All Just Glass

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “Don’t. Bet. On. It.” The growled words came from the girl on the chair as she shifted for the first time, testing her restraints. She rolled her head, making the joints in her neck and shoulders pop like cracking knuckles, and then looked up with blue-gray eyes.

  Jay stood and slunk across the room to kneel, probably unwisely, in front of the bloodbond. Her feet were not tied to the chair, so Jay was risking a foot in the face, but if he wasn’t bright enough to figure that out on his own, he didn’t deserve a warning.

  “A bloodbond’s loyalty to her master tends to be fairly unwavering,” Jay said, his words probably for Robert despite his holding Heather’s gaze. “I will hunt as necessary, but I do not have the stomach for harsh interrogation. So unless Vida-kin have torture in their blood, I, too, wonder what we intend to do with this girl.”

  “We’re not torturing anyone,” Robert said, clearly horrified.

  Zachary hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but every Vida present knew they had less room to be idealistic than the Marinitch or the human.

  “Found it,” Adia said, still staring at the laptop screen. “It looks like that missed call was from an independent bookstore called Makeshift.”

  “If it’s a store, anyone could have asked to use the phone,” Zachary observed.

  Dominique nodded. “We’ll keep it in mind, but it’s probably not worth—”

  “I think you should check it out,” Jay interrupted, still looking at Heather.

  “While you’re at it, could you pick up the book I ordered?” Heather asked sardonically.

  Adia asked, almost too casually, “Do you know anything about this place, Jay?”

  Zachary saw Dominique give Jay a wary look a moment before his mind caught up to what the other two Vidas had obviously already realized. Each line descended from Macht had its own skill set. The Vida line worked with raw power and could manipulate it in a variety of ways. The Arun line were faster and stronger than most witches and focused their training on offensive magic for fighting. The Smoke witches studied healing. Each Marinitch chose how to focus his abilities; some became hunters, some were healers, and some were closer to oracles or adjudicators. The Marinitch line was talented in empathy, bordering in some cases on telepathy.

  Most hunters did not develop that skill; it was not beneficial to feel too much of what their prey experienced. Jay was apparently an exception.

  He shrugged in response to Adia’s question. “Nothing specific,” he said.

  Heather suddenly looked at Jay sharply, perhaps deducing the reason for his intent stare. At last she attempted the savage kick Zachary had predicted. Jay dodged handily.

  “I’m going to check it out,” Adia said. “The rest of you should stay here with our ‘guest.’ ”

  Dominique broke in: “I spoke to one of my informants shortly before you returned. He says he might know something, and asked me to meet him in the city.”

  Adia nodded, obviously not comfortable questioning her mother for more details. “If you think he’s worth meeting, then we’ll manage without you until you’re back.” To Zachary, she said, “You’re in charge while we’re both gone. Michael should be back soon to join you. You can catch him up. I imagine Kaleo will come for his property sooner rather than later.”

  Zachary nodded, acknowledging and assenting to her commands. Adia had a natural air of authority and confidence. He was happy to follow her lead.

  Unfortunately, once she and Dominique were gone, he was alone with the Marinitch telepath, the human and the tied-up bloodbond.

  “Anyone up for a round of go fish?” Jay asked after looking around the room. It was the kind of idiocy Zachary expected from him. Did it really even deserve an answer?

  There was silence for the space of a few heartbeats, and then Heather pointed out, “I don’t have a hand for the cards.”

  Robert said, “I guess I appreciate your calling me in if you’re hunting Kaleo, but is this your entire plan? We’re just going to hang out until an angry, thousands-of-years-old vampire shows up to try to kill us all?”

  “Do you think we should rent a video?” Jay suggested, in his usual cavalier fashion.

  “I’m going to take a nap on the couch,” Zachary said. He had to get away from these three for a few minutes, and to lie down before he threw up.

