Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave.
One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from best-selling and acclaimed author Holly Black.
A Blackstone Audio production.
Release date:
August 12, 2014
Publisher:
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Print pages:
440
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Tana woke lying in a bathtub. Her legs were drawn up, her cheek pressed against the cold metal of the faucet. A slow drip had soaked the fabric on her shoulder and wetted locks of her hair. The rest of her, including her clothes, was still completely dry, which was kind of a relief. Her neck felt stiff; her shoulders ached. She looked up dazedly at the ceiling, at the blots of mold grown into Rorschach patterns. For a moment, she felt completely disoriented. Then she scrambled up onto her knees, skin sliding on the enamel, and pushed aside the shower curtain.
The sink was piled with plastic cups, beer bottles, and askew hand towels. Bright, buttery, late summer sunlight streamed in from a small window above the toilet, interrupted only by the swinging shadows made by the garland of garlic hung above it.
A party. Right. She’d been at a sundown party. “Ugh,” she said, her fingers on the curtain to steady herself, popping three rings off the rod with her weight. Her temples throbbed dully.
She remembered getting ready, putting on the jangling bracelets that still chimed together when she moved and the steel-toed oxblood boots that took forever to lace and were mysteriously no longer on her feet. Remembered the way she’d lined her foggy blue eyes in shimmering black and kissed her mirror for luck. Everything got a little blurry after that.
Levering herself up, Tana stumbled to the faucet and splashed water on her face. Her makeup was smudged, lipstick smeared across her cheek, mascara spread like a stain. The white baby-doll dress she’d borrowed out of her mother’s closet was ripped at the sleeve. Her black hair was a tangled mess that finger-combing didn’t do a lot to fix. She looked like a dissipated mime.
The truth was that she was pretty sure she’d passed out in the bathroom while avoiding her ex, Aidan. Before that there’d been some playing of a drinking game called The Lady or The Tiger, where you bet on whether a tossed coin would come up heads (lady) or tails (tiger). If you picked wrong, you had to do a shot. After that came a lot of dancing and some more swigs from a bottle of whiskey. Aidan had urged Tana to make out with his new sulky-mouthed, strawberry-haired girlfriend, the one who was wearing a dog collar she’d found in the mudroom. He said it would be like an eclipse of the sun and the moon in the sky, a marriage of all things dark and light. You mean an eclipse of the sun and moon in your pants, Tana had told him, but he’d been doggedly, infuriatingly persistent. And as the whiskey sang through her blood and sweat slicked her skin, a dangerously familiar recklessness filled her. With a face like a wicked cherub, Aidan had always been hard to say no to. Worse, he knew it.
Sighing, Tana opened the bathroom door—not even locked, so people could have been coming in and out all night with her right there, behind the shower curtain, and how humiliating was that?—and padded out into the hall. The smell of spilled beer filled the air, along with something else, something metallic and charnel-sweet. The television was on in the other room, and she could hear the low voice of a newscaster as she walked toward the kitchen. Lance’s parents didn’t care about his having sundown parties at their old farmhouse, so he had one almost every weekend, locking the doors at dusk and keeping them barred until dawn. She’d been to plenty, and the mornings were always full of shouting and showers, boiling coffee and trying to hack together breakfast from a couple of eggs and scraps of toast.
And long lines for the two small bathrooms, with people beating on the doors if you took too long. Everyone needed to pee, take a shower, and change clothes. Surely that would have woken her.
But if she had slept through it and everyone was already out at a diner, they would be laughing it up. Joking about her unconscious in the tub and whatever they’d done in that bathroom while she was asleep, plus maybe photos, all kinds of stupid stuff that she’d have to hear repeated over and over once school started. She was just lucky they hadn’t markered a mustache on her.
If Pauline had been at the party, none of this would have happened. When they got wasted, they usually curled up underneath the dining room table, limbs draped over each other like kittens in a basket, and no boy in the world, not even Aidan, was bold enough to face Pauline’s razor tongue. But Pauline was away at drama camp, and Tana had been bored, so she’d gone to the party alone.
