All Just Glass (6 page)

“Kaleo’s favorite bloodbond, I believe,” Zachary answered. His voice was too loud, but he held himself from flinching or whispering. “Heather. We found Nissa, but then this one attacked us, and the vampire got away.” Dominique’s expression shifted; there was just the barest tightening between her brows. Zachary added, “She should be able to tell us a good deal. Kaleo is a major player in Nikolas’s and Kristopher’s circuit, and she will also probably be easier to persuade than a full-blooded vampire would be.”

Reluctantly, Dominique nodded, as if his defensive babbling had in any way been new information to her.

“Bring her in. We should bind her before she wakes.”

Fortunately, Dominique turned around too early to see him stumble on the steps. Adia caught his arm, steadying him.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

He nodded, regretting the sharpness of the motion the instant he made it.

“Who else is here?” Adia asked as they followed Dominique to the kitchen. Zachary wondered at the question for a moment until Adia added, “I don’t know all the cars in the driveway.”

Zachary hadn’t even looked. His senses were so dull at that moment he could probably have been run over by a truck without noticing.

“Jay Marinitch arrived a few minutes ago,” Dominique answered. “Robert is also here.”

Jay. Oh, joy
. Zachary had known he would have to work with that hunter once the Rights were called, but he had hoped
Jay’s flighty tendencies would keep him from showing up so promptly.

And then there was Robert Richards, the human would-be hunter. He lacked any recognizable discipline and had no formal training and was only of interest to Dominique because of his sister’s connection to Nikolas. Christine Richards had been abducted by Nikolas the day before.

Neither Jay nor Robert would be much help in this hunt, and either could prove a hindrance. Robert’s loyalties were downright questionable; Nikolas had apparently told him that Kaleo had tortured his sister and driven her mad, and had claimed he was taking Christine with him for her own good. Robert was just gullible enough to believe it.

“Zachary Vida goes out looking for a vampire, and comes back with a date.”

The clear, almost musical voice belonged to Jay. His wit had never been to Zachary’s taste, and now was no exception. Jay had the sense not to bait Michael, because he knew that the Arun witch would swing a punch at him, but Zachary didn’t have that freedom.

Zachary set Heather down in one of the sturdy armchairs. Dominique had already gone to get rope and duct tape to bind her. Alone, the rope and tape together could not hold a bloodbond with Heather’s strength, but they could be used as a base for magic that could dampen Heather’s natural power and make the bonds more effective.

“Look here,” Adia said, slipping something out of Heather’s pocket as she helped arrange the bloodbond in the chair. “Cell
phone!” She flipped open the phone and started hitting buttons. “Nothing in the address book … and it looks like she had the sense to clear incoming and outgoing calls before she attacked us … but there’s one missed call.”

“Anything familiar?” Zachary asked, though he didn’t hold out much hope. There was a chance they could figure out the billing address for the cell phone if it was on a contract, but creatures who had been smart enough to survive being hunted for centuries tended not to be so easily caught.

“Looks like a local number,” Adia answered. She turned and flipped open her laptop, which had been sitting on the kitchen counter, humming softly.

Robert, who had been staring at Heather since Zachary had brought her in, asked suddenly, “What is going
on
? Dominique called, and I showed up at six a.m. on a
Saturday
without asking a lot of questions. But if we’re tying up random girls, I think I deserve to know why.”

Zachary bit back a sharp retort. The human wasn’t worth it. Past Robert, Dominique frowned, and only then did Zachary realize he had lifted a hand to rub his temple again.

“She’s Kaleo’s oldest, and by all indications favorite, bloodbond,” he said, responding only to the last of Robert’s demands. If Dominique had chosen to leave him in the dark about recent events, that was her call to make.

“Kaleo’s?” Robert asked, brows rising. “Does that mean she’s likely to help us out?”

“Don’t. Bet. On. It.” The growled words came from the girl on the chair as she shifted for the first time, testing her
restraints. She rolled her head, making the joints in her neck and shoulders pop like cracking knuckles, and then looked up with blue-gray eyes.

