We propose an energy efficient routing protocol, VCost, for sensor networks. We assume that nodes are unaware of their geographic location thus, VCost assigns virtual coordinates to nodes as follows. Based on the node hop count distances from a set of landmarks, our method computes a distance metric to obtain the node's virtual coordinates. VCost, then uses these coordinates to route packets from node u to node v, in its neighborhood, such that the ratio of the cost to send a message to v to the progress in the routing task towards the destination is minimized. Compared to existing algorithms that use virtual locations, our simulation shows that VCost improves significantly energy consumption and preserves the small percentage of successful routings.