“I can’t stay,” Tana said, hovering in the doorway.
Aidan shook his head, squinting against the indirect light of the hall. It obviously bothered him, but he didn’t seem to hurt. “She’s watching the footage that Rufus recorded over and over again. She’s watching me bite her and listening to herself talk about exquisite pain and transmutation and ‘this is my body this is my blood.’ Watching herself kill Winter. Over and over and over. With Winter’s body still right there, decaying next to her. I can’t take it. And I keep thinking about Kristin dying and how horrible I am and I just can’t stop.” He hit his hands against his head three times like he was trying to drive the demons out. “I saw her die and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen, her dying with the others, all of them dying—I mean it was the absolute worst, unimaginably bad. But now, when I think about it and I remember all the blood, it’s awful and yet I want to lick it all up, lick the walls of the party, and I can’t stop, Tana, I can’t—”
“Kristin?” Tana said, but then it came back to her that that had been the name of his new girlfriend, the strawberry-haired one who’d worn the dog collar at Lance’s party. Tana sat down on the edge of the mattress and put her hand against his back, feeling his shirt slide over his chilled skin. “It’ll get better. You’re not used to being what you are yet, that’s all. It takes time, but you have endless time, Aidan.”
“I don’t want to get used to it,” he said.
Tana thought about the three vampires in the square, burning up in the sun, and what Winter said about their not being able to handle what they’d become. She’d heard distant but distinct screams that morning, too, as they walked through the streets. “You have to,” Tana said, making her voice firm. “And you have to give back what you were holding onto for me.”
“Because you don’t trust me,” he said.
“You’re not used to what you are yet,” she told him. “That’s all. Friends don’t blackmail each other.”
“You can’t leave me here, Tana,” he said. “Promise me that you won’t leave me.”
After a long moment, she said, “I’ll be here for eighty-eight days at least. I’m infected, remember? That’s a lot of time.” She wasn’t sure she was infected, not anymore, but she figured that it’d be safer if he thought her being Cold was certain.
Safer, because if there was any way to, she was leaving him. She was going home, home to hide under covers that smelled like bleach and violets and to sleep until she forgot the last three days. She wanted to take a shower so hot that it gave her a sunburn. She wanted to cry until she didn’t have any tears left, until the salt of them dried on her cheeks and blew away.
“We could find him again—Gavriel,” Aidan said, making the name into a taunt, but not a mean one. He sounded like Pauline did sometimes when she was teasing Tana about a boy, the way she’d once sounded when she was teasing Tana about Aidan. “I bet we could find him if we looked, and I know you’d like to see him again, even if you won’t say so.”
Tana let herself smile with relief that Aidan had moved on to a subject that didn’t involve dying. He might let her out of the room without a fight, might let her out with the marker. “Okay, sure. Let’s look for him.”
“I bet he wants to see you, too.” With a sigh, Aidan reached into his jeans and took out the manila envelope, then put it in her hand. “We’ll start tomorrow. You trust me now, right?”
She wanted to open it up and look, but she didn’t want to take her gaze off Aidan. She could feel the weight of the marker, could trace her finger around the outline of it through the paper. That would have to do. She slipped it into one of the zip pockets of her jacket while he watched.
“I trust you,” she said, and stepped into the hallway.
The dim slashes of sunlight through the painted windows were little comfort. As soon as she’d walked a few steps, she started to run down the stairs. She was tired through and through, tired from adrenaline, exhausted from being drugged the morning before, and worn down from fear so deep it seemed to live in her bones. She forced herself to walk out the front, down the street, and seven blocks in a random direction before she let out her breath. Then she looked for a house with boarded up windows. Using the bolt cutter to force her way inside, she searched it as thoroughly as she could in her exhausted state, climbing her way to the topmost room. There, she pushed a dresser against the door, made a nest of the dusty curtains and curled up in their center, happy for the warmth of the sun on her face, happy for it to burn away everything about the night before.