The kitchen was empty, spilled booze and orange soda pooling on the countertops and being soaked up by a smattering of potato chips. Tana was reaching for the coffeepot when, across the black-and-white linoleum floor, just on the other side of the door frame to the living room, she saw a hand, its fingers stretched out as if in sleep. She relaxed. No one was awake yet—that was all. Maybe she was the first one up, although when she thought back to the sun streaking through the bathroom window, it had seemed high in the sky.
The longer she gazed at the hand, though, the more she noticed that it seemed oddly pale, the skin around the fingernails bluish. Tana’s heart started to thud, her body reacting before her mind caught up. She slowly set the pot back on the counter and forced herself to cross the kitchen floor, step by careful step, until she was over the threshold of the living room.
Then she had to force herself not to scream.
The tan carpet was stiff and black with stripes of dried blood, spattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas. The walls were streaked with it, handprints smearing the dingy beige surfaces. And the bodies. Dozens of bodies. People she’d seen every day since kindergarten, people whom she’d played tag with and cried over and kissed, were lying at odd angles, their bodies pale and cold, their eyes staring like rows of dolls in a shop window.
The hand near Tana’s foot belonged to Imogen, a pretty, plump, pink-haired girl who was planning to go to art school next year. Her lips were slightly apart, and her navy anchor-print sundress rode up so that her thighs were visible. She appeared to have been caught as she was trying to crawl away, one arm extended and the other gripping the carpet.
Otta’s, Ilaina’s, and Jon’s bodies were piled together. They’d just gotten back from summer cheer camp and had started the party off with a series of backflips in the yard just before sunset, as mosquitoes buzzed through the warm breeze. Now dried blood crusted on their clothing like rust, tinting their hair, dotting their skin like freckles. Their eyes were locked open, the pupils gone cloudy.
She found Lance on a couch, posed with his arms thrown over the shoulders of a girl on one side and a boy on the other, all three of their throats bearing ragged puncture marks. All three of them with beer bottles resting near their hands, as if they were still at the party. As though their white-blue lips were likely to say her name at any moment.
Tana felt dizzy. The room seemed to spin. She sank to the blood-covered carpet and sat, the pounding in her head growing louder and louder. On the television, someone was spraying orange cleaner on a granite countertop while a grinning child ate jam off a slice of bread.
One of the windows was open, she noticed, curtain fluttering. The party must have gotten too warm, everyone sweating in the small house and yearning for the cool breeze just outside. Then, once the window was open, it would have been easy to forget to close it. There was still the garlic, after all, still the holy water on the lintels. Things like this happened in Europe, in places like Belgium, where the streets teemed with vampires and the shops didn’t open until after dark. Not here. Not in Tana’s town, where there hadn’t been a single attack in more than five years.
And yet it had happened. A window had been left open to the night, and a vampire had crawled through.
She should get her phone and call—call someone. Not her father; there was no way he would be able to deal with this. Maybe the police. Or a vampire hunter, like Hemlok from TV, the huge, bald former wrestler always decked out in leather. He would know what to do. Her little sister had a poster of Hemlok in her locker, right next to pictures of golden-haired Lucien, her favorite Coldtown vampire. Pearl would be so excited if Hemlok came; she could finally get his autograph.
Tana started giggling, which was bad, she knew, and put her hands over her mouth to smother the sound. It wasn’t okay to laugh in front of dead people. That was like laughing at a funeral.
The unblinking eyes of her friends watched her.
On the television, the newscaster was predicting scattered showers later in the week. The Nasdaq was down.
Tana remembered all over again that Pauline hadn’t been at the party, and she was so fiercely, so selfishly glad that she couldn’t even feel bad about it, because Pauline was alive even though everyone else was dead.
From far away in the guest room, someone’s phone started to ring. It was playing a tinny remix of “Tainted Love.” After a while, it stopped. Then two phones much closer went off almost at the same time, their rings combining into a chorus of discordant sound.
