Lysander tracked the Arcadian to his precise location, the sentinel wasn't The One, he was a cub. Sitting in one of the comfy chairs in front of a star bucks window in New York, he sipped his coffee while walking a coin across the backs of his fingers, he looked bored, tired, perhaps a little depressed but the kid didn't look lethal. A long time ago that fact would not have mattered to Lysander, he would have waited until the guy came from the shop, would have followed him to a dark alley way and let the kid catch his scent on the breeze, so he would turn and find himself face to face with a full grown Katagaria tiger. And that would have been his end, he would have died tonight had it not been for Nyssa. The memory of her pain filled eyes was burning at him, it clotted up his chest until he felt he couldn't rightly breathe. Rain that had been nothing more then a light drizzle thundered down and Lysander had no more wish to move out of it and seek shelter then he did to be there.

Time flew by without a backward glance and the coffee shop cleared, the tables were being cleaned, the chairs stacked, the lights dimmed and it was only when the waitress locking up asked him to leave did the sentinel move. He turned up his collar and stepped out into the still pounding rain. Immediately his eyes meet Lysander's and through the beat of rain and whoosh of traffic and wind, he heard the Arcadian choke out a bitter laugh that sounded more like a sob. He raised his arms and looked heavenwards.

"Could you have bestowed upon me a more blessed gift, O wise Moirae!"

Lysander arched a brow and felt his body tense in preparation for a fight but the sentinel seemed indifferent. He strolled towards Lysander, not minding the cars narrowly missing his body, when he was a few feet before him the sentinel again opened his arms wide.

"Do it, Slayer!" he pleaded, "do what you came for!"

"What's wrong with you?" Lysander muttered incredulously, now reading signs of insanity in the distraught grey eyes of the human.

"Everything!" the sentinel howled, he was laughing, and Lysander suspected crying with the rain, "you've cornered me, Slayer. Kill me now!"

Lysander grumbled and was about to turn his back when the sentinel flashed himself in front of him, Lysander gaped.

"Are you fucking crazy!" he hissed, "the humans will see you!"

"No!" the sentinel barked back, an insane smile breaking over his face. "No, they won't. Because they don't like to see beyond their own lives, they do not like to see what they can't understand. Like me I can't see things, and sometimes I can!"

Lysander pushed past the kid but to his shock the Arcadian jumped on his back as if Lysander were giving him a piggy back, Lysander turned with a ferocious snarl his hand raised, his claws out. He stopped in mid swipe when he realised that the Arcadian was waiting serenely, with his eyes closed.

"I don't understand you," Lysander mused aloud and the Arcadian laughed again, that bitter choking laugh that was bordering weeping.

"How could you possibly understand, Slayer? When I don't either. I don't understand how one day a mark can appear on my hand," Lysander's head whipped up to stare intently at the Arcadian whose features were ravished with grief. "It was the first time and I was mated. I loved her more then anything and then the Teressa took her. And while I was out hunting my mark just disappeared and it won't come back."

The Arcadian rubbed and scratched furiously at his palm, Lysander winced as pain for the man sliced his chest, the only way for a mark to disappear meant the death of your mate.

"I tried to track her, but I can't find her. My nose is wrong, Slayer, imagine that?" He laughed crazily, "Its wrong because I keep tracking her scent back to the same place, the same, same, same place. And I can't find her, she's hiding from me because the smell is so strong."

He broke down then, he threw back his head and let out a roar, his human throat worked, its tendons straining as it produced a noise that made the human women across the street shriek. Lysander couldn't feel anything but pity for the man before him, the death of his mate had driven him mad, Lysander could imagine him prowling in a circle around the place where his mate's scent was strongest. Where she had last been, where she met her death, they had probably left no trace of her. Lysander was about to lift his hand and lay it upon the man's shoulder, it would have been the first time he'd voluntarily touched a sentinel. The man jerked back and drew a gun from inside his pocket, Lysander eyed it warily, not out of fear for himself …

Were-Hunters may be able to take more pain and injury then an average human but mortal wounds were still enough to kill them outright. The man didn't say another word but swiftly drew the gun up to his heart, his eyes locked with Lysander's.

"No, don -"

"It stops the pain."

He pulled the trigger. The lead bullet rattled through its chamber, through the cold flesh, the muscle, tissue, nerves. It broke through the walls of the heart, severing arteries and causing blood to spill, lungs to flood, no oxygen got to the brain. Yet the Arcadian sentinel, who lay amidst a pool of his own blood that was made into a pink river by the tumbling gush of rain, died with a smile on his face

In his loose fist was the coin he had been rolling over his fingers, Lysander picked it up, it was slightly bloody and slippery with the rain too. On one side a tiger roaring was intricately engraved, on the other a human man, on the tiger side a woman's name was engraved under it: Kadejah.

