All Just Glass

Jerome looked at Adia, who pulled away from him and Zachary to stand on her own.

“I want you to call the lines together again, and declare the Rights of Kin satisfied,” Adianna said.

“I can’t just decide—”

“You called them,” Zachary interrupted. “You can declare satisfaction, and it will be over.”

Only upon hearing Zachary speak did emotion start to rise again: anger. She grasped at it and the righteous indignation that she had used for years to keep her moving when she wanted to stop, and let herself fall apart.

“How can you stand here, next to that thing, and talk to me about it being over?”

Adianna continued as if she had never spoken, giving her nothing against which to keep arguing.

“And then,” she said, “while the lines are still there, I want you to step down as matriarch of the Vida line. If you do not … if you cannot, I will call you to trial for crimes against the line.”

“Dommy.” Jerome stepped forward. Dominique tried to pull back again, but was already against the wall. He caught her hands, and she didn’t seem to have the will to take them away again.

Once upon a time, she would have followed him anywhere. She had believed him when he had spun stories about how she could be more than just a Vida, about how she deserved more than the narrow life her family wanted to define for her. She had trusted him when he had said he would take care of her.

“This isn’t like last time,” he said.

“Please,” Frederick begged her. “I can’t live like this.” He dropped to his knees and clasped his hands behind his back, saying that one word over and over as tears tracked through the dried blood on his face. “Please.”

She yanked her hands out of Jerome’s and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

He never turned away from her, but stepped carefully back. He knew she would kill him if only she could make her body move.

After Frederick had died—after she had killed Frederick—she had tried to convince Jacqueline not to make the same mistake. They had both been wild; Jacqueline had a shapeshifter boyfriend her mother never knew about, who had been trying to convince her to give up the hunting. Dominique had tried to warn her.

The last time Jacqueline had stormed out, she had been gone seven months. She had left behind her Vida blade and a note saying she wasn’t coming back. Human police had found her body, with a broken neck and drained of blood, at a club she used to frequent.

“Dominique?” Adianna asked.

Dominique looked at her oldest daughter, and it was like a stranger was standing there. A few days earlier, Adianna had told her Sarah was carrying on with a creature from her school. Sarah had come home, and all Dominique had been able to see was herself, walking into the house ready for a fight, and Jacqueline, sneaking out to see her shapeshifter suitor.

“I’m going to step out now,” Jerome announced. “Someone let me know how it goes.”

He disappeared. Dominique stared at where he had been, unwilling to turn her gaze back to the two hunters standing before her.

“Dominique.” Adianna’s voice cut like a blade, even more so when she said, “Mother. Please. I don’t know what you’ve done or what you think you’re guilty of, but I am your daughter, and I forgive you. But you must step down. We cannot continue this way, or we will not survive.”

“Would you have us give up everything we are, to survive?”

“We don’t even know what we are,” Zachary replied softly. He drew a deep breath and then announced, “I’m going to go ring Olivia. Adia, let me know when you’re calling the lines.”

He said the words with mock calm, but Dominique could see the tremble in his back as he walked away. She knew Olivia. Jerome and Olivia were a team.

She felt like she was drowning. She looked up at Adianna’s bright blue gaze, and the shame and horror was bile in her throat. She realized that her nails were cutting crescents into her crossed arms. Once—or, more accurately, a hundred or more times—she would have called to Jerome when she felt like this. She would have put herself in his arms and he would have taken away every emotion she could possibly feel.

Leaving him had been hard. Not going back to him, on hands and knees if necessary, after Jacqueline’s death had been nearly impossible. Every moment of every day, she had fought to keep his face out of her mind and his voice out of her head, had fought not to hear him say, “Just relax, luv. It’s all right.”

Now she had no choice but to feel it all.

She wasn’t even sure she knew how.

EPILOGUE

SUNDAY, 6:15 A.M.

ZACHARY BREWED COFFEE as dawn light began to seep through the windows at Olivia’s apartment. Normally, he was a tea drinker, but this was a bitter morning.

Olivia wrapped her arms around his waist from behind.

“No word yet?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Dommy will do what she needs to do,” Jerome said from the couch, where he was flipping through one of Olivia’s books on human psychology. “She’s a practical girl that way.”

“I still can’t believe the two of you had a relationship,” Jay remarked as he accepted a cup of coffee from Zachary. “Is this handmade?” he asked Olivia as he paused to admire the mug. She smiled and nodded. “It’s beautiful.” Returning to the subject, he added, “I mean, she’s Dominique the indomitable. Even I can’t read her most of the time. It’s like the emotions just aren’t there. I have a hard time picturing her as a wild, rebellious partygoer.”

Across the room, Robert laughed, a bitter, barking sound. The human had been cautiously excited when Christine had called him and asked him to join them all for breakfast and news at Olivia’s. “It’s like the straight-A Catholic school kid who goes out and gets drunk every weekend,” he said. “You can’t be that tightly wound without going a little nuts.”

“More like a recovering alcoholic violently preaching sobriety,” Olivia suggested. “Dommy used us to hide, and to relax. The only way to give that up was to remove any possible temptation.”

“She could have just stayed with us, if she was that unhappy with her real life,” Heather suggested sleepily from her perch on the back of the couch, behind Jerome.

Jerome shook his head. “She blamed herself for too much. Frederick followed her one night, and one of our kind grabbed him while she was with me,” Jerome explained. “Olivia and I didn’t even know about it until he showed up the next night with fangs, telling Dommy he couldn’t live this way. He begged her to kill him. She tried to say no, but he kept telling her she owed it to him, that he wouldn’t be this creature if not for her. It was like she shut down. I don’t know what part of her she had to kill to put a knife in his heart, but she did it. Then she turned around, told me never to speak to her again and went home.”

“Poor Dommy.” Heather sighed. “She was such a sweet, addled little creature.”

The front door opened, admitting a bruised Adia and an exhausted Michael. All voices in the apartment hushed as everyone waited to hear what she would say. She looked around, not speaking until the rest of Olivia’s guests emerged from the bedrooms.

“Is it over?” Kristopher asked.

“It’s over,” Adia answered. “Dominique has declared the Rights of Kin satisfied. She won’t hunt you anymore.”

“She won’t hunt much of anyone anymore,” Michael said. “She announced that