Mardave touched his hand gently to her arm. “Hey,” he said.
She almost hissed with delight at the press of his hot fingers. She smiled up at him and hoped her eyes weren’t as hungry as her skin. “I really like you.”
He flinched. “Look, it’s late. Maybe we could meet up another time.” Then he backed away, which made her so angry that she bit the inside of her own cheek.
Her mouth flooded with the taste of copper, and a red haze floated in front of her eyes.
Fifty-seven days ago, Matilda had been sober. She’d had a boyfriend named Julian, and they would dress up together in her bedroom. He liked to wear skinny ties and glittery eye shadow. She liked to wear vintage rock T- shirts and boots that laced up so high that they would constantly be late because they were busy tying them.
Matilda and Julian would dress up and prowl the streets and party at lockdown clubs that barred the doors from dusk to dawn. Matilda wasn’t particularly careless; she was just careless enough.
She’d been at a friend’s party. It had been stiflingly hot, and she was mad because Julian and Lydia were doing some dance thing from the musical they were in at school. Matilda just wanted to get some air. She opened a window and climbed out under the bobbing garland of garlic.
Another girl was already on the lawn. Matilda should have noticed that the girl’s breath didn’t crystallize in the air, but she didn’t.
“Do you have a light?” the girl had asked.
Matilda did. She reached for Julian’s lighter when the girl caught her arm and bent her backward. Matilda’s scream turned into a shocked cry when she felt the girl’s cold mouth against her neck, the girl’s cold fingers holding her off balance.
Then it was as though someone slid two shards of ice into her skin.
The spread of vampirism could be traced to one person—Caspar Morales. Films and books and television had started romanticizing vampires, and maybe it was only a matter of time before a vampire started romanticizing
Crazy, romantic Caspar decided that he wouldn’t kill his victims. He’d just drink a little blood and then move on, city to city. By the time other vampires caught up with him and ripped him to pieces, he’d infected hundreds of people. And those new vampires, with no idea how to prevent the spread, infected thousands.
When the first outbreak happened in Tokyo, it seemed like a journalist’s prank. Then there was another outbreak in Hong Kong and another in San Francisco.
The military put up barricades around the area where the infection broke out. That was the way the first Coldtown was founded.
Matilda’s body twitched involuntarily. She could feel the spasm start in the muscles of her back and move to her face. She wrapped her arms around herself to try and stop it, but her hands were shaking pretty hard. “You want my help, you better get me some booze.”
“You’re killing yourself,” Dante said, shaking his head.
“I just need another drink,” she said. “Then I’ll be fine.”
He shook his head. “You can’t keep going like this. You can’t just stay drunk to avoid your problems. I know, people do. It’s a classic move even, but I didn’t figure you for fetishizing your own doom.”
She started laughing. “You don’t understand. When I’m wasted I don’t crave blood. It’s the only thing keeping me human.”
“What?” He looked at Matilda like he couldn’t quite make sense of her words.
“Let me spell it out: if you don’t get me some alcohol, I am going to bite you.”
“Oh.” He fumbled for his wallet. “Oh. Okay.”
Matilda had spent all the cash she’d brought with her in the first few weeks, so it’d been a long time since she could simply overpay some homeless guy to go into a liquor store and get her a fifth of vodka. She gulped gratefully from the bottle Dante gave her in a nearby alley.
A few moments later, warmth started to creep up from her belly and her mouth felt like it was full of needles and Novocain.
“You okay?” he asked her.
“Better now,” she said, her words slurring slightly. “But I still don’t understand. Why do you need me to help you find Lydia and Julian?
“Lydia got obsessed with becoming a vampire,” Dante said, irritably brushing back the stray hair that fell across his face.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “She used to be really scared of vampires. When we were kids, she begged Mom to let her camp in the hallway because she wanted to sleep where there were no windows. But then I guess she started to be fascinated instead. She thinks that human annihilation is coming. She says that we all have to choose sides, and she’s already chosen.”
“I’m not a vampire,” Matilda says.
Dante gestured irritably with his cigarette holder. The cigarette had long burned out. He didn’t look like his usual contemptuous self; he looked lost. “I know. I thought you would be. And—I don’t know—you’re on the street. Maybe you know more than the video feeds do about where someone might go to get themselves bitten.”
Matilda thought about lying on the floor of Julian’s parents’ living room. They were sweaty from dancing and kissed languidly. On the television, a list of missing people flashed. She had closed her eyes and kissed him again.
She nodded slowly. “I know a couple of places. Have you heard from her at all?”
He shook his head. “She won’t take any of my calls, but she’s been updating her blog. I’ll show you.”
He loaded it on his phone. The latest entry was titled:
It was impossible to know which comments Lydia had read and which ones she believed.
Runaways went to Coldtown all the time, along with the sick, the sad, and the maudlin. There was supposed to be a constant party, theirs for the price of blood. But once they went inside, humans—even human children, even babies born in Coldtown—wouldn’t be allowed to leave. The National Guard patrolled the barbed-wire-wrapped and garlic-covered walls to make sure that Coldtown stayed contained.
People said that vampires found ways through the walls to the outside world. Maybe that was just a rumor, although Matilda remembered reading something online about a documentary that proved the truth. She hadn’t seen it.
But everyone knew there was only one way to get out of Coldtown if you were still human. Your family had to be rich enough to afford hiring a vampire hunter. Vampire hunters got money from the government for each vampire they put in Coldtown, but they could give up the cash reward in favor of a voucher for a single human’s release. One vampire in, one human out.
There was a popular reality television series about one of the hunters, called
Most people didn’t have the money to outbid the government for a hunter’s services. Matilda didn’t think that Dante’s family did and knew Julian’s didn’t. Her only chance was to catch Lydia and Julian before they crossed over.
“What’s with Julian?” Matilda asked. She’d been avoiding the question for hours as they walked through the alleys that grew progressively more empty the closer they got to the gates.
“What do you mean?” Dante was hunched over against the wind, his long skinny frame offering little protection against the chill. Still, she knew he was warm underneath. Inside.
