From that night on, she’d be far more than a colleague or a friend.

She would be his immortal child.

Baojia struck quickly. Makeda’s heartbeat was already faltering. He would have to be very, very fast. He could feel Lucien watching his every move, feel the ancient vampire’s focused attention.

“I give you my word, Baojia,” he said quietly. “I’ll kill her myself if she hates this life. I promise you. But right now I need her mind.”

Oh, my friend. Baojia said nothing as he drained the blood from Dr. Makeda Abel’s body. You need far more than that.

CHAPTER ONE

Near Chencha, Ethiopia

2012

The first thing Lucien remembered when he woke from death was the familiar sound of his mother’s people. The staccato rhythm of Amharic dropped around him like rain hitting dusty earth. He opened his eyes to darkness, but the musky scent of burning bamboo and the mixed accents told him he was high in the mountains.

The last thing he remembered was intense heat and the sound of trickling water in the courtyard in Rome where he’d waited for dawn, hoping to end the confusion and suffering of his plague-ridden mind.

“I’m tired… I’m so tired.”

Now he lay in a round tukul, the faint glow from the fire enough to illuminate the distinctive bamboo house recognizable for its twin smoke vents and bamboo screens. He was far from the heat of the Mediterranean. He was in Ethiopia, in the mountains of the Dorze people, high in one of his mother’s remote compounds above the sister lakes of Abaya and Chamo.

And he was alive.

Damn.

His hair fell nearly to his shoulders, a shaggy brown and silver mix incongruous with a face humans usually assumed to be near thirty years. Saba must have given him a hell of a lot of blood for his hair to have grown that long. He reached up and touched his face, remembering the ache of the sun burning his skin.

“My son. My lovely child, what have you done?”

A wave of guilt at the memory of his mother’s voice.

He was tired in spirit, but his body had not felt this strong in years. He could feel the hum of energy as the earth held him. He was stripped to his skin, the dark red soil rising from the Great Rift Valley cradling his body. The ancient energy soaked into him, making his blood and his mind race.

Home.

If there was any place on the earth that was home to him, it was this one. These mountains. Perhaps some might call it a strange thought for a pale, foreign creature who lived in the shadows, but this was the place Saba had brought him when he’d first been sired to immortal life. This was the place where the earth first fell under his aegis and the land spoke to him. Home wasn’t the blood-soaked forests of Europe where his human life had come to an end. It was here.

Something in his soul realigned as he lay in the furrowed earth of his mother’s land.

Life. The long, aching, glorious stretch of it appeared before his mind’s eye.

Life.

Or some imitation of it.

Lucien closed his eyes and let himself fall back into sleep.

2013

“You need to leave,” Saba said.

Lucien swung the sharp-bladed hoe into the earth in time with the human next to him. Though he could turn the earth faster on his own—could upend the whole of the topsoil with his amnis—the rhythmic labor with the men around him satisfied something essential. Though he did not sweat, the mist on the mountainside had gathered on his bare chest and arms. A fire burned nearby, warming the men who worked beside him. They were readying the fields for planting maize, the steep mountainside too difficult for the horse-drawn plow to traverse.

“Stop,” his mother said. “And listen to me.”

Ever the faithful child, Lucien stepped away and handed the hoe to one of the men by the fire.

He wiped the mist from his face, feeling a smear of grit across his cheek. He glanced down at Saba, who stood in the gathering dusk watching the humans who continued working.

“I’m listening, Emaye,” he said.

“Yene Luka…” She put her hand on his cheek. “When will you decide to live again?”

Lucien took a deep breath, tasting the night air and the turned earth. “What do you want from me?”

“You are my beloved son. I want you to be a man of honor and usefulness.”

Lucien smiled. A mother in the modern world might have answered “happiness” or “contentment” when asked what she wanted for her child. Saba was not a modern mother. From her regal profile to the scars decorating her body in whirling spirals, his sire was a proud reflection of an ancient past. The oldest known vampire of their race didn’t remember how she had come to be. She’d forgotten more than he’d ever learned. But some traits were eternal.

From ancient times to modern, mothers nagged their sons.

“Am I not a man of honor?” he asked.

“You are one of the finest men I know,” Saba said, her chin lifting. “But you are not useful here.”

He glanced at the half-plowed field and raised his eyebrows.

Saba lifted her hand as if she would strike him. She didn’t, but the empty threat made Lucien smile.

“Do you think me stupid?” She nudged him away from the field and down the muddy path back to the village. “You’re hiding.”

A stabbing pain in his chest. “I’m mourning.”

Her eyes, dark as the night sky, softened. “Mourn her, but do not despair. She was not your true mate.”

“How do you know?” he asked, his voice frustratingly raw.