Looking around, she saw a chimney nearby and wrapped one end of the rope around it, wishing that she’d gone to Girl Scouts. Didn’t they learn how to tie knots?
She climbed down into the room. Down was easy, except that it was hard to go slow, when her rope was just rope, with no interval knots to brace her feet against. Halfway down, Tana slipped and fell onto the floorboards, making a sound that everyone inside must have heard.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. She braced for the sound of running feet, but the only thing she heard was a low moan from somewhere deep in the house.
Tana crept into the hallway.
A man in a bowling shirt, jeans, and sandals sat against the wall, his head tipped back and his eyes open. He had short hair the brown of rabbit fur and wore a pair of large, round silver-rimmed glasses, the lens of one mottled with bloody fingerprints. His arms were outstretched and his wrist had been ripped open, a mess of torn skin and pink insides. The floor was washed in a sticky pool of red that the rug had begun to soak up, blackening it along one edge. Much too much blood and more still bubbled lazily from his veins.
The other wrist was marked with two small puncture holes.
One of his legs twitched spasmodically. He looked at her with his glazed-over brown eyes. The smell of blood rose up, breaking over her like a wave, rich and hot. Her tongue pressed against her teeth eagerly. Bile rose in the back of her throat.
“Ru-un,” he said between rapid, heaving breaths and then just stopped, like a toy that had been switched off. A rattling sound came from deep inside his rib cage.
Tana’s heart was thudding in her chest, beating like punches from a fist.
In that moment, she realized she’d seen him before—a picture of him anyway. He must be the neighbor they’d talked about. Bill Story, the one who’d been chronicling life inside the walls, the one who’d refused to leave even after his friends sent him a way out. She was sure that however he imagined dying, it wasn’t like this.
She carefully removed Bill’s glasses. Then she pressed her fingers to his eyelids, closing his eyes and hoping they’d stay closed. Then she crossed his hands over his chest, the way that dead pharaohs posed on their sarcophagi.
No matter what warning he’d whispered with his final breath, she couldn’t run. She couldn’t go anywhere without the marker. Carefully, she slid the long knife out of her boot.
Edging along further, she turned a corner and saw Christobel standing by a window with a can of paint and a brush. She was blackening the panes and crying at the same time, her thin shoulders shaking and her eyes red-rimmed. She looked at Tana and started to cry harder.
“What are you doing?” Tana whispered.
“Getting everything ready for tomorrow.” Her makeup streaked her blotchy cheeks in tracks of glittering gray and silver. Her voice sounded vague and dreamy, almost singsong. “We’re going to be vampires, and the house has to be ready for us. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You shouldn’t have left. Why did you leave?”
Since Tana had been their prisoner, she’d assumed that if she was spotted sneaking back into their fortress with a big knife, it would be cause for alarm. But Christobel was looking at her as if she had gone out for groceries and taken too long getting back and now their whole dinner party was ruined.
There was another low moan from behind a door down the hall and the sound of frantic hushed voices. Christobel looked nervously in that direction and then back at Tana.
“After you left, we thought—when we didn’t hear you anymore, it seemed like Aidan had fed on you. So we thought it was safe. We were sad, but—”
Tana nodded and gestured for her to go on, to speed past that part. She knew why she’d been locked in the room with him, even if not everyone on the other side of the door was willing to admit to it.
“Midnight and Zara fought over who would go first. Zara said it was her house and so she’d go, so she went and he—he drained her.”
“Oh,” Tana said, thinking of the human Aidan she’d known. Aidan, who was silly and selfish, but who could never have been a murderer.
“I know he didn’t mean to.” Christobel started crying even harder, dropping the paint can and kicking it with her foot. The black paint spattered the wall and ran in rivulets, like rotten blood. “He was so upset after. But it was supposed to be you who died, not Zara. It’s not fair. We did everything right. We gave him you to eat, as the sacrifice for the newly risen vampire. It was supposed to be you.”
“Where is he now?” Tana asked, trying to keep from slapping the girl. “Down there?” She’d pointed toward the room where the sounds came from, and the girl nodded.