Blood Runner
JD Stanley
eBook
(JD Stanley, March 12, 2016)
When the world was new, the Great Mountain, Enlil, banishes his sister to the Netherworld for taking a lesser as consort. But Sumerian doctor-priest, Kurshram, fights a hard human way through Ereshkigal’s flaming palace to trade his soul and life for the release of his great love. A thousand years later during a temple raid, the blood of slain priests washes into his crypt and reanimates his body while his memories remain locked away with his soul. Only half a man, he thirsts for the Water of Life that woke him and stumbles through darkness in walking half-life, dreaming on she who he cannot recall, forgotten by time, and left without place or purpose…Richard has problems - perennially unsettled, curmudgeonly, immortal... He can’t even remember his real name. Reinventing himself through several millennia while ducking pitchfork-wielding mobs, he finds use as an apothecary, though can’t recall learning the trade. Riddled with guilt, he’s compelled to heal in return for the human blood he steals. Sometimes, he craves ending the nightmare. Mostly? He just wants to be left alone.That’s not working out for him.Eighteenth century Britain sees Maggie burst across his threshold as the mirror of painful self-examination that tears him apart while the vicious pirate captain, Billy the Blackdeath, with a secret as old as his own, tangles them up in an inhuman, rage-fuelled vendetta that burns down his world.Richard still nurses his wounds in the solitude of a remote Canadian forest three hundred years later, but to his undying exasperation, everyone is looking for him - the living and the undead. And fate seems determined to serve him up existence in unexplainable harmony with people he doesn’t know.When the truth comes out, it smacks of supernal collusion and though Richard protests he’s nobody’s hero, a manic, all-consuming need to protect human and not-so-human explodes into a fiery five-thousand-year-old destiny of epic, mythological proportions.
