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"Thank you"

He closed his eyes and rested his hands on his splayed knees Krysta reh his nose, held it, then released it several tih with his hands

War agent had been applied Blood ceased oozing froers The pain eased

When Sean withdrew his hands, the cut had been replaced by a faint scar "Turn to the side a bit"

She did so, giving hi her shoulder

He cupped a hand over it Again a soothing warmth suffused her wound as it healed beneath his touch Sean had borne this gift all of his life Just as she had borne hers And he had been healing her for as long as she could reh she o years older than Sean, she couldn’t count the nu in their youth by covering a scraped knee or cut elboith his little hands andthe wounds disappear

Of course, they didn’t actually disappear Neither of them were sure how exactly it worked, but he seemed to transfer the wound to his own body, which healed at an accelerated rate Even now, a red stain appeared on the shoulder of his shirt

"I’ll heal the leg now before I heal the others"

"The others aren’t bad," she insisted "I can just use some butterfly closures on them"

He shook his head With careful hands, he lifted her foot and propped it next to him on the coffee table "Do we really have to do this every time?" He settled his hands on her shin where it hurt the most A muscle in his jaw ju him pain That was the worst part of all of this Not the va to hide what she did from everyone so they wouldn’t think she was crazy and commit her But the pain Sean experienced when he healed her tio out and do the sa vanished And she knew Sean would limp if he were to stand and try to walk now But he didn’t He stubbornly healed every cut and bruise on her arerly when he finished, knowing he now ached in all of the places she had "Thank you"

He patted her back, then shifted over to slu her didn’t just open wounds on hi?" she asked

He shook his head "How long are we going to do this, Krys?"

She sluuess"

"Takes to do what? For a while there, it see a difference The vao weeks soht?"

"Twelve, if you count the"

"What? The good one?"

She sighed "I don’t know"

"It’s turning into a never-ending battle We can’t win this"

"How can we stop?"

Another deep sigh soughed fro a hand, he rubbed his eyes and shook his head

She understood his weariness Soht a victory But she and Sean could see it only as defeat, as proof that they would never succeed in ridding the world of every bloodsucker on the planet

It was a war they couldn’t win

And sooner or later it would kill the down at Krysta Darkness surrounded theits on her alarm clock

She slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, curled on her side with a faded, striped sheet tucked beneath her chin Sean slumbered in the only other bedroom in the house Both were blissfully unaware that he had invaded the safety of their hoths to avoid detection while he had followed the his time, he inspected the interior of the house It re when Roland had uessed, by the pictures displayed on the wall, that the tere siblings Why that was a relief puzzled hih he didn’t know them, he hadn’t wanted the two of them to be lovers It made no sense

He returned silently to Krysta’s bedroom, a task made more difficult by the many squeaky floorboards

The conversation he had overheard earlier led hi vaone undetected? There were over a dozen immortals in the area Seth, their leader and the ularly Seconds and cleaners abounded And the network headquarters was stationed in Greensboro Yet none of them had ever encountered Krysta? It see sounded in the next room Etienne melted back into the darkest corner as Sean shuffled past the doorway in boxer shorts and a T-shirt Moments later the door to the bathroom closed and Etienne returned his attention to the warrior wo so peacefully a few feet away

She would have to be dealt with

Both of them would

When Sean next passed by his sister’s bedrooh the front door of David’s ho how eager he had been to leave this place a couple of months earlier

Of course, he hadn’t left under the circuht he would tell the Immortal Guardians to kiss his ass and either leave and never see theht them to the death Most likely the latter

Instead he had fallen in love with a otten her into all kinds of trouble, then married her and moved into a quaint hoe as hell sometimes Who could’ve foreseen that fate for him?

Well,Very annoying