All Just Glass

weapon tied to someone else.

How dare Kristopher come here? Sarah thought. Doesn’t he know how hard this already is?

Zachary said to the other hunters, “Check on it.”

Jay and Michael obeyed instantly, any disagreement between the three men now forgotten in the face of a threat.

If Kristopher was here, was Nikolas? The hunger had made her too unfocused to sense clearly. Had Heather somehow called them? How could she have had time? If he was here alone, Michael and Jay would kill him. He didn’t stand a chance. Those thoughts whipped through Sarah’s mind, and she moved toward the kitchen, intending to cut off Michael and Jay, as she shouted mentally at Kristopher, Get out of here!

The answer that slapped her with its intensity was, unequivocally, No!

She didn’t have time for anything more. Seeing her move, Zachary reacted; she barely managed to dodge the knife she should have known was coming.

They had fought countless times. They knew each other’s weaknesses. His power was more of a danger to her now that she was a vampire; her strength and speed, however, were greater than they had been when she had been a witch.

On the other hand, she had one serious handicap: she didn’t want to kill him. She wanted to incapacitate him quickly, without doing permanent damage. Even if she no longer agreed with everything she had been taught growing up, the world needed hunters—and she would never kill someone who had been her family. Zachary might have been able to sever the connections in his heart, but she didn’t think she would ever be able to do the same.

It was very hard to be careful when she had been trained all her life to kill. She didn’t dare try to reach her knife. A blade would only remind her body of deadly habits.

Behind Zachary, she saw two figures move past the doorway. She wasn’t close enough or sufficiently focused to tell if it was Nikolas or Kristopher who Michael had just dragged through her line of sight, one arm around the vampire’s neck as if in a stranglehold. It was impossible to tell from the glimpse if Michael had a knife in play, or if it had been lost, and she had no idea what Jay was doing.

In her moment of distraction, Zachary lunged. She dodged but not quite quickly enough; his knife tore a gash deep into her shoulder. The wound cut through the rose scar as if striking it out, and the poisonous magic in the blade sent agony down to her fingertips and then swirling toward her core.

She had been trained for many years to experience pain and push it out of her mind until she had the chance to deal with it. She had been taught to focus no matter what other stimuli were around.

Something went wrong.

The pain and anxiety and frustration and fear all mingled in the spot where her heart now sat silent and unused except by the parasite that gave her life, and suddenly she beheld the world through a haze. Her mind stopped tracking details and intentions, like protecting Kristopher without killing Zachary. She moved. They fought in a whirlwind. When Jay tried to join on Zachary’s side, she managed to get just enough of a grip on his arm to throw him into the wall, hard. She paid only enough attention to see someone else engage him before returning her focus to the more dangerous witch.

Zachary got past her guard. She twisted just enough for the knife to miss her heart, but it cut into her stomach and sliced upward. Her eyes widened with shock, her body frozen for the moment with the pain. For the first time, Zachary’s eyes met hers, and in them she saw regret.

“I’m sorry, Cousin,” he whispered.

He hesitated.

She didn’t.

Snarling, mindless beyond the pain and the predator screaming in her head, she grabbed his wrist and squeezed until she felt it splinter. He shuddered, but he was a Vida. He didn’t cry out.

He had what she needed. She locked her prey’s wrists together in one hand, so slight and delicate but possessing a vampire’s terrible strength, and then with the other hand she pinned him in place and leaned his head to the side.

As if sensing his defeat, he went limp. In that last second, he didn’t fight her at all.

Warmth where she had been cold. Peaceful satisfaction where there had been gnawing hunger. She wasn’t fighting anymore. She was feeding, and the predator within her purred with triumph.

The voice seemed very far away, even though she knew it was screaming: “Sarah! ”

She growled without lifting herself away from her prey.

“Sarah, you have to let him go,” the voice pleaded. Hands tried to pull her back. “Sarah, he’s your cousin. You won’t be able to live with yourself if you kill him.”

CHAPTER 10

SATURDAY, 7:36 A.M.

ZACHARY WAS AWARE of nothing beyond the waves of need and satisfaction so deep they felt like love. His mind wandered, his memories skipping through events that he and Sarah had both experienced—moments of exhilaration, when they had fought together and known they were on top of the world.

At least, he thought, I’ll be dying with family.

When it stopped, he wanted to weep.

“You take her,” a familiar voice said. “Your brother needs her help. I will take care of this one.”

“Don’t kill him,” another voice said. “We came here to stop Sarah from doing something stupid, not to destroy everyone she once called family.”

“I won’t kill him. I’ll even call a healer, once the three of you are gone. Now go!”

Zachary managed to open his eyes just in time to feel himself lifted. He couldn’t raise a hand to defend himself, much less to shove the vampire carrying him away.

He couldn’t even raise any mental shields, so when the vampire looked at him and said, “Get some rest,” with a tiny nudge of power to go along with the command, Zachary fell into deep black sleep.

He woke on the couch with Caryn Smoke leaning over him, putting stitches into his side where Sarah had shoved his own knife back at him. It looked like she had already wrapped his wrist with a compression bandage. It had felt like Sarah had fractured his wrist, but it must have been minor enough for Caryn to mostly heal it before he woke.

“Don’t try to sit up yet,” she said, tying off the last stitch and taping a bandage over it. “There’s juice on the end table. You lost a lot of blood, but you’ll be fine.” She stood up and shook her head. “I’m going to head out, before I break an ancient vow of nonviolence by beating your head in. It’s your stupid Vida pride that led to all this.”

She stormed out. Zachary ignored the healer’s brief tirade as he had many times in the past, rubbed his neck and reached to take a large gulp of orange juice. He could afford to lose more blood than most humans, since his body, especially his heart, was strong enough to keep his systems going on very limited resources, but this had been a close call despite that.

He had been sure that this would be the last fight.

He looked up at Michael, who was stretched out with his eyes closed on the love seat, his feet up on the arm, his skin as pale as Zachary’s.

“Where’s Jay?” Zachary asked. When he had last seen the Marinitch, Sarah had just flung Jay across the room and into the wall.

“Here.”

It took far too much effort to turn his head, but when he did, he found Jay sitting on an end table. His arm was in a cast, but otherwise he looked better than Zachary or Michael.