Now Adia. He had seen the look of disgust on her face. If he lost her, too …
Olivia held him silently until the sobbing ceased; then she stood and quietly poured the now-boiling water for the tea she had promised.
He leaned over the cup, inhaling the steam, unable to meet Olivia’s gaze.
“Better?” she asked.
“Probably never.”
She sighed again. “Why do you do this to yourself?”
“I owe it to my family,” he replied. Had always replied. They were all he had, after all. “After Dominique took me in—”
“Dominique.” Olivia snickered, a sound that contrasted with her normally soft, gentle image. “Even the indomitable Vida matriarch isn’t perfect, you know.”
“I know.” He remembered all too well the terrible days after Fredrick had died. “But I have to try, the way she does.”
Olivia kissed his throat, and he let her, even though he knew that if she took his blood, it would probably kill him. He had lost too much to Sarah, too recently. But of course Olivia knew that and knew she had to control herself.
Heather’s words came back to him. He remembered the way her eyes had flashed as she had tried to unsettle them all by describing her life.
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?
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?
If only she had known. If she hadn’t scrambled Jay’s mind so much with whatever she had shown him, Zachary’s secret surely would have been revealed right then, because he knew exactly why the bloodbond had stayed with Kaleo all this time. As it was, Jay had picked up on Zachary’s relationship with Olivia, even if he hadn’t gotten the more sordid details.
I have seen hundreds of humans pass through, willing to die, willing to give up everything, just to experience that bliss.
When his cell phone rang, he pulled it out of his pocket and then just stared at it as Adia’s number flashed on the front. He wanted to put it away. Couldn’t they just leave him alone for a night?
He wasn’t ready to talk to her again, to face her. He didn’t think he ever would be ready.
Still, he hit the “talk” button and said, “Hello.”
“Is now a bad time?” she asked.
Now was a bad time, but that wasn’t really what she was asking. She wanted to know if she could talk frankly.
“Now’s fine,” he said. “Adia, I—”
“You are not going to apologize, or say a single freaking word about it right now,” Adia interrupted. “If you need to talk, we’ll talk when the job is done. In the meantime, I need you to pull it together and be at my back. Can you do that?”
He looked up at Olivia and met her steady gaze for several seconds before saying, “I can do that.”
“Good. Then meet me at Michael’s place, as soon as you can get there. We’re ending this thing tonight.”
Michael’s apartment was in New York City. Had he located Sarah or the twins there? Adia obviously believed she knew where their targets would soon be.
“It’ll take me three or four hours to get there.”
“Then we’ll make it by intermission.”
Could it really be over so soon? And when it was done, what then? Adia knew the truth about him. So did Jay. He wouldn’t be able to stay around, but he didn’t know what else to be, or how else to live.
Adia hung up without saying goodbye.
“Where are you headed?” Olivia asked as Zachary put his phone back into his pocket and stood.
He shook his head. She knew he never told her outright where his hunts took him.
“Judging by the time, the people involved, and the mention of intermission, I’m guessing you’re headed to Broadway,” she said.
“Guess whatever you like,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Zimmy, you know I have no power to interfere with Kendra in Manhattan, right?”
He hesitated in the doorway and then shrugged. “I do now.”
He felt calmer when he sat behind the wheel of his car. Adia had said it would be over that night. Maybe then he could rest for a while.
CHAPTER 22
SATURDAY, 6:29 P.M.
SARAH FELT ABOUT as stupid as she ever had in her life, sitting in front of the full-length mirror while Christine did her hair. Christine had insisted on helping, and short of shoving her down the stairs, Sarah couldn’t figure out how to convince her otherwise.
The evening had taken a surreal turn somewhere. Maybe it had been when she had tasted a symphony, or when she had spoken to Michael, but she was pretty sure it had happened somewhere on Madison Avenue, on a rack between Chanel and Vera Wang.
Going shopping for formal wear in New York with a vampire who had once founded a mystery cult in the days of the Roman republic, and who tended to chatter about the fall of empires in the tone most people used when discussing the weather, was a unique experience. Kendra referred to Nikolas as “Nikki,” a nickname she claimed he hated. She also referred to Tizoc Theron, one of the most powerful mercenaries in all of vampiric existence, as her “Tizzy.” The Inquisition was “a dreadful inconvenience,” World War II was “a little spat” and the fall of Midnight, the vampiric empire that had reigned for centuries, was “an unfortunate event.”
If Sarah lived two thousand years, maybe she would look back and agree. For now, the sentiments were almost as unsettling as the expression on Kendra’s face when one of the shop managers—who had instantly appeared to wait on Kendra when she had crossed the threshold—presented a dress she found unattractive.
Now Sarah was in a turquoise dress with a neckline slightly lower than she was used to but, fortunately, no eighteenth-century-style hoops—something she had been a little worried about, given the individuals she was going with. Even better, she was almost certain no one had died in her acquisition of the dress, or in the search for shoes to match it.
