He swallowed a bite of his food and took a drink. "Scared villagers mostly. Since the day Atlantis was sucked into the ocean, Apollites and Daimons have been persecuted. At one time, all the Greek city-states knew about the Dark-Hunters and we were revered. But as time went on and the Dark-Hunters became more solitary, we were mostly forgotten except in myths and legends. Acheron and the others liked it that way. Ash even went so far as to collect and hide the ancient writings that referred to us."
"Acheron?" she asked, cutting a piece of her chicken. "You keep mentioning him. Who is he?"
"He was the first Dark-Hunter chosen by Artemis."
"And he's still alive?"
"Oh yeah. I think he's in California this week."
She arched a brow at him.
Hunter smiled. "He travels to a new location every few days."
"How? Why?"
He shrugged. "I guess when you're eleven thousand years old, things get rather boring. As for how, he has a custom-built helicopter that can break the sound barrier."
Amanda digested the news and tried to imagine what this oldest Dark-Hunter must look like. For some reason, Yoda came to mind. Some small, gray-green-skinned ancient who walked around stooped over, spouting broken words of wisdom to the others.
"Have you ever met Acheron?" she asked.
Kyrian nodded. "We all have. He trains all the new Dark-Hunters and in a way he is our unofficial leader. There's also the theory that he's the hit man the gods call in to execute us when we step over the line of propriety."
She didn't like the sound of that at all. "Step over how?"
"Preying on humans, for one. We have a Code of Conduct that has to be followed. No revealing of our powers before the masses, no association with Apollites or Daimons, et cetera."
It was strangely comforting to know that they had such a thing, but also scary to think of one of these guys turning bad with the powers they possessed. "If Dark-Hunters are forbidden to hurt each other and you drain one another's powers, how can Acheron be an executioner?"
"He doesn't drain our powers." He took a drink of wine. "Ash was the guinea pig Dark-Hunter. Since he was the first, the gods hadn't quite got the kinks out of the system. So he has some ... peculiar, shall we say, side effects."
Now she definitely pictured some mutant life-form. A little hunchback Dark-Hunter with a lisp.
"And just how many Dark-Hunters are there?" she asked.
"Thousands."
Amanda's jaw went slack. "Seriously?"
By the light in his eyes, she could see the answer.
"How often are new ones created?"
"Not often," he said quietly. "Most of us have been around for quite some time."
"Wow," she breathed. "So if Acheron is the oldest, who is the youngest?"
Kyrian frowned as he thought about the answer. "Offhand, I would say Tristan, Diana, or Sundown, but I would have to check with Acheron on it."
"Sundown? Nickname, or did his mother not like him very much?"
He laughed. "He was a gunslinger and that was the name they used on his wanted posters. The authorities claimed he did his best work after dark."
"Okay," Amanda said slowly. Now she pictured some Wild Bill Hickok character. Complete with bowlegs and shaggy beard and a wad of tobacco in his cheek. "I take it you Dark-Hunters weren't merchants or um..."
"Decent law-abiding folks?"
She smiled. "I wasn't implying you were indecent, but you have the gist of what I was going for."
Kyrian returned her smile. "Indecent" would certainly describe the thoughts in his mind that concerned his guest. "It takes a certain demeanor and passion to become a Dark-Hunter. Artemis doesn't want to waste her time or ours by picking someone incapable of hunting. I guess you could say we are all mad, bad, and immortal."
Her smile widened, showing just a very tiny hint of a dimple in her right cheek. How odd he'd never noticed that before. "Bad and immortal I will give you, but are you truly mad?"
"If by mad you mean insane, what then would you say?"
Her eyes flashed wickedly. "That you are definitely mad. But you know, I think I like that about you. There's something to be said for unpredictability."
Kyrian wasn't sure which of them was most surprised by her confession. She looked away quickly, her cheeks turning bright red.
She liked him ... The words evoked a truly juvenile response inside him. He felt a peculiar urge to run tell someone, "She likes me, she likes me."
