“Why did Julian go with her?” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. She didn’t think Dante would understand. He DJed at a club in town and was rumored to see a different boy or girl every day of the week. The only person he actually seemed to care about was his sister.
Dante shrugged slim shoulders. “Maybe he was looking for you.”
That was the answer she wanted to hear. She smiled and let herself imagine saving Julian right before he could enter Coldtown. He would tell her that he’d been coming to save her, and then they’d laugh and she wouldn’t bite him, no matter how warm his skin felt.
Dante snapped his fingers in front of Matilda, and she stumbled.
“Hey,” she said. “Drunk girl here. No messing with me.”
He chuckled.
Melinda and Dante checked all the places she knew, all the places she’d slept on cardboard near runaways and begged for change. Dante had a picture of Lydia in his wallet, but no one who looked at it remembered her.
Finally, outside a bar, they bumped into a girl who said she had seen Lydia and Julian. Dante traded her the rest of his pack of cigarettes for her story.
“They were headed for Coldtown,” she said, lighting up. In the flickering flame of her lighter, Melinda noticed the shallow cuts along her wrists. “Said she was tired of waiting.”
“What about the guy?” Matilda asked. She stared at the girl’s dried garnet scabs. They looked like crusts of sugar, like the lines of salt left on the beach when the tide goes out. She wanted to lick them.
“He said his girlfriend was a vampire,” said the girl, inhaling deeply. She blew out smoke and then started to cough.
“When was that?” Dante asked.
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Just a couple of hours ago.”
Dante took out his phone and pressed some buttons. “Load,” he muttered. “Come on,
“What happened to your arms?” Matilda asked.
The girl shrugged again. “They bought some blood off me. Said that they might need it inside. They had a real professional setup too. Sharp razor and one of those glass bowls with the plastic lids.”
Matilda’s stomach clenched with hunger. She turned against the wall and breathed slowly. She needed a drink.
“Is something wrong with her?” the girl asked.
“Matilda,” Dante said, and Matilda half-turned. He was holding out his phone. There was a new entry up on Lydia’s blog, entitled:
“You should post about it,” Dante said. “On the message boards.”
Matilda was sitting on the ground, picking at the brick wall to give her fingers something to do. Dante had massively over-paid for another bottle of vodka and was cradling it in a crinkled paper bag.
She frowned. “Post about what?”
“About the alcohol. About it helping you keep from turning.”
“Where would I post about that?”
Dante twisted off the cap. The heat seemed to radiate off his skin as he swigged from the bottle. “There are forums for people who have to restrain someone for eighty-eight days. They hang out and exchange tips on straps and dealing with the begging for blood. Haven’t you seen them?”
She shook her head. “I bet sedation’s already a hot topic of discussion. I doubt I’d be telling them anything they don’t already know.”
He laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. “Then there’s all the people that want to be vampires. The websites reminding all the corpsebait out there that being bitten by an infected person isn’t enough; it has to be a vampire. The ones listing gimmicks to get vampires to notice you.”
“Like what?”
“I dated a girl who cut thin lines on her thighs before she went out dancing so if there was a vampire in the club, it’d be drawn to her scent.” Dante didn’t look extravagant or affected anymore. He looked defeated.
Matilda smiled at him. “She was probably a better bet than me for getting you into Coldtown.”
He returned the smile wanly. “The worst part is that Lydia’s not going to get what she wants. She’s going to become the human servant of some vampire who’s going to make her a whole bunch of promises and never turn her. The last thing they need in Coldtown is new vampires.”
Matilda imagined Lydia and Julian dancing at the endless Eternal Ball. She pictured them on the streets she’d seen in pictures uploaded to Facebook and Flickr, trying to trade a bowl full of blood for their own deaths.
When Dante passed the bottle to her, she pretended to swig. On the eve of her fifty-eighth day of being infected, Matilda started sobering up.
Crawling over, she straddled Dante’s waist before he had a chance to shift positions. His mouth tasted like tobacco. When she pulled back from him, his eyes were wide with surprise, his pupils blown and black even in the dim streetlight.
“Matilda,” he said and there was nothing in his voice but longing.
“If you really want your sister, I am going to need one more thing from you,” she said.
His blood tasted like tears.
Matilda’s skin felt like it had caught fire. She’d turned into lit paper, burning up. Curling into black ash.
She licked his neck over and over and over.
The gates of Coldtown were large and made of consecrated wood, barbed wire covering them like heavy, thorny vines. The guards slouched at their posts, guns over their shoulders, sharing a cigarette. The smell of percolating coffee wafted out of the guardhouse.
“Um, hello,” Matilda said. Blood was still sticky where it half-dried around her mouth and on her neck. It had dribbled down her shirt, stiffening it nearly to cracking when she moved. Her body felt strange now that she was dying. Hot. More alive than it had in weeks.
Dante would be all right; she wasn’t contagious and she didn’t think she’d hurt him too badly. She hoped she hadn’t hurt him too badly. She touched the phone in her pocket, his phone, the one she’d used to call 911 after she’d left him.
“Hello,” she called to the guards again.
One turned. “Oh my god,” he said and reached for his rifle.
“I’m here to turn in a vampire. For a voucher. I want to turn in a vampire in exchange for letting a human out of Coldtown.”
“What vampire?” asked the other guard. He’d dropped the cigarette, but hadn’t stepped on the filter so that it just smoked on the asphalt.
“Me,” said Matilda. “I want to turn in me.”
They made her wait as her pulse thrummed slower and slower. She wasn’t a vampire yet, and after a few phone calls, they discovered that technically she could only have the voucher after undeath. They did let her wash her face in the bathroom of the guardhouse and wring the thin cloth of her shirt until the water ran down the drain clear, instead of murky with blood.
When she looked into the mirror, her skin had unfamiliar purple shadows, like bruises. She was still staring at them when she stopped being able to catch her breath. The hollow feeling in her chest expanded and she found herself panicked, falling to her knees on the filthy tile floor. She died there, a moment later.
It didn’t hurt as much as she’d worried it would. Like most things, the surprise was the worst part.
The guards released Matilda into Coldtown just a little before dawn. The world looked strange—everything had taken on a smudgy, silvery cast, like she was watching an old movie. Sometimes people’s heads seemed to blur into black smears. Only one color was distinct—a pulsing, oozing color that seemed to glow from beneath skin.
Red.
