All Just Glass (3 page)

Any memory of him alive would have been welcome. Why did she have to dream his
death
?

It didn’t matter that her mother had tracked down and killed his murderers. There was no way to avenge the slaughter of a child’s innocence. With her father’s death, her childhood had ended.

She drew a deep breath, dropping into old habits meant to focus the body and mind, but she had no pulse to regulate and the air that came into her lungs was useless to her.

She rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to remind herself of her physical body and remove herself from memories, and her palms passed over pale skin and paler scars. The lines were faint now: a strand of ivy etched into her wrist, a rose on one shoulder and the name Nikolas on the other. There had been other wounds, including another name—Kristopher—but they had been too new and had healed completely when she had been—

She leaned back against the wall as it all returned.

The previous day, she had come to the home of one of the most infamous vampires in history, planning to kill him or die trying. What she hadn’t expected was that she would die, and then wake up as the sun set, with no pulse, and blood on her lips.

She shuddered. Not long before, if anyone had asked her what she would do if she were changed, she would have said without hesitation,
I’ll do the right thing. A daughter of Vida would never allow herself to become a monster
.

Now she didn’t know.

All she knew was that Nikolas and Kristopher—the two vampires who had killed her, albeit somewhat accidentally—had brought her here to their home to wait for her meeting at SingleEarth.

SingleEarth, an international organization founded by the Smoke line of witches in the early nineteen hundreds, was dedicated to the concept that all the sentient creatures of this world were capable of peaceful coexistence. To that end, they helped immortal and ageless creatures function in a mortal world. They did everything, from providing passports and setting up bank accounts to creating updated birth and death certificates as necessary. Sarah needed them to help her find a place to stay.

Kristopher had offered to let her live with them for as long as she liked, of course, but she wanted to find her own path first. She didn’t want to give up on independence and move in, even with the vampire who had taught her that not all of his kind was as evil as she had been raised to believe.

His kind; her kind now.

My kind
. The words echoed in her mind, and again she tried to draw a breath to steady herself. It brought the smell of browning butter to her. Someone, probably her housemate, Christine, was cooking downstairs.

Christine was a fine example of why the hunters generally thought vampires like Nikolas deserved to die. Like Sarah, Christine wore Nikolas’s marks on her arms. Hunters saw them as a kind of brand, left by a sadist whose arrogance led him to sign his kills. Vampires saw them as a claim, one they could not say they didn’t notice, that marked the human as under Nikolas’s protection.

Normally no one would dare harm anyone who wore those marks, but Christine had been caught in the power struggle between Nikolas and another of his kind, an ancient vampire named Kaleo. By the time Nikolas had been alerted to Christine’s situation, Kaleo had nearly driven her mad.

The sun was only hinting at rising, but nevertheless, Sarah found Christine in the kitchen, beating eggs while mushrooms and peppers crackled in butter on the stove. Dressed in gray sweatpants and a black pajama top, Christine was humming some upbeat pop song as she worked, her eyes half closed as one of her bare feet tapped on the floor.

And she smelled good, Sarah realized. It wasn’t browning butter and sautéing mushrooms and peppers that had snared Sarah’s attention; it was the rich, metallic smell beyond all that, beneath the flesh.…

Sarah shoved herself backward before Christine even noticed her. In the living room, out of sight of the mostly human girl, she leaned against the wall.

She shoved the craving back down. Her body, which had momentarily gloried in the prospect of sustenance, screamed at her that she needed to
hunt
, to
feed
, but she ignored that, too, until the pain that scraped across her flesh and along the inside of her veins was nothing to her.

How
could
she? Christine had been victimized and brutalized, but for just a moment, Sarah had seen her, smelled her and thought of her as
food
.

She would have to be more careful. She had a sense of how long a vampire could safely go without blood. Most of them lacked the self-control to refrain from hunting more frequently—
killing, even—but she had been a daughter of Vida. Pain was nothing. Soon the vampires at SingleEarth would be able to teach her how they survived without killing; they would teach her how to feed safely, maybe on animals, the way Kristopher had for fifty years before she met him. Until then, she wouldn’t let the bloodlust control her even a moment more.

