All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [33]
“Lay down, Zachary,” Michael said. “We all feel the same way, but if the brave Zachary Vida is admitting to weakness, we’re all screwed.”
The brave Zachary Vida. He worked hard to mimic the kind of hunter he wanted to be, and to present an image that was ruthlessly controlled, but it had all fallen apart recently. Had they not seen the way he had let the bloodbond get under his skin, or the way he had hesitated with Sarah—or worst, the way he had given up when he felt her fangs at his throat, and let her nearly kill him?
He had told himself and told himself what he knew was true: It’s not Sarah. It’s just a monster. But in the split second when he should have pushed the knife forward, something in him had decided to die instead.
“How many of them were there?” Adia asked. She had always been able to find reason in chaos, a trait that Zachary admired and tried with little success to emulate. He was a good fighter, but Adia could see patterns and come to conclusions faster than the rest of them, and kept her head no matter what the crisis.
“Three vampires,” Jay answered. “Nikolas, Kristopher and Sarah. One of the twins showed up first. It looked like Michael had it under control, so I went to help Zachary.” He looked at Michael as if for confirmation.
“I figured it was Sarah’s boyfriend,” Michael said, disdain heavy in his voice. “I didn’t even sense the second one until he was practically on top of me. There’s something weird about their auras. They get mixed up, so it’s hard to tell there are two of them.”
“Wait, then who …” She looked at Jay’s and Zachary’s injuries.
“Sarah,” Zachary said flatly. “I gave her an opening, and she took it.”
Jay nodded, indicating that the same had happened to him. Zachary had barely noticed when Jay had tried to join his fight with Sarah. She hadn’t even glanced away but had reached out and flung the Marinitch across the room. Zachary had heard him hit a wall but hadn’t seen more of him after that.
Adia crossed her arms but failed to suppress a visible shiver at the notion of Sarah’s being the one to inflict such damage.
“It isn’t much consolation,” Michael said, “but I think I may have taken down one of the twins. I have no idea which I managed to get a knife in, but getting rid of either one will make it exponentially easier to deal with the other. They fight as a team.”
“That’s something, at least.”
It was something they could tell Dominique so maybe she wouldn’t decide the three of them were a complete waste of space.
“Hey, what’s this?” Michael got up off the love seat to pick up something from the floor. The movement apparently was too much for him, though. He dropped his head as if dizzy and then rolled over onto his back and lay on the floor while he offered the item to Adia. “One of them must have dropped it.”
Adia looked at the item, which Zachary thought might be a photograph, and then held it at arm’s length before tossing it onto the end table next to him. “That’s sick,” she said.
Morbid curiosity forced Zachary to pick up the picture. The quality of the shot was bad, and the photograph had been scuffed, so it took a minute for his mind to make sense of the swatches of dark and light.
The stream of bright golden color turned into long blond hair. Dark shapes resolved themselves into two figures holding a blond woman gently as they both fed at her throat. Zachary couldn’t make out the details of anyone’s features.
“Sarah?” Jay asked, peering over the couch to see what Zachary held.
He shook his head numbly. “The picture’s too old for it to be Sarah,” he said. “But it could still be Nikolas and Kristopher. I guess they have a penchant for blondes.”