All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [6]
Any memory of him alive would have been welcome. Why did she have to dream his death?
It didn’t matter that her mother had tracked down and killed his murderers. There was no way to avenge the slaughter of a child’s innocence. With her father’s death, her childhood had ended.
She drew a deep breath, dropping into old habits meant to focus the body and mind, but she had no pulse to regulate and the air that came into her lungs was useless to her.
She rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to remind herself of her physical body and remove herself from memories, and her palms passed over pale skin and paler scars. The lines were faint now: a strand of ivy etched into her wrist, a rose on one shoulder and the name Nikolas on the other. There had been other wounds, including another name—Kristopher—but they had been too new and had healed completely when she had been—
She leaned back against the wall as it all returned.
The previous day, she had come to the home of one of the most infamous vampires in history, planning to kill him or die trying. What she hadn’t expected was that she would die, and then wake up as the sun set, with no pulse, and blood on her lips.
She shuddered. Not long before, if anyone had asked her what she would do if she were changed, she would have said without hesitation, I’ll do the right thing. A daughter of Vida would never allow herself to become a monster.
Now she didn’t know.
All she knew was that Nikolas and Kristopher—the two vampires who had killed her, albeit somewhat accidentally—had brought her here to their home to wait for her meeting at SingleEarth.
SingleEarth, an international organization founded by the Smoke line of witches in the early nineteen hundreds, was dedicated to the concept that all the sentient creatures of this world were capable of peaceful coexistence. To that end, they helped immortal and ageless creatures function in a mortal world. They did everything, from providing passports and setting up bank accounts to creating updated birth and death certificates as necessary. Sarah needed them to help her find a place to stay.
Kristopher had offered to let her live with them for as long as she liked, of course, but she wanted to find her own path first. She didn’t want to give up on independence and move in, even with the vampire who had taught her that not all of his kind was as evil as she had been raised to believe.
His kind; her kind now.
My kind. The words echoed in her mind, and again she tried to draw a breath to steady herself. It brought the smell of browning butter to her. Someone, probably her housemate, Christine, was cooking downstairs.
Christine was a fine example of why the hunters generally thought vampires like Nikolas deserved to die. Like Sarah, Christine wore Nikolas’s marks on her arms. Hunters saw them as a kind of brand, left by a sadist whose arrogance led him to sign his kills. Vampires saw them as a claim, one they could not say they didn’t notice, that marked the human as under Nikolas’s protection.
Normally no one would dare harm anyone who wore those marks, but Christine had been caught in the power struggle between Nikolas and another of his kind, an ancient vampire named Kaleo. By the time Nikolas had been alerted to Christine’s situation, Kaleo had nearly driven her mad.
The sun was only hinting at rising, but nevertheless, Sarah found Christine in the kitchen, beating eggs while mushrooms and peppers crackled in butter on the stove. Dressed in gray sweatpants and a black pajama top, Christine was humming some upbeat pop song as she worked, her eyes half closed as one of her bare feet tapped on the floor.
And she smelled good, Sarah realized. It wasn’t browning butter and sautéing mushrooms and peppers that had snared Sarah’s attention; it was the rich, metallic smell beyond all that, beneath