The Swordmaster

For two days and three nights, Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan has slept, trapped in a strange dream of a shifting world of spirits. Everyone in the dream is clad in the forms of animals, including Françoise herself, and they are discussing secret affairs of monsters and princes – until a host of vampires attacks them in the dream. A man with a beautiful voice faces them down, telling her to run. Françoise wakes in her grave, buried by her grieving parents and abandoned by her fiancé – and determined to find the man who’d saved her life, identifiable only by his voice. She flees to Paris and finds people like her: the Benandanti, born in their cauls, and blessed with the gift to enter the spirit realm in dreams. She learns that the vampires who attacked her in spirit are a threat in the waking world – and that they sit in the highest positions in the land. Only she and her new brothers and sisters can bring them down.