The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;



But my breath smells earthy strong;



If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,



Your time will not be long.



-The Child Ballads 78: The Unquiet Grave



Eyebrows raised, lips caught in midscoff, Aidan was watching Tana from the mouth of the alley. Midnight smirked, looking into her phone and thumbing something on the screen, while Winter glowered impatiently beside her. When the wind caught Midnight and Winter's hair, it blew like two blazes of deep blue sky.



"Well, that was interesting," Winter said, sour-voiced.



Tana rubbed her hand against her face, her thoughts too chaotic to make any sense. All she knew was that she was embarrassed. Her face felt hot and her tongue stung, reminding her of what she'd been doing. "You waited."



Aidan took a step toward her, the smile leaving his face. "Hey. You okay? He didn't hurt you, did he?"



To get that reaction, her expression must be very strange, Tana realized.



Midnight rolled her eyes, as though Aidan was being ridiculous. "I bet you were a good girl back home," she said to Tana. "A good girl all your life until you finally met the trouble you want to get in."



"You obviously don't know her at all," Aidan told Midnight gruffly. Then he turned back to Tana. "Did he bite you?"



She shook her head. The more she thought about it, the more stupid she felt. She was probably infected, but that didn't mean she should have tempted him into making it a sure thing. And, hungry as he was, crazy as he might be, he could have drained her dead, pinned her against the brick wall and ripped out her throat. She'd been playing with fire, just as he'd accused Midnight of doing.



Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.



At that thought, a feeling of vast exhaustion came over her. They'd made it beyond the gates of Coldtown, and Tana was tempted to lie down amid the refuse, close her heavy eyes, and pretend away everything else. She'd done her best to protect the world from what she and Aidan would become, and now that that was done, despair settled on her shoulders.



She didn't want to be infected.



She didn't want to think about the taste of her own blood, or about how, if she sucked hard enough on her own tongue, the taste would bloom fresh in her mouth.



She rubbed the scar on her arm and thought about what it must feel like to press teeth against skin, about what her mother must have had to do to rip open an arm. She stopped herself in the unconscious act of bringing her own wrist to her lips.



Winter sighed and took her by her elbow, steering her down the street. "You sure he didn't bite you? You're acting weird."



"I'm fine. I just didn't think, you know," she said finally, stumbling along the cracked concrete sidewalk beside him and smiling a little guiltily. "I didn't think they could even like that sort of thing."



Winter's lip curled at the edge. "You sure looked as though you-"



"Okay, okay." She lifted her hands, interrupting him, warding off the words. She remembered looking at Gavriel's mouth, smeared with Aidan's blood, when he got into the driver's side of the car back at the gas station. She'd thought about kissing him then, sure. But it was one of those messed-up fantasies that people have when they're under stress. Sick, but harmless. It wasn't like he was ever going to know.



"Haven't you watched the feeds?" Winter asked her, more gently. "Vampires like anything and everything that keeps them from getting bored. Anything and everything."



She shook her head again, shaking off the conversation in a motion that turned into a shudder.



"I've got pictures of you two lovebirds," said Midnight in a singsong voice, holding out her phone. They weren't clear, just images of two dark shapes leaned against each other, the outline of cheekbones and his fingers in her hair, the glare from a window above them that had probably messed up the camera's light sensors.



"You should probably just delete those," Tana said, embarrassed, reaching for the phone. "You can barely see anything."



"Oh no, I don't think so!" Midnight laughed, dancing out of Tana's way, clearly pleased that her teasing had some effect. "While you were busy saying good-bye, I found us a place that's not too far. My friend Rufus has a squat over on one of the renamed streets. Wormwood."



Tana nodded, trying to smile. What she needed was sleep, she decided. Lots and lots of sleep.



"Lead on," Aidan said. His skin had an odd sheen to it, and he looked pale, as though his blood was cooling inside him, as though body warmth would soon be something that could only be stolen from others.



A few cars were parked on the sidewalk. One sheltered a woman bundled up in a comforter in the backseat among bags of garbage. Was she alive? Tana couldn't see the blanket rise or fall. Another car burned merrily, sending acrid black smoke up into the sky.



Tana passed two girls holding each other up, clearly coming from a party. One had green glitter sparkling in her hair, and the other was wearing the torn remains of a gold-sequin dress. They were barefoot, seeming to have lost their shoes. Both had bruises and needle marks all the way up their calves to their thighs, disappearing beneath the hems of their dresses. Both had identical expressions of dazed contentment as they staggered along.



