“ADIANNA, YOU—” Dominique broke off when her oldest daughter turned to her with a focused expression.
“Yes?” she asked when Dominique paused, reminding herself that she had put Adianna in charge for a reason. Her daughters were—had been—adults, ready for authority, but she had kept them strictly under her command for too long. The recent disaster had made her realize that it was time to make adult responsibilities a little clearer.
She did believe that Adianna was capable, but defying old habits was still difficult.
“I can gather the books,” she said, changing her tone from commanding to offering. Even though they did not need the records to identify their current targets, leaving the heavy tomes behind was not an option.
Adianna nodded. “Yes, thank you.”
There were two books. One was an ancient tome of Vida law. Every witch of their line was required to study those pages, and needed to be able to recite each law word for word before she was given her primary weapon and named a full member. The second was a collection of notes and drawings about every vampire hunters had ever encountered, currently gathered in a giant binder.
Those invaluable records, representing centuries of knowledge, had been in horrendous shape when Dominique had first seen them, with information, sometimes in other languages, jotted down on scraps of paper, parchment and even bark, often worn, faded or crumbling beyond all readability.
She had sealed the salvageable drawings in archive-quality sleeves, laboriously worked with language experts to translate pieces no one had read in decades, and agonized over her first typewriter in an effort to transcribe and organize what could be read of the older, handwritten notes.
After Jacqueline’s death, locking herself away with the occasionally ancient, dusty texts had been soothing. Pregnant with her second child, she hadn’t been able to hunt. Sitting, doing nothing—indeed, being protected by an eight-year-old orphan child and the human she had married—had been infuriating. She had wanted nothing more than to call up old friends, whose companionship had always been comforting, if not entirely healthy.
She slid the drawing of the twin vampires into the proper acid-free sleeve and then gathered the books into a canvas bag.
Maybe she should have spent those months hunting instead. An unfortunate accident eighteen years earlier might have saved her daughter and nephew from learning what it meant to put a knife in someone they loved.
Please, Dommy.
She could almost hear his voice pleading with her.
Please. You owe me this.
She tried to chase the phantom away. He was long dead. She knew, because she was the one who had killed him. He hadn’t been strong enough to do it himself—just as Sarah wasn’t strong enough now.
“Did you manage to reach any of our other contacts?” Adianna asked, returning to the room with a duffel bag thrown over her shoulder.
Dominique shook her head, recalling with frustration how her many phone calls had gone. At first she had been able to reach most of the hunters she dialed. They were grumpy and groggy, often having just gone to bed, but they answered.
Some of them told her they would contact her if they got word, but made it clear they had no interest in joining the hunt. Others told her flat out to go to hell. Word must have traveled fast, because after the first round of attempts, she hadn’t reached anything but voice mail. The one contact who had asked to set up a meeting had then left a message saying he had changed his mind.
Traitors. They claimed moral objections, but the truth was they didn’t want to risk their hides hunting powerful prey, especially when it already knew all their names and faces.
“Our allies know what is going on, but I do not believe any of them will prove useful.”
Adianna shrugged, seeming unconcerned. “Might as well keep it in the family.”
She looked up into Dominique’s eyes as she said it. Her gaze held many questions and a silent plea of Don’t make me do this.
Adianna prided herself on her control, with good reason, but she was still Dominique’s daughter; she couldn’t hide perfectly when she looked into her mother’s eyes. But though Dominique saw the plea, Adianna clearly already knew she wouldn’t respond. They couldn’t afford to be sentimental that day.
Dominique would watch her and make sure she didn’t balk, because forward was the only direction that would get them through this. She wouldn’t let Adianna become another Jacqueline, whose impulsiveness and doubts had destroyed her, along with most of her family.
“I’m going to see if Zachary and Michael need help,” Adianna said, looking away. “They’re pretty worn down. You check on Jay.”
Adianna turned away without waiting for acknowledgement, a gesture Dominique knew had been learned from her. It didn’t leave any space for an argument, had Dominique wanted to make one.
Jay had arrived with a backpack and a small tote bag that held all his weaponry. When Dominique reached him, he had finished packing but was struggling with the zipper because of his broken arm.
She reached down to help without asking, or even looking directly at the empath. Nevertheless, he responded as his line tended to, with no regard for her obvious signals that she had no desire to engage in conversation.
“It isn’t your fault,” he said.
“A hunter shouldn’t try to be a therapist,” she said, zipping the backpack and tossing it at him. He caught it one-handed without a problem.
“I just wanted to—”
“It isn’t my fault,” she interrupted. She knew too well the way Marinitch witches worked when they tried to get inside someone’s head. “If anything, it’s the fault of those damned fools at SingleEarth. If it weren’t for their insistence that we honor their alliances, my daughter never would have been put into a situation where she was forced to endure the company of a leech just because he was pretending to play nice.”
The Vida line had laws forbidding relationships with their prey—even friendly ones, much less romantic—for a reason. They could all pretend to be human for a while. They could pretend to be charming, even. She had seen it. Believing that they were, however, was a good way to get someone killed.
“You’ve never once had doubts?” Jay asked.
