The Dark-Hunters (90 page)

Acheron removed his sunglasses and gave him a hard, serious stare with those ageless, timeless glowing eyes. “Yes, it would. You are the one Dark-Hunter I can depend on to have a clear, level head. I need you to stay focused, especially since we have Daimon Fest coming up and two Dark-Hunters in town who hate each other.

“Your emotions are the key to your powers, Talon. When you lose your control, you lose your Dark-Hunter immortality with it, and I don’t want to see you dead because you can’t control your libido.”

“Don’t worry. I’m under control.”

“Good. Just make sure you stay that way because if you don’t, you
will
get yourself killed.”

Chapter 5

“Oh, thank God you’re there,” Selena said in Sunshine’s ear as soon as Sunshine answered the phone. “Where have you been? I’ve been ringing the phone off the hook all day long trying to reach you. I know you can never find the damn thing, but dang, girl … I’ve been so worried that I was about to head over there and see if you were okay or if this unknown guy had murdered you in your loft.” Selena finally took a breath in the midst of her tirade. “Please tell me he’s not still there.”

Wiping off her paint-stained hands while she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder, Sunshine smiled at Selena’s concerned voice and her motherlike lecture. “No, Selena, Mr. Bodacious is gone. He had to go meet some friends.”

“Well, what time did he leave?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“Sunshine!”

“What?” she asked in feigned innocence.

“Oh, honey,” Selena gasped, “don’t tell me you spent the whole day with him playing Parcheesi or something.”

Sunshine bit her lip as she remembered exactly what they had spent the day doing. It made her warm and tingly all over again. “We didn’t get to the Parcheesi, but we did it on the backgammon table a couple of times. And on the couch, the kitchen counter, the floor, the coffee table, and—”

“Oh, my God, TMI—way too much information. Tell me you’re joking about this.”

“Nope, not a bit. I’m telling you, Selena, forget the Energizer Bunny, this guy had it all.”

Selena groaned. “What were you thinking? You just met him.”

“I know,” Sunshine said, agreeing completely with her friend that she was a lunatic for doing something so stupid. “It’s so not like me, but I couldn’t help myself. It was just like that weird magnetic force that grabs me when I’m walking past the Frostbyte Cafe and makes me swerve in to get a triple scoop of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.”

That was her one major vice. Sunshine had never been able pass up Chunky Monkey.

“The power of temptation was just too much, Selena. I couldn’t resist it. He was a Chunky Monkey container and all I could think was, ‘Someone give me a spoon.’”

“Oh, good grief,” Selena said.

“Yeah. It was weird. I was here, he was here, and then he said, ‘Let’s do it,’ and the next thing I knew, the spoon was in my hand and I was going for it.”

Selena made a disgusted noise. “Please tell me no one was using a spoon.”

Sunshine smiled devilishly. “No, no spoon, but there was a whole lot of licking going on.”

“Oh, oh, oh! You’re killing me. Don’t go there.”

Sunshine laughed. “I can’t stop myself. He was so hot that I feel this deep need to share his spectacular hotness with you.”

Selena snorted at her. “Are you at least going to see him again?”

“No, unfortunately not. I didn’t even get his last name.”

“Sunshine! Girl, you are nuts.”

“Yeah, I know. It was just a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”

“Sheez, are you okay, though? He didn’t hurt you or anything?”

“Oh no, not at all. It was the best day of my life. Freaky, ain’t it?”

“Ah jeez, Sunny. I can’t believe you did this. You’ve been hanging around all those weird friends of yours so much that you’re picking up their bad habits. Bringing home stray men you don’t even know. Next thing you know, you’ll be dancing naked on tabletops … Oh wait, that was me.”

Sunshine laughed. “Don’t worry. It’ll never happen again. You know me, I do date occasionally, but I usually spend at least a few normal, boring days with a guy before we rock the house down. Of course, no one ever rocked my house down the way this guy did. He leveled the mother to its foundations.”

Selena shrieked. “I can’t believe you keep telling me this.”

