"Squires?" she asked. How strange. "Like in the Middle Ages?"
"Something like that." He looked at her, but didn't elaborate. "What about you? Have you lived here all your life?"
"Born and raised. My mother's parents immigrated from Romania during the Depression and my father's people were backwoods Cajuns."
He laughed at that. "I've known a lot of those."
"Living here for a hundred years, I'll bet you have."
Amanda considered the life Hunter must have lived. All the centuries of solitude, of watching people he cared about die of old age while he never changed. It must have been hard for him.
But along with that, his life must have had a few really neat perks. "What's it like knowing you're going to live forever?"
He shrugged. "Honestly, I no longer think about it. Much like the rest of the world, I just get up, do my job, and go to bed."
How simple he made it sound. Yet she sensed something else from him. A deep-rooted sadness. Living without dreams must be excruciating. The human spirit needed goals to strive for, and killing Daimons just didn't seem like much of a goal to her.
She dropped her gaze to the counter and tried to imagine what Hunter had been like as a man. Julian had told her how they would drink after battle and how much Hunter had wanted children. Worse, she remembered the way Hunter had looked holding Vanessa. "Have you ever had any children?"
Intense pain flashed through his eyes for only an instant until he recovered his stoicism. "No, Dark-Hunters are sterile."
"So you are impotent."
He gasped indignantly and looked at her. "Hardly. I can have sex, I just can't procreate."
"Oh." She wrinkled her nose devilishly at him and tried to lighten the mood. "That was really a nosy question. I'm sorry."
"It's all right."
Hunter started the dishwasher. "Would you like a tour of the house?"
"House?" she asked, cocking a disbelieving brow. "If this is a house, then I live in a two-room shanty." Her breath caught as she remembered that she didn't live anywhere anymore. Clearing her throat, she pushed the thought aside. "Yes," she said quietly. "I'd like to see it."
Hunter led her through the doorway on her left, into a massively large living room. The walls, crown moldings, and medallions were absolutely gorgeous in their old-fashioned grace and elegance, but the furniture in the house was as modern as it could be.
The room was decorated for comfort, not to impress visitors. But then she imagined vampires didn't entertain guests too often. A huge entertainment center lined one wall with a JVC component system, big-screen TV, double-decker VCR and DVD player. Though there were lamps all around, the room was lit only by candles from three ornate sconces.
"You don't like modern light bulbs, do you?" she asked as Hunter moved to light a candelabrum.
"No," he said. "They're too bright for my eyes."
"Light hurts you?"
He nodded. "Dark-Hunters have eyes made for darkness. Our pupils are larger than yours and they don't dilate the same way. As a result, our eyes let in a lot more light than human eyes."
While he spoke, she noticed the floor-to-ceiling windows were covered with black shutters that would shield the house from daylight. As she stepped around a black leather sofa, Amanda stopped dead in her tracks. There was a coffin sitting in front of it.
"Is that…" She couldn't finish the sentence. Not while she held a gruesome image of Hunter lying asleep inside it every day.
Hunter glanced at it, then met her shocked gaze unblinkingly. "Yes," he said in a deadpan voice. "Yes, it is. It's my… coffee table."
He walked over to it, lifted the lid and pulled a remote out of it. "For the TV if you want to watch it tomorrow."
Amanda shook her head. Now that she noticed it, she saw there were all kinds of weird little vampire trinkets lying around. Miniature statues, small crossbows, even a vampire tarot deck on the mantel.
"Nick thinks it's funny," Hunter said as she picked up the deck of tarot cards. "Any time he finds something with a vampire in it or on it, he brings it here and leaves it for me to find."
"Does it bother you?"
"No, he's a good kid most of the time."
As he led her room by room through the old mansion, she began to get lost. "Just how big is this place?" she asked as they entered a game room.
"There are twelve bedrooms and it's a little over seven thousand square feet."
"Jeez, I've been inside smaller malls."
He laughed.
An elaborate pool table was set in the middle of the game room, along with a collection of arcade games and a big-screen TV with an entire array of game consoles lined up on a low coffee table in front of it. But what she found most peculiar was a pair of baseball gloves and a baseball on a drop-leaf table in one corner of the room. Amanda went over to them.
"I toss the ball around with Nick some nights," Hunter explained.
"Why?"
He shrugged. "It clears my head when I'm trying to sort through things."