All Just Glass (21 page)

When someone knocked on the door, Sarah called out, “Come in,” without realizing that it was still an hour before the time Kristopher had agreed to pick her up. Christine tensed, and this time Sarah was the one to put herself between the human and the vampire, making no attempt to hide her anger.

“What do you want?” she snapped at Kaleo.

Kaleo quirked one brow. “I’m not here to hurt the girl. I just need to speak to you, Sarah.”

“Out! In the hall.”

The Roman looked amused by the order but obeyed, which Sarah found a little unsettling. She took a minute to reassure Christine and then followed Kaleo.

“Nikolas and Kristopher aren’t here,” she said flatly. “So what do you want?”

“Are you under the impression you are such a nonentity that I could not possibly be here to speak with you?” Kaleo asked.

“If you have something to say to
me
, then just get on with it. You freak the hell out of Christine just by being here.”

“Kendra mentioned you are going to a show tonight,” Kaleo said.

“Yeah, she does like to chat,” Sarah quipped.

Kaleo glared. “Do not confuse Kendra with some of our line. She may appear outwardly indifferent to reality, but she has been one of the driving forces behind the rise and fall of empires for two thousand years. She has a fondness for Nikolas, a passing fondness for Kristopher, and thus far a limited tolerance of you that extends just far enough for her to suggest I might want to pass on a message.”

The sharp words were enough to make Sarah step back and attempt to control her temper long enough to listen rationally. “You don’t strike me as the errand-boy type,” she said, not as an attempt to insult, but in a search for Kaleo’s agenda. He did not seem likely to blithely agree to deliver messages.

“I may not like you, and I am certain you do not like me, but like it or not, we share blood. Beyond that, you risked yourself to save Heather, and I trust that you would do the same for any of our people. Your blood and your actions make you kin to me, and so I chose to come here to warn you.”

Sarah nodded, taken aback by his tone and the absolute sincerity behind it. It was hard to reconcile this Kaleo with the one who had tortured Christine and killed the Ravenas’ father. Of course, it was hard to reconcile the Nikolas she now knew with who she had once thought him to be.

For now, she accepted the tentative truce implied in the words.

She hadn’t entirely resigned herself to the idea that living in this world meant not killing him, but if he insisted on talking like he gave a damn about his human bonds and the others Sarah cared about, she feared she might start hating him a little less.

Kaleo continued. “Michael has spoken to other hunters,” he said. “They do not know what theater you will be in, but they know you plan to rendezvous with the Arun afterward. Kendra has elected not to stop the hunters forcefully, because she believes it is a confrontation that will happen sooner or later. She has asked that you try not to disrupt the play”—he quirked his mouth in a half smile—“but understands if it cannot be helped. She assures me that there would be no way to smuggle a large weapon into the theater, but would like me to remind you that not all hunters insist on engaging their prey up close, and the streets can be exposed.”

Though the Vida line preferred close contact in a hunt, she knew crossbows were favored by some hunters—the kind who would shoot the silent weapon from a rooftop or a higher window, or even across a crowded theater if they could get the weapon inside.

“Do you need to sit?” Kaleo suddenly asked.

The solicitousness seemed out of place until Sarah realized she had not responded to his warning, and several seconds had gone by.

Long before their short fling, Michael had been her best friend. But this new life of hers was full of betrayals by those from the former one, so why was this surprising?

As Kendra, through Kaleo, had said, this confrontation had to happen sometime.

Inanely, Sarah said, “I had actually started to look forward to seeing the show.”

“Then go,” Kaleo replied. “Watch the play. I would simply advise not idling long on the streets.”

He made it sound so simple. But maybe something good could come of this. She had promised Nikolas and Kristopher, and more importantly herself, that she would not give up her life, but in a public area owned by such a powerful figure, surely she would have some room to negotiate. Perhaps she could find an opportunity to plead her case. There had to be a way to convince those who had been her friends and family that she was still who she had been only days before.

