It had been days since the call rang out, alerting the Carpathians to the presence of the Undead closing in on the small village under their protection.  The battle had been fought and won, and the numerous piles of dead bodies lay burnt and twisted at the hunters' feet. Villagers had been saved and lifemates protected. All that remained on the battlefield after the acrid smoke lifted and the skies cleared were a band of mighty brothers…and him.

Blaine had done his part - in some ways more than his part - in the gruesome fight considering he had no lifemate of his own to keep safe…and no family among those still living. He had endangered himself for the safety of others, and he had fought well. Not that he was asked. Not that he was wanted. He was considered just as dangerous as the Undead, and in many ways, less welcome. The other men eyed him warily, cursing him with their glares, threatening him with the curl of their snarling lips.

Regardless of their obvious disdain for him, honor bound him to the task of protecting his people. As a Carpathian, he felt duty required that he defend those who scorned him. Every time a call rang out, he answered. He fought just as hard, if not harder, attempting to replace actual emotion with blood lust and a thirst for vengeance. He tried to see what he knew were red blood stains against crystal white snow, but to him it was simply varying shades of gray against gray.

With no lifemate, no children, no love to hold his sanity together, he had lost all sense of color long ago. Emotion barely held on by a thread thinner than a single spider's silk. The haze of crimson clouding his molten gold eyes spoke a warning to the others – Blaine's time was growing short.

He would soon turn into the same monster they had fought and conquered.

Undead.

Vampire.

The eldest of the brothers stepped out from among the crowd – his muscular body weary, his flesh scorched and battle scarred. He would need to go to ground soon to heal the wounds littered across his chest, and others deeper would require time and the skills of a healer to mend. Regardless of his imminent need, he stood fierce and confronted Blaine, speaking for the group.

“Your task is done here, Wanderer,” the man said, speaking in more of a guttural growl than a voice. That was as much of a thank you as Blaine could expect, but it wasn't a thank you at all.

It was a cue for him to leave.

Blaine smirked, the sly twist of his lips coming nowhere near to touching his eyes.

Standing among people he should be able to call brothers, Blaine had no friends here. It seemed the other males around him would have been willing to sacrifice one more innocent life, maybe even their own, if they could have ensured that he not appear.

The ring of alphas tightened in front of him, pushing him back toward the forest from where he had come, bounding through the foliage to the battlefield in the form of a massive black panther. Blaine eyed one at a time the tall, dark, muscular men with their murderous stares trained on him. They could glare all they wanted, but they could not touch him. The slightest touch from Blaine - even the slap across his face that so many of them craved to give him - would lead to certain death. That's how Blaine killed the vampire menace. He was the only one who dared get close to the Undead, to embrace their fallen brothers bodily (since many of the vampire legions were once Carpathian males, doomed without a lifemate to the change that made them soulless monsters), and condemn them.

In a morbid way, it gave him a sense of belonging, a momentary sensation of physical contact.

Those who should have embraced him, even with just their minds, turned their backs on him.

So Blaine turned his back as well, leaving the village in peace and venturing into the dark.

Blaine.

The Wanderer, as his people referred to him.

A Carpathian with no home.

An outcast.

A disease.

The nightmare that kept evil things awake, fearful of the dark.

Mortals live in a reality they believe to be safe from the nightmares of the Old World. Stories about werewolves and vampires, and ghouls that hide under beds, feeding off children's souls when they sleep, are fun ways to be frightened, but monsters are easily shut away in books and movies, dismissed as legends with no basis of fact.

But there are places in the world – the modern, shiny, technologically advanced world – where Old World myths exist. In the Carpathian Mountains, a once thriving society - a race of people who are nearly immortal - clings to life, but with an inexplicable lack of female lifemates and no new children born that survive past infancy, more men lose the will to live and become vampire…or simply choose to meet the dawn, to save their brothers from the painful task of having to destroy those that they once loved.

As frightening as the prospect of becoming one of the Undead is, there are fates even more terrifying. Of all the legends meant to keep unruly Carpathian children tucked securely in their beds, there is none so blood chilling than that of The Wanderer. The Wanderer, a Carpathian himself, is known for killing any creature - man, animal, or Undead - with a single touch. It is rumored that he lures victims into the forest with a seductive song and eyes of golden fire, but once he touches the hands of his intended victims to draw them in and suck their blood (in the manner that all Carpathians must feed), they disintegrate and blow away, their bodies becoming nothing more than a fine, powdery dust.

Always a killer, always hungry, always on the search for fresh blood he can never taste.

So the Wanderer hides in the forest, starved to insanity from lack of blood, lying in wait. It is said of the Carpathian people that he usually takes the form of a massive jungle cat, crawling through the underbrush, ready to pounce.

Those outsiders unfortunate enough to have seen him in his human form rarely survive to tell the tale, and survivors have been known to go mad shortly after.

Of course, as with many legends, the reality of Blaine's story is far less sinister, though still terribly tragic – but only for him.

