Seize the Night (Dark-Hunter #7)(3)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Still, the longer he was here the more his blood was thinning, and the cool night air was a bit chilly to him.

Valerius paused as his Dark-Hunter senses detected the presence of a Daimon. Tilting his head, he listened with his heightened hearing.

He heard a group of men laughing at their victim. And then he heard the strangest thing of all…

"Laugh it up, ass**le. But she who laughs last, laughs longest and I intend to belly roll tonight."

A fight broke out.

Valerius whirled on his heel and headed back the direction he’d come from.

He drifted through the darkness until he found an ajar gate that led to a courtyard.

There in the back were six Daimons fighting a tall human woman.

Valerius was mesmerized by the macabre beauty of the battle. One Daimon came at the woman’s back. She flipped him over her shoulder and in one graceful motion stabbed him in the chest with a long, black dagger. The Daimon burst into a golden dust.

She twirled as she rose up to face another one. She tossed the dagger from one hand to the other and held it like a woman well used to defending herself from the undead.

Two Daimons rushed her. She actually did a cartwheel away from them, but the other Daimon had anticipated her action. He grabbed her.

Without panicking, the woman surrendered her weight by picking both of her legs up to her chest. It brought the Daimon to his knees. The woman sprang to her feet and whirled to stab the Daimon in his back.

He evaporated.

Normally the remaining Daimons would flee. The last four didn’t. Instead they spoke to each other in a language he hadn’t heard in a long time: ancient Greek.

"Little chickie la la, isn’t dumb enough to fall for that, guys," the woman answered back in flawless Greek.

Valerius was so stunned he couldn’t move. In over two thousand years, he’d never seen or heard of anything like this. Not even the Amazons had ever produced a better fighter than the woman who now confronted the Daimons.

Suddenly a light appeared behind the woman. It flashed bright and swirling. A chill, cold wind swept through the courtyard before six more Daimons stepped out.

Valerius went rigid at something even rarer than the warrior-woman fighting the Daimons.

Tabitha turned slowly to see the group of new Daimons. Holy shit. She’d only seen this one other time.

The new batch of Daimons looked at her and laughed. "Pitiful human."

"Pitiful this," she said as tossed her dagger at his chest.

He moved his hand and deflected the dagger before it reached him. Then he slung his arm toward her. Something invisible and painful slashed through her chest as she went flying head over heels.

Dazed and scared, Tabitha lay on the ground.

Horrible memories ripped through her of the night when her friends had died. The way the warrior Spathi Daimons had torn through them…

No, no, no.

They were dead. Kyrian had killed them all.

Her panic tripled as she struggled to right herself.

She was dizzy, her vision blurry as she pushed herself to her feet.

Valerius was across the alley in microseconds as he saw the woman fall.

The tallest Daimon, who stood even in height to Valerius, laughed. "How nice of Acheron to send us a playmate."

Valerius pulled his two retractable swords from his coat and extended the blades. "Play is for children and dogs. Now that you have identified which category you fall into, I’ll show you what Romans do to rabid dogs."

One of the Daimons smiled. "Romans? My father always told me that all Romans die squealing like pigs."

The Daimon attacked.

Valerius sidestepped and brought his sword down. The Daimon pulled a sword out of nothing and parried his attack with a skill that bespoke a man with years of training.

The other Daimons struck at once.

Valerius dropped his swords and swung out with his arms, releasing the grappling hooks and cords that were attached to his wrists. The hooks went straight into the chest of the tallest Daimon and the one he was fighting.

Unlike most Daimons, they didn’t disintegrate instantly. They stared at him with hollow eyes before they burst apart.

But while he was distracted by them, another Daimon retrieved his sword and cut him across his back. Valerius hissed in pain before he turned and elbowed the Daimon in the face.

The woman was back on her feet. She killed two more

Valerius wasn’t sure what had happened to the others; in truth, he was having a bit of trouble moving because of the vicious pain of his back.