“What’s wrong?” were Kristopher’s first words as he walked into the room where Sarah had not too long before been primping, and where she was now sitting on the bed, no longer worried about wrinkling the beautiful dress before Kristopher came to pick her up. She just looked at him. She knew he had been angry when he had left.

Since then, she had fed for the first time. She had experienced something wonderful. Then she had seen an old friend, briefly experienced the hope for forgiveness and acceptance, only to have that crushed. After Kaleo had left, she had spent nearly half an hour helping Christine calm down while trying to fight the yawning void in her own gut.

He hadn’t been there for any of that, and she couldn’t blame him. Nikolas had said Kristopher wasn’t hard enough to
force her to feed, and he was probably right. He thought that if he could only convince her this life was
worth
living, the rest would take care of itself. He didn’t understand that the first steps of survival were too much to take on her own, no matter what she wanted.

He and Nikolas had left their world behind when they had become vampires. They had even changed their names to mark the transition. It wasn’t as easy for her to stop being Sarah Vida, even if the Rights of Kin hadn’t been in play.

“Nikolas and Kendra are going to join us for the show. I’ll explain everything once your brother gets back.” She didn’t want to have to describe Michael’s betrayal twice. Nikolas was going to meet them at home, but Kendra had said she would catch up with them at the theater, so there would be time for them to talk.

“Okay.” She could still sense Kristopher’s concern, but he was willing to let it drop if she wanted it to. “Where is Nikolas?”

“Talking to some contact,” Sarah said, vague because he had been vague with her. “He has a plan, but hasn’t explained it to me. He promised he would be back in time for the show, though.”

Kristopher didn’t object to Nikolas’s joining them, or even ask when that had been decided, and there wasn’t as much as a tendril of annoyance in response to his brother’s having invited himself along on their date. Sarah realized, quite suddenly, that she was irritated by that—not that Kendra and Nikolas had invited themselves, but that Kristopher just accepted it as a matter of course, even without knowing that Kendra had been involved in the decision.

“You look good,” she said, the compliment lame, but she couldn’t get more eloquent words past her throat.

Of course he looked good. Kristopher Ravena in a tux was a sight to see. She was glad Nikolas and Kendra had insisted that Sarah find something “appropriate,” or she would have been devastatingly underdressed. The beautiful man in front of her was like something out of a black-and-white magazine. He was standing before her, but impossible to touch.

He took the words as further invitation to change the subject and pretend everything was fine again. Holding out a hand to her, he said, “You look incredible yourself.”

She ducked her head, oddly shy, and admitted, “I kid you not, Kendra took me shopping.”

His eyes widened. “How on Earth did that happen?”

“Nikolas asked her to,” Sarah replied. “I gather he figured I would be hopeless to prepare myself adequately on my own.”

At that, there was a stab of something from him … not jealousy, but … guilt? “It’s okay,” she blurted out. “This whole thing has been hard on you, too. I can understand needing to get away for a bit.”

She said the words before she even fully processed the thoughts she had picked up from him. Nikolas had exaggerated the amount of help Nissa had needed, but Kristopher had stalled nevertheless, needing time to go over some of the same thoughts Sarah had found slashing through her brain.

She accepted his hand.

As he drew her closer, he observed, “You’ve hunted.”

Something made her hesitate to say Nikolas’s name again,
but she knew that it was implied when she said, “I went to Phaethon.”

“Oh.” He reached up as if to run his fingers through his hair, and then seemed to remember that it was tied back tightly. When she had met him, Kristopher’s hair had been chopped short, but it had been long when he was changed. Since he had rejoined his brother, his vampiric body had swiftly returned to its original state, and now he and Nikolas were again close enough that they were like reflections of each other. Even their auras were nearly identical, in the way they twined together.

And yet they were very different.

She had comforted him, because the feeling of his guilt had hit her so powerfully, but Kristopher was coming to the same realization she had already reached. Kristopher had changed her to save her life. Before that, at most he had intended to bloodbond her—and that only because his brother had intervened. If it hadn’t been for Nikolas’s struggles to get his brother to return to him, Sarah would have driven Kristopher away, and that would have been the end of their relationship instead of the beginning.

