All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [32]
“Sarah, you have to let him go,” the voice pleaded. Hands tried to pull her back. “Sarah, he’s your cousin. You won’t be able to live with yourself if you kill him.”
CHAPTER 10
SATURDAY, 7:36 A.M.
ZACHARY WAS AWARE of nothing beyond the waves of need and satisfaction so deep they felt like love. His mind wandered, his memories skipping through events that he and Sarah had both experienced—moments of exhilaration, when they had fought together and known they were on top of the world.
At least, he thought, I’ll be dying with family.
When it stopped, he wanted to weep.
“You take her,” a familiar voice said. “Your brother needs her help. I will take care of this one.”
“Don’t kill him,” another voice said. “We came here to stop Sarah from doing something stupid, not to destroy everyone she once called family.”
“I won’t kill him. I’ll even call a healer, once the three of you are gone. Now go!”
Zachary managed to open his eyes just in time to feel himself lifted. He couldn’t raise a hand to defend himself, much less to shove the vampire carrying him away.
He couldn’t even raise any mental shields, so when the vampire looked at him and said, “Get some rest,” with a tiny nudge of power to go along with the command, Zachary fell into deep black sleep.
He woke on the couch with Caryn Smoke leaning over him, putting stitches into his side where Sarah had shoved his own knife back at him. It looked like she had already wrapped his wrist with a compression bandage. It had felt like Sarah had fractured his wrist, but it must have been minor enough for Caryn to mostly heal it before he woke.
“Don’t try to sit up yet,” she said, tying off the last stitch and taping a bandage over it. “There’s juice on the end table. You lost a lot of blood, but you’ll be fine.” She stood up and shook her head. “I’m going to head out, before I break an ancient vow of nonviolence by beating your head in. It’s your stupid Vida pride that led to all this.”
She stormed out. Zachary ignored the healer’s brief tirade as he had many times in the past, rubbed his neck and reached to take a large gulp of orange juice. He could afford to lose more blood than most humans, since his body, especially his heart, was strong enough to keep his systems going on very limited resources, but this had been a close call despite that.
He had been sure that this would be the last fight.
He looked up at Michael, who was stretched out with his eyes closed on the love seat, his feet up on the arm, his skin as pale as Zachary’s.
“Where’s Jay?” Zachary asked. When he had last seen the Marinitch, Sarah had just flung Jay across the room and into the wall.
“Here.”
It took far too much effort to turn his head, but when he did, he found Jay sitting on an end table. His arm was in a cast, but otherwise he looked better than Zachary or Michael.
The door burst open, and Zachary cringed, expecting Dominique. Instead, the eyes that swept the room, obviously taking in every detail of the wreckage and injuries, were Adia’s. Her voice was barely audible as she asked, “What happened?”
“Idiocy happened,” Jay answered. “I didn’t … up until the very end, I really didn’t think she would hurt us.”
“Don’t call it the very end,” Michael grumbled. “We’re not dead. But I second the notion of us being idiots. We should have been watching our backs. Zachary’s the only one who actually believed it was a trap. Jay and I were twiddling our thumbs like kids at a family reunion.”
“And the … the targets?” Adia asked. She looked pale, probably disgusted that they hadn’t yet reported any success in the face of such blatant mistakes.
Zachary tried to shake his head and push himself to his feet. He felt the world rush into silence; his lips tingled, cold, and black encroached on his vision. He stumbled, ending up back on the couch abruptly. Adia called his name and grabbed his arm to steady him.
“Lay back,” she said. “Put your feet up. How much blood did you lose?”
“A lot,” he snapped. Mentally chastising himself for the harsh response,