Jay stood and slunk across the room to kneel, probably unwisely, in front of the bloodbond. Her feet were not tied to the chair, so Jay was risking a foot in the face, but if he wasn’t bright enough to figure that out on his own, he didn’t deserve a warning.

“A bloodbond’s loyalty to her master tends to be fairly unwavering,” Jay said, his words probably for Robert despite his holding Heather’s gaze. “I will
hunt
as necessary, but I do not have the stomach for harsh interrogation. So unless Vida-kin have torture in their blood, I, too, wonder what we intend to do with this girl.”

“We’re not torturing anyone,” Robert said, clearly horrified.

Zachary hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but every Vida present knew they had less room to be idealistic than the Marinitch or the human.

“Found it,” Adia said, still staring at the laptop screen. “It looks like that missed call was from an independent bookstore called Makeshift.”

“If it’s a store, anyone could have asked to use the phone,” Zachary observed.

Dominique nodded. “We’ll keep it in mind, but it’s probably not worth—”

“I think you should check it out,” Jay interrupted, still looking at Heather.

“While you’re at it, could you pick up the book I ordered?” Heather asked sardonically.

Adia asked, almost too casually, “Do you know anything about this place, Jay?”

Zachary saw Dominique give Jay a wary look a moment before his mind caught up to what the other two Vidas had obviously already realized. Each line descended from Macht had its own skill set. The Vida line worked with raw power and could manipulate it in a variety of ways. The Arun line were faster and stronger than most witches and focused their training on offensive magic for fighting. The Smoke witches studied healing. Each Marinitch chose how to focus his abilities; some became hunters, some were healers, and some were closer to oracles or adjudicators. The Marinitch line was talented in empathy, bordering in some cases on telepathy.

Most hunters did not develop that skill; it was not beneficial to feel too much of what their prey experienced. Jay was apparently an exception.

He shrugged in response to Adia’s question. “Nothing specific,” he said.

Heather suddenly looked at Jay sharply, perhaps deducing the reason for his intent stare. At last she attempted the savage kick Zachary had predicted. Jay dodged handily.

“I’m going to check it out,” Adia said. “The rest of you should stay here with our ‘guest.’ ”

Dominique broke in: “I spoke to one of my informants shortly before you returned. He says he might know something, and asked me to meet him in the city.”

Adia nodded, obviously not comfortable questioning her mother for more details. “If you think he’s worth meeting, then we’ll manage without you until you’re back.” To Zachary, she
said, “You’re in charge while we’re both gone. Michael should be back soon to join you. You can catch him up. I imagine Kaleo will come for his property sooner rather than later.”

Zachary nodded, acknowledging and assenting to her commands. Adia had a natural air of authority and confidence. He was happy to follow her lead.

Unfortunately, once she and Dominique were gone, he was alone with the Marinitch telepath, the human and the tied-up bloodbond.

“Anyone up for a round of go fish?” Jay asked after looking around the room. It was the kind of idiocy Zachary expected from him. Did it really even deserve an answer?

There was silence for the space of a few heartbeats, and then Heather pointed out, “I don’t have a hand for the cards.”

Robert said, “I guess I appreciate your calling me in if you’re hunting Kaleo, but is this your entire plan? We’re just going to hang out until an angry, thousands-of-years-old vampire shows up to try to kill us all?”

“Do you think we should rent a video?” Jay suggested, in his usual cavalier fashion.

“I’m going to take a nap on the couch,” Zachary said. He had to get away from these three for a few minutes, and to lie down before he threw up.

Taunting and jokes aside, Jay paused to ask, “Are you all right?”

He didn’t want to answer. Worse, he was worried he didn’t
need
to answer. How much could Jay see, just looking at him? Zachary worked too hard to keep his external Vida poise to let some birdbrained Marinitch see what was inside.

“Don’t worry,” he said, putting up the same mental walls he would use to try to keep a vampire out of his thoughts, and speaking as if he assumed that Jay was asking about the plan and not his physical or mental condition. “The house is warded, so any vampire who plans to come for Heather will have to enter like a human, instead of appearing wherever he wants. If Kaleo shows, I’ll be able to join the fight in plenty of time.”