“You look far away,” Christine remarked.
Sarah tried to pull herself back to the moment. “Did you know Nero played the lyre, not the fiddle?” she asked. “There was no such thing as a fiddle yet.” The misconception about which musical instrument Nero had played while Rome burned was apparently one of Kendra’s pet peeves.
“Um, okay,” Christine answered, pulling Sarah more truly into the correct time and place.
“I feel like an idiot,” Sarah said aloud for the first time.
“You look beautiful,” Christine insisted.
“Not because of that.” Sarah shook her head. “Despite people trying to kill me, I just spent two hours shopping. With, I’m pretty sure, an outright psychopath.”
“That’s most of the line, or so I’ve heard,” Christine murmured, her tone so dry Sarah actually laughed.
“Where do I fit in, then?” she asked.
Christine shrugged. “Wherever you want to. What show are you seeing?”
“I don’t remember.” The name had been meaningless to her. She was hoping Kendra was right that she would like it, but wasn’t convinced that her tastes and those of a millennia-old vampire were likely to be the same.
When someone knocked on the door, Sarah called out, “Come in,” without realizing that it was still an hour before the time Kristopher had agreed to pick her up. Christine tensed, and this time Sarah was the one to put herself between the human and the vampire, making no attempt to hide her anger.
“What do you want?” she snapped at Kaleo.
Kaleo quirked one brow. “I’m not here to hurt the girl. I just need to speak to you, Sarah.”
“Out! In the hall.”
The Roman looked amused by the order but obeyed, which Sarah found a little unsettling. She took a minute to reassure Christine and then followed Kaleo.
“Nikolas and Kristopher aren’t here,” she said fla
tly. “So what do you want?”
“Are you under the impression you are such a nonentity that I could not possibly be here to speak with you?” Kaleo asked.
“If you have something to say to me, then just get on with it. You freak the hell out of Christine just by being here.”
“Kendra mentioned you are going to a show tonight,” Kaleo said.
“Yeah, she does like to chat,” Sarah quipped.
Kaleo glared. “Do not confuse Kendra with some of our line. She may appear outwardly indifferent to reality, but she has been one of the driving forces behind the rise and fall of empires for two thousand years. She has a fondness for Nikolas, a passing fondness for Kristopher, and thus far a limited tolerance of you that extends just far enough for her to suggest I might want to pass on a message.”
The sharp words were enough to make Sarah step back and attempt to control her temper long enough to listen rationally. “You don’t strike me as the errand-boy type,” she said, not as an attempt to insult, but in a search for Kaleo’s agenda. He did not seem likely to blithely agree to deliver messages.
“I may not like you, and I am certain you do not like me, but like it or not, we share blood. Beyond that, you risked yourself to save Heather, and I trust that you would do the same for any of our people. Your blood and your actions make you kin to me, and so I chose to come here to warn you.”
Sarah nodded, taken aback by his tone and the absolute sincerity behind it. It was hard to reconcile this Kaleo with the one who had tortured Christine and killed the Ravenas’ father. Of course, it was hard to reconcile the Nikolas she now knew with who she had once thought him to be.
For now, she accepted the tentative truce implied in the words.
She hadn’t entirely resigned herself to the idea that living in this world meant not killing him, but if he insisted on talking like he gave a damn about his human bonds and the others Sarah cared about, she feared she might start hating him a little less.
Kaleo continued. “Michael has spoken to other hunters,” he said. “They do not know what theater you will be in, but they know you plan to rendezvous with the Arun afterward. Kendra has elected not to stop the hunters forcefully, because she believes it is a confrontation that will happen sooner or later. She has asked that you try not to disrupt the play”—he quirked his mouth in a half smile—“but understands if it cannot be helped. She assures me that there would be no way to smuggle a large weapon into the theater, but would like me to remind you that not all hunters insist on engaging their prey up close, and the streets can be exposed.”
Though the Vida line preferred close contact in a hunt, she knew crossbows were favored by some hunters—the kind who would shoot the silent weapon from a rooftop or a higher window, or even across a crowded theater if they could get the weapon inside.
“Do you need to sit?” Kaleo suddenly asked.
The solicitousness seemed out of place until Sarah realized she had not responded to his warning, and several seconds had gone by.
Long before their short fling, Michael had been her best friend. But this new life of hers was full of betrayals by those from the former one, so why was this surprising?
As Kendra, through Kaleo, had said, this confrontation had to happen sometime.
Inanely, Sarah said, “I had actually started to look forward to seeing the show.”
“Then go,” Kaleo replied. “Watch the play. I would simply advise not idling long on the streets.”
He made it sound so simple. But maybe something good could come of this. She had promised Nikolas and Kristopher, and more importantly herself, that she would not give up her life, but in a public area owned by such a powerful figure, surely she would have some room to negotiate. Perhaps she could find an opportunity to plead her case. There had to be a way to convince those who had been her friends and family that she was still who she had been only days before.
