“They want to take Winter away from me,” Midnight said. “We’re not supposed to be parted.”
“Do you know what happens to corpses?” Rufus yelled. “They bloat. They get blowflies and they stink. The longer we wait, the worse it’ll be.”
Tana wondered how many bodies he’d seen before, how many he’d moved, and how many had belonged to people he’d once cared about. He sounded entirely practical, but there was something in his face that belied that indifference.
She wondered where Zara’s body was, whether he’d buried her already or taken her to the gate or if she was waiting, rolled in a blanket in another room. Tana wondered if he’d done whatever it was himself or if Christobel had, before she’d started painting.
Most of all, she wondered if either of them still wanted to be vampires.
“I’ll help,” Tana said, letting go of Aidan’s hand and standing. If they moved around, maybe she could talk with Aidan alone. And if that was impossible, then she still had to get out of the house, marker or no marker.
“Winter stays with me,” Midnight told them, stroking her brother’s hair.
“That’s disgusting,” Aidan said.
She flashed him a terrible look. “He’s mine!”
“Fine, we’ll leave him,” Rufus told her, walking toward the door. Tana followed, holding her breath as she went through, gripping her knife tightly in her palm, waiting for cold hands to seize her and pull her back. When that didn’t happen, she looked over her shoulder at Aidan and raised both her eyebrows. “You, too. We’re going to need help lifting the bodies.”
It turned out that even as a vampire, Aidan liked being bullied a little. But not enough to give her the marker.
“When you get back,” he promised her, quietly, in the hall, “I want us to talk.”
And so, she helped wrap and carry Bill Story and then Zara. Her body had been resting on the divan in the front room, posed as though she were a mannequin about to come to life.
Every night, in every Coldtown, people die. People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.
Death drinks down their warmth until their veins are dry. Death forgets restraint. The older vampires might grow dusty and careful, but those freshly made want to glut themselves and sometimes, foolishly, they do.
And so, each morning, the denizens of Coldtown who remain must bring out their dead. They’re brought in front of one of the guard towers, and in the afternoon, the guards come from the safety of the wall and hammer two silver nails into the corpses—one in the head and one in the heart. If the bodies are still there the next day, spoiling in the sun, they’re shipped home to their families.
By the time Tana and Rufus and Christobel had wrapped Zara and Bill in sheets and set them down beside the other bodies, the sun was high in the sky, hot and unforgiving. The three of them walked back through the too-bright streets, littered with the night’s leavings: several kids slumped together in an alley, wrapped around one another for warmth like bears in a cave; a scattering of feathers and sequins in a gutter; stubbed out corn silk and clover cigarettes with blue lipstick smudging the filters; broken bottles of whiskey; and withered white flowers. They stepped over it all without speaking, too tired to do anything else. Distant bird noises and petals blown from rooftop gardens filled the air with daylight sounds and smells. Tana wanted to sleep, but this was the most vulnerable that Aidan was likely to be. And after dragging bodies he’d killed through the street, she wanted that damn marker.
She wanted it back and she wanted to punch him in the face.
Aidan was sitting on a bare mattress in a room upstairs, one with windows covered in garbage bags in a disturbing echo of the one she’d found him in at Lance’s party. He was thumbing through a yellowed paperback he’d gotten from somewhere around the house. Dylan Thomas. Aidan looked up at her, grinned, and tossed the book to one side. She remembered Bill’s slack, changed face and bluish skin in the unforgiving light of day. Bill, whom she didn’t know at all, but who would have still been alive if not for Aidan. Aidan, with his constant need to please everyone around him, who had changed a girl into a monster to make her happy.
And Zara, beautiful Zara, with two puncture marks on her neck. She’d pinned up her hair and picked out a beautiful dress to go to her grave. Zara, whom they’d had to throw out as if she were garbage.
Aidan, who was partly responsible for the deaths of three people. Aidan, who was a monster.