Kerrelyn Sparks - How to Seduce a Vampire (Without Really Trying)

“My lord.” Domokos knocked on the door.

“Come.” Zoltan had tried years ago to convince Milan’s grandfather not to address him so formally. But as far as Domokos was concerned, Zoltan was a count from an ancient line of counts, so all the servants had to give him the respect he was due.

Domokos entered with a tray laden with a warm bottle of blood and a wineglass, which he set on the table in front of the hearth. “Would you like a fire, my lord?”

“No. I’m fine, thank you.”

Domokos opened the bottle and poured until the wineglass was half full. When his hand shook, Zoltan moved forward to help him.

“Allow me, my lord.” Domokos set the bottle down and regarded Zoltan with tear-filled eyes. “May I say how honored we are over Milan’s promotion. His success wouldn’t have been possible if you hadn’t paid for his education and taken him under your wing. He will do his best to make you proud.”

“I’m sure he will. Thank you, Domokos. That will be all for this evening.”

“Yes, my lord.” Domokos bowed his head and hobbled to the door.

When had he started to walk like that? And when had his hair turned silver? “Domokos.”

“Yes, my lord?”

Zoltan hesitated. How long had Domokos been his steward? Thirty or forty years? “Are you watching out for your health? You can retire whenever you like at full pay. Just let me know.”

He smiled. “I know, my lord. There are enough servants here that all I really do is supervise. I choose to do this one chore every evening, since it is my pleasure to serve you in person.”

Even after eight hundred years, Zoltan could get caught off guard by the loyalty of those mortals who surrounded him. True, he took care of them the best he could, but they seemed more of a blessing to him than he deserved. “I am the grateful one, Domokos. You’ve taken care of me for . . . years.”

Domokos’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “Sixty years, my lord.”

Zoltan blinked. “That long?”

Domokos grinned. “Yes, my lord. Good night.”

“Good night, Domokos.” Zoltan watched him close the door. Sixty years? How did time pass by so quickly? Working five years with Milan had felt like five months. Apparently he’d become such a workaholic that years were zooming by him unnoticed.

Something nagged in the back of his mind. The six women of Beyul-La. He’d seen them from a distance while they’d sat around the fire, eating. They had all appeared young, most probably in their twenties, but that couldn’t be right. One of them was the queen and Neona’s mother.

He strode to his desk and turned on the computer. He needed more information. Something concrete that he could investigate. Maybe Frederic?

He sat down and typed Frederic Chesterton in the search box. To his surprise, there were several articles. Frederic Chesterton had been one of the members of a doomed British expedition to the Himalayas. They’d planned to map a northern approach to Mount Everest, but the team had gotten lost in a sudden snowstorm in Tibet. In 1922.

Zoltan’s mouth dropped open. This couldn’t be right. He kept reading. A surprising development had occurred in 1933 when a man calling himself Frederic Chesterton arrived in England with a six-year-old boy. His surviving family accepted him back, claiming he truly was Frederic Chesterton. He’d aged eleven years but had no memory of that time. When newspaper reporters tried to interview him, he told them he had suffered from amnesia and couldn’t tell anyone where he had been or who had given birth to his son.

Zoltan swallowed hard. According to Neona, Frederic had fathered two daughters with Calliope. But if the two girls were born in the 1920s, they would be elderly by now. And all the women of Beyul-La looked young.

A chill ran down his back. Was the myth of Shangri-La based on fact? Was Beyul-La a valley where no one grew old?

He recalled the words Neona had said about her sister. The sentence had seemed odd at the time, but he’d figured it was her grief that had been coloring her words. Now he wondered if her grief had actually caused her to be honest.

You don’t understand how long we were together, how long we will be apart. Was Neona facing an eternity without her twin? Was that why she sat crying by her sister’s grave in the middle of the night? And how long had they been together before her sister’s death?

A memory flashed through his mind of his first sighting of Neona. She’d been dressed in armor, looking like an ancient Greek soldier sacking Troy.

“Good God,” he whispered. How old was Neona?

The next evening after sunset, Zoltan quickly showered and dressed. He was eager to see Neona but nervous about asking her about her age. Normally that would be considered rude, but in this case, it might be cause for murder.

She’d tried to kill him the first time they’d met, and she’d mentioned several times that men were not allowed there. So he assumed the women were guarding a secret they couldn’t trust with anyone else. Eternal life would fit the bill.

Was that what Master Han and Lord Liao were looking for? As vampires they already enjoyed the possibility of eternal life, but maybe they thought the women’s secret would enable them to live during the day. That would give them a huge advantage over the Vamps who were dead and vulnerable during the day. If Master Han possessed the secret, he could rule the vampire world.

It would also give him a tremendous amount of power over mortals, since he could decide who received the gift of eternal life and who didn’t. He would be a god among mortal men.

Zoltan walked into the kitchen for a quick meal and found Howard seated at the kitchen table, polishing off his box of donuts.

“You’re going back to see your girl, right?” Howard pushed a sat phone and a knife across the table. “Neona was her name?”

“Yes.” Zoltan dropped the sat phone into his pocket but ignored the knife. How could he win her trust if he arrived with a weapon?

“I e-mailed a report to Angus. He agrees with us.”

Zoltan finished his glass of blood. “Where is Angus now?”

“Still in London with Emma.”

Zoltan walked over to the fridge while he considered. “Can you ask Angus to check on something for me?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I want to know what happened to a guy named Frederic Chesterton. He may be dead by now, but his son might be alive and remember something.”

“Remember what?” Howard asked.

“Something from the first six years of his life.”

Howard frowned. “Does this Frederic own the cabin Russell mentioned?”

“He lived there for eleven years.” Zoltan slipped a plastic bag of blood into one of his jacket pockets and zipped it shut. “I should be going now.”

Before Howard could object, Zoltan teleported back to the clearing where he’d first met Neona. She was almost four hours ahead of him, so midnight would come soon. He levitated up to the tree branch to retrieve the arrow Russell wanted back, then hurried down the mountainside to Frederic’s cabin in the valley.

It was an idyllic place. Green meadows, forested hillsides, a gurgling mountain stream, and the waterfall shooting out of Beyul-La. He could see why Frederic Chesterton had stayed for eleven years. Especially if he’d been in love with one of the women.

As Zoltan approached the cabin, his heart beat faster. No woman had ever intrigued him as much as Neona did. She was such a fascinating mixture—tough but innocent, fierce yet tender. Beautiful, but totally unaware of it. He’d never met someone who needed love as much as she did. She was a lonely soul like him and, he suspected, an old soul as well.