Vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian is hunting a trio of cop killers. But it can destroy him, because one might be another vampire...old and powerful and ruthless at blood games.
Garreth Mikaelian has an enemy...Time. He thought he knew all about being a vampire. After all, he has had sixteen years in the life to learn. But now he discovers that while Time ignores him, he cannot ignore it. Around him everyone he knows is aging: fellow officer and periodic lover Maggie Lebekov, friends, parents. His own son now looks more like a brother. The price of his existence, he realizes, is standing rooted while Time carries everything away from him.
But suddenly he has more urgent matters to worry about. Baumen's comfortable peace is shattered by sudden death and a lethal trio playing ever escalating blood games. Garreth finds himself criss-crossing the country tracking them and racing to learn whether the leader is the vampire he appears to be. If so, he has to find a way to deal with the man. In any case, Garreth must locate the suspects before other law enforcement officers do, to be sure they are captured alive...because if not yet vampires, they have drunk vampire blood, and if killed will rise again even more deadly...and unstoppable.
Excerpt
Garreth's thoughts lingered on the conversation with Sue Ann. Why had he not let Maggie meet his family? He grimaced, cold knotting his gut. Because that would reveal the lie he had been living here. That he came on false pretenses. He had claimed to be hunting his grandmother, Madelaine Bieber, who had been born here but after leaving, had his father out of wedlock and then abandoned the baby with her landlady. In reality he wanted Mada because living under the name Lane Barber, she had been the woman who attacked him in San Francisco. Dressed in men's clothing, she had also been the archer who attacked him here, but after he killed her in self defense, he tampered with the evidence to conceal her identity. How could he tell Maggie that, and more, how could he reveal the real nightmare, that Lane had not merely tried to kill him in San Francisco but _had_ done so. He re-lived the red glow of her eyes in the darkness of that alley, the pain of her teeth tearing out his throat, his terror as he lay in his blood listening to his heart and breathing stumble to a halt.
A tilt of the rearview mirror reflected sandy hair and a thin face, a face that in sixteen years had not changed, that in fact looked even younger than the twenty-eight years he had been when he came here. He pulled his glasses down his nose. Above the mirror lenses, his gray eyes caught the reflected rays from the setting sun coming in through the rear window. The eyes flared red.
Most of all, how in the world could he tell Maggie that Mada/Lane had made him a vampire.
Book eight in my Belinda Lawrence Classic Mysteries. Mysteries confront amateur sleuths, Belinda Lawrence and Hazel Whitby in the Somerset village of Milford.
Among the eccentrics is the shadowy Madam Malefic.
While working on the set of a Hollywood horror movie, a simulated murder turns into a real homocide. Special effects artist Harri Lewis (aka Agent Proteus) steps in to try to solve the murder
