{"product_id":"the-vampires-seduction-isbn-9780345479754","title":"The Vampire's Seduction","description":"When it comes to a wild and seductive nightlife, Savannah has bite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOlder than the United States and wealthy beyond his years, playboy William Cuyler Thorne is a vampire with a nice long undead life—one that includes a steady stream of admirers, a consistent supply of rejuvenating blood, and, best of all, a cover as one of Savannah’s most prominent pillars of society.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut all good things must end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow an ancient enemy has come for William from across the seas. It is his sire, Reedrek, the vampire who created him. And Reedrek will stop at nothing until all that is precious to William—his beautiful mistress, his stable of willing female victims, his glorious estates, and his good-ol’-boy vampire sidekick, Jack—is within his voracious grasp. But William has an arsenal of his own—one that is enhanced by the power of voodoo. And when these two bloodsuckers meet, there will be hell to pay.\u003cb\u003eRaven Hart\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Vampire's Seduction\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Vampire's Secret\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Vampire's Kiss, \u003ci\u003eThe Vampire's Betrayal\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Vampire's Revenge\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives and loves in the South.Savannah, Georgia  2005 a.d.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Letter from William, a Vampire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My name is William Cuyler Thorne. I have been a soldier, a scholar, a  wastrel, and a womanizer. But most important, I suppose, is the fact that  among the many things I have been, I remain an unwavering killer of men. A  predator.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Oh, I’ve taken my share of women as well, in temper and in pity, in hunger  or merely in petulance. I have kissed the lips of some of the most  beautiful courtesans on the planet before turning to baser needs. But  always the blue blood of my savage ancestry, which runs so coolly through  my veins, calls out for heat and for life. For sustenance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I am a blood drinker.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have walked the earth for five hundred years, plus or minus a decade.  For two hundred of those years I was bound by kinship to hunt with my  sire—a degenerate savage who deserved a righteous staking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember what it was to be human, a time so long ago that I feel the  vibration of mortal pain like the desperate tug of a rope falling into a  bottomless grave. The tug no longer gives me pause. I am immortal,  blessed, and cursed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the beginning of my undeath I fed as a soldier and since have watched  men uncounted meet their doom.   In my bloodlust I am a nightwalker, armed with flesh-tearing teeth like  the Roman war dogs and with the sharp talons of the carrion crows who  circle the battlefield. I kill the weakest and find life among the dying,  feeding on the wreck of man’s foolish predilection for conquest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The English and French fed me for nearly two centuries with their petty  bickering; but then I set my sights on America and a bloody revolution of  men wresting a country from other men. Being part Scots and part English  in my parentage I should have preferred the “Redcoats,” as my rebellious  New World neighbors called them. But I found the blood of the  revolutionaries a wilder vintage, more vital and sustaining. No, I am not  an avenger or a bringer of justice. Nor am I the sadistic killer I was  created to be. I am merely the last spectral face dying soldiers see on  the darkened battlefield before facing oblivion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the winter of 1778 I arrived in Savannah, a fading flower of a city. I  carried with me a welcome supply of gold and the implied support of my  newly chosen British surname—Thorne. The Brits had captured the city  earlier that year and I had no reason to dispute them. There was plenty of  bloodshed to go around. I have remained in the vicinity of Savannah for  many reasons, including other murderous wars, but I see no need to  broadcast my motives. Let’s just say that the city and its darker  hugger-muggery suit me. As winter suits me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Summer in these southern climes arrives with a glorious pressing heat that  breeds bloodlust even in the mortal heart. Human nature being what it is,  I find a steady, gourmand source in their casual bloodshed. Passions rise  and humans die. There is something to be said for the term “red-blooded  Americans,”and I sense their fury like a shark tracks a drop of blood in  the outgoing tide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so I’ve given up the wandering life of a war dog, and now I reside in  this city near the sea. The sharks and I are brothers. They fear nothing  and cruise the watery darkness like silent sentinels waiting for the scent  of the abandoned and dying, the flashing shock of hopelessness to draw  them in for the kill. I live a gentleman’s life, attending evening social  events, smoking cigars and drinking port in private gambling dens or  exclusive bordellos, and walking the dark streets to feed my destiny.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I own all I wish to own of my adopted city. My “ancestral” home—since I am  in effect my own ancestor—is centered on one city block on Houghton  Square. The entire block belongs to me, along with a row of businesses  bordered by the river. I find enterprise a mostly pleasant diversion to  occupy my mind, while the riverfront assures private access to a dock near  the port of Savannah.