The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (20 page)

Later, he couldn’t quite remember what they’d spoken of—only that he’d been desperate to charm her. Incredibly, he seemed to have succeeded. She agreed to let him pay court to her. Her father, the stolid owner of a factory, had more than one daughter to settle and seemed to find Gavriel’s title and connections enough to make up for the paucity of his finances.

Love took Gavriel as nothing had before. He was drunk with it. He wrote Roza long letters in which he shamelessly stole lines from Tyutchev to describe her eyes. He cajoled his mother into letting him give her a sapphire ring that could have been sold instead. He took a new interest in his clothes, suddenly aware of every worn cuff and hem on his coats.

The longer it went on, the less Aleksander found it amusing. “You’re making a fool of yourself over a merchant’s daughter,” he would say before Gavriel stalked from the table. “It’s one thing to marry her for her money, but you do her too much honor by this display.”

Maybe that was what prompted Aleksander. Perhaps he wanted his responsible, careful, dull younger brother back. Or maybe he merely thought that since Gavriel couldn’t see what a fool he was making of himself, Aleksander would make a bigger fool of him—big enough to
make
him see.

Whatever the reason, Aleksander set out to and succeeded in seducing and debauching Roza. She wept as she explained, sitting on a silk-covered couch and begging Gavriel not to be angry, that she and his brother had never meant to fall in love.

Gavriel sat stock-still. Inside him roiled such turmoil that he feared that should he move, he would smash every piece of furniture in the room, crack every pane of every window, until there was nothing but shining splinters where the parlor had been.

Instead, he leaned back his head and laughed, a long, cruel laugh that did not seem to belong to the boy Roza had known. It blazed up from deep inside him, from some embers he’d always been careful never to stoke.

“You’re a fool,” he told her and watched her stumble out of the drawing room, looking back at him as if he were the betrayer.

She’d go to him now, Gavriel reasoned. For long moments he sat, staring at the wall, willing himself to calm. Finally, he got up, intending to leave the house. On the way through the hall, he passed the
library, where Roza was kneeling on the floor, massive skirts billowing around her, hands over her face. Alek was heaping scorn on her, telling her he would never marry a girl who’d already proved herself faithless. She’d misunderstood; he’d promised her nothing. He merely wanted to know what kind of wife his brother would choose for himself. It was a terrible thing, the glee with which Aleksander dismantled every one of her romantic hopes. He had ruined her and he was proud of it.

Gavriel waited until she staggered out, racking sobs threatening to rob her of the ability to walk, before he challenged his brother to a duel. His voice was unsteady when he spoke the words. Aleksander looked at him as if he were a puppy trying to show his teeth.

Then Alek walked to a crystal decanter, pouring out a measure of clear liquid. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Gavriel knocked his brother’s glass to the floor, shattering it. Then taking a step toward Aleksander, Gavriel slapped him across his cheek, the sound of skin against skin as sharp as a branch snapped in two.

For a moment, Alek staggered back.

Then, throwing up his hands in resignation, Aleksander agreed to meet Gavriel on the grounds of their estate the following morning, an hour before dawn. He didn’t seem particularly concerned, touching his reddened cheek with a grin. He’d been in thirteen duels before and had emerged without so much as a scratch. He was an excellent shot. Gavriel had been Aleksander’s second, but he had never done anything more than stand around on the grass and make sure the pistols were properly ready.

One of the servants must have overheard and told the vikontess, because she came to Gavriel’s room that night and begged him not to go. When he refused, she said she would go to Aleksander and persuade him to apologize for the grave offense.

“I will not forgive him,” Gavriel told her. “And I still mean to marry her, do you understand?”

“Roza?” his mother asked, her voice shaking. “You cannot.”

“Even if I no longer loved her, I would marry her to prove that he cannot take from me what I will not give. I would do it to spite him. But I do love her.”

His mother left, wringing her hands.

The sun was already rising, orange flames licking the sky, when Aleksander arrived at the clearing where the duel was set to take place. He was stumbling drunk. Two of his friends held him up.

They found Gavriel alone, pacing through the snow, the shoulders of his long coat dusted with fresh flakes.

“Ganya!” Aleksander cried out, as though nothing could please him more than the sight of his little brother. “Have you been waiting long?”

Gavriel shook his head. “Not long at all.”

“You can’t go through with this,” said a boy named Vladimir, one of his arms around Aleksander, staggering under his weight.

“Go to the devil,” Aleksander said, pulling out of their hold. He drew his own pistol and lurched over the snow, getting closer to Gavriel, waving the gun around. “My little brother wants to defend his honor. Let him! I thought he was too much of a coward. Come on, Ganya. Shoot! What are you waiting for?”

“Sasha can barely stand,” Vladimir called. “Don’t be stupid.”

It was just like Aleksander to steal even this from him, Gavriel thought. To treat the duel as a joke, to treat
him
as a joke. Now his only choices were to take aim at a man about to fall over or bear the shame of crying off. And Aleksander would laugh at him later.
I wasn’t so very drunk
, he would say.
And if I was, so what? If you weren’t such a milksop then surely you’d have—

Gavriel raised his pistol and shot his brother through the heart.

For a long moment there was only the burn of the gun in his hand and Aleksander’s blood staining the snow like spilled rubies. No one spoke. Then Gavriel threw down the gun and began walking back to the house.

He felt as cold as the snow.

By evening, Roza had heard of Aleksander’s death. Mad with grief, she threw herself into an icy river and drowned. Gavriel’s mother, having lost one son, refused to lose another; she gave Gavriel what jewels hadn’t already been sold and sent him to Paris, where the Russian authorities couldn’t arrest him.

There, in Paris, he fulfilled the promise of his voluptuous mouth and passionate eyes. He fulfilled the promise of his blood. If his brother was bad, he was determined to be worse. He drank absinthe to his brother’s wine. He gambled away the boots right off his feet. And if Aleksander had been a rake, Gavriel was determined to best him by never saying no, not to even the crudest, most degrading and vile offers, not to anything.

That was when he met Lucien.

CHAPTER 19

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

E
yebrows 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.