A few blocks away, someone began to scream. A moment later, that scream was joined by another and another. Three voices, each distinct, each rising and falling in a continuous cry that made up a hellish melody. The barefoot girls stumbled, looked in the direction of the sound, and then kept on walking, one speaking softly to the other.



Midnight bit her lower lip, sucking the ball of a silvery ring into her mouth. She shook her head.



Aidan closed his eyes, seeming to drink in the sound.



"Come on," Tana said, turning down a garbage-strewn alley, heading in the direction of the screams before she thought better of it. This is exactly what's wrong with me, she told herself as she walked. If there's trouble, I go straight for it.



"Are you sure?" Winter asked, but followed her anyway.



Several blocks later they came to a crossroads with a large courtyard. A crowd of humans had gathered around the edges, some of the people carrying white flowers. Three vampires knelt at the very center of the road, underneath a defunct stoplight-a man, a woman, and a young girl-screeching up at the sky as the sunlight scorched them. Their hair flamed. Flesh was blackening and flaking off, like paint from the planks of an old house. Underneath, their skin looked raw and red, as though they were made of embers instead of muscles and ligaments. In moments, their cries had grown guttural, and then the noise diminished. Two people from the crowd inched closer to the bodies, and the woman vampire jerked upright. Tana saw a flash of fangs before the vampire collapsed again in a heap of black smoke and steam. Gasps rose from the crowd, and a few people stepped farther away.



"I know what this place is," Winter said under his breath. "Suicide Square."



For a moment, Tana was sure she hadn't heard him right. She felt dizzy with horror.



"If you've seen videos of vampires burning in the sun on YouTube, this is where most of the footage comes from." He pointed up at a camera mounted outside a window. Then he nodded to the audience. "People come out to watch them die-happens every morning. Citizens hope to get infected or for the vampire to give out money or information-sometimes they can be generous right before they die, I hear. Or other times they'll kill a bunch of the crowd, just for spite."



"But why do they want to die?" Tana asked.



Midnight looked at the dying vampires. Her lip curled with contempt. "Most of them never wanted to go Cold in the first place. They can't hack drinking blood or being stuck in Coldtown. A lot of them can't deal with the things they did when they were freshly turned. Not everyone's worthy."



Not everyone's a monster, Tana thought. It should have made her feel better, more proof that vampires weren't so inhuman that they didn't feel pity or fear or regret. Instead, it just reminded her that sometimes there were no good choices.



"Or they get superbored," Winter said. "That's why the old ones die. Eventually, they don't care enough to feed and they starve."



Midnight gave him an unfriendly look and he stopped talking. She drew herself up, and Tana could see her willing him to remember his role. They had an image to project-two beautiful, condescending creatures who needed nothing but each other, who walked in each other's shadows automatically. But Tana could tell that Midnight didn't like Winter's talking about some future where even if they were vampires, they still might not be happy.



"You can ask Lucien Moreau about it personally," Midnight said, as though reminding her brother of something he should already know. "We're going to crash one of his parties."



Aidan had moved into the shadows of a building, as if the sun bothered him. Tana wondered if he was trying to imagine himself as one of them, wondering if he could hack it, wondering if he was worthy.



"But why die like this?" Tana asked softly, to herself, not really expecting an answer. Two of the vampires had stopped moving, but the little girl-now almost entirely cinders-moved occasionally, spasmodically, causing what was left of her to crumble. People had begun to throw the white blossoms, pelting flowers at the girl in particular.



"Tradition?" Winter shrugged, turning away from the spectacle. He was trying to play it off as if he were apathetic about what was happening, but he looked pale and sick. Watching the vampires burn up in front of him wasn't like watching it on video. It was different to hear their screams echoing across the square. It was different when, with every breath, you sucked in the smell of scorched skin and hair.



"Now at least we know where we are on the map," Midnight said. There was a light in her face that Tana hadn't seen before, a beatific calm, as though, perhaps for the first time, she felt sure about everything. "It should be easy to find Rufus's place."



Tana took Aidan's arm, lacing her fingers through his, ignoring how cold they felt. His gaze seemed to snag on people from the crowd and follow them for a bit, before moving to study another, a cheetah surveying a herd of gazelles for stragglers.



