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.
Kate Heartfield’s fiction has appeared in places such as Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Podcastle and Daily Science Fiction. She is also a freelance journalist in Ottawa, Canada. Her favourite undergraduate assignment, nearly two decades ago, was to write an entire essay about Shakespeare’s uses of a single word; her word was “mount.”