But here’s the part that’s hard to talk about. I did a bad thing. A really bad thing.
I’m the one that killed Winter. I didn’t mean to. I only meant to turn him, but things got way out of control when my new fangs slid into his vein. Drinking someone’s blood is nothing like having your blood taken. Drinking blood is like an explosion of rose petals, it’s like honey and milk and every warm thing in the world. It’s like drinking pure light.
I held him to me and drank and drank and drank. It was like drowning in him, like being closer than ever, together inside my veins. But now Winter isn’t here to laugh with or help me pick out outfits, or to understand me the way no one else ever did. Maybe no one else ever will understand me like that.
I’ll never be anyone’s twin sister. No one will recognize me as the mortal I once was. The last bits of the girl I gave up being died with him. Now there is only Midnight.
I guess it wouldn’t have come to this if I hadn’t wanted to be a vampire, if I hadn’t wanted to be a marvelous monster and beautiful like the dawn. But even though I will miss Winter every minute of every day for the rest of eternity, I know that he wanted this for me. So, in his memory, I am going to rip out this town’s throat.
Oh, and you, my faithful friends and readers, deserve a warning. The videos are disturbing, but we always say that we want to see the real stuff, so here it is.
CHAPTER 27
Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed
But Death intenser—Death is Life’s high mead.
—John Keats
The gates of Lucien Moreau’s house stood open, with bouncers choosing guests from a human crowd gathered in front of them. Tana looked around at the girls in glittering red dresses and inky gowns, their eyes shimmering with liner and shadow and fake feathery lashes, and at the boys in their tight coats. Valentina had said it would be hard to stand out, and it was.
Tana had chosen a long, ivory silk dress with a plunging neckline, the kind worn by starlets in old movies, with a slit on her thigh that hid the scratch but revealed a lot of the rest of her leg. Unlike most vampire partygoers, she had no fresh holes at the crooks of her elbows, where needles slipped in for venipuncture, no marks except for the old scar on her arm, and she hoped that might be unique enough to get her inside if Jameson’s name didn’t. Tana had piled her mass of black hair up on her head, secured with two silver combs she’d bought at the pawnshop so that everyone could see that the only thing at her throat was Gavriel’s garnet necklace, each stone shining like a single droplet of blood. She hoped she looked fresh and clean, untasted, wrapped up like a dumb little sacrifice.
She’d left her boots, jacket, and backpack at the shop and concealed the rest of her things in a vintage clutch of hammered brass, sculpted into the shape of a gilded lion’s head with gluey pits for eyes where stones had once been set. Her knife she’d strapped to her thigh with two leather belts.
It had taken her the better part of an hour to put together the outfit and fifteen more minutes of struggling in front of a cloudy window to get her hair up and staying that way. Then Valentina had made Tana sit in front of a mirror while she brushed her lashes with mascara, highlighted the arch of her brow with silver, and painted her lips a pale shell pink. As she walked up to the gate, the lion clutch banged against her hip from a thin chain, making her change rattle inside it, a hollow metallic sound.
Valentina wore a bronze dress that shimmered with beading. It showed off the long expanse of her legs. Her lion’s mane of hair hung around her shoulders, and her golden makeup was brighter than ever. Tana grinned at her as they waded through the crowd to the gate.
The bouncer was a big, muscular man with long hair pulled back in a black velvet ribbon. His gaze stopped on Tana for a moment, but instead he waved in a tall girl, naked except for a mangy mink coat. Tana edged closer as a trio of boys in leather pants slipped past. Then the bouncer chose two girls in matching green silk cheongsams, their hair styled and colored in identical copper bobs so it seemed as if they were twins.
“Our friend is on the list!” Tana yelled over the noise, pointing and hoping the bouncer could hear her.
“Your friend?” he repeated back dubiously. “Really? What’s the name?”
“Jameson,” Tana said, standing up on her toes, trying to see the clipboard.
“He got any more name than that?” the bouncer asked. A superior smile twisted his lips.
Valentina stepped forward, managing to project an impressive aura of haughty impatience. “You know his name. Jameson Ramirez Alonso. Now, he told us to meet him here, and he told us we wouldn’t have any trouble getting in. This is ridiculous.”