Midnight bore Tana to the ground, her weight and the suddenness of the strike enough to knock Tana off balance. She fell amid the trash cans, the sour stink of garbage all around her. Tana looked up at the sky for an odd lucid moment, seeing the stars spread out like a carpet over them. Then she kicked Midnight in the stomach.
The vampire girl let go of Tana’s throat in surprise, and Tana scuttled back. But before she could get to her feet, Midnight threw herself against her, grasping her arms and sitting on her legs. Pinned, Tana could only try to reach for the wooden shaft of a rake that seemed just beyond her grasp.
“What is wrong with you?” Tana demanded, fingers wiggling through the dirt. “I helped you.”
“Helped me? I didn’t need you and your watching, judging eyes. You’ll try to take Winter away from me again. Leave him in the sun to bake and rot. He’s mine. I get to bury him the way I want.” Tana didn’t know if this manic energy and violence had always been in her or if being turned had made her this way, but right then Midnight sounded like a little girl who’d forgotten to feed her gerbil and then, finding it dead, cared more about decorating its shoe box coffin than about what she’d done. “And now you’re trying to take away Aidan, too. It’s not fair.”
Tana finally caught hold of the rake and brought it down as hard as she could. It smacked Midnight in the shoulder, which wasn’t exactly what Tana intended, but it made Midnight recoil, snarling. Tana hit her again. This time the wood struck her head. Midnight grabbed it and snapped it in two, throwing the jagged ends among the trash.
In that moment, Tana pushed free and started to run toward the house, but Midnight caught her, dragging her back through the dirt.
Tana tried to flip over, pushing against the ground. She rose up just as Midnight sunk her teeth into Tana’s neck.
Pain seared along Tana’s nerves. It hurt, it really hurt. It was like her mother ripping open her arm all over again. But as she cried out, a kind of icy numbness began to spread through her veins, and after that, a velvety consuming pleasure. It ate away at the edges of her thoughts, pressing on her to fall deeper into its darkness. She still felt Midnight’s mouth moving against her neck, still felt the sting of teeth and the pull of her blood being drawn from her, but all those feelings were growing more and more indistinct. Instead, it was as though she were being devoured by cold flame and each lick of that black fire made her shudder with rapturous agony.
She kicked her feet and scrabbled with the nails of her fingers, scratching Midnight’s arms futilely. The vampire held Tana firmly, pulling her closer. Her lion’s purse was wedged between her waist and the ground, but that small discomfort barely registered.
It was so hard to push through the feelings and think. Everything was getting murkier. The shadows were closing in. When she opened her eyes, all she saw was the blurry blue of Midnight’s hair.
Think, she told herself muzzily. Think.
She forced her hand to close on the metal shell of the purse and push at the lock, letting her money, the marker, and everything else spill out onto the dirt. She felt among the fallen things, looking for something, but she no longer remembered what she had been searching for.
A wave of blissful weakness washed over her. She was so tired. And her ears were full of a distant thudding that seemed to slow, like a drum beat in time to music about to end.
Then her fingers closed on an object she recognized. The rose water she’d taken from one of the purses at Lance’s party. Pulling off the stoppered top clumsily, she splashed the contents in Midnight’s face.
The vampire screamed.
Tana plunged back into reality. She was lying in the dirt, about to die. Panic hit her hard and she scrambled to stand, even though she swayed unsteadily on her feet. She grabbed for what she could find on the ground, holding her pathetic weapon up as she knocked into trash cans and then the wall.
Midnight’s face was red along one side, as if she’d been scalded. Drawing back her lips over her teeth, she hissed like a cat and rushed at Tana.
Tana had a sudden, vivid memory of her teacher in art class explaining how understanding anatomy was important to life drawing. He’d borrowed a skeleton from the biology room and started talking about ulnas and tibias, when Marcus Yates, the school’s most reliable weed dealer, called out something about stabbing someone so you hit them right in the heart. Up under the fifth rib, he’d said.
She didn’t have time to count, but she remembered those words as she brought up the stick she’d grabbed—the broken piece of rake—and slammed it into Midnight’s side, thrusting it up toward her heart.