“Hi,” she replied.
“This is awkward,” he said.
Michael giggled, the sound almost hysterical.
They were still all standing just out of striking distance from each other. She was pretty sure Michael and Jay had absolutely no intention of attacking her. Neither even looked inclined to draw a weapon. Zachary was probably waiting for a clear shot or a solid indication from her of whether she planned to fight.
She decided she was grateful that Zachary was the one there. She put her hands behind her back, clasping them together, sure that he wouldn’t hesitate. He would make it quick, and she would never see in his eyes the betrayal she imagined she would have seen in Adia’s.
The sound of shattering glass from the next room interrupted them an instant before she sensed Kristopher. Sarah instinctively fell back, unsure how to respond immediately. Michael’s eyes widened, and a look of betrayal crossed his face as he set Sarah’s knife down and drew his own. A hunter’s magic was twined to his primary blade; Michael would risk the low likelihood of Sarah’s retrieving the Vida knife, rather than try to fight with a 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.
The door burst open, and Zachary cringed, expecting Dominique. Instead, the eyes that swept the room, obviously taking in every detail of the wreckage and injuries, were Adia’s. Her voice was barely audible as she asked, “What happened?”
“Idiocy happened,” Jay answered. “I didn’t … up until the very end, I really didn’t think she would hurt us.”
“Don’t call it the very end,” Michael grumbled. “We’re not dead. But I second the notion of us being idiots. We should have been watching our backs. Zachary’s the only one who actually believed it was a trap. Jay and I were twiddling our thumbs like kids at a family reunion.”
“And the … the targets?” Adia asked. She looked pale, probably disgusted that they hadn’t yet reported any success in the face of such blatant mistakes.
Zachary tried to shake his head and push himself to his feet. He felt the world rush into silence; his lips tingled, cold, and black encroached on his vision. He stumbled, ending up back on the couch abruptly. Adia called his name and grabbed his arm to steady him.
“Lay back,” she said. “Put your feet up. How much blood did you lose?”
“A lot,” he snapped. Mentally chastising himself for the harsh response, he added, “Not enough to be in immediate danger.” With a sigh, he added, “I knew it had to be a trap, but I really wanted her to be here honestly. When I first sensed her, I thought maybe, just maybe, she was still Sarah enough to fall on the knife instead of inflicting another of those creatures on this world. It’s what made me hesitate. I had a perfect moment for a kill, but I thought I saw my cousin in her face.”
“Lay down, Zachary,” Michael said. “We all feel the same way, but if the brave Zachary Vida is admitting to weakness, we’re all screwed.”
The brave Zachary Vida. He worked hard to mimic the kind of hunter he wanted to be, and to present an image that was ruthlessly controlled, but it had all fallen apart recently. Had they not seen the way he had let the bloodbond get under his skin, or the way he had hesitated with Sarah—or worst, the way he had given up when he felt her fangs at his throat, and let her nearly kill him?
He had told himself and told himself what he knew was true: It’s not Sarah. It’s just a monster. But in the split second when he should have pushed the knife forward, something in him had decided to die instead.
“How many of them were there?” Adia asked. She had always been able to find reason in chaos, a trait that Zachary admired and tried with little success to emulate. He was a good fighter, but Adia could see patterns and come to conclusions faster than the rest of them, and kept her head no matter what the crisis.
“Three vampires,” Jay answered. “Nikolas, Kristopher and Sarah. One of the twins showed up first. It looked like Michael had it under control, so I went to help Zachary.” He looked at Michael as if for confirmation.
“I figured it was Sarah’s boyfriend,” Michael said, disdain heavy in his voice. “I didn’t even sense the second one until he was practically on top of me. There’s something weird about their auras. They get mixed up, so it’s hard to tell there are two of them.”
“Wait, then who …” She looked at Jay’s and Zachary’s injuries.
“Sarah,” Zachary said flatly. “I gave her an opening, and she took it.”
Jay nodded, indicating that the same had happened to him. Zachary had barely noticed when Jay had tried to join his fight with Sarah. She hadn’t even glanced away but had reached out and flung the Marinitch across the room. Zachary had heard him hit a wall but hadn’t seen more of him after that.
Adia crossed her arms but failed to suppress a visible shiver at the notion of Sarah’s being the one to inflict such damage.
“It isn’t much consolation,” Michael said, “but I think I may have taken down one of the twins. I have no idea which I managed to get a knife in, but getting rid of either one will make it exponentially easier to deal with the other. They fight as a team.”
“That’s something, at least.”
