All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [17]
“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