All Just Glass

Jerome was kneeling over her. It was remarkable that someone who didn’t need to breathe could give another individual breath, but she wasn’t quibbling right then. She was alive, and she was breathing, which was not the normal expected result of being throttled by an angry vampire.

That meant something had gone right.

“She’s okay?” Zachary stood behind Jerome, who looked back and nodded. Adia started to ask him something, but the bruises on her throat choked off her first attempt. Zachary guessed the question and said, “I keep meaning to take a CPR lesson, but I haven’t gotten around to it.”

“Yeah, somewhere in your dallying about as a bleeder you got some funny survival priorities,” Adia said, or at least tried to say. It came out as a squeak. That was for the best. She was happy to be alive, but the near- death experience was making her grumpy.

More composed, she managed to whisper, “Where are the others?”

“Kendra and Jay both showed up,” Jerome answered. “They tried to convince Nikolas and Kristopher that Sarah wouldn’t want your neck broken. I’m not sure they were convinced, but Kendra grabbed them each by the scruff and disappeared with them. Jay took Sarah out.”

“Jerome called me when he realized you had gone to talk to Sarah,” Zachary said. “He said you might need my help, but I couldn’t get inside in time.” If Jay had gotten there first, he must have disregarded Adia’s orders. He must have known what she had planned. “I think Michael is still at his post,” Zachary added. “The second act hasn’t even begun yet.”

Funny how being strangled into unconsciousness affected one’s sense of time. Logically, she knew she couldn’t have stopped breathing for more than a couple of minutes, but the thoughtless darkness seemed so long.

Zachary never asked why Jerome was there. Maybe he was just used to vampires showing up to extract him from tricky situations, and assumed Jerome was once again here because of him.

Jerome, however, had known the plan; Adia had called him from the car. Now he said, “We have another rendezvous to make. Adia, are you up to it?”

“I’m a Vida,” she answered. There wasn’t any choice. This needed to be done now. She had fulfilled her vow.

A wave of dizziness hit her, and Jerome and Zachary simultaneously reached for her, each catching one arm.

“Would you like some ice?” Jerome offered.

“Later.”

“Where are we going?” Zachary asked.

“Dominique should be at the restaurant, waiting for us,” she said. “I told her to meet me.”

Zachary hesitated, nearly tripping them all up. She heard him swallow before he said, “I see.”

He kept walking with them, but he did so with a heavy step.

The three of them crossed the lobby. Jerome flashed a smile at the guys working there, who nodded back in a familiar way. They looked puzzled but accepted Jerome’s assurances that everything was all right. Adia was unsurprised that they knew him well enough to trust his word, given she had already been told that Kendra herself owned this theater.

Zachary balked just before the doorway to the restaurant’s private room, saying under his breath, “Adia …”

“Come on, Zimmy,” Jerome said, reaching over Adia to pat Zachary on the shoulder. “Be brave.”

“Did you really kill Fredrick Kallison?” Zachary blurted out.

The question sounded as if it had been simmering for a long time, possibly years.

Jerome hesitated but then shook his head.

“No,” he said as he pushed the door open ahead of them. “She did.”

The “she” in question, who was waiting for them, turned in the middle of a demand. “Adia, Zachary …” Adia could tell exactly when Dominique saw Jerome. It was as if Dominique’s mind refused to process what she was seeing right away. The words kept coming, with an empty sound, despite the horror on her face. “I don’t appreciate being … being ordered to meet you.… Is it … You said you would find Sarah tonight.… I … oh, my god.”

She stumbled backward until her shoulders were pressed against the far wall, her eyes locked on Jerome.

Jerome greeted her with a smile and a “Hello, luv. It’s been a while.”

Zachary looked from Dominique to Jerome, his eyes going wide. He stammered, “You … sh-she … I thought …”

He looked at Adia with desperation, hope and resignation nakedly warring on his face. He had thought she was about to turn him in.

“I did as I swore I would,” Adia said to Dominique. She had to clear her throat, but managed to continue at an audible level. “Now, Mother, I think we need to talk.”

In the moment when Adianna and Zachary walked through the door with Jerome, Dominique Vida saw her life flash before her eyes.

She saw herself on a city street at night, a pink rose falling in front of her feet from a balcony several stories up. She saw herself blushing furiously when, after she had sneaked into a club to get away from her mother for a night, someone who should have been her prey asked her to dance. There had been a shouting argument with her mother that afternoon, and she had been angry and hurt, so she had said, to hell with it, and she had danced with him.

And over weeks, he had courted her. There had been flowers, and candy, and dancing, and one night it had seemed natural when he pulled her close to just lean her head back. She had wanted to know what it felt like. She had needed to know why, when she was hunting these monsters, so many humans were running after them, begging to be used as a midnight snack even if it meant risking their lives.

Now here he was, in front of her, with the daughter whose birth had made Dominique swear up and down that she could be better, stronger, perfect, so her children would never need to go through the same thing, and the nephew she had promised her dead sister she would always take care of.

“Frederick is a good hunter. He’s a good match for you.”

“He has the personality of a ferret,” she replied. “I’m going out.”

“You are not going out. You have—”

“Bye!”

Another night. She met Jerome down the street, swung a leg over his Harley-Davidson and tucked her head down against his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his waist and made herself forget the fact that he didn’t have a heartbeat. Hers beat fast enough for both of them, right?

The speed and the wind swept the sound of her mother’s voice out of her ears.

He brought her to a party, to a place where she wasn’t Dominique Vida, hunter, but just Dommy, a pretty girl who got to dance, and play, and flirt, and go wild. And when it was too much, and the ringing of expectations in her ears was too loud, she could go to him and bare her throat and he could make it all disappear in a haze.

“You told me you would leave me alone,” she said to Jerome. Her voice sounded flat in her ears, not from Vida control, but from the absolute inability to summon any energy or emotion at all.

There was no use denying that she knew him. There was no reason Adianna and Zachary would bring him here unless they already knew the truth. She had seen the horror on Zachary’s face before he had composed himself.

Now they were standing there with expressions like glass, smooth and flawless and fake, and she knew it because she was the one who had taught them how to wear those masks.

“I owed some favors to some friends,” he answered.

“What do you want?”

Was it fear she was feeling? Or perhaps something more like relief? She couldn’t tell. She felt like she was walking through a dreamscape, with someone else speaking for her.