They marched a few more blocks in the dawn light, Winter and Midnight in the lead, looking for the right street. Some had regular names like Orange or Dickinson or Mill Road. But others had new names scrawled along the fronts of buildings or pasted over the original signs, proclaiming them Way of the Dragon or The Nonsense Court of Endless Alley or Butcher's Boulevard. The confusion was made worse by house marks that were even stranger-some numbered in random order, others in hammered cuneiform, or even random letters of the alphabet. There was a series of houses scrawled with what seemed to be a combination of stick figure drawings and mathematical code.



The area they walked through mostly consisted of row houses; a few brick industrial buildings; and the odd church, one with its stained glass windows smashed and its door spray painted with the word ROTTERS in bright neon green. The streets were quiet, but sometimes Tana thought she saw someone watching them from a window. They passed a brown lawn with what looked like a body collapsed in a wilted bush. The reek of it, a heady mix of decay and spilled wine, persuaded her to stay back and to pull Aidan's arm-hard-when he started over.



"The hunger's bad," he said. "Clawing at my stomach. For a while, I was okay, but I don't think I am going to be okay for much longer."



She nodded. She wasn't sure how long she was going to be okay for either.



As they walked on, she noticed a dark-haired boy watching her from the vantage of a peaked roof. He was shirtless, his brown arms covered almost entirely in colorful tattoos. An albino crow sat on his arm, its snowy head and bone-pale beak tipped to one side. Even from the street, she could see the glint of the creature's pink eyes.



"Hey," Winter said. "There. That's the house."



Tana turned to observe Midnight walking toward a set of steps, her garbage-bag luggage resting by the side of the street. The place was three stories in height with what looked like a rotted-out balcony on the third floor. The sides had been painted a deep gray but had chipped and bubbled off to reveal pale blue underneath. There was very little lawn out front, and what grass grew there was scrubby and brownish.



Tana glanced back toward the roof on the other side of the street, but the boy with the crow was gone.



"Do they know about us?" she asked, hesitating on the stairs. "Me and Aidan? We're not exactly... safe to be around."



Midnight narrowed her eyes at Tana, then knocked her fist against the wood frame. "That's not going to be a problem," she said over her shoulder.



Then the door opened a crack, a chain keeping it from opening farther. Midnight said something. The door shut and then, latch removed, swung open wide.



A boy was standing in the doorway, looking like a pirate or a prince. Half his head was shaved, and he wore layered clothing of leather and flowing cotton, with rings on each of his fingers and long necklaces of silver and bone hanging one over another at his throat. He waved them inside with a grand sweep of his bejeweled hand.



Tana followed the others into a house that had long ago fallen into disrepair. Mildew discolored the ceiling, and flickering candles cast strange shadows on the smoke-stained walls of the curtained room. A tall girl with honey blond hair wearing a vintage pale pink gown almost the color of her flesh sat on an old Victorian settee with the stuffing hanging out. Next to her, on a threadbare divan, was a dark-skinned girl, her hair dyed bright red and twisted up with a stick, wearing black jeans and an army coat. The room was coated in a perfume of herbs and alcohol so raw that it scorched Tana's nose to breathe. Against one wall, cans were stacked up, next to cardboard boxes. She could read them from where she was: peaches in syrup, peas and carrots, corned beef hash.



"This is my friend Rufus, the one I was telling you about," Midnight said, seeming thoroughly delighted, touching the shoulder of the boy with the half-shaved head. He smiled at her.



"Welcome, everyone," Rufus said. "Get comfortable."



Midnight walked over to the couch and reclined on it like an evil queen. She reached out a slippered foot to slide it up the tall girl's knee and then pointed her toe toward the other. "This is Christobel and Zara. Zara and Christobel, meet Tana and Aidan."



Aidan grinned at the girls but stayed near the door.



Winter went back outside to bring in the rest of their stuff. He dragged in Midnight's garbage bag and dumped it on the floor heavily beside his and then set down their suitcase beside the bags.



"Thanks for putting us up," Tana said warily.



"Is this house yours?" Aidan asked. Very deliberately, he walked to the stairs and sat down on them, clenching his hands into fists.



"It's ours now," said Christobel. "There's plenty of abandoned places. You just pick one out and break in."



"Bill Story lives next door," said Zara, hunching forward. "He's been streaming feeds since the city was quarantined."



