Blood Runner

Richard cannot die, and he is convinced he is a monster, though he cannot recall what he did to earn that label. Over the centuries he has grown gruff, taken new names, and rebuilt his own version of events again and again. He works as a healer, but he is weighed down by guilt over a curse that makes him steal blood, and he cannot escape it, even as people keep coming to him for help. What he really wants is to be left alone. He claims he stopped asking why things happen long ago, though he may need to start again.

One night in eighteenth-century Britain, a frightened and desperate woman named Maggie stumbles onto his doorstep, full of life and impossible to ignore. Her arrival draws in a young boy, ten-year-old Myles, who gets past Richard's snarling and becomes important to him. Their lives change for good when the pirate captain Billy the Blackdeath comes calling at the small house in the hills that Richard built for Maggie.

Richard then spends three hundred years hiding in a remote forest in the New World. In the present day, much to his irritation, he is pushed into raising a child by Alan, a young, tech-savvy vampire who is exasperating, along with his companions. Richard insists he is no hero, yet an intense, unstoppable urge to protect both humans and those who are not quite human suggests otherwise. The more he refuses, the more the situation resembles a divine intervention on a mythic scale, one that places the destiny of the whole world right on his doorstep.