The news turned into a show about three men who lived together in an apartment with a wisecracking skull. The laugh track roared every time the skull spoke. Tana wasn’t sure if it was a real show or if she was imagining it. Time slipped by.
She gave herself a little lecture: She had to get up off the floor and go into the guest room, where jackets were piled up on the bed, and root around until she found her purse and her boots and her car keys. Her cell phone was there, too. She’d need that if she was going to call someone.
She had to do it right then—no more sitting.
It occurred to her that there was a phone closer, shoved into the pocket of one of the corpses or pressed between cold, dead skin and the lace of a bra. But she couldn’t bear the idea of searching bodies.
Get up, she told herself.
Pushing herself to stand, she started picking her way across the floor, trying to ignore the way the carpet crunched under her bare feet, trying not to think about the smell of decay blooming in the room. She remembered something from her sophomore-year social studies class—her teacher had told them about the famous raid in Corpus Christi, when Texas tried to close its Coldtown and drove tanks into it during the day. Every human inside who might have been infected got shot. Even the mayor’s daughter was killed. A lot of sleeping vampires were killed, too, rooted out of their hiding places and beheaded or exposed to sunlight. When night fell, the remaining vampires were able to kill the guards at the gate and flee, leaving dozens and dozens of drained and infected people in their wake. Corpus Christi vampires were still a popular target for bounty hunters on television.
Every kid had to do a different project for that class. Tana had made a diorama, with a shoe box and a lot of red poster paint, to represent a news article that she’d cut out of the paper—one about three vampires on the run from Corpus Christi who’d break into a house, kill everyone, and then rest among the corpses until night fell again.
Which made her wonder if there could still be a vampire in this house, the vampire who had slaughtered all these people. Who’d somehow overlooked her, who’d been too intent on blood and butchery to open every door to every hall closet or bathroom, who hadn’t swept aside a shower curtain. It would murder her now, though, if it heard her moving.
Her heart raced, thundering against her rib cage, and every beat felt like a punch in the chest. Stupid, her heart said. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Tana felt light-headed, her breath coming in shallow gasps. She knew she should sit down again and put her head between her legs—that was what you were supposed to do if you were hyperventilating—but if she sat down, she might never get up. She forced herself to inhale deeply instead, letting the air out of her lungs as slowly as she could.
She wanted to run out the front, race across the lawn, and pound on one of the neighbors’ doors until they let her inside.
But without her boots or phone or keys, she’d be in a lot of trouble if no one was home. Lance’s parents’ farmhouse was out in the country, and all the land behind the house was state park. There just weren’t that many neighbors nearby. And Tana knew that once she walked out the door, no force on earth could make her return.
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can’t-see-monsters-monsters-can’t-see-me. Neither of those impulses were going to save her. She had to think.
Sunlight dappled the living room, filtered through the leaves of trees outside—late afternoon sun, sure, but still sun. She clung to that. Even if a whole nest of vampires were in the basement, they wouldn’t—couldn’t—come up before nightfall. She should just stick to her plan: Go to the guest room and get her boots and cell phone and car keys. Then go outside and have the biggest, most awful freak-out of her life. She would allow herself to scream or even faint, so long as she did it in her car, far from here, with the windows up and the doors locked.
Carefully, carefully, she pushed off each of her shining metal bracelets, setting them on the rug so they wouldn’t jangle when she moved.
This time as she crossed the room, she was aware of every creak of the floorboards, every ragged breath she took. She imagined fanged mouths in the shadows; she imagined cold hands cracking through the kitchen linoleum, fingernails scratching her ankles as she was dragged down into the dark. It seemed like forever before she made it to the door of the spare room and twisted the knob.
Then, despite all her best intentions, she gasped.