Ye gods, what was that?
He was two thousand years old. Long past the age for such behavior.
Yet there was no denying the satisfaction and happiness he felt.
Awkward silence fell between them while they ate.
As she finished, Amanda did her best not to think about her house. All she'd lost. She would deal with that tomorrow. At the moment, she just wanted to get through the night.
"Tabitha is staying put," she said as she watched Kyrian take his plate to the sink and rinse it off.
"Good."
"You know," she said quietly, "you still haven't told me how you knew so much about my sister the night we met."
He put the plate and silverware in the dishwasher. "Talon and Tabitha have a mutual friend."
Amanda's eyes widened at that. A mole ... who would have thought. "One of Tabitha's Zoo Crew?"
He nodded.
"Who?"
"Since this person spies for us, I'm not about to tell you who it is."
She laughed at that, then narrowed her eyes, trying to divine who it was. "I'll bet it's Gary."
"I'm giving away nothing."
It was intriguing, but not nearly as much as the Dark-Hunter before her. Sighing, Amanda continued to eat and glance around the richly appointed kitchen while Kyrian put the food away. There was a marble breakfast counter that vaguely resembled a Greek temple. It separated the table where she sat from the rest of the kitchen. Three tall bar stools were set before it.
Everything was crisp and clean and enormous.
"This is a big house for one person. How long have you lived here?"
"A little over a hundred years."
She choked. "Are you serious?"
"There's no need for me to move. I like New Orleans."
She got up and took her plate to him. "You put down some serious roots, don't you? Where did you live before here?"
"Paris for a while," he said, putting the plate aside. "Geneva. London, Barcelona, Hamburg, Athens. Before that I wandered around."
She watched his face while he spoke. There was no telltale sign of his mood. He was hiding his feelings from her and she wondered if there was any way to draw him out. "It sounds really lonely."
"It was okay." Still no facial clues.
"Did you ever have friends in any of those places?"
"No, not really. I've had a few Squires over the centuries, but for the most part, I prefer solitude."
"Squires?" she asked. How strange. "Like in the Middle Ages?"
"Something like that." He looked at her, but didn't elaborate. "What about you? Have you lived here all your life?"
"Born and raised. My mother's parents immigrated from Romania during the Depression and my father's people were backwoods Cajuns."
He laughed at that. "I've known a lot of those."
"Living here for a hundred years, I'll bet you have."
Amanda considered the life Hunter must have lived. All the centuries of solitude, of watching people he cared about die of old age while he never changed. It must have been hard for him.
But along with that, his life must have had a few really neat perks.
"What's it like knowing you're going to live forever?"
He shrugged. "Honestly, I no longer think about it. Much like the rest of the world, I just get up, do my job, and go to bed."
How simple he made it sound. Yet she sensed something else from him. A deep-rooted sadness. Living without dreams must be excruciating. The human spirit needed goa
She dropped her gaze to the counter and tried to imagine what Hunter had been like as a man. Julian had told her how they would drink after battle and how much Hunter had wanted children.
Worse, she remembered the way Hunter had looked holding Vanessa.
"Have you ever had any children?"
Intense pain flashed through his eyes for only an instant until he recovered his stoicism. "No, Dark-Hunters are sterile."
"So you are impotent."
He gasped indignantly and looked at her. "Hardly. I can have sex, I just can't procreate."
"Oh." She wrinkled her nose devilishly at him and tried to lighten the mood. "That was really a nosy question. I'm sorry."
"It's all right."
Hunter started the dishwasher. "Would you like a tour of the house?"
"House?" she asked, cocking a disbelieving brow. "If this is a house, then I live in a two-room shanty." Her breath caught as she remembered that she didn't live anywhere anymore. Clearing her throat, she pushed the thought aside. "Yes," she said quietly. "I'd like to see it."
