"Do you think we'll ever get our lives back to normal?"
Ravyn was silent as he considered that. The concept of normal to him was actually laughable. But he knew that wasn't what she was asking him.
She wanted him to tell her that everything would be all right.
"I'm sure you'll get your life back, Susan." The only problem was that he knew he, too, would go back to being a Dark-Hunter, but after spending this day with her he didn't think that his life would ever be the same again. How could it?
He'd shared things with her that he'd never shared with another living being. More than that, she'd touched a part of him that he didn't even know he still had.
But he also knew that in the end, he was going to have to walk away from her. It was all he could do. He was a Dark-Hunter and she was human.
And that reality broke the heart he thought had died more than three hundred years ago.
Cael jerked awake as a sense of foreboding terrorized him. Amaranda rolled over in bed to stare up at him with her brow furrowed by concern.
"Are you okay, baby?"
He couldn't speak as he tried to pull his dream into his conscious mind. One of his gifts as a Dark-Hunter was the power of precognition.
Yet this vision escaped him completely. Except for one thing that he remembered clearly.
Amaranda's death.
He pulled her into his arms and held her as pain racked him. He couldn't lose her. He couldn't.
"Cael? You're starting to scare me."
Still, he couldn't speak, not while he saw her dead at his feet. And as in the past, the thought of her death weakened his Dark-Hunter powers. He could feel them slipping, even as he drew personal strength from her.
"Cael?"
"It's okay, Randa," he said, finally. But inside it wasn't. He'd already lost everyone who'd ever meant anything to him. He didn't want to ever feel that grief again.
And yet what choice did he have?
She was going to die. Their time together was so finite that he couldn't even let himself think about it.
Tightening his arms around her, he laid a gentle kiss on her cheek. "Go back to sleep, love."
He reluctantly pulled away from her.
She frowned at him. "Where are you going?"
"Bathroom." Cael pulled up his plaid and wrapped it around his hips before he opened the door and stepped through it toward the bathroom in the hallway.
He'd only taken a few steps when he felt a preternatural frisson go up his spine. He turned just as a door opened on his right to show him a man almost even in height to him. And even though the man had black hair, he oozed the scent and aura of a Daimon.
But unlike a Daimon, this man had swirling silver eyes that Cael had only seen on one other being.
Acheron Parthenopaeus.
"Who are you?"
The man smiled to show him a set of fangs. "Stryker."
"You don't belong here."
He arched a brow at that. "I would think, as a Daimon, that I have more right here than a Dark-Hunter does. Tell me, why is the enemy living in peace in a commune of Apollites?"