Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - All Just Glass

Any memory of him alive would have been welcome. Why did she have to dream his death ?

It didn’t matter that her mother had tracked down and killed his murderers. There was no way to avenge the slaughter of a child’s innocence. With her father’s death, her childhood had ended.

She drew a deep breath, dropping into old habits meant to focus the body and mind, but she had no pulse to regulate and the air that came into her lungs was useless to her.

She rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to remind herself of her physical body and remove herself from memories, and her palms passed over pale skin and paler scars. The lines were faint now: a strand of ivy etched into her wrist, a rose on one shoulder and the name Nikolas on the other. There had been other wounds, including another name—Kristopher—but they had been too new and had healed completely when she had been—

She leaned back against the wall as it all returned.

The previous day, she had come to the home of one of the most infamous vampires in history, planning to kill him or die trying. What she hadn’t expected was that she would die, and then wake up as the sun set, with no pulse, and blood on her lips.

She shuddered. Not long before, if anyone had asked her what she would do if she were changed, she would have said without hesitation, I’ll do the right thing. A daughter of Vida would never allow herself to become a monster .

Now she didn’t know.

All she knew was that Nikolas and Kristopher—the two vampires who had killed her, albeit somewhat accidentally—had brought her here to their home to wait for her meeting at SingleEarth.

SingleEarth, an international organization founded by the Smoke line of witches in the early nineteen hundreds, was dedicated to the concept that all the sentient creatures of this world were capable of peaceful coexistence. To that end, they helped immortal and ageless creatures function in a mortal world. They did everything, from providing passports and setting up bank accounts to creating updated birth and death certificates as necessary. Sarah needed them to help her find a place to stay.

Kristopher had offered to let her live with them for as long as she liked, of course, but she wanted to find her own path first. She didn’t want to give up on independence and move in, even with the vampire who had taught her that not all of his kind was as evil as she had been raised to believe.

His kind; her kind now.

My kind . The words echoed in her mind, and again she tried to draw a breath to steady herself. It brought the smell of browning butter to her. Someone, probably her housemate, Christine, was cooking downstairs.

Christine was a fine example of why the hunters generally thought vampires like Nikolas deserved to die. Like Sarah, Christine wore Nikolas’s marks on her arms. Hunters saw them as a kind of brand, left by a sadist whose arrogance led him to sign his kills. Vampires saw them as a claim, one they could not say they didn’t notice, that marked the human as under Nikolas’s protection.

Normally no one would dare harm anyone who wore those marks, but Christine had been caught in the power struggle between Nikolas and another of his kind, an ancient vampire named Kaleo. By the time Nikolas had been alerted to Christine’s situation, Kaleo had nearly driven her mad.

The sun was only hinting at rising, but nevertheless, Sarah found Christine in the kitchen, beating eggs while mushrooms and peppers crackled in butter on the stove. Dressed in gray sweatpants and a black pajama top, Christine was humming some upbeat pop song as she worked, her eyes half closed as one of her bare feet tapped on the floor.

And she smelled good, Sarah realized. It wasn’t browning butter and sautéing mushrooms and peppers that had snared Sarah’s attention; it was the rich, metallic smell beyond all that, beneath the flesh.…

Sarah shoved herself backward before Christine even noticed her. In the living room, out of sight of the mostly human girl, she leaned against the wall.

She shoved the craving back down. Her body, which had momentarily gloried in the prospect of sustenance, screamed at her that she needed to hunt , to feed , but she ignored that, too, until the pain that scraped across her flesh and along the inside of her veins was nothing to her.

How could she? Christine had been victimized and brutalized, but for just a moment, Sarah had seen her, smelled her and thought of her as food .

She would have to be more careful. She had a sense of how long a vampire could safely go without blood. Most of them lacked the self-control to refrain from hunting more frequently—killing, even—but she had been a daughter of Vida. Pain was nothing. Soon the vampires at SingleEarth would be able to teach her how they survived without killing; they would teach her how to feed safely, maybe on animals, the way Kristopher had for fifty years before she met him. Until then, she wouldn’t let the bloodlust control her even a moment more.

Now fully under control, she stepped back into the kitchen. Her face reflected none of the horror of her dream or the agony of the bloodlust as she said, “Good morning, Christine.”

Christine turned with a grin and a glance out the window. “I guess it is. I’m making an omelet. Would you like some?”

Sarah smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think it would do much for me.”

Christine shrugged. “You might not need it to fill your stomach, but Nikolas tells me that a lot of vampires enjoy the taste or smell of food, even if it doesn’t provide sustenance. He says it’s one of the things that make eternity worthwhile.” Maybe in another century Sarah would agree, but for the moment it seemed like a terrible waste of food. She didn’t have to answer, though, since Christine glanced at the clock and said, “You keep odd hours for a vampire.”

“It might take me some time to get it right,” Sarah said.

Like most vampires, she had slept all day following her change. She had woken disoriented, nearly mindless. Kristopher had bared his own throat, knowing that she needed blood to survive but risked killing any human she fed on in that state. It had been enough to help complete the change, but she had still been exhausted. She lay down, expecting to close her eyes for just a minute, and now it was nearly dawn.

She had to get to SingleEarth before it got later. Even as a newly changed vampire, she knew that her energy levels would only plummet more as the sun rose higher.

“Are you all right here for a bit?” Sarah asked.

Christine hesitated but then nodded.

“I’ll be back soon.”

Sarah dressed in a knee-length black skirt and a white blouse—clothes borrowed from Christine. Nikolas decorated himself and his house in combinations of black and white, and Christine had taken to styling herself in the same. Sarah swore that when she bought herself new clothes, they would be decorated with rainbows.

She stared at herself in the full-length mirror as she brushed her blond hair and braided it back, out of her way. At least she had found a long-sleeved shirt that hid the scars on her arms, but the vampiric black eyes where she was used to seeing Vida-blue ones chilled her. She barely resisted an urge to slam a palm into the mirror’s surface and shatter it to send the image away.

She remembered doing something similar when she was seven. Hysterical, still screaming after the discovery of her father, she had thrown anything that had come to hand. When she had run out of things to throw, she had turned toward the window. The bright rainbows around the room, dancing over her father’s dead flesh, had offended her. She had slammed a fist with all her strength through the decorative cut-glass panels.