1
Contemplating allowing himself to die made Andor Katona feel like a coward. He had never believed that sitting out in the open waiting to meet the dawn and have the sun fry him was an act of nobility. He—and a very few others—had always believed it to be an act of cowardice. Yet here he was, deliberating whether or not to give himself permission to die. The sun wasn’t close, but the wounds he’d sustained battling so many vampires at one time had weakened him.
With the loss of blood, and several near-fatal wounds, the human vampire hunters hadn’t recognized him as a hunter and had attacked while he’d left his body an empty shell so he could try to heal those wounds. A stake close to the heart—they’d missed—hadn’t felt so good. They really weren’t very good at their self-appointed task. They’d torn open his chest, and more blood had spilled onto the battleground. He’d never thought he’d die in a country far from home—killed by a trio of bumbling humans—but dying seemed a good alternative to continuing a life of battle in an endless gray void.
The three men, Carter, Barnaby and Shorty, huddled together a distance from him, casting him terrified and hate-filled glances. They were trying to convince themselves they’d done it right and he was dying. Of course, they’d expected him to die immediately and now wondered why he hadn’t and what they should do about it. He could have told them they’d need another stake and a much better impaling technique if they wanted him to die. Did he really have to instruct others on how to kill him? That was ridiculous.
Sighing, he tried weighing the pros and cons of dying in order to make a rational decision. He’d lived too long. Far too long. He’d killed too often—so much so that there was little left of his soul. He’d lived with honor, but there had to be a time when one could let go with honor. It was past his time. He’d known that for well over a century. He’d searched the world over for his lifemate, the woman holding the other half of his soul, the light to his darkness. She didn’t exist. It was that simple. She didn’t exist.
Carpathian males lost all emotion and the ability to see in color after two hundred years. Some lost it earlier. They had to exist on memories, and after so many centuries, even those faded. They retained their battle skills—honed them nightly—but as time passed, all those long, endless years, even the memories of family and friends faded away. He lived his life far from humans most of the time, working in the night to keep them safe.
Vampires were Carpathians who had given up their honor in order to feel again. There was a rush when one killed while feeding. Adrenaline-laced blood could produce a high. Vampires craved it, and they terrorized their victims before killing them. Andor had hunted them on nearly every continent. As time passed, the centuries coming and going, the whispers of temptation to turn increased. For a few hundred years, those whispers sustained him, even if he knew the promise was empty. Eventually, even that was lost to him. Then he lived in a gray world of . . . nothing.
He had entered the monastery high in the remote Carpathian Mountains, a place where a very few ancients had locked themselves away from the world when they’d been deemed too dangerous to hunt and kill but didn’t believe in giving themselves to the dawn. Every kill increased the danger of turning, and he had lived too long, knew too much to be vampire. Few hunters would ever be able to defeat him, yet here he was, nearly done in by a trio of inept, bumbling human assassins.
He had taken the vow to be honorable in waiting for his lifemate with the other ancients. Of course, the situation had been made worse by secreting themselves in a place where there was no hope of each finding the one woman who could restore emotions and color to their lives—but they had known that. They had accepted the truth: their women were no longer in the same world with them.
The whispers of his would-be killers grew annoying. Really annoying. His head was swimming, making it difficult to think. He lay looking up at the sky. Stars were out, but they appeared as blurred lights, nothing more. Their light was a dull gray, just as the moon was. He looked down at the blood seeping out of his body, pooling around him from more than a dozen wounds—and that didn’t count the stake. The blood was a darker gray. An ugly mess. How had he gotten here, so far from his homeland and the monastery where he’d placed himself so he wouldn’t give in to the nothingness that surrounded him?
Hope had come to the monks, so they’d scattered, looking once again for the women who might save their souls. When they’d realized the world was too changed and too vast and once more they didn’t fit and there was little hope, they’d answered the call of their fellow monk and followed him to the United States. The vampires had grown powerful, and Carpathians were behind in the ways of the new world. It had been an effort to catch up when before he had always found it easy to learn newer, more modern things. That had led him to this moment—considering that he’d outlived his time.
Everything was different. He was forced to live in close proximity to humans and to hide who and what he was. Women were different. They no longer were satisfied having a man care for them. He had no idea what to do with a modern woman. Contemplating his demise seemed so much wiser than trying to understand the reasoning of a present-day woman.
It was difficult to think, although the night was beautiful. The humans kept talking, whispering together, sending anxious looks his way. He wanted them to be quiet and considered silencing them so he could continue to contemplate, but it was finally dawning on them that maybe they should have studied anatomy a little better before deciding on their profession.
Carter ended up drawing the short straw. The others sent him over to figure out what had gone wrong. He was shaking, trembling from head to foot as he approached, clearly terrified of the man they had tried to murder. Sweat poured off the assassin, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand as he drew near.
He loomed over Andor, the stink of fanaticism reeking from his pores, his features twisted into a mask of hatred and determination. Andor wasn’t quite ready to make up his mind about death. He lifted his hand to push enough air at the man to send him flying backward when a woman rushed out of the darkness and attacked.
The moon was full, scattering beams of light over the battleground. There was no evidence of the vampires he’d killed because he’d disposed of them properly. He wasn’t getting a minute of peace any time soon, not even with a stake sticking out of him and his blood everywhere, not with his supposed savior in the form of a little whirlwind of fury attacking his three would-be assassins. He was going to have to rescue her. That meant living longer. He didn’t like having his mind made up for him.
She moved with incredible speed, an avenging angel, her long hair flying, her hiking boots crunching rock, dirt and the lightning-scorched grass beneath her feet. She bashed Carter with what appeared to be a saucepot, whirling like a tornado and striking him again. She went under his punch, blocking it upward with one arm: it sounded as if it must have felt like a blow as she clobbered him right in the face with the pot. Carter staggered backward and then hit the ground.