Blaine didn't start out life as a monster. Far from it. A loving, childless, Carpathian couple found Blaine orphaned on the mountain, without a stitch of clothing on his malnourished and frail body, sitting beside the corpses of his parents, their bodies in full rigor. Carpathian deaths, especially in the wilds away from the village of their ancestors, were not uncommon. Actually, such deaths were all too common, but why this couple would have abandoned the safety of their people to raise their child alone would forever be a mystery. Children were precious – too precious to risk for any reason - and there was safety within the bounds of blood.

To abandon the village in favor of raising a child alone was unheard of, so naturally speculation abounded with regard to the nature of their demise. The couple buried the poor souls, being sure to mark their graves with rough stones and white flowers, and returned with Blaine to the loving, open arms of their people. The couple devoted their lives to Blaine (a name they gave him since they could find none other among his meager things – it means thin, but lean and strong, which fit him to a T since he was so painfully underweight when they found him, but he had such a thirst for life, an unquenchable spirit).

Blaine wanted for nothing - he was spoiled with love and affection - but he never felt that he belonged on the mountain.

For one, he didn't look like his brothers. Where most of the males in the village grew tall and pale, with dark hair and dark eyes, Blaine was shorter in stature (which many excused with the understanding of his rough start to life), but he had tan skin and golden eyes. Where Carpathian men spent their lives in search of their female lifemates – the other half of their souls, the light to their dark – Blaine discovered very early on that if a lifemate existed for him, he would definitely not find them among the women of the village.

In a vision, Blaine had seen the eyes of his lifemate, the skin, the hair, and they definitely did not belong to any woman who lived or would ever live, and no one of their kind.

He confessed this to his adopted parents, and though they loved him unswervingly, they found his inclination impossible to accept. They tried to impress upon him that a Carpathian man belonged with a Carpathian (or sometimes, a special human) female. This match was predetermined, predestined – the universe having already chosen a mate for him before his birth - and when those two perfect halves of one soul came together, they could create the most beloved thing in the Carpathian world – a child.

Blaine listened to their rhetoric and logically he understood it, but in his heart he didn't believe it to be true – not for everyone, and especially not for him. He explained his feelings over and over with the same passion that they explained theirs, but his words fell on deaf ears. He resigned himself to not finding a lifemate at all, but that option seemed to be worse than the former.

To not have a lifemate meant to abandon one's self to a slow decent into madness, and eventually – either at the hands of his brothers or the light of the dawn – death.

Blaine's adopted parents worried for him. Often times they would instruct him to focus his thoughts on the beautiful woman his lifemate could be. Carpathians believed that they could touch the mind of their lifemate, wherever they existed in the world, even possibly across the spans of life times.

Nothing but death could keep lifemates apart, and even then, fate did some negotiating.

Blaine humored them. He allowed himself to be chanted over, he meditated in the way that he was taught, he recited the ancient pleas to the ancients to guide his visions, but still, when Blaine pictured his lifemate, it wasnt a voluptuous maiden he saw, but a lithe human man, with skin so pale it appeared as white as the virgin snow on the mountain tops, and eyes so gloriously blue that the sky herself must have lent color to them.

Word about Blaine's stubbornness got out in a round-about way. His mother, distraught over her son's chosen destiny, sought out help for what she thought might be a sickness. None among their kind had ever heard of a male who did not long for a lifemate. (His mother did not mention Blaine's belief that the one who would bring light to his darkness would be male, in fear that he might be sentenced to death.)

Once word circulated, Blaine became an outcast, and even without a verdict on the subject from their prince, he was shunned by all. No one acknowledged him. When they saw him approach, they turned and walked away. Only Blaine's parents spoke to him, and by doing so, they were outcasts by association.

Not long after, Blaine came of age, and with a heavy and regretful heart, he left the home of his adopted parents – for their sake as much as his own. They were lost in the forced solitude his presence had sentenced them to, and without contact from their own kind, they had begun to wither. Blaine left them no note, no word of good-bye, touching their minds only briefly while they slept to leave them with images of the years they had spent together, of the good times of love and joy that he would always cherish, that he had only known because of them, and that he would always be thankful for.

Blaine knew in his soul that he was not of the mountain, so he went in search of what he figured was his own clan - others like him, or at least, more accepting of ones like him. He traveled the world over numerous times. He felt a certain kinship with the water, an undeniable pull to be near it, so he began there, following where it led and working his way through towns and cities, rivers and forests, by waterfalls and lakes. He even risked crossing the treacherous seas, with no place to go to ground for rest (where his kind must go during the heat of the day lest their bodies burn), in search of the place where he belonged.

For centuries, Blaine journeyed the world alone, and with every step he suffered a terrible loss as moment by moment, day by day, hope within him began to fade until it was little more than a single smothered ember slowly growing cold.

But it flared anew when, right at the dawn of a new era, he heard of one who might have the answers he sought. It was a long shot, little else than a dream, but it was more than he had.

