The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.



-Friedrich Nietzsche



The night that Gavriel was bitten for the first time, he woke to freshly starched sheets and an unfamiliar high-ceilinged room. He stank of liquor; even his sweat smelled faintly of Chartreuse, and he thought he might still be drunk. When he sat up, his head spun such that he had to lie back down. Outside the windows, the gas lamps of Paris burned beneath a moonless sky.



"Drink this," a man's voice said, bringing a glass to his mouth.



He gulped what turned out to be water. He felt odd, hot and cold at the same time, as though a fever was coming on. He was used to waking in filthy rooms, used to shame on the face of the person or persons who'd brought him there, used to walking back to his tiny apartment with a sour stomach and rumpled clothes in the late afternoon, scandalizing his landlord.



What he wasn't used to was finding himself in an opulent hotel with a blond man standing over him wearing a wicked grin. Vaguely, he remembered a piano playing and a sting at his throat, as though a cobra had struck him, and some great pressure against his neck. But he'd spent most of the evening in one of the more raffish haut boheme salons, and while he'd heard it said that places like that were frequented by snakes, no one meant it literally.



"I ought to go," Gavriel said muzzily, trying to sit up again. "I'm not well."



"Some sicknesses are worse than their cure," said the man, pinning Gavriel in place with the press of a single hand. In the dim light, the iris of his eyes appeared to be spilled-blood red. Gavriel stared up at him, too amazed to be afraid. After courting the devil's attention for so long, it seemed that at last the devil had come for him.



"When it's done, we'll be like brothers," said the devil.



"I already have a brother," Gavriel slurred. "He's dead."



The devil loomed over him, his grin widening to show off sharp teeth. "As am I."



Gavriel opened his mouth to shout, but drunk as he was, he began to laugh instead.



When Gavriel woke again, light was streaming through the window, making his memories of the night before seem ridiculous. A particularly silly and indulgent nightmare, brought on by too many drinks and too much misery. No man loomed over him, ready to strike. No blood stained the bright white sheets. The hotel room was empty, his shirt and shoes resting on a nearby settee. On a low table, a fresh bottle of Chartreuse was set out, beside a cut-crystal glass and a plate of baked oysters.



He blinked at the bed, at the rumpled sheets. He brushed fingers over his neck. They touched tender skin, as though he'd been bruised. That gave him pause, making him nervous enough to gather up his things and leave the room quickly, heading for home.



He felt light-headed as he made his way past the gambling dens and pawnshops that studded the Ninth Arrondissement around the Folies Bergere Music Hall. He walked inside a boucherie without even really deciding on it. There, he spent what meager coins he had on calf liver and ate it raw, straight off the brown paper in which it was wrapped, on the steps of his building.



Gavriel slept through most of the day, waking at night with a creeping chill in his bones. Outside his apartment, he heard all the sounds of night in Paris-people hawking wares, whether food or flesh. Someone was playing dice in the back alley below his window; the sound of them on the cobblestones made him think of a skeleton rattling in its coffin.



He found that he did not want to be alone. Fortunately in Paris, he could find low company at any time. In a cabaret where a dark-haired girl performed the shocking danse du ventre, he met up with a few of his acquaintances. He knew little about any of them, really, except for their appetites, which were prodigious. Still, their laughter chased away the dreams of the night before-at least until Gavriel found himself studying the throat of Raoul de Cleves, a comte's son prone to gambling and deep in debt. As the night wore on, Gavriel became more and more aware of the movements of blood under de Cleves' skin, of the way his heart sped it along, fresh and hot. It would be so easy to slice open flesh and release that red stream, bright as claret. It would be so easy to get him alone, to promise him the loan of some money and then press him against the wall of the alley and-Gavriel pushed away the thought of what came next. He tried to watch the girl onstage, but when she rotated her hips, making the bells on her skirt tinkle, all he could think of was the artery that ran down the inside of her sweat-slicked inner thigh.



He staggered home, drunk as he could make himself. When he opened the door to his room, a fire was burning in the grate and the devil sat in a threadbare chair, as elegantly dressed in a dove gray coat with covered buttons as though he'd come straight from Versailles.



"I'm Lucien Moreau," the devil said, eyes bright with hellfire. "I imagine you have questions."



Gavriel stood in the doorway, frozen.



"I feel so strange," said Lucien in a falsetto, a smile stretching his mouth, clearly much entertained by his own performance. "What's happening to me? How could you make me have these terrible desires? Satan, avaunt!"



Gavriel came inside, closing the door behind him. "I apologize," he said. "I am very drunk and not likely to be as clever in my interrogation as you imagine. I confess I am discomposed, but you may stay as long as you please. I have been searching through the streets of Paris for damnation, and now that damnation has come to sit by my grate. Who am I to turn it away?"



He was not as cool as his words made him appear, but Lucien's mocking rendition of his thoughts had put him on his mettle: He refused to let the creature see how afraid he was.



Lucien inclined his head in thanks. "You never do quite what I expect. To me, surprise is a quality precious above rubies." He held up his hand, and Gavriel could see that one of the silvery rings he wore covered the length of his finger like some kind of armor, with a wicked hooked talon at the end.