“What’s wrong?” were Kristopher’s first words as he walked into the room where Sarah had not too long before been primping, and where she was now sitting on the bed, no longer worried about wrinkling the beautiful dress before Kristopher came to pick her up. She just looked at him. She knew he had been angry when he had left.
Since then, she had fed for the first time. She had experienced something wonderful. Then she had seen an old friend, briefly experienced the hope for forgiveness and acceptance, only to have that crushed. After Kaleo had left, she had spent nearly half an hour helping Christine calm down while trying to fight the yawning void in her own gut.
He hadn’t been there for any of that, and she couldn’t blame him. Nikolas had said Kristopher wasn’t hard enough to force her to feed, and he was probably right. He thought that if he could only convince her this life was worth living, the rest would take care of itself. He didn’t understand that the first steps of survival were too much to take on her own, no matter what she wanted.
He and Nikolas had left their world behind when they had become vampires. They had even changed their names to mark the transition. It wasn’t as easy for her to stop being Sarah Vida, even if the Rights of Kin hadn’t been in play.
“Nikolas and Kendra are going to join us for the show. I’ll explain everything once your brother gets back.” She didn’t want to have to describe Michael’s betrayal twice. Nikolas was going to meet them at home, but Kendra had said she would catch up with them at the theater, so there would be time for them to talk.
“Okay.” She could still sense Kristopher’s concern, but he was willing to let it drop if she wanted it to. “Where is Nikolas?”
“Talking to some contact,” Sarah said, vague because he had been vague with her. “He has a plan, but hasn’t explained it to me. He promised he would be back in time for the show, though.”
Kristopher didn’t object to Nikolas’s joining them, or even ask when that had been decided, and there wasn’t as much as a tendril of annoyance in response to his brother’s having invited himself along on their date. Sarah realized, quite suddenly, that she was irritated by that—not that Kendra and Nikolas had invited themselves, but that Kristopher just accepted it as a matter of course, even without knowing that Kendra had been involved in the decision.
“You look good,” she said, the compliment lame, but she couldn’t get more eloquent words past her throat.
Of course he looked good. Kristopher Ravena in a tux was a sight to see. She was glad Nikolas and Kendra had insisted that Sarah find something “appropriate,” or she would have been devastatingly underdressed. The beautiful man in front of her was like something out of a black-and-white magazine. He was standing before her, but impossible to touch.
He took the words as further invitation to change the subject and pretend everything was fine again. Holding out a hand to her, he said, “You look incredible yourself.”
She ducked her head, oddly shy, and admitted, “I kid you not, Kendra took me shopping.”
His eyes widened. “How on Earth did that happen?”
“Nikolas asked her to,” Sarah replied. “I gather he figured I would be hopeless to prepare myself adequately on my own.”
At that, there was a stab of something from him … not jealousy, but … guilt? “It’s okay,” she blurted out. “This whole thing has been hard on you, too. I can understand needing to get away for a bit.”
She said the words before she even fully processed the thoughts she had picked up from him. Nikolas had exaggerated the amount of help Nissa had needed, but Kristopher had stalled nevertheless, needing time to go over some of the same thoughts Sarah had found slashing through her brain.
She accepted his hand.
As he drew her closer, he observed, “You’ve hunted.”
Something made her hesitate to say Nikolas’s name again, but she knew that it was implied when she said, “I went to Phaethon.”
“Oh.” He reached up as if to run his fingers through his hair, and then seemed to remember that it was tied back tightly. When she had met him,
Kristopher’s hair had been chopped short, but it had been long when he was changed. Since he had rejoined his brother, his vampiric body had swiftly returned to its original state, and now he and Nikolas were again close enough that they were like reflections of each other. Even their auras were nearly identical, in the way they twined together.
And yet they were very different.
She had comforted him, because the feeling of his guilt had hit her so powerfully, but Kristopher was coming to the same realization she had already reached. Kristopher had changed her to save her life. Before that, at most he had intended to bloodbond her—and that only because his brother had intervened. If it hadn’t been for Nikolas’s struggles to get his brother to return to him, Sarah would have driven Kristopher away, and that would have been the end of their relationship instead of the beginning.
“Kristopher—” she said at the same moment that Kristopher said, “I’m sorry, Sarah.”
“I should have …” His voice trailed off as he thought that he should have been the one to show her how to hunt, but he still hadn’t reconnected with all his contacts after his fifty years away. He wouldn’t have been confident enough to bring Sarah somewhere like Phaethon at a time like this. He had left to try to get his thoughts straight, at a time when he knew perfectly well that she needed him. She was new to this world, former Vida or not.
“Kristopher,” Sarah said firmly. She waited until he had pulled himself from his thoughts and was really looking at her before she continued. “We both made mistakes, which caused us to end up here, but that doesn’t mean you’re responsible for me from here to eternity. Going to one school dance together for a date that didn’t even work out doesn’t mean we’re destined to be together forever. I know that.”