The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

by Holly Black

CHAPTER 16

  Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

  -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

  All Tana's holidays were always awful. Her mother's parents would come and hug Tana and hug Pearl and talk about what a tragedy it was that their mother would never see how big they got or how pretty they were. Her other grandparents-her dad's parents-would say little digging things about the state of the house and the girls' wrinkled dresses. They would sigh over how the green beans were overdone or the roast was burnt. Tana would hear them late at night telling her dad that he owed it to his daughters to remarry-that it would give them stability and self-esteem. That it would help Tana forget.

  Their father had grown up in Pittsburgh. He got a fake ID at fifteen so that he could work in one of the two remaining steel mills with his brothers and father. He worked hard and managed to put himself through two years of community college, majoring in business. From there, he got accepted at a state school in Philadelphia, working as a janitor at a hospital to pay his way.

  He met Tana's mother on the way back from the fireworks on the Fourth of July. She was swimming in a city fountain while her art school friends only dipped their feet in. She looked like a beautiful nymph from a painting he'd seen in one of his classes. He waded into the fountain in his clothes, grinning like an idiot, and told her so. A few months later, they were married.

  He'd loved her more than he'd ever loved anything. She had been wild and full of manic energy, a whirlwind that could sometimes crash into deep depressions. But other times she'd been gloriously full of fun. Without her at the center of everything, he was lost. No matter what Tana and Pearl's grandparents said, he wasn't interested in remarrying. Sometimes he went on dates, but they always ended quickly. He would come home and head into his old bedroom-a place that was left just as it had been since his wife died-for a while, before retreating to the couch in the den, where he'd slept since her death. The holidays stayed miserable.

  Tana's father was the kind of man who believed in doing the right thing, no matter what. Working hard, staying as honest as you could, doing what had to be done. Doing the right thing because it was right. And he believed that the right thing was obvious to anyone who took a minute to think about it.

  When his wife got bitten by a vampire and her fever spiked and her skin became chilled, when she begged him not to turn her in, he knew what he had to do. He didn't care about the government billboards and TV spots admonishing people to observe the quarantine. The rich bribed private hospitals to lock up their loved ones in very private rooms. And he knew there were plenty of other working stiffs doing what he did: turning their basements into makeshift prisons with reinforced doors and heavy chains.

  The way he saw it, locking up his wife when she'd gone Cold was the right thing to do, so he did it.

  Saving his elder daughter from bleeding to death was the right thing to do, too. To keep her safe, he had to kill his infected wife, so he severed her neck with a shovel.

  He didn't flinch. He didn't hesitate. He had hated it, but he'd done it just the same. Even though it was a terrible thing. Even though he lived in the past now, plodding through life as if against a heavy storm, so distracted by grief that he could barely remember to do the grocery shopping or turn off the stove after he'd warmed some packaged dinner.

  Tana wondered if he had a fantasy like hers, one where he had been the one who was bitten, one where he and his beloved vampire wife were still together. One where they hunted the streets and swam in fountains under a fat, bright moon.

  Growing up, Tana thought that she and her dad didn't have much in common. Tana wasn't ever sure what the right thing was, but out here on the road, she couldn't help thinking of him. She wondered whether, if push came to shove and she discovered what it was she was supposed to do, she could be like him and be strong enough to do it.