"About what?"
"How to be a Dark-Hunter. Everything you think you know about fighting, surviving, it's nothing. I have to show you how to use your new powers and to see correctly with those eyes."
"And if I don't want to learn?"
"Then you'll die and there won't be any coming back from it this time."
Nick took his hand and allowed him to pull him to his feet.
Ash closed his eyes and took Nick home.
He'd never looked forward to training a new Dark-Hunter, but this one...
This one hurt most of all.
Valerius slipped out of the Devereaux house an hour before dawn. Tabitha had finally fallen asleep, and he had carried her upstairs to the room that she had shared with Amanda when they were children.
After placing her on the bed, he'd spent longer than he should have looking over the old photos on the wall of the two of them together.
Of them with their sisters.
His poor Tabitha. He didn't know if she'd ever heal.
He called a taxi and had it drop him at his house. The place was completely dark. There was no one there now, and he realized just how reliant he'd become on Tabitha.
These last couple of weeks...
They had been miraculous.
She was miraculous.
Now their time together was over.
Valerius opened the door to his house and listened to the silence. He shut and locked the door, then walked up the stairs to the solarium where Agrippina's statue waited.
He refilled the oil in her lamp before he realized just how stupid he'd been, both as a man and as a Dark-Hunter.
He hadn't been able to protect Agrippina or Tabitha from the pain that was life.
Just as he couldn't protect himself.
But then, maybe life wasn't about protecting. Maybe it was about something else.
Something even more valuable.
It was about sharing.
He didn't need someone to protect him from the past. He needed the touch of a woman whose warmth chased away those demons. A woman whose very presence had made the unbearable bearable.
And in all these centuries he still hadn't learned the most valuable thing of all.
How to say "I love you" to someone.
But at least now he understood what feeling it meant.
His heart shattering, he touched Agrippina's cold cheek. It was time to let go of the past.
"Good night, Agrippina," he whispered.