The bouncer looked as though he wanted to hassle her a little more, but something about her crossed arms and downturned mouth warned him off it. “Fine, go on.”
Relief washed over Tana, and then, before she could quite believe it, they were walking past the scrollwork gate with knife-sharp posts and into Lucien Moreau’s party.
“Nice job,” she said, under her breath.
Valentina smiled, chin high. “Good plan. We’re like a pair of hot girl spies.”
The house was a massive Victorian with a wraparound porch. The building loomed tall and strange, with several roofs of slate and glass. Partygoers stood on the sloped lawn beyond the gates, a few lying in the patchy grass or laughing as they ran in teasing circles. A thick, cloying incense perfumed the air, and the closer she got to the massive door, which stood open atop the steps, the stronger the smell grew. Myrrh and musk, covering up some sweet, foul stench underneath.
She walked up the steps and through the open door into the foyer. There was music playing somewhere, the thin tortured sound of violins, accompanied by discordant, distant human cries. Her heart started to speed and her breath came unsteadily. She had the immediate sense that this party wasn’t for humans, no matter how many were present or who watched the recordings from their homes.
Cameras looked down from the corners of the ceilings, blinking with green lights to show they were on. On the local cable channel back home, from three until four thirty in the morning, there was a show in which a girl called Asphodel, wearing a long purple wig, would broadcast clips of the party she thought were worth highlighting and discuss them with callers. Black bars covered any actual penetration of fangs so as not to offend the FCC. A red-eyed girl in a silver dress passed Tana, spattered with blood, jolting her out of any pretense this was anything but a dangerous fishbowl of monsters, a snake cage full of mice.
A thin, mad giggle threatened to burst from Tana’s lips, but she clenched her fingers hard enough for her nails to dig into her palms and waited for the feeling to pass.
“You okay?” Valentina asked. She was looking up the stairs at the people there, holding mismatched Champagne coupes in their hands. A vampire in a tuxedo looked down from the landing, his pale hands gripping the wood railing. He smiled like a ferryman come to conduct her to the realm of the dead.
Tana nodded. Calm down, she told herself. Just find Aidan, get the marker back, and get out.
When she left Coldtown, she decided, she and Pauline would go on a road trip. She wouldn’t go straight home, not with her thoughts full of blood and teeth and ruby eyes. They’d go on an adventure instead—a normal one, where nothing very adventurous happened. They could head south until the money ran out. She imagined driving through the day with the windows down, slushies melting in the cup holders, the radio turned up, and Pauline singing along in the passenger seat.
Tana forced herself to move, to walk into the first of a honeycomb of high-ceilinged rooms. It was purple-walled, with a boy spread out on a table that was covered in a white cloth. A few vampires gathered around, licking the thin lines of blood welling up from shallow slices on his arms and legs, his skin already glossy with spit. His eyes were closed, but sometimes they fluttered a little, as if in dreams.
“Do you see her anywhere?” Tana whispered.
Valentina shook her head. She was trying to seem blasé, but she couldn’t quite tear her gaze from the boy and the blood. Taking her arm, Tana steered her through to a second room. There, human girls and boys, painted with latex, metal gags covering their mouths, had been manacled directly to the walls, which were covered in a pattern of steel plates to look like picture-frame molding. Tana watched in astonishment as a man walked up to one, grabbed the girl’s wrist, and sank his teeth directly into her skin.
“They’re infected,” said a vampire in a long dress of deep red satin, corseted over her stomach and sewn with pieces of jet. It showed off a long, jagged half moon of a scar at her shoulder. Her coffee brown hair was pulled back into a tight, sleek chignon and her lips were painted the same scarlet as her eyes. “It doesn’t matter if you bite them. They can’t get any more infected, can they?”
Tana smothered a gasp at the sight of the woman. She was famous; Tana knew her instantly from watching clips from Coldtown and from dozens of Tumblr gifs showing her sternest expression captioned with OMGWTF? or I’M FREAKING DEAD SERIOUS or NOMNOMNOM. She was Elisabet, Lucien’s lover, rumored to be far more callous and cruel than he was. She appeared young, barely older than Tana, but her eyes were ancient and cold as lead. And there was something else about her face….
“They’ll never get any less infected, either,” Valentina said, under her breath.