Heather visibly relaxed and then let out a sigh. “If you’re up, then I’m here later than I meant to be. I should get home.” She turned and grasped one of Christine’s hands before saying earnestly, “It’ll be okay, I promise.” She nodded to Sarah, Nikolas and Kristopher and then went through the front door as if she were fleeing.
“What was that about?” Kristopher asked.
“Robert gave her some photos and other sentimental stuff,” Christine said, the mention of her brother making her expression warm. “And she brought some of her own pictures, and stayed to talk awhile.”
“About what?” Sarah asked, wary. It was nice to see Christine forming attachments to people other than Nikolas, but Sarah wasn’t sure how much of a role model Kaleo’s favorite, most dependant bloodbond should be.
“About life,” Christine replied sharply. “About what it’s like to be in this world. I know she’s old as heck, but she seems like she could be a friend, and knowing she’s been around this long and is happy makes me a little less scared about my future.”
Happy, with Kaleo.
Christine’s retort to what she must have seen on all their faces was again swift. “Yes, she’s happy.” She started gathering up her own collection of pictures, as well as a handful of camera memory cards. She noticed a photo on the ground and paused before putting it aside.
Sarah glanced at the photo with idle curiosity. Christine didn’t seem distressed by the image, but Sarah found it more than a little disturbing.
The photo was old and scuffed and had hardly been high quality in the first place, but enough details were visible for Sarah to get the gist. The woman at the center was kneeling on the floor, one hand tenderly twined in the hair of a man she was kissing. Someone else was kneeling behind the woman; she was leaning trustingly back against him while his lips were locked onto her throat, over her pulse. With them was another woman, who was feeding at the victim’s free wrist.
Sarah shuddered. Christine said defensively, “There’s nothing wrong with donating blood. I mean, I wouldn’t mind, if it were someone I cared about.”
The implied offer made Sarah realize for the first time that the hunger was back. She had fed on powerful blood, but then she had spent most of the energy healing herself and Kristopher.
Nikolas saved her from needing to respond to Christine by reaching between them to pluck the picture from the table. He frowned at it before he told the human girl, “There’s nothing wrong with donating, but don’t let Heather convince you there aren’t any dangers, either. You’re safe because you wear my marks, but that doesn’t mean all of my kind are always … kind.” He stared at the photograph, a dark but thoughtful expression on his face.
“Who is she?” Kristopher asked.
“You were with Nissa when Jerome started bringing her to our circuit,” Nikolas answered. He glanced at Sarah and then explained, “Jerome is an ally, but not someone I would call a friend. He likes to play with his prey, manipulating their emotions and making them completely dependent on him. Heather can be pretty … needy,” he said, obviously trying to be gentle for Christine’s sake, “but part of that is having been bonded to Kaleo for centuries. This girl was probably one of the worst addicts I have ever seen, and she was still completely human.”
“Did you ever—” Sarah broke off, realizing she didn’t want to know.
“I never fed on her,” Nikolas answered. “And I haven’t seen her in decades, so Jerome either tired of her or she gave her throat to the wrong person. Or both.” He looked at the photo again and then put it into his pocket. “I’m going to catch up with Heather and return this.”
He disappeared.
Nikolas’s description had obviously unsettled Christine a bit, but she shrugged at his disappearance and said, “Heather made it pretty clear that we’re the lucky ones. Kaleo—” She choked out the word and swallowed before continuing. “She says he treats her well, and protects her. I know not everyone has it so easy.” She looked directly at Sarah as she said, “Heather agrees that you’ll be one of the good ones. You risked yourself to save her. It made an impression.”
Sarah had the sense to control her first response and try to swallow the compliment. It was nice that someone thought she would be a good person even as a vampire, but she wasn’t sure Heather’s judgment was exactly sound.
“Unfortunately, many of our kind don’t make much of an effort to take care of the bonds other than their own,” Kristopher said when Sarah struggled to think of a reply. “I have a feeling you’ll never be that type. It’s something you and Nissa have in common.”
The memory that flashed through his mind—and Sarah’s—in that moment was of Nissa’s horrified reaction the first time she killed. The human she had fed on had abused his hosts’ hospitality at a bash in Kaleo’s circuit. Specifically, he had insulted Nissa, with Kaleo, Nikolas and Kristopher looking on. He never would have survived the night, but that didn’t change Nissa’s reaction when she realized she had taken too much.
Kristopher ripped his mind away from the memory—or tried. He couldn’t turn away from the memory of Nissa refusing to feed for weeks, or of Nikolas’s expression when Kristopher told him he was leaving for a while.
Kristopher stepped back, averting his gaze from Sarah’s.
Oblivious to the images running through both of their minds, Christine announced, “I’m going to head to bed. My body can’t seem to decide if it wants to be nocturnal or not lately.”
They both watched her walk away, and they both wanted to call her back to act as a buffer between them. There were too many dark thoughts on Kristopher’s mind that he couldn’t stop and couldn’t hide.
If he had just stepped in at that party and stopped Nissa, she never would have punished herself that way. No one in the room had paused to consider how Nissa would react to taking a human life, least of all him. He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Sarah. But what would be the mistake? She had been a Vida; she had been a killer most of her life. Who was he to judge?
Is that really how he sees me? Sarah wondered.
Suddenly, Kristopher’s thoughts focused, as he made what he felt to be a significant decision.
Enough of this, he thought. There are better things in this life.
Sarah’s instinctive reaction was unease, and she almost spoke to distract him, before he said, “I have an idea. It’s Saturday. In a couple hours, dozens of curtains will be going up in the city.” He said “the city” as if Sarah should know which one he meant. “Our people are safe. We’ve done all we can do for now. So let’s go out.”
Sarah blinked at him in confusion. What did anything he was saying have to do with anything that had occurred so far that morning? “Out … where?”
“To a show,” Kristopher said. “Maybe a musical—something light, anyway. What would you like to see?”
She almost said, I have never been to a musical in my life. I have no idea what I would like to see. Then the absurdity of the suggestion caught her, and without her will she said, “Are you insane?”
CHAPTER 16
SATURDAY, 4:40 P.M.
ADIA RETURNED TO the Makeshift near dusk. The sun set early that time of year, and heavy clouds had rolled in during the day, leaving the world far darker than it should have been at not even five in the evening. The bookstore was still open, bustling with humans who probably didn’t have a clue what kinds of creatures inhabited the place after dark. Unfortunately, Jerome was not present.
He might not have been awake yet, but she was impatient. Sitting on the hood of her car, she dialed the number he had given her. If he didn’t pick up, she could leave a message asking him if he wanted to get dinner. She was sure he would oblige once he woke.
As the phone rang, she watched a family with three young children spill out of the closing bookstore. The youngest was waving a book with a blue monster on the cover above his head triumphantly. To Adia, it seemed like a strange sight. She was used to visiting diners and cafés late at night
, when her prey was about and there were no children with pom-poms on their knit hats.
When she had been in high school, she had complained about spending time doing “stupid human things” that had nothing to do with her real work. Dominique had given long lectures on discipline and perseverance, while Adia had limped, exhausted, through the school day. There had been no excuses, not for failed fights and not for failed tests.
Never excuses.
She had graduated high school with a grade point average of 3.8.
She had also graduated with a long scar down her back, from her shoulder blade to her hip, gained in a fight in a rundown lot. A vampire had thrown her on top of a mess of junk, then grabbed her arm to pull her up; he had dragged her across a jagged piece of scrap metal.
She had won the fight, eventually. She had bandaged herself, grateful that her kind couldn’t get tetanus or hepatitis. And she had never told her mother.
“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 firs
t 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.”
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