He turned to face him. "Don't worry," he said as his black gaze burned Alexion with its intensity, "I won't. Your mistake was that you wouldn't have believed your friend had he told you the truth. My mistake would be listening to my 'friend' now... Then again, you're not my friend, are you? My friend died nine thousand years ago, and had he lived, he would have told me and not left me to live centuries with guilt over his death."
Kyros turned around and renewed his angry stride toward the parking lot.
"Kyros-"
"Dialegomaiana o echeri," Kyros said without even looking back.
"What language is that?" Danger asked.
"It's our native tongue."
"And what did he say?"
Alexion let out a disgusted breath. "Briefly put, 'talk to the hand.'"
She looked as deflated as he felt. "Should we follow him?"
"To do what? I can't beat sense into him, much as I would like to. The choice has to be his."
Damn fate for that. He hated free will at times. No wonder Acheron cursed it constantly. His boss was right, free will sucked.
His gaze went to Marco. The poor, hapless Dark-Hunter still had a dagger protruding from his chest, where someone, probably a Daimon, had stabbed him. Shaking his head in regret at the man's foolishness, Alexion went to the fallen Dark-Hunter and pulled the dagger free. Of course it wasn't the dagger that had killed him. His decapitated head lay a few feet away.
Danger moved to stand just behind him as she examined the body too. He could sense her revulsion, but like a trouper she kept herself calm and professional. "You don't think Kyros did that, do you?"
"He couldn't have."
"Then who?"
The voice that answered her question wasn't his and it came from the other side of the shadows. "Just your friendly neighborhood Daimon patrol."
Alexion leaned back ever so slightly so that he could see behind Danger.
There in the shadows was a group of six Daimons...
Danger's gaze narrowed angrily at the sound of the Daimons' taunting. How rare for the Daimons not to try and run away. Could they be the Spathis Alexion had mentioned?
Then again if they really had killed one Dark-Hunter already, they were probably drunk on their own power and looking to kill more.
"Oh, I so don't like you people," she growled.
"The feeling's entirely mutual," the lead Daimon said.
The Daimon glanced over to Marco's body. "We do nice work, don't we?"
She shrugged, unwilling to give them any sort of reward or praise for their barbarism, which brought back one too many nightmares from her human life. "Looks like he committed suicide to me. He probably took one look at your ugly face and went blind, so he decided it was better to be dead than have your heinous form be the last thing he'd seen."
Alexion actually laughed out loud at that.
The Daimon glowered at her. "I assure you he died screaming like a girl."
She looked over at Alexion and shook her head in disgust. "Oh, I am so offended by that. What is the deal with that sexist statement? I'm a female and I don't scream. But I've killed many a male Daimon who did."
Alexion didn't comment.
Danger turned back toward the Daimons, who were still eyeing her as if she were a main course. She was definitely going to beat the life out of them, but before she did, she had one question. "So why did you kill him?"
The Daimon shrugged. "He had a victim he didn't want to share. Seems he thought he could take the soul into his own body like we do. We thought turnabout was fair play so we staked him to free it. You know, Dark-Hunters don't burst apart when a soul is freed. Why is that?"