She answered him honestly, because that was the only way to deal with an empath. Lies only made them pry further.
“Everyone doubts at some point. If we’re lucky, we learn better. If we’re not, it gets us or someone else killed. If you want to second-guess this situation, do it in your own head. We need a hunter, not a shrink.”
She had checked on him. Now, as she returned to Adianna, Michael and Zachary, who were gathered in the living room, she said, “Jay will be right down. Adianna, let me give you the safe house address. I won’t be traveling or staying with you.”
She had put Adianna in charge but didn’t expect her to question the statement, and was not disappointed. This was Adianna’s hunt, and Dominique’s presence would only undermine her. More important, this was a crucial lesson for Adianna to learn—one Dominique had already studied once before, and felt no need to review.
She had turned to go before she heard Adianna say, “If you’re not coming with us, then you’re in charge of keeping an eye on Robert. He’s conflicted about the vampires, and he and his sister are both young and naïve. He might try to join her or he might try to rescue her, but either way, he could potentially lead us right to our targets.”
Dominique nodded. “I know a pair of local shapeshifters—birds—who wouldn’t be much use in a hunt but do good surveillance work.” If they weren’t being called upon to risk their pinfeathers, they would probably even return her call. “I’ll see if they can help.”
“Good,” Adianna said. “You tail the human. Michael, you and Sarah used to hunt in New York City. That area tends to be popular with Kendra’s line. Do you think Sarah might go back, if she’s looking for familiar territory to feed in?”
“She might go to feed, or she might g
o to get help from old contacts,” Michael answered. “A couple of the hunters we knew in the city were in it more for sport and money than ethics. Sarah might figure they could be allies.”
“Will they be?” Jay asked.
Michael shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust them at my back in a fight against her, which is why I haven’t called them to work with us already. But I can check in. If nothing else, I’m sure I can find someone to confirm whether or not we took down one of the brothers. But I’m going to need some rest and food before I’m fit to go anywhere.” He rolled his head and shoulders, obviously stiff from the fight. “I have to admit, I’m still trying to figure out how we’re still alive.”
“You said you think you took one of the brothers down,” Adianna replied. “They may have panicked, then cut their losses and run.”
“If so, they didn’t panic until after one of them had me down and had taken a pint,” Michael grumbled in reply. “Once a vamp has his teeth in your throat, he doesn’t tend to let go without good reason.”
“They may be playing with us,” Zachary suggested. “Catch and release.”
“Sarah wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that,” Michael replied. “She knows the only reason they did so well today was because we were surprised.”
“Sarah,” Zachary said, the emphasis suggesting a convenient label as opposed to the name of the original individual, “wouldn’t have stopped if the two others hadn’t pulled her off me.”
“Nikolas has been known to play with his prey,” Dominique said, refusing to acknowledge Zachary’s comment on how his fight with Sarah had ended. He knew she was disturbed by it. He wouldn’t let it happen again. “He marked Sarah and let her go once before he lured her out to kill her. He may be doing the same with us, in which case it sounds like you all have the vampire to thank for your lives.”
The words brought the appropriate looks of shame to Michael’s and Zachary’s faces.
“What matters most right now is that we are alive,” Adianna said, “and most of our prey will need to rest for the day, which gives us a chance to do the same, and recover. We’re not beaten, people. We have a plan. Now, let’s get out of here before Kaleo comes down the chimney like some kind of evil Santa, okay?”
Leaving them with that last grim image, Adianna lifted her bags, pulled her keys from her pocket and led the way out the front door.
Dominique followed, the position unnatural to her. It wasn’t that she had never followed anyone else—but the last time she had, her guide had been unwisely chosen. That path had ended with a knife in her hand and the body of a fellow hunter in her arms.
As she watched the next generation file out, Adianna in the lead, she wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, it was her fault that her daughters seemed to be treading that same dark road.
CHAPTER 12
SATURDAY, 8:21 A.M.
NIKOLAS WAS IN a towering rage. It should have frightened Sarah—his fury, after all, had directly led to her death—but she could barely focus on it. He was pacing and kept grabbing her arm and occasionally shaking her and shouting, but it was like that only added colored lights to the kaleidoscope of her thoughts.
She couldn’t hold on to any single image long; they all slid into each other—one, then the next. Someone was crying across the room, with quick little breaths that made the air quiver. Then there was Nikolas, who was black and white and red.… She giggled, reminded of that stupid joke about the newspaper, and he stared at her, but then his features blurred again.
Her skin was buzzing, and her ears ringing. The world was too vivid, all light and sound and sensation.
“You have to focus now!” Nikolas’s anger was tainted by terror, and seemed to make the world roll. “Sarah, please!” he begged. “I know what you’re feeling right now. It wasn’t just your first feed on live blood, but it was witch blood. It’s intoxicating. Kristopher and I have both been there before.…”
The words disappeared from her attention. He was still talking; she just wasn’t hearing. Nikolas’s voice had ceased to have meaning and had blended into patterns of rising and falling noise.
He grabbed her shoulder and shook her yet again.
“Sarah!” She managed to focus on him for a moment, only to have him throw her across the room. “Is there anything you can do?” he demanded.