"I've always wanted to meet him," Midnight said dreamily. "The intrepid reporter."



Even Tana had heard of William T. Willingham, a comic book writer who'd been caught behind the gates, gave up fiction, picked a catchy name, and turned to documentary-style reporting about what was really happening inside the quarantine. His literary friends tried to get him out, but he gave the two markers they'd sent away-one right after the other-to people he said were more deserving and who had no chance otherwise of being released.



Cynics claimed he'd never been as famous as he was in Coldtown and was going to milk it for all it was worth. According to them, he was shopping an autobiography. Fans said he was the perfect example of how brave regular people could really be when life turned out differently than expected. Tana had seen footage of him once, a regular-looking guy in glasses.



I can never decide if I'm lucky or not to have seen this, he'd said.



Tana thought about the marker in her purse and couldn't imagine giving up her only chance to get out-not for anything. She wondered how long Rufus and Christobel and Zara had been in Coldtown, breaking into houses, posting about their adventures, and not worrying about the future. She wondered if there was something about the city that made you want to stay, despite everything.



Of course, since most people were stuck here, it didn't matter whether they wanted to stay or not.



She thought of Pauline, sleeping in her bunk at drama camp. Was she up yet? Eventually someone from back home would call her to tell her what happened. Or she'd go online and see pictures, read reports. Then she'd realize that Tana had called her after the massacre-called her and lied. For a moment, the weight of everything that had happened in the last day settled on Tana's shoulders.



Winter crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside Midnight, resting his head on her knee. They looked like a matched set of elegant punk rock figurines.



"You're both just like I thought you'd be," said Rufus, eyeing them appreciatively. "Just like in your videos. You're not scared at all, even in the middle of this place, are you?"



Midnight shook her head, posing deliberately. "I feel like after a long journey, we've finally come home."



The others giggled, but Tana could tell they were impressed by her.



Christobel looked over at Tana and patted the seat beside her. "You look so tired. Come in, sit down. You're safe here."



Tana crossed the floor and perched on the end of the divan. It smelled like dust, and the smell was oddly comforting, reminding her of used bookstores, of browsing the racks and finding old mysteries with funny covers. She let out her breath in a rush and tipped her head back, looking up at the chandelier painted a messy red and black, the original brass showing through in patches. It hit her suddenly that they'd made it. They were inside Coldtown, they were still human, and they even had a place to sleep.



Zara got up from the couch. "You all must be starving. We don't have much food, but let me bring out what we do have."



"Grab some booze while you're out there," Rufus said.



"Grab it yourself," she told him and stalked off. He laughed, calling something after her that Tana didn't quite catch.



Tana smiled up at the chandelier, listening to them banter.



She imagined herself lying on her bed in her own bedroom, with strings of fairy lights hanging above her and kitschy stenciled-over paintings from Goodwill on the wall. She thought about Pearl in the other room, watching terrible television with the volume turned up too high. Her dad would come home and then they would have dinner together. It made her feel very strange to imagine herself back there-comfortable and claustrophobic at once, as though she'd grown larger when everything else had stayed small.



Her father had warned her to leave Pearl alone, but she had to say some kind of good-bye. After a moment, she went to the window and took a photo of the view of the walls from the inside in the early morning light. Then she composed a text to go with it: Coldtown is crappy & I love you & I'm fine.



Hopefully, Pearl would like that. Hopefully, Pearl would understand.



A few minutes later, Zara came back with a big silver tray, piled with a fairly random assortment of things: black olives, mandarin orange slices, pickled beets, baby corn, smoked oysters still in the can, a block of misshapen cheese, and a hunk of stale and slightly burnt bread. Tana popped three olives into her mouth, along with a stalk of vinegary baby corn.



Rufus got out a bunch of little glasses from a cabinet, along with a bottle of yellowish and slightly cloudy liquid. He poured with his back to them and then brought the shots over to everyone, like a butler. She thought abruptly of the drinking game she and Aidan had played at the farmhouse, The Lady or The Tiger. She didn't remember who'd come up with it, only that their friends had been playing it since freshman year of high school, after they'd talked about the story in English class. What she did recall was Pauline standing unsteadily on the granite island in Rachel Meltzer's house, red Solo cup in hand, declaiming a limerick of unknown provenance:



There was a young lady of Niger



Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;



They returned from a ride



With the lady inside,



And the smile on the face of the tiger.