  Taunting and jokes aside, Jay paused to ask, “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t want to answer. Worse, he was worried he didn’t need to answer. How much could Jay see, just looking at him? Zachary worked too hard to keep his external Vida poise to let some birdbrained Marinitch see what was inside.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, putting up the same mental walls he would use to try to keep a vampire out of his thoughts, and speaking as if he assumed that Jay was asking about the plan and not his physical or mental condition. “The house is warded, so any vampire who plans to come for Heather will have to enter like a human, instead of appearing wherever he wants. If Kaleo shows, I’ll be able to join the fight in plenty of time.”

  Jay nodded and waved him off.

  He lay down. Strict training of his body allowed him to fall asleep almost instantly, but that sleep was far from restful. Dominique’s earlier words had stirred up horrors that he normally tried to forget. It didn’t take vampirism for sleep to recall a five-year-old child’s nightmares come true.

  He was just old enough to understand: Mama had gone mad. Someone had told her something bad, and she had gone wild. She had screamed and shrieked and cried in a way he hadn’t thought Vidas even could. Then she had stormed out. Hours later, he had realized he was alone in the house. His older sister had already been missing for a week. His little brother had gone out the door after Mama.

  No one came home.

  As the day turned into night, he went through the cabinets to try to find something to eat. He went to bed when it got dark. He couldn’t sleep.

  He turned on every light in the house in an attempt to banish the shadows, and then he turned them off, because a Vida shouldn’t be afraid of the dark.

  He turned just one back on.

  He fell asleep only when the dawn came, and woke because he was hungry. He scavenged for breakfast, the way he had done before. Someone had to come home soon.

  When someone finally did, it wasn’t Mama, but Jacqueline’s friend Dominique. She brought him to her house and gave him dinner and then told him she was going back out to look for the rest of his family.

  “Take care of the baby while I’m gone,” she added.

  He nodded solemnly. After Dominique left, he went into the nursery. She had taught him how to hold and feed and change a baby when he had visited before with his mother, but right then Adianna was sleeping, so he just sat next to the crib and listened to her breathe. He would protect her until everyone came home.

  CHAPTER 6

  SATURDAY, 6:38 A.M.

  “SARAH—”

  Sarah knew what Nikolas was going to say, and interrupted with “I won’t kill my own family.”

  “And if it comes down to a choice between them and us?” he asked.

  Kristopher tensed, his arms protective around Sarah. “We don’t have to discuss this now. Much as I hate to say it, Kaleo is right. We need to talk to our people.”

  “Can I call Robert?” Christine’s soft voice cut through the vampires’ anxiety.

  “I sent Robert to my mother for training, when I first learned he had been hunting,” Sarah said with a wince. “She’ll be watching him.”

  “We have some disposable cell phones,” Kristopher said. “You can help Christine figure out what she can safely say.”

  Sarah was about to reject the idea again, but then she hesitated. Facing Kaleo the way Christine had was incredibly brave, considering her previous experiences with him. The seemingly frail human had been ripped from her own life as surely as Sarah had been, and this was the one comfort she asked.

  Sarah realized, suddenly, that part of the sympathy she was feeling wasn�
��t hers. She was picking up on Kristopher’s thoughts again. She had forgotten to shield against him, and he had no ability to mask his mind.

  She made an effort to block him out, but the damage—if that was what it was—had already been done. She could not be as cold and practical toward Christine as she wished to be.

  She nodded. “We’ll just have to be careful.”

  “Good,” Nikolas said. “Meanwhile, Kristopher and I should go and speak to our people. They need to know the situation.”

  Sarah nodded, wondering with frustration, When can we kill Kaleo?

  There. That was her cold practicality coming back to the surface. She wanted him gone, and making vampires gone was a task she knew how to handle. The ancient Roman had come to them this time looking for help to save one of his people, but that didn’t negate his history of destroying anything and anyone who got in his way.

  She must have projected the thought, because the brothers responded to it. Kristopher nodded to Nikolas, who waited with Christine while Kristopher pulled Sarah into the next room. In the past Sarah had been able, with effort, to communicate silently with Adianna, because they were close and they had often mingled powers for a hunt, but full-blown vampiric telepathy was a talent she would need some time to get used to.

