The twins approached like avatars of fury.
One reached down and dragged her to her feet by her throat. “You traitorous little—”
“Nikolas!” the other protested.
“No, Kristopher,” the one choking Adia protested. “You do not protect her after—”
“Wait.”
The choked voice made everyone freeze. Adia raised a hand to try to peel the fingers off her windpipe, but knew better than to draw a knife even in her own self-defense at that moment.
The twins turned to look, Kristopher leaving Adia a wide-open shot if Nikolas hadn’t been careful to keep the hunter clearly under control. She wondered if Kristopher was careless, or just trusted his brother that much.
Adia had known that Sarah trusted her that much.
She felt her vision start to waver. The two twins became four in her blurry view.
“Hi, Sarah,” she wanted to say as the world went dark.
Adia saw their father’s body, but before she could even think what that meant, Sarah started screaming and throwing things. Adia tried to hold on to her and calm her down, but it wasn’t any use.
Sarah put her fist through one of the etched-glass panes on the doorway.
“There is no rainbow,” she declared.
Another punch, another pane, another concussion of sound followed by the gentle ring of the window’s remains falling to the ground.
“Sarah Vida!” their mother shouted, trying to get Sarah’s attention, but Sarah wasn’t listening. She seemed hypnotized by the window.
“No rainbows,” she said, tears streaking her face. “It’s all …”
Zachary was old enough and big enough that he finally managed to pull Sarah back before she could hurt herself more.
Weeping, Sarah whispered, “It’s all just glass.”
Adia woke with someone’s lips on hers. The instinct to protest was replaced by the need to start coughing, and only when she did, and the individual above her drew back, did she realize that he had been doing CPR. She had stopped breathing.
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.
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 Adia’s performance on this last mission was exemplary, and named Adia the new matriarch of the Vida line. Dominique has stepped aside. Evan Marinitch is convinced she is having a mental breakdown. She refuses to talk to him, so the Smoke witches are trying to convince her that a tropical vacation would be good for her health.”
“How do you feel?” Kristopher asked Adia.
She rubbed her bruised throat and then shrugged. “I’ve been worse. How ’bout you, Sis?”
Most of them turned to look at Sarah, who was standing with Nikolas a little behind Kristopher. She stepped into the room shyly and answered, “Grateful you’re as good as you are, but still like I took a knife to the heart. And I think Kendra is cross at me for bleeding on an eight-hundred-dollar dress.”
Kristopher added, “It would have been nice to know the plan a little earlier.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Jerome insisted.