All Just Glass (16 page)

“Hello?”

“What?” For a moment, she forgot who she had been calling. She shook herself, trying to focus. The last twenty-four hours had been too hard, too much. “I mean, hi,” she said. “It’s Anna.”

“Hi, Anna. Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to cover for her moment of inexcusable distraction. “It’s been a long day, but I was thinking a nice dinner out would be a good way to improve it. Want to join me?”

“I would love to,” he replied. “How far are you from Boston?”

“Maybe twenty minutes,” she answered. “Are you thinking of somewhere particular?”

He would choose somewhere there would be few witnesses, of course. That would work for her plans, too.

“I’m thinking I’m a pretty good cook, and if you want to go somewhere peaceful and relaxing, I can set a table where we won’t have to worry about nosy waiters and other people’s screaming children.”

You move fast, pretty boy
, she thought, while she said, “Sounds lovely.”

Jerome gave her directions to what turned out to be a moderate-sized apartment just outside Boston. She doubted it was his only residence; it was probably just the closest address he had to the Makeshift, which he figured would be an acceptable distance for her.

It didn’t matter.

A lot of things didn’t matter lately. She felt like she was going through the motions, unable to think past the moment to focus on any kind of goal.

She approached the door and knocked, still lost in her own morbid thoughts. She heard Jerome call out, “It’s unlocked.”

She pushed open the door, and only at that moment did she realize that she had made a grave miscalculation.

Jerome was not alone. Actually, he was more than not alone; he was perched on a stool at a quaint breakfast bar, apparently deep in conversation with an irate-looking vampire Adia recognized as either Nikolas or Kristopher.

Adia had exactly enough time to recognize the twin and note the presence of two other vampires—a man and a woman, curled together on the sofa with an apparently willing victim—before one of the doors in the far wall opened and another familiar figure emerged.

Heather took one look at Adia and began to shriek. The shrill wail was like a siren and was more than enough to startle the feeding vampires so they turned from their prey to Adia.

Four to one
, Adia calculated as she took a step backward. There was no space to maneuver in the apartment, she didn’t have the element of surprise and—

Five to one
, she thought, correcting herself, as someone caught her at the scruff of her neck, propelling her forward into the room. She managed to wrench herself from the newcomer’s grip, though she fell awkwardly, hurting her wrist.

Heather’s screams had brought her master. It was Kaleo who had blindsided Adia.

“You,” Kaleo snarled as the twin started to chuckle in a humorless way.

“Well, Jerome, it’s been a ball,” Nikolas—Adia was almost certain it was Nikolas—said without taking his eyes from her. “But you look like you’re busy here. Have fun.”

When Nikolas met her gaze, Adia expected to see triumph, or amusement, or at least relief. He had to know she was
hunting him, and now he had a chance to get rid of her without ever dirtying his hands. So why did he just look thoughtful?

No point in puzzling it out now. She had to survive first.

One down
, Adia thought as Nikolas disappeared.
Death estimated in … maybe two minutes?

She started to push herself up, only to get kicked in the shoulder by Kaleo. Though not hard enough to break anything, it was hardly a love tap. Pain radiated down her arm.

“Kaleo, back off,” Jerome said. “She’s my guest.”

“Guest. Sure,” Kaleo replied. Heather had ducked behind him, and he had one protective hand on her shoulder.

“She is
my
guest,” Jerome repeated, “and she is in
my
home. That makes her mine to do with as I will, and that doesn’t involve you. Now, perhaps you and Heather should go … get a coffee, or something.”

And then there were three
.

Again Adia started to push herself to her feet, but before she could get far, Jerome knelt beside her. His gaze held an even mixture of solicitous courtesy and warning. She stopped moving.

“Anyone else leaving, or should we just do this now?” she asked, stalling. Her right arm was still tingling; she didn’t trust it not to seize up if she went for a knife. She eased to the side, trying to make it look like a painful movement—and it
did
hurt as she put more weight on her right arm to free up her left.