He drew that across his wrist, letting blood well. It was darker than the blood Gavriel remembered spattering his brother's chest, darker and with an unusual blue tint. The smell of it seemed to fill the room, a hypnotizing scent, like ozone rising after a lightning strike, and he lurched forward without meaning to.



"Drink," Lucien said. "This is what you thirst for. Come and drink."



And as Gavriel bent his head, falling to his knees, fingers shaking as he closed them around Lucien's wrist, some part of him knew that before this moment, he had only been playing at wickedness. He had never done anything in Paris so terrible that he could not have returned to the man he had once been.



Then the flavor of Lucien's blood washed over him and he was lost. He sucked at the wound, tongue pushing into the slit skin of Lucien's wrist, a low sound starting in the back of his throat. He forgot about Aleksander. He forgot about his mother and father and sister. He forgot about the sound of the gun firing and the smell of the powder and the way his brother's body had sprawled in the snow. There was only this.



And when he woke in the late morning, with blood staining his lips and teeth, blood smeared on the pillow where he'd rubbed his mouth against it in the night, all he thought of was getting more.



Before, Gavriel had been full of self-loathing and conflicting desires, but now his days had a singular focus. He waited for night and for Lucien to drink from him and then feed him from his wrist. Nothing else mattered very much. He drifted through his days, no longer caring about salons or cabarets, no longer caring about drink or degradation.



At first, the feedings exhausted him, but then the blood seemed to have worked some strange alchemy. His hunger abated. He walked through the streets during the day, feeling stronger, swifter, and more alert than ever before. He could snap a poker in half and catch the reins of a frightened horse, jerking it to a halt, without even exerting himself. In his room, alone, he threw a knife at the wall again and again, perfectly able to control where it struck. His canines grew longer and sharper, making his gums bleed. He was delighted, running his fingers over their points absently when he was alone, to prove to himself they were really there.



And as Gavriel hunched over Lucien's wrist, new teeth making neat little holes in his skin, Gavriel felt as far from himself as he could have ever wished to be.



On the seventh night, when Gavriel returned to his apartment just after dusk, Lucien was there, lounging in a chair, wearing a dinner jacket with a shawl collar. He had a girl with him, sitting on one of the arms, in a thin, stained shirt and heavy-looking brown skirt. Dirt rouged her cheeks, darkened her throat, and gloved her hands. A box rested on the table, apple green satin spilling out.



"I told her that she could take a bath here," said Lucien. "Is that all right?"



Gavriel nodded numbly, his heart speeding as he took in the scene. "Of course, if she wishes."



"She wishes," said Lucien and gave the girl a little shove. She stood obediently. "I told her she had to be quite thoroughly clean before she could put on the dress you bought her."



Gavriel glanced over at the box of green satin and then back at the girl. She was looking at the fabric with longing fierce enough to make her foolish. He remembered his sister's closet full of such dresses, and he thought that it was such a small thing to want, but of course, for her, it wouldn't be.



Run, he thought, but didn't say aloud. You know you ought to run. Please run.



He pointed toward the back of his apartment and watched her as she lifted the box and walked slowly toward the tin bath in his bedroom, the jug of water he'd left there along with a square of lye soap. She moved lightly, and there was a sway to her step that made him think of the dancer he'd seen just days before. He imagined pressing his mouth to her neck, her heartbeat fluttering like a bird's wings, and shuddered.



"Why is she here?" Gavriel asked.



"Oh, don't be tiresome," said Lucien. "Surely, you can guess both her provenance and her purpose. There is no mystery."



"Lucien," Gavriel said, cautioning him, "what do you mean to do with her?"



"She's not for me," Lucien said. "My blood has made you ready, but the final transformation is before you. Tonight is your last night as a living man. Drink from her and be born anew. Her death buys you life eternal."



Gavriel shook his head, backing away.



"Oh, come now. You can't pour wine back and forth between two vessels forever." Lucien smirked.



"I have enough innocent blood on my hands," Gavriel said. "Enough and more than enough."



Lucien laughed. "So that's what you're running from, is it? Oh my dear boy, very soon it will be as nothing to you, I promise. There will be rivers of blood to drown in, and one single drop will be as meaningless as a single star in all the tapestry of the sky."



"I won't do it," Gavriel told him, stalking toward the door. Lucien grabbed for his arm, but Gavriel pushed him away with all the stolen strength of his blood. "I don't care what I do to myself, but I won't be the cause of suffering for another."



"You will," Lucien said, red eyes shining, lips curled into a mocking smile.



Gavriel escaped into the night, the echo of Lucien's laughter following him.



Lucien found him a week later. Gavriel had taken the stagecoach away from Paris and found himself a small hostelry outside Marseille. He had lain down the night before, sweating and shaking, hearing the heartbeats of humans like drums through the walls. Cold crept deeper and deeper into his skin until it finally froze his heart.



When Lucien opened the front door and saw the common room streaked with scarlet, the bodies of the innkeeper and his wife, the barely grown children who worked in the kitchens and stables, he smiled. Gavriel, crouched over a body, looked up at him with a despair so deep that it was barely a feeling at all.



Of course, Lucien had killed the girl Gavriel had tried to spare. He told Gavriel all about it on their ride back to Paris.