Samson

They made him a monster to kill monsters. On the Ottoman frontier, a boy named Samson learns two things from his father: how to hold a sabre, and that courage without reason is the shortest road to the grave. His mother teaches him the rest - which roots heal, which ones kill. Then the Janissaries come. They burn the village and carry him east, to a cellar beneath Topkapi Palace, where an alchemist has spent years mixing monster's blood into human flesh, looking for the one boy who won't die of it. Dozens died before him. Samson doesn't. What climbs out of that cellar has golden eyes, the strength of five men, and a rage coiled under its ribs that it has no idea how to control. Home is a thousand miles west, through plague towns and burnt villages, and the road is thick with things worse than men - drowners waiting at the river fords, samodivas in the treeline, and a vampire four centuries old who stopped hunting people long ago. He offers Samson no comfort. Only the discipline to survive what he has become, and one hard truth: a sword means nothing in the hand of a man who doesn't know why he's holding it. Somewhere to the north there is a keep in the mountains, and men with eyes like his who have been hunting since before his grandfather was born. And in Istanbul, the man who made him is not finished.