Emily Dinwiddie, current overseer of the Dinwiddie Society for the Exploration of Matters Abstruse and Supersensible, knows full well that fantastical beings exist. To her regret, she has not yet been privileged to meet one of those creatures in, as it were, the flesh. However, that is about to change. Valentin Lupescu, Count Revay-Czobar, is not the sort of supersensible being read about in books. No vampire melancholia for Ravensclaw. No regret for past lives, lost loves. His situation suits him well enough, save for his tendency to get bored. When Emily Dinwiddie arrives on his doorstep, draped about with every vampire-repelling charm devised by mortal man, he sees in this freckled, bespectacled spinster the source of more potential amusement than he's enjoyed in a score of decades. She wants him, of course. It is the nature of his kind. He wants her also. Which is not at all the way these matters generally play out. A quest. A curse. Passion and perplexities. Mytery, mayhem and madness in the dark streets of Regency Edinburgh's Old Town.