Evil never dies. It may sleep for centuries, and then awaken to bring horror into the lives of modern people who have never dreamed that the supernatural might be real. NEXT, AFTER LUCIFER takes place in a quiet rural village in France. There, in the year 1307, a medieval knight—a renegade Templar named Guilhem de Courdeval—was burned at the stake for practicing magic, offering sacrifices to the demon Belial by ruthless murdering and drinking the victims' blood in vampire rituals. After his execution, his evil spirit was sealed in a hidden underground spring, and trapped there for almost 700 years. But when a wealthy American couple arrives to rent a nearby luxury villa, the sacred spring is tapped to fill their swimming pool—with no one realizing that the vampire Courdeval is now released, and free to ply his evil magic again. His first agenda is to possess a human body, through sinister, supernatural seduction—a tightening vise of horror that brings tragedy, death, and spine-chilling fear to the local French villagers and the Americans alike.

The undead Guilhelm de Courdeval, living in present-day San Francisco, poses as a spiritual teacher for four young Americans seeking guidance