Sins of the Night (Dark-Hunter 7)

She glanced over at the partying co-eds. "Yeah, I do. At that time in my life, I thought I was going to be one of the greatest actresses in France, like my mother. I thought Michel and I would retire wealthy, to the countryside, to raise our multitude of children and to watch our grandchildren play." She sighed as if the memory were too painful to dwell on for long. "What about you?"

Alexion let his mind drift back all those countless centuries ago. It wasn't something he did often, for many reasons. But old dreams never really died. They were always there, living as regrets for what might have been.

"I wanted to retire from the army. I never really wanted to join in the first place. But my father insisted on it. When they came to our village for boys, he grabbed my older brother and I, and literally threw us at the recruiters. He wanted us to be more than just simple farmers trying to eke out a living from a stingy soil that would rather see us starved than fed. He thought a soldier's calling would be our chance for a much better life."

"What happened to your brother?"

Alexion paused as he remembered Darius's face. His brother had been full of life and had never wanted anything more than to be a farmer with a good wife by his side. All he'd ever talked about was going home again, seeing the cattle and tending the fields.

His heart ached at what had happened to both of them. "He died about a year before I did. I would have, too, had I not been in a regiment with Kyros. For some reason I never understood, he took me under his wing."

"He was older?"

"By only three years, but at the time it seemed like he was an adult while I was just a terrified kid."

Danger could hear the admiration in his voice. It was obvious he'd once worshiped his friend. No wonder he wanted to save him.

"The other boys didn't think much of me," he confided. "Like Kyros, they came from a long line of soldiers and thought that I should go back to the farm. They didn't want to waste time training or supplying someone they figured would die soon anyway. Better to save the food for someone who could earn his keep."

She didn't need his sfora to see how they'd made their displeasure known. Nine thousand years later, she could still hear the pain in his voice.

"But you hung in there."

"As Nietzsche said, 'that which doesn't kill you-'"

"Will only require brief hospitalization. And if you're a Dark-Hunter, just a good day's sleep."

Alexion laughed at her humor. She definitely had a unique way of looking at things.

He returned his attention to the campus and to the cars that sped past them with stereos thumping and kids screaming and laughing just from the sheer joy of being alive.

How he envied them. With the exception of Danger, who had an incredible knack for poking his sore spots, he normally felt nothing at all. "You have no idea just how amazing this world is. It hasn't really changed all that much since your birth, but mine..."

"Yeah, you're from what, the Bronze Age?"

Alexion snorted. "No, I predate even that. We were so primitive, we really should have had dinosaurs to ride."

"Primitive how?"

Inwardly, he cringed at the memories of how his people had lived, what they had been forced to endure just to survive. It had been survival in its purest, rawest form. "Modern" man had no idea how good they had it.

"We had no swords, no real metals, no pottery. Our daggers and spear points were made of stone that we chipped with our own hands until our hands were bloody and bruised from it. Our armor was made of leather from the hides of the animals we killed for food. We boiled and shaped it ourselves. We had no government to speak of, no real laws. If you got screwed over, there was no one to appeal to. You either handled it yourself or you let it go."

He sighed at the harsh memories of his human life. "Hell, there were no judges, police, or politicians. We had only two classes of people: the farmers who fed themselves and the soldiers who protected the farmers from those who wanted to steal their food and kill them. That was it.".

"You didn't have priests?"

"We had one. He'd been a farmer who'd lost the use of his right hand in a fire. Since he couldn't support himself, he interpreted signs and the farmers fed him for it."

Danger frowned as she tried to imagine the world he described. And she had thought her life without a proper toilet was primitive. Suddenly her eighteenth-century world looked very high tech indeed.

"My people never dreamed of a world like this," Alexion continued. "Of having so much without back-breaking, debilitating work. And yet for all the physical improvements, people are still people. They're killing each other to get more or to prove a point only the killer understands. Still brutalizing and torturing each other over things that in another hundred years won't even matter."

Danger's eyes teared as his words struck a particular chord in her own heart. "Tell me about it. Just like everywhere else in the world, the rich in France are still rich. There are still countless in my homeland who starve every day, and it's not because they're anorexic or fasting. It's because they can't afford food while the rich waste money all the time on trivial things. And yet my entire family was killed-I was killed-to make a better France where no one would ever go hungry again. Every time I hear about the starvation in Paris, I ask myself what good was the so-called Revolution? All it did was ruin thousands of lives."

"Chronia apostraph, anthrice mi achi."

She frowned. "What is that?"

"It's Atlantean. Something Acheron says a lot. Roughly translated, it means 'time moves on, people do not.'"

Danger thought about that. It was very true and very Ash-like. "Can you imagine the world he must have known? As backward as yours-"

"His world was extremely advanced," he said, interrupting her. "The Atlanteans most definitely weren't in the stone age."

"What do you mean?"

"The world he was born into was amazingly high tech. They had carriages of sorts, medicine, metal-working, you name it. The Greece and Atlantis he knew were several millennia ahead of their time."

"Then what happened that it was all lost?"

"Succinctly put, the wrath of a goddess. Atlantis was swept into the sea, not by natural means, but by the anger of a woman who wanted vengeance on all of them. She ravished her own continent and people, then moved across Greece, throwing them all back into the dinosaur age."

"Why?"

He let out a tired breath. "They took something from her that she wanted back."

Danger nodded as she suddenly understood. "They took her child."