Now fully under control, she stepped back into the kitchen. Her face reflected none of the horror of her dream or the agony of the bloodlust as she said, “Good morning, Christine.”

Christine turned with a grin and a glance out the window. “I guess it is. I’m making an omelet. Would you like some?”

Sarah smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think it would do much for me.”

Christine shrugged. “You might not need it to fill your stomach, but Nikolas tells me that a lot of vampires enjoy the taste or smell of food, even if it doesn’t provide sustenance. He says it’s one of the things that make eternity worthwhile.” Maybe in another century Sarah would agree, but for the moment it seemed like a terrible waste of food. She didn’t have to answer, though, since Christine glanced at the clock and said, “You keep odd hours for a vampire.”

“It might take me some time to get it right,” Sarah said.

Like most vampires, she had slept all day following her change. She had woken disoriented, nearly mindless. Kristopher had bared his own throat, knowing that she needed blood to survive but risked killing any human she fed on in that state. It had been enough to help complete the change, but she had still been exhausted. She lay down, expecting to close her eyes for just a minute, and now it was nearly dawn.

She had to get to SingleEarth before it got later. Even as a newly changed vampire, she knew that her energy levels would only plummet more as the sun rose higher.

“Are you all right here for a bit?” Sarah asked.

Christine hesitated but then nodded.

“I’ll be back soon.”

Sarah dressed in a knee-length black skirt and a white blouse—clothes borrowed from Christine. Nikolas decorated himself and his house in combinations of black and white, and Christine had taken to styling herself in the same. Sarah swore that when she bought herself new clothes, they would be decorated with rainbows.

She stared at herself in the full-length mirror as she brushed her blond hair and braided it back, out of her way. At least she had found a long-sleeved shirt that hid the scars on her arms, but the vampiric black eyes where she was used to seeing Vida-blue ones chilled her. She barely resisted an urge to slam a palm into the mirror’s surface and shatter it to send the image away.

She remembered doing something similar when she was seven. Hysterical, still screaming after the discovery of her father, she had thrown anything that had come to hand. When she had run out of things to throw, she had turned toward the window. The bright rainbows around the room, dancing over her father’s dead flesh, had offended her. She had slammed a fist with all her strength through the decorative cut-glass panels.

She had torn her hand to ribbons and broken three fingers. Her mother had allowed the hand to be set and bandaged but had bound Sarah’s power so she would heal at a nearly human
rate, to teach her the consequences of emotional reactions. Of losing control.

She was supposed to have learned her lesson. Now all those years of struggling for flawless discipline, training to be
perfect
, had left her in a refuge provided to her by the vampire who had been her enemy so recently she wore his marks in her flesh—and would for the rest of eternity.

A
DIA FELT A
little giddy as she and Zachary crossed the threshold of the local SingleEarth Haven.

The compound was less than fifteen minutes away from their house, but Adia had never been there. Dominique had chosen to live close to SingleEarth’s healers, but they normally came to the house so hunters did not need to profane SingleEarth’s cherished lands.

It wasn’t that hunters weren’t
allowed
at SingleEarth, exactly, but they certainly were not welcome.

As the name implied, this was supposed to be a safe place. Those inside were protected from persecution, whether by hunters or others of their own kind. The Vida, Arun and Marinitch lines had sworn to honor that agreement, even though
SingleEarth’s dominion caused a great deal of frustration. There was nothing quite so frustrating as knowing that someone in this place had information, or a history of slaughter, and not being able to do anything about it.

Everything had changed when Dominique had invoked the Rights, though.

Adia pitied Michael a little. It had seemed like a bad idea to bring someone as volatile as an Arun to SingleEarth, so Michael was assigned to check the house where Kristopher and his sister, Nissa, had previously stayed.

