She drew her feet from his boots and sauntered past him. "But not by much."

"That's true. And why do you think I stopped aging at thirty-five?" he asked again.

She frowned as if she didn't know where his question had come from, then said, "Because naughty Kristoff found you dying on a battlefield, decided you'd make a fine recruit, then made you drink his blood. Bit a wrist open, perhaps? Then with his vampiric hoo-doo blood in your veins, he let you die. Unless he was in a hurry, then he would've killed you. One to three nights later and voilà, you rise from the dead—most likely with a frown on your face as you think ‘Holy shite, it worked!' "

He ignored the last and asked, "How do you know the blood ritual?" He'd thought that only vampires knew the true way to turn a human. In movies and books, the change always came as a consequence of a vampire's bite, when in fact a human had more chance of turning if he bit a vampire.

"Like I said, I know everything."

Yes, but he was learning, if sporadically. She was an immortal, who'd been frozen physiologically at twenty-five. If she was pagan she was at least a few hundred years old. She knew of the blood ritual and that Kristoff "recruited" his soldiers straight from the battlefield.

When she scooped up her clothes, opened his door, then snapped her fingers for a guard down the hall, Wroth merely watched like a bystander.

"Pssst. Minion. I need these laundered. Very little starch. Don't just stand there gawking or you'll anger my good frenemy General Wroth. We're like this."

He couldn't see her but knew she was twining two fingers together.

Once she'd foisted her laundry, she closed the door by dramatically leaning back against it—as if to say he couldn't get away from her now—then glided over to him. As a rule, he observed, he calculated and he waited, but he'd never quite enjoyed sitting back and watching events unfurl as much as with her. Unpredictable didn't begin to describe—