The Coldest Girl in Coldtown Read Online Free PDF Page A

after she’d licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.
    After Tana’s mother was infected, she bit Tana’s father while he was unconscious, because she needed human blood to complete her own transformation, and biting him was fine because you couldn’t go Cold from being bitten by infected people. After that, they would put him to bed; he was probably tired.
    He slept peacefully while Tana and her mother told Pearl that they would be back for her when she was older. Then they put on long gowns and went out into the night, mother vampire and child vampire, to hunt and haunt the streets together.
    They’d be the good kind, like the devoted scientists who’d infected themselves to study the disease better; like the vampire bounty hunters who hunted other vampires; like the vampire woman in Greece who still lived with her husband, making all his meals at night and leaving them for him to reheat while she slept the day away in a grave of freshly turned earth under the root cellar. Tana and her mother would be like that, and they would never kill anybody, not even by accident.
    In the dream, everything was convenient, everything was perfect, everything would be fine forever.
    In the dream, Tana’s mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
    I don’t want to be a vampire , she told herself over and over again. But in her dreams, she kind of did.

CHAPTER 5
He whom the gods love dies young.
—Menander
    D riving across Lance’s lawn, Tana ran over a coiled length of hose and crushed the daffodil patch that his mother had planted. Then she threw the Crown Vic into reverse and pulled up to the window as tightly as she could. As soon as her bumper hit the wall, she got out, climbed on top of the car, and tried to wriggle back through the window, this time holding a tire iron.
    It took several tries and a lot of jumping and scrambling and kicking. When she did make it in, her calves and hands scraped, she realized that the room was darker than it had been. The shadows were lengthening as afternoon turned inexorably toward evening. It was probably after six already, maybe after seven. The smell of death hung heavy in the air.
    “Tana,” Aidan said as soon as he saw her. “Tana, they’re going tocome in as soon as it’s dark. They told us.” He looked pale and frantic, worse than she remembered him looking when she’d left. “We’re going to die, Tana.”
    “ Condamné à mort ,” a voice rasped from the other side of the door. She could hear the creatures whispering to one another in the hall, shifting hungrily, waiting for the sun to set.
    Her hands shook.
    She whirled on Gavriel, who was watching her with those eerie garnet eyes, huddled in the corner like a black crow. “What does that mean?”
    “There are so many odd dappled patches of sunlight here,” he called to them from his pile of blankets and coats, ignoring her. “Come in. I long to watch your skin blister. I long to—”
    “Don’t say that!” she cut him off, panicked. If the vampires pushed their way in, she had no idea what she would do.
    Run, probably. Abandon them.
    Aidan pulled against his bonds. “They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn of Istra. I think he’s in trouble.”
    “Are you?” Tana asked.
    “No, not exactly,” said Gavriel.
    Tana shuddered and looked back toward the window and her car with longing. The Thorn of Istra ? She’d once seen a late-night special called Piercing the Veil: Vampire Secrets from Before the World Went Cold . On-screen, two guys in tweed jackets talked about their research into how vampires had stayed hidden for so long. Apparently, in the old days, a few ancient vampires held sway over bigswaths of territory, like creepy warlords, with more vampires who were basically their servants. Vampires took victims who wouldn’t be missed, killing after every feeding. But if a