All Just Glass (20 page)

Nikolas shook his head. “I may have accidentally mentioned your
other
problem. Kendra is a woman of great class and style.”

He didn’t say it; he didn’t
need
to say it. Like some kind of ancient, bloodthirsty mother-in-law, Kendra wanted to get to know the newest member of her line. What better way to do so than a shopping trip?

Goddess help her. She would rather face the hunters.

Z
ACHARY STORMED UP
the familiar weathered steps, his fingertips trembling and his breath coming quickly in what anyone who knew him would call a shockingly uncharacteristic loss of control. A streetlamp nearby flickered, and he realized he was throwing off so much wild energy he was disrupting the electrical currents.

Before putting his hand on the knob of the front door, he took a moment to pause, close his eyes and hold his breath until he stopped shaking and his heartbeat calmed. Above him, the lamp flickered once more and then died, leaving his side of the street dark.

Then, eyes cold as steel, he pulled open the door—it wasn’t
locked; it was never locked—and moved into the front parlor of the small apartment.

The familiar room made his throat tighten with emotions he preferred not to analyze too closely. From the worn suede love seat and ottoman and the soft velvet curtains to the throw rug and a Tiffany lamp that cast muted light the color of roses and gold about the room and into the small kitchenette, everything was warm and welcoming. Embracing.

There were three doors from the living room entrance; now one of those doors opened and Olivia padded out, clothed in pajama pants and a camisole top of creamy silk.

Through the doorway he could see the human she had left behind on the bed. His name was Vick, and he was a hard-core blood junkie who had been living with Olivia for months. He and Zachary had met and even talked some—enough for Zachary to know he did not want to talk to him more. Vick had no family, no past he was willing to talk about and probably no future at all. His wasn’t bloodbonded to anyone, but that was only because no one had claimed him so permanently. His entire existence consisted of being passed from one vampire to the next, with no desires of his own except to bleed for them.

Vick didn’t even twitch when the door opened. Olivia took one look at Zachary and sighed heavily. “This again?” she asked him. She drifted closer, pausing only to close the door behind her. “After we had such a nice visit earlier.”

“You took
pictures
?”

She smiled, just slightly. “Not me. But Jerome does love that camera of his.”

“Adianna saw them.”

“So that’s the reason for today’s tantrum.”

She had moved close enough that now she could lay her palm against his cheek.

“Darling,” she whispered, “if you intend to try to kill me, it would help if you drew a knife.”

He jumped at the reminder, his hand going to the knife handle at the back of his neck. The movement was slower than usual as he fought learned reflexes.

Olivia moved her hand from his cheek and across the back of his reaching arm until her palm lay over his hand, at the back of his neck. The motion he had attempted stalled as muscles reacted to a more familiar position, relaxing and arching his throat back.

“Or,” Olivia suggested, “we could do something more enjoyable.”

“No.”

But he couldn’t make himself shove her away.

“So, what? You’ll kill me?” she asked. “And then you’ll go home, having destroyed the one place where you don’t have to be the perfect, flawless Zachary Vida. You’ll have destroyed the only person who welcomes you no matter what.”

She slid against him and stretched her petite form so she could kiss his throat. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, he leaned back against the wall, his eyes closing. It was the same reflex that had shut him down at the end of the fight with Sarah.

“Did you really come here to kill me?” she purred.

“Yes.”

She ran a hand up his chest. “You aren’t doing a very good
job. No, hush, love,” she said, laughing, when he tried to protest. “It’s okay.” Abruptly, she drew back, pulling a small sound of protest from his throat as she said, “Come. Sit and relax a while. We’ll figure out what you can say to your dear cousin. Was she the only one who saw?”

He took a seat on the plush couch, wondering even as he did what the hell he was doing.

He had come here, once again, to kill her. He had resolved to do so dozens of times, if not hundreds, but every time she calmed him and set him off his guard.

