Dark Curse

Dark Curse is a novel by the American writer Christine Feehan, published in 2008 and part of her long-running Dark series.

The Carpathian novels are built on a set of rules about an ancient people who can change shape, live for centuries, need a life-mate to keep their humanity and lose themselves to darkness when they cannot find one. Nicolas De La Cruz has reached the end of that process: he has come to the mountains to pass on information to the prince of his people, after which he intends to meet the sunrise, because the centuries he has spent hunting have brought him close to becoming what he hunts. Lara's arrival interrupts the plan, and much of the book is concerned with the two of them negotiating what each of them will accept from the other. Feehan writes these novels as romances with a horror machinery underneath, and the structure is deliberate: the couple's intimacy and the violence are handled in the same register, and the series' readership follows the mounting count of Carpathians who have found partners across dozens of books.