Jerome shook his head, his gaze never leaving hers. The vampires on the couch exchanged glances, and then carried their victim into one of the bedrooms and shut the door.

“I didn’t invite you here for a fight,” Jerome said.

“Of course not,” she grumbled. “You invited me for a romantic dinner, right?”

“Temper, temper, Vida,” he said, chastising her. “I think we need to have a conversation, that’s all. Now, I’m going to step back and let you stand up. I do not want to fight, but neither will I let you out that door before I have said my piece.”

He walked toward the kitchenette, putting a peninsula counter between them. Adia stood quickly, drawing a knife and taking in details of the apartment around her as a matter of course without ever turning her attention from Jerome.

It was easy to tell that he was from Kendra’s line. His medium of choice was obviously photography; his work was on the apartment walls, and several photographs had been scattered on the coffee table Adia was standing next to, as if he had been looking for a particular image.

Many of the photographs were of natural features, like glaciers, waterfalls, gigantic waves, slithering rivers of lava and enormous crevices in the earth. Others were candid pictures of people, sometimes sleeping, sometimes with others in friendly or intimate embraces, rarely looking at the camera.

In one, Jerome was dancing with an attractive blond woman. She was in a slinky indigo dress, and her head was tucked down against his chest. The picture wouldn’t have been unsettling, except that the one beside it showed the same indigo dress, visible only in brief glimpses around the three vampires feeding on her—Jerome at her throat, and the male and female who had just left the room, one at each wrist. All Adia had to say in favor of the shot was that the vampires had been discreet. They
did not hide their own faces, but the photograph seemed specifically angled to conceal the identity of their victim.

Was she dead? Did they hide her face because her lifeless form had showed up a day later, and they knew that this way they could flaunt the crime with immunity? Then again, the main thing she knew about this vampire was that he had no shame or desire to hide his sins. He preferred to flaunt them. She wondered what he told the innocent humans he lured here when they asked about the photographs. Did he feed them some lie, or did he wait to take them here until they were already enough under his control that they wouldn’t care?

Jerome had returned to where he had been sitting when she’d first entered, and was just watching her. Waiting for what?

“Can we get this over with so I can get on with my night?” she asked.

He sighed, and nodded as if to himself. Finally, though, he began speaking.

“Can you imagine the terror I felt when I saw Kristopher Ravena lying, near death, with a hunter’s blade in his chest?” he asked. As he spoke, he approached her, as if to plead with her for sanity. “When I saw Zachary Vida with his throat nearly torn out by his own kin?”

She circled to put the coffee table between them, and Jerome backed off and leaned against the front door.

“I imagine it was terrible for you—Wait, you were
there
?” She interrupted her wry response as pieces fell into place.

“I hadn’t picked up on who you were, but Heather called me a few minutes after you left. I alerted the brothers.”

Adia wondered for a moment why Heather had called
Jerome and not Kaleo. Then she realized that it made sense: her intention had been to warn Jerome that the hunters had found his number, and not to protect Sarah.

“You sent Kristopher and Nikolas, and yet you pretend to be concerned that Zachary was hurt?”

“I believed that the brothers would, to the best of their ability, attempt not to harm the hunters, out of respect for their newest fledgling. If I had wanted to ensure the Vidas’ slaughter, I would have called Kaleo instead.”

“And why didn’t you?” Suddenly she was remembering the scene she had returned to, and imagining once again how much worse it could have been. Zachary and Michael had both lost enough blood that they would have been dead had the vampires wished it.

“You believe me now, do you?” Jerome asked.

She shook her head but said, “I’m willing to entertain a conversation about the possibility.”

Jerome nodded. “That’s about as much as I can expect. In short, the world needs hunters. Immortals need the possibility of their own deaths. And, as I’ve said before, I am uncomfortable with the concept of wholesale slaughter. But now we have a problem. Dominique has called on the Rights of Kin. So long as that law is in play, it almost guarantees the death of your line, and every other witch line alive.”