At first, it had just been the fights. The frustration and fear and pain from the battle and any resulting injuries had faded away in the peace that a vampire’s bite could bring. At that point, he had normally woken up in an empty house, long after the vampires had left.

The first time he had woken up with her still there, he had stormed out, refusing to say a word but lacking the courage to attack her.

The next time, she had woken him with a home-cooked meal and apologized that they had taken too much.
I can take care of you here, or I can take you to the healers. Your choice
. He hadn’t wanted to go to the witches. He would have had to admit to them what had happened.

So he had stayed, and they had eaten breakfast together.

And it had evolved from there, over the course of what had to have been almost two years.

He enjoyed watching her as she moved about the kitchen, her feet bare and her hair down, softly humming some song he
thought maybe he knew from the radio as she set a kettle on the stove to boil.

“Why haven’t you killed me?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder as she portioned loose leaves into an old-fashioned tea ball. “I don’t care for killing. I’ve done it when forced to,” she admitted, “but this is nicer. Why? Did you want me to kill you?”

“I don’t know.”

She sat next to him and curled against his side.

“Poor dear. What can I do for you?”

The answer was utterly beyond him. Suddenly, he was shaking, a bone-deep trembling he struggled to control until she cooed, “It’s all right. You don’t have to be strong here.”

It was the type of permission he didn’t know how to react to. Wrapped in her arms, he could for the moment step outside the perfect Vida cage, and as soon as he did so, he was weeping.

It was all crumbling. His earliest memories were those of Jacqueline and Dominique screaming at each other, and then Jacqueline storming out. His mother wailing when they told her Jacqueline was dead, demanding to see the body for herself, leaving and never coming back. His brother, only five years old, wandering out in a quest for Mother, never to return. A parade of people leaving and getting killed, until at last Sarah was taken from them, or more likely ran from them.

Now Adia. He had seen the look of disgust on her face. If he lost her, too …

Olivia held him silently until the sobbing ceased; then she
stood and quietly poured the now-boiling water for the tea she had promised.

He leaned over the cup, inhaling the steam, unable to meet Olivia’s gaze.

“Better?” she asked.

“Probably never.”

She sighed again. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

“I owe it to my family,” he replied. Had always replied. They were all he had, after all. “After Dominique took me in—”

“
Dominique.
” Olivia snickered, a sound that contrasted with her normally soft, gentle image. “Even the indomitable Vida matriarch isn’t perfect, you know.”

“I know.” He remembered all too well the terrible days after Fredrick had died. “But I have to try, the way she does.”

Olivia kissed his throat, and he let her, even though he knew that if she took his blood, it would probably kill him. He had lost too much to Sarah, too recently. But of course Olivia knew that and knew she had to control herself.

Heather’s words came back to him. He remembered the way her eyes had flashed as she had tried to unsettle them all by describing her life.

Would you like to know what it’s like when one of them takes you? When you’re in their arms and they bare your throat and drink?

I have seen hundreds of humans pass through, willing to die, willing to give up everything, just to experience that bliss. And not just humans. The Vida line isn’t immune, is it?

If only she had known. If she hadn’t scrambled Jay’s mind so much with whatever she had shown him, Zachary’s secret surely would have been revealed right then, because he knew
exactly why the bloodbond had stayed with Kaleo all this time. As it was, Jay had picked up on Zachary’s relationship with Olivia, even if he hadn’t gotten the more sordid details.

I have seen hundreds of humans pass through, willing to die, willing to give up everything, just to experience that bliss
.

When his cell phone rang, he pulled it out of his pocket and then just stared at it as Adia’s number flashed on the front. He wanted to put it away. Couldn’t they just leave him alone for a night?

He wasn’t ready to talk to her again, to face her. He didn’t think he ever
would
be ready.

Still, he hit the “talk” button and said, “Hello.”

“Is now a bad time?” she asked.

Now
was
a bad time, but that wasn’t really what she was asking. She wanted to know if she could talk frankly.

