All Just Glass

“I’ll do that, then,” Zachary said. He had forgotten to shield his thoughts when approaching the kitchen. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He would, however, take Jay’s advice. The shirt he was wearing still had blood on it from Heather’s X-Acto attack.

He had only a couple of outfits in this house—Dominique had asked him to stay here while they tracked Sarah, and he hadn’t brought many of his belongings—but that was fine, because to Zachary Vida, dressed could mean any clothing plus two things: a weapon and a woven silver chain with a white-gold pendant in the figure-eight symbol for eternity. The chain was his only remaining memento of his mother. The pendant had been a gift from another woman.

Dominique didn’t know either one existed, as both were always hidden by his undershirt, which was under the harness that held his primary knife at the small of his back.

Once fully dressed, he returned to the kitchen; he walked in just in time to see Dominique backhand Heather. Robert grabbed the witch’s arm and dragged her away from the bloodbond, earning a cold warning expression that made even the foolhardy human take a step back.

“This isn’t going to help anything,” Robert protested. “She already hates us. Beating her up isn’t going to make her like us more.”

“And you claim to be the good guys,” Heather snapped.

The expression on Dominique’s face was enough to make Zachary hesitate in the doorway. Though few other people would have noticed, Zachary could see the tension at the edges of her eyes and lips.

He would never ask about it, but he did wonder: Was there part of Dominique that was weakened by the loss of her daughter? Was there anywhere in her heart where she blamed herself? Could Dominique Vida feel regret, or was she just frustrated by the delay in catching her current prey?

Zachary understood impatience. When he had been eight, he had spent as many hours walking the colicky Sarah as he had training. He had warmed bottles at three in the morning and sung her to sleep when her father wasn’t home to do so. He had held her hands as she’d learned to walk, and grinned in a very un-Vida fashion as she’d learned her first fighting forms. Now every minute that passed was a minute when he failed her and let her dead body be violated.

He tried to strike the thoughts from his mind. That way lay the same kind of madness of grief that had gripped his mother after Jacqueline was taken, and a kind of shame he had no desire to share with the Marinitch next to him.

Perhaps too abruptly, he asked, “Jay, isn’t this what you’re here for?”

As frail as Heather looked, Zachary did not doubt that she would be willing to kill every one of them if given a chance. And she had certainly experienced worse abuse at Kaleo’s hands than Dominique was unleashing now —which meant Robert was right: this was a useless way of getting her to talk. Why wasn’t the damned telepath doing his job?

Jay turned in his seat to answer the question, naked gratitude on his face as he looked away from Dominique. “This one has been around vampires for a couple centuries, I’d guess. She knows how to obscure her thoughts. Anything you could do to her that is severe enough to disrupt her concentration would cause too much distress for me to read her past it.”

Dominique turned from the bond, just slowly enough to reveal that she was not satisfied with the single blow.

At that moment, however, Heather tossed her head. “You want me to talk? I could tell you things to give you nightmares. Worse, maybe I could give you happy dreams. Would you like to know what it’s like when one of them takes you? When you’re in their arms and they bare your throat and drink?”

Zachary stood very still and fought to keep his mind blank. Blank. Not filled with the images the bloodbond’s words evoked. Yet she continued.

“I’ve been told that Kendra’s line is the best at it, though naturally I’ve never experienced anything else. All I know is that nothing you can do to me here matters for more than a moment. I’ve had three hundred years, and even if you kill me today, I will always have something you will never have: peace. You call me a victim, but I think maybe I am the only one in this room who isn’t. Look in my head if you want to,” she said, challenging Jay. “I have seen hundreds of humans pass through, willing to die, willing to give up everything, just to experience that bliss. And not just humans. The Vida line isn’t immune, is it?”

Zachary had been staring, hypnotized, so it took him by surprise when Dominique hit the bloodbond again, this time hard enough to rock her head back and unfocus her eyes.

Heather spat blood onto the floor before saying, “Sarah liked it enough to die for it.”

Michael was apparently the only sensible person left in the room. He tore off another strip of duct tape and slapped it over Heather’s bruised mouth.

“I’m going out,” Dominique announced.

No one questioned her as she left. Dominique’s self-control and composure might be perfect, but even she had to be disturbed by such an accusation regarding one of her blood. Of course she would want to get away.

“Sarah’s dead?” Robert asked in the silence that followed. No one had told him why he had been called to Dominique’s house. And apparently, no one was in the mood to answer him now.

Zachary looked around, trying to focus on his surroundings and not on his thoughts. He found Jay sitting in the corner, not quite out of the room but as far from Heather as he could get without truly fleeing. Whatever he had seen in Heather’s mind in those moments had shut him down.

“We should just get rid of her,” Michael said. “As long as we are guarding her, we are not out hunting Nikolas and Kristopher, and any secure locations she knows about will be empty long before we pry the information out of her.”

“I thought this was a trap for Kaleo,” Robert said weakly. “Sarah can’t be dead. Heather was messing with us, wasn’t she?”

“This being a trap assumes the mass-murdering sadist cares enough about this particular human to risk his hide,” Michael said, ignoring the human, as they all were. “We have more important prey to track.”

“She absolutely believes that he will come,” Jay said softly as he pushed himself to his feet. “Whether or not she is right, I do not know.”

“Like it or not, she’s one of our only leads,” Zachary said. “I do believe Kaleo will come for her, and even if he doesn’t lead us to our targets, removing him will make hunting them easier. We also need her in case Adia’s trip to the bookstore doesn’t pan out. After she gets home, she can decide what we do with this one.”

“ ‘This one’?” Jay echoed. “You’re trying so hard to distance yourself from her mentally, you can’t even stand to see her as human, can you?”

“She barely is human,” Michael replied. “After a couple hundred years, a bloodbond gets to be a lot more like a vampire. They get strong, and fast, and some of them even feel the bloodlust. If we give her a chance, she will kill us all.”

“Not all bloodbonds—”

“Shut up, Robert,” Zachary snapped.

“Did Nikolas kill Sarah?” Robert asked, gaze level and nearly empty.

Zachary nodded.

“He’s got my sister,” Robert said. “I thought … I thought she was safe with him.”

“The situation isn’t quite as clear-cut as it seems,” Jay said.

“Shut up, Marinitch,” Michael advised. “We don’t need you playing shrink with us.”

“I’m just trying to—”

Michael stood abruptly, his chair clattering to the floor behind him as he grabbed Jay by the shirtfront and shoved him back against the wall. “Trying to what?” the Arun said, challenging him. “Make us realize how hard this is? Trust me, we’ve got that covered. Zachary and I have known Sarah all her life. We trained with her and fought with her. We have watched each other’s backs in fights none of us would have survived on our own. You and Sarah have barely even been introduced. You think this is hard? You have no idea.”