The Dark-Hunters (297 page)

“I’ll be right there.” She reluctantly pulled away from Alexion. “I won’t be gone long,” she said softly in his ear.

She wasn’t sure if he heard her or not. Her heart heavy, she left him on the bed and went to take the call.

*   *   *

“All right,” Alexion said after a few minutes, trying to talk to his newfound soul. What the hell? He didn’t have anything to lose and staying here in the bed until she died didn’t seem productive for either one of them. “If you want to be free, lady, you and I have to make a pact.”

She continued to wail.

“Woman, listen to me,” he snarled out odd. “I can’t even function if you don’t stop doing that. You’re going to get us both killed unless you get control of yourself.”

“I want to go home. Where am I? Why am I here? Who are you? Why is it so dark? I don’t understand what happened to me. I need to go home now. Why can’t I go home…?”

Her questions came at him in rapid succession. So many that he could barely focus on any one of them.

“If a Daimon can do this, I can too,” he growled, forcing himself to sit up. The room swam around him.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. He had to take control of this situation. He had to.

“Who are you?” he asked the woman.

“Carol.”

The wailing lessened a degree, as if she were trying to get hold of herself. “All right, Carol. Everything will be all right. I promise. But you have to calm down and be quiet for a little while.”

“Who are you? Why are you telling me to be quiet?”

How did he answer that one? “It’s a bad dream you’re having. If you rest quietly for a while, it’ll get better.”

“I want to go home!”

“I know, but you have to trust me.”

“Is it really a bad dream?”

“Yes.”

“It will get better?”

“Yes.”

To his relief, she settled down. Alexion took a deep breath as his vision cleared a degree. He could hear the soul rustling around inside him, but at least she was no longer crying or screaming.

Rubbing his eyes, he continued to breathe deeply, and hoped that Carol stayed calm for a while.

He got up slowly from the bed and shrugged his coat off. Stryker had given him only a few days to live or Carol’s soul would die …

There was no choice. He would have to kill himself to free her. But he had a lot of work to do before then. It was time he put all the foolishness with Danger behind him. He was here to do a job.

And thanks to Stryker, it would be the last thing he ever did.

*   *   *

After hanging up, Danger took a minute to check on Keller and Xirena, who seemed to be hitting it off famously. They were watching a movie and eating chili while Keller talked a mile a minute.

Apparently the demon didn’t share Danger’s need for silence while watching TV.

Satisfied the demon wasn’t going to eat her Squire, Danger headed back to the guest room. She opened the door quietly, expecting to find Alexion still on the bed.

Her jaw went slack as she found him at the writing desk, making what appeared to be notes.

“You okay?” she asked, entering the room slowly.

He nodded as he continued to write.

Danger moved closer only to realize he was writing in Greek. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She frowned at his curtness. There was something very different about him now. He was like he’d been the first night they’d met. Curt. Unfeeling. Distant.

Even the air around him was cold.

“Hey,” she said, reaching out to stop his hand. It, too, was icy cold. “What happened?”

He looked at her, stone-faced. “I’m not here to make friends, Danger. I’m here to deliver an ultimatum. I need you to call together the Dark-Hunters on this list.”

He handed her the top sheet of paper. “I can’t read—” Before she could finish the words, the writing changed from Greek to English.

Whoa. That was impressive.

She saw that he was still jotting things down. “What’s that over there?”

“My own personal list.”

Her frown deepened, especially after she glanced over the names on her paper and found one in particular missing.

“Where’s Kyros?”

Alexion didn’t answer.

Danger grabbed his hand and waited until he looked at her. “What is going on with you?”

“I’m getting down to business. If Stryker was telling the truth, and in this I believe he was, I only have three days to get to the Dark-Hunters who are on the fence and convince them to side with Acheron.”

“And Kyros?”

His eerie green eyes were dull and as cold as his skin. “I’m writing him off.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t do that. You were friends.”

“Yes, we
were
friends. Now we’re enemies.”

