Longest Days by C.L. Quinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Daniel had been a mercenary longer than his soul could take. On that final job, looking down at the face of an angel whose death he’d been responsible for, he knew he was done. And although he hadn’t pulled the trigger on the bullets that took her life, he felt like he had. He’d buried her in a hidden grave in the Canadian woods so no one would desecrate her lovely body. From the mission site in Vancouver, he’d headed north to the most inhospitable place he could think of to try to find peace that he knew he didn’t deserve. But after a year of dreams, her face was as vivid as it had been that day. There would be no peace for a guilty man.

Eillia had been killed and buried. Buried by someone who did not know she was vampire…that bullets would not kill her forever. But beheading would. Which is how her centuries long love affair with Hamid ended in an attack a year ago. She didn’t know how to pick up the pieces of her life without him. All she wanted was to crawl back in a hole like the one she’d crawled out of that day. And she had. Lost, in pain, she’d gone north and buried herself in the land of the midnight sun until darkness came and she thought that maybe she might be able to think about living her life again. All she had with her from her old life was a tattered flak jacket that someone had wrapped around her head when they buried her. It had smelled of earth and man and she thought that whoever had done it had cared about the body they laid to rest that night. But she had no idea who it was.

Fate brought them together on that awful night. It brought them together a year later in a frozen land that was as stunning as it was brutal. Daniel spends most of his time working when the hard weather allows it, and drinking when it doesn’t. Eillia has spent most of the sunlit summer in bed alone and lonely. Longest days…longer nights.

Now, winter extremes bring them together. He won’t believe it can be her…she’s dead, he knows that. She won’t know why he knows her. Or why his scent is so familiar. Is it possible to overcome such a tragic history? Find out how it plays out above the Arctic circle for a vampire and a human who should never have met at all.

Longest Days

I’m really liking this vampire series so far!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤❤️💜
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☹️☺😋😘😍

The heroine: Eillia – she is a first blood vampire, born not made; she is stronger, faster and more powerful than made vampires. When the mercenaries hired by the vampire Alvin, who wants to end all vampires, attacked Bas’s stronghold, she was shot multiple times. Her lover Hamid was also shot and then beheaded. He had been with her for 800 years and after she woke and realized what had happened, she wanted some time away from everyone where she could be alone in her grief.

The Hero: Daniel – He was the leader of the mercenary team that attacked the vampire stronghold. Of course, he and his team were human and had no idea vampires existed. Though he thought his orders to kill and then behead everyone was overkill, he assumed it was due to a lesson the man who hired him wanted to spread or something like that. However, after his team took the heads off a few of their kills, Daniel sees Eillia laying dead on the ground and can’t stomach the beheading anymore, so he tells his team to stop and just shoot the rest of the people, while he took the beautiful female out into the forest and gave her a proper burial underground, before leaving for good.

The story: Both Eillia and Daniel end up in small town in Alaska, where she worked at getting through her grief over losing Hamid, and Daniel sentenced himself to hard labor in a harsh environment to assuage some of the guilt he felt over the things he had done as a mercenary, especially over the death of the beautiful woman he buried. A year later, while Eillia was working as a night cook in town, and Daniel worked in the fishing industry, only going into town at night after work to drink with fellow fishermen, the two of them meet. Daniel is surprised that Eillia looks like a twin to the woman he buried that day he can’t forget and Eillia is attracted to Daniel and loves how good he smells.

I usually don’t like vampire books where the female is the vampire and the male is the weak human, but I liked both Eillia and Daniel from the first book in this series, Forbidden Days. I ended up liking their stories quite a bit as well. This book turned out to be pretty good. Though I did hate the fact that every time the two of them got together, Eillia would use compulsion on Daniel and make him forget they ever met. It was kind of fun that each time they met was the first time for him, but it got a bit old by the third time.

This book also had the ongoing storylines of Alvin from Forbidden Days, the small weakling vampire who says he hates all vampires, but seems to love what he can do as a vampire, like compelling people and getting some blood and sex whenever he wants. He meets Tamesine, the crazy first blood vampire from Endless Days, in Australia where they are both hiding out from other vampires whom they have wronged. So the two of them team up and are quite a pair, especially after finding out that Eillia is alone in Alaska and is hiding herself from the other firsts.

This book was another very good one in this series. I have been really enjoying the characters and many of the characters from the last two books were in this one as well. The first blood vampires are like a big extended family and I am really enjoying that about this series. I definitely plan to keep reading. I love vampires and these are mostly good ones, who feed on humans, but don’t kill them. They either have humans they feed on called blood-bonds and those humans live long lives because of it, or they compel humans to let them feed and make them forget about it afterwards. Very humane for vampires, of course, like with any group of people, there are bad ones, that want to kill them, but for the most part, even they don’t go around killing the humans they feed on. Which really makes sense when you think about it, since killing people every few nights or whatever, in the same town would draw suspicion.

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