Viktoria and Jael are the couple in my second story — Viktoria’s Shadow: Jael. In the first book, Ember is someone who knows nothing about magic or anything supernatural, so I wanted to change things up a bit with Viktoria. There are tons of stories where the male character is the older one who has seen and done it all, and I wanted to shake that up a bit, too.

Jael is thousands of years old, naturally, since all my vampires were around for the Dragă massacre which happened a thousand years ago, which meant Viktoria had to be even older. Obviously, that meant she couldn’t be human, so I made her a goddess.

In Finnish mythology, there’s a hapless Maiden of Pohjola who doesn’t really have any freedom or personality. She seems to exist in order for heroes to irritate her mother, Louhi, Goddess of Witchcraft and Death. And Love, in some stories.

The Maiden of Pohjola is always either being kidnapped or used as a bargaining chip. I never even saw where she has a name — the poor woman is only ever called the Maiden of Pohjola. There are also conflicting stories about how many daughters Louhi has.

So, I took some liberties and gave Louhi 13 daughters. She’s got 9 (or maybe 10) sons, so really, it’s not too much of a stretch. When I arbitrarily made up that number of daughters, I wasn’t planning on developing them too deeply as characters. I wanted to focus on Viktoria, since it’s her story, after all. But I found I love writing the character of Louhi, and all of Viktoria’s sisters took on personalities of their own. That happens sometimes, where the characters write themselves. Plus, it’s about time someone helped out that poor Maiden of Pohjola and let her tell her own story!

Jael is a world-weary man. I gave him a tragic life and he needed his numb existence rocked. What better way than to match him with a woman who already knows what he is and exactly how to deal with him? I enjoyed forcing him to deal with all of Viktoria’s sisters and her mother. All of his assassin training did him no good. 🙂

I learned about The Old Man of the Mountain on my travels and loved the idea of having him train assassins. Which he actually did in real life, but I added a supernatural twist and backed up the legend a few thousand years. So Jael is used to being a predator and hunting his targets, but he can’t quite catch Viktoria.

Setting Jael’s life in that part of the world let me adapt some really old stories into my work and have Viktoria and Jael meet way in the past. I don’t want to have all my vampires and witches meet initially in the current time since the time line spans 12,000 years.

I was also able to introduce an excellent villain, and set up some background work for Xenos’ story. One of the things I love to do when I write is interweave all my characters and stories.