“Adianna.” She wasn’t being asked to witness; Zachary had already spoken for their line. A tremor of nervousness passed through her as Dominique gave her orders. “I am putting you in charge of this hunt. Nikolas and Kristopher are necessary targets, but your highest goal is the creature wearing Sarah’s form. I want you to find her, and put a knife in her heart. Is that clear?”
Adia glanced toward Zachary, but he had dropped his gaze back to the blades before him, accepting Dominique’s delegation of power without question.
Zachary was older, twenty-six years to Adia’s nineteen, but he had been a child when his mother and his two siblings had been lost. Dominique had become matriarch of their line, and Adia would inherit that title from her, so it was natural that she would want to put Adia in charge of this mission.
What Dominique could never know was that Adia had already failed once, when she had turned around and let one of them give Sarah his blood. Adia had been there. She could have ended this travesty before it began. But she hadn’t been strong enough.
Now the command had been given and there was only one possible response.
“Yes, and I will obey,” she replied, her words formal despite her silent dread. She had to make herself strong enough. Anything else would be a betrayal of her line.
Michael turned his face away as if he couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. Evan stood and said flatly, “I will send my son to you,” before walking out the door.
Dominique stepped back and glanced at the clock before saying to her daughter, “If there is a next generation, you will be its matriarch, but I’ve held you in my shadow longer than I should have. The hunters you will be working with are your peers, so it is right that you lead them now. I will get out of the way unless you call me in.” Then, in as close to an admission of weakness as Adia had ever heard her mother utter, she added, “For now, I need to rest.”
Adia did not think Dominique had truly slept since she had bound Sarah’s powers two days before. She had given good reasons for Adia’s leading this hunt, but Adia suspected there was one more: Dominique was tired, in body and heart.
Adia nodded, though it felt odd to have her mother looking to her for permission. “You rest. We need you strong. Once you’re up, you can start calling your contacts.” Dominique’s network of hunters and informants was impressive. Adia knew only some of them.
Only once Dominique left did Hasana approach Adia to say, “I should set those fingers before they start to heal that way. It looks like you need stitches in your arm, too.”
“Where’s Caryn?” Adia asked, wondering why Hasana hadn’t gone to check on her daughter.
“She brought her own car,” Hasana said, moving to examine the wounds while she spoke. “She thought we were being called for Sarah’s trial, and insisted on coming to speak on her behalf.”
Caryn herself had nearly been brought to trial not long before for far more severe crimes than Sarah had ever committed; if she had been a hunter, and not a healer, she never could have justified her actions. But maybe she had thought she could justify Sarah’s.
Adia sat while Hasana set and splinted her broken fingers, then put six stitches in her upper arm. The healer’s power numbed the pain from the injury and the needle going into and out of damaged flesh, leaving Adia with a disconnected sensation. In some ways she would rather have the pain than this sense that the skin the healer was stitching wasn’t really hers, but instead belonged to a stranger.
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 her mother was not there to stop him. He hadn’t been a Vida; he hadn’t needed to follow their obsessive code of perfection and self-control. He hadn’t even been a witch—just a damn fine hunter, one who had earned even Dominique’s respect.
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 the flesh.…
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 control.
She was supposed to have learned her lesson. Now all those years of struggling for flawless discipline, training to be perfect, had left her in a refuge provided to her by the vampire who had been her enemy so recently she wore his marks in her flesh—and would for the rest of eternity.
CHAPTER 3
SATURDAY, 6:12 A.M.
ADIA FELT A little giddy as she and Zachary crossed the threshold of the local SingleEarth Haven.
The compound was less than fifteen minutes away from their house, but Adia had ne
ver been there. Dominique had chosen to live close to SingleEarth’s healers, but they normally came to the house so hunters did not need to profane SingleEarth’s cherished lands.
It wasn’t that hunters weren’t allowed at SingleEarth, exactly, but they certainly were not welcome.
As the name implied, this was supposed to be a safe place. Those inside were protected from persecution, whether by hunters or others of their own kind. The Vida, Arun and Marinitch lines had sworn to honor that agreement, even though SingleEarth’s dominion caused a great deal of frustration. There was nothing quite so frustrating as knowing that someone in this place had information, or a history of slaughter, and not being able to do anything about it.
Everything had changed when Dominique had invoked the Rights, though.
Adia pitied Michael a little. It had seemed like a bad idea to bring someone as volatile as an Arun to SingleEarth, so Michael was assigned to check the house where Kristopher and his sister, Nissa, had previously stayed.
It wasn’t entirely busywork. The witches were bound to tell the others of their lines about the Rights of Kin, but no one would have told Nissa. If she had any brains at all, she would have disappeared when she’d learned that her brothers had tangled with a Vida, but maybe she wasn’t that bright. Maybe Michael would get lucky.
Adia doubted it. Their prey was much more likely to have gone somewhere like SingleEarth, where they would assume that the witches’ own laws would protect them. Therefore, Adia much preferred to be here, with Zachary. Zachary had moved out when he was sixteen and Adia was nine, so they had never been as close as siblings. But when they exchanged a glance at that moment, Adia could see that he was as thrilled by their new freedom as she was. She knew that her expression did not show her excitement—she had trained too long and hard to let such an emotion betray her—but her cousin would see it in her eyes just as she could see it in his.
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