Chapter 3
Tabitha hung up the phone, feeling a little odd about her conversation. And she felt even odder about Amanda's prediction for her health. It concerned her a lot, especially when combined with her own uneasy feeling.
She'd almost died twice three years ago when Desiderius had been out to kill Amanda and Kyrian. Since then, no Daimon had gotten near her. Mostly because she had honed her skills and become much more observant.
But the ones last night...
They'd been tough kills and a group of them had gotten away. Surely they wouldn't be back. Most Daimons vacated the area very quickly after they ran into her or one of the Dark-Hunters. Courage wasn't exactly something they were known for: Since they were young and the idea was to stay alive, very few Daimons wanted to run head-to-head with Artemis's army, which was comprised of warriors with hundreds, if not thousands, of years of combat experience on them.
Only Desiderius-who had been a half-god-had possessed the strength and stupidity to fight the Dark-Hunters.
No, the Daimons from last night were gone and she would be fine. Amanda must have had bad chicken or something.
She returned to Valerius, who was finishing up his food. "What are your powers?" she asked.
He looked a bit taken aback by the question. "Excuse me?"
"Your Dark-Hunter powers. Do they include premonitions or precog?"
"No," he said before taking a drink of wine. "Like most Roman Dark-Hunters, I got rather, and please excuse the crassness of this, 'shafted' in that department."
Tabitha frowned. "How do you mean?"
He took a deep breath before he answered. "Artemis didn't care for the fact that in Rome, she wasn't a major deity. Rather, she was mostly revered by our lower classes, slaves and women. So she carried her grudge over to us when we were created. I'm stronger than a human and faster, but I don't have the elevated psychic powers that the rest of the Dark-Hunters do."
"Then how do you manage to fight the Daimons?"
He shrugged. "The same way you do. I battle more skillfully than they."
Yeah, maybe, but she often found herself bloody from her battles. She wondered how often he did, too. It was hard to fight a Daimon as a human.
"That's not right," Tabitha said, angry on his behalf that Artemis would create such a disparity among her Dark-Hunters. How could the goddess turn them loose, knowing what they were up against?
Man, Simi was right. Artemis was a bitch-goddess.
Valerius frowned at the anger he heard in Tabitha's voice. He wasn't used to anyone taking his side in any matter. Neither as a man nor as a Dark-Hunter. It had always seemed his ill fate to end up on the losing end of any matter regardless of whether he was right or wrong. "Few things ever are fair."
He drained the last of his wine and rose to his feet, then inclined his head to her. "I thank you for the food."
"Any time, Val."
He stiffened at her use of a nickname he despised. The only people to ever use it had been his brother Markus and his father, and then only to mock or belittle him. "My name is Valerius."
She looked at him dryly. "I can't call you Valerius. Jeez. It sounds like some broken-down Italian car. And every time I hear that name I feel the deep need to break out into Vo-lar-ray, Oh, oh, oh-and then I start thinking of the movie The Hollywood Knights and believe me you don't want me to go there. So to save my sanity from that crappy song echoing in my head and images of a lunatic running around a high school gym doing unspeakable things, you can be known as Val or Babycakes."
His gaze darkened. "My name is Valerius and I will not answer to Val."
She shrugged. "Fine then, Babycakes, have it your way."
He opened his mouth to protest, but already he knew better than to argue. Tabitha had a way of doing just as she pleased, all arguments be damned. "Very well," he said grudgingly, "I shall endure Val. But only from you."
She smiled. "See how painless that is? Why would you hate the name, anyway?"
"It's coarse."
She rolled her eyes at him. "You must really be fun in bed," she said sarcastically.
Valerius was stunned by her words. "Excuse me?"
"I'm just wondering what it would be like to make love to a man who is so concerned about being rigid-then again... Nah. I can't imagine someone so regal getting down and dirty with it."
"I assure you, I've never had any complaints in that regard."
"Really? Then you must be sleeping with women who are so cold you could freeze ice cubes on them."
He turned to leave the room. "We are not having this discussion."
But she gave him no reprieve as she followed him toward the stairs. "Were you like this in Rome? I mean, from everything I've read, you guys were raw with sexuality."
"I can just imagine the lies they tell."
"So were you always this uptight?"
"What do you care?"
Her response stunned him as she pulled him to a stop. "Because I'm trying to figure out what made you like you are now. You are so closed off, you're barely human."
"I am not human, Ms. Devereaux. In case you haven't noticed, I'm one of the damned."
"Baby, open your eyes and look around. We're all damned in one way or another. But damned is a far cry from dead. And you live like you're dead."
"I'm that, too."
She ran a hot look over his scrumptious body. "For a dead man you look remarkably fit."
His face hardened. "You don't even know me."
"No, I don't. But the question is, do you know you?"
"I'm the only one who does."
And that simple sentence told her everything she needed to know about him.
He was alone.
Tabitha wanted to reach out to him, but could sense that she needed to give him some space. He wasn't used to interacting with people like her... then again, few were.
As Grandma Flora, the gypsy seer of their family, always said, Tabitha tended to come on to people like a freight train and mow them down where they stood.