Aidan was tied to the bed. His wrists and ankles were bound to the posts with bungee cords, and there was silver duct tape over his mouth, but he was alive. For a long moment, all she could do was stare at him, the shock of everything coming over her all at once. Someone had taped garbage bags over the windows, blocking out sunlight. And beside the bed, gagged and in chains, amid the jackets someone had swept to the floor, was another boy, one with hair as black as spilled ink. He looked up at her. His eyes were bright as rubies and just as red.
We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
—Sir Thomas Browne
When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester linings. Kids would dress up like vampires on Halloween, wearing plastic teeth that fitted badly over their own and smearing their faces with sweet syrup to make mock rivulets of cherry-bright blood.
That all changed with Caspar Morales. There had been plenty of books and films romanticizing vampires over the last century. It was only a matter of time before a vampire started romanticizing himself.
Crazy, romantic Caspar decided that unlike decades of ancient, hidebound vampires, he wouldn’t kill his victims. He would seduce them, drink a little blood, and then move on, from city to city. By the time the old vampires caught up with him and ripped him to pieces, he’d already infected hundreds of people. And those new vampires, with no idea how to prevent the spread, infected thousands.
The first outbreak happened in Caspar’s birthplace, the smallish city of Springfield, Massachusetts, around the time Tana turned seven. Springfield was only fifty miles from her house, so it was in the local news before it went national. Initially, it seemed like a journalist’s prank. Then there was another outbreak in Chicago and another in San Francisco and another in Las Vegas. A girl, caught trying to bite a blackjack dealer, burst into flame as cops dragged her out of a casino to their squad car. A businessman was found holed up in his penthouse apartment, surrounded by gnawed corpses. A child stood at Fisherman’s Wharf on a foggy night, reaching up her arms to any adult who offered to help find her father, just before she sank her teeth into their throats. A burlesque dancer introduced bloodplay into her act and required audience members to sign waivers before attending her performances. When they left, they left hungry.
The military put up barricades around the areas of the cities where the infections broke out. That was the way the first Coldtowns were founded.
Vampirism is an American problem, the BBC declared. But the next outbreak was in Hong Kong, then Yokohama, then Marseille, then Brecht, then Liverpool. After that, it spread across Europe like wildfire.
At ten, Tana watched her mother sit at her mirrored vanity and get ready to go to the party of an art buyer intent on lending her gallery a few pieces. She had on a pencil skirt with an emerald-colored silk shell top, her short black hair gelled tightly back. She was fastening on a pair of pearl drop earrings.
“Aren’t you afraid of the vampires?” Tana had asked, leaning bonelessly against her mother’s leg, feeling the scratch of tights against her cheek and inhaling the smell of her mother’s perfume. Usually, both of her parents were home before dark.
Tana’s mother had just laughed, but she came back from the party sick. Cold, they called it, which at first sounded harmless, like the kind of cold that gave you the sniffles and a sore throat. But this was another kind of Cold, one where body temperatures dropped, senses spiked, and the craving for blood became almost overwhelming.
If one of the people who’d gone Cold drank human blood, the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised them back up again, Colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was only one cure. The victim had to be kept from drinking human blood until the infection was flushed out of the system, which could take up to eighty-eight days. No clinic provided such a service. In the beginning, hospitals had heavily sedated Cold patients, until a middle-aged and very wealthy woman came out of her medically induced coma to attack a doctor. Some people managed to take the edge off the craving for blood with booze or drugs; nothing worked for others. But if the police found out about a potential case of infection, that person would be quarantined and relocated to a Coldtown. Tana’s mother was terrified. And so, two days in, once the shakes had gotten bad enough and the hunger came on, she agreed to be locked up in the only part of the house that would hold her.
Tana remembered the screams rising from the basement a week later, screams that went on all day long, while her father was at work, and then all through the night, when her father turned up the television until it drowned out every other sound and drank himself to sleep. In the afternoons after school, between bouts of screaming, Tana’s mother would call for her, pleading, begging to be let out. Promising to be good. Explaining that she was better now, that she wasn’t sick anymore.
