Blood Runner

Book Excellence Award 2017 Fantasy Finalist

I’m everything they speak about in whispers. I’m the evil that travels through the mist at night. I am the bringer of death the whole world fears…

Richard can’t die. And he’s sure he’s a monster, though can’t remember. Cranky, changing names and inventing his own reality century after century, a healer by trade, he’s riddled with guilt over the blood-stealing curse he can’t outrun while people keep showing up for help. Mostly? He wants to be left alone. He says he’s been in the world so long he stopped looking at why things happen. But maybe he should.

Frantic and needing protection, in eighteenth century Britain, Maggie falls across his threshold one night all brilliant light and life and wholly irresistible. And ten-year-old Myles sees past his growling to worm his way into his undead heart, too. But after vicious pirate captain, Billy the Blackdeath, calls at the little house in the hills Richard builds for Maggie, things are never the same again. Morose, Richard drifts through three-hundred years of self-imposed isolation in a remote forest in the New World until, to his undying annoyance, in the present day he’s forced into foster-parenthood by an exasperating, young, computer-savvy vampire, Alan, and his cohorts. And learns there is a reason for everything.

Richard protests he’s nobody’s hero though a manic, all-consuming need to protect human and not-so-human says otherwise, but the harder he resists, the more it smacks of godly interference of mythological proportion that threatens to drop destiny and the fate of the entire world in his own backyard.