Under the human was the name, Raoul. And above it, on both sides, the inscription written in ancient Greek: we are one. He'd been mated to a Katagaria.

Lysander closed his fist tight around the coin and closed his eyes against a sudden vision of himself in Raoul's place, Nyssa gone from the world and him left to live when there was nothing to live for. The sudden onslaught of Arcadian scent made Lysander aware he was standing before a dead body, raising his eyes to scan through the tendrils of his soaking hair, Lysander saw that in front of his and Raoul a loose semi-circle was made. A woman with blond hair and similar features to Raoul let out a scream and threw herself beside Raoul and began rocking him in her arms, the grime from the street made her white robe gleam against it.

"Raoul! My Filos, My brother!"

A man with a tired, haggard face turned his eyes up to meet Lysander's, they were the only thing that were alive in the fading body. A burning pool of emerald hate, they shone like neon lights; it was those eyes that made Lysander feel, more then his words.

"So, brave and immortal slayer," the man said mockingly, he began to circle his prey. Stupid tiger, Lysander thought as he stayed motionless, waiting patiently for when to strike the tiger down.

"You slay a cub. Does that make you proud? Do you put another victory on your belt, slaying a defenceless, grief-stricken cub!"

"I never touched your boy," Lysander said in calm, low tones. As a testament to how passive he was to the whole situation, he wasn't even growling; all he wanted to do was go back to his mate, in reflex he tensed for the fight. He was not a coward and his epiphany had not gone so far as to make him walk away from a fight, but should one come knocking on the door, he would regret having to answer it.

The blond woman rose to her feet with the grace and dignity of a queen, her face livid, she raked Lysander with a sneer.

"Kill it, Brutus," she spat, "make him suffer how Raoul suffered! Make him suffer as I suffer."

"Could I heal your pain, female, I would," Lysander stared into her eyes. "No more need to die this day, but should you try and fight me, you will lose. Make no mistake."

She smiled grimly. "I want you dead, Tigerian, I did not say anything about fighting you."

The man, Brutus, shouted for her to stop, his eyes bulging with anger, but from under her robe her quick and delicate hand pulled forth a phaser and she shot it at Lysander. The volts of electricity knocked him off his feet, into the air and then hard against a brick wall, the wall flaked and crumbled. The pain that blasted through his body was terrible and so unfamiliar, never had he been attacked by a phaser before. From the rapid and frenzied flickering of forms, Lysander would have placed a bet that she had set the thing for kill, and no doubt should he not get out of here it would.

The blond woman stepped forward with the phaser raised, again ready to deliver a fatal, painful blow, the man grabbed her wrist and she winced, dimly, beyond the pain and thoughts of Nyssa Lysander heard the male speak.

"No, Cara, no! What's wrong with you? Why would you use this?"

"To kill, you fool! I want him dead!" She screamed back into the Brutus's face.

"And you would debase yourself and your reputation for this? Your honour in exchange for your revenge? Kill him fair, in the way of a noble human not a worthless, spineless animal!"

The woman's face was almost as white as her robe, her knuckles were white, her nostrils too, they flared as she panted through them.

"Take him then. If he dies he dies. If he lives, it is only to be gutted."

Brutus winced and held up his dagger, perhaps to indicate he wanted a fight to the death loser dies, winner leaves.

"You have chosen his death for him, that's how it stands now, Brutus, it is the law of the land. I'll have my revenge no other way."

Brutus nodded. They turned to stare at the tiger flickering to a naked man and back to a tiger, Brutus barely held back from cringing, thinking of the pain. Lysander however was not thinking of the pain, one would not believe it but it was possible even in the midst of total gut wrenching, physical agony to think past the pain. He thought of Nyssa, and knowing with dead certainty that he would not make it to being gutted, that he wished he could have made love to her one final time. Could have told her that he loved her just once and tell her that she was the only thing that had ever and would ever matter to him. If only he could hear her sing to him.

But all the wishing in the world would not change his fate, he would die and it would not be in the arms of the woman he loved but at the unmerciful hands of people that hated him. And it was a sick type of irony, that after all he had done and crimes he had committed in his life, it would be ended over something he did not commit. Strange is life. Oh, Nyssa …..

****

Pain, Nyssa wrote in her diary, is something we all live with, I have lived with it many years. Not only with the memory of it but with tangible pain, when we are in pain we are not whole. I am not whole. There are those who thrive on pain, such as my both beloved and hated mate. Lysander is a wanderer of the earth, he is too stubborn, too strong and too proud to give into the pain that threatens to weaken him. Instead he channels that pain, such intense suffering, he fills the empty void with it, and rather than letting the pain eat at him, he subverts the process. Miraculously he eats the pain, he uses it as a sustenance to survive and becomes all the more stronger for it. A diet of thorns and nettles, of bitter herbs and sour grapes, someone would need an iron stomach … an iron heart.

