Chapter 3

   Silence.

   Perched high in the lush tree tops surrounding the grounds, I sat, waiting for my team to return with their victory. Cloaked in the depths of night, they hunted while I sat to observe. The chill in the air as it whipped across my cheek carried the same feeling of doubt and loneliness that had been haunting me the past few months. The past few decades in fact, had been long, and continued to make me feel the age of these bones.

    There was once a time when this would have been thrilling. I would have been out there hunting with them, chasing that mortal man through the woods, and more than likely being the first of us to reach him and torment him. But this game that we had been playing was starting to make me feel empty and alone in my immortality.

  The wind began to pick up again, the smell of blood sweeping up and in as screaming echoed in the distance…

   “Galen?”

   I turned to meet that familiar steely gaze which twisted eerily as he met mine. So quiet in his steps that not even I had heard him.

   “Yes Finn?”

   “You seem off tonight.” He pulled his muscled shoulders back from his crouched position lethally turning those cold eyes back on me.

   I forced the feeling I had been fighting back and tried to show nothing with my eyes knowing that he could read any doubts with just a glimpse. “It’s nothing, just anxious for our next orders. I hate feeling like we are sitting around doing nothing. These men are the best trained killers he has.”

   “Yes, that they are.”

   “I just feel like we are missing out on something.”

   Finn turned those eyes away from me nodding in approval before stepping off the branch and landing cleanly on the ground and heading to join the others, the thoughts in my head drowning out his footsteps. I didn’t breathe again until he was far enough away to not hear the stress and disappointment in the release.

   There was nothing left for me here.

   Nothing left in this life.

   I found myself holding onto a distant promise from a woman in my dreams. Someone who’d looked at me with love and respect in a life I couldn’t quite recall because those memories had been stolen so long ago.

   Sighing, I stepped from the tree branch landing flawlessly on the grass below turning toward home. Longing to hide in the sanctuary of my room yet again, pull the covers over my head and wait for whatever seemed to be coming. Whatever seemed to be waiting in the wings to make this life what it should have been so long ago, what I longed for it to be now.

   A place of home and hope.