Tana, please. You know I would never hurt you, my beautiful little girl. You know I love you more than anything, more than my own life. Your father, he doesn’t understand that I’m better. He doesn’t believe me, and I’m frightened of him, Tana. He’s going to keep me imprisoned here forever. He’ll never let me out. He’s always wanted to control me, always been afraid of how independent I was. Please, Tana, please. It’s cold down here and there are things crawling on me in the dark and you know how much I hate spiders. You’re my baby, my sweet baby, my darling, and I need your help. You’re scared, but if you let me out, we’ll be together forever, Tana, you and me and Pearl. We’ll go to the park and eat ice cream and feed the squirrels. We’ll dig for worms in the garden. We’ll be happy again. You’ll get the key, won’t you? Get the key. Please get the key. Please, Tana, please. Get the key. Get the key.
Tana would sit near the door to the basement with her fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana’s little bed. Make her stop, Pearl said, but Tana couldn’t.
And when their father put on chain mesh gloves, the kind chefs use to open oysters, and big work boots to bring their mother food at night, Pearl and Tana cried hardest of all. They were terrified he would get sick, too. He explained that only a vampire could infect someone and that their mother was still human, so she couldn’t pass on her sickness. He explained that her craving for blood was not so different from how someone with pica might crave chalk or potting soil or metal filings. He explained that everything would be fine, so long as Mom didn’t get what she wanted, so long as Tana and Pearl acted normal and didn’t tell anyone what was wrong with Mom, not their teachers, not their friends, not even their grandparents, who wouldn’t understand.
He sounded calm, reasonable. Then he walked into the other room and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And the screams went on and on.
It took thirty-four days before Tana broke and promised her mother that she’d help her get free. It took thirty-seven days before she managed to steal the ring of keys out of the back pocket of her father’s tan Dockers. Once Dad left for work, she unlocked the latches, one by one.
The basement smelled damp, like mold and minerals, as she started down the creaking, wooden stairs. Her mother had stopped screaming the moment the door opened. Everything was very quiet as Tana descended, the scratch of her shoes on the wood loud in her ears. Her foot hesitated on the last step.
Then something knocked her down.
Tana remembered the way it felt, the endless burn of teeth on her skin. Even though they weren’t fully changed, the canines had still bit down like twin thorns or like the pincers of some enormous spider. There had been the soft pressure of a mouth, and pain, and there had been another feeling, too, as though everything was going out of her in a rush.
She’d fought back, screaming and crying, kicking her chubby little-kid legs and scrabbling with the nails of her pink child fingers. All that had done was make her mother squeeze her more tightly, make the flesh of her inner arm tear, make her blood jet like pumps from a water gun.
That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father that the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Aidan’s eyes were wide and terrified. He strained against the bungee cords, trying to talk through the tape. Tana couldn’t make out the words, but she was pretty sure from the tone that he was begging her to untie him, pleading with her not to leave him. She bet he was regretting that time he’d forgotten her birthday and also the way he’d dumped her via a direct message on Twitter and, almost certainly, everything he’d said to her last night. She almost started giggling again, hysteria rising in her throat, but she managed to swallow it down.
Sliding her fingernail under the edge of the duct tape, she began to peel it back as gently as she could. Aidan winced, his caramel eyes blinking rapidly. Across the room, the rattle of chains made her stop what she was doing and look up.
It was the vampire boy. He was pulling against his collar, shaking his head, and staring at her with great intensity, as though he was trying to communicate something important. He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair was a mad forest of dirty curls. As she stared, he kicked a leg of the bed with his foot, making the frame groan, and shook his head again.
Oh yeah, as if she was going to leave Aidan to die because the pretty vampire didn’t want his snack taken away.
“Stop it,” she said, louder than she’d intended because she was scared. She should climb over the bed, to the windows, and pull down the garbage bags. He’d burn up in the sun, blackening and splintering into embers like a dying star. She’d never seen it happen in real life, though, only watched it on the same YouTube videos as everyone else, and the idea of killing something while it was bound and gagged and watching made her feel sick. She wasn’t sure she could do it.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, said her heart.
