Children of Night

Book #1. In the Dark Children of Night, Book 1

When you live forever, you're bound to make a few mistakes. Especially if yours is a life lived in the dark.

1969 San Francisco. World-weary Conrad Quintano should have known better than to fall in love with a human-much less Suzanne Fischer, the barely legal, adventure-seeking hippie beauty known as Desert Rose. And the very last thing he should have agreed to do was to raise her babies and protect them with his life. But even twelve-hundred-year-old master vampires can find it hard to reject a deathbed request-especially when issues of love, guilt and blood are involved.

Present day. Raised in virtual isolation, twins Marc and Julie Fischer have always known they are vampires. But they never knew their parentage-or their unique status in the vampire world-until their "uncle" Damian comes to fetch them home. The family reunion, however, isn't what they expect. They're thrust into a world for which they're totally unprepared. And the father they expected to see, Conrad, is missing.

How to find him--and whom to trust? Solving the mystery of betrayal and vampire family values will prove the Beatles had it right. All you need is love--and an occasional side of blood.

Product Warnings

While reading this book you may experience any of the following, an increased desire to wear flowers in your hair, dress in tie-dye or nap during the day. Other symptoms may include an intolerance to sunlight, an aversion to garlic-flavored tofu and a pronounced urge to bake--or get baked.

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Book #2. Old Sins, Long Shadows. Children of Night, Book 2

Living forever is hard, but loving forever? That's damn near impossible.

1856, New York City. Moments after Conrad Quintano drives his life-mate away, heartache and guilt descend around his heart like a pall. Convinced that Damian's hatred is as permanent as the scars Conrad has inflicted on him, Conrad steels himself for an eternity of emotional torture.

Present day, San Francisco. For the sake of vampire twins Marc and Julie Fischer, Conrad and Damian present a united parental front. In reality, their truce is a sham. Conrad, weakened by his recent ordeal, struggles against the urge to bring his mate back to his bed. And Damian misinterprets Conrad's explosive temper as proof their relationship is irreparably broken.

When an old enemy's quest to create a dangerous new breed of vampire threatens the twins' lives-and the precarious state of vampire peace-it's imperative the estranged lovers put the past behind them. Or the shadows of the past will tear apart everything they hold dear.

Product Warnings

This book may not be suitable for readers with an aversion to emotionally damaged vampire heroes. Caution is advised if you have experienced prior sensitivity to any of the following: costume parties, fencing lessons, interspecies, inter-generational or intra-gender dating, occasional mild violence, and/or recreational blood-drinking.

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Book #3. Family Affair Children of Night, Book 3

Family Values--Vampire Style. It's how we roll!

You can choose your food, but not your family. Or can you? For Julie and Marc Fischer, vampires since birth, the simple facts of life have just become a lot less simple.

In Family Affair, the third installment in the Children of Night series, the twins are confronted with new challenges-and new choices. Marc must decide whether to stay with the only family he's ever known or embrace his unexpected destiny and the new family that comes along with it. Meanwhile, Julie is forced to deal with the unpleasant realization that sometimes the food you want doesn't want you.

Faced with new mysteries to solve, new alliances to forge and new secrets to keep, it's no wonder the Fischer-Quintano vampires are feeling more than a little nostalgic this holiday season. They're longing for the good old days-when food was food and family was all that mattered.

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Book #4. The Luminosity Factor

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

There is a very simple reason for all the myths and misconceptions surrounding vampires, a very simple truth behind the legends and the lies. The truth and the reason is this: there is nothing simple about vampires. They are amazingly complex creatures, an amalgam of man and mystery that first saw life on some long-forgotten evening in some dark, forsaken corner of the globe. Each vampire is informed and imprinted, shaped if you will, by both its parents-the sire who re-made it, fashioning it in his or her own image, and the human it used to be.

There is a saying, common now among humans, that when you take someone to bed, it's not just that one lover (or two or three, or whatever your preference may be) with whom you'll be sleeping, but everyone with whom they've ever been intimate, as well.

Vampires have always known this to be so.

Book #6. To Curse the Darkness

There's a thin line between blood and madness. Tonight, it's gonna get crossed.

Humans talk about love as though it were the only thing that mattered; vampires know better. Love is a strong root. It runs deep. It resists frost and drought and is even capable of surviving decades or sometimes even centuries of neglect or abuse. Despite all of that, if given even the smallest bit of encouragement, love is always willing to send up another green shoot of hope.

Love is tough. That's what makes it so important, so very hard to destroy. Trust, on the other hand-that fragile flower with its sweet perfume-is a far less hardy specimen and much more difficult to cultivate.

Once damaged, in even the slightest degree, it can be very hard to coax trust back to full health. It's susceptible to cold, is easily stunted and it's prone to an early death. All of which would be bad enough on its own, of course, because without trust your world is left a bleaker and more colorless place. But it's seldom the damage stops there.

The lack of trust is one of the few things capable of blighting even the deepest love. It can turn love bitter, can twist it into something evil, ugly, obsessive. It's an insidious change, one that frequently strikes without warning, without your ever realizing it's happening. Until you wake up one evening and find that you've somehow destroyed everything you once held dear.

Book #6. Ashes of the Day

Only blood can break your heart.

Blurb and excerpt coming soon.

1. When you live forever you're bound to make a few mistakes. It goes with the territory, especially if you're still partly human. To err is human-isn't that how the saying goes? It doesn't matter how old or how careful or how intelligent you are. Every now and again there's going to be something you fail to take into account. It's inevitable. There's really very little in this world more prone to miscalculation than the human heart...or even the mostly human heart.

2. Living forever is not always as easy as it appears. Sooner or later, you may find yourself wondering, "is this a blessing, or a curse?" Loving forever is even more difficult. It's a rare few who will even get the chance to try it; and only a fraction of those will actually make it work.

3. Men might say time heals all wounds, but vampires, with all the time in the world, know better. Some wounds never heal properly. Some losses can never be recovered. Some sins are past redemption, some mistakes beyond repair.

4. Vampires are nothing if not adaptable. It's a basic survival skill. Either you learn early on to blend in, to fold seamlessly into the mise-en-scene, to 'pass' as mortal, or angry mobs armed with torches and wooden stakes are likely to figure prominently in your sure-to-be-short-lived future.

5. When you count your life in centuries, it's easy to lose track of a decade or two. Which is why any vampire wishing to avoid detection, must develop an eye for detail and work hard to keep up with the times. After all, it's one thing to be able to recognize a carefully preserved antique. It's another thing entirely to advertise yourself as one.

6. "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Or so George Santayana is reputed to have said and, for a human that may very well be true. For a vampire, on the other hand, a better truth might be this: Those who cannot remember the present are doomed. Successful vampires know this and the most successful vampires are the ones who have learned to eschew the comfort of the familiar, the well-worn, the tried-and-true; to put the past behind them and embrace the unknown in all its glorious uncertainty.

7. You can choose your friends, but not your family. This is true for humans and vampires alike. It's best to make peace with that fact, as soon as possible, since the opportunity to change it only comes along rarely and usually requires a great quantity of time and even more so of luck.