Feehan's Dark Carpathians - Part 5

DARK LEGEND                             DARK GUARDIAN

Christine Feehan                            Christine Feehan

Book 8: Dark Series                       Book 9: Dark Series

ISBN: 0-8439-4952-X                    ISBN: 0-8439-4994-5

 For two thousand years they’ve stood side-by-side, anchoring each other to the world.  They’ve lived always in each other’s mind and fought always back-to-back.  In all the centuries of their existence there has never been another as powerful as them and this is no one who knows them as well as each other.  It is with this in mind that they make their vow – if one should succumb to the darkness in his soul, the other will hunt him and give him justice before he then seeks the dawn for himself.

“Don’t get any ideas, I’m just giving the devil his due.  All this time our people called you the angel of light and Lucian the dark angel.  I think they might have it backward.”

Gabriel has spent several centuries hunting his twin and in their last great battle he managed to surprise Lucian and locked them both within the earth for 200 years. Awakening to a much changed Paris, Gabriel is starving and his beast crouches close in wait of blood.  While terrified that Lucian has also risen, Gabriel is even more terrified of his own weakness, for he knows that he doesn’t have the strength within himself to maintain his honor.  Then Francesca slides into his life and upon realizing his dire straits, says the only phrase that could chain the beast. “I offer my life for yours as is my right.” And he is saved.

They do not come together gently and the path to their future happiness is not completely smooth.  He manipulates her body to hold her to this life and binds them without her full consent, but despite this she can do no other than respect him and need him.  And when he helps her to save Skyler (the traumatically abused psychic girl she’s introduced to at the hospital), Francesca can only love him too.

She supports Gabriel as best she can while he hunts the undead who have threatened her, and her city.  She soothes his pain as he must continue to hunt his twin.  And when the truth is revealed that Lucian had never turned vampire and had done only what he must to keep Gabriel safe, she gives them both a great gift – the knowledge that Lucian’s lifemate exists in the world at that time too.

It is with this hope in his mind that Lucian holds on to life and begins his search for the light to his dark soul.

“I would change what I am if I could – the dark angel of death, my people call me – but I am a hunter of the undead, and I fear I always will be.”

          Her wide eyes flashed with sudden anger.  “They call you that? ‘The dark angel of death’? How can they be so terrible when you’ve given them so much? What right do they have to judge you?”

Jaxon Montgomery has lived in hell nearly her entire life.  Everyone she’s ever loved, everyone she’s ever cared about, has been killed by her step-father.  Their only sin? They cared about her too. She knows she can never be close to anyone, yet when Lucian Daratrazanoff bursts into her life she feels drawn to him and oddly compelled to keep him close. 

She is nothing like what he had expected his lifemate would be. In his mind he’d envisioned a woman like those born to the Carpathian race: tall with dark hair and eyes. Yet Jaxon is a small, curvy firecracker and he loves her almost immediately.

She’s fiercely protective of everyone around her and when evidence suggests that her oldest enemy has come back in to the picture, she can’t help but want to protect Lucian too.  It doesn’t take long before she realizes that it’s not just monsters of the human variety that are drawn to her and she knows, at least subconsciously, that she’ll never stop protecting the world from any of them.  And she’ll do it at Lucian’s side.

Together they draw her stepfather and the undead away from their city.  Together they destroy the master vampire determined to capture her. And together they defeat her all-to-human demons.  After all that they know that nothing can stand in their way and that life just got a whole lot brighter.  For both of them.