Part of Series
Young and beautiful, Fenice Zucchar lives in opulent splendor on the world's richest island. The pampered daughter of a wealthy and powerful owner of ocean-going merchant vessels, Fenice's soul yearns for the freedom of the sea—for the adventures and breathtaking sights and sounds that await her far from Venice, her velvet prison. Determined to flee, she feigns an audacious kidnapping and stows away on one of her brother's ships on the very eve of her own arranged wedding.But her plans are dashed to bits when, upon discovery, her brother refuses to offer her safe quarter—and abandons the young noblewoman in the teeming port of Varna, just as panic is descending upon the city. For death has come to this place, spawning stories told in hushed, frightened whispers in the night—a being of strange, alluring power and dark sensuality who has chosen Fenice, offering her more freedom than she could know in a hundred lifetimes. Subjugation is the price this mesmirizing creature demands fro the exquisite renegade's eternal pleasure, as Fenice follows her Dark Lord to his mountain domain, where she is to live...and die. But another is waiting there already, lurking in the shadows of the imposing castle keep: a lovely and crazed consort already corrupted by Dracula's terrible passion...a once-mortal girl named Kelene, late of a distant realm called Greece who could prove to be Fenice's staunchest ally and sister, or her most fearsome adversary.
Author
A professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet. After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers. She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories. In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco. She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can. Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera. Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order. Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
