“I wanted to hold him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to show him how much I loved him and had missed him. I wanted five minutes, ten, the rest of our eternal lives. I wanted long enough to make love to him, to taste him, to be tasted by him, to reaffirm our Bond. But I felt a Dark shadow above me, all around me, pressing in from every side and every angle, that threatened to cut our time short.” Recovering from the fallout of a vampire virus, Lucinda Monk-Durand, vampire hunter by birth and Kindred to the Champion of the Iunctio, has had to dig deep to keep her fractured heart beating. Her motto, though? Never show fear. Never give an inch. And always stay on guard. But something is slithering out of the shadows in Auckland City and it smells of death and rot and Dark tidings. Add in an Old God who wants to win an eternal war against Ra — due back any day now to cause more havoc — and Luce just knows, these bad guys are going to be deadly. The fact that they’re already dead doesn’t even register on her WTF metre. As the days turn into nights, Lucinda begins to question just where is the God of the Underworld anyway? Using every trick up her sleeve to face this new threat, and keeping a wary eye out for the evil divine being’s return, Luce doesn’t even see the hit coming. But then, she’d never been very good at politics, had she?