“Now’s fine,” he said. “Adia, I—”

“You are
not
going to apologize, or say a single freaking word about it right now,” Adia interrupted. “If you need to talk, we’ll talk when the job is done. In the meantime, I need you to pull it together and be at my back. Can you do that?”

He looked up at Olivia and met her steady gaze for several seconds before saying, “I can do that.”

“Good. Then meet me at Michael’s place, as soon as you can get there. We’re ending this thing tonight.”

Michael’s apartment was in New York City. Had he located Sarah or the twins there? Adia obviously believed she knew where their targets would soon be.

“It’ll take me three or four hours to get there.”

“Then we’ll make it by intermission.”

Could it really be over so soon? And when it was done, what then? Adia knew the truth about him. So did Jay. He wouldn’t be able to stay around, but he didn’t know what else to be, or how else to live.

Adia hung up without saying goodbye.

“Where are you headed?” Olivia asked as Zachary put his phone back into his pocket and stood.

He shook his head. She knew he never told her outright where his hunts took him.

“Judging by the time, the people involved, and the mention of intermission, I’m guessing you’re headed to Broadway,” she said.

“Guess whatever you like,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Zimmy, you know I have no power to interfere with Kendra in Manhattan, right?”

He hesitated in the doorway and then shrugged. “I do now.”

He felt calmer when he sat behind the wheel of his car. Adia had said it would be over that night. Maybe then he could rest for a while.

S
ARAH FELT ABOUT
as stupid as she ever had in her life, sitting in front of the full-length mirror while Christine did her hair. Christine had insisted on helping, and short of shoving her down the stairs, Sarah couldn’t figure out how to convince her otherwise.

The evening had taken a surreal turn somewhere. Maybe it had been when she had tasted a symphony, or when she had spoken to Michael, but she was pretty sure it had happened somewhere on Madison Avenue, on a rack between Chanel and Vera Wang.

Going shopping for formal wear in New York with a vampire who had once founded a mystery cult in the days of the Roman republic, and who tended to chatter about the fall of
empires in the tone most people used when discussing the weather, was a unique experience. Kendra referred to Nikolas as “Nikki,” a nickname she claimed he hated. She also referred to Tizoc Theron, one of the most powerful mercenaries in all of vampiric existence, as her “Tizzy.” The Inquisition was “a dreadful inconvenience,” World War II was “a little spat” and the fall of Midnight, the vampiric empire that had reigned for centuries, was “an unfortunate event.”

If Sarah lived two thousand years, maybe she would look back and agree. For now, the sentiments were almost as unsettling as the expression on Kendra’s face when one of the shop managers—who had instantly appeared to wait on Kendra when she had crossed the threshold—presented a dress she found unattractive.

Now Sarah was in a turquoise dress with a neckline slightly lower than she was used to but, fortunately, no eighteenth-century-style hoops—something she had been a little worried about, given the individuals she was going with. Even better, she was almost certain no one had died in her acquisition of the dress, or in the search for shoes to match it.

“You look far away,” Christine remarked.

Sarah tried to pull herself back to the moment. “Did you know Nero played the lyre, not the fiddle?” she asked. “There was no such thing as a fiddle yet.” The misconception about
which
musical instrument Nero had played while Rome burned was apparently one of Kendra’s pet peeves.

“Um, okay,” Christine answered, pulling Sarah more truly into the correct time and place.

“I feel like an idiot,” Sarah said aloud for the first time.

“You look beautiful,” Christine insisted.

“Not because of that.” Sarah shook her head. “Despite people trying to kill me, I just spent two hours
shopping
. With, I’m pretty sure, an outright psychopath.”

“That’s most of the line, or so I’ve heard,” Christine murmured, her tone so dry Sarah actually laughed.

“Where do I fit in, then?” she asked.

Christine shrugged. “Wherever you want to. What show are you seeing?”

“I don’t remember.” The name had been meaningless to her. She was hoping Kendra was right that she would like it, but wasn’t convinced that her tastes and those of a millennia-old vampire were likely to be the same.