Page 88 of Bloodhunter

They rolled through the night, screaming and growling andbleeding, like two wild, rabid animals.

And then there was only silence and the pungent, ripe scentof pain and blood.

I lay on the ground and stared up into the starlit sky,bereft. Black depression had descended when the incubus left me, and I hadn’tthe will to move.

“Clayton,” Miriam said. “Get her off the ground!”

Clayton lifted me into his arms and Miriam grabbed my hand,her eyes a little too wide. “Trinity,” she cried.

I was alive, but I was swimming in black water, drowning itin, and I didn’t have the will to reassure her.

Shane got in my face. “It will pass, Trinity.”

And I clung to his gaze with a desperation that rivaled thedemon’s nearly unbreakable connection to my mouth. And then even thedesperation passed.

“It will pass,” he repeated. And there was no doubt in hisface. Only a calm certainty. “You won’t feel this way forever.”

I didn’t believe him. There was no belief left inside me. Itwas as though the incubus had taken every drop of joy, hope, and love I’dpossessed, and had left only darkness.

Was that how the vampires felt? When they’d died, had theyfaced this gaping empty endlessness? Had they retained that memory, thatknowledge? Was that why they feared death so violently and needed beyondanything else to kill me, the one who could toss them back into that nightmare?

Was this their afterlife?

It was. I knew it as well as they knew it.

And I could not blame them for wanting to end the hunters.

Amias had chased the incubus away, but the desperate demonwould be back. He’d had a taste, but in order to regain full strength, he wouldneed all of me. And now he was strong enough to take it.

But what he wanted to do, what heneededto do, thosewere secret things that one should do in darkness.

And in darkness he would wait. He would wait for the rightmoment, because no longer was he quite as desperate. No longer would he have totake such risks to get a taste of healing power.

I was too dejected to even shudder at the notion.

Because worse than the fear that he would return was thefear that he wouldn’t.

Miriam grabbed my face. “I don’t like that look in your eyes,Trinity. That’s not who you are.”

“It’ll take a while to restore what the incubus took,”Clayton said. And maybe he didn’t mean to, but he tightened his armsprotectively around me. “She’ll heal.”

“I don’t like it,” Miriam spat. “She looks likeyou.Emotionless and unreachable. Fucking…I don’t like it.”

“I’m not hurt,” I said, dully. “Put me down, Clayton. I havea vampire to track.”

He hesitated, and only when Miriam turned her glare on himdid he let me slide to the ground.

I stood beside Shane, who looked at me with maybe thetiniest spark of admiration.

“Trinity,” Miriam said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t come to see me until you’ve lost that shit. I can’tdeal with it.”

“You realize none of this matters,” I said. “Don’t you?”

She frowned. “What doesn’t matter?”