It was something they could tell Dominique so maybe she wouldn’t decide the three of them were a complete waste of space.
“Hey, what’s this?” Michael got up off the love seat to pick up something from the floor. The movement apparently was too much for him, though. He dropped his head as if dizzy and then rolled over onto his back and lay on the floor while he offered the item to Adia. “One of them must have dropped it.”
Adia looked at the item, which Zachary thought might be a photograph, and then held it at arm’s length before tossing it onto the end table next to him. “That’s sick,” she said.
Morbid curiosity forced Zachary to pick up the picture. The quality of the shot was bad, and the photograph had been scuffed, so it took a minute for his mind to make sense of the swatches of dark and light.
The stream of bright golden color turned into long blond hair. Dark shapes resolved themselves into two figures holding a blond woman gently as they both fed at her throat. Zachary couldn’t make out the details of anyone’s features.
“Sarah?” Jay asked, peering over the couch to see what Zachary held.
He shook his head numbly. “The picture’s too old for it to be Sarah,” he said. “But it could still be Nikolas and Kristopher. I guess they have a penchant for blondes.”
He dropped his head again and shut his eyes. Jay took the picture from his hand.
“It’s not a very useful shot, but should it go in the book anyway?” Jay asked, referring to the immense collection of notes and images that hunters had put together through the centuries to help them identify their prey.
They hadn’t decided before the door opened again, this time admitting the one person none of them wanted to face yet.
Dominique froze in the doorway, her cold gaze going from one hunter to the next. Disapproval was clear on her face. Zachary tried to sit up, but the dizziness warned him that standing to greet her would be a bad idea.
“I’ve already heard reports,” Adia said, preempting Dominique’s response. “It was a rough fight, but we sustained no losses, and it looks like we have eliminated one of our targets. Also, I have identified a potential contact, so we have a plan for our next move.”
Adia was the consummate liar, Zachary knew. He didn’t think he had ever seen her turn her ability to manipulate people, situations and information against her own mother, but maybe he just hadn’t ever noticed. She wouldn’t have made up the possibility of a contact entirely, but he wondered if she would stretch the truth a bit to make their successes look more impressive that day. Given that possibility, he knew that right then was not a good time to ask who the contact was or how useful he or she might be.
“And that?” Dominique asked, nodding at the photograph that Jay was still holding.
“One of the vampires dropped it,” Jay answered, handing it over.
Dominique’s reaction was like Adia’s, instant revulsion visible despite her normal reserve. Zachary, disturbed, had to avert his gaze. It wasn’t that he didn’t know perfectly well why any Vida would be disgusted by the bloodbonds and sycophants who willingly bared their throats to the vampires. He just couldn’t stand to see such a reaction from Dominique.
He rubbed at his own throat, remembering. Sarah hadn’t just fed from him. She had gripped his mind and sent him deep into the bliss that Heather had recently described. If Dominique had known any of the thoughts that had passed through his mind as the blood had flowed out, that disgust on her face would surely have been directed at him.
He wanted to hate Sarah for what she had done to him, but he kept recalling the me
mories she had dragged from both of their minds.
I don’t know if I can kill her, he thought as Dominique said, “Foul.” She ripped the photograph in half. “Probably left intentionally to make us think of Sarah. This isn’t how I want my daughter remembered.”
She methodically tore the photo apart. It was the most sentimental thing Zachary had ever seen her do.
He realized he was rubbing his neck again, and shuddered. Dominique glanced at him, her expression back to the calm disapproval he was used to from her, but she didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, his shiver could have been caused by low blood pressure.
“What’s next?” Dominique asked Adia.
“Next …” Adia paused, thinking on her feet. “Zachary, Michael and Jay will all need some recovery time. I made a contact at that bookstore that may be able to lead us to our remaining targets, but first we need to relocate. If our targets are going to be launching full-scale attacks on us, we should be somewhere less well known and better fortified, at least until we’re back to our peak strength. I assume we have a safe house that Sarah doesn’t know about.” Dominique nodded. Adia pondered a moment longer, then shook her head, declining to continue with her plans. “I think that needs to be our first move. Once we’re there, we can recover our strength. Everyone gather only what you need. I don’t want to stay in this house any longer than necessary.”
Dominique didn’t look happy with the delay, and Zachary took the blame for that upon himself, but she didn’t argue with the daughter she had put in charge of this mission. Fortunately, though Zachary had been planning to stay with Dominique as long as necessary, he had not yet unpacked his bags. It would be easy to go somewhere else. One house, one bed, one table, was like any other.
CHAPTER 11
SATURDAY, 8:20 A.M.