All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [5]
After a few minutes, Michael came to the table. Zachary looked up. The three hunters exchanged wary glances.
“Where do we begin?” Zachary asked.
Adia shook her head, just barely. She had some ideas, but they couldn’t be spoken in front of Hasana. Once the healer was gone, the hunters would begin to make their plans.
CHAPTER 2
SATURDAY, 5:54 A.M.
SARAH SAT ON her feet so she could look across the scarred old oak table at her sister. The year between them might as well have been a century, if one judged by the awe with which Sarah regarded Adia—or the childlike haughtiness the eight-year-old demonstrated in response.
“It’s ‘make no deals, barter no honor,’ ” Adia corrected her gently.
Sarah ran the words through her head, whispering them under her breath before repeating them out loud, and then asking, “What does ‘barter’ mean?”
Adia glanced up through the doorway, to where their mother was demonstrating a new fighting form to Zachary, before she answered, “Like if I agree to do the dishes if you’ll do my homework.”
“Then … I should stop doing that.”
“It’s only with them. Not us,” Adia explained. “We can be trusted, so it’s okay.”
Sarah frowned, trying to make sense of the passage Dominique had assigned her to memorize. Why did it all have to be written with big words and fancy sentences?
Her gaze drifted from the book to a streak of color on the table. The kitchen window had a panel of decorative cut glass, and at that moment, the rising sun was hitting it just right to make tiny rainbows all around the room. The spring day was windy, and the new leaves on the trees outside rustled, making the light move and the rainbows dance on the table.
“Sarah, Adia,” Dominique admonished them, appearing like magic in Sarah’s instant of inattention.
“Sorry, Mother,” Adia said while Sarah tried to decide if she really had seen movement through the window.
It had probably been a squirrel or a stray cat, but she said, “I think I saw someone outside.”
Seizing the excuse to get out of her chair before her mother could forbid her, she sprang to her feet and bounced across the room, stretching her seven-year-old body. She had pins and needles in her left foot, and that caused her to stumble as she flung open the door.
She saw the object on the front step, but she couldn’t stop her forward momentum before she tripped over it. She fell. Her eyes focused, and understanding came in flashes. Red blood, sticky. Clammy texture under her hands—dead skin. Glazed eyes staring toward her, seeing nothing. There was blood … everywhere … from what seemed like millions of cuts on his arms and throat and chest.
And it was her father.
And he was dead.
The scream bubbled up through a throat tight with horror and came out strangled.
“Sarah Vida!”
Her mother’s voice sounded very far away.
Adia grabbed her and dragged her from the doorway. Mother and Zachary worked together to get the body off the front porch before anyone else could see it.
Rainbows danced on his chalk gray and blood-slicked skin.
Sarah Vida woke with a silent shudder. When she had been seven, she had screamed until her throat was raw. Now she did not utter a sound.
She had known that vampires did not create dreams but instead relived their memories when they slept. Knowing was not the same as experiencing, however. Humans and witches alike were capable of having nightmares about the bad times. She had dreamed about her father’s death before. She had thought that was what people meant when they said vampires dreamed the past.
But dreams weren’t like this, with every detail as vivid as it had been then.
Why couldn’t she have dreamed about going to the butterfly garden with her father? Or about the way he had smiled whenever she had correctly reproduced a complicated fighting form? Her best memories of him involved hot cocoa on cold nights when her mother was away hunting, and his singing her to sleep—again, on nights when