"What is it?" Aidan asked, holding his glass up to the light and frowning at it.



"You know how in prison they make Pruno?" said Zara. "Well, this is our Coldtown specialty-our very own moonshine. Regular old white sugar, baker's yeast, and water. We run it through a still, bottle it, and sell it."



Tana sniffed hers. It seared her nose hairs. Tiger, she chose silently and drank. Immediately, she began to cough.



Aidan raised his eyebrows. "What's it supposed to taste like?"



"Satan's balls," Rufus said, and they all laughed. He raised his glass. "To bravery, because you've got to be brave to drink this!"



Christobel and Zara threw theirs back, then Aidan, then Midnight and Winter. They all winced, and Zara howled with laughter.



"Burns all the way down," Rufus said.



"And keeps burning," Aidan put in, but he was smiling.



For a moment, Tana felt light-headed. A cold shudder went through her body, and she was reminded of the infection lurking in her blood. I have the opposite of a fever, she thought, and shook it off.



The food was weird, but it was food. She stuffed herself with it, gnawing on the bread and spreading mandarin slices over it as if they were jam. The shots got easier to knock back, too, although the more she drank, the dizzier she felt.



After the third, she forced herself to stand. "I think maybe I better lay down. I don't feel so good."



"Well, on that note," said Rufus, a smile stretching his mouth. "Let's show everyone to their rooms."



Christobel and Zara stood, too, glancing covertly toward Aidan.



In that moment, Tana knew something was definitely wrong. What she saw passing between them was more than laughing behind someone's back; it was scheming.



"Come with me," Christobel told Aidan, her silky gown skimming over her body as she walked toward the stairs. He started after her when Tana grabbed his hand.



"Wait," she said, her mouth feeling numb enough that she wasn't sure she could get the words out. "Wait."



He looked back at her, confused and very drunk.



But once she had his attention, she couldn't think of a single thing to say that would prove something bad was about to happen. "Maybe we shouldn't bother them-I mean, they said we could just break in anywhere, right? We can go find our own place."



Aidan frowned, looking at Christobel and then back at Tana, as though he was trying to puzzle out her meaning. "I don't want to go anywhere. I feel weird," he said, and she realized why it was so hard to think.



They'd been drugged.



Tana watched helplessly as he climbed the stairs, Christobel in the lead and Zara following, pushing him along. She didn't know how to save Aidan; she turned toward the open door, toward escape and the cool morning air that might clear her head. She took two faltering steps. Rufus kicked the door shut.



"Going somewhere?" he asked.



Midnight started to laugh from the couch. "Your face!" she said. "Oh my god, Tana, I wish you could see your face! I should have recorded it. Don't be scared-I mean, really, you'd think after traveling with a vampire, you wouldn't let us rattle you."



Stupid, Tana thought. I am so stupid. I got tired and distracted and sad. I stopped paying attention. "What are you going to do to us?"



"She's infected, too, you know," Winter said. "We should put them in together."



"Really?" Rufus looked over at Midnight for confirmation. "Her?"



She stretched out her skinny-jean-covered legs on the couch. Her velvet top slipped to one side, showing the bandage. "I guess we'll see."



"Come upstairs," Christobel called to Tana.



With Rufus and Winter leading her, she had no choice.



The windowless bedroom contained a mattress and a few blankets piled haphazardly on it. A brass chandelier. A scratched old skylight with water damage at the corners showed a small patch of blue sky and a lot of brown leaves. The door was big and old, with an electronic cat hatch in it.



Now, when it was too late, she had a moment of terrible clarity. Two infected people. Eventually, we snap and attack each other, taste human blood. Then we're not human anymore. Then we'll be willing to bite them. Of course, that's what they want.



She heard locks turn, one after the next. On the other side, someone started giggling.



Thirty brass locks with thirty brass keys. Like in her dream. Fury pierced her then.



She punched the door, kicked it, threw her whole body against it, but she was weak and everything was getting cloudy. "I'm going to kill you!" she yelled through the opening, her voice coming out slow and strange. "Open this door so I can kill you."



Aidan tried to rise and collapsed heavily onto the mattress, chuckling, obviously not understanding half of what was going on. "You never give up, do you?"



With her last bit of strength, she crawled onto the mattress, which smelled like cigarettes and old perfume. Curling up next to Aidan, with daylight streaming down from above, she passed out before she could answer him.