About This Book
"Your life will last only as long as our conversation," I said gently. "You will share some of your life with me, and then I will share some of my life with you. If you lie to me, about anything, I will know it. My senses are a thousand times more sensitive than your own. I will smell the lie in your sweat, see it in the quiver of your pupils, and then I will kill you, more slowly, and more painfully, than you could ever imagine. Now… Do we have a bargain?" So begins the second volume of the Oldest Living Vampire saga. In modern day Belgium, the vampire Gon has kidnapped a ruthless murderer, holding the man hostage in his suite. Captivated by the human's cruelty, Gon decides to share his life story with him in exchange for the killer's own tales. So long as he is entertained, his captive lives. As their Faustian bargain unfolds, Gon tells his unhappy hostage the story of his human child Ilio, and their battle with the depraved Oombai, the first large human settlement in post-ice age Europe. The last great ice age has passed, and Gon is reborn into a world that is very much changed from the one he was born to. He awakens on a frigid tundra, his body crushed by the icy floes that have swept him far from the valley of his youth, with no memory of his past or any sense of identity or human sentiment. A heartless and ravening beast, Gon feeds upon a nomadic tribe of Mammoth Hunters. Healed by their blood, he is horrified by his own predations, and adopts the group's only surviving member, an innocent boy named Ilio, who is unaware that the man who saved him is also the monster who stalked and killed his clan by night. Hoping to find a new home for his adopted human child, they journey to the village of the Oombai, a burgeoning agricultural society. There, Gon is confronted by a violent and perverse culture, one that is ruled by a council of corrupt and bloodthirsty elders. The elders know of the cold, white blood-drinkers who stalk the night-- how to tempt them, how to trap them-- and crave the healing properties of Gon's blood.
