An immortal hunter lived off borrowed time, his debt paid in unicorn blood. Damien knocked an arrow and aimed his bow at a small unicorn colt. Its silver, equine head dipped to the underbrush, unaware of its impending doom. Damien's exhale came out in a frosty cloud. He was about to loose his arrow and secure the next hundred years of his life.

"Whatcha doing?" The long, white hair of a woman swung into his field of vision.

Damien flinched and gripped his fingers tighter around the bowstring. The tensile wire sliced into his skin. Damien hissed between his teeth and gradually released the arrow from its readied position on the bow.

The woman's shrill voice brought the unicorn's head to pick up. Its eyes looked wide as a deer caught in magelight. The unicorn bounded into a shimmering portal which opened up and made the unicorn disappear in a flash. The azure portal wavered for a second before it closed.

The young woman blinked her big, blue eyes as she leaned sideways into Damien's face.

"What are you doing?" he erupted. "You almost got shot!"

The woman backed away from him in her white, flowy dress. One dainty arm framed her short skirt while the other she raised to tap two fingers against her chin. "Hm. To me, it looked more like your arrow was going to hit that unicorn."

Damien's red face, already flushed with anger, turned a deep shade of crimson. "I was hunting deer, nothing more. The unicorn surprised me almost as much as you." His eyes narrowed at the peculiar woman. Her aura made him wonder if she was an enchantress, and if so, what manner of charms she would cast. She might be another unicorn hunter. I can't let my guard down around her, Damien reminded himself. He bolstered an invisible, anti-magic barrier around his person.

"You say you were hunting deer." The woman batted her eyelashes. "Does that mean you were poaching?" The lower lids of her smiling eyes pinched too much to maintain her veil of innocence. She knew full-well what she implied.

Damien already understood the possible repercussions of his actions. A simple poacher is a thief. Once caught, I'd have a hand cut off. However, Damien did not fear the loss of a limb—not when his would grow back. But a unicorn hunter is a monster. They'd put me to death. It did not matter if his previous bounty of unicorns made Damien immortal with an impressive regeneration rate; his life would expire if he did not renew its effect every hundred years. A lifelong imprisonment was a death sentence for him. The last years of his life would catch up with him all at once, swift and instant as a guillotine.

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I can't let her report my crime to the authorities. Damien could have killed both the unicorn and the witness, but just one-hundred years of eternal youth had not made him so callous. Before he had set off on the second unicorn hunt of his life, Damien vowed to follow a strict moral code. He wanted immortality but not at the cost of his humanity. I'll never treat mortal life as though it's worthless.

Yet his eyes glazed over with indifference, blinking at the woman who had interrupted his hunt. "So what if you caught me poaching? Does that mean you were trespassing on the king’s land?"

"What you call trespassing, I call getting lost!" the woman exclaimed. Her momentary exasperation melded back into a smile, and she gave Damien a wink. "I won't report your crime if you help me get back to town."

"You won't be able to report me if you can't get back to town!" he snapped.

"Oh, woe," the woman sighed, taking a step back from his outburst. "Would you really leave me out here to starve? The wolves will swallow me up and gnaw on my bones!"

Damien grumbled like a growling wolf. As much as this flippant girl annoyed him, that was all the more reason it would be cruel to leave her in the wilderness. She obviously would not survive long—unless she had some magic tricks up her sleeve. At last, Damien relented. "Fine. I'll help you, but let's make this quick."

"Hooray! I'm saved!" The carefree woman gave a twirl in her silken dress. When she faced Damien once more, she offered a curtsy. "My name is Katherine, but you're welcome to call me Katie."

"Wish I could say it's nice to meet you, Katherine, but your timing was unfortunate."

At his blunt refusal to call her by nickname, Katherine pouted her lower lip. "May I know the name of my hero?"

"It's Damien," he spat, "and I'm not your hero."

"But of course, you are, Damie," Katherine said, drawling over her new pet name for him in the same, deriding tone that he had said her proper name.

"Absolutely not."

"I'll call you Damien," she said, "but only if you call me Katie." Her blue irises sparkled like pools of spring water. However, Damien did not trust the springs in this area as a source of clean drinking water.

"Let's get moving, Katie." Damien did not care what he called her, nor did he care for her amateurish, flirtatious behavior. He set a brisk pace to the nearest town. The sooner he got rid of Katie, the sooner he could resume his hunt for the elusive unicorns. It took me over a year to track one down to this forest…. he griped, his focus reserved solely for his prey.

Although the hunter set off in the right direction, Damien did not notice when his next step took him the wrong way. Katie followed behind him, one hand covering her smirk. The glow of a magic spell faded from her palm.