All Just Glass Read Online Free

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 humanrate, 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.

C HAPTER 3
S ATURDAY , 6:12 A.M.
    A DIA 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 never 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 thoughSingleEarth’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.
    Sarah would