She was aghast at his words. “How could you—”

“I don’t have anyone in this world I can trust,” he said harshly, cutting her deeply that she was included on the list after everything she had done for him. Dear Lord, she had even given
him
her trust and that was something she did for no man.

“I should never have tried to save him,” Alexion said. “Artemis is right, compassion is for the weak.”

“So that’s it?” she asked, disgusted by his sudden turnaround. “You’re going to give up on your best friend?”

“I’m not giving up. I’m dying. I have a soul inside me that will have to be freed in—”

Danger narrowed her eyes two seconds before she pulled the dagger out of her boot and plunged it straight into Alexion’s heart.

He burst apart.

Chapter 17

Two seconds later, Alexion was back in human form, standing before Danger, who waited with her hands on her hips.

He patted his chest as if he couldn’t believe he’d returned. He reached out and placed a hand on her desk.

“Soul inside you all gone now?” she asked.

He nodded slowly.

“Good. Now you can stop being a total jerk.” She turned to leave.

Alexion grabbed her and pulled her to a stop. He couldn’t believe that he had his body back. “How did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t. I was only guessing. But it was something I thought of while I was downstairs talking to Rafe. The first rule of being a Dark-Hunter is to stab the soul’s host to free it. Stryker said that you had to kill yourself, which would cause you to die permanently—he conveniently left out what would happen if anyone else ‘killed’ you.”

Alexion was still aghast. It was true. Whenever a Dark-Hunter stabbed a Daimon and their body burst apart, the stolen souls always returned to their resting places.

She laughed bitterly. “I’m a staunch Catholic. My mother used to excel at sins of omission. Growing up with her, I learned early on to listen to what she said, not what I heard. And most of all, to pay attention to what she didn’t say. Since Stryker put the soul into you during your mid-poofing, I was betting that another poof such as the one caused by an outside person stabbing you would release it. Why else would he have said you had to stab yourself?”

Alexion was completely stunned on so many levels that he didn’t even know where to begin. Part of him wanted to choke her, but another was impressed by the fact that she had correctly deduced Stryker’s logic.

“I wasn’t being a jerk,” he said sullenly, returning to her earlier insult.

She stared at him dryly. “Yes you were.”

“No,” he said honestly, “I’m only being what I am. I’m here to—”

“What you are, Alexion,” she said, interrupting him, “is a caring man.”

He shook his head in denial. “I’m the Alexion. My only goal is to protect Acheron.”

She placed her hand to his cheek. “It wasn’t a cold, unfeeling entity that slept with me last night and it wasn’t an unfeeling ‘other’ that looked hurt when Kyros betrayed him. You are still human.”

“No,” he insisted emphatically, “I’m not.”

She stood up on her tiptoes and pulled his head down so that she could kiss him. The coldness of his skin immediately vanished as he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her blind.

She could feel his heartbeat increase as his tongue swept against hers.

Danger pulled back. “You’re not unfeeling or uncaring. I doubt if you ever have been.”

Alexion’s head spun at her words and his reaction to her kiss. It was true. Around her he was completely different. He found himself feeling things that he hadn’t felt in untold centuries. Until the moment she had entered his life, he’d begun to doubt he could ever really feel again.

With her, he did.

How could this be?

“There can never be anything between us, Danger.”

“I know.” He heard the pain in her voice. “I’m a big girl, Ias, and I can take care of myself. But you … you need to can the destroyer act around me. I don’t like it.”

He frowned at her words. “Why did you call me Ias?”

“Because Ias is the man who considers a demon his daughter and it was Ias who woke me up tonight with a rose tickling my cheek.”

“But I’m also the Alexion.”

She offered him a smile that melted the iciness of his entire existence. “There’s a tough side to all of us. Be grateful; it was my tough side that nailed you with the dagger a few minutes ago.”

He laughed at that, then sobered. “I don’t know what to feel when I’m around you.”

“Yeah, I’m confused too. I can’t believe that I’m about to help you hang my friends.”

