All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [41]
She would have killed Zachary.
He had looked at her, and seen her as Sarah, and called her cousin. Zachary Vida, who never hesitated, had paused, unable to drive his blade into her heart. And in return, she had nearly torn his throat out. If she had had any hope that he might trust her before, how could he possibly forgive her now? She could live, but after what had happened, how could she ever convince any of her once kin that she was anything but the monster they assumed her to be?
Their problems were insurmountable. The Rights of Kin would have them hunted as long as witches lived. Their normal lives could not resume as long as the Vida line drew breath, but Sarah would not let her new allies destroy her mother, sister, cousins and other kin.
She didn’t know what to do.
The first step of living this life, though, was learning how to survive. She had tried to ignore her new blood instead of facing it. If she had listened to Nikolas and Kristopher and—much as she hated to admit it—Kaleo in the first place, maybe she could have ended the earlier fight by running, instead of creating the disaster she had.
She needed to learn how to hunt without killing. There were vampires at SingleEarth who never killed, and Kristopher had gone fifty years without taking a life … though Nikolas had once strongly implied that the self-control she had seen in him came only at the cost of human life, and that he did not know how to live without death.
She shuddered and tried to shove that thought from her mind. Such doubts would help nothing.
For now, the power she had taken from her cousin and then from Nikolas was sustaining her, but there would be other nights. She needed to know how to be. She had never before had choices about who she was and how she wanted to live. All of her life had been dedicated to her duty as a Vida.
As she closed her eyes to sleep, she wondered: was there anything more to her now?
CHAPTER 13
SATURDAY, 9:32 A.M.
ADIA HADN’T HAD a lot of trouble packing to move to the safe house. After all, she didn’t have a piece of sentimental memorabilia that didn’t in some way involve Sarah.
She tried to sleep after they settled in, but managed less than an hour before she succumbed to the compulsive need to look up her latest contact. Sleeping would mean letting herself be still, which would mean thinking. While she was working and focused on the next steps, she could avoid thinking about the big picture and the overall goal. The oversized binder took up most of the kitchen counter as Adia leaned over it, balanced on a stool.
She had already decided that once she was in charge, all the information was going to be entered into a database, searchable by known characteristics.
Such a system would have made it much easier to find Jerome. Searching by name wasn’t effective, since even if he had given his real name at the coffee shop, the book wasn’t arranged in alphabetical order. Many vampires weren’t known by name, or else were known by several names, so they were arranged by lineage instead. That was why they needed a searchable database.
Dominique had objected on the premise that technology was unreliable and easier to interfere with, but Adia suspected that it was more because Dominique hadn’t grown up with computers and didn’t trust new things. She was more technophobic than the eighty-year-old woman Adia occasionally handed change to in the subway station.
At last, Adia found Jerome. She smirked at the well-lit color photograph that went with the entry. Though the book held many sketches, there were few photos, because most vampires were smart enough not to get themselves caught on film. This one, however, had smiled for the camera. Stretched out in casual jeans and a T-shirt, with one arm draped over the back of a leather couch the color of good coffee beans, he looked as friendly and welcoming as he had at the Makeshift.
She read the typed entry.
Jerome. Kendra’s line,