Sunshine laughed at the tortured angst in Selena’s voice as she continued to tease her. “I can’t believe I spent the day in bed with this guy, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’m telling you, these were the best eighteen hours of my life.”

“Jeez, you didn’t even know him a whole day?”

“Well, I know him now. Every last yummy inch of him. By the way, he had a lot of inches.”

“Stop it, Sunny,” Selena begged, her voice cracking with laughter. “I can’t take any more. I don’t need to know the sexual athlete of all time is running around New Orleans and I’m married to the lawyer. This is so cruel.”

Sunshine laughed again. “Well, Bill is nice, in a very Bill sort of way.”

“Oh gee, thanks, now you’re ripping on my Bill.”

“I’m sorry. You know I love Bill, but this guy was really, really great.” Sunshine, dragging the heavy, psychedelic phone in her wake, crossed the kitchen toward her fridge to get some guava juice. Teasing Selena was fun, but oddly enough there was a part of her that was extremely sad Talon had left.

He really had been a lot of fun and not just in the bed, or on the floor, or on the other five thousand places where they’d had sex. He’d been fun to talk to too.

Best of all, he hadn’t lost his patience with her.

She opened the fridge, then laughed again.

“What?” Selena asked.

Sunshine saw Talon’s prized Snoopy Pez dispenser standing up, looking straight at her. She couldn’t believe it.

So that was what he’d been doing in the fridge while she was in the shower. No wonder he had looked uncomfortable when she caught him.

How adorable.

“Awww, he left me his Snoopy Pez dispenser on top of the soy cheese.”

“What?” Selena asked.

“Nothing,” Sunshine said, taking the cold plastic toy into her hand. “It’s an inside joke.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you did something with the cheese.”

“No, we just ate it. Jeez, Selena, get your mind out of the gutter. Not everything has to do with sex.”

“Well, with the two of you it does. The basis of your whole entire relationship seems to be nothing but sex … Oh wait, it’s only been eighteen hours since you met him. Does that qualify as a relationship?”

“Believe me, the way he does sex, it counts. Besides, he did leave me his Pez dispenser.”

“Ooo,” Selena teased, “he’s bodacious and generous. What a guy.”

“Hey now, be fair to my bodacious biker. It’s a valuable Pez dispenser. A 1960-something collector’s item.”

“Yeah, but did he leave you his phone number?”

“Well no, but he did put Snoopy on the top shelf so I would find it.”

“Enough said. Case closed. You’re still riding the loser train when Snoopy becomes something valuable.”

“Okay, fine, Selena, you’re bringing me down from my love fest and I’m losing my afterglow. It’s been ten months since I last slept with a guy and it’ll probably be forever and a day before another one who’s not gay darkens my doorstep, so let me go back to work where I can bask in the after-greatness of my afternoon.”

“Okay, sweetie. I’ll call you later. I was just concerned. You go back to work and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, thanks. Bye.”

Sunshine hung up the phone and looked down at the Snoopy in her hand. She laughed.

Talon might not be perfect, he might even occasionally screw up and get run down by a Mardi Gras float, but he had been a great guy, and great guys were hard to come by in this day and age.

It was a pity she’d never see him again. But then, she wasn’t the kind of woman to mope over what could have been. She was an artist with a good career that she had worked very hard for.

A serious relationship with someone wasn’t something she was looking for right now.

She liked living alone. Loved having the freedom to just pick up and go whenever and wherever she wanted to. Her brief marriage in her early twenties had schooled her well on what a man expected from a wife.

She had no intention of
ever
revisiting that fiasco.

Talon had been a fun afternoon diversion, but that was all he was. Her life would now go on just as it always had.

Her heart lighter at the thought of him, she took Snoopy into her bedroom and set him on the nightstand by the bed.

Sunshine smiled. She’d never had a memento before. But that’s what Snoopy was to her. A token reminder of a wonderful day.

“Have a nice life, Talon,” she said, turning off the light by the bed before she headed back to her work. “Maybe someday we might meet again.”

*   *   *

It was just after one
A.M
. when Talon found himself outside the club Runningwolf’s on Canal Street. He’d tried to tell himself that he was here because Daimons were often found hanging in and around clubs where drunken humans made easy pickings.