Yet such a diet is still poison and that poison, though tasting good to him, will still kill him, it will rot him from the inside out. Yet he will die thinking that he lived strong and happy, he will die content thinking he was fulfilled and he did not live or die in vain. At least he will be happy, I suppose. Perhaps I am wrong then in calling it a poison, its an hallucinogen, a drug - an escape. Perhaps its not so bad?

I am not Lysander. My diet needs more then sour poison and blandness. I no longer want to survive, I want to live; but it is a physiological fact that you cannot live without your heart. I have also made that a psychological fact now, oh joy for me. I cannot live knowing that the man I love will forever be ashamed of me, nor can I live a life without him in it. I'm only 191 and yet I am so weary, so utterly tired of being alone. Some can survive it and some cannot, like I said before surviving isn't enough anymore, I despise myself for the choice but now my mind is made up I feel there is no alternative.

I went back to Little Dina, to be honest I always knew Rumba would be murdered rather then die warm in his bed, though in truth he probably deserved his fate. Still I did pray for him, he hated me, scorned me and punished me but he still gave me a home. Though I blackmailed him into it and through his weakness he could not see that killing me would have been a better course of action, he still gave me that which I could not live without.

Liko is not so weak or so tolerant of me. Savitar revoked the Iri'ni's license to be a Limani, which Liko wasn't so upset about, you can imagine the animals that lived there were pissed. He sent me packing of course and I barely got away without being attacked, the scratches down my back are a killer though. So where do I go? For someone who has lived most of her life calling home a place where the people there would like nothing more then to see her miserable and fry her in the underworld, it's a perplexing question.

I am without home now, I am as I have always been without friends or family, I am without money; not a true necessity of my life but still good to have. I could always plead a room at Sanctuary or even the Inferno, though the Serengeti would be a better option, they are Arcadian at least. But I don't want to.

I am without my mate and I don't want a life without my mate. I suppose some would call me a coward, but one hundred and ninety one years of loneliness and being hated wears you down, right down to your very marrow. Still I could have carried on, had I not met Lysander and it was brought to my attention how truly pathetic I am, I would have been able to ramble through my life, surviving like I always do, existing.

I love him so much. I just don't like being alone anymore.

Nyssa laid down the pen, it had not taken long to write in her entry but the furious scribbling crippled her hand. She gave a wry smile as she shut the book, and run her hand over the unspoiled, dark gold material cover, she had bought new before she had arrived in New Orleans to see Papa bear. It amused her that the first page of her new diary was something of a suicide note - no she would not think that - it was simply a lasting reminder that she had once been here, on earth. That though she had mattered really to nobody, she was somebody. Suicide notes she felt were made for guilt, she felt no guilt and wanted Lysander to feel none, though if she were brutally honest, he was unlikely to know until his mark disappeared. He would come looking, she presumed, out of curiosity but not because he cared. The truth did not set you free, Nyssa rubbed her sternum, it made you ache so badly that all you wanted to do was shrivel up and be lost in a dark, unfeeling corner.

Nyssa stood up when there was a tap on the hotel room door, she was in a new white hotel robe, her hair and body freshly clean and scrubbed and brushed. It was a strange preparation to do before she did the thing she did not want to think about. The room service brought in the trolley and stopped it next to the table, she tipped him with what money she had left and he exited the room with a kind smile. Was it kind or was it because it was perhaps the last one she would see she wished for it to be kind. That what he bestowed upon her was really a priceless gift, a gesture of simple, untarnished friendliness. A smile.

The food on the plate smelt delicious and she removed the silver tops one by one to reveal scrumptious looking delights, brownies and double chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate cake with chocolate custard, toast with chocolate spread on them. Strawberries with melted chocolate running from a fountain, Nyssa arched her brow, if the thing tasted as good as it smelled then this was a fine way to croak. If she was going to die by poison, she wasn't going for a dramatic effect but it was neat and un-messy and well, painless really, she did not want the transition into peace to be painful, she'd had enough of pain.

Chocolate for Weres was a killer, a poison in their blood, what was said by human women to be better then sex was deadly to her kind, both Arcadian and Katagaria. Unlike humans its did not just stimulate their endorphins but it mutated them, if consumed over a vast period of time the mutated endorphins would cause the brain to shut down the organs one by one. As Nyssa planned to go the whole way with hers and do a big binge it would merely overload and act as a sleeping drug, a tasty, warming sleeping drug.

Nyssa sat staring at the flow of sweet-smelling brown liquid from the fountain, she rolled up her bathrobe sleeves and stretched her forefinger towards the streaming chocolate. It coated her fingertip in warmth, Nyssa almost laughed. Suddenly a fissure went down her spine that had her sitting bolt up right in her chair, staring around her.

Lysander. He was in trouble!

Nyssa stared at the chocolate waiting innocently at the tip of her finger and she sighed, wiping it delicately on a napkin she got up and began the hurried process of dressing.