Still holding the knife, she crouched down and gripped his fingers with her other hand. Even though his skin was cold, she squeezed in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “It’s going to be okay. Let’s get out of here.”
“Everything looks different, silvery and blurry, like watercolor smears and… I can hear your heart, Tana. Your blood, your heat. It’s blowing off you—bright and red and sweet as anything. But that’s not—I know that’s not how you look. I can’t see things right anymore.”
Aidan’s mouth had changed, his canine teeth grown a little longer and sharper. But he had that same persuasive way of talking. “It was an accident, Tana. She was going to turn Winter, but she took too much. Now he won’t wake up. But if we just let him rest, then…”
Tana’s gaze went to Midnight, with Winter’s body in her arms. That was the accident he was talking about, not Bill Story or Zara.
“You know that’s not true,” Rufus said, sounding a shade short of hysteria. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Shut up!” Midnight shouted. Fangs gleamed in her open mouth. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
“There’s a dead man in the hallway.” Tana tried to make it sound as if she were perfectly calm, but the quaver in her voice betrayed her.
“Bill had never seen it, a person dying and waking up a newborn vampire. He wanted to record what happened. We all did.” Rufus’s voice kept its manic edge. “Things just got out of control.”
“He brought over some of his equipment to film me biting her,” Aidan said. “I didn’t want to do it. I was afraid I’d hurt her the same way that I—” He stopped talking abruptly.
Midnight pressed her lips to Winter’s pallid cheek and whispered words against his skin.
“What went wrong?” Tana asked, to keep them talking. She was trying to think through the fear, trying to plan. If she wanted the marker, she was going to have to get Aidan alone. It wasn’t safe for him to hand it over in front of them.
“Midnight finally convinced Aidan that it would be okay,” Rufus said. “We waited awhile, until we figured the infection was in her system and then used the venipuncture stuff she brought to draw some blood from Winter. Sterilized it with a lighter, which I know isn’t great, but they’re brother and sister, so whatever. She drank the blood and waited. Then she died.”
“She died,” Aidan said. “Just like I did. She died and we watched her. We even filmed it. It took forty minutes before it was over.”
Tana shuddered, thinking of Aidan alone in the room, listening to his heartbeats count their way down to dead. There was something changed about him, something that turned his familiar face into a mask. She could see a newly born thing looking out of his eyes.
“It was horrible,” Rufus said. “But that’s what she wanted. It’s what she told us to do, and she kept yelling at us to keep going, to keep filming.”
“And when she got up, she was really hungry.” An odd expression passed over Aidan’s face, as though he was remembering that hunger, as though it was waking anew inside of him. “She was burning up with it.”
“Bill got too close and she lunged at him,” Rufus said, lowering his voice, as though that was going to help.
“He tried to get away from her,” said Aidan. “But it only made the wound rip open wider. I grabbed her and tried to pull her off him. I tried. But then the smell of the blood was too much for me and I—”
Tana remembered the wounds on Bill’s other wrist and thought she knew what he meant. She wondered if being turned had wrought some inner change on Aidan or if this was his true self, his true self without any reason to hesitate.
“We didn’t mean to,” Midnight said, looking up abruptly. “It’s still gnawing at my gut. The hunger. All I can see is blood. All I can smell is blood.” She shook Winter, and his head flopped back and forth, a marionette with his strings cut. “Wake up, Winter. No more birthdays, remember? It happened just like we said and all you have to do is wake up.”
Tana sucked in a breath. She felt as though everything teetered on a razor’s edge.
“Winter volunteered to be the first one turned, after,” Rufus was saying, and Tana tried to focus on him, on what was happening then and there. “He trusted her. And then she just didn’t stop feeding—she went on and on and we didn’t know how to stop her. Winter seemed lost, swooning in her arms. He had been making these breathy sounds, and they just got quieter and quieter. Christobel realized that something had gone wrong before any of the rest of us did. She tried to get Midnight to let Winter go.”
“And what were you doing all this time?” Tana asked Rufus.
He swallowed hard. “I was still filming. I hadn’t realized—” He stopped talking before explaining exactly what he hadn’t realized. That Midnight had gone crazy? That Winter was dying?
“So what happened after that?” Tana prompted, and Midnight’s mad eyes found hers.