The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

CHAPTER 12

  Call no man happy till he is dead.

  -Aeschylus

  Vampires were always more beautiful than the living.

  Their skin was without blemish, marble smooth, and pore-less. The older they got, the more their unnatural red eyes grew bright as poppies and their hair became as lustrous as silk. It was as if whatever demon possessed them, whatever force kept their corpses from the grave, had refined them in the blaze of its power, burning away their humanity to reveal something finer. Caspar Morales had stolen the fire from Prometheus, and his children were spreading it.

  They looked absurdly gorgeous, glowing from the television like fallen angels. Even from the beginning, that was a problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

  After the infections started burgeoning and the first walls around the infected areas were built-the crude ones that kept only some things inside-news cameras couldn't get enough coverage. Reporters were always climbing around the rubble, filming, putting their lives in danger.

  And it wasn't just television and newspapers. Flickr and Tumblr and Instagram were full of pictures of teeth and blood. In the beginning, an amateur videographer uploaded footage of long-limbed vampire girls feeding on a shock-faced middle-aged man. It got hundreds of thousands of hits in a matter of hours. Gossip columns ran long pieces on vampires who acquired an almost celebrity status, their string of kills only seeming to increase interest.

  Vampires were fairy tales and magic. They were the wolf in the forest who ran ahead to grandmother's house, the video game big boss who could be hunted without guilt, the monster who tempted you into his bed, the powerful eternal beast one might become. The beautiful dead, la belle mort. And if, after gorging themselves in an orgy of death, they became less lovely, if they became bloated and purple and horrible, then they hid it well.

  Everyone was afraid to die and vampires never would. It was tempting to wish to be one, even if not everyone had the courage to try.

  But everyone wanted to see one, if from afar.

  And no one really wanted them gone.

  There were seven hot zones in the United States, seven cities kissed by Caspar Morales, seven places brought over into the dark. Of those cities, six became Coldtowns, and five of those Coldtowns remained operational. All but San Francisco had feeds running out, plenty of them corporate-sponsored and lucrative. Between the reality shows about vampire hunters-most of which had a high rate of cast turnover-and the reality shows featuring vampires-there was a very popular one cut from the live feed in Lucien Moreau's Coldtown parlor-the United States stabilized into an odd detente with vampires.

  Coldtowns were jails ruled by their inmates. Within them, vampires were free. But any vampire on the outside-without the protection of those walls, whether hiding, newly turned, or committing massacres-was fair game for hunters and for the military.

  And if people argued that the system was flawed, that the infection was still spreading, that romanticizing the dead was making the problem worse, well then, one only had to look at how bad things were outside the United States-and how much money there was to be made by continuing to let things stay just the way they were.