“Kristopher—” she said at the same moment that Kristopher said, “I’m sorry, Sarah.”

“I should have …” His voice trailed off as he thought that he should have been the one to show her how to hunt, but he still hadn’t reconnected with all his contacts after his fifty years away. He wouldn’t have been confident enough to bring Sarah somewhere like Phaethon at a time like this. He had left to try to get his thoughts straight, at a time when he knew perfectly
well that she needed him. She was new to this world, former Vida or not.

“Kristopher,” Sarah said firmly. She waited until he had pulled himself from his thoughts and was really looking at her before she continued. “We both made mistakes, which caused us to end up here, but that doesn’t mean you’re responsible for me from here to eternity. Going to one school dance together for a date that didn’t even work out doesn’t mean we’re destined to be together forever. I know that.”

Kristopher said softly, “I was thinking earlier about what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had woken up.”

“Me too,” Sarah admitted. Maybe she had picked the thought up from him. “I don’t need a boyfriend, Kristopher.” She started off strong, but her voice faded as she added, “But I could really use some family tonight.”

This time, when Kristopher pulled her into his arms, there were no anxious doubts about responsibility and romance and failures. Kristopher knew what it meant to be family and how it felt to lose family.

I’m not losing anyone else
, they both thought.

“We’ll get through this,” Sarah said. “I don’t know how yet, but we will.”

A
DIA KNEW IT
was impossible to get to New York City before the show began. Dominique had access to a private jet, but trying to scramble it, get a flight plan approved and fly into New York would take even longer than driving.

After days of anxiety riding her so tightly she thought she might explode, Adia felt strangely calm. Even with the sporadic traffic she hit, she was pretty sure she made it to New York City in record time.

Like most hunters, she tended to avoid Broadway and the general theater area of Manhattan. It was too bright, too shiny, with too many people and rarely a worthwhile hit. Being there made her nervous.

She knew what she had to do—the only thing she
could
do
if she wanted her line to survive. They were flawed; she had accepted that. But she could salvage what was left of her line, if only she could find the nerve to fulfill her vow and end this hunt.

Michael had called shortly before she reached the city, to give her the address of a Mexican restaurant not far from the theater. He had found them. Michael used a little money and a little magic to reserve the restaurant’s back room for their meeting. When Adia arrived, he was eating chips and freshly made guacamole.

Zachary arrived behind Adia by less than ten minutes. He was avoiding looking at her, which was fine, since she still wasn’t sure what he would see in her face. Once Jay joined them, even Michael noticed that something was up. Adia saw Jay meet the Arun’s gaze and shake his head. She had never been so grateful for the telepath’s interference. Now was not the time.

Adia began. “Michael, fill everyone in so we can decide what to do next.”

“I was scoping spots where I thought I might hear news about Nikolas, and was lucky enough to see Sarah herself,” Michael explained. “For the record, she fed, but didn’t kill. Does anyone in this room really think that she would?”

Jay was the first to say no. Zachary sighed and leaned back against the counter.

Michael said, “Jay and I agree that Sarah came to the house the other day to turn herself in.” He looked over at Jay, who nodded without adding anything. “We’re also agreed that the
most surprising part of all this is that Sarah
is
still alive. She hasn’t come to us again, and she hasn’t fallen on the knife. When I saw her at the club, she barely spoke. Nikolas did all the talking. I don’t want her dead, you all know I don’t, but I know Sarah. I want some kind of assurance that if she’s living this life, it’s by her own choice.”

“What’s your plan?” Zachary asked.

“By now, I figure they’ll know we’re here, but Kendra’s line is arrogant enough, and takes their theater seriously enough, that they won’t—”

“Wait,” Zachary interrupted. “They know we’re here,
why?
”

“I cleared it with Kendra,” Michael replied, utterly blasé. “She has given us a green light. If Sarah or the twins present us with an opportunity, we have carte blanche to take them down. Sarah knows the way we work. If she wants to make it through the night, we won’t have a clear shot. If she is being held against her will, though, we’ll have a chance.”