It wasn’t
entirely
busywork. The witches were bound to tell the others of their lines about the Rights of Kin, but no one would have told Nissa. If she had any brains at all, she would have disappeared when she’d learned that her brothers had tangled with a Vida, but maybe she wasn’t that bright. Maybe Michael would get lucky.

Adia doubted it. Their prey was much more likely to have gone somewhere like SingleEarth, where they would assume that the witches’ own laws would protect them. Therefore, Adia much preferred to be here, with Zachary. Zachary had moved out when he was sixteen and Adia was nine, so they had never been as close as siblings. But when they exchanged a glance at that moment, Adia could see that he was as thrilled by their new freedom as she was. She knew that her expression did not show her excitement—she had trained too long and hard to let such an emotion betray her—but her cousin would see it in her eyes just as she could see it in his.

Sarah would have
.

And just like that, the excitement came crashing down.

“You take the resident halls,” she said softly. “I’ll check the common rooms.”

Vampires had the irritating ability to disappear and travel any distance in the blink of an eye. A well-trained witch of their line could disrupt that power, but to do so required touch, which meant it was normally hard to catch someone who wasn’t arrogant enough to come out and fight. They would have only one chance at this, before their target learned that the Rights of Kin were in play, so it would be best to cover as much ground as quickly as possible. This early in the morning, most of SingleEarth’s vampires were still awake and social. Adia would have been happy to wait until they were curled up asleep in bed, which most would be within the next couple of hours, but she did not want to risk waiting and having word reach their targets.

After they split up, Adia was the one who got lucky. She found Nissa in one of the art rooms, receiving instruction on stone carving from a girl who reeked of a vampiric taint. She was not a vampire, but a bloodbond to someone old, and powerful.

“Nissa?”

The vampire lifted black eyes as Adia said her name. A sad smile crossed her face, but she walked fearlessly toward Adia.

“Adianna, right?” she asked. “You’re Sarah’s sister.”

Adia nodded tightly. Unfortunately, Nissa wasn’t dumb. Adia doubted she would say anything helpful without coercion.

“And you’re … Kristopher’s sister,” Adia said. At least for a little while recently, Kristopher had pretended to be human. To be something other than evil. His little game had started this whole disaster.

“Are younger sisters as much trouble as brothers?” Nissa
asked, shaking her head. “If you were hoping to get in touch with Sarah, I can pass a message on for you.”

Adia winced. She couldn’t help it.

Nissa stepped forward and put a comforting hand on Adia’s shoulder. Adia resisted the instinct to pull back, instead letting her power seep subtly over Nissa’s, tangling it enough to hold her in place when she decided the wise course of action was to flee.

“I know what you’re going through,” Nissa said. “I’m sure your whole world has been turned upside down. But it gets better. I don’t approve of a lot of the choices Nikolas and Kristopher make, but they’re still my brothers, you know?”

Adia couldn’t handle too much more of this. “Do you know where I would find Sarah?”

“She and Christine are—” Nissa stopped and frowned, her body going tense. Her eyes searched Adia’s face. “Are you looking for her because she’s your sister, or because she’s your prey?”

Adia let herself look offended and innocent, eyes wide. “I just want to see her,” she said. It didn’t hurt to try, right?

Nissa looked ambivalent. “I can pass on a message, and see if she would be willing to meet you here,” she suggested.

Adia considered it. If Sarah didn’t know that the Rights were in play, she might show up, believing herself safe. On the other hand, she was smart and knew Vida law as well as Adia did. If she received such an invitation, she would wonder why Adia was extending it, and might deduce what was going on, at which point Adia would have lost her best lead.

Adia didn’t need Nissa to tell her anything, really. The twins protected their kin.

“I need you to come with me,” Adia said.

Nissa looked shocked. “You’re hunting her,” she said. “You’re really … You would really kill your own
sister
?”

Adia was sure she could take Nissa down in a fight, but with Zachary’s help, she could take Nissa alive. The twins would undoubtedly come to avenge her, but the hunters had more leverage if she was alive. Adia sent out a thread of power to Zachary, prompting him to come back to her, and answered Nissa’s question as a stall tactic.