  “Killing him would kill Christine,” Kristopher reminded Sarah, his voice every bit as bitter as she felt. Killing a bloodbond’s master was almost always fatal to the bond, as the vampire’s death was felt by the bonded human. The shock too often caused the body simply to shut down.

  “I could protect her,” Sarah said. “It will take me a while to get the hang of using my magic again, now that it’s been changed by mixing it with vampiric powers, but I can feel it and I know it’s not just gone. I don’t know any magic that can break a bloodbond, but with effort, I should be able to block Christine’s connection to Kaleo long enough that she wouldn’t feel his death.”

  Kristopher paused to consider, but finally shook his head. “Kaleo already knows what thin ice he’s on; that’s why he didn’t dispute our claim on Christine when we insisted on bringing her to stay with us. Nikolas and I would love an excuse to challenge him, but to do so now, especially when our actions have put his people in so much danger, would be seen by others of our kind as unprovoked.”

  “I find myself hard-pressed to care about the opinions of other vampires,” Sarah said. “And even Nikolas said he would kill him. He said it to Christine.”

  “And you’ve never said anything in a moment of anger that you couldn’t follow through with?” She didn’t know how to respond to that, but a moment later, Kristopher spared her the need. He ran a hand through his long hair, frustrated, as he said under his breath, “Of course not. Vida control. You never say anything you don’t mean, right?” He sighed and added, “I admire your self-discipline. It’s not a trait most of our line shares, which is why we tend to hold to certain understandings, including that we don’t kill each other over personal vendettas. If we did, we really would be the animals the hunters see us as … except there wouldn’t be any hunters, because we would have killed ourselves off long ago.”

  Sarah was stunned, both by the bitterness in Kristopher’s tone and the notion of such “certain understandings.” She wasn’t fully convinced that Kaleo wouldn’t someday need killing, but she would hold her tongue on the subject, at least until the current crisis was dealt with.

  Nikolas returned, expression somber. “Christine is activating one of the phones. It looks like it might take a while. Are we going to help Kaleo?”

  “Will Heather help the hunters?” Sarah asked. Nikolas and Kristopher both shook their heads without even needing to consider. “Then they’ll hurt her. She’s old enough, and close enough to Kaleo, that if they decide she’s useless, they might even kill her to weaken him.”

  “And we’ll risk our necks rescuing her in order to help that bastard.” Nikolas sighed. “Sarah, help Christine make her call, but get away from her before … Just get away from her.”

  “I’m not sure she should be alone right now,” Sarah said.

  “We won’t be long,” Nikolas said. “Trust me, Sarah. You don’t know what a newly made vampire’s hunger can be like.”

  “We’ll help you feed safely as soon as we get the word out about the Rights,” Kristopher said. “For now, be careful.” He bent his head to kiss her, and whispered, “I love you,” against her lips.

  The brief touch of lips to lips should have been comforting, but for some reason it gave her chills. How many times had Kristopher said he loved her? She had never said it back to him. Should she?

  Kristopher paused, as if hoping for a response, but then drew away. She didn’t dare look at his mind; she didn’t want to know if he was disappointed or relieved.

  She felt numb.

  The brothers both left, and Sarah sighed as some of the hard questions were deferred. She went to check on Christine, who was still struggling to activate the cell phone.

  The tears on Christine’s face made Sarah freeze in the doorway and think, I don’t know how to handle this.

  While Sarah tried to figure out what to say, Christine abruptly threw the phone across the room with a frustrated shriek. “Why do people have to be so stupid?” she cried as the phone broke through one of the windowpanes.

  She stood up, and Sarah’s first instinct was to tell her to sit down, shut up and cope. If anyone had a right to hysterics, it was Sarah, right? But Sarah was a daughter of Vida, and she wasn’t allowed such a luxury, even now. It didn’t matter that the sister who had once studied Vida law beside her was now using it to remove all barriers to killing her.