He’d tried to tell himself that he was just doing his job.

But as he looked up at the dark windows above the club and wondered if Sunshine was up there in her bed or if she was at her easel painting, he knew better.

He was here because of her.

Talon cursed under his breath. Acheron was right. She was inside him in a way no one had been inside of him in centuries.

No matter what he tried, he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

Over and over, he could feel her. Feel her body under his, her breath on his skin. Hear the sound of her soft Southern drawl whispering in his ear.

And when she had touched him …

It was like a song from heaven.

The physical comfort and companionship she’d given him this afternoon had touched him profoundly.

He’d felt welcomed in a way that wasn’t sexual.

What had she done to him? Why after all these centuries had a woman crept inside his feelings?

His thoughts?

Even more frustrating, he knew if he were human, he’d be with her now.

You’re not human.

He didn’t need the reminder. All too well, he knew what he was. He liked what he was. There was a special kind of satisfaction that came with his job.

And yet …

“Speirr? What are you doing?”

He tensed at Ceara’s voice coming out of the darkness and at the fact that someone had caught him doing something he shouldn’t be doing.

“Nothing.”

She appeared beside him. Her shimmering face smiled knowingly.

He let out a disgusted breath. Why did he bother trying to hide anything from the ones who could see straight into his thoughts?

“Yeah, okay,” he admitted reluctantly, “so I wanted to check up on her and see how she’s doing.”

“She’s fine.”

“And that
really
irritates me.” The words were out before he realized it.

Ceara laughed at that. “You were expecting her to be sad?”

“Of course. She should at least have had a moment or two of regret or something.”

Ceara clucked her tongue. “Poor Speirr. You found the only woman alive who doesn’t think you hung the moon and the stars.”

He rolled his eyes at her. “So maybe I’m being a little arrogant…” She arched a brow and he corrected himself. “So I’m being a lot arrogant, but damn, I can’t get her out of my thoughts. How can she feel nothing?”

“I didn’t say she felt nothing, I only said she’s not sad.”

“So she did feel something for me?”

“If you like, I could do more investigating.”

“Nae,”
Talon said quickly. The last thing he wanted was for Ceara to find out what he and Sunshine had been doing all afternoon.

Ceara was naive and he wanted to keep her that way.

His sister walked a small circle around his body. For some reason she’d always liked to do that. As a little girl, she’d made him dizzy as she raced around him at a dead run, giggling as she went.

Even though she was a young woman before him now, in his heart he always saw her as that chubby little toddler who used to sit on his lap for hours, playing with his braids as she gibbered her baby speech at him.

Just like Dere …

His stomach clenched at the memory.

Ceara hadn’t been his only sister. Three more had been born between them. Fia had died her first year of life. Tress had lived to age five when she perished of the same illness that had claimed their mother.

And Dere …

She had died at age four.

She’d gone out at sunrise, wanting to see the fey folk Talon had teased her with. He’d told her how he often saw them out the window at daybreak while she slept.

Only five years old himself, he had heard someone leave their hut. At first he had thought it was his father. But as he snuggled back down to sleep, he’d realized Dere wasn’t in their bed.

He’d gotten up immediately and rushed out to find her.

She had slipped on the rocks along the edge of the cliff that looked out onto the sea where he’d told her the fey frolicked in the early dawn’s light.

He heard her scream and had run as fast as he could.

By the time he reached her, it was too late. Her young arms had been unable to hold on until he got there.

She lay below on the rocks with the waves rushing over her.

Even now, he could see her lying there. Could see the looks on his parents’ faces when he had awakened them with the news.

Worst of all, he could see the accusation in his father’s eyes.

Neither of his parents had ever uttered the words aloud, but in his heart he knew they had blamed him for it.

Not that it mattered. He blamed himself. He always had.

It was why he had been so protective of Ceara and Tress. Why he had been so determined that nothing bad would ever happen to his youngest sister.

Tonight, he saw a hesitancy in Ceara’s steps.

“So, what’s the news from the Daimon world?” he asked her.

Ceara paused. “How did you know?”