Jay nodded and waved him off.

He lay down. Strict training of his body allowed him to fall asleep almost instantly, but that sleep was far from restful. Dominique’s earlier words had stirred up horrors that he normally tried to forget. It didn’t take vampirism for sleep to recall a five-year-old child’s nightmares come true.

He was just old enough to understand: Mama had gone mad. Someone had told her something bad, and she had gone wild. She had screamed and shrieked and cried in a way he hadn’t thought Vidas even
could.
Then she had stormed out. Hours later, he had realized he was alone in the house. His older sister had already been missing for a week. His little brother had gone out the door after Mama
.

No one came home
.

As the day turned into night, he went through the cabinets to try to find something to eat. He went to bed when it got dark. He couldn’t sleep
.

He turned on every light in the house in an attempt to banish the shadows, and then he turned them off, because a Vida shouldn’t be afraid of the dark
.

He turned just one back on
.

He fell asleep only when the dawn came, and woke because he was
hungry. He scavenged for breakfast, the way he had done before. Someone had to come home soon
.

When someone finally did, it wasn’t Mama, but Jacqueline’s friend Dominique. She brought him to her house and gave him dinner and then told him she was going back out to look for the rest of his family
.

“
Take care of the baby while I’m gone,” she added
.

He nodded solemnly. After Dominique left, he went into the nursery. She had taught him how to hold and feed and change a baby when he had visited before with his mother, but right then Adianna was sleeping, so he just sat next to the crib and listened to her breathe. He would protect her until everyone came home
.

“S
ARAH
—”

Sarah knew what Nikolas was going to say, and interrupted with “I won’t kill my own family.”

“And if it comes down to a choice between them and us?” he asked.

Kristopher tensed, his arms protective around Sarah. “We don’t have to discuss this now. Much as I hate to say it, Kaleo is right. We need to talk to our people.”

“Can I call Robert?” Christine’s soft voice cut through the vampires’ anxiety.

“I sent Robert to my mother for training, when I first learned he had been hunting,” Sarah said with a wince. “She’ll be watching him.”

“We have some disposable cell phones,” Kristopher said. “You can help Christine figure out what she can safely say.”

Sarah was about to reject the idea again, but then she hesitated. Facing Kaleo the way Christine had was incredibly brave, considering her previous experiences with him. The seemingly frail human had been ripped from her own life as surely as Sarah had been, and this was the one comfort she asked.

Sarah realized, suddenly, that part of the sympathy she was feeling wasn’t hers. She was picking up on Kristopher’s thoughts again. She had forgotten to shield against him, and he had no ability to mask his mind.

She made an effort to block him out, but the damage—if that was what it was—had already been done. She could not be as cold and practical toward Christine as she wished to be.

She nodded. “We’ll just have to be careful.”

“Good,” Nikolas said. “Meanwhile, Kristopher and I should go and speak to our people. They need to know the situation.”

Sarah nodded, wondering with frustration,
When can we kill Kaleo?

There. That was her cold practicality coming back to the surface. She wanted him
gone
, and making vampires gone was a task she knew how to handle. The ancient Roman had come to them this time looking for help to save one of his people, but that didn’t negate his history of destroying anything and anyone who got in his way.

She must have projected the thought, because the brothers responded to it. Kristopher nodded to Nikolas, who waited with Christine while Kristopher pulled Sarah into the next room. In the past Sarah had been able, with effort, to communicate
silently with Adianna, because they were close and they had often mingled powers for a hunt, but full-blown vampiric telepathy was a talent she would need some time to get used to.

“Killing him would kill Christine,” Kristopher reminded Sarah, his voice every bit as bitter as she felt. Killing a bloodbond’s master was almost always fatal to the bond, as the vampire’s death was felt by the bonded human. The shock too often caused the body simply to shut down.

“I could protect her,” Sarah said. “It will take me a while to get the hang of using my magic again, now that it’s been changed by mixing it with vampiric powers, but I can feel it and I know it’s not just
gone
. I don’t know any magic that can break a bloodbond, but with effort, I should be able to block Christine’s connection to Kaleo long enough that she wouldn’t feel his death.”