“I’m not trying to hang anyone, Danger.”

“No? Then what’s with the list of hopeless you have over there?”

He glanced to the paper where he’d been writing. “That’s not a list of names. It’s a list of rules for Keller so that the demon doesn’t eat him.”

She laughed at him. Leave it to Alexion to think of that one. “I knew I should have studied Greek in school.”

Grateful that he was almost back to “normal,” she took his hand in hers. It was still warm. “Are we friends again?”

“Yeah, I think we are.”

*   *   *

“Akri!”

Ash rolled over in his bed as he heard Simi running down the hallway outside his room in Katoteros. She burst through the door, then launched herself at his bed.

He woofed as she landed on him then sat heavily on his chest. “I was sleeping, Sim.”

“I know, but I heard Alexion calling out again. The Simi wants to go see him,
akri.
Lemme go! Please.”

Ash felt the all too familiar knot in his gut as he fought himself not to allow her that wish. But he couldn’t.

The last two times he’d let Simi out without him had been disastrous. In Alaska, she’d almost died, and in New Orleans …

That was something he still couldn’t think about without his temper erupting.

“I can’t, Simi.”

“Why not?”

He sighed heavily. “I can’t tamper with his fate. You know that. This is his time and if I answer him I will probably do whatever it is he asks. So for all our sakes, I’ve turned his voice off in my head and I would advise you to do the same.”

She pouted as she pulled the sfora out of her pink coffin-shaped purse. “At least make this work so’s I can see him.”

“No.”

She growled at him. “But what if he gets hurt? What if he dies?” Her face blanched. “You can’t let him die,
akri.
You can’t. The Simi loves her Alexion.”

He reached up to brush her long black hair back from her face. “I know,
edera,
” he said, using the Atlantean endearment for “precious baby.” “But his fate is in his hands, not mine. I won’t alter it.”

Her pout increased. “You control fate. All fate. You can make everything all right. Please do it for your Simi?”

That was easier said than done. He was a living example of the disaster that came from trying to interfere with someone’s destiny. His entire life both as a man and a god had been destroyed because of people who meddled with his “fate.” He would
never
do such a thing to someone else. “Sim, that’s not fair and you know it.”

“Not fair is hearing Alexion in my head and not being able to help him. He don’t sound right,
akri.
I think them peoples is being mean to him. Let the Simi go eat them.”

Ash closed his eyes and tried to see the future for Alexion so that he could give Simi some peace.

But there was nothing to be seen except black mist. Damn. He hated that he couldn’t see the fates of his loved ones, any more than he could see his own.

He considered calling Atropos, who was the Greek goddess in charge of cutting the thread of life that governed humans. She would be able to tell him if Alexion would die. But he knew better than to summon her. She hated him passionately.

None of the Greek Fates would ever tell him anything of the future. They had turned their backs on him centuries ago. To them, he was long dead and forgotten.

“We will just have to wait and see what happens.”

Simi blew him a raspberry, then got up to leave.

She slammed the door on her way out.

Ash rubbed his head as the sound echoed in the room. Since his emotions weren’t tied to the Mississippi Hunters, he knew which of them would live and who would die. That saddened him greatly, and all he could do was hope that Alexion was able to sway them away from their destinies in time.

Only their free will could alter what he saw for them.

That was why he’d sent Alexion to Danger. Since the day he’d started training her, he’d had a soft spot for her. The small Frenchwoman covered her tender heart with a coat of arsenic to keep others away, but he knew what she hid from others. She was a good woman who’d been dealt a bad hand. The last thing he wanted was to see her dead. And yet he knew in his heart the futility of wishing for what could have been.

Danger’s days were extremely numbered, and unless a miracle happened, there was nothing any of them could do to help her.

Chapter 18

They were seriously batting absolute zero with no pinch hitter in sight. Danger sighed heavily as they returned to her house. They’d spent the last few hours seeking out the Dark-Hunters in the area only to find out that most of them had an ax to grind with Acheron.