“Get up,” Valentina was saying, shaking her shoulder. “Tana, you’ve got to get up.”
She tried to open her eyes, but they felt as though they were glued together and wouldn’t move. Her limbs felt so heavy that she thought she might sink right through the floor.
“She’s lost too much blood,” said an unfamiliar voice, a girl’s. It echoed in the room. “It’s all over her. There’s no way she’s going to make it.”
“I don’t think that’s her blood,” said a boy.
Tana reached out with her fingers and touched steel bars, chilly against her skin. She wasn’t sure where she could be. The room smelled damp, with the vaguely mineral smell of basements. Open your eyes, she told herself, but she couldn’t.
“Somebody!” Valentina shouted. “She’s really sick. Somebody, please!”
When she woke again, she was lying in a massive bed in a dimly lit room. Her arm was shackled to the brass headboard and there was a long IV running from her arm to a bag of clear fluid that hung from a picture hook on the wall, over a bedside table. Someone had taken the painting down and leaned its gilded frame against a chair.
She still hurt, pretty much all over.
“When you’re in danger, everything becomes clear, doesn’t it?” Gavriel said softly, in a tone that made her shiver. He was sitting on her non-IV side, in a leather chair beside a makeup table, his face in shadows. “Everything else falls away. Danger is a terrible addiction, but that’s what I like—the clarity of thought it provides. How about you?”
And even though she’d known him for less than a week and plenty of what she did know of him was horrendous, at the sight of him, she let out her breath all at once. She let herself fall back on the bed, boneless with relief.
She knew she shouldn’t feel that way about a monster, but right then, she wanted nothing more than a monster of her very own.
“What’s happening to me?” she finally asked, then rattled her arm, indicating the line of tubing. Had she dreamed Valentina’s voice?
“Would that it were the waters of Lethe dripping into your veins.” He leaned forward, so that the dim light of the tinted window showed the curve of his mouth and the way his dark lashes brushed his cheeks when he lowered his eyes. He looked very young and very old at once. Then a corner of his red mouth lifted in a wry smile. “But alas, the answer is merely that you lost a lot of blood and we’re giving you saline.”
“Like the stuff people with contacts put in their eyes?” she asked, before realizing he probably had no idea what she was talking about.
He picked up her purse from where it rested beside her and shook it gently. “In case you were concerned. All just as you left it.”
She nodded. “Thanks. Although I guess whether or not I’ll ever get to use that marker is pretty up in the air right now.”
“You should have let me eat her in that parking lot,” Gavriel said, raising his eyebrows.
That startled a laugh out of Tana. It wasn’t just that what he’d said was funny—it was the waggish way he said it, as if he expected her to get the joke, expected her to get that he was joking. It made her feel less bizarre about how comfortable she felt around him, if he felt even a little bit the same way.
“It’s not so bad,” Gavriel said, standing and coming to sit at the end of the bed. The amusement had gone from his face as he watched his own hand smooth over her bedclothes. “You’re younger than I was when I turned and more adaptable than I remember myself to have been. You’ll be marvelous.”
For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was saying, and then she realized, of course, he must know she was infected. Lucien had seen the fight she’d had with Midnight, and Gavriel must have, too, given what he’d said a moment ago. He certainly could see the bite marks on her throat.
“I’m not going to be a vampire,” she said, trying to make her voice sound more certain than she was. She remembered the sound of her mother shouting up from the basement, calling for blood, being willing to sink her teeth into her own daughter’s arm. She remembered Aidan lunging at her in the coatroom of Lance’s party when she’d untied his gag. What would Tana do once the infection wormed deep into her brain, so that there was nothing but the need for blood and the willingness to do anything to get it? Once she was entirely Cold, Cold through and through. Then she would scream and threaten and beg for blood.
Her eyes started to water and she blinked back the tears. She hadn’t cried since the gas station, and she wasn’t going to cry now.
“Tana,” Gavriel said, helplessly.
“Whose necklace did you give me?” she asked, wiping her eyes with her free hand. “Lucien recognized it.”
“It belonged to my sister once,” he said, so quietly that she was sure there was more to the story than that. Then he smiled. “But Katya is long dead, and there’s no point in my keeping it when I hardly ever wear it.”