He had had images of Didyme dead before, very real images that had driven him to act in ways that his brothers and their wives considered insane, but that was long ago in the year after he had met Didyme, when she had been human.

He had grown attached to the girl since that first night that they had met, his brothers would have called it obsessed while his sisters-in-law would have labeled it something all together different. They saw the way he acted, his tone when he spoke about the girl, they knew he was in love.

Love. He hadn’t really thought of such an emotion being applied to him until Didyme herself had mentioned it. They had been sitting on the shadowed steps of Rome’s many amphitheaters in the middle of the night, high up on the upper tiers just talking. It was easy for him to bring her into places like that that were supposedly off limits and guarded when not open to the public masses. In fact, he had enjoyed taking her into such places and opening a new world to her.

She had not seemed to mind his cold skin as she curled up against him in the darkness; instead it was almost as if she welcomed his cool touch and he craved it as well. He always too precautions before he took her sleeping from her small room in the temple after her evening prayers and rituals were done and fed to excess at the slave camps and slave markets. It was not as fun to hunt prey that couldn’t run, but it was also the easiest place to feed since no one questioned the facts that an abundance of slaved died on a daily basis due to various diseases and maltreatment. No one saw anything supernatural when there were a few extra deaths that were unexplained.

She knew what he did, after all, she was a rare creature uniquely attached to death, but she didn’t seem to mind. When he questioned her on this she had simply said, “It is who you are and I love who you are.”

Love.

Such a strange word, such a human emotion, and she hadn’t said she loved him just what he was. How strange.