Hunter led her through the doorway on her left, into a massively large living room. The walls, crown moldings, and medallions were absolutely gorgeous in their old-fashioned grace and elegance, but the furniture in the house was as modern as it could be.
The room was decorated for comfort, not to impress visitors. But then she imagined vampires didn't entertain guests too often.
A huge entertainment center lined one wall with a JVC component system, big-screen TV, double-decker VCR and DVD player.
Though there were lamps all around, the room was lit only by candles from three ornate sconces.
"You don't like modern light bulbs, do you?" she asked as Hunter moved to light a candelabrum.
"No," he said. "They're too bright for my eyes."
"Light hurts you?"
He nodded. "Dark-Hunters have eyes made for darkness. Our pupils are larger than yours and they don't dilate the same way. As a result, our eyes let in a lot more light than human eyes."
While he spoke, she noticed the floor-to-ceiling windows were covered with black shutters that would shield the house from daylight.
As she stepped around a black leather sofa, Amanda stopped dead in her tracks.
There was a coffin sitting in front of it.
"Is that..." She couldn't finish the sentence. Not while she held a gruesome image of Hunter lying asleep inside it every day.
Hunter glanced at it, then met her shocked gaze unblinkingly. "Yes," he said in a deadpan voice. "Yes, it is. It's my ... coffee table."
He walked over to it, lifted the lid and pulled a remote out of it. "For the TV if you want to watch it tomorrow."
Amanda shook her head. Now that she noticed it, she saw there were all kinds of weird little vampire trinkets lying around. Miniature statues, small crossbows, even a vampire tarot deck on the mantel.
"Nick thinks it's funny," Hunter said as she picked up the deck of tarot cards. "Any time he finds something with a vampire in it or on it, he brings it here and leaves it for me to find."
"Does it bother you?"
"No, he's a good kid most of the time."
As he led her room by room through the old mansion, she began to get lost. "Just how big is this place?" she asked as they entered a game room.
"There are twelve bedrooms and it's a little over seven thousand square feet."
"Jeez, I've been inside smaller malls."
He laughed.
An elaborate pool table was set in the middle of the game room, along with a collection of arcade games and a big-screen TV with an entire array of game consoles lined up on a low coffee table in front of it. But what she found most peculiar was a pair of baseball gloves and a baseball on a drop-leaf table in one corner of the room. Amanda went over to them.
"I toss the ball around with Nick some nights," Hunter explained.
"Why?"
He shrugged. "It clears my head when I'm trying to sort through things."
"Nick doesn't mind?"
He laughed at that. "Nick minds everything. I don't think I've ever asked him to do something he didn't complain about it."
"Then why do you keep him around?"
"I'm a glutton for punishment."
Now it was her turn to laugh. "I would really like to meet this Nick."
"No doubt you will tomorrow."
"Really?"
He nodded. "Anything you need, you tell him and he'll get it for you. If he offends you in any way, let me know and I'll kill him when I get up."
There was a note in his voice that told her it might not be an empty threat.
Hunter opened the large French doors and led her into a glass-enclosed atrium. The ceiling was clear and showed a million stars flickering overhead and their shoes clicked idly on the tile floor.
"It's beautiful in here."
"Thanks."
She walked up to a large statue of three women in the center of the room. The piece was absolutely breathtaking. The youngest of them was lying on her side with a scroll while the other two were sitting with their backs to each other. One held a lyre while the other appeared to sing. But what amazed her most was the way they were painted. Each one looked real, and they bore a striking resemblance to Hunter.
"Is this from Greece?" she asked.
A painful look crossed his face as he nodded. "They were my sisters."
Her heart heavy, she studied them closely.
Hunter gently touched the arm of the one with a scroll. His brow furrowed ever so slightly while he gazed up at the life-sized statue of a girl in her late teens. The blue togalike dress matched her eyes perfectly.
