She heard only the sound of murmuring voices floating up from the rooms below.
There was a commercial that ran sometimes on television, especially during daytime soap operas when moms might be watching. It showed chicken nuggets on a plate in front of a human boy and a blood milk shake in front of a slavering vampire girl tied to her chair with ropes. The human messily gorged on the nuggets in the time the vampire just got started on her milk shake. Then voice-over guy said, “Shipton’s nuggets will make your kid hungrier than a newborn vampire.”
The joke’s on you, she told herself, remembering. Nothing is as hungry as a newborn vampire.
He was going to die. And before he came back to life as a vampire, if Tana wanted to live, she was going to have to kill him just like her dad had killed her mom. Kill him before he attacked her with all that new strength.
Her best bet was probably the wooden bowl. It was already split in half, and maybe she could chip off a splinter big enough to work like a stake.
But just the thought of it, of pressing it into his chest deep enough to puncture his heart, made her sick.
Aidan sat down heavily, his back to the bloodstained wall. His lips were red. “I’m sorry,” he said miserably, and she couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t just apologizing for what he’d done, but for what he would inevitably do. “I’m sorry, Tana.”
She nodded. “I know. Me, too.”
They sat like that, on opposite ends of the room, watching the river of light move across the floor as early morning stretched into afternoon. Aidan began to shiver, his gaze going again and again to the wall. Occasionally, he would turn to look at her with a wild light in his eyes and then turn away, breathing heavily as though he was in pain.
Think, she told herself, think.
She got up, pacing the room, forcing herself to look at the trim of door frames and baseboards, to consider what could be pried loose and used to kill him. Of course, there was another way.
If she took a little blood, his still-human blood or blood from the wall, so long as she was infected, she’d change, too.
Haven’t you ever thought about it—being a vampire?
It would be good-bye, Pearl; good-bye, Pauline; good-bye, dream of Los Angeles and palm trees and bright blue ocean. Good-bye, lying on a towel in the backyard under the summer sun, ants crawling across her foot, slippery cocoa butter gleaming on her skin. Good-bye, beating heart and burgers and having blue-gray eyes.
Kill Aidan or die herself. Die and rise.
We’ll never die, Tana.
She looked at the wall where the bowl had struck, considering the small hole halfway up the plaster, and had a sudden desperate thought.
Crossing the room, she kicked the blood-soaked wall, just above the baseboard. Even in her steel-tipped boots, her toes hurt, but she’d cracked the plaster. She kicked again, widening the hole. Maybe she didn’t have to make a terrible choice. Maybe she could put off being a monster for another day.
“What are you doing?” Aidan said, looking up at her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It might not work.”
She walked to where a sharp-looking piece of the bowl had fallen and picked it up. Then she closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and slammed it midway between the first hole and the dent.
Dust coated her skin and clothes.
Then, wedging her boot in the first hole, she reached up through the second to the slats, gripped the wood, and started climbing. It was hard to balance, and harder, with her foot pressing down, making more plaster crumble, not to slip. And then, hardest of all, to slam the piece of bowl into the wall from that position so that she made another hole and kept climbing.
“Tana?” Aidan asked. She looked down, realizing he was standing beneath her. He had a hungry expression on his face. His mouth was slightly apart, his pink tongue pressing against one of his canines speculatively, as if testing it for sharpness.
“I think I can make it to the skylight,” she said. Normal, normal, keep acting like everything’s normal. I’m climbing a wall as if I’m the lamest superhero in the world and you’re dying and everything’s normal. “If the chandelier holds me and if I can actually jump on it.”
Tana was reminded of a similar exercise they did every year in gym class. Last time, she’d gotten halfway up the climbing wall before jumping off and landing on one of the mats in exhaustion. Pauline, who’d conned an ice pack out of the school nurse for her unhurt wrist so she could sit on the bleachers and avoid the whole thing, had called her a sucker for even trying that hard.
Now, she wished she’d tried a lot harder. She wished she’d practiced climbing that wall every day.
“You’re going to leave me here?” he asked her.
Tana shifted her weight, muscles straining. “When I get up onto the roof, I’ll see if I can find some way to get you out—”