I am back in St Louis and trying to live a normal life - as normal as possible for someone who is a legal vampire executioner and a US Marshal. I have my lovers, my friends and their children, school programs to attend. In the midst of all this ordinary happiness a vampire from my past reaches out. She was supposed to be dead, killed in an explosion, but the Mother of All Darkness is the first vampire, the dark creator, and it's hard to kill a god. She has reached out to me here - in St Louis, home of everyone I love most. She has decided she has to act now or never, to control me, and all the vampires in America.

The Mother of All Darkness believes that the triumvirate created by master vampire Jean-Claude with me and the werewolf Richard Zeeman has enough power for her to regain a body and to emigrate to the New World. But the body she wants to possess is already taken; I'm about to learn a whole new meaning to sharing my body, one that has nothing to do with the bedroom. And if the Mother of All Darkness can't succeed in taking over my body for herself, she means to see that no one else has the use of it, ever again. Even Belle Morte, not always a friend to me, has sent word: 'Run if you can...'