The long flowing script on the basement wall marked the chamber as a safe place, one of many havens which had been fortified for those Carpathians who needed shelter in a hurry. These could be caves, buildings, ruins, whatever would suit the purpose and could be kept dark during daylight hours. The safe chamber had once been the cellars of a manor house entrenched in its own expanse of wooded estate. Now only a small tract and the lower ruins of the house was left owned by one of the many shadowy conglomerates the Carpathians used to manage their holdings.

Ardal Urs rechecked the markings hadn't lost their potency or had been altered before he sealed the room for the day. He was careful as he was finding his movements heavy as the sun rose higher in the sky and his deep green eyes hurt where daylight had touched them. Absentmindedly he cleaned the bloodied tears from around his cheeks and pushed strands of thick chestnut hair from his face. Yes the daylight had burned but the prize had been worth the pain.

Angel lay still in the deep sleep his influence had put her in, her red hair spilling in a pool around her head. She would not rise until he lifted the command and the rest was already healing the long burn mark on her cheek. He hadn't bothered about a bed but she rested on soft blankets laid directly on earth brought from the Carpathian Mountains themselves. The earth was working its magic. The chamber had been well fitted in case those who needed it also required healing.

He stretched his long, heavy frame out some distance from her aware that she would be unlikely to welcome his presence close to her body when she awoke. Instead of holding her as he wished he turned so that he could look at her one hand stretched slightly towards her sleeping form. As he drifted into the day's inertia he drew her scent deep into his lungs and savoured the rich perfume he had been chasing wisps of for over a decade.

He had been but a child when he had first caught a hint of her many years ago, a brief flash of colour and perfume that he had spent over half his lifetime trying to hunt down again. His family had been constantly on the move painfully aware of the constant threat of Vampire attack. So many young males were turning that a blood tie or mental link providing an easy path to a first kill for a new turned vampire was a real danger. His father had compensated by shifting them from safe house to safe house using the old power hewn into ancient sanctuaries to try and shield them. It had been a good strategy, at least for a while.

As Ardal's chest stilled and his body shut down as the sun broke fully into the sky his mind performed its last checks, examining the mental links that he had used to block the old Carpathian and the small group from Angel. They were solid, layered on top of his life mate's own in built barriers against the others they would be all but impenetrable. It felt strange to say those words now even to himself. Life mate the other half of his soul, light to his dark, day to his night. Life mate, words he had heard so many times over the years but which he had himself never used. Had it been his time blending in with the human world around him that had made such a fundamental part of his heritage sound strangely alien to him. Was it simply that until now the rush of pursuit had meant little time for actually assessing what this woman was to him? Or was it simply that he had never fully dared to hope he would actually be able to find her amongst the sprawling mass of humanity as he tracked tirelessly on ghosts of embedded emotion, scent and scant tantalising morsels of her physical presence.

He reminded himself that they were not bonded yet. Although he himself had not yet felt the darkness begin to rise up within him as it did eventually in all Carpathian males he had felt the aftershock of her pain rises again and again as over the years he had drawn closer to his quarry. The pain was abstract and out of context, just a feeling of something a twin soul was experiencing that itched and burned in some corner of his mind. It was only when he passed through the same physical location that he could gain evidence of what Angel had actually gone through. An unguarded conversation, broken furniture hastily replaced in a bar, the occasional a fragment of newspaper column buried in the back of some local rag he had fitted it all together in his mind as he raced after her. She had been through hell ten times over and he could do nothing but sift through the wreckage she left behind.

His mind stirred slightly and then settled down more deeply into slumber. He needed to rest, the night would bring troubles. The old Carpathian would not give up the hunt for Angel so easily and then there would be Angel to deal with. He would be met with her anger and her fear and her mistrust. He would have to be patient with her and move carefully over old wounds. One sign that he was a threat and he was under no illusions about what would happen. She was strong and skilled as a fighter. There would be no adequate defence he would be willing to use against her physically and if he tried mentally she would never forgive him. She would kill him and he would do nothing to stop her.

Ardal waited for dusk. He had to convince her that he was worth loving, that their future would not be yet more years of pain and misery for her. He had to prove to her he was everything she had never dared to let herself dream she could have. First however he had to trust that when Angel woke up in a strange place with a strange man by her side their mutual bond would be enough to stop her ripping out his heart and burning it to ash.