All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [29]
Unless the witches inside held to the law of never making deals with vampires.
Once she was certain she was reasonably well under control, she crossed the street. She was not surprised to see the front door open. Zachary stepped onto the front porch, and Sarah stopped on the sidewalk. They should have been somewhere in the old west, with tumbleweeds and a saloon to mosey into, not in peaceful suburbia, surrounded by rotting pumpkins and straw turkeys.
Zachary’s expression was as impossible to read as ever. He wore a slight smile that she had seen often enough when they had hunted together to know it was meaningless, and had his hands tucked into his back pockets. The position looked casual, but Sarah knew that it meant he had a knife sheathed at the small of his back. The only reason he hadn’t drawn it yet, she was sure, was the possibility of nosy neighbors peering out their windows. He would try to take the fight inside if he could.
His heartbeat was perfectly even. It wasn’t like the flawless Zachary to lose control in such a silly situation as preparing to murder his cousin.
“I’m not here to fight,” she said, lifting her voice enough that he would hear it, but hoping the words wouldn’t travel to the neighbors. “I’m here to …” Her voice trailed off. Would it kill him to look human once in a while? She shook her head and reached for her knife, which she had strapped to her wrist. It was warm to the touch these days, even uncomfortably hot.
Zachary tensed slightly, one arm shifting as he went for his own blade, but when he realized she was undoing the straps that held the sheath in place, he returned to his prepared but relaxed posture.
She set the knife, still securely sheathed, on the grass.
“I came to return this, and to turn myself in,” she said. The words were a little more tight, and a little louder, than she had intended, but she had never had Zachary’s perfect control.
At least she didn’t have to face Adia this way.
“All I want,” she said, taking a step away from where she had left the knife, “is for Heather to go free before I turn myself in. She’s human, just a bloodbond. Once you have me, you don’t need her.”
She could see somewhere in Zachary’s glacier blue eyes the exact moment that he decided she was trying to play him.
“Turn yourself in, and I’ll give you my word that she will be let free.”
Sarah’s laugh sounded a little like a snarl. “I grew up with you, Zachary! Trust me, damn you.”
“You did not grow up with me. Sarah grew up with me,” he replied. “Do we have a deal?”
“If I’m not Sarah to you, then I know for a fact that your word means nothing,” she said. “If I’m just a vampire, then you can swear on your mother’s grave and it’s all meaningless.”
Stalemate. There had to be a way to get past this.
Zachary had long been an enigma to her. She had hazy memories of his being around when she was young, but the one that stood out most in her mind was the resigned expression on his face as he watched Dominique bind her powers and set her broken fingers after her father’s death. He had apologized to her later, though she had never been sure why.
Had they been closer before then? She remembered that he had moved out the next day, and that his visits after then had always been purely business, either to work on a hunt or to help her and Adia train. He had never played “nice” when training. She had liked that as a kid. It meant that by the time she was strong enough to beat him, she never doubted that she had done it fairly.
She moved closer. He couldn’t hold her here as long as she stayed out of his reach. Zachary had the finest control over his raw magic and was able to do things with it that Sarah had never quite grasped, but for the past few years she had almost always been able to take him down in a plain old-fashioned physical fight. If he grabbed for her, she trusted herself to get out of his grip.
“Bring Heather to the door,” she said. “Then we can decide our next step.”
He nodded slowly and then glanced behind him. He didn’t need to speak.
Robert and Michael