The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

by Holly Black

As though their white-blue lips were likely to say her name at any moment.

Death is a shadow that always follows the body. —English proverb

Vampire canines grew longer than their human counterparts’, with thin channels that let the creature draw blood up through its teeth and into the back of its throat. When a vampire bit down, a little of its own fouled blood was pushed into the human bloodstream, causing infection.

If she didn’t go Cold in forty-eight hours, she’d know her luck had held.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them. —George Eliot

to be ageless and frozen and magic and monstrous.

will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him. We have been adversaries for so long that we are closer than friends.”

And she felt chilled through, as though she’d kicked off a blanket in the middle of winter.

takes less than an hour to die, and as soon as fifteen minutes they can be back up again,

“I won’t always obey you,” he said softly. “One night you will ask me for something I cannot give.”

Edgar Allan Poe books

and pasted over her dressers and spattered with her blood.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations. —Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

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 seem older than he must have been when he died; just entirely stranger.

Jennifer and Jack Gan?

“You are more dangerous than daybreak.”

was different when, with every breath, you sucked in the smell of scorched skin and hair.

“You put wood through its heart, you set it on fire, or you chop off its head.

“And don’t forget sunlight,

“Some sicknesses are worse than their cure,”

Then, with Gavriel’s own knife, Lucien sliced her throat open.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. —Leonardo da Vinci

“Tana. In all my long life, though there were many times I prayed for it, no one has ever saved me. No one but you.”

dauntless,

“I’ll stay with you.”

Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.”

I am used to girls screaming, and your screams—your screams will be sweeter than another’s cries of love.”