  She found herself staring at the shards of glass hanging loosely in the shattered window. She wanted to convince herself that even if Dominique had called the Rights of Kin, Adia would never follow them, but no matter what Sarah wanted, that was too selfish a thought to contemplate. There weren’t that many Vidas left. Adia couldn’t throw it all away.

  Sarah was standing there, immobile, when Christine flung herself into Sarah’s arms and began to weep, her sobs almost as loud as the heartbeat that suddenly seemed to ricochet through Sarah’s bones. She could feel Christine’s pulse everywhere they touched as Christine shrieked, “I’m so … so … tired of being helpless!”

  Sarah shut her eyes, trying to block out the sensation of the human’s pulse and the scent of her skin.

  “Robert tried to protect me. You protected me from Kaleo even though it meant trusting Nikolas. Nikolas and Kristopher try to protect me now, and I’m grateful and I do feel better, but I’m—” She broke off with a hiccup. “I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, Sarah, I’m so—” She choked back another sob, struggling to control herself, as she pulled herself back. At the same time, Sarah regained her own control, so she could meet Christine’s eye without tasting the human’s heartbeat on her tongue. “I’m so selfish. This has to be so hard for you. I wish, for once, that I could be someone who could fight, who could help, instead of someone you need to protect.”

  Sarah didn’t think. She wasn’t good at giving emotional comfort, but there was one thing she knew, and knew well, that she could use to help Christine. She asked, “Do you want me to teach you how to fight?”

  Christine looked up slowly, seeming bewildered by the offer. “What?”

  “You said you felt helpless,” Sarah said. “I can teach you how to do things like protect yourself, and the people around you.”

  Christine gave her an odd look, partly of longing and partly of skepticism. Sarah expected her to say something denigrating her own potential as a fighter. Instead, she said, “Umm … I don’t know how to put this, really, but … your family’s methods for teaching fighting are kind of …” She trailed off, considered for a moment and then concluded with “cold.”

  Cold. That was one word for it. Sarah flexed her hand as the memory of her mother’s reaction to her father’s death passed through her mind again.

  Nikolas and Kri
stopher had told her to get away from Christine because they worried Sarah would lose control, but neither of them understood what it was to be a Vida. She had been trained to ignore pain, and cold, and hunger. The moment of hyperawareness earlier had been no different, really. Self-control and discipline were at the heart of a Vida’s training, because they meant a hunter could continue to fight no matter what happened.

  A Vida did not give up, or make deals, or compromise, or flinch even when death seemed to be the only alternative. Their line had survived intact for tens of thousands of years by obeying that mandate. Dominique probably wasn’t even as strict as some of her ancestors. At least Sarah had been allowed to attend public school and, to an extent, fraternize with hunters of a less-pedigreed birth.

  On the other hand, if Dominique had been as harsh as Vidas had been historically, Sarah might not be in this mess.

  “You don’t have to follow Vida philosophy to learn some basic self-defense,” Sarah said to Christine, keeping her “what if” thoughts to herself. “It’s helpful to have some concept of focus and control, but most hunters don’t go to the lengths my line does … did. Look at Nikolas and Kristopher. They fight well, especially when they’re together.”

  Again, the words brought an unpleasant memory to mind. Sarah knew how well the two of them fought, and how cooperatively they worked in a fight, because that had been how she had lost.

  Every hunter knew that the day would come when she was too slow, but most never needed to reflect on it afterward. They certainly did not wake up in the arms of the one who had taken them down.

  “Anyway,” she said. “I can teach you whatever you want to learn, even if it’s just how to throw a punch or get out of a hold.”

  Christine nodded. “I think I would like that,” she said. “It’s finally getting through my mind that I could be around a long time, and I don’t want to be a victim forever. Some of the bloodbonds I’ve met are like that. They just expect Nikolas to take care of everything. I want to scream at them, ‘Who’s taking care of him?’ ”