WEEK TEN: 13 Weeks of Vampires
Spoiler warning: there will be many discussions of plot points and characters below, so if you haven't read these books yet, you may wish to give this section a pass. You have been warned.
Week Ten rolls up to Nikola, my second favorite vampire. I don't know quite why I love him so much, but I suspect it might be his curiosity, and the fact that he cares about beings that are not perfect. He's a natural born protector. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's A TALE OF TWO VAMPIRES.
THE BOOK
Time isn’t always on a vampire’s side…
Iolanthe Tennyson has had a very bad year—due in part to the very bad men in her life. So, she’s accepted her cousin’s invitation to spend the summer in Austria indulging in her photography hobby. There, rumors of a haunted forest draw Iolanthe into the dark woods—and into the eighteenth century…
Nikola Czerny is a cursed man, forced by his half-brothers to live forever as a Dark One. But his miserable existence takes an intriguing turn when a strange, babbling woman is thrown in his path. Iolanthe claims to know Nikola’s daughter—three hundred years in the future. She also knows what fate—in the form of his murderous half-brothers—has in store for him. If only she knew the consequences of changing the past to save one good, impossibly sexy vampire…
HOW THE BOOK CAME TO BE As you will see in the original outline below, Nikola's existence was a pure act of serendipity. I hadn't intended to write the story of Ben and Imogen's dad, but once it struck me that he could be that person, a whole world of conflict unrolled itself before me like a pre-fabricated cinnamon roll.
Writers love conflict in books. It makes us happy. It lets us really sink our teeth (ha! pun!) into a story, and torment the characters. So when I realized that if I made Nikola the hero, he would have ENDLESS amounts of baggage to deal with when it came to his kids in the present day. And that temptation was just too much to resist.
THE CHARACTERS I really wanted to write an older heroine since Fran was relatively young (early twenties), which meant I needed to have a woman who was comfortable with herself, knew what sort of man she liked, and had no problem speaking her mind. Well, to be honest, none of my heroines have a problem with that, but I wanted Io to be pretty self assured despite being in a position where she was more or less jobless, homeless, and sans romantic partner. We'll call it a turning point in her life.
Nikola was another one of those characters that burst almost fully formed from the brainmeats. I had a vision of him being an early 18th century scientist with an almost incessant curiosity about everything around him, a learned man, but one who also valued continued learning. Then it turned out he was also highly compassionate when it came to people and animals that were scarred (mentally, emotionally, or physically), everything that was opposite of how Ben described his father in IN THE COMPANY OF VAMPIRES.
And yes, I named him for Nikola Tesla. Because how could I not?
THE ORIGINAL OUTLINE
Here's a big chunk of the original outline. Note the first few paragraphs...those were literally me thinking out loud, only via my fingers on a keyboard. Sometimes I do that when I start plotting. As soon as I figured out that Nikola was Ben's daddy, the outline started taking form.
-----Outline notes------
Woman gets sent back in time (really, or just in her mind? Body too?) via cursed portal in murky woods. Area supposedly blighted by the devil (aka demon lord). Taking pictures for magazine article, and gets sucked into portal which goes through time rather than place.
Meets a vamp. Brings him forward? What about current self? What if he died between then and now? Paradox? Meet his adult son? What if son is Ben?
Ben's father was cursed by a demon lord. Ben's mom loved him. Could he have done something for her that resulted in him being cursed?
Iolanthe Tennyson has had a very bad year. First, she was fired by her boss after being made a scapegoat for his mistakes after she called him out for sexual harassment. Then her boyfriend of seven years got drunk, and punched her in the face. She kicked his butt out to the curb, and swore of men altogether, accepting an invitation by a cousin in Austria to spend the summer forgetting her troubles, and indulging in her hobby of photography.
While there, she meets her cousin's friend Imogen, a palm reader who is in the area with a small travelling fair. Io asks Imogen if she'd pose for her, since some shots of the lovely Imogen couldn't help but perk up her portfolio. Reluctantly, Imogen agrees. Intrigued by rumors of a nearby haunted wood, Io ignores the warnings of locals, and plans a day spent photographing the admittedly creepy woods. She asks Imogen to meet her there, and is surprised when Imogen flat out refuses to get within five miles of the woods. Imogen later explains that the location has a very bad memory for her, since it's where her father was brutally murdered by his two younger half-brothers.
Later, Io visit the woods, more intrigued than ever by its dark past. Not normally sensitive to such things, even Io gets the willies in the atmospheric location, and just as she's about to give in to her inner warning system and leave, she stumbles across a curious anomaly, a spot of land between two trees that seems to be not quite real. And it's not, as she finds out when she approaches it to photograph the strange phenomenon. It's a cursed portal, one tainted by the comings and goings of demonic beings, so perverted after centuries of use, that its form is warped and instead of transporting the user to another location, it sends Io back in time to the early 18th century.
Nikola Czerny is a cursed man, both literally and figuratively. Once a mortal member of minor nobility, his younger brothers attempt to eliminate him by engaging a demon lord to curse him into oblivion. Unfortunately, the demon lord they picked was less than effective, and Nikola ended up cursed all right...but cursed to exist forever as a Dark One. Not quite what his brothers wanted.
After settling his son at a university, Nikola is on his way home when a strange woman stumbles across the road in front of his carriage, babbling something about a haunted wood, and things too impossible to even consider...except the woman is very convincing, very sincere, and very, very tempting. There's something about her that brings a warmth to his life that he hadn't felt since his soul had been ripped from him by the demon lord, so many years before. Against common sense, he takes her home with him, seeing to her slight injuries, even while telling himself that she's not all there in the head.
Io is in a terrible quandry. One the one hand, she's dealt magnificently with the fact that she's been magically transported back in time. Really, she should get some sort of an award for coping with that impossibility. But when it turns out that the impossibly handsome, darkly sexy man who almost mows her down with his carriage turns out to be Imogen's father, the world seems to go completely mental. How could Imogen's father have existed more than three hundred years in the past? What will happen if she warns him to stay away from the woods? Should she encourage him to get rid of his murderous half-brothers? Will there be some sort of cosmic repercussion if she intervenes on his behalf?
What if she could save him? The temptation to do that is too great, and she does her level best to convince Nikola that he's in grave danger, but it doesn't seem to matter, for with one avenue of murder closed off to them, they simply try another. It becomes clear to Io that it wasn't enough to keep Nikola out of the woods on that fateful night...if she wants to truly save him, she's going to have to do something much more drastic.
Nikola isn't sure why he's let Io talk him into accompanying him on a mysterious journey that she insists will save his life, but he's become more and more aware that pleasing her has moved to this top priority, so with an indulgent smile, he follows her into the deepest part of the woods that border his land. He expects a pleasant tryst by moonlight, but instead finds himself in a whole new world, one made of up large metal vehicles, tiny devices that Io insists he soon won't be able to live without...and his children, dumbstruck to see him again.
It's only when he finds out that his murderous half-brothers have followed him into this new world, with more than revenge on their minds, that he begins to believe that everything Io told him was true. Now the trick is to keep them all alive long enough to enjoy her repeated statements of "I told you so!"
ENTHRALLED CONNECTION
The Moravian Council is mentioned, although the members of it that show up in ENTHRALLED aren't in this book.
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