GhostWalkers 10 - Samurai Game

smile that always set his heart racing. “I
love
you wild, Sam.”
    He watched her go, that fluid grace, her hair snaking down her back to below her waist, and his heart ached with pure contentment. He had found home and it wasn’t the wooden structure surrounding him, it was a little slip of a woman who had forever taken his heart.

Keep reading for a special preview of
the next Carpathian novel
by Christine Feehan
    DARK
STORM
    Available in September 2012
from Piatkus
    E vil permeated the very ground he slept in. Every breath he drew into his lungs brought the stench of malevolence deep into his body. Hunger crawled through him, clawing at his gut, pounding through every heartbeat, each pulse point. His fangs refused to retract. They had become permanent now, and with the edge of his tongue he could feel the slow lengthening of his canines. Sharp. Terrible. A heralding of the vile, foul abomination every male Carpathian feared, creeping relentlessly into his body and mind no matter how hard he tried to hold it back. Evil had an insidious way of creeping in at the very moment one was most vulnerable.
    His world was one of absolute darkness, heat, and tremendous pressure. He’d been buried alive, trapped in the volcano for hundreds of years. Outside his prison, the world had changed and evolved, but he remained imprisoned in this eternal stasis, a mosquito trapped in an amber prison, if he was being poetic. But it was more like a hot lava bed of fire and stone and pure hell.
    He searched his mind to remember his name—there hadbeen so many. Names meant nothing in his world; they never had. His species was immortal and they moved from century to century, shedding identities and acquiring new ones, taking on the customs, languages, and names of those around them so they blended into whatever world they lived in. Once, so long ago, he’d had a birth name—the name his family had given him—but then so had the vile creature he’d chased across continents.
    Of all the names he’d called himself over the centuries, Dax was the only one left from his ancient heritage, a small part of the original very long name he’d been given at birth. After tracking the vampire to this continent, he’d taken the name of a fierce warrior of the Chachapoyas people and had become one of them. Later, when the Incas arrived, easily overrunning the Chachapoyas whose numbers had already been decimated by the vampire, he’d shed his Chachapoya identity and assumed an Incan persona, learning their language and customs by reading the minds of the people. Then, like always, he’d become what he must to hunt his prey.
    All bloodlines save one—the Dragonseekers—knew the horror, the tragedy, of watching family members succumb to the curse of their species. The more powerful the lineage, the quicker, deeper, and more potently they grew once a warrior made the choice to turn vampire. This vampire, the one Dax had hunted all these long centuries, was the epitome of evil. He came from an extremely powerful line—second in command to the prince of the Carpathian people.
    Dax had known the ancient Carpathian warrior, as had all warriors in their community. And they’d all known the moment Mitro Daratrazanoff made the choice to turn wholly vampire. All his life, Mitro had carried power like a mantle of authority, but his ego had been wounded beyond repair when the prince had passed over Mitro and chosen one of Mitro’s younger brothers to serve as his second. Mitro’s hatred grew, as well as his vanity, until he wanted his entire family and the prince dead.
    Driven mad by his hatred, he rejected his lifemate, Arabejila, a beautiful Carpathian woman with astonishing gifts, and in doing so he’d rejected the salvation she could have given him. That alone was a crime unheard of in their world, but Mitro compounded his sins by trying to kill her, to drain of her blood and life. Mitro had the insane idea that should he murder his lifemate as he made the transformation, he would be the most powerful of all vampires and could easily destroy his famous family and that of the prince.
    Thinking he could betray and kill Arabejila while still Carpathian proved impossible. He took her blood, but the lifemate bond refused to allow him to use his other half as his entry to transform to pure evil. But he’d killed her mother and father and left Arabejila dying, bleeding out on the ground beside their dead bodies. Worse, her mother had been pregnant