Sherrilyn Kenyon by One Silent Night: The Dark-Hunter World

Author:One Silent Night: The Dark-Hunter World
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780748133413
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-09-21T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

ZEPHYRA LOOKED UP FROM HER DESK AT THE sound of a light tapping on her door. "Come in, love," she said, knowing by the sound of it that it would be Medea.

Sure enough, she pushed the door open to peer into the room. "Am I disturbing you?"

"No, baby. I was just straightening up a bit."

Medea arched one brow at that. Zephyra couldn't blame her. She was, after all, horrifyingly tidy on her worst day. But it was a ner vous habit she had. Whenever things were confusing, she had a compulsive need to clean what she could.

"How's our guest?" she asked, trying to distract her daughter from that bold scrutiny.

"Eyeing a couple of the priestesses for dinner. I've already warned him that they're off the menu even though he thinks they'd be quite tasty."

"Good. I don't want to fight Artemis on that."

Medea entered the room and closed the door. "You still love him, don't you?"

"Love who?" she asked, trying to make light of the question. "Davyn? I don't even know him. The only thing I love about him is his absence."

"My father."

She hated how pointed Medea could be at times. "I don't love him, either," she said dismissively. "I can barely stand his presence."

"And yet you light up every time he looks at you."

Zephyra put a stack of papers into the garbage can. "Don't be ridiculous."

Medea stopped her as she started for her desk again. "I know you, Matera. You've always been very calculated and cold. For centuries I've worried that my stupidity had killed something inside you."

She frowned at her daughter. "What stupidity?"

"Living with the humans. Being naive enough to think that so long as we didn't harm them, they wouldn't harm us. I still remember what you said to me a few weeks before they attacked us. 'You can't tame a wolf and expect it to lie before your hearth in harmony. Sooner or later, the nature of the beast sets in and it does what its instincts tell it—it kills.' I thought then that you were talking about us, but you weren't. And after we were attacked—after you were almost killed trying to save me—something inside you died. That piece of sympathy for others. The ability to have mercy."

It was true. Any belief she'd had in the world, in kindness or so-called humanity, had died alongside her grandson. Kill the monster. Rip out his heart so he doesn't kill us.

Five years old . . . no monster. Just a child, screaming for his parents to save him. For his grandmother to make them stop hurting him. She'd done her best to protect them all and the sad truth was her best hadn't been good enough. They'd dragged him down and clubbed him to death.

Her baby's baby.

She had died that night, and it was a sad, hollow core that was now her heart.

"Life is hard," she said with a calmness she didn't really feel. She'd known it even before then. As the daughter of a fisherman, she'd

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