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Even monsters take vacations on occasion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You might wish to know of my other pastimes and the small number of humans  I trust. I am in no mood to speak of such things here. And I certainly do  not divulge my true name or where I sleep when the sun is high   and hot. My secrets are my own, as is the bounty on my traitorous, dark  heart. These few scrawled lines were written only to warn that other  beings walk beside you betimes. Beings you cannot fathom or interpret. Be  wary of taking in strangers unawares.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Savannah, Georgia  2005 a.d.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Letter from Jack, a Vampire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My name is Jack McShane and I’ve been asked what I remember of being  human. Of   the days before William and I met.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember the hunger. And the fighting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember a kid whose empty gut gnawed at him night and day. I dreamed of  food—bread and meat piled to the sky, fruit from endless orchards, cabbage  and potatoes from fields that stretched for miles. I had visions of butter  and eggs to say grace over, of fat brothers and sisters and a rosy-cheeked  mother. I don’t even remember their faces now. Hell, I barely remember my  own. All I remember is hollow cheeks, listless eyes, and dull complexions.  And my mother’s thin wails for those of us who didn’t survive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I didn’t spend my days shooting marbles or playing tag like young boys are  meant to do. My father, an immigrant dirt farmer, didn’t seem to know any  way to raise his children other than to treat them like the slaves he  couldn’t afford. Before his passage to America, he’d foraged and fought  for food in the sooty, dank, urban hell of Belfast, darting up and down  cobblestone alleys, dodging lines full of dingy laundry and heaps of  garbage while trying to stay out of sight of bigger boys as desperate and  hungry as himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In this new land of promised plenty, my brothers and sisters and I, the  ones of us who survived, were raised on a diet of cornmeal mush and  merciless beatings. All the time being told how lucky we were. My daddy  beat me for not getting the milking done fast enough, for stealing an  apple that could’ve been sold, for helping my sisters meet their measure  of picked cotton. My mother was little more than a shell of a woman,  without the will or the strength to challenge my father’s iron hand. When  I got big enough to fight back, I did. By the time I was seventeen, I  figured I’d better leave home before one of us killed the other, so I ran  away to the grand city of Savannah where I worked the docks as a stevedore.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No sooner had I gotten a full belly and a dollar in my pocket than a war  came along to damn me to a life of hunger and fighting again. A cruel  blockade dried up the work and left poor laborers like me with no other  choice than to join up with the Confederacy. By 1864, we were down to  bug-infested hardtack and hot water that had only a passing acquaintance  with coffee grounds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After the demon Sherman torched Atlanta, his army headed east toward the  sea on the Georgia Central railroad. They ordered three brigades of us in  the Georgia militia from Macon to cut off the Federals on their way to  Augusta to seize its arsenal and foundry. That was when we ran smack dab  into U.S. General Charles Walcott and his men, part of Sherman’s right  flank, not headed for Augusta, but for Savannah.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Confederate Brigadier General Pleasant J. Phillips, as poorly named a  bastard as I ever came across, ordered us to charge—across an open field  and up a hill—the Union troops entrenched behind a railroad embankment.  Shaking as much from fury as fear, I looked around at what was left of the  Georgia militia—a handful of able-bodied men like me and hundreds of old  men and boys. I wanted to turn my rifle on that idiot Phillips, but when I  heard the bugle call I started across the field with my comrades. I  remember looking into the barrels of the Yankees’ Spencer repeating rifles  and thinking that I didn’t survive hunger and merciless beatings just to  wind up with a bullet in my brain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then I saw a blinding flash and felt a blow to my stomach that knocked me  to the soggy earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The next thing I knew it was night, and I could feel that old familiar  gnawing in my gut again. Only this time, it wasn’t hunger but a sucking  wound setting free my life’s blood with every beat of my dying heart. This  was it, then. All the fighting to stay alive had come down to my spilling  out my life in a swampy field surrounded by the dregs of the slaughtered  Confederacy. Nearing my last breath I cursed heaven as I had in my youth,  not caring if it damned me to hell as it surely would.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The very next moment I sensed something near me, something both hot and  cold, alive and yet not. Something evil . . . with a craving. And then it  was looming over me, its eyes glowing like a hellhound’s, face and fangs  dripping with blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was William.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You cannot save them now,” he said, gesturing to the corpses of my  comrades around me. “Do you want to live?” he asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Do you swear to serve me as long as you exist on the earth?” he asked.Good to the last bite.","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302288511205,"sku":"NP9780345479754","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345479754.jpg?v=1767742034","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-vampires-seduction-isbn-9780345479754","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}