"Die, Daimon snot!" the woman snarled at him an instant before she, too, stabbed him straight in the chest.

She pulled the dagger out instantly.

Valerius hissed and staggered back as pain ripped through his heart. He clutched at his chest, unable to think past the agony of it.

Tabitha bit her lip in terror as she saw the man recoil and not explode into dust.

"Oh, shit," she breathed, rushing to his side. "Please tell me you’re some screwed-up Dark-Hunter and that I didn’t just kill an accountant or lawyer."

The man hit the street hard.

Tabitha rolled him over onto his back and checked his breathing. His eyes were partially opened, but he wasn’t speaking. He held his jaw clamped firmly shut as he groaned deep in his throat.

Terrified, she still wasn’t sure who she had mistakenly stabbed. Her heart hammering, she pulled up his turtle-neck to see the nasty-looking stab wound in the center of his chest.

And then she saw what she had hoped for…

He had a bow and arrow brand above his right hipbone.

"Oh, thank God," she breathed as relief poured through her. He was in fact a Dark-Hunter and not some unfortunate human.

She grabbed her phone and called Acheron to let him know one of his men had been hurt, but he didn’t answer.

So she started dialing her sister Amanda until her common sense returned. There were only four Dark-Hunters in this city. Ash who led them. Janice whom she had met earlier. The former pirate captain, Jean-Luc. And…

Valerius Magnus.

He was the only Dark-Hunter in New Orleans she didn’t know personally. And he was the mortal enemy of her brother-in-law.

She hit the cancel button on her phone. Kyrian would kill this man in a heartbeat and bring the wrath of Artemis down fully upon his head. In return, the goddess would kill Kyrian for it and that was the last thing Tabitha wanted. Her sister would die if anything happened to her husband.

Come to think of it, if half of what Kyrian said about this man and his family was true, she should just leave him here and let him die.

But then Ash would never forgive her if she did that to one of his men. Besides she couldn’t leave him here, not even she was that heartless. Like it or not, he had saved her life and she was honor-bound to return the favor.

Wincing, she realized she was going to have to get him to safety. And he was just a little too large for her to handle on her own. She dialed her phone again and waited for an answer that came in a slick, Cajun drawl.

"Hey, Nick, it’s Tabitha Devereaux. I’m in the old courtyard off Royal Street with a man down and I need help. Any chance you want to be my knight in shining armor tonight and lend a hand to a damsel in distress?"

Nick Gautier’s smooth laugh rippled in her ear. "Why, cher, you know I live for such moments. I’ll be right there."

"Thanks," she said before she gave him precise directions and hung up.

A New Orleans native like herself, Nick had been an acquaintance of hers for years since the two of them frequented many of the same restaurants and clubs. Not to mention, Nick had brought a few of his girlfriends in to browse some of the racier outfits that Tabitha sold in her adult boutique, Pandora’s Box.

A charming rogue, Nick was about as handsome as any man she’d ever seen. He had dark brown hair that tended to stay in a pair of eyes that were so blue and seductive they really should be illegal.

And when it came to his smile…

Not even she was entirely immune to it.

She’d been stunned to learn at her sister’s wedding three years ago that Nick actually worked for the undead. Rumors on the street had always abounded on what Nick did for a living. Every native who haunted the Quarter knew the man had a ton of cash and no real job that anyone could discern. When he’d shown up as best man for Kyrian, she’d been completely shocked.

But since that night, she and Nick had forged an odd alliance as drinking buddies and partners-in-crime who lived to rankle the Dark-Hunters. It was really nice to have someone she could talk to who knew that the vampires were real and who understood the dangers she faced every night.

Tabitha sat down on the cobblestoned walk to wait on Nick. Valerius still wasn’t moving. She cocked her head to study Kyrian’s great Satan. According to her brother-in-law, Valerius and his Roman family had been the worst sort of bastards.

They had killed and raped any- and everything that came into their paths as they led bloody campaigns across the ancient world. She would have taken Kyrian’s aspersions with more grains of salt if it wasn’t for the fact that other Dark-Hunters concurred.