“A little arrogant, don’t you think?” Adia said with a bravado she didn’t really feel.

“
Think
about it. If you slay either brother, the other will avenge it. Those two are closer than human twins. They have twined their powers together for more than a century. As a
witch, you would be able to see that when you look at them. Neither survives well in separation, and I fear that if one died, the other would simply succumb to madness, and that madness would demand vengeance. And, since both brothers are protected by Kaleo, and Nikolas is one of Kendra’s favorites, they would have powerful allies. They would bring most of our line into the fray, and though other lines have tried to rule our kind, Kendra’s line has always been the deciding factor. The result would be a war, and your stupid,
stupid
kin would keep fighting it because of a law written by a scared little girl who had just witnessed her mother’s murder thousands of years before either of us was born.”

Adia had been so wrapped up in his words she was startled when he fell silent and she suddenly realized he was much closer than he should have been. She moved to raise her knife, and he shoved her backward, sending her off balance—but only long enough for him to step back again, keeping her from attacking.

“What option do we have?” she asked. “Should we just forget all the deaths this generation?”

“Do you want to
survive
?” he snapped.

“Sacrificing all we believe in to preserve some semblance of our flesh would destroy our line as surely as any of your kind could.” She had already accepted that this might be the end. If their line had to die, she would rather die with dignity than beg for leniency and fade into obscurity.

“I’ve seen enough genocide in my time, witch,” he said. “You don’t want to choose that path. Find an option. Be creative. Use some of the wit and intelligence I know your line possesses and come up with
something.
” She started to object,
but he spoke over her. “And don’t give me that line about how Vidas don’t compromise or make deals. It’s crap. There is no such thing as perfection.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted, thinking of the many mistakes she had made in the past day alone. “But that doesn’t mean we stop trying.”

Jerome shook his head. “Would you like to see what perfection looks like in reality, Adia?” he asked.

There was a challenging light in his eyes, along with a hint of anger. Part of her wanted to rise to that challenge, but part of her sensed that if she did so, she would regret it.

Refusing, however, had never been a choice.

S
ARAH GAPED AT
Kristopher, struggling to control her anger and the bloodlust that seemed to rise and tangle with it, like the two were feeding on each other.

Her family was trying to kill her. As if that weren’t sufficient, she had dreamed Kristopher’s memories of his dead first crush and then heard from Kaleo’s favorite bloodbond that she would be a good little vampire, before having a short discussion about how vampires occasionally utterly ruined human lives for fun. Then she had a flashback to Nissa’s committing murder, and now Kristopher thought he could fix it all up with a
Broadway musical
?

Kristopher seemed taken aback by her response. “I thought
it would be nice to spend an evening focused on something other than a situation we have no power to change right now.” Though he didn’t say it out loud, and tried to squash it before she heard it, another thought sneaked through to her:
I want to show you there are still things in the world worth living for
. “If you don’t want to see a show, we could do something else, anywhere we want. Have you ever wanted to visit the Louvre? It’s past ten o’clock in Paris right now, but I could call Kendra, and she could have it opened for us.”

The words felt like a blow. She was on the verge of tears and had
no idea why
.

“Damn it, Kristopher!” Sarah shouted. “You nearly died today. I nearly killed my cousin. We are being made top priority by every hunter my mother has ever met—including everyone I ever called family. Your people are in danger, mostly because you and I showed absolutely no common sense or self-control—”

“You chose to live your own life,” Kristopher said challengingly.

“I didn’t
choose
anything. You chose for both of us, remember?”

Kristopher had waited, perfectly mellow, through most of the tirade, his expression clearly asking,
So
? It was only then that he flinched. “Then let me do something right this time. Let me show you something beautiful. Do you like—”

“Kristopher,
please,
” she begged before he could finish the question. “I know you’re scared for me.” His anxiety and guilt were pummeling her, no matter how he tried to suppress them. “I know you think this will make me feel better. But this isn’t what I need right now.”