All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [37]
“Will they be?” Jay asked.
Michael shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust them at my back in a fight against her, which is why I haven’t called them to work with us already. But I can check in. If nothing else, I’m sure I can find someone to confirm whether or not we took down one of the brothers. But I’m going to need some rest and food before I’m fit to go anywhere.” He rolled his head and shoulders, obviously stiff from the fight. “I have to admit, I’m still trying to figure out how we’re still alive.”
“You said you think you took one of the brothers down,” Adianna replied. “They may have panicked, then cut their losses and run.”
“If so, they didn’t panic until after one of them had me down and had taken a pint,” Michael grumbled in reply. “Once a vamp has his teeth in your throat, he doesn’t tend to let go without good reason.”
“They may be playing with us,” Zachary suggested. “Catch and release.”
“Sarah wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that,” Michael replied. “She knows the only reason they did so well today was because we were surprised.”
“Sarah,” Zachary said, the emphasis suggesting a convenient label as opposed to the name of the original individual, “wouldn’t have stopped if the two others hadn’t pulled her off me.”
“Nikolas has been known to play with his prey,” Dominique said, refusing to acknowledge Zachary’s comment on how his fight with Sarah had ended. He knew she was disturbed by it. He wouldn’t let it happen again. “He marked Sarah and let her go once before he lured her out to kill her. He may be doing the same with us, in which case it sounds like you all have the vampire to thank for your lives.”
The words brought the appropriate looks of shame to Michael’s and Zachary’s faces.
“What matters most right now is that we are alive,” Adianna said, “and most of our prey will need to rest for the day, which gives us a chance to do the same, and recover. We’re not beaten, people. We have a plan. Now, let’s get out of here before Kaleo comes down the chimney like some kind of evil Santa, okay?”
Leaving them with that last grim image, Adianna lifted her bags, pulled her keys from her pocket and led the way out the front door.
Dominique followed, the position unnatural to her. It wasn’t that she had never followed anyone else—but the last time she had, her guide had been unwisely chosen. That path had ended with a knife in her hand and the body of a fellow hunter in her arms.
As she watched the next generation file out, Adianna in the lead, she wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, it was her fault that her daughters seemed to be treading that same dark road.
CHAPTER 12
SATURDAY, 8:21 A.M.
NIKOLAS WAS IN a towering rage. It should have frightened Sarah—his fury, after all, had directly led to her death—but she could barely focus on it. He was pacing and kept grabbing her arm and occasionally shaking her and shouting, but it was like that only added colored lights to the kaleidoscope of her thoughts.
She couldn’t hold on to any single image long; they all slid into each other—one, then the next. Someone was crying across the room, with quick little breaths that made the air quiver. Then there was Nikolas, who was black and white and red.… She giggled, reminded of that stupid joke about the newspaper, and he stared at her, but then his features blurred again.
Her skin was buzzing, and her ears ringing. The world was too vivid, all light and sound and sensation.
“You have to focus now!” Nikolas’s anger was tainted by terror, and seemed to make the world roll. “Sarah, please!” he begged. “I know what you’re feeling right now. It wasn’t just your first feed on live blood, but it was witch blood. It’s intoxicating. Kristopher and I have both been there before.…”
The words disappeared from her attention. He was still talking; she just wasn’t hearing. Nikolas’s voice had ceased to have meaning and had blended into patterns of rising and falling noise.
He grabbed