A lesser - possibly even wiser - man might have turned down this particular aid. The roots of that knowledge, he was told, were deeply engrained in black magic, and would come at a terrible price.

Blaine knew that all magic came with a price - that part could not be avoided – and rarely was it ever something as simple or common as money.

Feeling more lost and alone than he ever had, with no people to call his own, his mind blocked off to all who once loved him, he went in search of it.

Deep in the heart of the rainforest, Blaine found her – the witch he was promised would hold the key to discovering his people…and his true identity. If he wasn't a Carpathian of the mountain, then what was he? He asked the witch for the truth about his origins. She promised him a way to find the answers, but told him that it would take him on a quest that would force him to give up his claim to all that he held dear. He would never be able to touch those that he loved, would never again know the sweet taste of sustenance. He would find no shelter among the people of the world. But worse than that, he would forfeit all that was yet to come. She spoke to him in vague commands and warnings, and he accepted them all, making the decision to find out what he needed to know, and then afterward greet the sun.

She created for him a glowing orb of radiant light, gathered from the life force of the forest and mixed with a potion that included a vial of his own blood. She told him that if he followed its trail, it would reveal the secret of his beginnings. Without a single other word of instruction, the orb took off immediately after being released from her hands and Blaine followed obediently where it led. He tracked the orb for seventeen years. It took him through underground caves and volcanoes, and above the canopies of trees. It threw him in the path of danger and sometimes it didnt let him sleep. When the light had finally faded and his journey came to an end, he found himself, sickeningly, maddeningly, at the foot of his birth parents' grave.

Looking down at the flattened earth, the outline of the plots defined by weathered rocks and the skeletal remains of once beautiful, blossoming flowers, Blaine knelt on the ground, bowed his head in reverence…and gave in.

It was all over for him.

He was worn, weary, and spent.

He had nothing, so he would return to nothing.

It would have been a simple thing to wait for sunrise and become ash beneath its golden rays, but he decided, in the end, to exile himself instead.

Since he felt the pull of the water so strongly, it was to the ocean that he banished himself.

He searched the seas and found the spot that the last piece of his shattered psyche told him he was looking for. He sank to the ocean floor, embracing the pressure of the water bearing down on him and the shifting change in temperature since it gave him the illusion that he could actually feel. There he dug his grave, and in that grave he lay - a pariah, a festering scourge beneath the vibrant sea, in a place where no fish swam and coral ceased to grow.

Blaines soul had died centuries before he buried himself in the sands of the Pacific Ocean. Now he would wait for his body to petrify.

There he stayed till time no longer had meaning, and the end of one day blurred into the passage of a hundred.

Long years passed, but however long, Blaine did not know. He had stopped trying to track the passage of time. What did it matter anyway? Without his lifemate - that one person meant for him - life didnt interest him. Beauty, pain, life, death - they were all abstract concepts that didnt apply to him anymore.

In the dreamless, stone sleep of the dead, his visions haunted him – the blue eyes, the pale skin, the chestnut hair, wavy and soft between his fingers. His lifemate. Blaine tried to block the visions out, to keep them from driving him further over the brink of insanity, but the images became stronger, more persistent, with details added:  a voice - high and clear, pure as the songs of the birds that rang throughout the home of his childhood, a scent of jasmine and vanilla, every breath sweet with it even when Blaine did not draw one, a touch – light and delicate, around his hairline, over his cheekbones, traveling down to his neck…

Blaine tried to reach out with his mind to find the source of these visions. Could it be? Could there possibly be a lifemate for him walking the planet, unaware of his presence and yet dreaming of him?

Blaine called out to him but his mind had become weak, and the source of the visions too far for him to touch. He captured them most clearly when his lifemate (if it truly was him) seemed to be scared or in pain. At those times, Blaine suffered with his lifemate, and would try his best to send out songs of comfort, words of longing.

Blaine tried day after day to touch what was his and hold on, but his lifemate always seemed to flee from his grasp. Blaine couldn't conjure a complete picture of the man and couldn't find his name. Something strong blocked him when he tried to delve too deeply into his lifemate's mind, but Blaine just knew that there was something special about this man, something that spoke of power…something that attracted trouble.

But in his state, beneath the water, entombed by sand that didn't offer him the same restorative life as the soil on land, he did not have the strength to go in search of him. Blaine started to despair, thinking he would lose his chance forever.

Until he felt it - something pressed into the ocean, had reached with long, seductive tendrils to lure him from his grave. It vibrated in his veins - the song of the one person whose blood sang only for him.

His lifemate was there, short miles away, on an island nearby that had cropped up while Blaine remained a stranger to the world. It had started out life as a sandbar and grew. Now it teemed with life and had become the home of the one person Blaine needed most.

Every time the man touched the water, Blaine saw him. The ocean itself filled Blaine's mind with pictures of him.

Blaine's love…his life…his salvation…

And he was in mortal danger.