"Althea was the youngest of us," he said, his voice a full octave deeper. "She was quiet and bashful, and she had a quaint stutter when she got nervous. Gods, how she hated it, but I thought it was sweet. Diana"--he indicated the one with a lyre who was dressed in red--"was two years older than me and had the temperament of a shrew. My father said we were too much alike and that is why we could never get along. And Phaedra was a year younger than me and had the voice of an angel."
Amanda looked up at the young woman dressed in yellow.
There was such delicate grace to his sisters. The sculptor had captured them as if they were in mid-movement. Even the folds of their clothes were realistic and dainty. She'd never seen such craftsmanship. They looked so real she half expected them to talk to her.
No wonder it hurt him so.
"You loved them a lot."
He nodded.
"What happened to them?"
He moved away. "They married and had long, happy lives. Diana named her first son after me."
A tenuous smile curved her lips that the one who had fought most with him had done such a thing. It spoke a lot for their relationship. While she looked at the women, she remembered what he had said about Althea in the car. She had shorn off all her long, wavy blond hair when she learned her brother was gone. They must have loved him as much as he loved them.
"What did they think of your transition into a Dark-Hunter?"
He cleared his throat. "They never knew. To them, I was dead."
"Then how do you know so much about--"
"I could hear them while they lived. Feel them, the same way you can open your heart to Tabitha and tell when she's troubled."
She stiffened at his words. "How did you know about that?"
"I told you, I can feel your powers."
A shiver went down her spine and she wondered if she could hide anything from him. "You are one scary man."
A strange light darkened his eyes. "I'm not a man. I gave up my humanity when I crossed over."
He said that, but she knew better. He might not have a soul, but the man had a good heart and was nothing if not humane. "Why did you agree to be a Dark-Hunter even though you never took your revenge against Theone?"
"It seemed like a good idea at the time."
With those few words something inside her melted. Perhaps it was the loneliness in his voice, the calm acceptance of his fate in his eyes. She didn't know exactly what it was, but she knew she couldn't just walk back into her old life and forget this man.
She'd seen too much of his goodness. Too much of his pain. And God help her, the more she learned about him the more she wanted him.
Wanted him in a way that defied explanation. They'd barely met and yet there was something that bound them together.
Amanda looked up at those tormented eyes that studied her with hunger and heat. He was what her mother had called the "missing half." It was the term her mother used to describe her father. The term Selena used when she spoke of Bill.
For the first time in her life, Amanda understood. And having found it with him, she knew she couldn't just let it go.
Not without a fight.
Unaware of her thoughts, Hunter turned and led her back into the house. He showed her to a bedroom suite on the bottom floor. "You can sleep in here. I'll bring you something more comfortable to wear."
Amanda wandered around the lush bedroom. The king-sized plantation bed looked like something out of an old movie. The dark green paint would have made a small room look tiny, but in this massive space, it gave it a quaint, homey feel.
Hunter returned a few minutes later with a black T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that would swallow her whole. "Thanks," she said, taking them from him.
He stood before her, his eyes searching hers.
To her surprise, he lifted his hand and ran his finger down her jaw. His short fingernail gently scraped her flesh, sending chills through her. She knew he wanted to kiss her, and she was amazed at how much she wanted his kiss.
But he didn't kiss her. He just stared at her with those dark hungry eyes.
Then he ran the pad of his thumb over her lips and she barely bit back a moan at how good he felt. How good he smelled. The air between them was rife with tension. With mutual desire and need. The force of it took her breath and made her both weak and strong at the same time.
Just when she was sure he'd kiss her, he pulled away. "Good night, Amanda."
Her heart pounding, she watched him go.
*
Kyrian cursed himself with every step he took toward his office. He should have kissed her. He should have ...
No, he'd done the right thing. There would never be anything between them. Dark-Hunters could take women for a few nights, but they were forbidden to become seriously involved with them. The danger was just too great.
It made the women vulnerable to the Daimons, and it made the Dark-Hunter weak. Made him cautious, and in this line of work, caution got you killed.
-->