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do anything, Gavriel rolled over, turning his body so that the exposed part was pressed against the dirt, hidden from the light.
    “Gavriel?” Tana said, scrambling up, wrapping the blankets back around him.
    He tried to stand.
    Stumbling and exhausted and not very careful, they managed toopen the trunk and dump Gavriel heavily inside. Aidan slammed it shut, donning his bad-boy-about-to-do-a-bad-thing grin. His gag was in his other hand, pulled free from his mouth.
    “ Aidan ,” she said, taking a step back, her voice coming out half as if he’d annoyed her and half as if she was afraid, which she was. “Aidan, we don’t have time. You have to get in there with him. I can’t drive with you wanting to attack me.”
    “Have you looked at yourself?” he asked her, his voice odd, almost dreamy. “You’re covered in blood.”
    She glanced down and saw that he was right. Her skin was dappled with shallow cuts, welling and streaking red down her arms and legs. A smear of it on the back of her hand where she’d wiped her face. It must have been fragments of glass from the window.
    “We have to go, Aidan.”
    “I’m not getting in the trunk with a vampire,” he said, looking at her hungrily, his eyes black with desire, the pupils blown. “See, I’m controlling myself. You’re bleeding and I’m controlling myself.”
    “Okay,” she said, pretending to believe him. “Get in.”
    As he walked toward the passenger side, she picked up the tire iron and her boots. She knew what she should do—hit him in the back of the head and hope it knocked him unconscious—but she couldn’t. Not with a house full of dead kids behind them. Not when she wasn’t sure he would survive the blow. Not when she was shaking so hard she was about to shake apart.
    She took a deep breath and made her decision.
    “No, on the other side,” she told Aidan. “You’re going to drive.”
    He turned back to her, brows knitted in confusion.
    “It’ll give you something to concentrate on other than biting me. And I can keep an eye on you.” She held up the tire iron. “And we head where I say—understand?”
    “I’ve been good,” he complained.
    “Get in!” she shouted, and somehow that, of all things, seemed to work. With a sigh, he walked around the front of the car. She got in on the other side and passed him the keys, holding the metal bar up with her other hand to show she’d use it if she had to. It was solid and smelled faintly of oil and hung comfortingly heavy in her grip.
    Aidan took a quick look at her face and turned the key in the ignition.
    “Go,” she said, under her breath, like a prayer. “Go, go, go, go.”
    He pulled across the lawn toward the road. In the rearview mirror, the house looked like an ordinary clapboard farmhouse, except for the broken window and the bit of curtain fluttering through it, a lone and lonely ghost.

CHAPTER 6
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
—Woody Allen
    A idan had been the worst boyfriend in the world.
    They’d met in art class, which Tana had taken only because her friend Pauline had promised her it’d be easy and full of other slackers. Pauline was more or less right. Their teacher spent the time painting trompe l’oeils of arched windows leading into darkness-soaked rooms or somewhat grisly still lifes of rotting fruit, flies, and spilled honey. He sold the paintings in a gallery three towns over and told the class at length about how he needed the money since teachers’ salaries sucked, especially in these dark times.
    Basically, so long as everyone worked on some kind of project more or less quietly, he didn’t bother any of them.
    Pauline decided that she was going to cut up yearbooks and glue tiny pieces to stiffened linen so that she could make a bra out of the heads of the boys in class. She planned to frame it in a shadowbox and sneak it into the award cabinet once it was done.
    Tana was mostly doing