What is Your Deepest Sin?

I'm getting back into the swing of things!  Here's the first book of one of my favorite paranormal series.  I just did a re read too, in preparation for the start of a new series by the same author in just a few months!

Jeaniene Frost's heroine in the Night Prince series, which starts with Once Burned, is pretty awesome.  She's snarky, which I love, and she brings a legend to his knees.  Leila Dalton, known as Frankie to many, knows your deepest sin with a single touch of her hand, thanks to a childhood accident.  Beyond this power, she can link to an individual and track where they are in the present.  This makes her exceptionally special to some vampires who are searching for a foe of theirs.  This foe is particularly powerful as a vampire because he is old, vicious, and can set things on fire with a thought.  Oh, and he's Vlad the Impaler.

Leila links to Vlad and, not knowing who he is at the time, obtains his help in escaping the group hunting him, as they've kidnapped her.  When Vlad comes sweeping in, he and Leila start a strange connection that grows.  A ramification of Leila's accident was that she is fatally charged with electricity, but Vlad's fire starting abilities make him immune to Leila's power.  Vlad knows that the men who searched for him through Leila are not working alone, and he plans to use her power to hunt down the puppet master who is hunting him.  He whisks her from Florida to his home in Romania, and the search is on.

As it turns out, the man hunting Vlad is someone that he has long thought dead, and whose name I couldn't pronounce if I tried.  Mihaly Szilagyi was a contemporary of Vlad's, and boy is there some history between them.  As the hunt continues, Vlad and Leila are, predictably as they are the heroes of the book, drawn to each other.  Their relationship is not an easy one, of course.  Leila was, before Vlad, unable to really touch anyone, vampire included, because she could kill them, so she's pretty new to the relationship game.  Vlad, on the other hand, is a medieval warlord who has been burned by love in the past.  There is going to be a few issues, particularly when Leila wants to help hunt down the man threatening her and her only remaining family members.  Vlad is violently opposed to this and does his best to keep her protected behind stone walls.  He doesn't succeed.  I'll let you read the book to discover what happens when Leila gets loose!

One of the things that I really love about this book and this series is that it dispels some of the Dracula myths, and tells you some of the real history of the character.  Vlad the Impaler was the third of his name to rule Wallachia, province in Romania.  He had two wives and three children.  He did have a tendency to stick people on poles, but hey, it worked as a scare tactic!  Something that many people don't know however is that Vlad and his brother, Radu, were both prisoners of the Ottoman empire as children, where they likely suffered horrible abuse.  This was with their father's knowledge and consent, so it likely left a few scars that made him so vicious later in life. 

I love books that bring historical figures to life, and this series gets better with each book.