“Maybe you will decide to stay.”
Ivo glanced quickly at Vitki. “Here?”
Vitki’s grin changed his face and made him seem so much more handsome. “Da.”
Faced with a smile like that, Ivo knew he’d agree with just about anything Vitki said. He smiled back, a feeling of lightheartedness filling him. “Maybe.”
“We need to go. When the sun comes back up tomorrow, I will show you the valley. You will see such beauty, you will never think of leaving again.”
“I’d like that.”
A weird glint came into Vitki’s eyes, but it was gone before Ivo could figure out what it was.
“Come, we must go. We still have a lot of area to cover before we reach home.”
Ivo wasn’t sure about the whole “home” thing. His home was a small apartment back in New York City that he inherited when his parents passed away. It wasn’t some strange and mysterious castle in the middle of a valley in a foreign country.
Until he saw Max’s body settled in his homeland, nothing else seemed important. That was why he was here, anyway. As intriguing as Vitki’s assertion that he should stay sounded, Ivo would put that aside until he did what he came here to do, and then he would consider changing his entire life.
Going down the hill into the valley was a lot easier than climbing had been. Ivo felt less tired and out of breath. Strangely enough, he even felt more invigorated the closer they got to the lights looming in the distance.
By the time the ground leveled out, the exhaustion that had plagued Ivo on the other side of the mountain was almost a distant memory. He was a little uneasy with how refreshed he actually became.
“What is it about this place?” he mumbled as he glanced around.
“What was that, Ivo?” Vitki asked.
“It’s weird. I was so tired by the time we topped the mountain, and now I feel great.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.” Ivo shook out his arms. The energy running through them was actually a little off-putting. He had felt this in the past, but only after drinking three shots of espresso back-to-back. “I feel like I could run the Boston Marathon.”
“The exhilaration you feel comes from returning to the land of your birth.”
“Is that why Max asked me to bring him home?”
“In a sense. The land will welcome him back, her rich soil giving him a peace he could not have found in your New York City.”
Okay, this was just sounding weirder and weirder by the moment.
“We’re talking soil here, right? Real soil?” Ivo was confused about Vitki’s wording, but maybe he meant laying Max to rest where he was born.
“It is so much more than mere soil, Ivo. It is the people, the trees, the rivers, the bees that pollinate our flowers and crops. It is everything that is the Vítkovský Clan homeland.”
Ivo really had no idea what Vitki was talking about, but he sure said it with pretty words. “I can’t wait until daylight comes and you can show it to me.”
“There is a lot to see, Ivo. It will take more than a day.”
“Oh.” The smile fell from Ivo’s lips. “I’m only supposed to be here for a couple of days.”
Ivo hadn’t resolved things with his work or anything. Being a sudden multimillionaire was too new. Mr. Berkshire assured him that he never had to work another day in his life, but that just didn’t seem reasonable. People didn’t just suddenly inherit hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, except Ivo.
He still wasn’t sure if this was real. For all he knew, he had fallen and hit his head and was in some sort of medically induced coma where the dreams were really fantastic.
Things like this really just did not happen to people.