Tana turned back to Aidan, her hands shaking now. “Stay quiet, okay?”
At his nod, she pulled the tape free from his mouth in one swift rip.
“Ow,” Aidan said. Then he lunged at her teeth-first.
Tana was reaching for the bungee cord restraining his wrist when it happened. His sudden movement startled her so much that she stumbled back, losing her balance and yelping as she fell onto the pile of jackets. His blunt canines had grazed her arm, not far from where her scar was.
Aidan had tried to bite her.
Aidan was infected.
She’d made a noise loud enough to maybe wake a nest of sleeping vampires.
“You asshole,” she said, anger the only thing standing between her and staggering panic. Forcing herself up, she punched Aidan in the shoulder as hard as she could.
He let out a hiss of pain, then smiled that crooked, sheepish smile that he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. “Sorry. I—I didn’t mean to. I just—I’ve been lying here for hours, thinking about blood.”
She shuddered. The smooth expanse of his neck looked unmarked, but there were lots of other places he could have been bitten.
Please, Tana, please.
She’d never told Aidan about her mother, but he knew. Everyone at school knew. And he’d seen the scar, a jagged mess of raised shiny skin, pale, with a purple cast to the edges. She’d told him how it felt sometimes, as if there were a sliver of ice wedged in the bone underneath.
“If you just gave me a little, then—” Aidan started.
“Then you’d die, idiot. You’d become a vampire.” She wanted to hit him again, but instead she made herself squat down and root among the jackets until she found her own purse with her keys. “When we get out of this, you are going to grovel like you’ve never groveled in your life.”
The vampire boy kicked the bed again, chains rattling. She glanced over at him. He looked at her, then at the door, then back at her. He widened his eyes, grim and impatient.
This time, she understood. Something was coming. Something that had probably heard her fall. She waded through scattered jackets to a dresser and pushed it against the door, hopefully blocking the way in. Cold sweat started between her shoulder blades. Her limbs felt leaden, and she wasn’t sure how much longer it was going to be before she couldn’t go on, before the desire to curl up and hide overtook her.
She looked over at the red-eyed boy and wondered if a few hours before he’d been one of the kids drinking beer and dancing and laughing. She didn’t remember seeing him, but that didn’t mean anything. There’d been some kids she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have remembered, kids from Conway or Meredith. Yesterday, he might have been human. Or maybe he hadn’t been human for a hundred years. Either way, he was a monster now.
Tana picked up a hockey trophy from the dresser. It was heavy in her hand as she crossed the floor to where he was chained, her heart beating like a shutter in a thunderstorm. “I’m going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I’ll hit you with this thing as hard as I can and as many times as I can. Understood?”
He nodded, red eyes steady.
His wax-white skin was cool to the touch when she brushed his neck to find the knot of the cloth. She’d never been this close to a vampire, never realized what it would be like to be so near to someone who didn’t breathe, who could be still as any statue. His chest neither rose nor fell. Her hands shook.
She thought she heard something somewhere in the bowels of the house, a creaking sound, like a door opening. She forced herself to concentrate on unknotting the cloth faster, even though she had to do it one-handed. She wished desperately for a knife, wished she’d been clever enough to pick one up when she’d been in the kitchen, wished she had something better than a pot-metal trophy covered in gold paint.
“Look, I’m sorry about before,” Aidan called from the bed. “I’m half out of my head, okay? But I won’t do it again—I would never hurt you.”
“You’re not exactly someone who’s big on resisting temptation,” Tana said.
He laughed a little, before the laugh turned into a cough. “I’m more the run-toward-it-with-open-arms type, right? But really, please believe me, I scared myself, too. I won’t do anything like that again.”
Infected people got loose from restraints and attacked their families all the time. Those kinds of stories weren’t even headline news anymore.
But vampires weren’t all monsters, sc
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