She landed on … Oh, goddess. She shrieked, because for an instant, in her state, she was on her father’s corpse again. There was blood on her hands. Was it his blood? Then the reality came clear, and it was Kristopher lying still and silent on the ground, a ragged wound from Michael’s knife in his chest. It hadn’t been a heart blow, and the Arun magic wasn’t quite as poisonous as a Vida’s, but it was killing him slowly nevertheless.
She had to draw out the magic. She could do that. Her powers didn’t work the same now as they used to, but they weren’t entirely gone. She …
She glanced up and found herself staring into wide, frightened eyes. Sarah’s heart wasn’t beating, but someone else’s heart was racing, pounding, matched by her ragged breaths and the trembling that rippled across the surface of her skin. Nikolas shouted something, and the girl stood and bolted out of the room. Sarah started to rise to follow.
Nikolas grabbed her by the arm and hit her, the blow hard enough that it might have broken her neck if she had been human. Now it was barely enough to get her attention. He snapped, “I swear, if you let my brother die here—” He broke off and shook his head sharply before saying, apparently to himself, “You’re going to hate me for this.”
What did he—
She couldn’t complete the thought. He grabbed her, and then his fangs were in her throat.
And it hurt. The buzzing across her flesh turned to wildfire, and her blood turned to lava. The white noise of the world turned to screaming, and the voice behind the screams was hers, until Nikolas threw her away again.
He staggered under the power he had just stolen from her, but he had more practice. He had ripped apart her giddy drunkenness, and now she existed in a cold reality where all she could see was Kristopher’s form.
She put a hand over the wound and tried to reach for her magic. Vampiric power wouldn’t help her with this. She needed a witch’s power, but her Vida magic had fled deep inside, hiding from the new blood.
“I tried to get him to feed,” Nikolas said. “That helped when Elisabeth nearly killed us, as if her blood combated her magic. But he wouldn’t. I fed for him, on the witch who had attacked him, but I couldn’t even get him to take blood from me.”
She nodded. The power was already too deep inside Kristopher for him to rouse enough to feed. Sarah didn’t know if she could find her Vida power in time to pull Michael’s power from the wound, but Nikolas was right that such power could be drowned with more of the same—normally by taking blood, but there were other methods.
“Come here,” she said. She didn’t have to say why or ask permission. As soon as Nikolas was near enough, she put her left hand on his throat. He tensed a fraction but did not draw back, even when she pulled at his power. He clenched his jaw; she knew it hurt, what she was doing, but she also knew that Nikolas would never argue against any measure that might save his brother.
Besides, he had taken her blood; he could hear her concerns in her mind. He knew perfectly well that she didn’t know how to control her magic anymore, and that she could easily mangle his power through clumsy fumbling, killing both or all of them.
She used herself like a wire to funnel power from Nikolas into Kristopher. She transferred to Kristopher the power Nikolas had taken from Michael, which would temporarily fool the magic of the knife into thinking this body was not an enemy but a friend. It wouldn’t completely heal him, but it would slow the damage, like a shot of epinephrine delaying a fatal allergic reaction.
Only when she had given as much power to Kristopher as she dared did she put both hands on Kristopher’s chest, one over the wound and one over his heart. She closed her eyes and struggled to find
the blade’s magic, which she knew almost as well as her own. She and Michael had grown up together. They had trained together. She had helped him form the link between his power and the centuries-old Arun blade.
Bit by bit, she subdued the poison. Now that Michael’s magic was feeding Kristopher instead of killing him, Kristopher’s own power was able to help heal the wound.
At last, Sarah turned to Nikolas to say, “He’ll live. He’ll need to rest, and feed when he wakes, but he’ll live.”
Nikolas nodded, and then it was like that wasn’t enough. He pulled her close and kissed her. Through Kristopher, whose mind was still open to her and tightly linked to his brother’s, she could sense the overwhelming wash of emotion: protectiveness, gratitude, relief, maybe even love. It was like a reflection on a stream, not as clear as the thoughts she could normally hear from Kristopher, but a background hum Nikolas wasn’t trying to hide from her. She didn’t want to shut it out, because in that instant she was feeling exactly the same way. Whatever she felt about Kristopher, she did not want him to die for her.
And whatever she felt for Kristopher, she probably shouldn’t be kissing his brother.
“Thank you,” Nikolas said when she pulled back. There was no sense of guilt in his mind about the kiss. Did he know something she didn’t know about Kristopher’s feelings for her? Or did he just know that Kristopher wouldn’t mind, regardless of his relationship with Sarah?
She had to block out the echoes of thought. It was too much to think about and try to dissect these relationships in the middle of everything else.
“It was my fault Kristopher was hurt,” she said.
“It was our choice to come for you,” he replied. “We argued over whether or not you had the right to end your own life. We decided it didn’t matter if you did have the right. We weren’t going to let you go through with it.”
Argued. These brothers did not argue, not with each other. Their paths had diverged only once, when Kristopher had chosen to stay with his sister to help her through a difficult time. Otherwise they were always so similar. Sarah’s impression had been that Nikolas tended to defer to his brother.