“Lucien is Gavriel’s maker,” Jameson said.
“What?” She couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine Gavriel, whom she thought of as half the boy who’d promised her another day and half the screaming creature underneath Père-Lachaise Cemetery, having anything to do with slickster Lucien Moreau, who had sold licensing rights to his image so that posters of him could be sold at malls across the country. “Look, obviously I don’t know much of anything. All I can tell you is that Gavriel’s traveling alone, and there were some vampires hunting for him. He let us assume they were sent by the Thorn of Istra, but I guess they belonged to this Spider person. The massacre Midnight mentioned in her post, that was because of them.”
A white thing streaked down from the sky, surprising Tana into nearly toppling off her chair. The crow spread its albino wings and alighted on the table, regarding her with its ruby eyes. It stalked across the plastic surface, cawing once and then picking at a few fallen curds of egg.
Jameson started to laugh as the bird hopped up onto his shoulder. Flapping its wings, it flew up to his head. “This is Gremlin,” he said, swatting the crow back to the table.
Tana put out her fingers tentatively and was surprised when the bird scampered over and rubbed its beak against her skin. She smiled a little, relaxing. There was something about an animal that made it hard not to feel like the person who kept it was basically decent.
“Let me explain something about Coldtown,” Jameson said. “Mostly, we’re an ecosystem that works. The vampires need lots of living people to supply them with blood, willingly, through the shunts. If they had to go around attacking people, they’d risk spreading infection and losing their food supply. But when something shakes Coldtown up, we descend into chaos very quickly. Whether it’s human terrorists breaking the windows of the Eternal Ball and setting themselves on fire or turf wars between rival vampires gangs, things can get heated pretty fast. So if Gavriel’s here to stir things up, there are a lot of vampires and humans who already hate Lucien and who would join him—”
She tried to imagine Gavriel’s recruiting anybody and shook her head. “I think whatever he’s going to do, he’ll be alone. He’s not really—he’s kind of crazy.”
Jameson looked faintly relieved. “I’ll tell my friend to try and get away from Lucien’s for a few days, but I doubt she’ll go.”
Tana took a last swig of the coffee, drinking down the grounds, feeling the caffeine sing through her blood. The sky above them had turned dark, and she thought of Aidan, back in the house, dead and risen, and waiting for her to return. “Why’s she with him in the first place if he’s so awful?”
Jameson looked away from her. “She’s a vampire,” he said quietly.
The way he’d said it, as if he was embarrassed, made her wonder what it was like to have grown up here human. What did it mean to never have made the choice to come to Coldtown, to never want something from the vampires. What would he do for a marker like the one she’d lost? And how would he feel if he knew about the infection bubbling in her blood?
Reaching over, Jameson stroked Gremlin’s white feathers. “Did you know that crows get to like the chemical in ant bites? Formic acid, I think. Anyway, they start to get so addicted to it that they’ll spread out their wings on top of anthills. I think that she—my friend—I think she knows that Lucien’s horrible, but she’s gotten to like it.”
Tana shuddered at the image. “Maybe she’s just used to it.”
“Maybe,” Jameson said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“My turn to ask you for something,” she said. The thing about Jameson was that he seemed so oddly normal. Tough-looking, with a shadow of stubble over his jaw and the wiry muscles of someone who spent a lot of time climbing across rooftops, but he’d helped her and hadn’t asked for anything much in exchange. “If you know a place where I can buy some stuff like clothes and maybe a weapon, I’d love some directions. I didn’t exactly come prepared.”
“I know somebody with a pretty decent pawnshop. I could walk you over.” Jameson raised both his eyebrows, waiting.
“Thanks again,” she said, and he stood.
Tonight, she was going to have to find her way back to Aidan and retrieve her marker. And once she did, she was going to have to find herself a new prison, one where she could hole up and wait out the infection with enough food and water and blankets to get her through eighty-eight days of torment.
Eighty-eight days, starting with this one.
CHAPTER 22
One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
—Friedrich Nietzsche