Is it safe? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t think that Christobel was going to give her an honest answer. With Bill Story and Zara dead, it was hard to imagine that Aidan was still hungry, but what did she know about newborn vampires? At the farmhouse, those creatures had fed until they were swollen like ticks.
Tana walked farther down the hall, her footsteps tracking more black paint as she went. When she glanced over her shoulder, Christobel was looking out the window, even though she’d painted it so thickly that there was nothing to see.
It was supposed to be you.
In that moment, with her hand on the doorknob, Tana wished that life were like a recording where you could fast-forward past all the scary parts where everything got turned upside down to whatever came next, no matter how bad. Taking a deep, ragged breath, she pushed the door open. Then the tableau revealed itself and there was no more wishing.
Aidan crouched on the floor with inhuman stillness. That and the unnatural pallor of his skin made it clear that he was changed, even before he looked up at her with his new scarlet-tinted eyes. Beside him rocked Midnight, back and forth, holding her brother’s body.
Winter’s blue bangs hung in his face, and his mouth looked chalky and chapped, the way Pearl’s mouth sometimes did when she’d brushed her teeth and hadn’t wiped all the toothpaste away. Two bright pinpricks marred his throat, one leaking a thin line of blood. Winter’s eyes were closed, but Midnight’s eyes were open and red as coals in the heart of a fire. At the sight of Tana, she made a horrible keening sound and clutched her brother closer.
Rufus hunched in a corner of the room, wearing only pajama pants. A tiny video phone rested next to him as though he’d dropped it and forgotten it was there. The blinking light showed that it was still recording.
CHAPTER 24
Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.
—Emily Bront?
Pearl sat in front of the television, eating spaghetti with lots of sprinkle cheese. Her father was in the kitchen, cleaning the stove. He’d been cleaning since Tana left—doing laundry, scrubbing the inside of the microwave, even pulling out the refrigerator and getting down on his knees to wash the tiles by hand. He’d been at it so long that although it was after ten, he still hadn’t eaten dinner. The only times he stopped were when the phone rang with calls from Homeland Security and, later, Aidan’s parents.
On the television, a news anchor in a blue suit stood in front of the logo TEEN BLOODBATH with a big red spatter over the letters.
“Now for the latest update on the sundown party turned tragedy,” she read off the teleprompter, “we go to Mitch Evans at the gas station off Highway Ninety-Three where a trio of teen survivors of the tragedy were spotted late Sunday night. Aidan Marinos and Tana Bach, along with an unidentified third young person, were caught on video, isn’t that right, Mitch?”
Then the screen flashed to a newsman with an ill-fitting toupee standing in front of a gas station and holding a microphone on a bewildered-looking kid. “Absolutely, Tiffany,” the man in the toupee said. “We’re here with Garrett Walker, who’s been working behind the counter at Global Gas for nearly a year. Can you describe what you saw last night?”
Pearl scooted forward on the sofa. “Dad!” she yelled. “Dad, they’re talking about Tana on television.”
“Sure I can,” the kid with big red spikes in his hair, Garrett, said. “Two kids came into the mart. She was all scratched up, and the boy looked a little shifty, so that made me keep my eye on them. I thought maybe they were going to steal something.”
“What do you mean, shifty?” Mitch Evans asked on the screen.
Garrett shrugged. “He was looking at things too long. Staring right through you.”
“And how about the girl?” asked the reporter.
Garrett squinted at the sky, as if he was trying to remember. “She bought a sandwich, I think. Nice blue eyes. Short skirt. Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to her until after what happened out by the pumps.”
Pearl reached out and picked up the cell phone resting beside her on the leather cushions of the couch. She’d looked at it about a hundred times since she’d seen the text from her sister that morning: a photo of a normal-looking street just after sunrise and the words Coldtown is crappy & I love you & I’m fine.
Every time Pearl looked at it, she could hear Tana saying the words, could hear her exact tone of voice. She even knew what they meant, because sisters spoke a certain kind of language so deep it was almost code. They meant that Coldtown was okay and not too scary, but also that Tana was teasing her for thinking of it as a romantic place. They meant that Tana wasn’t a vampire yet because she could take photographs of sunrises. They meant that Tana was trying to hide how she really felt, which wasn’t fine at all.
Pearl’s dad walked into the room, sponge in hand. “What are you yelling about?”
She pointed at the screen. “Watch. They’re talking about Tana.”
“Turn it off,” her father said, his voice hard.