the mattress, chuckling, obviously not understanding half of what was going on. “You never give up, do you?”
With her last bit of strength, she crawled onto the mattress, which smelled like cigarettes and old perfume. Curling up next to Aidan, with daylight streaming down from above, she passed out before she could answer him.
CHAPTER 20
Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.
—Jean Paul Richter
The Monday morning after Tana went missing, Pearl woke up early. Her father was at the kitchen table, head pillowed on his hands, sleeping in the same clothes he’d worn the night before. A half-finished coffee rested next to him, a filmy ring formed around the inside of the mug.
Most days on summer vacation, she’d gone over to a friend’s house to swim in their pool, or shop for cheap earrings at the mall, or imitate dance moves from YouTube videos, but today she didn’t want to go anywhere. Her stomach felt sour with nerves.
She poured herself a bowl of Cheerios and added milk. Carrying it into the living room, she set it down on the coffee table and switched on the TV from the couch, flicking through channels until she came to a show she recognized—Hemlok: Vampire Bounty Hunter.
All the neighborhood kids had been super into Hemlok when they were younger. For the last three whole summers, Pearl had played bounty hunters and vampires with them, running through backyards with a branch in her hand, holding it up like a stake. She’d even dressed up like Hemlok one Halloween, although Mike Chavez told her that it wasn’t a good costume for a girl. But in the last year, Hemlok had been on at the same time as another show that she liked better, so she hadn’t seen any of the new episodes. And this summer, boys and girls didn’t play with each other anyway.
But right then, the familiarity of the show was reassuring, so she left it on.
“The thing about vampires,” Hemlok said from his equipment room, strapping stakes carved from rosewood and hawthorn onto a bandolier, their tips capped with plastic so they didn’t go blunt during travel. “They’re all messed up in the head. They’re hungry all the time. We gotta think like they do, think like predators, and outsmart them at their own game. They might be faster and stronger, but we’re still human, and that’s what makes us better, that’s what counts.”
The show cut to him sitting in his truck with his assistant, Jeana. She was drinking from a Big Gulp, in white jeans and a cutoff shirt studded with rhinestones, her hair teased so big that it hit the roof. They were parked in front of a strip club, loud music pumping from the speakers. A rerun, Pearl realized; an okay one, but not supergreat.
“We think we’ve spotted her inside that building,” Jeana said, in her exaggerated camera-friendly whisper. “There’s a door around back, so we’re going to have to get one of us on either side of the building and see if we can’t flush her out.”
Before he started vampire hunting, Hemlok used to be a wrestler. He quit (although some people say he was thrown out of the league) after an opponent died in the ring. Pearl knew all this from the Hemlok fan club she’d joined when she was nine, around the same time that Hemlok started going on talk shows and telling the story, weeping as he explained that the death of that man was the moment he realized he needed to change his life.