Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - All Just Glass

“Adianna.” She wasn’t being asked to witness; Zachary had already spoken for their line. A tremor of nervousness passed through her as Dominique gave her orders. “I am putting you in charge of this hunt. Nikolas and Kristopher are necessary targets, but your highest goal is the creature wearing Sarah’s form. I want you to find her, and put a knife in her heart. Is that clear?”

Adia glanced toward Zachary, but he had dropped his gaze back to the blades before him, accepting Dominique’s delegation of power without question.

Zachary was older, twenty-six years to Adia’s nineteen, but he had been a child when his mother and his two siblings had been lost. Dominique had become matriarch of their line, and Adia would inherit that title from her, so it was natural that she would want to put Adia in charge of this mission.

What Dominique could never know was that Adia had already failed once, when she had turned around and let one of them give Sarah his blood. Adia had been there. She could have ended this travesty before it began. But she hadn’t been strong enough.

Now the command had been given and there was only one possible response.

“Yes, and I will obey,” she replied, her words formal despite her silent dread. She had to make herself strong enough. Anything else would be a betrayal of her line.

Michael turned his face away as if he couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. Evan stood and said flatly, “I will send my son to you,” before walking out the door.

Dominique stepped back and glanced at the clock before saying to her daughter, “If there is a next generation, you will be its matriarch, but I’ve held you in my shadow longer than I should have. The hunters you will be working with are your peers, so it is right that you lead them now. I will get out of the way unless you call me in.” Then, in as close to an admission of weakness as Adia had ever heard her mother utter, she added, “For now, I need to rest.”

Adia did not think Dominique had truly slept since she had bound Sarah’s powers two days before. She had given good reasons for Adia’s leading this hunt, but Adia suspected there was one more: Dominique was tired, in body and heart.

Adia nodded, though it felt odd to have her mother looking to her for permission. “You rest. We need you strong. Once you’re up, you can start calling your contacts.” Dominique’s network of hunters and informants was impressive. Adia knew only some of them.

Only once Dominique left did Hasana approach Adia to say, “I should set those fingers before they start to heal that way. It looks like you need stitches in your arm, too.”

“Where’s Caryn?” Adia asked, wondering why Hasana hadn’t gone to check on her daughter.

“She brought her own car,” Hasana said, moving to examine the wounds while she spoke. “She thought we were being called for Sarah’s trial, and insisted on coming to speak on her behalf.”

Caryn herself had nearly been brought to trial not long before for far more severe crimes than Sarah had ever committed; if she had been a hunter, and not a healer, she never could have justified her actions. But maybe she had thought she could justify Sarah’s.

Adia sat while Hasana set and splinted her broken fingers, then put six stitches in her upper arm. The healer’s power numbed the pain from the injury and the needle going into and out of damaged flesh, leaving Adia with a disconnected sensation. In some ways she would rather have the pain than this sense that the skin the healer was stitching wasn’t really hers, but instead belonged to a stranger.

After a few minutes, Michael came to the table. Zachary looked up. The three hunters exchanged wary glances.

“Where do we begin?” Zachary asked.

Adia shook her head, just barely. She had some ideas, but they couldn’t be spoken in front of Hasana. Once the healer was gone, the hunters would begin to make their plans.

SATURDAY, 5:54 A.M.

SARAH SAT ON her feet so she could look across the scarred old oak table at her sister. The year between them might as well have been a century, if one judged by the awe with which Sarah regarded Adia—or the childlike haughtiness the eight-year-old demonstrated in response .

“ It’s ‘make no deals, barter no honor,’ ” Adia corrected her gently .

Sarah ran the words through her head, whispering them under her breath before repeating them out loud, and then asking, “What does ‘barter’ mean? ”

Adia glanced up through the doorway, to where their mother was demonstrating a new fighting form to Zachary, before she answered, “Like if I agree to do the dishes if you’ll do my homework. ”

“ Then … I should stop doing that. ”

“ It’s only with them. Not us,” Adia explained. “We can be trusted, so it’s okay. ”

Sarah frowned, trying to make sense of the passage Dominique had assigned her to memorize. Why did it all have to be written with big words and fancy sentences?

Her gaze drifted from the book to a streak of color on the table. The kitchen window had a panel of decorative cut glass, and at that moment, the rising sun was hitting it just right to make tiny rainbows all around the room. The spring day was windy, and the new leaves on the trees outside rustled, making the light move and the rainbows dance on the table .

“ Sarah, Adia,” Dominique admonished them, appearing like magic in Sarah’s instant of inattention .

“ Sorry, Mother,” Adia said while Sarah tried to decide if she really had seen movement through the window .

It had probably been a squirrel or a stray cat, but she said, “I think I saw someone outside. ”

Seizing the excuse to get out of her chair before her mother could forbid her, she sprang to her feet and bounced across the room, stretching her seven-year-old body. She had pins and needles in her left foot, and that caused her to stumble as she flung open the door .

She saw the object on the front step, but she couldn’t stop her forward momentum before she tripped over it. She fell. Her eyes focused, and understanding came in flashes. Red blood, sticky. Clammy texture under her hands—dead skin. Glazed eyes staring toward her, seeing nothing. There was blood … everywhere … from what seemed like millions of cuts on his arms and throat and chest .

And it was her father .

And he was dead .

The scream bubbled up through a throat tight with horror and came out strangled .

“ Sarah Vida! ”

Her mother’s voice sounded very far away .

Adia grabbed her and dragged her from the doorway. Mother and Zachary worked together to get the body off the front porch before anyone else could see it .

Rainbows danced on his chalk gray and blood-slicked skin .

Sarah Vida woke with a silent shudder. When she had been seven, she had screamed until her throat was raw. Now she did not utter a sound.

She had known that vampires did not create dreams but instead relived their memories when they slept. Knowing was not the same as experiencing, however. Humans and witches alike were capable of having nightmares about the bad times. She had dreamed about her father’s death before. She had thought that was what people meant when they said vampires dreamed the past.

But dreams weren’t like this , with every detail as vivid as it had been then.

Why couldn’t she have dreamed about going to the butterfly garden with her father? Or about the way he had smiled whenever she had correctly reproduced a complicated fighting form? Her best memories of him involved hot cocoa on cold nights when her mother was away hunting, and his singing her to sleep—again, on nights when her mother was not there to stop him. He hadn’t been a Vida; he hadn’t needed to follow their obsessive code of perfection and self-control. He hadn’t even been a witch—just a damn fine hunter, one who had earned even Dominique’s respect.