To her knowledge, no one liked Valerius.

No one.

But as she watched him breathing lightly, he didn’t look so ominous.

Probably because he’s practically dead.

Actually, he was all dead. But still breathing. The moonlight cast shadows over the handsome planes of his face and showed the tears in his clothing where he was bleeding. If he could bleed to death, she’d hold a compress to his chest wound, but since he couldn’t she stayed put.

"How did you die?" she whispered. Kyrian didn’t know, and in all her readings about ancient Rome and Greece, Valerius’s name had seldom been mentioned. For all the brutality that Kyrian accused him of, Valerius Magnus wasn’t much more than a footnote in history.

"Hey, Tab, you in here?"

She breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of Nick’s deep Cajun drawl. Thank goodness he only lived three blocks away and knew how to hustle in a jam. "I’m over here."

Dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt, Nick quickly joined her, then cursed the instant he saw who was lying on the ground.

"You’ve got to be kidding me," he snarled after she asked him to help her get Valerius up. "I wouldn’t throw piss on that man if he were on fire."

"Nick!" Tabitha said, shocked at his rancor. Normally Nick was the most laid-back of men. "That was uncalled-for."

"Oh, yeah, right. I notice you didn’t call Kyrian for this. Why is that, Tabitha? ‘Cause he’d kill you both?"

She stamped down her own temper, which would only set his off more if she started telling him how juvenile he was behaving. "C’mon, Nick. Don’t be like that. I don’t want to help him, either, but Ash won’t answer the phone and no one else seems to like him."

"Damn straight. Everyone, but you, has a brain. Let him rot on the street."

She stood up and faced him with her hands on her hips. "Fine. You explain to Ash why one of his Hunters was killed, then. You deal with his anger. I’m out of it."

Nick narrowed his eyes on her. "You really suck, Tabby. Why didn’t you call Eric for this?"

"Because it’s awkward to ask your ex-who is happily married to someone else-for favors, okay? I somehow thought my friend Nick wouldn’t hassle me over this, but I can see now that I was wrong."

He gave an exaggerated wince at that. "I really hate this man, Tabitha. I’ve known Kyrian too long and owe him too much to render aid to the man whose grandfather crucified him."

"And we are not responsible for the actions of our family members, are we, Nick?"

His jaw ticced at that.

Nick’s father had been a convicted murderer who had died in a prison riot. It was well known by everyone that the man was a repeat felon who had spent the whole of Nick’s youth in and out of jail for all sorts of unsavory crimes. Nick himself had been well on his way to repeating his father’s fate when Kyrian had stepped in and saved him.

"That’s low, Tab, real low."

"But it’s true. Now, please, forget that he’s a dickhead and help me get him home, okay?"

Nick growled at her before he came near them. "Do you know where he lives?"

"No, do you?"

"Somewhere over in the Garden District." Nick pulled out his phone and dialed a number. After a minute, he cursed. "Otto, answer the phone." He cursed again, then hung up and glared at her. "You know it’s bad when the guy’s own Squire won’t answer to save him."

"Maybe Otto’s busy."

"Maybe Otto’s psychic."

"Nick…"

Nick put his phone in his pocket, then bent over, tossed Valerius over his shoulder, and headed out of the courtyard to where his Jaguar was parked on the street. He dumped Valerius unceremoniously into the passenger seat.

"Watch his head, Nick!" she snapped as Nick banged it against the car.

"Not like I could kill him or anything. What happened to him, anyway?"

"I stabbed him."

Nick blinked, then burst out laughing. "I knew I liked you for a reason. Oh man, I can’t wait to tell Kyrian. He’ll laugh his ass off."

"Yeah, well, in the meantime, take Valerius back to my place and give me Otto’s number so that I can keep trying to call him."

"And you want to tell me how I’m going to get him to your place since Bourbon Street is closed off to traffic after dark?"