All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [7]
Sarah shoved herself backward before Christine even noticed her. In the living room, out of sight of the mostly human girl, she leaned against the wall.
She shoved the craving back down. Her body, which had momentarily gloried in the prospect of sustenance, screamed at her that she needed to hunt, to feed, but she ignored that, too, until the pain that scraped across her flesh and along the inside of her veins was nothing to her.
How could she? Christine had been victimized and brutalized, but for just a moment, Sarah had seen her, smelled her and thought of her as food.
She would have to be more careful. She had a sense of how long a vampire could safely go without blood. Most of them lacked the self-control to refrain from hunting more frequently—killing, even—but she had been a daughter of Vida. Pain was nothing. Soon the vampires at SingleEarth would be able to teach her how they survived without killing; they would teach her how to feed safely, maybe on animals, the way Kristopher had for fifty years before she met him. Until then, she wouldn’t let the bloodlust control her even a moment more.
Now fully under control, she stepped back into the kitchen. Her face reflected none of the horror of her dream or the agony of the bloodlust as she said, “Good morning, Christine.”
Christine turned with a grin and a glance out the window. “I guess it is. I’m making an omelet. Would you like some?”
Sarah smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think it would do much for me.”
Christine shrugged. “You might not need it to fill your stomach, but Nikolas tells me that a lot of vampires enjoy the taste or smell of food, even if it doesn’t provide sustenance. He says it’s one of the things that make eternity worthwhile.” Maybe in another century Sarah would agree, but for the moment it seemed like a terrible waste of food. She didn’t have to answer, though, since Christine glanced at the clock and said, “You keep odd hours for a vampire.”
“It might take me some time to get it right,” Sarah said.
Like most vampires, she had slept all day following her change. She had woken disoriented, nearly mindless. Kristopher had bared his own throat, knowing that she needed blood to survive but risked killing any human she fed on in that state. It had been enough to help complete the change, but she had still been exhausted. She lay down, expecting to close her eyes for just a minute, and now it was nearly dawn.
She had to get to SingleEarth before it got later. Even as a newly changed vampire, she knew that her energy levels would only plummet more as the sun rose higher.
“Are you all right here for a bit?” Sarah asked.
Christine hesitated but then nodded.
“I’ll be back soon.”
Sarah dressed in a knee-length black skirt and a white blouse—clothes borrowed from Christine. Nikolas decorated himself and his house in combinations of black and white, and Christine had taken to styling herself in the same. Sarah swore that when she bought herself new clothes, they would be decorated with rainbows.
She stared at herself in the full-length mirror as she brushed her blond hair and braided it back, out of her way. At least she had found a long-sleeved shirt that hid the scars on her arms, but the vampiric black eyes where she was used to seeing Vida-blue ones chilled her. She barely resisted an urge to slam a palm into the mirror’s surface and shatter it to send the image away.
She remembered doing something similar when she was seven. Hysterical, still screaming after the discovery of her father, she had thrown anything that had come to hand. When she had run out of things to throw, she had turned toward the window. The bright rainbows around the room, dancing over her father’s dead flesh, had offended her. She had slammed a fist with all her strength through the decorative cut-glass panels.
She had torn her hand to ribbons and broken three fingers. Her mother had allowed the hand to be set and bandaged but had bound Sarah’s power so she would heal at a nearly human rate, to teach her the consequences of emotional reactions. Of losing